An overdue existential crisis, or moment of clarity, caused by a lifetime of routine alienation between the consumer, the product, the store, the factory pen and butchery.
Mom should read Marx, and The Jungle.
Maybe pick up hunting, if she wants to see what it takes from her own pov.
I was pressured into going hunting a few times with my dad growing up, and I ended up killing a few deer. It's something I'm not proud of, one among many things I came to regret later in life.
I used to think "If you can't or won't kill it personally, then you shouldn't eat it" was an argument in support of hunting. Now I think of it as an argument in support of vegetarianism. Funny how perspective changes everything...
What's also funny is how as a society we say things like "kids who kill bugs grow up to be psychopaths," yet we totally normalize hunting as a sport. Why is that? For that matter, why don't we say "anyone who eats animal flesh is a psychopath?"
As if being five steps removed from the suffering and death somehow abstracts the cruelty so that one can indulge in the pleasure of what is produced by it without bearing any moral culpability in the processes by which that meat arrived on one's plate?
Why is it only the forms of cruelty that society doesn't accept as cultural pastimes that are considered taboo? I should rephrase. Why does society accept some forms of cruelty and not others?
As if being five steps removed from the suffering and death somehow abstracts the cruelty so that one can indulge in the pleasure of what is produced by it without bearing any moral culpability in the processes by which that meat arrived on one’s plate?
This, and as a vegan it infuriates/despairs me when people whom I otherwise like and respect just never turn a thought towards this dissonance in their lives. They may care deeply about social injustices and oppression, but see no problem with continuing to participate in the mass torture and murder of non-human sentient creatures. So by now when someone says they "love animals", my first (internal) reaction is a bitter snort, because it's extremely rare that such people are even vegetarian, let alone vegan.
The principal difference ia that you see the death of a non-sapient animal as murder and I ascribe it the same ethical weight whether a person or a lion does it. It's not "dissonance" it's a foundational disagreement on inherent morality, our place in nature, and the "value of life".
There's lots to complain about regarding the factory farming industry (environmental impact foremost in my mind, and the needlessly inhumane conditions they're raised in) but eating meat is not imo itself a cruel act.
Definitely, my comment was made within the practical reality of what "eating meat" involves for the vast majority of people living in Western societies. If animals would just be painlessly and "stresslessly" euthanised, I would have almost zero issues with the concept. (And yes, I'm setting higher standards for humans than for predators re: painlessly/stresslessly, because we do have both the means and a sense of right and wrong, unlike lions.)
I don't see life itself as valuable - a life filled with suffering imho is not necessarily better than nonexistence, though of course this is up to each entity to decide about themselves. (And for this reason I'm also pro-euthanasia / assisted dying.)
Kidding, but I fully agree with your comments. I write a lot about the public perceptions on nature in my work. The stories we tell ourselves sometimes, I swear.
A little more lot and she'll eventually stumble in to "Where did this existence come from? Why is there matter to have a universe, why is there any existence at all? If God exists, how was he created?"
Or she is on a few different neurospectra, and gets species dysphoria as a regular thing and finds it funny as well.
But yeah after stopping being a vegetarian I went and killed a lot of animals for other people to balance the scales. Now I prefer if my terrestrial meat had a name, not number.
Yep, not a hunter myself, but I do respect someone that actually does the work, does it well, follows the rules, ain't an insane gun nut, lets the local butcher sell the bits they don't want for themself.
I feel for mom. I want to be vegan but I hate legumes. So instead of becoming protein deficient because I refuse to eat beans, I'll just wait for lab-grown meat to finally get USDA (FDA?) approval.
Tofu, seitan, synthesized pea or soy protein… where I live, you can get vegan nonfat skyr that tastes every bit as funky as real skyr, and although it does have a hollow, oaty aftertaste, you can counter it pretty easily by adding a fat (I tend to carefully temper melted vegan butter and just add that) or using it with something (like jam, oats, and wheat germ/flaxseed) or as a thickener/creamy/cultured element in a recipe
That estrogen thing is wrong. There's more estrogen in the meat people consume, far more, and you never hear anyone about that.
If you're worried about stuff like that, you'd do much better avoiding PFAS, which can affect male fertility. And cause cancer and a bunch of other diseases.
