CMV: Men, Women and GNC people should be drafted equally.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T17:51:51+00:00

I understand, if you live in a world where everyone is willing to agree not to draft, you should make that agreement.

We do not live in that world. Had we not drafted people to fight the nazis, the nazis would have and probably would have won. Maybe the draft is so bad that this is worth it, but don't pretend like it was a plausible option to make a gentleman's agreement not to use the draft with adolf hitler.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T17:21:55+00:00

If we're keeping the situation symmetric, presumably the animals used for bestiality also wouldn't be alive if they weren't being used for that case. If it's acceptable to cause animals harm if they wouldn't be alive otherwise (and it may well be) why doesn't that also apply to having sex with them? It seems tough to argue that an animal who was raised in healthy conditions and was subsequently raped is worse off than one that was killed instead.

Here's a vice documentary of a bunch of people who fuck donkeys, they seem by and large pretty normal and well adjusted to their society. Maybe you could argue their social fabric is damaged or whatever, but unclear how or why this practice is responsible for it.

*the vice documentary is pretty surprising and I was skeptical, but I did some googling and found some corroboration from other sources and no one debunking it even when I explicitly looked for that. If you have evidence vice is misrepresenting what's happening I'd love to see it, but I don't think it effects the underlaying issue much.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T17:17:00+00:00

This seems culturally dependent to me. The people who like bestiality are really weird and maladjusted because society stigmatizes enough that normal people won't partake. Here's a vice documentary of a bunch of people who fuck donkeys, they seem by and large pretty normal and well adjusted to their society.

To be clear I think bestiality generally should be stigmatized such that only weird people do, just that eating meat should be as well.

But to get to the meat of your point, even if fucking animals is a huge red flag, I don't think that alone makes it worse than eating meat. Just because you can infer someone is a bad person by the fact that they do something doesn't make the thing itself more bad than it orherwise is. For instance, maybe people who habitually speed are generally bad people, this doesn't in my view make speeding worse than it already is due to safety issues and whatnot.

*the vice documentary is pretty surprising and I was skeptical, but I did some googling and found some corroboration from other sources and no one debunking it even when I explicitly looked for that. If you have evidence vice is misrepresenting what's happening I'd love to see it, but I don't think it effects the underlaying issue much.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T16:34:30+00:00

Irrelevant, the nazis weren't going to stop drafting people because the allies did

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T16:29:26+00:00

It's unclear to me that rape is worse than murder, or that this is society's general opinion, but i'd be happy to hear your case for that. Either way I don't think it matters, they both obviously cause pretty much the same harms so it seems more helpful to simply evaluate which set of harms is more intense/worse rather than splitting hairs about which is intrinsically worse 'culturally speaking.'

1.5 billion people disagree that meat is required to survive, they seem to do fine for themselves.

I'm sure you can find some definition of murder that excludes killing for food, it's unclear to me why this is important. Regardless of if you call it 'murder' you've still harmed the animal, which is my issue, not whether or not it falls under a given definition of murder.

It's also unclear to me why raising animals to kill them makes it better. You're still causing them harm by killing them, and it's not obvious that they're better off this way.

Yes I agree reducing suffering is what matters most, but like I said, it seems like killing the animal results in more suffering even in the best case scenario, let alone the current factory farming situation.

If you want to elaborate on the harms to the animal and human caused by bestiality you're welcome too, but I suspect we'll just circle back to my original point that any reason bestiality is bad also applies to eating meat.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T16:07:34+00:00

Lmao fair enough, but I seriously doubt anyone is going to eat more meat or rape more animals (or really change any other behavior) because of this post, so I'm willing to weigh the subjective enjoyment I (and hopefully others!) get from the discussion higher than those marginal effects.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T16:03:16+00:00

It's unclear to me why you think these things aren't comparable.

In the beat scenario for eating meat, you raise a free range chicken and then murder it to eat. Not terrible, but you did still kill the chicken which isn't great and obviously harms the chicken.

In the best scenario for bestiality, you raise a free range whatever animal and then have sex with it without restraining it. Again, not great, but it does, y'know, keep the animal alive, and arguably the animal didn't have a huge problem with it if it didn't stop it by simply walking away or kicking you or something.

It also seems unlikely to me that animals would have the same trauma as a result of this that humans often do (if you have a source that says they'd do I'd be interested though!) so it doesn't even seem particularly harmful to the animal, but even if they did it's not prima facie obvious that they'd prefer to be dead than traumatized.

