I know that the industry is horrific. I have battled internally with becoming a vegan. And this isn't a but, it's just something i thought about once when thinking about the argument that whilst in nature, animals eat other animals, its not the same as what we do as we farma dn torture animals to get the meat....

Its cats....

Cats torture their prey....

They play with it, and maim it and keep it alive for as long as possible so they can chase it, for fun...

And sometimes they just fucking leave it there when it dies.

And we love cats. Even vegans love cats.

And that sort of makes me laugh a bit.

Absolutely, the meat industry needs to be clamped down on hard

But, there are plenty of vegans who also rail against alternatives like lab grown beef which is still meat but bypasses all the problems with the meat industry of today

Isn't that every joke on veganism?

The human brain is fueled by about 20% of your caloric intake. We're evolved to be omnivorous. This isn't prescriptive but descriptive. It's going to take development to make vegan food delicious and something we want to eat (and then all the other features we want out of food: cheap, storage-safe, easy to prepare, etc.)

For those of us who still eat a meat diet, it usually takes a chef to make something actually enjoyable from strictly vegetables. Otherwise, we're used to receiving oddly-spiced bland mush from our vegan friends. But we could do better if we were putting billions into it, and not another more-addictive cheeto.

But we live entrenched in capitalism, so no one is going to take this seriously until we're already dropping dead from natural disasters and famine.

Veganism is not return to nature. Quite the opposite. And it's definitely not a return to the past. Veganism is a modern view of society where we look at the possibilities we have today, granted to us by technology and science, and decide to spare the lives of animals. We have a surplus of food and supplements that makes meat consumption less healthy, efficient and ethical than plant based. It's was virtually impossible to do be 100% plant based 100 years ago in full health.

Telling boys to just go masturbate got us the Immorten Joe's Warboys ^†^ that are the alt-right, that got Trump into power twice. The boys we told to literally go fuck themselves when they raged over their sexual frustration got us the army of militants and voters behind the white Christian nationalist movement. I was among them in the 1980s, when the society gave a meager few more fucks about them than they do in the twenty-first century.

I suspect similar movements exist through Europe, which is generally rejecting neoliberalism for fascist-thick movements towards one-party autocracy.

No, I don't have a solution, and I've been working on it for thirty years. Christianity's proscription against sex (later limited to non-reproductive sex) figures largely into the problem and it's served so far as a sufficient distraction from class consciousness and effective response to industry's effect on climate, and the imminent climate crisis.

We don't have a way to let our young guys sow their wild oats, while we're careening towards multiple great filters we are unprepared to navigate.

I know: 🧶📌📇

Maybe even: 🐰🎩🫖☕

And yet, very few people think about it, still. Those who do ponder the angry-young-men problem discount them as ineligible or feel they are too repugnant to civilized folk to consider. I've heard otherwise rational content creators actually say (I paraphrase) these guys were mistreated as kids and are now a societal problem. But they suck, so fuck those guys.

It might be a failing of the human species itself, that we are compelled to cast our young men out the way gorillas cast out their adolescent females (but welcome strange females), and capitalism intentionally only has limited seats where they can pick themselves up, so the system teaches them from the beginning to be aggressive, ruthless and transactional. Not to get completely nihilist, but maybe our capacity for civilization is limited and we just can't overcome the paradigms that served us as migratory bands of hunter-gatherers.

In the meantime, our boys are taught they suck in our Christianity-heavy abstinence-only sex-ed, ^‡^ from which they descend into the incel movement, the manosphere, gamergaters, etc and from there into the transnational white power movement. Our society gave Trump his instant army, and it was ready for him the moment Trump went into politics. And our lack of interest or concern about the new batch of warboys we churn our from the US education system every year, is going to literally kill us all.

Just go vegan is going to end the same way, especially since the food industry cares not about actual nutrition but profit. Taking a page from Fourth International Posadism, we may have to end capitalism before we can create an ethical food production system (probably incorporating farming invertebrates as well as vegetables), but the problem right now is not what's the end result ( Fully Automated Gay Space Communism ) but how the heck we get there and not crash and burn with the global ecology.

Totally open to ideas, but I'm not the guy you have to convince.

† Not to be confused with Warboyz of W4K fame.

‡ Twenty six states mandate abstinence-only sex ed, that stuff that teaches girls they are chewing gum, or someother one-use safety-sealed metaphor, and that boys aren't allowed to think about sex until they have a salaried job and a ring. Seriously, this is still what is taught.

Three states mandate comprehensive sex ed: The west coast. And none of them require discussion of consent. (Some teachers include it anyway, as an elective topic). Of course, if we demanded opt-in consent in our sexual relationships, we might demand opt-in sex in our other contracts as well, say our jobs, our devices, our software, etc.

But what about my sharp canine teeth? Check mate.

Humans are part of nature, but what call nature is the mostly well balanced group of ecosystems and food chains. Humans turned nature into a devilish food machine. There's very few animals that hunt and kill for pleasure the way humans do, and even then the vast majority of humans could never kill an animal. So we pay someone else to do it. Killing meat for pleasure is evil, buying it at the supermarket is both evil and cowardly.