I'm pretty weirded out by everyone in this thread saying Mom is high as fuck or having a mental break because this feels like a pretty normal series of thoughts to me, and not like something that would be distressing or brought on by distress.
The shift in the unseen eyes as the thread takes hold, suffocating and spinning; a meal for me, an annoyance for you. In the corners you don't check, a cornucopia of opportunity as yet another morsel is discarded, attracting them by the droves, your apathy to your own glutton as forgotten as the coconut you keep under your bed. (And, scene.)
I think it's more that this is from 'mom' as in, the parental figure, which is usually the recipient of existential dread of their kids, rather than the one expressing it onto them.
Mom is beginning to see through her cultural conditioning to things that the owner class meant to be invisible. Mom is made of meat and the flesh on her table was once an individual like her, maybe even a mom like her, and Mom let herself become complicit in a system that makes one victim the victim of another victim all for the enrichment of the cruel and hateful creatures with economic power.
This goes back way further than ownership. We’re talking millions of years. Dinosaurs feasting on dinosaurs. We’re a little speck of dust on a speck of dust in the blink of an eye to the vast, uncaring universe.
We are the universe just as much as anything else. And this universe is likely teeming with life, at least this planet is. Therefore, the universe very much cares.
Fallacy of composition. A car’s tires are made of rubber, doesn’t mean the whole car is made of rubber. Caring is a thing individuals do, not the systems they belong to.
We’re all living in a capitalist society. Does that mean capitalism cares?
// I cooked a steak tonight
// and was feeling alien
//
// How weird this gross piece
// of cold raw flesh
// on a cold plate is
//
// and I was thinking
// I am just an animal
// with the luxury of packaged flesh
// and is it human flesh?
// Like
// I wouldn't know
// We just believe it's a cow but
//
// we don't
//
// have fucking proof
//
// of anything
//
//
// The knife went through the same
//
// as if it was my own leg
//
// -Mom
Trying desperately to recall AP English classes to remember which poet was particularly renowned for doing unusual spacing and alignment in poems like this. Hemmingway?
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
I want to be mechanized.
This [feeling] comes from my brain, from my flesh, from my bones.
I go mad to get my hands on every dynamo.
My saliva-covered tongue is licking copper wires.
The auto-draisine in my veins is chasing down locomotives.
vroom,
vroom!
clank clank clank!
I want to be mechanized.
Certainly I will find a solution to this.
And then I will be content only
the day I mount a turbine in my abdomen, and
append a double-propulsor on my tailplane!
I don't think anything should suffer unnecessarily (so most of the meat industry is of course terrible), but anything without sapience, and doesn't have a sense of self or concept of time isn't much different to plants to my mind. I don't think there's any cognitive dissonance inherent in eating meat in general.
You probably also wouldn't appreciate my stance on how little I care about a human infant's life.
Every mammal possesses sapience and a robust concept of time and self.
You are a bad person for eating meat just as I am. For the selfish desire of our own pleasure and simplicity of nutrition, we cause immense suffering and death at a scale and acuity worse than the holocaust. There is no way to rationalize eating meat in modern society as anything but catastrophically unethical.
Don’t rationalize your way out of it, accept that it makes us bad people and try to do something about it.
You guys keep saying the word "sapience." But do you mean SENTIENCE? Because "sapience" is a derivative of homo sapiens which means human. But if you are talking about animals, they are not humans, therefore not homo sapiens, therefore no "sapience." I think you are contemplating animals' SENTIENCE. 🤔
Holy moral absolutism batman, this barely reaches Sunday School levels of ethical thought. I'm a strong proponent of abandoning animal product dependence but poor-puppy-dog arguments drive me nuts.
For starters, every living being has a prerogative to survive and propagate its genetic pattern; pleasure and pain are base mechanisms for that. I personally refuse to believe that there is anything inherently bad about the existence of pain any more than the existence of pleasure is inherently good. Our human aversion to inflicting undue pain is natural as prosocial animals but that doesn't make it morally just or our tolerances for violence absolute.
Our reactions to violence aren't universal because every plant and animal has a set of characteristics which overlap with human characteristics to varying degrees. Those overlap very little with plants, more with mammals, even more with domesticated animals (selected for prosocial traits) and most with primates.
