Good question. The first step with any endeavour is mindset. So when people ask “where do we go from here?” my first thought is that we should stop the glorification of exploitation. Stop wearing brand logos. Stop showing our new devices to people with enthusiasm. Stop celebrating the “winners” of capitalism.

I don’t think we should despair - that doesn’t scale well. But we should (IMO) buy these things with a sense of regret or realism. We should normalise the discourse. I want us to be as up to date on this as people who follow sports.

Otherwise, not only will we never think of ways to fix this, but we won’t even recognise the solution when it’s in front of us.

We need to become conscious and informed of the dilemma of people who look different to us and consider them our brethren. That does wonders for the exploitative appetites we’ve developed.

If we feel good about it, we’re primed to continue the dark pattern. The first step is acknowledging the problem. If you remove the first step, subsequent steps can’t happen.

I get where you’re coming from. I see land acknowledgements used in colonies like NZ, Canada and USA yet treaties remain broken. I think (IMO) the answer is “all the things” rather than some. But we’re not even shuffling the deck yet as a population so making first steps accessible is important in my own experience. Too much in one go and peoples eyes glaze over.

Fair, however a balanced vegetarian diet is as cheap or cheaper than a cheap meat centric diet, and certainly healthier.

A can of beans is about a dollar, less depending on where you shop. Potatoes are a few dollars a bag, and for most people, a bag of large russets would last them several days if not a week. Same for leafy greens, frozen fruit and veggies, bags of rice, etc.

I agree that there can be other factors, but impoverished communities around the world for centuries have lived on staple foods like those.

I think some personal responsibility is necessary still. Sure the megacorps are the ones doing the most harm and push people to be more consumerist, but that doesn’t absolve people of all their personal autonomy, otherwise you justify all kinds of “just following orders” arguments.

We ought to still resist the corpos and try to live our lives in ways that are better for the world as a whole. Sure, me recycling cans and trying to buy local isn’t going to save the planet, but that doesn’t mean I should just throw litter around in the street and buy everything from Amazon and Walmart.

There are a lot of calories lost when eating meat, because the animals burn calories by staying alive. So eating meat is like eating 15x times more calories from veggies. So everything bad for the environment about vegetarian consumption is true for meat too but in worse.

And perfect is the enemy of good. Veggies aren’t perfect, but they’re far better than meat for the environment.

Some of those are useless calories, we can’t eat grass and on some lands where only grass grows so cows are a way of using that grass, but that’s not the majority.

Amazing how many plants rights advocates pop up every time someone mentions the cruelty and violence being endured by farm animals. And no other time.

As it currently stands, the morally correct option for food production would probably be for a large amount of the population to starve. That, of course, is also not entirely morally correct.

Considering almost 1.5 billion adults in the world are overweight it wouldn’t be so bad to let some people starve.

Guess what, most if not all veggies and vegans are also doing something morally dubious at best. Factory farming, extensive farming, they’re all bad for the soil, bad for native wildlife, bad for native plants. The societal impacts of factory farming are also not small. In the end, the moral lines people draw are mostly at different places, neither is undoubtedly better than the other.

Animals needs to eat and drink too, the meat industry has the highest tool on the farming industry.

I have personally tried to give up meat twice, once for 6 months and once for a year. On both cases my health suffered massively for it, and I went back to eating meat. I had a cousin who was, for many years, a hardcore vegetarian. She was also of the opinion that eating meat was wrong. A few years ago she reintroduced fish in her diet to overcome health issues after fighting them for years. Most symptoms subsided in a handful of months. I believe she now also eats beef, although infrequently and in small quantities. I’m sorry to be that guy but reality is more complex than whatever moral line any one of us would like to draw. You’re not wrong but it would behoove you to acquire some nuance on your thoughts.

It sound like your diet was off, if you don’t eat animal products you need valid alternatives to complete and balance your diet. In cultures shaped around animal products it may not be automatic or easy to find alternatives. Our ancestors diet for example had less meat and more lentils, in countries were they consume less meat you are most likely to find popular dish with other proteins sources.

Guess what, most if not all veggies and vegans are also doing something morally dubious at best.

Care to elaborate? Like are you saying that there is something inherently wrong about veganism or are you saying that vegans are not perfect people and also commit bad acts?

