silver [she/her]

  • 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2021

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  • silver [she/her]tovegan*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 years ago

    I sort of felt similarly at one point but then they just started hanging out in our sink since they could get water from the tap/drain. Bad cycle when you can't clean dishes without killing ants.





  • silver [she/her]tovegan*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 years ago

    why in the goddamn fuck did I have this image of cows being milked as just like the gentle, loving ranch-hand going to say hi to Bessie in the morning?

    That's not unique to you, there is a LOT of money and effort that goes into putting that image into people's heads.


  • silver [she/her]toveganFuck it, I'm not leaving
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    The hypocrisy means I simply can’t take any of their capitalist criticisms seriously anymore.

    I've been pretty disillusioned about these sort of spaces since I realised the majority of the online leftists are motivated by clout. Most are exactly as progressive as necessary to raise their own lot in life.


  • silver [she/her]tostrugglesessionMake me a vegan, go!
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Oh that's fair. To me, I see that other animals have the same sort of sentience as I do, the capacity to suffer, and the preference to avoid death, pain, and seek pleasure, and thus consider it worthwhile to grant them consideration when evaluating actions that would infringe upon those preferences.

    Speciesism as a concept explains an ideology that grants all the above, but still prioritizes certain species over others purely on those grounds. For instance, a culture that classifies dogs as friends and pigs as food (as you pointed out earlier) would be a speciesist one.


  • silver [she/her]tostrugglesessionMake me a vegan, go!
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    4 years ago

    Right, and I definitely think it can exist as that useful construct for certain people or types of behavior, but that other people can exist in the world just fine without ever making reference of that construct.

    I guess I would say, being able to live detached from the consequences of speciesism is something that we as humans enjoy as a privilege.

    Though I could not even go that far as there is a lot of intersection between speciesism and other forms of oppression, to dehumanise a being as an animal is to remove from them the right of agency and moral consideration, whether that be due to a lack of ability or faculties, or the shape of their body.

    This resonated already with my preexisting, liberal, humanitarian beliefs, and so it was a relatively easy jump to make.

    And so when it comes to non-human beings you are left asking "what values do i hold that mean I should care?".

    (re: dogs) the answer is obviously that humans define reality in relation to their cultural surroundings.

    Again I'm left wondering, how do you defend speciesism, other than prioritizing it based on it being the default?



  • silver [she/her]tostrugglesessionMake me a vegan, go!
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Like you imply, it is difficult to be certain (I could not even prove other humans have consciousness after all). However, we can observe how other humans behave and infer the existence of internal emotions such as fear and pain, and operate on good faith that our experiences are similar. Similar species such as dogs, cats, cows, sheep, pigs etc... we can do similarly.

    That said I think you can distinguish between the range of qualia a being experiences, and the presence of an "experiencer" itself. There are all kinds of faculties you can, as a human, lose, before you lose a sense of subjective experience, and at no point do we determine moral worth based on what faculties an individual posseses. Lastly, a seemingly universal tendency seems for experiencers to have desires, such as avoiding and seeking certain things, an extremely evolutionary tool. For animal life that mostly manifests in pain and pleasure, and it seems to be fair not to infringe upon these things.


  • silver [she/her]tostrugglesessionMake me a vegan, go!
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Accept it or not, you’re still going to end up with an acculturated worldview, even if it’s not the one you started out in. This doesn’t conflict with anti-speciesism but it also doesn’t necessitate it.

    Okay sure, don't see this as a block/something I feel any need to challenge.

    Isn’t that true for everyone? If I’m going to adopt a new model and discard my old model, shouldn’t I have some reason for doing so that I consider a benefit? It might be something as anodyne as “It helps me live more in line with my ideals”, but that’s still a benefit right?

    Forgive me if I'm not following, but... yes, I think you should hold world views that you can consider to be accurate, useful world views. And these ideals you're speaking of, they stand separate to your "model"? You're speaking quite abstractly right now, and I still don't really follow your usage of "benefit".

    But perhaps I would argue that speciesism is a useful construct for analysing our relations with non-human beings - that in the absence of morally significant differences we ascribe value to certain bodies based on species.

    Maybe you could assist: when you first heard of the concept of communism (something you surely were no acculturated to) what benefit did you see proved it worthy of adopting, and thus "right"?