Replies

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:28 AM

  That's what Dave is effectively arguing. He's not implicated, because it all happens without his involvement.

  Jack, reaching for rape as a metaphor, fails to even engage with Dave's get out of jail free card ploy, even when Dave, in breaking down the inapplicability of Jack's metaphor, leads him half way to recognizing Dave's own fallacy.

  Yes, you can introduce degrees of separation. Those degrees of separation are not the escape hatch Dave wants them to be. Yet Jack instead doubles down with a "threshold argument".

  Which allows Jack to double down with a no ethical consumption cop-out. "If nobody bought meat" once again externalizes the locus of control. If it were normal, if everybody didn't do the thing, then going along with the crowd wouldn't be ethics. It would be conformity.

  Dave opens to citing to targeted gun violence against children during a genocide. How does that happen?

  2/6

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:30 AM

  Yes, there's the proximate cause: the soldier lines up his sights and pulls a trigger. But what are the systems that puts the soldier in that position, gun in hand, with the belief that the action that follows is a thing to do?

  We want it to just be the soldier, or the government of an apartheid state, or the supremacist ideology that state is organized around, that is to blame. The off-hand gratuitousness of his description (reminding me, apropos to context, of a Geller essay) invites us to hear it as the evil that person who pulled the trigger engaged in. It has nothing to do with us.

  But then if that were the case, why would any of us protest? Why would we demand that our own governments act differently in relation to that state? Why would we demand that the resources and legitimacy that empowers those who direct and perform the killing be withdrawn?

  We might not be pulling the trigger, but in protest we acknowledge that we're nonetheless implicated by the gun ever being in the hand of that soldier, in that place, with those rules of engagement.

  3/6

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:31 AM

  We don't get to say "Yeah, but my personally not participating won't change anything," and wipe our hands of it.

  With respect to your own journey, perhaps this will help you to fully embody. Myself for years brushed off all the standard vegan debate bro arguments for veganism.

  Like, sure, yes, it's bad to eat animals, for any number of reasons, without even asking the question of how it impacts the animals themselves. Enlightened self-interest alone, as inhabitants of a planet being rapidly changed, in significant part, by industrial animal husbandry, should be reason enough to not participate in those systems.

  But as someone who lives subject to those systems, it would just be more difficult to not eat animals or animal by-products. It would require more thought and effort on my part. And that was where my engagement with the issue ended.

  Then 2020 happened, and we learned that chains of transmission, however many steps removed, can kill or disable people we don't even know.

  4/6

  #veganism

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:33 AM

  Further, we learned that viruses move through the air, can even hang out in the air for hours after someone shedding them has gone.

  We learned that respirator masks served as effective source control, and that even cloth masks were better than nothing in limiting concentrations that we and others were exposed to.

  Yet, there was resistance. Wearing a mask, and wearing it properly, took more thought and effort.

  We're offered the promise of a vaccine. Do this and you won't have to mask anymore, we're told. Only the vaccine was non-sterilizing. You can (and will) still contract and pass on the virus despite doing your civic duty to get the shot. Protecting ourselves and others wasn't so easy and thoughtless as getting a jab.

  Yet the consensus was to return to normalcy. Folk wanted to get back to the conformity of 2019. Me and my household, we still mask. For a long time, myself carried around so much anger about how society took the thoughtless and easy path.

  5/6

  #CovidIsNotOver

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:35 AM

  Yet, this is the very thing myself was doing by continuing to participate in eating animals and animal by-products. In both cases, by doing the thoughtless and easy thing, the thing that is normal, we're implicated in the harms.

  By choosing the thoughtful and more challenging path, the ethical path, we don't stop those harms. We don't get to wave a magic wand and make it "If nobody bought meat" or "If everybody still masked".

  Nonetheless, for myself, my own anger—at how quickly folk chose to pretend an ongoing pandemic was over—revealed myself as a hypocrite.

  Wearing a mask consistently is more work. It requires more thought. Refusing to participate in systems of harm, however many steps removed we may individually be, is never going to be the easy path.

