Animal agriculture is a massive contributor to some of the largest problems in the world

It’s at least ~15-17% of climate emissions and is enough to make us miss climate targets on its own even if fossil fuels are immediately stopped

~73% of the world’s antibiotics go to animal agriculture, leading to antibiotic resistance diseases. It’s directly attributed to at least 50% of all zoonetic diseases since 1940

It’s one the most dangerous and exploitative industries to work in. There are multiple human right watch reports on working conditions in just the US (“When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting” and Blood, Sweat, and Fear). And this is not limited to the US, here’s just a handful of reporting from The Guardian Revealed: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe, ‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry

The rates of factory farming globally are far higher than most people think. It’s around 74% of all globally farmed land animals, and 90% of total global farmed land and marine animals. It’s around ~99% for the US. The number of animals slaughtered each year is immense at ~80 billion land animals / year, >100 total animals per year. The sheer number of individuals who go through that makes the level of suffering hard to parallel

And that’s just some of the harm the industry does, but I don’t want to ramble too long without talking about how to go about solving this

There is more we as individuals can do here than we can for 90% of other issues. With the laws of supply and demand, simply reducing our collective demand makes the industry smaller. That’s doable at the induvidal level: simply reducing (and ideally eliminating) our individual meat, dairy, etc. consumption can have a real impact. This is more achievable than people think. For instance, Germany has seen a 12% decline in per capita meat consumption over the last ~10 years. We don’t need wait for any institutions to make changes before that can work by doing collective action

There are also some systemic changes we can push for in the near-medium future to help make that happen faster. For instance, just making plant-based foods the default tends to increase plant-based consumption by several orders of magnitude. NYC hospitals implemented plant-based defaults and made their plant-based consumption rate go up to 51% of meals and reduced the average cost of a meal by 59 cents. If that sounds interesting to anyone there are campaigns with real successes to get more institutions and companies to implement those. There groups like the Better Food Foundation, Greener By Default, the Plant Based Treaty is running a Related Campaign, No Milk Tax which has gotten hundreds of chains to drop their plant milk up charge, among others

Trump has already threatened school lunches earlier this year. In Maine, he tried to pull funding from the entire state over some bs around trans people. Maine’s governor told him to his face that she’d see him in court over it. Then a little bit later, he settled in court and gave back the funding without attaching any strings

The article talks about more than just working conditions. For instance

While the larger poultry industry in neighboring Arkansas has given rise to worker centers and advocacy groups that push back against unsafe conditions, Oklahoma’s still sizable immigrant workforce has less support

[…]

Immigrant workers are often less inclined than native-born workers to report unsafe working conditions or injuries because they fear losing their jobs or being deported, said Jose Oliva, the campaigns director for the HEAL Food Alliance, a coalition of organizations that represent food industry workers.

[…]

“This industry is really skilled at constantly seeking out who is the most vulnerable or exploitable population, and how do we bring them in,” Stuesse said.

Not that useful in scenarios besides reading: if you curl your hands in front of your eye and leave a very tiny opening you can create a pinhole that’ll make a tiny bit of your view in focus

Photo from Minute Physics demonstrating what you need to do for that:

https://youtu.be/OydqR_7_DjI

I interpreted the word “this” in the original comment to mean at “New York, specifically” since that was the original topic for the reply. Maybe that’s not what you intended, but I think that’s how most people in this chain read it and understood it

Yes, it should be banned, but it should be banned nationally. Why focus on the people responding to an egregious behavior? Stop Texas from doing it, then it won’t spread. If they go through and dems don’t respond in kind, the voters will has already been subverted. What are we protecting really but republican power?

Texas dems have left the state to block quorum (Texas requires 2/3 legislature present to operate) so that Texas legislature can’t put the bill through. Keep the pressure on Text first and foremost instead of focusing rage at the people actually trying to fight back. It’s not a given that any of the response will be needed, but if that is needed, we must do it. If Republicans maximize gerrymandering of every state and there is no counterbalance, our republic will struggle to hold on. There will be no saving of the voter will if a party that wants to destroy it is left to continue holding the reigns

This is in response to Texas trying to doing it abruptly 5 years before redistricting. They will do every damn other state with Republican trifectas if dems don’t response in kind

Taking the high road doesn’t work. Unilateral disarmament is not the move here. It’s either banned for all or none. Republicans have been chipping away at any federal requirements against it for decades and using that to their advantage

Saw someone do a rough estimate mapped out all states with current trifectas and found that neither side could lock in a majority if that went to the max and could make maps that went 100% one side or another. Republicans in that scenario have a slight edge, but still 84 seats that wouldn’t be decided by gerrymandering alone (how much of a swing district it actually is may vary). It was a rough estimate so take it with a grain of salt. That also assumed that the states with independent legislative committees all remove said committees and that the Voting Rights Act becomes 100% gutted

State and local elections are going to matter a lot even if it doesn’t go to that extreme scenario. Make sure to always vote in them. Virginia and New Jersey have important statewide elections coming up this off-year in November

Good news doesn’t break through half as much as bad news does. State dems have often (though not always) shown much more resolve to do stuff like this than the national party has

