• zen@lemmy.zip
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    52 minutes ago

    Is this your mum?

    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.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      11 hours ago

      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.

      • quips@slrpnk.net
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        6 hours ago

        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.

        • JennaR8r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 hours ago

          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. 🤔

          • tetris11@feddit.uk
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            24 minutes ago

            *Gulps and almost chokes on triple-bacon-beefy-saiyan-deluxe*

            “Finally!”

      • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        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.)

  • Dimi Fisher@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Well there was claims that Mcdonalds were processing human cadavers making them into burgers, so it’s not a overfetched theory!

  • o1011o@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • quips@slrpnk.net
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        6 hours ago

        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.

  • stray@pawb.social
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 hours ago

      A few years ago, I saw some online discussion where multiple folks were saying you can’t write a beautiful poem about spiders, for whatever reason. At that point, I was deep into writing poems and I do think spiders are swell, so I actually took that as a little challenge to write such a poem. After half an hour, I had something I was happy with and just threw it into the thread.

      And man, the reaction will forever sit with me. Around ten folks responded. Every single one with yet another variation of the same joke, that they wanted to know what I’m smoking.
      Even when I disprove their thesis, that you can’t write such a poem, by literally just doing that, they still need to declare it impossible without the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

      I guess, I might have a special talent there, but it was just also particularly weird, because I’m practically clean-edge, as in the hardest drug I’ll occasionally have is coffein.
      And yeah, that just left me with the same bewilderment as you. How different is my reality from theirs that they absolutely cannot imagine such thoughts occurring without drugs?

      No idea, if that and the dissociating are linked. It does probably help a lot with poetry, too, to look at the world for what it is, rather than navigating it on auto-pilot.

      • Echolynx@lemmy.zip
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        14 hours ago

        It does probably help a lot with poetry, too, to look at the world for what it is, rather than navigating it on auto-pilot.

        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.

        • tetris11@feddit.uk
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          16 minutes ago

          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.)

        • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          17 hours ago

          I expected that response. 😅

          Unfortunately, I didn’t save it, because it wasn’t amazing or anything. It’s in some random internet comment, and I have no idea how one would find it… 🫠

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      You’re just casually slogging through dissociative existentialism on a regular basis?

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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      17 hours ago

      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?

      • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        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.

    • sartalon@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      +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?”

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        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.

    • asqapro@reddthat.com
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      19 hours ago

      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.

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      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.

      • Echolynx@lemmy.zip
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        14 hours ago

        Even chickpeas, lentils, or peanuts? I dislike western beans but I’m fine with these others which are (IMO) quite superior.

      • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        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

        • Psythik@lemmy.world
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          57 minutes ago

          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.

      • CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml
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        15 hours ago

        There are many more vegetal protein sources though, and if you really can’t bear those either just eat eggs