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This seems like a very strange thing to say. A vegetarian leftist who wants to mandate the end of animal slaughter wants to do so because they think it is unjustified violence, comparable to murder. But they understand that their values aren't universally shared, so they come up with more limited animal welfare arguments grounded in more commonly held values in the wider society they belong to. That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.
Like, if a pro-choice person A is talking to a morally pro-life, politically libertarian person B, of course A is going to appeal to B's political libertarianism when it comes to discussing how the government should legislate around abortion, regardless of what other disagreements they might have. This isn't trying to turn other people into meat puppets to do your bidding, it's respecting and understanding other people enough to try and meet them where they're at in order to achieve a compromise outcome both of you can accept.
It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt. One of the cleanest examples of this, historically, is the western Communist's appeal for human rights including freedom of speech, but only as it applies to their treatment by western governments. If the Communist were to take power, those rights would disappear instantly and any attempt to appeal to them on the basis of that shared value would reveal that it was never shared in the first place. There's not really a true coalition, unless you consider the conman and his mark in a coalition to steal the mark's money.
This is less clear on issues of bodily autonomy and meat production, but probably not hard to see less charitable angles if you zoom out a few levels and look at a bigger picture than just those issues.
So, the generalized version of the style of argumentation this meme is aimed at?
A smuggie is worth ten thousand words. The classic ones strike right at the heart of the issues, it's incredible.
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Why are they the only ones who get to be "pragmatic"? Other people can "pragmatically" realize they have gals beyond the limited version they're proposing now, and "pragmatically" move to deny them their goals, and prevent any coalition from forming, even if theoretically they wouldn't be opposed to the limited version on principle.
I mean, sure, people are pragmatic and meta-pragmatic all the time. I don't really see the point of this anti-lab grown meat bill, since I think meat eating is so culturally dominant that it won't be wiped out within our life times just because lab grown meat becomes affordable and widely available. More likely, vegetarianism will remain a costly social signal of a minority of people until the diet becomes indistinguishable from meat eating in terms of price and flavor, and then when it is practically effortless a law might eventually pass that bans animal slaughter altogether.
It's going to be exactly what happened with slavery. Banning slavery when an entire regional economy depends on it is difficult to accomplish, and probably requires a war and imposition of force. Living in a world where everyone has 200 to 8000 energy slaves thanks to electricity and industrialization makes being anti-slavery very easy, basically without cost to the individual. I think I would be more likely to see the point of slavery if I had to fetch my own water, grow, prepare and cook my own food from scratch, clean my clothes by hand, wash my dishes by hand, etc.
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