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warpedellipsis:

ozymandias271:

warpedellipsis:

theunitofcaring:

fnord888:

waystatus:

ozymandias271:

multiheaded1793:

antinegationism:

whitegirlsaintshit:

greencarnations:

vividolly:

loreweaver:

kohakuhoshi:

tree-gasm:

bossybroads:

Please remember that being vegan is a privilege, and that judging anyone for not adopting such a lifestyle makes you a gaping asshole.

truuuueeeeeeee

I like this vegan

this dude is badass

See THIS is how you can be a vegan without being a pretentious asshole about it.

so i hadn’t heard about this and i looked it up.

peta is offering to pay the overdue water bills of up to ten detroit households if those households go vegan for thirty days. detroit, one of the poorest cities in the country. they are extorting people into veganism. people who cannot afford to eat vegan all the time.

peta is garbage.

Fuck peta tbh.

A few things to note:

1. That isn’t what extortion means. Since PETA is offering to pay for a service that it doesn’t provide.
2. From PETAs perspective (though admittedly extreme) one might understand why they wouldn’t want to pay the water bills of people who will then use that water to help digest meat which comes from factory farms. Thereby increasing demand for factory farmed meat.
3. Like almost all of PETA’s campaigns, this is specifically designed to cause public outrage so as to bring attention to PETA’s cause. And it is obviously working.
4. PETA is fully aware that there are proportionally as many vegans who will vociferously be as outraged at its tactics as there are non-vegans, and it counts on those people to be outraged and distance themselves from PETA specifically to show that veganism can be chill and “normal.” 
5. This is additionally bringing attention to the fact that there are so many people in Detroit who can’t even afford their water bills.

PETA consistently uses troll tactics which are amusingly effective in multiple counter-intuitive ways. You may not agree with these tactics as a reasonable person, but you’ve gotta respect them in a “trollolol for the greater good” sort of way. 

I am personally made very uneasy by the fact that they are using low income demographics to advance their agenda — but that is also precisely what they want me to feel. 

Good analysis, Eron!

I mean, the baseline situation, without PETA’s involvement, is “Detroit people have water bills they can’t afford to pay.” The situation with PETA’s involvement is “Detroit people can choose between having water bills they can’t afford to pay and going vegan.” It’s the exact same situation except that they have one more choice. (As far as I’m aware— if PETA is trying to eliminate non-going-vegan options for Detroit people to pay their water bills in order to get more of them to go vegan, that is obviously deplorable.) If a person doesn’t want to go vegan, they can say “fuck off, PETA” and they are left in the same situation they would be in without PETA’s involvement; but if someone is totally willing to go vegan to get their water bill paid, they now have the option to do so. There is injustice here, but I think it’s in people not being able to afford water, not in PETA’s reaction.

Given that the other choice is “not having water”, I don’t feel like this is a legitimate choice.

Although “give me all your money or I shoot you” is better than “I shoot you”, if you see someone about to shoot someone else and offer to rescue them on the condition that they give you all your money that is not a moral thing to do. You’ve basically forced someone into giving you all their money with that offer, because it’s not like “I shoot you” is a choice that anyone would actually make.

Be careful not to commit the fallacy of the condemning the person doing something positive albeit imperfect to help more than the many people who are doing nothing.

1. unconditionally offering to rescue someone from being shot 

is better than 

2. offering to rescue someone if they pay you

is better than 

3. letting them be shot.

and 

1. paying someone’s water bills unconditionally

is better than

2. offering to pay someone’s water bills if they go vegan

is better than 

3. not offering to help them at all.

So it’s really weird that as a society we are way louder and more vehement in our criticisms of people doing #2 than people doing #3. Because the result is that people who were doing #2 will start doing #3 and then the world is actively worse off than it was. 

Help given on the condition that you benefit isn’t help. That’s extortion. Don’t conflate selfishness with altruism, that’s what libertarians do.

To be clear, I think PETA is being selfish; this is trade, not altruism on PETA’s part. I also feel like I am not going to call people assholes for engaging in trade that is mutually beneficial for everyone involved. Gifts may be better, but trade is still pretty decent.

Although I’m probably libertarian enough that you think I’m Chaotic Evil.

It’s not trade when one party has no choice, as said earlier. Trade assumes there’s good faith. This, again, is exploitation. Forced, not a choice. It’s not ethical to present that kind of choice and pretend it’s okay. That’s the point of rights. You might as well argue that slavery is an acceptable “trade” with that reasoning: they get to live and you get to beat them. Hey, they agreed, and you could have just let them die.

You don’t get points for refraining from being more of an ass. Less bad does not make you nice, it makes you fully aware of what you’re doing, and that makes you manipulative, which makes you opportunistically evil.

I’m a utilitarian. I am more than capable of calling things bad. For instance: it is morally wrong not to donate a tenth of your income to effective charity, assuming that this does not impair your ability to have basic life necessities. It is morally wrong not to minimize the amount of animal products you eat as much as you can while still maintaining good physical and mental health. I might go so far as to say that it is morally wrong not to altruistically donate a kidney, although I’m less certain about that. People disagreeing with you about what is bad does not mean they do not have a concept of morality. That said: if I do not give my grocer money for food, I will starve to death. This does not mean my grocer is exploiting me by charging the price that will maximize her profits, even if I can’t afford it. It does mean that it is shitty that people can’t afford basic life necessities, and we should try to solve that problem with a solid social safety net. Similarly, it is not PETA’s fault that Detroit people cannot pay their water bills. Yelling at PETA is unhelpful. We should have a more solid social safety net so people can pay their water bills, which will solve the actual problem.