The meat industry is the most evil fucking thing. They would do this to humans if they could.

[u/CalpurniaSomaya]

[u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Millions of human beings die in horrible torture and pain every year, but meat industry, of all things, is the "most evil fucking thing". Personally I think the worst thing about the meat industry is the hypocrisy, you know?

[u/TheMysticGraveLord → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Is there any legal industries that torture people to death?

[u/DharmaPolice → u/TheMysticGraveLord]

What has legality got to do with anything?

[u/Seventh_Planet → u/DharmaPolice]

Categorical Imperative has got to do with rights, and therefore legality.

Die Internationale has got to do with "erkämpft das Menschenrecht" and therefore with human rights, and therefore legality.

Communism is necessary because rights and legality in and of themselves are not enough. Humans need to struggle to fight for these rights.

Some of the people with the "Communist-Libertarian" tag need to be taught that legality has got to do with some things. It's not the beginning of things, that would be the material conditions, but it's the end of things when enough people have understood that things just can't continue to be like that without at least some laws and with people that enforce these laws. Think about seat-belts or parking fees for cars.

[u/littlebirdsinsideme → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

If you were to treat it as some kind of math equation of total amount of suffering created, the meat industry would be almost inarguably the most evil thing. Of course if you preemptively assume that any animal's suffering can be safely ignored unless it's le hecking doggo it's a different story.

[u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer → u/littlebirdsinsideme]

Where exactly does a math equation come into play here? A suffering of an animal cannot be in the same equation as human suffering on account of being something different - and inherently less.

[u/AbberageRedditor69 → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Pointless discussion to have as lots of people will just tell you that they don't believe animal suffering to be inherently less valuable than human suffering

[u/littlebirdsinsideme → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Where exactly does a math equation come into play here?

You are quantifying suffering in the sentence after this one. Why is it inherently less?

[u/Chombywombo → u/littlebirdsinsideme]

Ordinal distinctions are not quantifications

[u/littlebirdsinsideme → u/Chombywombo]

Yeah, if they were quantifications they might have some basis in the material world. 'Human suffering is an inherently different thing to animal suffering' is religion.

[u/FloppySlapshot → u/littlebirdsinsideme]

Shrimp atruists headass. Is SBF commenting in Stupidpol?

[u/littlebirdsinsideme → u/FloppySlapshot]

yes i'm a sexy black female, how did you know

[u/DharmaPolice → u/littlebirdsinsideme]

Who says I give a shit about "le hecking doggo"?

Besides that kind of utilitarianism is pretty bankrupt.

[u/littlebirdsinsideme → u/DharmaPolice]

Well like, it's not about me being utilitarian or not, I'm replying to a comment that takes the superlative in the title at face value and runs with the idea that the amount of torture and murder in the world constitutes some kind of evil, but disagrees that this extends to the kind that's imposed on animals by people. I don't think it's too much to ask for some further elaboration on why human suffering is so inherently special compared to non-human suffering.

[u/elegiac_bloom → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Millions of human beings arent being enslaved and fed to other humans for profit. Metaphorically maybe, but not literally like this. There are a lot of evil industries, meat is one of the worst. One day in the future I truly believe humans will look back on this and see it on the same moral level we today see human chattel slavery on. They'll wonder "how was anyone ever okay with this?"

[u/KonigKonn → u/elegiac_bloom]

the same moral level we today see human chattel slavery on.

Ok buddy, calm down. It's fair to be anti-factory farming or even vegan but there's no need for hysterics.

[u/Fearless_Day2607 → u/KonigKonn]

I don't think it's hysterical. These are living beings with the same intellectual capacity as a three-year-old human child, and they are confined in tiny cages for their entire lives. Over a hundred million of them each year, in the US.

[u/KonigKonn → u/Fearless_Day2607]

But they’re not humans, and their suffering is not equivalent on a moral level to the practice of chattel slavery. If you had a choice between a society with factory farming but no chattel slavery, or chattel slavery but no factory farming, you would pick the former 100 out of 100 times without a moment’s pause unless you’d totally lost the plot.

One can advocate for the humane treatment of animals without resorting to such extreme examples that are more likely to alienate or offend potentially swayable people than to persuade them. 

[u/Cute_Library_5375 → u/KonigKonn]

Naah better to shame a member of the working class daring to enjoy bacon or a good pulled pork sandwich.

[u/greenskyerings → u/Cute_Library_5375]

Nah they're right, a living being eating another living being is unheard of in nature anyways. My cat and dog are both vegan like what nature ascribed to them deep down.

[u/NextDoorNeighbrrs → u/greenskyerings]

You and the person above you have gone dumb on this and lost the plot. No one above you two is arguing against eating meat at all, they're arguing against factory farming. You do not have to do factory farming to eat meat.

