cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/6039150

> Sarah's Scribbles by Sarah Andersen, June 29 2024.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/6039150

> Sarah's Scribbles by Sarah Andersen, June 29 2024.

> ## 33 Holocausts per Year > > We all know that tormenting a cat or a dog is a pretty bad thing. Indeed, we regard it as criminal, highly immoral, and certainly as picking on someone weaker than ourselves. There’s little doubt for anybody who’s known an animals that they have real sensations, real discomfort, and—in a meaningful sense—feelings. Darwin studied this in considerable detail already in the 1860–70s. > > Now, still, maybe it’s even worse to torment a little kid or an old lady than being cruel to a cat? Who knows at the end of the day? Let’s say then, to remain on the safe side of the argument (so we don’t make ourselves any kinder than we really have to!) that tormenting two little dogs and killing them is about as bad as whacking an old lady. > > Nah, still don’t feel quite safe. Maybe we’re still giving the dogs too much slack. Make it three dogs. > > Hmm. No. The suffering of one HUMAN BEING must surely be worth more than three pesky mongrels, no? Make it five. > > Ten. Let’s say I torment and kill ten dogs, slowly, one by one. Is that about as bad as whacking that old lady? > > Still doesn’t feel right. How about a hundred dogs? And a few cats crushed under car wheels for good measure. > > No, no—let’s be serious about this. Let’s take one thousand dogs, each of which has a family of people and others who care about them, lock ’em up, starve them, make them work hard, humiliate them, and then gas them to death. Let’s make that count as the life of ONE human person. > > Admittedly, this is a pretty speciesist and supremacist position. We cannot exactly account for why one of us humans should be worth literally a thousand dogs. But let’s just go with it, as we all have a strong feeling that a human life is something so much more than the life of a non-human animal. Maybe even a thousand ones. Most of all—let’s just remain really on the safe side that we shouldn’t be any kinder to animals than we absolutely have to by a bare minimum of decency and ethics. A bare minimum. We don’t want to overburden ourselves, do we? We need to be kind to ourselves, not too harsh, when it comes to how kind we should be to others, right? > > So, a thousand it is. I, Hanzi Freinacht, hereby proclaim that I am literally worth one thousand (1,000) of those dirty mongrels. I am human. Let my supremacy be known. > > Now, this leaves us with a multiplier of 1000 when it comes to comparing crimes against humanity to crimes against “non-humanity” of animals roughly comparable to dogs (we don’t know how sentient different animals are, but we can gauge their intelligence to be above that of human babies or toddlers). > > Let us then consider how many land animals the global market “produces” per year—i.e., basically keeps in death camps—to the scale of the worst crime against humanity that we can think of: the Holocaust. > > \[Note before we go on*: Far-right apologists and Nazis have long used the trick of comparing human suffering to animal suffering while granting greater rights to the latter as a way of relativizing the plights of targeted ethnicities, who in turn are then compared to animals. The gap is thereby narrowed from both sides and atrocities become less unthinkable. I will have no such accusations cast against me for the comparison below: I am doing the exact opposite, namely using the profound seriousness of human suffering as a starting point for expanding our circle of care to other beings. The crooks are whoever become the apologists for crimes, not the ones who seek to prevent crimes from being committed.*\] > > Over the course of this event, the Nazis imprisoned, tormented, and killed about 6 million people over a period of five years (1941–45), so about 1.2 million per year on average (6/5 is 1.2). Or that is the relevant figure for what is usually referred to as Holocaust—the number of people killed under similar murder campaigns in Nazi Germany is around 12 million. But for the word “Holocaust” itself, 1.2 million per year is roughly correct. > > Our global non-human animal industry subjects about 60 billion land animals to a comparable fate per year. Now, let us remember that these are “just animals” right? So let’s apply the 1000 multiplier. They’re just worth a thousandth of one of us! > > That lands us, with this conservative estimate of the worth of non-human animal life, at 60 million. Per year. Not over five years. > > Divide 60m by 1.2m to see how this compares to the Holocaust’s yearly effects— and you get a rather grim number: 50. > > Our current global consumption of land animals causes: Fifty (50) ongoing Holocausts per year. > > The animal industry is not, of course, 50 times worse than the Holocaust. That would be a great under-estimation of the severity of our crimes against non-humanity. > > We must not forget that the Holocaust lasted only 5 years, whereas our animal megacide goes on year after year, decade after decade, and does not exhaust its killing fields. > > Oh, and that’s just the land animals. Aquatic animals account for an estimated over 1 trillion kills yearly (many of which are cruel and slow deaths). Yes, that involves a lot of fish, so let’s give ourselves a yet higher ethical premium: 10,000 non-human aquatic animals for just me! > > So, if you divide one trillion by 10,000 (including a few seal cubs and dolphins for good measure, death to them!) you get… 100 million. > > 100 million plus 60 million, divided by 1.2… produces… > > 133 Holocausts per year. Every year. And still growing. > > This is if, and only if, I am worth one thousand dogs or cats or chickens or cows or pigs—or ten thousand sea and water animals of various sorts. > > Phew, okay. Why am I saying this? It’s not really news to anyone, is it? It’s just to set the premise for what follows: This issue matters a lot. It’s well known that we all become less empathic, not more, when faced with large numbers. But as you may have noticed, I am not speaking to your feelings so much right now, but just to common sense, just to plain reason. It’s just weird to deny that this is a thing. > > Even if you don’t care about animals and only have a shrugging “well, we shouldn’t be unnecessarily cruel…” then you can hardly write the issue off as insignificant. It still matters. > > It’s not about your damned personal choice to eat what you feel like. It’s not about puritanism or scoring cheap moral shots. It’s not about crazy people on YouTube feeding their babies grass smoothies and sporting toothless smiles. It’s not about shame or guilt. It’s not about feeling hopeless or depressed. > > It’s about, with a very conservative estimate, 133 Holocausts per year. Every year. Decades on end. And growing. So don’t make it about yourself. > > 133 Holocausts per year—and that’s when I also used excessively conservative estimates of the number of animals killed. On what planet, in what barbaric dark age, is this considered to be okay and entirely normal? > > Answer: On planet Earth, right about this minute. > > Breathe it in. The numbers don’t land in our minds, they cannot. But we can all understand the concept of a staggering moral mountain to climb: a heroic struggle against what is just not right.

