garrethdsouza wrote:
One thing she (CYA) did talk about was how people often use animal rights as an excuse to not be involved in other social justice movements... Because animals have it worst
That's the relative privation fallacy and can be anti-human rights because nothing else winds up being talked about other than animal suffering.
That isn't the fallacy of relative privation. You've misunderstood something.
Your time, money, and energy IS limited. If you have to choose one or the other, optimizing your moral action, you SHOULD choose the one making the biggest difference in suffering per unit of resource.
The fallacy of relative privation is dismissing an argument because "there are more important things", without respect to what we're doing about it, or other real considerations. This is acknowledging it, and simply looking at ROI.
garrethdsouza wrote:
And ironically the ones saying "f**k human rights" ( like yourovsky) are generally the ones who already have majority oftheie human rights already.
I don't think there's anything ironic about that. But discrediting him because he is not personally disadvantaged is a fallacy.
As to that comment:
it is important to acknowledge that said injustice is still a current issue. If we do not, we unwittingly help to suppress the voices of that movement (our silence insinuates ‘hey this was an issue of the past, but now we live in a world where we don’t have to worry about this anymore’) and unfortunately reinforces the system of oppression.
No it isn't. Being concise is important; we can add pages of footnotes to everything because of assumptions people might make, but that's not necessarily productive to getting the most important message across.
No it doesn't; because this is based on the assumptions people are making; you are not adding more misinformation there, you just haven't gone out of your way to correct a preexisting assumption (you also have not taken advantage of that assumption in any way).
It does not insinuate that.
It reinforces nothing.
That's like saying, 'when you ask somebody what time is it, it's reinforcing the oppression of people without watches or the inability to keep time, because you didn't add a foot note to everything you said even vaguely related to that subject'.
More importantly, doesn’t the pain and suffering that we inflict on more than a billion of non human animals annually a compelling enough argument to stand on its own?
You would think it should, but people are speciesist and will often say they don't care, or refuse to be exposed to that information, so you have to meet them where they are.
I believe by continuing to compare the struggle of AR to human animal social justice movements we perpetuate speciesism.
No, we are not. It's not a speciesist argument, it's just not covering the topic of speciesism at all (a subject upon which harping is not effective), but instead addressing inconsistency and helping people realize the issue in terms they can understand.
It's absurd to think that trying to lecture people on speciesism is more effective; most people (unfortunately) don't give a shit.
Somehow their pain and oppression is not deserving of advocacy unless we compare it to OUR own human suffering....
Nobody has said or implied that in any way whatsoever.
Using arguments of human slavery without acknowledging the oppression many people of colour face every day not only hurts the civil rights/human rights movement but also hurts our (the AR) movement.
Evidence?
There's no reason to believe this would be the case.
Some people of colour are offended when it seems like people imply that racism (the foundation of slavery) isn’t an issue anymore.
There may be cases where people do that, such as in advocating animal liberation.
"All we have to do it liberate the animals, and then all of this prejudice against them and speciesism will be gone forever if they're just free just like it happened with African Americans!"
That's just a bad and unreasonable argument. Of course that will have untrue implications; the entire thing is founded on a false analogy, and historical revisionism.
Just as talking about the ‘rape of dairy cows’ without being witness to the millions of women who have endure sexual violence may hurt women who have been trafficked, raped, or sexually assaulted.
That's absurd.
People inherently want their pain to be acknowledged.
That's a rather far fetched claim, but even if they do, that doesn't mean it's good for them to dwell on it. The trick to becoming well adjusted after a trauma is moving past it. Expecting people to be shell shocked and freak out whenever anything vaguely associated with their traumas is mentioned is not a healthy expectation, and it will become an unhealthy habit when you encourage people to live your expectations in that regard.
See the Golem effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_effect
You are harming people by sheltering them and expecting so little of them.
This is one of the things we advocate for as AR activists, too? That people acknowledge the sentience of animals and their inherent right to their own life.
When it's the subject of the actual conversation at hand, or these people are directly contributing to animal suffering.
Animal rights is pushing it anyway, though; this is all veering in the direction of deontology, which is a bad assumption.
It doesn’t take very much to acknowledge the continual struggle (and progress) of other social justice movements if we chose to use them as a reference.
False, it distracts from the subject. Arguing about these topics is hard enough for most people without introducing their own red herrings to distract from
their own arguments. And it's easy enough for the carnists to lose focus and wander off.
I would have a hard time working with a handicap like that, and I'm something of a pro at debate.
It may actually help us win allies (a better strategy, perhaps?) too.
Very unlikely, considering the costs. In terms of efficacy, it seems to these comparisons are more effective than not, and alienating a very small minority of people who are anal enough to have a serious problem with it is not at issue; given the sheer number of people who need to be educated, alienating a few is a fair price to pay for a more effective strategy for the many.
This is why assholes like Gary Yourofsky's methods tend to be more effective than not. When we start running out of people to spread the message to, this will start being a problem, but at this point the economics of activism are very different and favor strong messages that have legs over wishy-washy hard to understand messages that are very likely to bore people but won't risk being offensive to a small minority (a minority who likely won't listen to them anyway, since they may be more prone to use the actual fallacy of relative privation, claiming they have their own problems so are justified in doing whatever to animals -- just as probable as finding allies, for all we know).