#in the vein of like that thing where a disproportionate number of men think they could land a plane in an emergency

[bookwyrminspiration]

Keefe, to me, feels like he thinks he can do a backflip, but 100% cannot

[mickibloo]

Human Rights and Veganism

I speak frequently about my passion for human rights and how this is often dismissed by nonvegans on the basis of me being vegan, and seeing how many other vegans have related to my struggles, I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the human rights issues animal agriculture is responsible for and/or perpetuates. This will not be a list that 100% encapsulates the extent to which human rights are violated by these industries, but I think it is still a really great introduction, if nothing else, to how ubiquitous the oppressive nature of animal agriculture is. This post will be mostly guided by links to sources and some key quotes and phrases from those sources. 

1. Slaughterhouse Workers

Slaughterhouse workers are one of, if not the most, abused, mistreated, and neglected groups of workers to exist within western countries. The traumatization they face as a result of their job is often ignored by almost everyone who is not vegan or who does not research the topic. 

“A Call to Action: Psychological Harm in Slaughterhouse Workers“

“These workers perform a job that, by its very nature, puts them at risk of psychological disorder and pathological sadism. This risk emerges from a combination of many factors of slaughterhouse work, one of which is the stressful environment that slaughtering creates. A large portion of this stress comes from the exceptionally high rates of injury among the workers.

“However, slaughterhouse work is unique among major industries due to its innate violence...one of the most prominent studies investigated the impact of having a slaughterhouse in a community on crime rates within that community, using this as a metric for psychological health... Though the industries they used for comparison were nearly identical in other predictors of changes in crime (namely worker demographics, potential to create social disorganization, and effect on unemployment in the surrounding areas), slaughterhouses outstripped all others in the effect they had on crime. They led not only to a larger increase in overall crime, but, disturbingly, disproportionate increases in violent crime and sexual crime.

“Creating and sustaining oneself with “good” moral character and having another self that can mechanically end lives for hours each day not only serves as another source of psychological stress for workers, but exposes workers to the risk that their pathologically un-empathetic work selves will slip into their community lives. This is another explanation for the “spillover” that affects slaughterhouse workers’ minds and communities.

“Living with the knowledge of their actions causes symptoms similar to those of individuals who are recipients of trauma: substance abuse, anxiety issues, depression, and dissociation from reality.

(Testimonies from slaughterhouse workers): “And then it gets to a point where you’re at a daydream stage. Where you can think about everything else and still do your job. You become emotionally dead.”

“So a lot of guys at Morrell [a major slaughterhouse] just drink and drug their problems away. Some of them end up abusing their spouses because they can’t get rid of the feelings. They leave work with this attitude and they go down to the bar to forget.”

Confessions of a slaughterhouse worker

There are things, though, that have the power to shatter the numbness. For me, it was the heads.

At the end of the slaughter line there was a huge skip, and it was filled with hundreds of cows' heads. Each one of them had been flayed, with all of the saleable flesh removed. But one thing was still attached - their eyeballs.

Whenever I walked past that skip, I couldn't help but feel like I had hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me. Some of them were accusing, knowing that I'd participated in their deaths. Others seemed to be pleading, as if there were some way I could go back in time and save them. It was disgusting, terrifying and heart-breaking, all at the same time. It made me feel guilty."

I know things like this bothered the other workers, too. I'll never forget the day, after I'd been at the abattoir for a few months, when one of the lads cut into a freshly killed cow to gut her - and out fell the foetus of a calf. She was pregnant. He immediately started shouting and throwing his arms about.

I took him into a meeting room to calm him down - and all he could say was, "It's just not right, it's not right," over and over again. These were hard men, and they rarely showed any emotion. But I could see tears prickling his eyes." I remember one day in particular, when I'd been there for about a year or so, when we had to slaughter five calves at the same time.

We tried to keep them within the rails of the pens, but they were so small and bony that they could easily skip out and trot around, slightly wobbly on their newly born legs. They sniffed us, like puppies, because they were young and curious. Some of the boys and I stroked them, and they suckled our fingers.

When the time came to kill them, it was tough, both emotionally and physically. Slaughterhouses are designed for slaughtering really large animals, so the stun boxes are normally just about the right size to hold a cow that weighs about a tonne. When we put the first calf in, it only came about a quarter of a way up the box, if that. We put all five calves in at once. Then we killed them.

America’s Slaughterhouses Aren’t Just Killing Animals

“I’ve seen bleeders, and they’re gushing because they got hit [by a knife] right in the vein, and I mean, they’re almost passing out,” she said, “and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops. It never stops.”