Moreover, our sensitivity to those traits is highly personal, depending on the context of our exposure to them. If your only exposure to non-human mammals is pet dogs then you'll obviously draw parallels when you see cattle with eyelashes and fur and tails. If you have to deal with dangerous feral dogs and nuisance vermin then you won't have the same sensitivity to those traits.
Our society exists at the expense of other forms of life, either directly (animal husbandry) or indirectly (habitats disrupted by our infrastructure). So saying nobody should eat meat because it causes suffering doesn't say anything about universal ethics, it's an unexamined exclamation that tells more about your existential dissonance than mine.
Before you dive into an argument about minimizing suffering, let's look closer at this part:
There is no way to rationalize eating meat in modern society as anything but catastrophically unethical
Humans have already destroyed many food chains, usually by eliminating apex predators. If there's nothing to hold the deer population in check, native plants will be decimated and the ecosystem will collapse. Humans are left in the position of culling them as the apex predator, the violence must happen either way.
How could eating the meat be "catastrophically unethical" in that situation? That's the expected flow of the food chain. Is it better to self-flagellate by disposing of ready calories; wasting water + topsoil + time to turn it into a vegan food?
Putting aside "humans greedy and meat bad", let's examine a fun part of your argument:
we cause immense suffering and death at a scale and acuity worse than the holocaust
We have 8 billion megafauna primates on our pale blue dot. Any pain we inflict is necessarily going to be at an immense scale. The scale has no ethical bearing unless you're arguing against utility derived, in which case a genocide is infinitely worse because we derive no utility from it.
I personally draw the line at ability to be in pain/suffering, rather than self-awareness. And so trying to minimise the suffering I cause to other beings, within practical limits - living in a capitalist society, everything I buy or use was at least partially made available by human exploitation.
But back to animals, I do agree that, say, a prawn is most likely capable of less suffering, than say, a cow or chicken, since their nervous system and "psychology" (if a prawn even has such) is much simpler. So if someone was truly forced to eat animal protein for health reasons (with the assumption that human health is of elevated priority over animal suffering), then I do think that eating animals of lower ability for suffering is more ethical than those with higher. Both prawns and cows can feel bodily pain, but animals with higher cognitive abilities are probably also harmed by all the ways in which factory farming stops them from being able to express their natural behaviours.
I am of mixed attitudes towards treating animals and humans on the same priority scale. My emotional affection to people I know and my awareness of societal norms tend to make me shy away from saying that a fetus/newborn or a person with profound intellectual disability are potentially less capable of non-pain suffering than a cow or a dog, but intellectually it would only be consistent reasoning. (Same with drawing parallels between human slavery and animal captivity and exploitation.)
I place the rotisserie chicken onto the cutting board and grab one wing firmly, then with a practiced hand, twist and dislocate the wing from its shoulder. I pause for a moment to look at the joints in my own fingers, then continue to dismember the rest of the chicken with my bare hands.
I find the juxtaposition of the innocuous lead in ("text from my mom") with the rather unhinged text funny. The comparison to poetry, which I personally associate with peacefulness, adds to the expectation that it's going to be a pleasant text, which gets subverted spectacularly. I can also imagine the mom's encounter with the steak, resulting in them drafting the text to their child, which makes me chuckle because it's such a silly thing to experience.
It's less explicitly funny than a lot of things, but the subtlety doesn't mean it isn't funny. Humor is subjective and all, but there's plenty of funny to be found here for most people.
Prose Poetry is a well established tradition that many are unaware of.
Greek Scene
He dismounted, hitched his horse to the huge mulberry tree, took a leak.
The horse was looking at him. He slapped its neck.
“We’re young,” he said.
The sun was calling out among the osiers.
The cicadas were coming on strong.
The fig tree’s shadow banged against the stones.
A huge red sail was flapping above the plane trees.
The horse was twitching its ears, sometimes the one,
sometimes the other, while below,
two young boatmen were rolling the huge iron barrel along the road.
And if she can't tell the difference between cow, bison, deer, chicken, gator, and then think human flesh wouldn't stand out as completely unfamiliar... Well I'm not sure what to say.
I read a short story once where in the future they could synthesize foods (like Star Trek), and part of the challenge was to find the best flavors. At some point there is a combination formula going around that everyone agrees is the best tasting food ever. The end of the story is the person narrating who had figured out what the formula is simulating, and it's people.
