I think it's fair to respond a bit more calmly than I did yesterday to everything that happened, and I'm going to write a short thread, and then be done with the matter. Liz appears to have blocked/unblocked/locked her account, and I don't think I can entirely blame her

1. to reiterate on some starting points of being an adult, if you are a part of the "lol that's not an argument!" crowd (who failed to read any of the threads, or if you just want to attack me, I'm not going to respond. Also relevant, please return that same courtesy to Liz/

you don't have to agree with someone, or even have great respect, to grant them that courtesy. Harassment is never the best way to go about things.

2. I think it's important to address my own moral beliefs on veganism

on conceptual grounds, I have no problems with the movement, in fact I'm a supporter of it, I 100% welcome a day when we only have synthetic food, not coming from animals or even plants. I try not to eat meat anymore, and am constantly trying to find a diet that doesn't result/

/in me being perpetually tired, unable to sleep, and then blacking out for over 24 hours. I am underweight and my doctors says I need more fatty foods and a higher protein intake, but over a year ago thanks to a conversation with @CosmologicalYT who is a wonderful guy/

/I am trying to avoid meat as much as I can even if it means giving up some of my health. I love animals, and I'm sick of my timeline being festered with people who say I don't.

But veganism as we see it in practice, I have more problems with.

Its moral frameworks come off as absolutist in their preaching and yet extraordinarily subjective on the edge of arbitrary on various specifics. I think they're far too dismissive of moral implications of eating plants and other non-sentient creatures by their own framework/

/and I am extremely unconvinced by the philosophy of pain, which appears to me to be an extremely reductionist and pseudoscientific attempt to turn moral philosophy into mathematics

and so, I do often poke fun at the movement as it currently exists

This leads into

3. I appreciate much of the thoughtful and respectful discussion in these threads. Not all of them have been malicious, and some of them very respectful.

https://twitter.com/Navier_Tokes/status/1248937611927920642

I think some of these conversations are incomplete, but they are not malicious

4. I think to have a good faith argument, and not simply reduce away someone's objections to them "not being able to fathom the horror!"

because the numbers are so huge

and so while I have refrained from the "moral calculus" everyone seems to be playing with, I'll play along

As for visualization (fathoming) of the numbers, that's. something I particularly have little problem with

1,000,000,000,000 chickens (i.e.) per 6,000,000 jews (henceforth known as the Liz ratio) ends up saying each Jew is worth about 166,667 chickens (408 columns and rows)

And while the previous discussions about suffering and pain were taken into account I'd like to focus on a hypothetical in which death in instantaneous; surely the sufferings of the holocaust and the conditions of factory farming are both egregious, but let's look at loss of life

you have a child standing before you (jewish or otherwise) in one room, and in the other, 408 columns and rows of chickens in one giant square

you must click one of two buttons, each of which will instantly incinerate one whole room

simply enough thought experiment?

Keep in mind, the child isn't baby Hitler - in a situation where adult Hitler is in the room, I fully expect the moral math to be greatly different - but just a random innocent child, with random innocent chickens

which room do you kill?

Of course a democratic majority does not necessitate a moral action, otherwise Socrates would still be alive and none of us would need to own our individual conscience

I do think there is an intuition to such moral decisions, but let's change the parameters:

Do you feed thousands of lives, keeping them nourished but killing the 166,6678 Chickens in the process, or do you burn the child alive?

*this* is the correct thought experiment to be had when comparing the atrocities of the Holocaust to animal agriculture

I also certainly hope that Liz's 1/1000 quip about the worth of animals to humans was a random number without any thought to put into it

But therein lies something I alluded to earlier - there is an absolutist belief inherent in the vegan doctrine, yet the specifics lack

as of yet, I've seen no master list on the specific moral tradeoffs of dead humans : dead chickens : dead cows : dead fish

And does the purpose of the death matter? Our legal system certainly treats accidental vs self defense vs murder as different terms

come now show your work

but the work, simply put, hasn't been done. It's casuistry

It's moral opining, pretending there's some scientific or mathematical truth to it, when in actuality it's a complex moral situation with differing perspectives

at some point you need to hear it: you're not special

and this comes to the extreme misreading of one of my takes

https://twitter.com/BlueRepublik/status/1248843196458811401

when I say human lives are "immeasurably" more valuable, this was not an attempt to say infinity : 1

it was to say that we're more valuable, but there's no meaningful way to measure it

what, are you really telling me that you'd kill your own father or mother if it meant saving 283,465 chickens, but not if it meant saving 283,464?

surely if this is all calculable, we would have a cut off, at which point it would be unbearable?

and as previously stated: i'm perfectly willing to be here and do the accounting, and run through the numbers

they're not. they don't have the answers, and yet purport to know that feeding humans via the death of poultry is worse than the Holocaust

I am not the absolutist here - and yet I still am perfectly willing to fight factory farming even if it means so at the expense of my own deteriorating health despite my individual contribution ultimately being a useless blip in the long run.

To finish: I refuse to listen to the narcissism of teenagers on the internet who purport to have all the moral answers, present their moral truths as an absolute, but don't bother to have fleshed out their own arguments

and flippantly dismissing the Holocaust as was done/

/would only be attributed to the most virulent antisemites, if not for the more horrifying reality that by their own numbers, it'd be better for the human race itself to have been slaughtered and the suffering of animals entirely avoided

perhaps it's better not to demand that people engage with morality as some large math equation, if you're unprepared to do the calculations yourself

/e