ARE YOU HUMAN? OR AN ETHEREAL BEAUTY?

COMMENT (September 3, 2024)

I wrote this comment out for a review I watched on the book Tender Is The Flesh on the 26th, but ended up never posting it, because. I was aware that anyone on YouTube checking the comments would immediately think I'm a danger to society or whatever. So I'm just gonna keep this here to remember my thoughts on the topic and share my insanity, teehee ❀

"This is only for the beginning of the video and maybe this is just my low empathy (I'm autistic and have other mental shit) speaking, but I find it weird to say that killing a human does not have the same impact as killing a cow or an animal in general. I'm not saying this to call people who eat meat murderers or whatever. I actually agree more with what indigenous people have said on this topic, where settlers percieve all relationships as having a dominant and submissive side rather than mutually beneficial. This view also comes from a very white Christian perspective, which a lot of settlers do have, where humans are seen as the only beings with souls (and thus, the only ones that can go to heaven or hell) and culturally, even if you're atheist, you'll percieve humans as not animals despite us being just that. We're part of nature. We're part of the cycle of life and death. Western cultures are just disconnected from that. And this isn't really a matter of mental superiority either, because even if this doesn't apply for cows, there are animals with similar levels of what people would consider intelligence. And also high intelligence = right to kill sounds very... wrong in my opinion. As someone in psych abolition spaces who knows subtler eugenicist rhetoric, even if a human person would never be comparable to an animal and it would be insulting to compare the two.

Like you said too, these are different creatures than us. We'll never fully know what goes on in their heads. So I feel like when people emphasize how much extreme vegans don't make sense, because "animals aren't the same as humans", then that can just as easily be redirected by them (and I HAVE seen vegans say it shouldn't matter if they're the same as people, because they're still being harmed, even if I disagree with that).

And for something like cannibalism, I feel like we're against that only because it just. Feels Wrong to eat another person. And it makes sense why for evolution reasons. And this would also obviously trigger people's affective empathy, again, in a way that makes sense with us being social animals that need to survive. So that can be explained without having to seperate people from other animals IMO. And even then, people in the comments have mentioned cannibalism either being used for spiritual beliefs or against a minority group (the latter being from dehumanization). So to bring it back to the book, this isn't a good metaphor due to cannibalism being very specifically disturbing to other humans for a reason. I do not think cannibalism would ever be a good metaphor for non-vegans because of that. But... I also think the way you described the problem isn't the real issue. If I'm being 100% honest, I would try human meat if I could get my hands on it, just out of curiosity, but I'd only do that if the person I got it from was never harmed or killed, which would probably only happen if they were harvested right after their death, but even then. If they died naturally, they were probably old or ill anyway. Or maybe died of heart attack or something from stress. But all those options would probably be unhealthy to consume. I've heard before that even if you killed someone to eat them, human meat isn't very healthy anyways and I'm also pretty sure sharks avoiding eating people/only eat them if they are mistaken for other animals due to us tasting bad. So I probably would not want to eat us anyways."