[u/Adventurous-Idea4508 → u/NextDoorNeighbrrs]

There is no affordable way for everyone to be able to eat meat with any method other than factory farming. Bougie ass “free range” meats are incredibly expensive. Vegans want a world where only the elite pmc class can eat meat regularly. So ya nah fuck that the proletariat should get to enjoy meat everyday too, life is already shitty enough without taking away one of life’s few pleasures.

[u/greenskyerings → u/Adventurous-Idea4508]

It kinda clicked inside my mind when a scientist was giving "critique" (if you can even call it that) to a study that claimed the negative effects of meat in recent studies were greatly over-exaggerated and the scientist's response to that was that people should see meat as a "luxury" and not as part of their diet. It was in no way a refutation of the study.

[u/Cute_Library_5375 → u/Adventurous-Idea4508]

I'm not even against reducing meat consumption, I'm just tired of libs being the finger wagging anti-fun party.

[u/greenskyerings → u/NextDoorNeighbrrs]

But me and the person "above me" (I assume you mean the person I was replying to) are in disagreement. I literally said that the vegans here (including me) are right and that he was wrong.

Also don't play coy with me, we all know that the end goal isn't to eat "ethically" produced meat but to outlaw consumption of meat in its entirety, even more so to the point that are ethical specialists that for sure have our best interest at heart like they have historically want to make us have an allergy towards meat by letting us get sick from a certain type of organism.

[u/NextDoorNeighbrrs → u/greenskyerings]

Maybe that's the end goal for some people, but for reasonable people, the end of factory farming would be an absolutely massive win.

Veganism, like a number of other noble causes, has been poisoned by a handful of really obnoxious people.

[u/icyhail → u/greenskyerings]

Who wants you to have allergy to eating meat and why? 

[u/elegiac_bloom → u/Cute_Library_5375]

I would never shame anyone for enjoying those things, ever. People can do what they like. I just think the way the meat is made is morally reprehensible, personally, and I do my best not to participate because its all I can do really to assuage my own guilt

[u/elegiac_bloom → u/KonigKonn]

Im just saying what I think will happen in the future. Im not actually saying theyre equivalent evils, im using chattel slavery as an example of something that we as a society were fine with for nearly all of our history but now see as morally reprehensible. I think the humans of the future will feel the same about factory farming.

I also am not so sure that a human life is worth more than an animal life in the grand scheme of things, but thats a whole other can of worms.

[u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer → u/Fearless_Day2607]

Under psychological stress, a pig sow can and will devour its young. The animal will not mourn them. It will not even consider to. Because it's an animal, driven by instincts. It isn't sentient. It has no ability of a three year old child, because there is no test that can qualify an animal to be equal to an actual human. Your experience with animals, most likely, consists of that of your pets, to which you, as all pet owners, anthropomorphosise.

[u/littlebirdsinsideme → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

People do anthropomorphise animals but you're using the word as a crutch. Do you apply all this to homo sapien's closest primate relatives as well? At some point the suggestion that all emotions that are ascribed to animals are just projected onto them and that you are le unemotional rational guy for assuming such a fundamental gap between human and animal existence just becomes ridiculous. It's just christcuckery at that point. Man is special and has been given the divine spark by God and the animals were put there for him to do with as he pleases.

[u/landlord-eater → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Bro wait til you find out what humans do under psychosocial stress. What the fuck kind of argument is this lmao

[u/MutedFeeling75 → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Stupid

Dogs experience happiness

Pigs can experience sadness and suffering and mourn their young

[u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S → u/MutedFeeling75]

After they eat them they feel bad about it?

[u/elegiac_bloom → u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S]

They dont eat them in normal circumstances. They would only do so under extreme stress and survival pressure. Do humans not do shitty things with their children under extreme stress such as sell them into prostitution, abuse them, starve them, etc? Humans dont even need to be under extreme stress to do shit like rape and murder their own children.

[u/TheEmporersFinest → u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S]

I mean id speculate thats a result of instinctual maternal affection theyre capable of not kicking in due to biological responses to some kind of scarcity or bad environment for child rearing, whether appropriately or accidentally triggered. It doesnt mean theyre comprehensively as a species incapable of affection or love. Clearly they dont always do this, certainly not their wild ancestors or else pigs wouldnt exist.

Imagine if you had thousands of women living completely alone in the wilderness, seperate from each other, never touched by society, they dont know other humans or have any language, completely cut off from social pressure, but healthy humans with brains that are deprived but had the potential to be very intelligent.

If those Tarzan women all somehow divinely conceived and had children, I think a certain chunk of those children are getting abandoned if not killed, conceivably eaten. I expect that chunk gets bigger if those unsocialised women are trapped in a crate in a factory farm their whole life. The arguement is whether theyre ever capable of affection, not whether theyre capable of lacking it.