  Nonetheless, if I'm gonna be angry with others for not putting in that work, then I don't get to claim it's too hard for me to put in the work of finding alternatives to eating animals. That was the day myself chose veganism.

  6/6

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  Androcatandrocat@toot.cat

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:36 AM

  @beadsland
  P1: We can't fix the system without trying.
  P2: Therefore we are blameless in the outcomes of the system without trying.
  C: If you try to fix the system, you are to blame for its outcomes

  Logic very useful, deceive self every time.

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:40 AM

  @androcat

  Most get as far as the postulates and call it a day. That conclusion is advanced-level self-deception.

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  Androcatandrocat@toot.cat

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:43 AM

  @beadsland
  On some level I think people do sort of reach that.
  Like, most people know that the total system of capitalism is intensely harmful, but so long as they perceive themselves as powerless before it (just rounding down that 0.0000001% influence to 0), they feel insulated from blame.

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 8:51 AM

  @androcat

  This essentially being my reification argument, quite explicitly not resorting to naming it by that shibbolethic hobgoblin spectre of floating signification. (There's a reason myself did not complete the whole of the idiom in my first scare quotation above.)

  Nonetheless, the leap from "external locus of control isn't my fault" to "working toward something else makes me the bad guy" requires one to not only equate all forms of refusal with reform (to fix the system is to preserve it), but to also convince oneself that one wasn't already participating before trying to engage in such "reform": that the attempt to do otherwise is the moral trespass itself.

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  Androcatandrocat@toot.cat

  Oct 9, 2026, 9:24 AM

  @beadsland

  That's if you want it to be a sound conclusion. It's clearly bogus, but I think subconsciously people do think that way: Knowing how the sausage is made is prerequisite to having a moral opinion about the sausage, and a moral opinion about the sausage might require some sort of moral stance, which feels overwhelming.

  This also smacks of "market failure", i.e. a situation where a group that could prevent some harm to themselves fails to do so because not enough members stand their ground.

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 9:31 AM

  @androcat

  This still doesn't get you to "if you, getting past that overwhelm, seek to do something, you are to blame for acting". You still have to make the act, itself, the moral trespass, such that staying overwhelmed makes you guiltless, rather than just ignorant of such guilt.

  The first to propositions don't leap that chasm on their own.

  Lacking a moral stance does not make one innocent.

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  Androcatandrocat@toot.cat

  Oct 9, 2026, 9:42 AM

  @beadsland
  (just in case I have been unclear: I do not regard the conclusion as true, but rather am sketching out how the rationalization of it might go. I think the (false) conclusion is reached, at least subconsciously. But again, I think it's bogus)

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  sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party

  Oct 9, 2026, 9:44 AM

  @androcat

  Yes, yes, you were clear that you disagree with the conclusion.

  Myself am arguing that you're giving folk more credit, in attributing that bogosity to them, for reaching a false conclusion that requires more heavy lifting, in service of self deception, than your initial toot lays out.

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  Androcatandrocat@toot.cat

  Oct 9, 2026, 9:50 AM

  @beadsland
  Oh that's just my personal philosophy:

  "Logic is useless, except for self-deceit"

  Nobody ever does it right. It's too weak and cumbersome, when our naturally occurring brains take to induction like fish to water.

  What we do do, is use it for self-deceit, and then sometimes to rationalize induced conclusions (which are often reliable [because we are very good at it], but not always).

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  Tiota Sramtiotasram@kolektiva.social

  Oct 9, 2026, 10:00 AM

  @androcat @beadsland this is one of the purposes of superhero movies as propaganda, and one of the reasons for their popularity: they almost explicitly postulate that *only* superheroes have moral responsibility, because *only* superheroes have the superhuman power necessary to oppose evil.

  A correlate of "With great power comes great responsibility" is "without great power comes small responsibility".

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  ⁂ Fish Id Wardrobefishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk

  Oct 9, 2026, 4:07 PM

  @tiotasram @androcat @beadsland i mean, that *is* the fantasy behind superheroes, more or less: what if there was someone for whom it was okay if they were violent, because they only used that violence to solve the genuine problems that we can't solve?

  it's problematic, but i can't deny that it's appealing as a fantasy.

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