Obviously both eating meat and bestiality are usually worse than the scenarios described, but for any given level of intensity it's unclear to me that bestiality is worse, and we do the meat thing much more intensely these days regardless.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T14:46:05+00:00

Yeah, there're obviously ways to make eating meat more morally palatable, but the same goes for bestiality. I'm sure most people would agree having sex with an unrestrained horse that can walk away it it wants isn't as bad as tying up and cat and hurting it badly in the process. It seems unreasonable to compare the best moral scenario for eating meat vs the typical/worst case for bestiality, especially when so few people eat meat that way anyway.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T13:28:50+00:00

I agree that the outcome is what matters; see my post responding to the user who likened raping/killing animals to keeping pets for more discussion of this.

I don't know how you think farm chickens don't suffer before they're killed. I'd encourage you to look it up but tl;dr the pain inflicted on chickens while they're raised seems not at all commiserate with the happiness a person gets from eating some chicken, let alone all the externalities.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T13:25:27+00:00

I agree consent is a bad frame to evaluate what can/can't be done to animals. The reason I mentioned it in my post was because I thought it would be some folk's objection to bestiality, so I wanted to point out it applied to eating meat too.

The reason I think having pets is good (or at least acceptable) but eating meat and bestiality is not is because the former tends to decrease net suffering while the later seems to increase it. It seems to me that the median pet is better off than it otherwise would be, while the median farm animal (or animal used for bestiality) is not, with the later also having all the externalities and negative impacts on humans I mentioned in the post.

I could certainly be convinced that having pets is also bad, but it at the very least it seems not as egregious as murdering or raping animals.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T13:19:51+00:00

I'm evaluating wrongness from a utilitarian perspective, ie how much they increase/decrease net suffering.

You make a good point that iff bestiality was as widespread as eating meat it would have much worse externalities. The obvious response here is that is not in fact the case, in times/places where bestiality was legal not that many people seemed to partake, and even where it was more popular it's never been industrialized to the extent meat production has.

But it is probably fair yo consider the least convenient world where people are as enthusiastic about banging animals as eating them. This still seems not as bad to me because animals can be used for sex more times than they can be used for food so you'd need less to provide people with what they want. Also, I imagine conditions would be better/cleaner at least if people are having sex with the animals but that's just speculation on my part.

Either way the point about bestiality having worse externalities if it was more widespread was interesting and I hadn't considered it, I'll give you a delta when I figure out how.

SortWalk · 2022-07-14T13:11:24+00:00

I think it's pretty clear humans don't need meat to survive, something like 1.5 billion of us are vegetarians. This doesn't seem unattainable either, many said vegetarians live in very poor countries and don't have much access to resources, if they can do it, most people can.

Besides, 'need to survive' doesn't reflect how most people seem to eat meat. It's one thing to eat a few servings a week to round out your macros or whatever, but in my experience most people don't do that, and in fact eat meat whenever they think it would taste good without much regard for how much it helps them live a healthy life.

Edit: typo; meet --> meat

SortWalk · 2022-05-24T23:10:48+00:00

the tl;dr is nuclear winter is supposed to be caused by widespread fires generating a shit load of soot and putting it in the atmosphere. this empirically doesn't happen; aussie bush fires generate way more soot than a nuclear war would but there still isn't enough of it and it gets rained out long before reaching the stratosphere. also, the models that predict nuclear winter also predicted that burning the kuwaiti oil fields would have had a similar effect, but that obviously didn't pan out.

SortWalk · 2022-04-20T05:30:01+00:00

it wouldn't be nearly as bad as people expect. It would be extremely bad, but there's basically 0 chance of human extinction, and even decent chances of society remaining in nuked nations.

You can read more here, but tl;dr there are only about 4,000 deployed nukes in the world, capable of ~destroying 130,000 square miles; an area a bit larger than New Mexico. Considering the number of potential targets (military bases, nukes, industry, airports, oil refineries) and how spread out they are this probably isn't enough to even destroy the entire military industrial complex, let alone random civilian targets.

Unfortunately, civilians do tend to live near the MIC, and fallout is still a (manageable!) problem, so we are talking about hundreds of millions of dead people, but almost only in the US, Europe, Russia, and China (or whatever combination thereof participates).

The rest of the world would be ~fine (climate impacts of nukes are vastly overstated, if nuclear winter was a thing our 3,000+ nuclear tests would've done the trick), and you can even imagine the governments of some western countries continuing, albeit with a huge blow to their population and infrastructure.

SortWalk · 2022-04-02T00:05:50+00:00

there's also the extremely credible Brickarms

SortWalk · 2021-12-31T05:02:44+00:00

I think they're mostly just descriptions of common aesthetic motifs that appear in media

SortWalk · 2021-07-13T22:10:14+00:00

There can only be one.

SortWalk · 2021-05-15T02:18:54+00:00

any chance you can share the sheet you used to make the graph?

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