> _“I would like to improve, but everything feels like fighting windmills. If i recycle, how many rich people commission a ride to space for fun, rendering it useless?”_
I encounter that line of reasoning very often and, respectfully, I think it is bogus.
A couple ways to see that:
* When a billionaire wastes a gazillion dollars and tons of CO₂ to have a space walk, he is not “rendering your recycling useless”. Those things don't cancel each other out. A world with wasteful space walks where @admitsWrongIfProven does not recycle what is sensible to recycle is _worse_ than a world with wasteful space walks — full stop.
* I bet [you are “rich”](https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i). If you avoid your responsibility, you are providing excuses not to do their part to the next in line (mid-income people, not to mention poor people).
* You would not dare use that argument when talking about big evils. You do not hit your spouse, steal money from your neighbour, throw chemical waste in a river, or torture lizzards — but you know for sure that there are lots and lots of serial killers, child molesters, criminals, war lords, genocidal rulers, etc. You do what is right, because it's right. Why then should we accept that argument for little evils?
/cc @freemo
I agree that messaging and choice of words are important from a strategic point of view: without ever lying, we can decide to stress one argument or another. And I admit my approach is not the one that would gain more supporters. But I have a tiny reach and PR is not my strength anyway; and I am only moderately confident about all this, so my interest is to gather counterarguments and spark discussion.
> _“So ‘exactly what we buy and use’ has a weak point: ‘we’ consists of many stressed people. ‘we’ can be manipulated and is manipulated currently. So to me, stopping the actual perpetrators makes much more sense.”_
My problem with that is related to what I mentioned above about my not being completely sure about all this: I would _not_ want all farms, fish farms, slaughterhouses, etc banned by law tomorrow. I very much prefer that consumers (and voters) push for them to become gradually irrelevant, extremely expensive, rare, frown upon.
> _“Truly, mainstream #media is the great Mugger of Reality. Even when its individual stories are rock solid, it promotes a deeply false Big Picture of the world. And unless you have the intellectual steel to_ constantly _remind yourself, ‘This is a horribly misleading perspective,’ consuming media tends to make you believe this deeply false Big Picture.”_
— [Bryan Caplan](https://betonit.substack.com/p/mainstream-media-is-worse-than-silence)
If you are an #English speaker but not a #Spanish speaker, do me a favour:
Imagine that the word you use in your native language for hair that is yellow-ish and for people with that type of hair (“blonde”) were, by sheer chance, identical to the word that the inhabitants of Otherland use to refer, approvingly, to people who like to sodomise babies.
Now, when you are using your language in public settings (on the street, on the internet) with fellow countrypeople , there are often Otherlanders nearby, overhearing what you say or reading your content.
Imagine that many Otherlanders openly expressed shock and disdain every time you used the word “blonde” to refer to someone who happens to have yellow-ish hair. That Otherlanders looked at you as if you were an insensitive monster. That they sometimes even scolded you for using that word _in your own language_.
Wouldn't you be annoyed every time that happened? Wouldn't you feel the urge to say “you don't know my language, educate yourself!”
Let me introduce you to [the Spanish word “negro”](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/negro#Noun_8), which happens to exists also [in English as a loanword which gained different connotations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/negro#Etymology).
> _“We are so conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unawares.”_
> _“I am speaking about the people trying to make ends meet - for them, ethical and nutritionally complete (not necessarily healthy) would be mutually exclusive i think.”_
Definitely so. I'm happy to cushion my personal exhortations towards (what I think are) more ethical habits (don't lie; don't use violence; obey the law by default; favour walking, cycling and public transport over cars; boycott animal products; encrypt; boycott big tech; etc) between all necessary caveats (do all that if you're in dire straits, oppressed, starving, etc).
> _“What i would support 100% would be telling the producers that the choices they offer are unethical.”_
Point taken. And, _at the same time_, support 100% reminding consumers (ie, _absolutely everybody_) that producers make, cheaper in and larger amounts, exactly what we collectively buy and use — and zero of what nobody wants.
For the sake of argumentation, let's restrict my call to veganism to the richest 10% of the world only.