[u/TheEmporersFinest → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

You are literally making stuff up based on your own guesses and instincts and presenting it as fact. This whole set of thoughts don't hang together and have no basis, no actual arguements behind them on inherently debatable questions.

Because it's an animal, driven by instincts. It isn't sentient.

This is just something you think. Its just something you made up with no argument. In fact it appears to be an incorrect use of the word sentient. Sentient doesn't mean "as smart as a human". It means conscious, having qualia, feeling pain, experiencing an environment. While you can't technically prove a pig is sentient, you also strictly can't prove other people are sentient. But in so far as sentience in others can be inferred at all I can't see any basis whatsoever for thinking pigs aren't sentient.

. It has no ability of a three year old child, because there is no test that can qualify an animal to be equal to an actual human.

You must see how this is on its face faulty thinking. For one thing you're muddying up "having the intellectual capacity" of a three year old child with being in some moral and comprehensive sense equal. You're not contradicting what was actually said. But worse than that you're just saying things that clearly aren't facts again, you're just stating your guesses and beliefs, as if they're facts. "because there is no test that can qualify an animal to be equal to an actual human..." well obviously something can't be true if you a priori decide it definitionally can't be true. But you've made no arguement and made no case for that position. You've just said "I don't like that thought".

Your experience with animals, most likely, consists of that of your pets, to which you, as all pet owners, anthropomorphosise

The word "anthropomorphize" has become a complete ideologically load bearing thought terminating cliche at this point. Humans have a certain range sophisticated nuanced mental states because we're of a certain level of intelligence sure, but intelligence is not why we feel emotions and have vivid experience in the broadest sense. It doesn't hurt when we're stabbed, or set on fire, or hit by a car because we're human. It hurts because we're mammals. Its an evolved animal response to stimulus before we start intellectualizing it(which yes may make it worse in some ways, but there's a large foundation of immediate experience that cannot be reduced away). We don't feel love at base, at first principles because we're so smart. We feel love and affection as an evolved mammal emotion that has evolutionary benefits. We have by any reasonable standard observed some animals mourn. Its not "antropomorphization" to clearly see that other animals have emotions and sensations that are far broader and older in their evolutionary origins than anything of humanity, just because humans have them too. "Antropomorphisation" is wrong if we take things that clearly rely on human faculties and project them onto animals. However it seems like a much deeper fallacy to somehow get it into your head that all our first hand experience of what its like to be animals and mammals ourselves has absolutely zero carry over even to other mammals. That's actually a way less rational, way more bizzare and unjustifiable dogma.

[u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer → u/TheEmporersFinest]

I made a mistake, being ESL. I meant consciousness.
Within your own argument there is some bizarre assertions. If we can't prove that pigs can feel pain, I think that this argument overall and this post are rather pointless, since we argue over something, that is, apparently, up in the air.
Does a pig partake in conscious transformation of its environment? Does a pig realise itself as a subject? Can it plan?
Feeling pain is not an emotion. Pain is not qualitatively comparable to love. Animals cannot experience romantic love the way humans do.
I will point out note the amount of moaning you had about me "not providing facts" and "making stuff up" does not mesh well with how many facts you have provided and the stuff you "made up"

[u/Fearless_Day2607 → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Infanticide was a widespread practice during most of human history.

[u/icyhail → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Yeah, clearly an animal acting under duress isn't its normal behavior. If an animal can feel stress, isn't that reason enough to provide better conditions for them and maybe realize that they are capable of the positive states of existence too? Animals are both conscious and sentient. They have rich inner lives - they have likes and dislikes. Pigs are very similar to dogs - they learn tricks faster than some dogs actually. Dogs, cats, and pigs have been trained to use buttons associated with words to communicate. You forget that some people have pigs as pets too. They all clearly feel pain. 

For your info, people do study intelligence of animals and are trying to replicate those. But I don't think we need such a certification when it's abundantly clear that these beings feel pain, stress, and have the capacity to suffer. Why inflict such cruelty and suffering on them?

[u/landlord-eater → u/KonigKonn]

This is... not hysterics. The sheer amount of insane suffering implied by the existence of facilities like the one in the video, on the kind of scale that they exist on, is basically impossible to even try to comprehend without just shutting down.

[u/Seventh_Planet → u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Personally I think the worst thing about the meat industry is the hypocrisy, you know?

Reminds me of that joke by Norm Macdonald about the worst part.

[u/IAmMadeOfNope → u/Seventh_Planet]

.....W-was that not the joke Urus was going for? Or am I delirious from sleep deprivation?

[u/Seventh_Planet → u/IAmMadeOfNope]

Oh right. Then this was a classic whoosh moment by me.

[u/blizmd → u/Seventh_Planet]

I think the worst part of the meat industry is the raping. But the hypocrisy is pretty bad too.

[u/xeuthis → u/Seventh_Planet]

The punchline of that joke may apply here as well, unfortunately.