Also, Soylent Green is mentioned in the movie to be a very popular and preferred flavor, more than the past Soylent products.
“I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
Mom is stoned.
"What kind of mushrooms did you put in the mushroom sauce?"
Trip ≠ High
Erm actually
An overdue existential crisis, or moment of clarity, caused by a lifetime of routine alienation between the consumer, the product, the store, the factory pen and butchery.
Mom should read Marx, and The Jungle.
Maybe pick up hunting, if she wants to see what it takes from her own pov.
Maybe watch Dominion
For busy moms who don't have time for a full documentary, try 3minutes.wtf.
my last straw was Meet Your Meat
I was pressured into going hunting a few times with my dad growing up, and I ended up killing a few deer. It's something I'm not proud of, one among many things I came to regret later in life.
I used to think "If you can't or won't kill it personally, then you shouldn't eat it" was an argument in support of hunting. Now I think of it as an argument in support of vegetarianism. Funny how perspective changes everything...
What's also funny is how as a society we say things like "kids who kill bugs grow up to be psychopaths," yet we totally normalize hunting as a sport. Why is that? For that matter, why don't we say "anyone who eats animal flesh is a psychopath?"
As if being five steps removed from the suffering and death somehow abstracts the cruelty so that one can indulge in the pleasure of what is produced by it without bearing any moral culpability in the processes by which that meat arrived on one's plate?
Why is it only the forms of cruelty that society doesn't accept as cultural pastimes that are considered taboo? I should rephrase. Why does society accept some forms of cruelty and not others?
This, and as a vegan it infuriates/despairs me when people whom I otherwise like and respect just never turn a thought towards this dissonance in their lives. They may care deeply about social injustices and oppression, but see no problem with continuing to participate in the mass torture and murder of non-human sentient creatures. So by now when someone says they "love animals", my first (internal) reaction is a bitter snort, because it's extremely rare that such people are even vegetarian, let alone vegan.
The principal difference ia that you see the death of a non-sapient animal as murder and I ascribe it the same ethical weight whether a person or a lion does it. It's not "dissonance" it's a foundational disagreement on inherent morality, our place in nature, and the "value of life".
There's lots to complain about regarding the factory farming industry (environmental impact foremost in my mind, and the needlessly inhumane conditions they're raised in) but eating meat is not imo itself a cruel act.
Definitely, my comment was made within the practical reality of what "eating meat" involves for the vast majority of people living in Western societies. If animals would just be painlessly and "stresslessly" euthanised, I would have almost zero issues with the concept. (And yes, I'm setting higher standards for humans than for predators re: painlessly/stresslessly, because we do have both the means and a sense of right and wrong, unlike lions.)
I don't see life itself as valuable - a life filled with suffering imho is not necessarily better than nonexistence, though of course this is up to each entity to decide about themselves. (And for this reason I'm also pro-euthanasia / assisted dying.)
This is why I prefer chicken, I know I can take one on 1v1.
You'd be surprised, those descendants of T-rex can be fierce!
Kidding, but I fully agree with your comments. I write a lot about the public perceptions on nature in my work. The stories we tell ourselves sometimes, I swear.
don’t be so sure
Idk, my mom's rooster bullies me relentlessly, and I could PROBABLY take him in a fight, but its not a sure thing.
+1 to the existential exploration.
A little more lot and she'll eventually stumble in to "Where did this existence come from? Why is there matter to have a universe, why is there any existence at all? If God exists, how was he created?"
Or she is on a few different neurospectra, and gets species dysphoria as a regular thing and finds it funny as well.
But yeah after stopping being a vegetarian I went and killed a lot of animals for other people to balance the scales. Now I prefer if my terrestrial meat had a name, not number.
Yep, not a hunter myself, but I do respect someone that actually does the work, does it well, follows the rules, ain't an insane gun nut, lets the local butcher sell the bits they don't want for themself.
Food is fucking weird
Pre-vegan thoughts.
I feel for mom. I want to be vegan but I hate legumes. So instead of becoming protein deficient because I refuse to eat beans, I'll just wait for lab-grown meat to finally get USDA (FDA?) approval.
