Emeryael

Emeryael wrote

That's pretty much the only sane response to this article, complete with two upraised middle fingers. Though they'll probably use this response as proof of how Milennials are all lazy and entitled, be like, "They're the worst for not wanting to work until they die to eke out an existence."

But the whole Baby Boomer BS can all be summed up this way:

Baby Boomers Continually elect politicians and support policies that dismantle the societal safety net given to them by their parents, dumping the consequences onto their kids. Afterwards...

Baby Boomers: looks at the Milennials Why haven't you solved all our problems for us? Whaddya mean 'you're too trying to survive in the economy we ruined.' You guys really need to learn something about responsibility."

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Emeryael wrote

Industrial Civilization or Capitalism has only been able to stay afloat because, until recently, there were always new lands to expand to with resources to exploit. But now, we've effectively run out of places to expand to. Right now, Capitalism stays going by cannibalizing other Capitalist nations, but there are obvious flaws with that strategy.

Edward Abbey said that "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell" and that's a fairly accurate summation of what's going on. Like a cancer, Capitalism has to keep moving and expanding, but in doing so, it will inevitably kill off its host.

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Emeryael wrote

I know Jesus advocated "Turn the Other Cheek" and generally, I support that, feel violence should be resorted to when all other measures have been exhausted or when it comes down to either violence or being responsible for an even greater sin. Even Gandhi basically once said that if your ever in a situation where your only choices are violence or cowardice, choose violence. Both are sins, but cowardice is the far greater one.

That's about my view. Not all sins are equivalent and again, often in life it comes down to the least-bad solution to a bad problem, or in other words, sometimes you must commit a sin in order to prevent an even greater one. Heck Jesus did say something similar in Mark 2:27 where he said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, which has its basis in Jewish law. A good Jew should strive to follow the Law, but as always, human life matters more than the law. So if your pregnant wife goes into labor on the Sabbath, even the most Orthodox of Rabbis would say that you're off the hook if you decide to break the Sabbath and drive her to a hospital.

I did like this quote from the link:

In a world that produces enough food to feed each and every one of us, starvation is violence. In a society where vacant houses outnumber homeless people six to one, homelessness is violence. A country in which health insurance companies rake in billions in profits while leaving nearly thirty million people uninsured and unable to access medical care is a violent society.

This is the everyday violence of capitalism – if it is profitable to let somebody die, or languish in abject poverty, we do so. That is a violent society.

That's an accurate summation of how effed up our culture is. Advocating and legislating policies that lead to the maiming, enslavement, and deaths of innocent people overseas, in no way, qualifies as an act of violence. Letting your own citizens die from easily preventable circumstances, in no way, qualifies as an act of violence. Yet God forbid someone on the Left breaks a window. :eyeroll:

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Emeryael wrote (edited )

I see it more as no matter which way you frame it, you live off the lives and sacrifices of others. It doesn't matter whether you eat meat or you don't. We may kill the animals, but someday, it will be our turn and we will die so they can live. That's how all this works.

Think of it more like the approach proposed in "The Mindful Carnivore" or this passage from "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver:

Recently while I was cooking eggs, my kids sat at the kitchen table entertaining me with readings from a magazine profile of a famous, rather young vegan movie star. Her dream was to create a safe-haven ranch where the cows and chickens could live free, happy lives and die natural deaths. “Wait till those cows start bawling to be milked,” I warned. Having nursed and weaned my own young, I can tell you there is no pain to compare with an overfilled udder. We wondered what the starlet might do for those bursting Jerseys, not to mention the eggs the chickens would keep dropping everywhere. What a life’s work for that poor gal: traipsing about the farm in her strappy heels, weaving among the cow flops, bending gracefully to pick up eggs and stick them in an incubator where they would maddeningly hatch, and grow up bent on laying more eggs. It’s dirty work, trying to save an endless chain of uneaten lives. Realistically, my kids observed, she’d hire somebody.

Forgive us. We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super-rich go, it’s more inspired than most. It’s just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke. The farm-liberation fantasy simply reflects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals. They’re human property, not just legally but biologically. Over the millennia of our clever history, we created from wild progenitors whole new classes of beasts whose sole purpose was to feed us. If turned loose in the wild, they would haplessly starve, succumb to predation, and destroy the habitats and lives of most or all natural things. If housed at the public expense they would pose a more immense civic burden than our public schools and prisons combined. No thoughtful person really wants those things to happen. But living at a remove from the actual workings of a farm, most humans no longer learn appropriate modes of thinking about animal harvest. Knowing that our family raises meat animals, many friends have told us—not judgmentally, just confessionally—“I don’t think I could kill an animal myself.” I find myself explaining: It’s not what you think. It’s nothing like putting down your dog.

Most nonfarmers are intimate with animal life in only three categories: people; pets (i.e., junior people); and wildlife (as seen on nature shows, presumed beautiful and rare). Purposely beheading any of the above is unthinkable, for obvious reasons. No other categories present themselves at close range for consideration. So I understand why it’s hard to think about harvest, a categorical act that includes cutting the heads off living lettuces, extended to crops that blink their beady eyes. On our farm we don’t especially enjoy processing our animals, but we do value it, as an important ritual for ourselves and any friends adventurous enough to come and help, because of what we learn from it. We reconnect with the purpose for which these animals were bred. We dispense with all delusions about who put the live in livestock, and who must take it away.<

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Emeryael wrote

I support the cause of Animal Rights and I believe that Factory Farms are an abomination that should be abolished, but at the same time, I do believe that entirely too many on the Animal Rights side are too naïve. Cows, pigs, and chickens aren't really animals that exist in nature; they're essentially creatures we created through centuries of careful breeding. As such, much of their instincts have been bred out of them. Turn them loose and they will either starve to death, get killed by other predators, or devastate the local environment on a massive scale, since that's what happens whenever you introduce non-native animals into a new environment.

And, as many will point out, often farming and agriculture leads to the deaths of many small animals, not just insects, but birds, rodents, and small reptiles. In eating a strictly plant-based diet, you are still killing animals.

The only way around this mess we've found ourselves in, regarding eating meat, is not only abolish factory farms and greatly reduce the amount of meat we consume, but acknowledge the basic reality that no matter where we live, no matter how we live, we do so as part of an ecosystem, dependent upon the lives and sacrifices of others. So if we butcher animals, we do it as cleanly and quickly as possible, with the understanding that some day, we will die and become food for them. And when it comes to livestock, we need to acknowledge our responsibility in creating them. We created them and as such, it is our duty to take care of them, give them as good a life as possible, and, if we are to eat them, we kill them as quickly and cleanly as possible and show respect for their sacrifice.

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