AITA for feeling torn between justice for mistreated people, a desire for diversity, but also a dislike for spiritism of any sort albeit Abrahamic or otherwise?

I mean, since you posed the question like that, I respond in kind: yes, YTA.

You’re welcome to disagree with religion. You’re welcome to dislike spirituality. That’s fine and cool and reasonable.

What you should not do is look at an injustice perpetrated on a group of people and think “well, I disagree with those people’s beliefs, and therefore I don’t care if they suffer injustice”. People you disagree with deserve justice. Stupid people deserve justice. Bad people deserve justice. Just treatment is not a privilege you earn by having the right beliefs and views.

Really, justice is as much a duty as it is a right. If you hold power, you have a duty to use that power in a just fashion, to treat others justly, to oppose injustice as it occurs, and to do recompense for past injustice you have done to others. It shouldn’t matter whether the victim of injustice is a sinner or a saint. It is your duty to treat them justly either way.

And when it comes to restoring land to Native American tribes, it doesn’t matter if members of those tribes are good people or bad people, rationalists or superstitious, saints or sinners - it matters that their ancestors were victims of injustice at the hands of the United States government, and we the people have a duty to right that injustice.

So you can hold those beliefs simultaneously: a dislike for spirituality and a desire for justice for mistreated people. But if you are torn by those two beliefs - if you believe a particular group of mistreated people is less worthy of justice because you disagree with their spiritual beliefs - I think your dislike for spirituality is becoming prejudice against spiritual people, and that’s not good at all.

How naive. True change doesn’t come from offending moderates - true change comes from making moderates comfortable, so they feel secure and confident that the change you won’t harm them. Any protest that makes people uncomfortable about society or their own actions is counterproductive and just makes things worse.

Take Colin Kaepernick. Taking a knee during the national anthem before a football game was exactly the wrong way to protest racism, because it angered people who loved football and loved America, who should have been his natural allies. What Colin should have done was been even more patriotic and sung the anthem even louder, to express how much he loved America and how he wanted to see it become better. That would have inspired people who supported his cause, without offending people who disagreed with him, and there would have been no controversy.

That’s the way white moderates want to see people protest. Being conformist and forgettable is how we make change.

Am I still being too subtle?

You don’t understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn’t like it. Responsible protests don’t hurt people’s feelings. They went too far.

Wait, do you really expect British citizens to fly to the US or China in order to commit vandalism?

What do you think they’d put on their visa application? “Purpose of travel: throw paint on the Statue of Liberty”?

In a world full of bad faith “I support your cause but not your methods” attacks on environmental activism, this is one of the most ridiculous ones I’ve ever heard.

We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.

When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

The fact you think “off brand” is garbage is painful. And telling.

Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.

I didn’t find one, someone else might have better luck.

To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)

Libraries have free books. That takes profit from Amazon.

Libraries have free Internet. That takes profit from ISPs.

Libraries have free research tools and expert guidance from librarians. That takes profit from all sorts of companies that profit off your ignorance.

And worst of all, that stuff is all publicly funded, so when you look at a library you see government helping people. And there’s nothing conservatives hate more than government that helps people.

If it helps, don’t think of it as dying early. Think of it as dying at a normal time. It’s earlier generations of Westerners that lived abnormally long lives. They lived in the “sweet spot” when childhood diseases had been defeated by vaccines and we hadn’t yet poisoned the environment with forever chemicals and microplastics, and benefited from the colonial wealth extracted from the rest of the world to give most of their white elders the best possible medical care in their last years - medical care the average person can no longer access or afford.

Simple fact: the 80-year life expectancies the last few generations enjoyed had never been seen before in human history and will never be seen again.

Have you ever seen a sheep be sheared? It’s violent and bloody. If your barber held you down and cut and scraped scraped the hell out of your scalp while shaving your head, you’d fire them.

Also, sheep too old to produce good wool don’t get a peaceful retirement. They get slaughtered and turned into dog or chicken food. The same thing happens when there’s a disease epidemic - common because of the crowded and filthy conditions in factory farming - or crop failures or drought. As soon as it’s not profitable to keep the sheep alive we kill them.

But neither of those points are actually the point of the conversation at all. The point is it’s immoral to use an animal as an object to benefit humans. If you wouldn’t keep humans in pens and shave them to make clothing, you shouldn’t do the same thing to sheep. Simple as.

How about spaying or neutering them and letting them live out their natural lives?

Yawn.

“Genocide” only applies to humans. The correct term for animals is “extinction”.

And I remind you: we humans control when and if our domestic livestock breed. And we let specific breeds of domestic livestock go extinct all the time. There are dozens of breeds of cows and chickens and sheep that are now extinct because they were replaced by other, more useful breeds - or the cultures that bred them were wiped out. Consider the Tautersheep, for example.

Let me be blunt. If scientists developed synthetic wool that was chemically identical to sheep wool but ten times cheaper, domestic sheep would be extinct within a decade. And nobody but sheep farmers would complain. So when carnists argue we have a moral duty to the species of domestic sheep to continue breeding them for human use I just roll my eyes.

Stupid children. Don’t they understand personal consumption is irrelevant and “carbon footprints” are industry propaganda? If they actually wanted to make a difference, they should have spent more time shitposting about the 100 corporations that produce 70% of fossil fuel emissions.

You should read the entire article.

Your post is helpful, informational, and made in good faith, and yet I desperately want to downvote it.

in no small part because it’s much more difficult to get the nutrition you need from a vegan diet without money.

Lol. Compare the price of a pound of beans and a pound of beef and get back to me, would you?

I can’t get more specific about costs unless you get specific about what you mean by “nutrition”, but studies have consistently found plant based diets are both cheaper and healthier than omnivorous diets. Especially the average American diet.

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