If it’s the first, you need some serious evidence and explanations since scientifically it is established that veganism is healthier, better for the environment, produces more calories per land, water and energy usage, and of course, the animals get to live free of torture.

If it’s the second option, well yeah, no one is perfect. We should all do our best to improve, I wasn’t born a vegan but once I understood what I was doing I stopped it, and it was hard and I had some fallbacks, but eventually I got used to it and had no issues. This is not just about veganism, there are many things in my life that at somepoint I came to understand that they were wrong, and I changed myself to be better. People can do both good and bad things, but if they are aware of the bad stuff and choose to ignore it, that’s when they become bad people.

A simple example from my past is that when I was younger (kid to teen) I thought “nig&er” was just a word for a black person, it was only when a black person explained it to me that I understood the historical and cultural significance of it. Does the fact that I said nig&er made me a bad person? I don’t think so, but if I ignored what I had learned and continued? Yeah, I think that would have been bad.

Large amounts of the population starving is not the morally correct option. Eating meat is many times more inefficient for resources used than eating plants. The infrastructure needed to sustainably mass farm vegetables for the whole world would be far less resource intensive than our current omnivorous factory farming system.

Your personal anecdote, assuming it’s true is completely included in my original critique. I specified factory farmed meat as the problem. I am fine with sustainable hunting if that’s your only option, because it requires genuine effort by the hunter, and it provides a generally less painful death for the animal vs what they would experience out in nature from any other predator. Also, there are some people who have medical situations where eating zero meat does cause them some issues. That being said, it’s a very small percentage of the population, and I suspect many folks (not necessarily you) are lying or mistaken that their health suffered when they gave up meat. Most of the time, it’s because they simply weren’t eating a balanced diet.

Eating less meat is better than eating more meat. Something is better than nothing, it’s good to cut down on meat consumption, even if you aren’t cutting it out completely.

Nothing we do is perfect, even the most hardcore vegan has slapped a mosquito or patronized a business that uses fossil fuels, etc. But it’s about trying to be better. Trying to equate the harms of the meat industry to harms that vegetarians/vegans cause is like trying to equate Ted Bundy with a kid who cheated on their math homework. Sure both did something bad, but one of those bad things is far more severe.

And as my personal anecdote: I am not vegan, I’m vegetarian. I get attacked by more hardcore vegans for eating honey and eggs. I have cut down my consumption of both, I drink almost exclusively non-dairy milk, and I bike and use public transport when I am able. But I’m not perfect, not possible to be.

Gaslighting

That’s willful self-delusion.

To be fair, I didn’t explain myself. I don’t think it is a lost cause. I think that we’re already at a point where it’s gonna become apocalyptic. I think if we don’t do anything about it, it will become an extinction event.

But, I will admit that the last few weeks have been super depressing and myi mnd ia probably not as objective as it can be about the future

Vague and ominous.

I laid out some bare minimums: knowledge about how to take care of and raise a healthy human child and the financial means to do so.

How tf does this shitty reply have 17 upvotes? How the fuck did 17 COMPLETE IDIOTS show that and though: “Hmmm… He is right!”

Like, hw stupid can you all be? Who’s going to decide? Obvious professionals who know of kids and have worked with them. Social workers, pedopsychiatrist, teachers, etc.

This isn’t even something new. This is how it’s done with adoption. You can’t all be so ignorant and dumb. I hate democracy because of idiots like you…

Create a reliable method via which fertility can be turned off and on. Turn it off by default.

Exactly! What OP says it should be happening from procreation as well!

But you can start them off on the right foot by making sure they have the knowledge and the means to do the job correctly

Eugenics is trying to erase particular traits from a genome which is not, at all, what I stated in my unpopular opinion. I just would like people who are wanting (or whoopsing) a child into the world to have the bare minimum knowledge and tools to do the job “correctly.”

I am not worried about helping people poop better

That’s not middle ground. That BS! And it doesn’t even have anything to do with what OP said. It just prevents pregnancy.

For fuck’s sake, I know people think differently and I try to accept and respect that but, some of you make me really wonder how tf we can think SO differently…

You are observing just one side of the equation: people who watched adds are using a product.

You don’t see the other part that is the problem. Cos of running those ads is higher than a profit gained from additional sales.

There are three valid affect/effect pairs, my dude. Are you sure you have the right one? :-D