Even chickpeas, lentils, or peanuts? I dislike western beans but I'm fine with these others which are (IMO) quite superior.
Especially chickpeas, lentils, and peanuts. Peanut butter is alright, though.
Valid!
There are many more vegetal protein sources though, and if you really can't bear those either just eat eggs
Then they would be vegetarian, not vegan
Tofu, seitan, synthesized pea or soy protein… where I live, you can get vegan nonfat skyr that tastes every bit as funky as real skyr, and although it does have a hollow, oaty aftertaste, you can counter it pretty easily by adding a fat (I tend to carefully temper melted vegan butter and just add that) or using it with something (like jam, oats, and wheat germ/flaxseed) or as a thickener/creamy/cultured element in a recipe
I avoid soy protein because I heard it can promote estrogen production. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Plus I just like steak and octopus too much. I'll wait for lab-grown meat.
That estrogen thing is wrong. There's more estrogen in the meat people consume, far more, and you never hear anyone about that.
If you're worried about stuff like that, you'd do much better avoiding PFAS, which can affect male fertility. And cause cancer and a bunch of other diseases.
That’s a misunderstanding due to the term phytoestrogens, afaik.
Or pre-hunter.
I'm pretty weirded out by everyone in this thread saying Mom is high as fuck or having a mental break because this feels like a pretty normal series of thoughts to me, and not like something that would be distressing or brought on by distress.
Post the spider poem
Well at least it's out there, thanks :)
The shift in the unseen eyes as the thread takes hold, suffocating and spinning; a meal for me, an annoyance for you. In the corners you don't check, a cornucopia of opportunity as yet another morsel is discarded, attracting them by the droves, your apathy to your own glutton as forgotten as the coconut you keep under your bed. (And, scene.)
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Very few people are capable of examining their loop for what it really is, let alone going off autopilot.
Some people just have a very narrow existence, I bet your spider poem was great.
You're just casually slogging through dissociative existentialism on a regular basis?
You guys are getting through?
If you're going through hell...
Keep going. Why would you stop in hell?
Who said anything about a regular basis?
The person I was replying to.
It was for me too. That’s why I opt for the tofu now.
Also, what's wrong with being high as fuck?
I think it's more that this is from 'mom' as in, the parental figure, which is usually the recipient of existential dread of their kids, rather than the one expressing it onto them.
Having them? Sure.
Mom is beginning to see through her cultural conditioning to things that the owner class meant to be invisible. Mom is made of meat and the flesh on her table was once an individual like her, maybe even a mom like her, and Mom let herself become complicit in a system that makes one victim the victim of another victim all for the enrichment of the cruel and hateful creatures with economic power.
This goes back way further than ownership. We’re talking millions of years. Dinosaurs feasting on dinosaurs. We’re a little speck of dust on a speck of dust in the blink of an eye to the vast, uncaring universe.
John Capitalism invented eating in 1901. Open your mind. Breathe.
We are the universe just as much as anything else. And this universe is likely teeming with life, at least this planet is. Therefore, the universe very much cares.
Fallacy of composition. A car’s tires are made of rubber, doesn’t mean the whole car is made of rubber. Caring is a thing individuals do, not the systems they belong to.
We’re all living in a capitalist society. Does that mean capitalism cares?
Fucking hell, man. I'm already depressed enough as it is.
Right?
I'm already in a perpetual exesential crisis. I don't need more reason to be.
That’s because it is poetry. Mom might need a psych eval, but it’s still poetry (and I love it).
Trying desperately to recall AP English classes to remember which poet was particularly renowned for doing unusual spacing and alignment in poems like this. Hemmingway?
ee cummings?
THAT'S THE GUY
Thank you!
Interesting, I didn't know there was actually a guy kind of famous for that. These days, it always feels like a bit of a meme, like,
^kbyethx^
Behutiful
Some Ezra guy?
The various spacings make this read to me like a William Shatner impression
Sounds like mom just took a hit of some gooooood shit.
Someone got into the edibles lol
Is this your mum?
I been procrastinating this translation for a while but now warhammer and poetry are in the same context, I simply have to.
(In case you wanna listen to it)
- Nazim Hikmet, 1923. Makinalaşmak İstiyorum.
Thank you for this!
