Memes

As a vegan, no offense taken even if I don't find your lines especially funny.

That's fine by me. I'm not out specifically to offend anyone, I'm just making fun of the dumb argument that's cropping up in the comment section of the meme community. When I saw a meat-eater also being dumb in this comment section I made fun of him just the same.

But by proxy, I'm taking offense on behalf of the "farm animals", because if I don't, who else would?

I suppose I can respect that even though I don't agree with most of your viewpoints.

I'm just always baffled by how easily carnists turn a blind eye to animal cruelty. Or turn it into a "comedy show" like in this case. Ofc, part of it is the whitewashing and propaganda spouted by the meat and dairy industry. Another part is that people don't want to think about it because it would compel them to re-think their consuming habits (and people tend to be lazy, myself included).

If you insist on being serious here, I'll throw you a bone and engage with this one in good faith. I certainly think factory farming is unethical (I wish to put a stop to it, even) and that killing animals is bad. And I'll admit that I'm biased because I do not work in agriculture and I find meat tasty.

My take on the subject is that if you're going to eat meat, go ahead, just be knowledgeable about where your meat is coming from. The fact that something had to die in order for me to get my daily sustenance is a fact of life and has been a fact of life ever since the first animal appeared and decided to take a bite out of the first photosynthetic plants. Factory farming is horrible for the environment and is a travesty of consumerism which does harm to everyone involved in it except whoever owns the factory, but the way we produce protein plants is bad for the environment as well, especially if farmed at the level needed to sustain a civilization. There are other theoretical methods which utilize modern technology, but once those become viable, we're probably also close to the point where we can just grow meat in a test tube, so there's no point in discussing those unless we bring that into it as well.

If you're worried about speciesism, which I'm not but you seem to be, there's also the fact that by saying you'd prefer to eat plants instead of animals, you're putting plants lower on the totem pole than animals. Logically, if we wanna live as ethically as possible, we should just kill ourselves so that we don't have to eat anything, or synthesize all of our nutrients and put it in a smoothie like those people from WALL-E.

Either that or we could subsist entirely off of fruit, like some type of bat, because fruit evolved for the purpose of being eaten. Not really possible right now and I'm not gonna stop you once it is, but at some point you have to make compromises. I'm simply willing to compromise at a closer point than you are in how evil I'm willing to be. Eliminating evil from the world is impossible, so you must be able to be content with a harsh and cruel world or you will not be very mentally healthy.

Humans were also built to eat meat. Maybe not as much as we do these days, but meat is still a natural part of our diet. The reason we have sharp teeth and front-facing eyes is because meat eating is what we evolved for. Human beings are still apart of nature even as far as we've come today, and throughout history, attempts to completely shut out our nature have usually come back to bite us in the ass.

There's also the fact that there are so many things I'd rate higher on the totem pole of evil (I can list some of them if you want) in modern society, and things I simply need to deal with with much more urgency, that I and many others ain't got time to worry about farm animals.

Speciesism much?

Yes I'm incredibly speciesist.

You've got it all backwards, man. Veganism is about reducing harm, not increasing it (compared to what pedos and Nazis do).

From Nazis' perspective, they're simply making the world a better place by getting rid of their, you guessed it, oppressors. Making fun of Jews would be punching up if you go by their logic. Meanwhile, making fun of pedophiles also implicates those who are simply unfortunate enough to be stuck with the illness and don't actually cause any harm.

How do we decide who's perspective is better when we declare who we can and can't make fun of? If we go by popular opinion, then clearly we're allowed to make fun of farm animals, and if we do what I do and ignore whatever power structures people have made up and internalized, we can just judge jokes by whether they're funny or not.

Funnily you bring up the topic of Nazis into this, as we, as the oppressors, are the stronger opponent and there's a Holocaust 2.0 ongoing, only it's nicely hidden from the public view.

I wouldn't put factory farming on the same level as the Holocaust. Despite using similar technologies and methods, factory farming has an actual goal, that being to ensure that people get fed and that civilization doesn't, y'know, collapse due to famine. Meanwhile, the Holocaust was motivated purely by hatred and a desire to remove an entire ethnic group from the face of the Earth because the perpetrators made up a conspiracy theory about them.