> Early Automobiles and “Separate Spheres” > > During the nineteenth century, various experts—doctors, professors, ministers, politicians—conceived of the American lady as frail, timid, easily shocked, and quickly exhausted, physically and temperamentally incapable of mastering the demands of public life. Born to the weak sex, biology consigned her to lifelong inactivity and immobility. Prominent men thus registered their fears about the consequences of women’s emergence from the private world of home into the public realm. They worried that women would neglect their housekeeping, ignore their children, undermine proper relations between the classes and races, and degrade their morals if involved in public life. Invoking the fragility of women’s bodies, the feebleness of their brains, or the frailty of their characters, Victorian experts admonished women to stay at home. Women could only dirty themselves, they argued, by venturing beyond the front door, into the hectic and unpredictable crush of public traffic. > > While many American women chafed at their social, spatial, and political limitations, some car makers began to fashion new wheels to preserve the dainty domain of Victorian decorum. Colonel Albert A. Pope, president of the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, believed that “you can’t get people to sit over an explosion.” As he moved his company out of bicycle manufacturing and into the automobile business, he determined to concentrate not on noisy, smelly gasoline-powered cars, but instead, on clean, quiet electric vehicles. By 1897, the Pope Manufacturing Company had produced some five hundred electric cars. > > While Pope pursued this entrepreneurial strategy, thousands of Americans proved him a bad prophet and purchased gasoline motorcars. In response to demand, Pope began to produce some gasoline cars, but the company remained committed to the idea that there was a natural market for slower, cleaner electrics. As Pope suggested in a 1903 advertisement for the Pope-Waverly electric model, “electrics . . . will appeal to any one interested in an absolutely noiseless, odorless, clean and stylish rig that is always ready and that, mile for mile, can be operated at less cost than any other type of motor car.” Lest this message escape those it was intended to attract, the text accompanied a picture of a delighted woman driver piloting a smiling female passenger. > > Pitching electric cars to women represented a strategy that was at once expansive and limiting, both for automakers’ opportunities, and for women who wanted to be motorists. After all, in the infancy of the automobile industry, men like Pope had to unravel mysteries of design and production—What kinds of devices might make a carriage move without benefit of a horse? Would gasoline, steam, or electricity prove to be the most practical source of power? Might not all three have their disparate uses? How should such devices be manufactured? What materials should they be made of? How might they be distributed? Neither omniscient nor omnipotent, auto manufacturers generally produced individual vehicles on order and groped only haltingly toward perceiving a wider market. > > The French and German automakers who pioneered the business in the late nineteenth century had produced luxury motorcars for the sporting rich, and at first, American manufacturers followed the European example in catering to the domestic carriage trade. As early as 1900, American socialites, male and female, vied with one another in devising ways of using the auto for entertainment. Wealthy men held races and rallies at various posh watering holes; women attended, and sometimes participated. Prominent women also developed their own automotive spectacles. They besieged Newport, Rhode Island, (where many of America’s wealthiest families built expensive vacation homes) in flower-decked car convoys, held drive-in dinner parties where they demanded curb service at fashionable Boston restaurants, or simply stepped from their elegant conveyances at the opera house door, dripping diamonds and pearls. In keeping with the tastes of their owners, expensive motorcars featured such “refinements” as cut-glass bud vases and built-in vanity cases. > > These male and female motoring larks differed more in terms of style than substance; wealthy men and women shared a taste for luxury and leisure, as well as bracing adventure, in their motoring. Nevertheless, manufacturers tended to associate the qualities of comfort, convenience, and aesthetic appeal with women, while linking power, range, economy, and thrift with men. Women were presumed to be too weak, timid, and fastidious to want to drive noisy, smelly gasoline-powered cars. Thus at first, manufacturers, influenced by Victorian notions of masculinity and femininity, devised a kind of “separate spheres” ideology about automobiles: gas cars were for men, electric cars were for women. > > The electric automobile had been around since the birth of the motor age, and its identification with women took hold early and tenaciously. Genevera Delphine Mudge of New York City, identified by one source as the first woman motorist in the United States, drove an electric in 1898, and one Miss Daisy Post also drove an electric vehicle as early as 1898. In 1900, the City Engineer of Chicago complained that many women drivers were not bothering to get licenses, and Horseless Age magazine, conflating all women drivers with those who drove electrics, noted that “so far only eight women have secured permits to operate electric vehicles, but . . . there are twenty-five to fifty women regularly running the machines through the city.” > > Certainly some women who wanted the increased mobility that came with driving a car believed that gasoline vehicles, being powerful, complicated, fast, dirty, and capable of long-distance runs, belonged to men, while electric cars, being simple, comfortable, clean, and quiet, though somewhat short on power and restricted in range, better suited women. Electrics tended to be smaller and slower than gasoline-powered cars, and