Thank you
Don’t you go aristotling on me
Deep Thoughts by Werner Herzog.
omnivore realises the cognitive dissonance required to consume meat :P
I don't think anything should suffer unnecessarily (so most of the meat industry is of course terrible), but anything without sapience, and doesn't have a sense of self or concept of time isn't much different to plants to my mind. I don't think there's any cognitive dissonance inherent in eating meat in general.
You probably also wouldn't appreciate my stance on how little I care about a human infant's life.
Every mammal possesses sapience and a robust concept of time and self.
You are a bad person for eating meat just as I am. For the selfish desire of our own pleasure and simplicity of nutrition, we cause immense suffering and death at a scale and acuity worse than the holocaust. There is no way to rationalize eating meat in modern society as anything but catastrophically unethical.
Don’t rationalize your way out of it, accept that it makes us bad people and try to do something about it.
You guys keep saying the word "sapience." But do you mean SENTIENCE? Because "sapience" is a derivative of homo sapiens which means human. But if you are talking about animals, they are not humans, therefore not homo sapiens, therefore no "sapience." I think you are contemplating animals' SENTIENCE. 🤔
Holy moral absolutism batman, this barely reaches Sunday School levels of ethical thought. I'm a strong proponent of abandoning animal product dependence but poor-puppy-dog arguments drive me nuts.
For starters, every living being has a prerogative to survive and propagate its genetic pattern; pleasure and pain are base mechanisms for that. I personally refuse to believe that there is anything inherently bad about the existence of pain any more than the existence of pleasure is inherently good. Our human aversion to inflicting undue pain is natural as prosocial animals but that doesn't make it morally just or our tolerances for violence absolute.
Our reactions to violence aren't universal because every plant and animal has a set of characteristics which overlap with human characteristics to varying degrees. Those overlap very little with plants, more with mammals, even more with domesticated animals (selected for prosocial traits) and most with primates.
Moreover, our sensitivity to those traits is highly personal, depending on the context of our exposure to them. If your only exposure to non-human mammals is pet dogs then you'll obviously draw parallels when you see cattle with eyelashes and fur and tails. If you have to deal with dangerous feral dogs and nuisance vermin then you won't have the same sensitivity to those traits.
Our society exists at the expense of other forms of life, either directly (animal husbandry) or indirectly (habitats disrupted by our infrastructure). So saying nobody should eat meat because it causes suffering doesn't say anything about universal ethics, it's an unexamined exclamation that tells more about your existential dissonance than mine.
Before you dive into an argument about minimizing suffering, let's look closer at this part:
Humans have already destroyed many food chains, usually by eliminating apex predators. If there's nothing to hold the deer population in check, native plants will be decimated and the ecosystem will collapse. Humans are left in the position of culling them as the apex predator, the violence must happen either way.
How could eating the meat be "catastrophically unethical" in that situation? That's the expected flow of the food chain. Is it better to self-flagellate by disposing of ready calories; wasting water + topsoil + time to turn it into a vegan food?
Putting aside "humans greedy and meat bad", let's examine a fun part of your argument:
We have 8 billion megafauna primates on our pale blue dot. Any pain we inflict is necessarily going to be at an immense scale. The scale has no ethical bearing unless you're arguing against utility derived, in which case a genocide is infinitely worse because we derive no utility from it.
Unless you have allergies and can't eat dairy or beans. Really cuts out all the good protein sources.
Counterpoint: shut up.
*Gulps and almost chokes on triple-bacon-beefy-saiyan-deluxe*
"Finally!"
I personally draw the line at ability to be in pain/suffering, rather than self-awareness. And so trying to minimise the suffering I cause to other beings, within practical limits - living in a capitalist society, everything I buy or use was at least partially made available by human exploitation.
But back to animals, I do agree that, say, a prawn is most likely capable of less suffering, than say, a cow or chicken, since their nervous system and "psychology" (if a prawn even has such) is much simpler. So if someone was truly forced to eat animal protein for health reasons (with the assumption that human health is of elevated priority over animal suffering), then I do think that eating animals of lower ability for suffering is more ethical than those with higher. Both prawns and cows can feel bodily pain, but animals with higher cognitive abilities are probably also harmed by all the ways in which factory farming stops them from being able to express their natural behaviours.
