mfed1122

To be fair, the headline of this article did literally call it a birthday parade.

Yes, we are agreeing. It's telling that you think we aren't, though.

I think there is a substantial difference though. Meat processing is done in a measured, considered way for a benefit (meat) that cannot be obtained without killing the animal. It is done in isolated facilities away from people who find the process disturbing. Just because people find something gross doesn't mean it shouldn't be done - we have sewage maintenance done out of the public eye too - but it does maybe mean it should be done where people don't have to see it. The only benefit this man gets from killing the animal is some sort of "revenge". But this is in principle completely contradictory to meat processing, where animals are seen as less capable of higher order experiences and therefore more acceptable to kill. To seek revenge, you would need to be assigning more higher order experience to the seagull than we typically see it as having. You have to see the seagull as selfish, stealing, criminal, rude, etc., even though in reality a more reasonable person understands that it's just an animal looking for food. Meat processing is not done out of some emotional vendetta against the animals, rather it is the cold detachment of it that is exactly what makes it acceptable. Can you imagine if we killed the same amount of chickens every day, not to eat them, but just because we hate them? This is much more horrifying! Because that would mean we think chickens are having complex enough inner experiences to warrant hatred, yet still we kill them.

Meat processing maybe isn't great, but it's still much better than this seagull killer. It isn't impulsive, it isn't disproportionate in response to the situation, it acknowledges and conceals its own horrors; thereby paying respect to important social codes. The actions of this man, though, disregarded the well-being of children and others around him, in an impulsive and disproportionate response - your average meat-eater is indeed better than that, I think. When I have a craving for some meat, I don't drag a calf down to the nearest playground, cut it in half and spray blood over the children, and proceed to mock the calf's weakness and inferiority as I beat it to tenderize it before consumption. I just want some food, dude. But what's this guy's beef? It's not beef, and it's not even seagull meat, but rather some frightening notion of swift and decisive revenge, which reveals that he is just waiting for any excuse to get away with brutalizing things around him.

I love the antigravity vomit coming out of the bottom half of the mouth.

Ugh. Yes. The gotchas are totally a pacifier.

"Hmm, nice genocide. Unfortunately for you I found this Twitter post you made ten years ago which proves you are acting hypocritically. Another victory for my cause!"

Like....you have achieved nothing by identifying and publicizing these hypocrisies. Only very logical people care about hypocrisy. Most people just want what they want, and will pick up any reason for it as long as it comforts them, then discard that reason and replace it with a mutually exclusive one later as needed. The only people that care about hypocrisy are logical, and as a general rule, the logical people already agree with you.

Yeah, agreed. But it's unfortunate that this is now being intermixed with other movements pertaining to all of this which more directly are concerned with capitalism. Feels like an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of dynamic, which is more than a little risky - especially when the enemy of my enemy is a much more powerful entity than I am, I run the risk of my message being completely drowned out by theirs.

Argument? I'm agreeing with you. What do you think we're even arguing about? And please don't insinuate that I'm posting in bad faith just because you think I disagree with you.

Nice, that's pretty cool. Like I mentioned in my other comment though, I'm less concerned about getting this functionality for myself, but more about how to most easily distribute it to as many Lemmy users as possible so that it becomes a part of the service itself - just because I feel like that kind of feature has benefits for the whole community as it is more adopted.

Yeah very true! It's just too bad that then it wouldn't be a core/universal feature, but I agree it makes the most sense on the client. I just wish it was possible to make it more universal, since this seems like a feature that would be useful to average users, but selecting clients based on these features seem more like a power-user level of concern. I suppose that would just be a matter of clients all copying useful features from each other if it gets popular.

Do I think Walton is one of these "good ones"? No, I don't. But I can't deny that there's no way for me to tell for sure. I don't believe she is, but the plausible deniability this provides her creates problematic dynamics, which is why I made my comment. Of course I believe that this is a cynical game on Walton's part, I'm only saying that we can't know for sure when it comes to this sort of activism, which is disturbing and problematic for movements, because it muddies the waters. It gives plausible deniability and confuses people in the middle, not to mention giving ammunition to the conservatives who want to claim that all these movements are billionaire funded ploys. "No Kings" is Walmart associated now? Now you need disclaimers to specify you don't like them either. It's disheartening to see (what I believe was a grassroots?) movements being co-opted by the wealthy and powerful as yet another way of the system integrating dissent to it's own benefit. It makes me think it may be necessary to form movements radical enough that they intrinsically cannot be adopted by the system - but of course such movements have proportionately more difficulty gathering support.

As an aside, I've noticed that I often get really reactionary responses to my comments like this on Lemmy when I say something that even hints at a possibility of reality being different from the dominant cultural narrative on the site, even when I in fact agree with that narrative. But even acknowledging the ways in which that narrative might be wrong is met with hostility. Nuance is an important thing, but it's unfortunate that I have to be so painstakingly precise with anything that even has the scent of countercultural thinking just to get my point across. The defensiveness and jumping to antagonistic conclusions is not a good thing to cultivate.

NGL, a Walton family member's involvement in this really just makes it look bad and even makes me question whether there's some sort of malicious ulterior goal to be achieved here. Of course I understand that Christy Walton is a human being fully capable of coming to right conclusions and having real emotional and ethical concerns even in contradiction to her background, as many people do. But is she actually that sort of person? Or is she the other type, and she's playing a cynical game and manipulating the masses for some covert benefit to herself? Unfortunately there's no way to tell.

In the same sense that some users might post only articles about ICE in California, or only articles about hurricanes in Florida, I still think that's not very strange. Some people are particularly invested in specific topics. Maybe the author is or is close to rape victims and is therefore especially interested in it. People dedicate their whole lives and careers to specific activist topics, so I don't think it's too strange for someone to dedicate most of their posting activity on one particular website to one. Anyways, I'm not sure what the ulterior motive would be here anyways - what do you think is the real reason for posting so many articles about rape?