Weekend Reading: Chillax, Vegans

Graphic above: You can throw the trolly switch and save everyone, but first you have to admit to you made a mistake.

Losing is a book-length admission of / apology for my mistakes. Along with some sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

Isha tells Vegans to calm down, with some of the best sentences ever:

There is no moral cliff between vegan and non-vegan because there is no moral cliff between right and wrong. Actions are only better or worse according to how they affect conscious wellbeing, and are therefore best understood as points on a continuous spectrum.** Veganism can be a useful rule, identity and commitment device,* but it has no value apart from the suffering it prevents.

Zachary Segall tells Vegans to calm down:

[P]eople are more receptive to non-vegans about reducing their meat consumption. More research is needed, but there is a real possibility that we could save more animals by not being fully vegan.

The fact that people who eat meat might be better at saving animals than us should give us pause. We’re in the habit of treating veganism as the primary criteria for someone’s morality and respectability. Yet when we focus on veganism, we obscure the many shades of gray within omnivorous diets and the ground we can gain from working within that space.

What Makes Humans Stupid

Stupidity begins where error is elaborated, defended, refined, institutionalized, and made the foundation for further action. Stupidity makes everything progressively worse.

Why We Demand Perfect Machines Yet Tolerate Human Carnage

We demand machines that function flawlessly, while accepting human-caused deaths and injuries as the cost of our daily travel. That double standard allows people to die by slowing the adoption of things that would save them.

*You know my take: Isha doesn't go far enough. Veganism isn't limited in utility, it is a net-negative, in the U.S. at least.

**OMG 💕