This kind of purity policing is deeply offputting IMO. And certainly won’t help build federated social media.

This is a decent point. Ignore the inane downvotes you’re getting for simply expressing your opinion in a polite and good-faith manner.

Personally I share your take, but you’re not helping the cause by insulting people.

Between what the law says and what actually happens, there is a yawning gulf. It’s the same in basically all jurisdictions where there are animal-welfare laws. The meat industry is powerful and consumers are unrelenting in their clamor for cheap meat. With such incentives, the weakest link is always going to be animals, which by definition have no voice.

This is exactly my mental response to this kind of story. Total hypocrisy. Try to ignore the pushback, cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

There is no expectation that everyone has to agree with you, either offline or online.

Egregious straw man, obviously I don’t think that.

enormous misunderstanding what [downvotes] are

Says who? You? What if it were you “misunderstanding” this? I know your version is the majority one, but there are plenty of people who agree with me that downvoting is toxic, hence the existence of downvote-free instances.

A downvote is softer than a negative comment, and if you think a downvote is a slap in the face, how should I interpret your negative comment? A kick in the face?

The big difference, to bore you with what you must already know, is that a downvote affects in most default configs the visibility of the comment. So it’s effectively a mild form of censorship, which IMO is not “softer” than a negative reply. And it’s certainly not better than than a constructive negative reply, which, believe it or not, is possible to do.

The best argument I have seen for your case is that downvoting provides an off-ramp for potentially sterile conflict. I.e. people hit the downvote button instead of replying with rage. That’s a decent pragmatic argument. But whatever reason I personally manage to control my rage at other people’s “wrong” opinions, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask them to do the same.

on somewhat of a crusade against downvotes

It’s true. For me, to downvote an opinion (and this is what the vast majority of downvoting is) is the virtual equivalent of slapping someone in the face, or telling them to shut up. We don’t do it in person, we shouldn’t do it virtually.

Yeah that’s true but in this scenario it’s your fault, not theirs.

Every social-media platform strips EXIF metadata before publishing the photo.

So the issue is the trustworthiness of the social-media platform itself. Personally I always strip the metadata before sharing anything anywhere.

Perhaps it depends on community but my experience has been pretty uniform: brigading, comment removal, bans, for expressing ideas that (according to opinion polls) are shared by literally most of the population. At first I was a bit shocked, now I know just to avoid politics, it’s not worth the trouble. If you’ve had a difference experience then good for you.

Try expressing a centrist or - heaven forbid (I haven’t actually tried this one) moderate conservative - position on a hot-button subject and see if you still feel that way.

Just don’t try to debate politics unless you already subscribe to the prevailing groupthink. In fairness, that’s true of any social-media forum, and the corporate ones have other problems on top.

Apart from the methane problem, all livestock farming takes, by definition, a massive amount more land than arable farming to produce the same amount of food. On a stressed planet of 9 billion people, there simply is not enough land to feed everyone with red meat.

First, well done for taking it seriously and doing your bit.

The point of the post (I think) is simply to illustrate that certain actions are much, much more important than others. Anecdotally, there are still plenty of people out there who believe that, say, turning off a couple of (low-energy) lights, or “recycling” a plastic bag, are somehow major good deeds that allow them to kick their feet up and celebrate with a steak. There’s still way too much ignorance about all this, IMO.

In reality (as you seem to understand), some gestures are far more important than others. Ditching red meat (and dairy) really is a big deal. Everyone who claims to care about this problem should at least consider doing it.

This is a nice articulation of nihilism.

The paradox being that the attitude is both justified and… certain to only make the problem worse.

lasts much longer which is important as a single household

This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don’t need a fridge.

Roughly true, but you’re eliding a very, very problematic activity into “travel”: aviation.

Per kilometer, flying is pretty carbon intensive (about the same as driving - basically: the extra efficiency of being packed into a tin can is offset by exponentially higher wind resistance at high speed). The problem is that airplanes allow you to burn up massive distances really quickly.

A single transatlantic flight will blow a 2-ton1-ton hole in your personal carbon footprint. That’s 10-20% of an average European’s annual footprint - or 100% a very large chunk of a sustainable annual footprint. For anyone who flies more than once a year (i.e. likely a bunch of people here), cutting down on flying is likely to be the single biggest thing you can do for the climate.

in places like France and Japan

This is completely wrong.

You talk exclusively about Japan, so even if your anecdata is representative, then my point is not “completely” wrong. Let’s begin by using language correctly.

I’ll be honest, a quick review of this thread did not clearly reveal who was downvoting who for what. My position, and this other person’s, is that downvoting opinions is bad manners and toxic to healthy discussion. If there was genuinely harmful advice there, then OK, downvote away.

(Obviously these days the word “harmful” is thrown around liberally so this probably just puts us back to square one.)

Freedom of speech as an absolute

Of course it’s not absolute, where did I say otherwise? Straw man.

paradox of tolerance

This just feels like a fancy reference deployed to back up intolerance.