Re:Researchers successfully potty-train cows
by elmomle on Monday September 13, 2021 @05:06PM
(#28516878)
There are actions you can take to reduce your negative impact.
For example, you reduce your ecological footprint by reducing or eliminating meat from your diet. In the net it reduces the amount of farmland your existence requires--remember, those animals you eat need to eat things too, and plant -> you is a much more efficient way of converting farmland into sustenance than plant -> animal -> you.
Re:Researchers successfully potty-train cows
by asdff on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:34AM
(#28520267)
I just don't think that my individual choice does anything when the issues are systemic and entrenched at this point. Whether I buy a pack of sausages a week or not, the grocery store orders the same amount of meat and probably just throws away what doesn't sell, the taco truck buys the same amount of meat whether I go there this week or not. What would do something is if literally everyone in the entire city did it, but that's a fantasy.
Re:Researchers successfully potty-train cows
by 7952 on Monday September 13, 2021 @05:59PM
(#28517436)
But I want to do the right thing if I can. Of course that won't have a global impact. But so what? Impact beyond oneself seems like a high bar to set.
Really I think your appeal to heodinism is just a value system like everyone else. Some people choose vegetables over nihilism.
Re:Researchers successfully potty-train cows
by asdff on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:38AM
(#28520293)
I still think its a little bit of a fallacy to think that eating vegetables is somehow better or worse for the world. Where did that carrot come from? A field in idaho that was once a forest hosting thousands of deer and other animals, that's since been clearcut and overfertilized to the point where the runoff is polluting the local river systems and making downstream ecosystems barren of life. There is blood on everyone's hands unless you set out to grow your own food on land that's already been scarred by someone else's poor behavior.
These are the realities of the modern world. You can either spend every second of your life stressing out about how it continually gets worse, and promises made decades ago by leaders are always broken in time, or you could try to block it out and take a more stoic approach to it all, and who knows maybe you might actually luck out and fool your brain into feeling legitimately good about things.
I've let go of feeling like I have to fix it, because solving these institutional issues is ultimately not my job and that sense of worry will never be relieved in my lifetime, because once again I have no personal agency to affect institutional change. Us peasants in history exists to live and die as units of labor beholden to a course charted by people ordained since birth to command that ship, and its a fallacy to ever imagine that we might ourselves take the helm and steer ourselves to logically rational utopian waters free of emotional biases. Instead of fighting upstream fruitlessly until you die restless, chase personal hedonism within your lifetime and means as much as possible.