Nestle? Spectrum? Some random company nobody knows about?

  • Ok so Nestle for child murder, Bayer for AIDs blood, Union Carbide for Bhopal disaster and its parent Dow Chemical for Agent Orange (Monsanto too).

    IBM for helping the Nazis with concentration camps and Degesch for Zyclon B. United Fruit Company and Dutch & British East India Companies for colonization, also everyone that was shipping rubber out of the Belgian Congo.

    Everyone who makes landmines, cluster bombs, etc.

    I think when this question is asked in 100 years Palantir is going to feature.

  • Chiquita bananas. They literally stole entire south/central American countries and used death squads and the CIA to enslave the workers and kill them when they asked for such unreasonable demands like being paid in actual currency

  • Google

    They made private data the „new gold“ which it is today long before social media started exploiting it. Changing their motto /code of conduct „Don’t be evil“ into „Do the right thing“ (for our shareholders) didn’t benefit their reputation either…

    • Changing their motto /code of conduct „Don’t be evil“ into „Do the right thing“ (for our shareholders) didn’t benefit their reputation either…

      It’s still in their code of conduct, though.

    • …And how exactly do you think people are going to be able to eat meat otherwise? Or have dairy, eggs, wool, etc.? Do you think that people should e.g., raise chickens in the city?

      And that’s ignoring the small obligate carnivores that make up most of the pets in the world.

      Hey, I’d rather hunt my own food too, but we no longer live in tribal or feudal societies where you can reasonably expect to engage in animal husbandry yourself.

        • First: How do you reconcile that view with the idea that animals also experience the world as people do with the idea that animals kill and eat other animals? Bears, for instance, are roughly as intelligent as a kindergartener, and yet happily kill and eat any other animals that they can. Pigs and crows are also omnivorous, and will eat any source of meat that they come across. They can all likewise avoid killing if they choose, yet they don’t. Are they immoral? Or does morality only apply to humans? (Even animals that we traditionally think of as herbivorous are opportunistic meat eaters.)

          Second: What would you propose replacing animal products with, when there are no alternatives that function as well? What about when the alternative products also cause greater environmental harms?

          Third: So you would not have a problem with, for instance, hunting and eating invasive species, since those species cause more harm to existing ecosystems than not eradicating them would? What about when those invasive species are also highly intelligent, e.g. feral pigs? Or is it better to let them wreck existing ecosystems so that humans aren’t causing harm? To drill down on that further, should humans allow harm to happen by failing to act, or should we cause harm to prevent greater harm?

          Fourth: “Exploiting” is such an interesting claim. Vegans are typically opposed to honey, since they view it as an exploitative product. Are you aware that without commercial apiaries, agriculture would collapse? That is, without exploiting honey bees, we are not capable of pollinating crops?

          Would you agree, given that all food production for humans causes environmental harm, that the only rational approach to eliminate that harm is the eradication of humanity?

          • I copy paste the first two from the bingo board.

            First:
            Yes, animals kill in the wild - to survive. We humans are, as opposed to predators, omnivores. We know how to grow crops, vegetables, etc. and cultivate fields. We have a choice, a conscience and have morals.
            Are you identifying with the intelligence and life situation of that of a lion? Do you also commonly ask yourself “What would a lion do in my place right now”? Are lions that kill newborns of other lions, for example, really good role models?

            I can add to this regarding your question about more intelligent animals. So because some animals choose to kill, does that justify you doing so when you know it causes suffering? That does not make sense.

            Second:
            There are no nutrients that stem exclusively from animals. Originally derived from bacteria and microorganisms, they are accumulated in the food chain via plants and animals. You can leave out the middleman, which is the animal. Accordingly, a balanced vegan diet can meet needs at any stage of life. For certain chronic diseases (type 2 diabetes, some cancers and heart disease), positive effects are even to be expected. Admittedly, it requires an initial conversion effort, since you have to get your nutrients via other foods and sometimes supplements. But don’t worry - it’s not rocket science and it’s for a good cause.

            See also: https://www.pcrm.org/news/health-nutrition/academy-nutrition-and-dietetics-publishes-stance-vegan-and-vegetarian-diets

            Third:
            I actually didn’t find this one on the bingo board, so kudos. And this is sort of a grey area argument that isn’t really the core of the vegan proposition. But anyway my personal opinion is that it is ethical to kill for self defense (depending on the situation), even for an animal of “higher intelligence”. The same way as killing a person in self defense can be ethical in certain situations. But at the same time I don’t think we have an obligation to “step in” and save animals that are subject to predation etc in the wild, see the argument under “first”. This argument is quite close to the common one about killing for conservation, which is quite hillarious when you think about it. We have killed off all the natural predators, so the prey animals become overpopulated so we have to step in to kill them off for their own good.

            Fourth:
            Not directly on the board, but anyway. We don’t need a honey bee industry for crop production. There are alternatives. And it makes more sense to use native pollinators anyways (see also here https://doi.org/10.1890/02-0626 ).