often were designed as enclosed vehicles. If electrics offered less automobility than gas cars, they offered greater mobility than horses, and more independence and flexibility than trolleys. Understandably, some women—most of them well-to-do—thus chose to drive electrics. In April of 1904, Motor magazine’s society columnist noted: > > > Mrs. James G. Blaine has been spending the last few weeks with her parents at Washington, and has been seen almost daily riding about in an electric runabout. The latter appears to be the most popular form of automobile for women, at any rate in the National Capital. . . . Indeed, judging from the number of motors that one sees driven by women on a fine afternoon, one would imagine that nearly every belle in Washington owned a machine. > > Like Pope, other electric car manufacturers were quick to see women as a potential gold mine. In the years before World War I, articles on electric vehicles, or on women drivers, and advertisements for electrics in such publications as Motor and Country Life in America featured photographs of women driving, charging, and otherwise maintaining electrics, reflecting both a specific marketing strategy and a more diffuse cultural tendency to divide the world between masculine and feminine. Electric vehicle manufacturers including the Anderson, Woods, Baker, Borland, and Milburn companies featured women in their advertisements. Touting such virtues as luxury, beauty, ease of operation, and economy, manufacturers attempted to appeal to an affluent female clientele without alienating men who might wish to purchase an electric for their wives or daughters, or even for themselves. The Argo company advertised its 1912 model, a sporty low-slung electric vehicle, as “a woman’s car that any man is proud to drive.” The Anderson Electric Car Company invited men to purchase its Detroit model “for your bride-to-be—or your bride of many Junes ago. . . . No other bridal present means so much—expresses so perfectly all that you want to say. . . . the most considerate choice for her permanent happiness, comfort, luxury, safety.” The Detroit Electric was said to be not only “the last word in luxury and beauty, as well as efficiency,” but also a boon to feminine comeliness: > > > To the well-bred woman—the Detroit Electric has a particular appeal. In it she can preserve her toilet immaculate, her coiffure intact. > > > > She can drive it with all desired privacy, yet safely—in constant touch with traffic conditions all about her. > > However much manufacturers trumpeted the appealing qualities of electrics, automobiles powered by electric batteries had serious disadvantages compared to gas-powered vehicles. They were generally more expensive to manufacture, had limited range (averaging twenty to fifty miles per charge), and were too heavy to climb hills or run at high speeds. Inventor Thomas Edison promised that he would develop a long-distance electric storage battery, but his efforts in this regard proved fruitless. By 1908, even some of those who applauded the use of electrics admitted their limitations. Writer Herbert H. Rice noted that despite improvements in charging technology and vehicle design, “there are not apparent any great opportunities for extraordinary changes unless in the battery.” Rice advised the motoring public to give up hoping for a battery that would go one hundred miles on a single charge (a hope which, he admitted, had caused electric sales to suffer) since “not one in one hundred users requires a service extending beyond thirty-five miles, while in the majority of cases the odometer would record less than fifteen miles for the day’s errands.” > > This acknowledgment of the electric auto’s problems suggests that its association with women was at once a symptom of, and an attempted cure for, its competitive disadvantages. The electric’s circumscribed mobility seemed adequate to those who assumed that “the electric is the vehicle of the home,” adequate, that is, for homemakers who did not expect to take long trips, or frequent trips, or to get stuck in traffic jams. Playing on the domestic theme, the General Electric Company asserted, “any woman can charge her own electric with a G-E Rectifier,” advertising with a photograph of a woman charging her car, using a machine that occupied most of one wall of the family garage. Declaring that “there are no tiresome trips to a public garage, no waiting—the car is always at home, ready when you are,” General Electric implied that using the rectifier would relieve the woman motorist of such inconveniences as often accompanied having to leave home. > > At times the electric car and its purportedly female clientele seemed entwined, as the electric’s advocates used a Victorian language of gender to talk about cars. Country Life in America writer Phil M. Riley combated the criticism that “electric power is weak,” by asserting, “It is important with an electric not to waste power needlessly, that is all.” Riley assured his readers that “the proper sphere of the electric vehicle is not in competition with the gasolene \[sic\] touring car.” Just as conservative commentators admonished women to forego high-powered business and political activity and conserve their energy for domestic tasks, so, Riley said, the electric vehicle might fulfill its mission as “an ever-ready runabout for daily use,” leaving extended travel and fast driving to men in gas-powered cars. Moreover, both Rice and Riley chose to refer to the electric vehicle’s venue of operation as a “sphere.” Victorian Americans commonly repre sented women’s and men’s respective social roles as “separate spheres.” This simple visual image often served as a shorthand description of complex relations not only between individuals of different biological sexes, but between feminine and masculine attributes (including passivity and activity), private and public life, household and workplace, homemaking and paid work, cul ture and politics. The automobile might be novel, but it could not escape entanglement in a web of meaning spun with threads of masculinity and femininity.

