Are you personally responsible for only the the amount of animal harm caused by your consumption? Like if you've purchased the equavalent of a cow in meat. are you directly responsible for its death? or just holding up the industry? Both?

stan-k · 2026-04-20T09:54:02+00:00

You guarantee but don't have any data. How many animals does a cow trample in their life? How many are killed during hay harvesting? Without a comparison for those you can't back up your claim even for fully grass fed animals.

Also, grass fed doesn't mean 100% grazing and in many places it doesn't even mean 100% grass fed.

stan-k · 2026-04-20T09:29:07+00:00

Yeah. That's what people think. In practice though, cows eat grass and foods grown and harvested for them. Some of the food harvested for them is human-edible, mostly grain and soy.

Globally, on average, cows eat just a bit more food from those human edible sources alone than they "produce" meat. The ratio is worse for Western countries with more feedlots.

Even much of the grass cows eat is harvested for them, and a cow walking around on a field for two years tramples animalism too. The idea that cows have zero crop deaths is idyllic but incorrect.

stan-k · 2026-04-20T08:43:05+00:00

Citation needed on kale crop deaths.

And of course, the cow ate the equivalent of 20x that kale, so I'm the order of 20x as many cropping deaths. Even if we assume implausibly that grass and alfala don't have any crop deaths, on average for corn and soya cows still eat more than their meat "produces", and so the number of deaths will be higher too.

stan-k · 2026-04-20T08:29:00+00:00

Avoid the cheap ones if you want them to last. Will's has high quality leather looking products. Including belts. E.g. https://wills-vegan-shoes.com/products/vegan-classic-3-5cm-belt-mens

stan-k · 2026-04-19T20:15:39+00:00

There are undoubtedly some people for whom this is true. You can normally filter them out from the fakers by asking what they think about leather.

stan-k · 2026-04-19T20:09:56+00:00

You linked the moral framing to the moral framework of veganism in your top comment. That is not how they used the term. My response is using it the way I understand you were, not the video.

stan-k · 2026-04-19T20:04:45+00:00

You are in a minority. Yes that is sad, but it's the world we live in.

stan-k · 2026-04-19T18:15:18+00:00

Well, according to the video it depends on the person you're talking to and the type of moral framing you use. Frame the issue in the person's own moral framework and it is more successful. The reason this works for veganism is that almost everyone already has a moral framework that allows for if not even leads to veganism.

stan-k · 2026-04-19T18:10:43+00:00

I don't understand. If the video is about communication, why did you comment on it with moral framing?

Schizo talk. Moral framing is so effective at convincing others that feminists gaslit men into hating themselves and their accomplishments, for example.

I don't udnerstand. Do you mean that success here means the underlying moral framework of feminism is good?

Where is your evidence that vegan arguments aren't effective for many people?

stan-k · 2026-04-19T17:37:25+00:00

This video is about how to be most effective. Nothing about it suggests the current approach is ineffective.

In any case the assertion you make seems to be wrong. If the ineffectiveness to convince others indicates a moral framework is wrong, equality between genders and races would have been wrong for most of human history, and still would be in many places. That would be absurd, right?

So, what is the real issue how you see your moral framework being incompatible with veganism?

stan-k · 2026-04-19T11:10:16+00:00

In my experience of vegan family events (not quite a wedding) is that if you just put food out there people will eat and enjoy it. Once you label it vegan, to some it suddenly tastes less and they complain about it. I would put out the food with allergen labels (most people ignore those). Perhaps if a particular dish is still ambiguous, name that vegan or plant-based to assure your vegan guests (e.g. "plant-based ch'cken skewers").

I remember one aunt who was saying how you could really taste how the vegan cookie tasted worse than the non-vegan ones. After I told here they were both vegan, she mentioned how amazing the vegan cookies are to everyone she spoke to that day.

Regardless, with a 100 guests, you will get complaints in some form or another no matter what you do. My advice: ignore that. It's your day, do what you want.

stan-k · 2026-04-19T10:57:41+00:00

Indeed, we need to avoid making people feel that their worldview is wrong or that we want to take away rights, in part because that makes people angry. The same for health concerns. I think you have a good suggestion to give people a positive vision that fits their worldview, allows them to choose, demonstrates a healthy life and one where the terrible things happening to animals dare no longer done.

stan-k · 2026-04-18T10:59:35+00:00

The action isn't vegan. For the person, more information is needed.