            And bee farming is exploitative. We cut off the wings of the queen to force her to stay. Forcibly impregnate her, and steal the honey. See more here https://youtu.be/clMNw_VO1xo

            And as for your last point, ofc we cause environmental harm, that is unavoidable. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Should we just give up and torture and kill sentient beings because we can’t avoid causing some harm to the environment? How does that make any sense?

          • I’m not a vegan, not even a vegetarian - but your message is so full of logical fallacies and whataboutisms, it’s enough to drive someone to veganism. Is that really the best you can do?

            The first sentence is like when a child has done something wrong, and their mother tells them off, so the child says “Well, <friend> did it too”, to which the mother responds, “Well, if <friend> jumped off a cliff, would you also jump off a cliff?”

                • I do enjoy how you went straight to insults to deflect your lack of knowledge. Then followed by implying I’m missing the same knowledge.

                  Just because we have yet to understand how plants experience life, does not mean that they do not. We know that plants respond to pain. We know plants respond to music.

                  Wife and I have been following the vegan eating habits for about 2 years now. We just don’t feel the need to proselytize about it. Yes, proselytize is the correct word. You’re trying to “save the animals because they feel pain”, we’re just trying to get in better shape in our 40s. We are not the same.

          • Currently to produce lab grown meat they still need a fair amount of biological material for input into the process. So while it does appear to be the lesser of the two evils, especially from an environmental perspective, it’s not a purely ethical process. So I’m not sure how many vegetarians/vegans would be convinced to incorporate lab grown meat into their diet at this time.

          • Not the OP. I’m not a vegan, and not even a vegetarian - however, I have hugely cut down on meat consumption because our western diet expectation of having meat in every single meal is absurdly excessive, and in my case resulting in increased cholesterol and other health risks. So I’ve cut back massively on meat such that it’s once a week, and something very lean.

            Lab grown meat has all the problems that farmed meat has, by and large, in terms of health impacts and energy intensiveness.

            The other thing is that since going to a mostly plant based diet, is I’ve found I simply do not miss meat, in particular I don’t miss red meat at all. So even if lab grown red meat could be less unhealthy, I’ll still give it a miss because plant based food is to be honest perfectly enjoyable. I would imagine many vegetarians and vegans won’t eat lab grown meat because they just don’t need it to enjoy food. I think it’s such a shame that so many eat lots of meat “politically” that they won’t even try reducing their meat consumption and finding other foods that are just as pleasurable, and a lot less damaging to their long term health.

      • We very much so do live in a society where you can easily engage in animal Husbandry on your own.

        Almost everyone I know raises their own food and sells the excess to City Dwellers…but, to be fair I manage a 40k bird turkey farm

    • Fun fact. Saudi Aramco got hit with malware that took down basically their entire computer system. The hackers then demanded $50m in ransom.

      The virus was used for cyberwarfare[4] against national oil companies including Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s RasGas.[5][2][6] A group named “Cutting Sword of Justice” claimed responsibility for an attack on 30,000 Saudi Aramco workstations, causing the company to spend more than a week restoring their services.[7]

    • It really is just a matter of scale. I’ve known some evil little fuckers, but they lack the resources to commit full scale atrocities. They’re not employing children in hazardous conditions or selling tainted blood, but that’s only because they don’t have access to a steady supply of either.

      The ethics is actually very simple. Taking those two examples:

      Kids love to work if you just give them the chance. What kid wouldn’t want to go and show how they can do grownup things and at the same time make money to help their family survive? It happens all the time with family businesses. Just because I’m a wage slave means my kids can’t contribute? What kind of elitist bullshit is that?

      The rest is just regulations meant to strangle the small businessman. You’ve got some pencil neck in an office somewhere who wants to stop LIFE SAVING MEDICATION from getting to people who need it. Bitter little fuck cares more about swinging his dick around and writing “laws” than actually helping people. Most of that blood is perfectly fine but the paperwork got fucked up and sure - maybe some isn’t fine - but if you ask the guy bleeding out from a stab wound if he wants some, he’ll say “YES!” In any case, malaria will probably get the poor fucker before the AIDS does. And he probably already has the HIV anyway.

      /s for those last two paragraphs because it’s not an argument that I’d make, but it very much is a parallel to arguments that I’ve seen being made in real life by seemingly normal people.

      And then of course people tend to operate on a spectrum of
      *literally does not care
      *only cares if it’s happening to me
      *only cares if someone else finds out (because then I’ll have to pretend I never noticed)
      *cares, but not enough to lose my livelihood over it
      *cares, but is really good about not thinking too hard and/or focusing on all the nice things instead of the things that probably aren’t even all that bad
      *will think about quitting, but realizes that they other guys are just as bad (or worse)
      *will quit and go live in a cave

  •  vegai   ( @vegai@suppo.fi ) 
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    All fossil fuel companies, for fucking up the climate without a hint of remorse.

    Legalized drug companies: alcohol, tobacco, coffee. Tobacco and alcohol companies have been more or less reigned in by all kinds of regulations, but big coffee is still roaming free out there.

    Even though Nestle and others are bad as well, I think they’re not quite in the same level of evil as the previous ones.