Earlier this year in Maine, the governor challenged Trump to his face on his illegal attempts to cut school lunch money funding over a single digit number of trans athletes in the state. She won in court and Trump folded and gave the money back

Earlier this year in Minnesota, a judge ruled a dem wasn’t able to go to office on a technicality (that Republicans only brought up after he won). That seat changed the house from tied to 1 seat GOP, and so Dems then did not show up to deny quorum until after a special election took place. The republicans tried to force operations and operated without a quorum. Dems sued and got a judge to rule every single one of the republican’s actions was invalid because it was without quorum. They then won the special election and only then started back up state legislative operations

There are people willing to do the work. Show up to every damn primary and vote to make sure they are the dominant force in the party

Still happening for some portion of MAGA / republicans, just less focus on it from them at the moment. For a recent example

July 30th: Thomas Massie: ".@SpeakerJohnson has been promoting this non-binding resolution, hoping to give cover to those who don’t want a full release of the Epstein files.

Embarrassingly section 3 of his resolution refers to section 2, which doesn’t exist! Thank you @RepMcGovern for highlighting this."

https://xcancel.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1950626797990588518

Slaugherhouses and similar lines of work change a person for the worse. Institutionalized killing makes workers often numb and more prone to all forms of violence. PTSD is common as well. Near universal dairy industry practices include things like killing cows after their productivity declines, separating calves from mothers, and more. Some quotes from workers in slaughterhouses I think describe what those kinds of things do to a person most aptly

“Maximum six months then you make a change, because if he shoots continuously it will start affecting him. He gets a murderous attitude in him. He will do it to other people. He will stab you with a knife, turn around and walk away.”

[…]

“As time passes, you get used to it. You feel nothing. You can imagine, if you kill a thing a 1000 times over and over, you wouldn’t have feelings after a while. It kills you on the inside, an abattoir, it kills you. You can be full of blood, it will not bother you”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4841092/

Here’s another

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.

https://theconversation.com/animals-suffer-for-meat-production-and-abattoir-workers-do-too-127506

Huh strange doesn’t show on for me, but https://archive.is/tV414 should let you see the article

And that drags out the discussion of it the entire time. Trump wants the story to go away because it’s splintering some of the base, that makes it louder at each step and makes more

So either the files do get release or the story continues to play out and become a bigger and bigger deal. Either way is not great for Trump

I’m not 100% sure he means from their redactions? I think the law only allows senators access to the files, so he might be meaning senators / senator staff releasing it after getting it then redacting victim names?

In either case, doing this still keeps it in the news which hurts Trump. Senate Dems can and should keep doing everything like this instead of Schumer’s previous strategy of stuff like caving on the CR for no reason. This is notable improvement from senate dems even compared to recently

Especially because house dems have shown more fight. They were far more aggressive in trying to force votes on releasing the files which lead to Republicans just shutting down the house instead of voting on it. Which both works to show Republicans are complicit and stops them from pushing through worse bills for an extra few weeks. Senate dems tried a couple of unanimous consent votes, but didn’t see it quite to the level of house dems forcing amendment votes in every committee on damn near everything

Can’t find any other reporting on his account being temporarily blocked from anywhere else

Site is even more suspicious than just being really new. nycjournals.com/blog/ has a link in “First time to the site? Start here” that goes to a page on financialbureau.org which is a dead site. Pulling it up in archive.org shows an almost identical site layout also with no real information on who’s behind it

Needs to be asked: “What did the president speaker know and when did he know it”

I’d also accept the Watergate quote of “I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow”

Because his base isn’t upset about those as much as they are about Epstein. He’s underwater in polling on all those other things now, but his core base wasn’t upset about it

Right wing media talked about Epstein a lot over the past many years. Claimed that Trump would give them all the truth. It became an ingrained belief. Then he abruptly and very suddenly contradicted all that at once and can’t keep to a consistent narrative

He also directly insult his base in the back and forth. Calling them “weaklings”, stupid, etc. for caring which he normally avoids doing. Normally he pretends to care about their concerns when coming up with a BS excuse

Headline is misleading and actively harmful. This produces the apathy the right wants from us. That they are engaging in voter suppression does not declare the results ahead of time. It can make it more difficult to win but far, far from impossible

Don’t do their dirty work for them by claiming it cannot be overcome at all. That just makes their job a lot easier. If the GOP really thought Georgia was on lock, then governor Kemp wouldn’t have stated he doesn’t want to run. The same for Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re super worried they’ll lose and hurt their career which is not how they’d be acting if it were impossible to win

Unfortunately it’s now no longer just limited to the US. Australia has some Ag-gag laws, Various Canadian provinces have tried and there is active ongoing litigation of one in Ontario, and France has some Ag-gag laws

Oh 100%, keeps it going and puts pressure on the representatives who are up for reelection. The base is already mad about this, and even those who may not abandon Trump on this may very well be willing to blame Republicans in congress

Plus dems for once are actually playing smart politics here. Over the past two weeks, they’ve been forcing votes on various versions of it. They’ve had 4 so far I believe. Some in various committees, some as amendments, etc. The Massie/Ro Khanna version of the bill would make it even harder to shoot down than those other votes because it would be fully stand alone and fairly well written to cover all the various other excuses raised earlier