> Scientifically, Pluto is a planet… and so are a bunch of moons.
This is a good post, but for those of you who are more audio-visually inclined, physicist Dr. Angela Collier published a video essay about this even earlier on her excellent youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwCbMJmgShg
I've mentioned this in your comments and I really don't mean to become a one-issue-commenter harping on about it, but
> The reason is that going vegan or vegetarian is difficult, so people rationalize their behavior. If an issue doesn’t affect you personally, it’s easy to ignore it.
seems like an unnecessarily hostile/judgemental framing. At best it assumes the conclusion (i.e. that vegetarianism is so obviously logically implied by everyone's values that any rationale they could give for not going vegetarian has to be a *rationalization*). Where many people will naturally fall off is at the idea that buying already-processed meat makes them "complicit" in the animal cruelty happening at the source. Maybe because they're not consequentialists at all, or because they don't believe any boycott will ever make a dent so they may as well enjoy the spoils of the inevitable. The latter seems particularly common to me (and is, of course, an unrefined form of thinking about it in tragedy-of-the-commons terms like I do) — people shake their heads slightly that it would be a better world if no factory farming happened, but don't believe that it'll ever actually change, so individual switches to vegetarianism would just be pointless self-deprivation to no practical end.
> Scientifically, Pluto is a planet… and so are a bunch of moons.
This is a good post, but for those of you who are more audio-visually inclined, physicist Dr. Angela Collier published a video essay about this even earlier on her excellent youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwCbMJmgShg
I've mentioned this in your comments and I really don't mean to become a one-issue-commenter harping on about it, but
> The reason is that going vegan or vegetarian is difficult, so people rationalize their behavior. If an issue doesn’t affect you personally, it’s easy to ignore it.
seems like an unnecessarily hostile/judgemental framing. At best it assumes the conclusion (i.e. that vegetarianism is so obviously logically implied by everyone's values that any rationale they could give for not going vegetarian has to be a *rationalization*). Where many people will naturally fall off is at the idea that buying already-processed meat makes them "complicit" in the animal cruelty happening at the source. Maybe because they're not consequentialists at all, or because they don't believe any boycott will ever make a dent so they may as well enjoy the spoils of the inevitable. The latter seems particularly common to me (and is, of course, an unrefined form of thinking about it in tragedy-of-the-commons terms like I do) — people shake their heads slightly that it would be a better world if no factory farming happened, but don't believe that it'll ever actually change, so individual switches to vegetarianism would just be pointless self-deprivation to no practical end.
I think there's a word missing from this sentence: "Sometimes an idea about how seems trite until you suddenly get it and it seems profound."
The "things unexpectedly named after people" leaves out my favorite one, which is the word "guy": https://www.etymonline.com/word/guy#etymonline_v_14401