What word would you prefer to someone who tells you to your face that they intend to “put you up against the wall” and then asks if you “know what that means, you fucking lib”?

I mean, I’m a demsoc, and of the last 20 death threats I have received in my life, 15 came from people who identify as Communist-Leninist. PLEASE give me a better word for them.

Well, by their teenage years, why not all the reasons adults need smartphones fully accessible? Looking up information from authoritative sources? Emergency contact? Coordinating schedules for office hours?

Schools often simultaneously demand more from children than workplaces do adults, and give them less opportunity to excel.

I’m not saying work-inappropriate phone use should be accepted, but taking them away entirely is downright irresponsible. Just like schools who still demand students write on a notebook instead of using a laptop. Raise your hand if you had RSI-related issues for a decade or more after high school? We old people tend to forget how bad school used to be (and can be) for physical and mental health AND for learning.

You do realise that meat-eaters eat animals that were killed for them to be eaten?

Yup. Animals that lived lives in the first place because they were going to be eaten. Why should anyone have an ethical problem with that? But honestly, I don’t think it’s just “were killed for them to be eaten” to you. I live in a deer population control zone. Hunters have a critical task of preventing deer overpopulation from devastating the area. Got any problems with the venison steak I had last week from deer that HAD to be killed?

Please explain to me how this is more empathetic than posting a meme that triggered some meat-eaters.

More empathetic? Because I’m not an anti-natalist. I know those animals would not have been born if not farmed. This is not a vacuum choice between “cows die” and “cows live”. It never was, and it never will be. I know that most of them live better lives and die easier than their non-domesticated counterparts. Ever watch a cat play with a mouse, slowly torturing it to death? My local farm (plants) have animals that do exactly that every day with the goal of killing off pest animals so they won’t destroy the harvest (a single pest animal like a squirrel can destroy 40 or 50 tomatoes in an hour).

Let’s go another way. Statistically, odds are pretty good that my death will be 100x worse than how a farm animal dies. So no, me being ok that death exists in our world is NOT a lack of empathy. You don’t get to make up my morals for me. The way I see it, giving farm animals a peaceful life is the height of empathy… so I look at you (your words) “triggering some meat-eaters” and note that statistically many of the people you go out of your way to “trigger” are going to end up dying long and painful battles with cancer. My view of empathy? Give them just a LITTLE bit more bloody peace while they’re alive.

Here’s my empathy. I fight for animal right laws. I strongly supported the free range chicken law that just passed in my state. I reject unethical and inhumane ways of treating and killing animals. But I’m not uneducated. I know how farming works. I know how the delicate relationship between agriculture and horticulture, while not perfect, leads to less death and less environmental impact than EITHER side of those alone.

Vegans are letting some crayola-colored dream be the enemy of good. And it’s nothing more than flat-earther, tinfoil, antivax gibberish to me. And I don’t care as long as they leave people alone.

I find vegans tend to have less empathy for their fellow man than we meat-eaters have for animals. It comes across as smug (and let’s be honest, it’s less insulting to call them smug).

Are you from a farm town?

A supermajority of animal feed comes from the waste product of crops we that were being grown anyway, or grass from a fallow field that needs to be harvested anyway (not enough the latter due to logistics, but my local farms all do). That whole “8 to 1” calorie to cow thing leaves out the part that it’s 8 calories of landfill material to make 1 calorie of beef. Nobody has an “animal only” corn field. And nobody is using harsh animal-killing chemicals on the fallow fields.

And cows are still being fed things whether you eat them or not. We need their manure and it’s overall better for the environment than synthetic fertilizer. Without some form of fertilizer, we need much more farmland, which means more animals killed per calorie. All compared to 700,000 calories in a cow.

Unfortunately, nobody has ever demonstrated in a defensible manner that a horticulture-only scenario would be anywhere near as efficient on animal lives as what we have now. It’s one thing to cut animal intake 10%, entirely another to try to rebuild our farming industry without animals.

Most people who eat meat also eat some subset of vegetables and know they like/hate some other subset of vegetables.

The human body loves getting addicted to the unhealthy sugar carbs found in some plants, but our taste buds do tend to have a healthier long-term relationship with the umami balance you get more easily from meats and seafoods.