I refuse any accusation of victim-blaming, because someone that rich is not a victim.
Besides: a victim of… what, exactly? The main victims of these issues (animal suffering, climate change, deforestation, water usage, antibiotic resistance, etc) are animals themselves. Human beings are secondary victims only, and although you can argue that rich humans will always cope better with all those problems than poor humans, it's a flimsy defence to say that you are a “victim” and that those advocating for more ethical and sustainable lifestyles are “blaming” you.
tripu
boosted
🇳🇱
@tripu This misses a very important point... While almost all land suitable for crops is also suitable for animals the reverse isnt true. In fact it is quite often the case animals are raised on land explicitly not suitable for crops. I dont know the exact breakdown, and that would be important to evaluate this fairly. But I know from my interaction with farmers that a great many of them raise their livestock on mountainous land not suited for crops and use fertile farmland mostly for crops.. Even when the land is flat and not mountainous it is often unsuitable for crops due to the makeup of the soil (too rocky, no good drainage, etc)
That too.
But [I'm in the richest 2% globally](https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i), know quite many people who are probably in the 1%, and none of them use private jets. The impact of that is at the very end of the tail of the distribution, perhaps a fraction of a fraction of the 1%.
I would absolutely tell a rich person to avoid flying private. But it's way more cost-effective to have hundreds of millions of people switch to plant-based diets.
Both initiatives can (should) coexist.
3️⃣ Number of animals affected:
You could reduce quite a lot your carbon footprint by replacing all your beef and lamb with chicken and fish (big mammals emit far more CO₂ per kg of protein than poultry and fish). The problem is, then [you would be indirectly responsible for many, many more individual animals raised in industrial farms and killed in slaughterhouses](http://hannahritchie.com/meat-environment-welfare-tradeoff/).
2️⃣ Carbon emissions:
Think you can stick to your steaks and omelettes and at the same time manage to significantly reduce your carbon footprint by “eating locally”? Actually, [transport accounts for a very small fraction of carbon released in food production](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local) (be it plant- or animal-based).
Also,
> _“most food internationally comes by ship. And, actually shipping is very carbon efficient. You're going to emit 10 to 20 times less CO₂ than trucks per kilometre and 50 times less than flying. Most of your soy or your avocados are nearly always coming by ship and shipping actually has a very, very small carbon footprint.”_
— [Hannah Ritchie](https://www.econtalk.org/hannah-ritchie-on-eating-local/#audio-highlights)
1️⃣ Land usage:
[Crops for human consumption make up only 23% of all agricultural land worldwide, and yet they provide 83% of all calories](http://hannahritchie.com/convergence-nutrition-sustainability/).
Plant-based calories (and proteins) are much more efficient and require way less land and water than meat and dairy.
I became a #vegetarian (aspiring #vegan) almost exclusively to contribute to reduce animal #suffering.
With time, I realised that the _other_ reasons to avoid animal-based foods are surprisingly strong, too.
🧵
Sometimes, only sometimes, there is progress on the #equality front. Not that you'll read a lot about it on the news, or see politicians and celebrities praising this development.
And yet, if you call yourself a #feminist you should celebrate this, and advocate for more countries to follow suit (otherwise, what kind of logical and moral contortions are you making to justify plain old, ages-old, sex-based discrimination?)
tripu
boosted
Read my lips:
An audio show that can only be played in an Apple player on an Apple device is not a podcast.
An audio show that can only be played in Spotify is not a podcast.
Repeat ad nauseam for any other proprietary audio show platforms.
A #podcast is an #RSS feed with enclosures of audio files which are playable across the whole ecosystem of podcast players.
Any reporter who reports on exclusive audio shows and calls them “podcasts” are doing a grave disservice to their audience.
tripu
boosted
Since I left home and started working full time, I've lived in eight places (five cities, three countries, two continents, both sharing a flat and living alone).
For whatever reason, in none of those places there was a #dishwasher.
A month ago we moved to the ninth place (and sixth city), and now I have a dishwasher, and every day I"m like OH MY GOD THIS IS AWESOME THIS IS THE FUTURE.
