under true libertarianism, animal rights are respected and we do not violate the NAP towards them. we have no more right to exploit an animal nonconsensually than we do a human.

this poll is also flawed because it involves animal exploitation either way

@Alex @xianc78 I havent gone back to veganism yet so I'm a hypocrite but this poll is fucking stupid I'm malding

some of the imo most convincing arguments for animal rights come from a libertarian philosophy and animal rights advocates are opposed to eating bugs, it's just so fundamentally flawed on every level

@Alex @georgia I know that, but most meat eaters are more disgusted at the thought of eating bugs than going vegan or vegetarian, so I chose that as the second option instead.

@Alex https://mises.org/mises-daily/rights-animals

read nozick

@Alex Read "The Secret Life of Plants" and you will realize that plants might be self-aware too, so there is no point in trying to not cause harm to other lifeforms besides your own kind, unless you want to die.

By the same logic used to justify violating the rights of animals, there's no reason to care about violating the rights of other humans.

@Alex Humans can petition for their rights. Animals cannot.

Murray Rothbard made that distinction in The Ethics of Liberty.

If you were to cut out a human's vocal chords and break their hands, do they suddenly lose all of their rights because they can no longer petition for them?

@Alex They can still communicate via mouthing. They can blink their eyes in Morse code or in binary.

An animal can communicate their pain through various nonverbal means as well. Their inability to speak our language doesn't deprive them of their rights any more than someone who's forced to communicate via morse code. I don't know about you, but I don't know morse code - the person in this theoretical certainly couldn't communicate with me.

To extend this - your argument is that a human needs to be capable of communicating to have rights. This means that a human who is unable to communicate would logically lack rights. A child who was never taught to speak, or someone stuck in a land where no one speaks their language, or the victim of some horrific accident that deprived them of their ability to speak, would lack rights in such a scenario. If an organization was to breed human slave labor and never teach any of them how to speak or communicate, would any of those people have rights, since they're unable to petition for their rights?

@Alex I don't care about the severely retarded. It's basically the same argument about pulling the plug on a brain-dead person. As for foreign language, you can communicate with hand signals that anyone can have a basic idea. That's how the European explorers were able to communicate with the natives.

@Alex @xianc78
I am so happy to see you too are against abortions.

I'm morally opposed to abortion but also believe in an absolute right to bodily autonomy and by extension support it remaining legal.

@xianc78 @Alex sophistic argument coming from a time when children were also seen as nothing more than property

@georgia @Alex @xianc78 the 60s?

@xianc78 @Alex Rothbard also says in that book that you can drive your kids into the woods and leave them there

@xianc78
Animal rights are a self-contradictory concept. Is it against a rat's rights to be eaten by a snake? Is it abuse to eat a hamburger? Or worse? What about the chemical warfare we use on animals to protect our crops and homes?

I am sorry, but although animal abuse is retarded, it is still a priviledge of being a supperior entity on this planet. So, this poll is offering one choice that is clearly a positive one, and one negative.

@LukeAlmighty @xianc78 Ultimately you're still eating animals anyway given it's ultimately impossible to eliminate insect pests from fruits and vegetables, and a decent portion of microbial life in the water/general environment are microscopic invertebrates. Meat consumption is IMO, about as morally neutral as any other source of sustenance provided the animals used as livestock are not tortured or the people involved in the agricultural process exploited.

@GD5426 @xianc78
Your point?

@LukeAlmighty @xianc78 veganism for moral reasons is flawed at best

@xianc78
It's odd to me that libertarianism morphed into justifying whatever sexual fetish the adherent wants to indulge.

Libertarianism has been defined (at some point or another) as everything that can possibly be imagined.

It's kind of like Protestant Christianity, there's nobody in charge to tell you that your definition is wrong, any definition imaginable will have *someone* defending it...

@pepsi_man I actually got the idea for this poll from the Hasan shock collar incident. I didn't have bestiality in mind.

@beardalaxy @xianc78 0 votes says a lot