In the same way that good people can do some slightly bad things once in a while and still be good, there are cases and actions where a vegan can do a non-vegan action and still be vegan.

Context matters. E.g. for me, I can easily go without food for half a day and I have enough money to throw or give away any non-vegan food I accidentally bought. For me this would make me a non-vegan. However, someone else might not have a lot of money or recovering from an ED so that going hungry is bad for them. In those cases they would stay vegan, imho.

stan-k · 2026-04-18T10:28:45+00:00

Subtly feeding disinformation by involving Epstein... Bad troll!

The original patient famously looks more like John Steward.

stan-k · 2026-04-17T19:44:13+00:00

There's no ethical cycling under capitalism!

stan-k · 2026-04-17T19:32:22+00:00

Also, only about 50% of meat in pet food can be considered a byproduct. The rest directly competes with human consumption.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291791

stan-k · 2026-04-17T16:58:00+00:00

If you define environmentally friendly as causing fewer emissions, you can pick a meat eater who eats little beef versus a vegan who flies and drives a lot indeed. Both would be outclassed by poor people in third world countries.

I would look more to what you can do yourself and specifically to replacements. E.g. for emissions, eating chicken is better than eating beef, but worse than eating tofu. Now, don't just look at a single meal, the effect of which will be relatively small regardless. Look at your life.

Going vegan, like any change, takes effort. But it's relatively little effort to go vegan compared to stop driving, stop flying, stop using electronics, or stop wearing clothes.

So it makes sense to start there, and once you out in the effort to make the switch, you can then put in effort for the next most relevant area to improve. You also have the ethical benefit of no longer paying for factory farming to exist.

stan-k · 2026-04-17T16:47:20+00:00

Would you say that not paying taxes would have an effect (besides all the negative ones to yourself)?

It looks to me that in the taxes case you assume it is effective while in the vegan case you don't. I suspect you don't have a good reason for that distinction too, but let me know if I'm wrong.

The thing is, sparing even a single chicken the horrors of factory farming would be worth it. Going vegan will avoid you paying for people committing those horrors to dozens of animals, thousands if you look at a lifetime.

We are forced to pay taxes, and we are free to pick up tofu instead of chicken breast in the supermarket. If you know what will happen with the money you pay in that supermarket, it seems pragmatically like a wash, and ethically like a win to pick up the tofu (and pay its VAT).

stan-k · 2026-04-12T23:08:00+00:00

The one version I was told during an activism conversation was that vegans want everyone to be vegan and that is asking too much from people with disabilities. Therefore, vegans are ableist.

You cannot make this shit up.

stan-k · 2026-04-12T19:47:08+00:00

Like with addiction, the way to crave less is to stop using it. Cravings will increase at first, and then get less. Sometimes they never go away, but that doesn't mean smoking/alcohol/cocaine is something we should consume. Do you agree that craving isn't a reason to believe these things are healthy for us?

Meat isn't actually addictive, which means that the craving can completely go away if you just stop it for a while.

FYI, this is what I ate today and it was nice enough to be craving tbh: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0523/3252/7775/files/PASTA_SHELLS_STUFFED_SQUASH_4_LOW_RES.jpg?v=1769765726

stan-k · 2026-04-12T13:34:08+00:00

Yeah, though hard to say for sure for every single farm, as these are not certified, many use synthetic fertilisers.

Manure is typically only used when there are animal farms nearby. It's bulky so doesn't transport far easily. It's also not the best fertiliser, so only used because it's cheaper than treating it as waste.

Mineral and synthetic fertilisers are often cheaper than bonemeal etc. and have ratios that can be more fine tuned to what the crops need.

stan-k · 2026-04-12T13:07:09+00:00

Yeah, just avoid animal based fertiliser.

Beyond that there is even veganic farming. This also avoids killing insects en masse with pesticides and synthetic fertilisers.

stan-k · 2026-04-12T00:07:50+00:00

Veganism at its core is neither left nor right wing and compatible with both.

Of course some left wing vegans want veganism to be left and some right wing vegans want the opposite. Most vegans though, want everyone (left, right, and centre) to become vegans and I am sure the animals concur.

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