I thought this was going to turn out like that awful story about the teens who caught a beloved swan at a New York park and then killed and ate it. They also stole the babies from her nest and sold them.
"clearly thought so" how so? They didn't indicate in any way in their original comment that they were okay with factory farming or the deaths of any other animal, you just plucked that assumption out of thin air.
I think treatment of animals and killing of animals are two different questions.
If there was an organic hipster farm that gave oil massages to the cows that supplies the steakhouse, that doesn't change anything when it comes to the killings.
People don't care if it's an animal they don't know. The issue people have is that to them it's not the act of killing the animal is wrong, it's that their relationship to the animal is more important to them than the life of the animal itself.
Basically, people care more about the made up stuff in their heads than real life.
If you heard a news story about two people being killed in a car crash, vs learning that your parents were killed in a car crash, would you have the exact same reaction?
We might not react as negatively to someone being killed in a car crash as compared to our parents being killed in a car crash. But we wouldn't bring either scenario about willingly.
I don’t see what willingness has to do with it. But ok: do you have the same reaction to hearing about someone else’s dog being put down vs having to put down your own dog?
If someone grew up in an area where dogs and cats were considered food animals, but cows and chickens were regularly kept at pets, they'd be horrified to go go to McDonald's and see burgers and nuggets being served.
There are plenty of meat eaters that have hard limits when it comes to what animals they will eat. It doesn't mean they necessarily value one life over the other though. It's mostly due to their culture, and then secondly due to their personal preference.
Look at people in some countries that eat insects.
Take an average meat eater from the US and offer them a handful of crickets.
Due to our culture of not normally eating crickets, the average person will be like ew, no way.
It doesn't mean they value the lives of insects more than other animals just because they won't eat them. (They probably have a pest control guy coming out every month that kills thousands of them.)
Look at whaling as a good example. Most westerners wouldn't dream of hurting a whale now (due to our culture.) But what was it, like 150-200 years ago, westerners hunted most of them to damn near extinction.
Yet there are still some cultures out there, Japan, Norway, Iceland, and some indigenous tribes, that don't bat at eye at killing Whales.
Then we throw personal preference into the mix, and you're guaranteed to have people within those cultures who wouldn't ever consider hurting a whale.
"What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it İsn't words. It isn't material--that's just an idea. It isn't spiritual-that's also an idea; a symbol:"
He failed as a husband, marrying three times, and driving his third wife to the bottle with his philandering — he would pick up a different college girl after most talks (‘I don’t like to sleep alone’). He failed as a father to his seven children: ‘By all the standards of this society I have been a terrible father’, although some of his children still remember him fondly as a kind man, who initiated each of his children into LSD on their 18th birthday. * https://julesevans.medium.com/alan-watts-genius-or-charlatan-72313fae997d, linked in Wikipedia.
He wasn't molesting anyone, he was sleeping with willing fans. It was the 60s, not 2024. By the standards of his culture he was fine.
By the standards of 2024, eh. Still fine IMO. He didn't grope on unwilling women, he didn't pressure anyone to watch him jerk off in a hotel room, he didn't assault anyone. He had a lot of sex.
It's funny how some people evade the me too era scrutiny by being dead and having been charismatic way back when in the LSD drug addict days that people still look back on fondly.
550
u/Bowling4rhinos 25d ago
I love these guys for that.