I am of mixed attitudes towards treating animals and humans on the same priority scale. My emotional affection to people I know and my awareness of societal norms tend to make me shy away from saying that a fetus/newborn or a person with profound intellectual disability are potentially less capable of non-pain suffering than a cow or a dog, but intellectually it would only be consistent reasoning. (Same with drawing parallels between human slavery and animal captivity and exploitation.)
Checkmate badgers.
I place the rotisserie chicken onto the cutting board and grab one wing firmly, then with a practiced hand, twist and dislocate the wing from its shoulder. I pause for a moment to look at the joints in my own fingers, then continue to dismember the rest of the chicken with my bare hands.
that lady is dissociating. get her some therapy.
Fuck that, get her elected
Mom trippin balls.
lol right? Mom smoked a bit too much green before starting dinner
Is your mom channeling Phillip K Dick?
OP's mom definitely has a lot of dick in her, if that's what you're asking.
Mom accidentally dropped an existential poem in the group chat and then probably went back to doing dishes.
OPs mom definitely got high as hell before eating her steak.
I mean, has she tried her leg?
This is exactly why I voted for Trump to dismantle the EPA and FDA.
If we can’t know anyway there’s no sense in wasting money on trying.
/s
Sounds like mom got a little crispy herself before dinner.
Gummies kicked in!
#tooktoomuch
Mom tried the edibles.
We should normalize poetry.
Only if it's not flowery language. Im too neurodiverse to understand metaphors.
Mom, did you find my shroom stash and how much did you take?
Mom got woke
Where funny
I find the juxtaposition of the innocuous lead in ("text from my mom") with the rather unhinged text funny. The comparison to poetry, which I personally associate with peacefulness, adds to the expectation that it's going to be a pleasant text, which gets subverted spectacularly. I can also imagine the mom's encounter with the steak, resulting in them drafting the text to their child, which makes me chuckle because it's such a silly thing to experience.
It's less explicitly funny than a lot of things, but the subtlety doesn't mean it isn't funny. Humor is subjective and all, but there's plenty of funny to be found here for most people.
Because you are unaware of 'prose?'
Prose Poetry is a well established tradition that many are unaware of.
Greek Scene
He dismounted, hitched his horse to the huge mulberry tree, took a leak.
The horse was looking at him. He slapped its neck.
“We’re young,” he said.
The sun was calling out among the osiers.
The cicadas were coming on strong.
The fig tree’s shadow banged against the stones.
A huge red sail was flapping above the plane trees.
The horse was twitching its ears, sometimes the one,
sometimes the other, while below,
two young boatmen were rolling the huge iron barrel along the road.
Yiannis Ritsos (transl. from Greek)
All flesh is one
Cold?
Mom needs to learn to cook
And if she can't tell the difference between cow, bison, deer, chicken, gator, and then think human flesh wouldn't stand out as completely unfamiliar... Well I'm not sure what to say.
"cold raw flesh"
Or maybe you just need to learn to read? This is clearly before cooking
Apparently the term "long pig" for human flesh originated because we taste like pork. I wonder if butchered cuts of human look like pork too.
I read a short story once where in the future they could synthesize foods (like Star Trek), and part of the challenge was to find the best flavors. At some point there is a combination formula going around that everyone agrees is the best tasting food ever. The end of the story is the person narrating who had figured out what the formula is simulating, and it's people.
Also, Soylent Green is mentioned in the movie to be a very popular and preferred flavor, more than the past Soylent products.
I know Mythbusters used pig carcasses a ton because it was so similar to humans so I assume so.
That's an interesting way to put it, but what similarities to we have between pork vs human
That's because it is poetry
“I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
- Terry Pratchett
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
I'm just more jealous than I should be that other people can still afford to go to the store and buy steak.
I have similar thoughts when I eat meat.
Its very hard to trave the supply chains. I drives me to eat, and grow for myself, a vegetarian diet.
Well there was claims that Mcdonalds were processing human cadavers making them into burgers, so it's not a overfetched theory!
New menu item - Soylent Green!
Or just two overfetched theories.
Interpretive dance intensifies
I read that as an indictment of poetry above anything else.
Literally Alan Wake type writing.
mom knows what it would feel like for the knife to go through her own leg?
It sounds like she's off her meds.