Greedy use of water reservoirs x Climate heating bringing more drought.

Greedy use of water reservoirs x Climate heating bringing more drought.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17066438

> They're usually shredded alive almost immediately because they're seen as "waste" since they don't lay eggs > > For some more context: > > Why the egg industry 'shreds' baby chicks alive (NSFL)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17066438

> They're usually shredded alive almost immediately because they're seen as "waste" since they don't lay eggs > > For some more context: > > Why the egg industry 'shreds' baby chicks alive (NSFL)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16659066

> source

https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/toothy-bj/gandalf-the-grey-area/viewer?title_no=99747&episode_no=368

> InfluenceMap’s new analysis outlines a campaign over the last three years stemming from the meat and dairy industry against policy efforts to address the sector’s climate impact. The strategic advocacy appears to have had a significant impact on the ambition of EU policymaking related to the production and consumption of meat and dairy products in Europe. > > - This report examines corporate engagement from ten companies and five industry associations in the meat and dairy sector on six EU policies to reduce emissions in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2019 Special Report on Climate Change and Land use and 2022 Working Group III recommendations. > - The analysis suggests a split between different parts of the meat and dairy sector, with consumer goods focused companies, such as Unilever and Nestlé, appearing to engage more positively on the EU policies covered by this report than meat and dairy producer companies, such as Arla and Danish Crown. Industry associations representing these companies were highly engaged on these policies, appearing to align with the more oppositional positions taken by food producer companies. > - Meat and dairy producers, and the industry associations that represent them, use a combination of strategic narrative building and detailed policy engagement that mirrors the tactics of the fossil fuel industry to obstruct climate policy tackling the sector’s emissions. Both sectors employ similar misleading narratives through strategic public messaging to sow doubt and undermine the need to tackle GHG emissions from the meat and dairy sector.

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> - The industry's efforts appear to have largely succeeded in attempts to weaken key climate policies aimed at the sector in the EU. Following intense corporate advocacy on the policies in 2020-23, a third of the policies included in this report were significantly weakened and half appear to have stalled following oppositional advocacy from companies and industry associations. This includes policies such as the Sustainable Food Systems Framework, a ‘flagship’ policy of the Farm to Fork Strategy, and the revision of the Industrial Emissions Directive which regulates pollutant emissions from European farms. > - Intensive advocacy appears to have influenced the main European conservative political party’s narratives regarding opposition to specific policies affecting the transition of diets and agricultural sector emissions, as well as their approach to the 2024 EU election. In 2022-23, the European People’s Party’s points of opposition to key policies and reducing GHG emissions from the sector mirrored narratives pushed by meat and dairy producers and the industry associations that represent them.