In Texas, where private employers are not required to carry workers’-compensation insurance, Tyson has opted out of the state system completely. When a worker gets injured at the Tyson beef slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas, in order to get medical care from the company, that person must first sign a document saying:

I hereby voluntarily release, waive, and forever give up all my rights, claims, and causes of action, whether now existing or arising in the future, that I may have against the company, Tyson Foods, Inc., and their parent, subsidiary and affiliated companies and all of their officers, directors, owners, employees, and agents that arise out of or are in any way related to injuries (including a subsequent or resulting death) sustained in the course of my employment with the company.

The pressure to sign was enormous. When a worker named Duane Mullin had both of his hands crushed in a hammer mill at the Amarillo slaughterhouse now owned by Tyson, a manager employed by its previous owner persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his teeth.

'We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war

The company is now measuring workers’ temperatures as they report for work, and began supplying surgical facemasks, but, according to Fields and workers interviewed by the Guardian, Tyson continues to suppress information on employees who have tested positive for Covid-19.”

One worker, a central American migrant who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her job, told the Guardian that the company was not enforcing social distancing. 'We are all given bathroom breaks at the same time and there are hundreds of us waiting to use them. There are only seven bathrooms,' she said. 'They [Tyson] don’t care about the worker. They don’t care if we get sick.' A spokesman for Tyson said the company was taking 'several measures' to allow social distancing but did not address the bathroom break allegations."

One African American worker at a Koch facility that had been targeted by Ice, spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. He alleged that while Koch had recently begun taking workers’ temperatures before shifts, they had also withheld details of any workers who contracted the virus. 'They ain’t offering nobody no disability, no unemployment, no time off,' the worker said. 'I just keep my hands washed up, my face covered up, my whole body covered, and I pray to myself and hope I don’t catch it. The truth is there’s a chance that everybody in [here] will catch it.'

The sociologist Lourdes Gouveia has studied the meatpacking industry for three decades and said the Covid-19 outbreak is simply highlighting again the dangerous conditions in processing plants. Gouveia said the industry has perfected a formula which allows it to maximize profit while producing relatively safe meat by resisting regulations and utilizing low cost, mostly immigrant, labor in unsafe conditions. 'All of these elements are of a highly perfected formula or maximizing profits that is unlikely to change fundamentally,' Gouveia said."

2. Environmental Racism and Classism

Animal agriculture, and factory farms specifically, tend to locate their facilities near poor communities (often black or Hispanic) who do not have the financial means to take them to court over the ways in which these farms affect their health and wellbeing. 

How Swine in North Carolina Affects real People | René Miller Excerpt

“When you go back and you look at where these hog facilities are located, there’s a disproportionate number of them that are located near communities of color, low income communities. It is definitely a human rights issue.”

“Now see, if you lived here, and saw the way they do, you wouldn’t eat no pork. I don’t eat bacon, because I know where it comes from. When they die, they go into a box, and they decompose because they swell in the heat. A truck come and pick them up, take them to the processing plant in Roseo, ground them up into feed, and feed them back to the hogs.

“It hits you right in the face. Smell like something that you had never smell before. Smell worse than a dead body.”

“When we go to the funeral, he used the spray. If we wanna have a cookout on Sunday, he’ll spray. He always sprays Sunday.

“Do you think it’s also a civil rights issue?”

“Yes, I do.”

When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting

Like many other hazardous and exhausting low-wage industries in the United States, this work depends on the labor of America’s most marginalized communities. Most workers in the industry are people of color, many are women, and nearly one-third are immigrants.

In 1983, wages for workers in the meat and poultry industry fell, for the first time, below the national average for manufacturing work; in 1985, they were 15 percent lower; in 2002, they were 24 percent lower; today, they are 44 percent lower. Workers earn, on average, less than $15 an hour.

Jobs in the meat and poultry industry have long been a starting point for many groups of new immigrants to the United States as many positions require little formal education, experience, or English-language skills. In 2015, nearly 30 percent of meat and poultry workers were foreign-born non-citizens—about three times more than the percentage of manufacturing workers nationally.

Even immigrants with work authorization can remain vulnerable to coercion from employers, as many are not aware of their workplace rights, may not be familiar with technical terms in English, or are otherwise hesitant to navigate the complex, and potentially costly, procedures to vindicate their rights. The result is a significant part of the low-wage workforce who are less likely to report workplace abuses or even injuries, and are therefore more easily exploitable than US citizens, for fear of their employers’ power to fundamentally disrupt their lives and the lives of their families. “Us workers are afraid to lose our job,” said Rebecca G., an immigrant worker at a poultry plant in Arkansas. “[P]eople don't speak up or say what's wrong about the chemicals, or the speed of the line, or the discrimination.”

3. The displacement and murder of indigenous peoples

The Companies Behind the Burning of the Amazon

The burning of the Amazon and the darkening of skies from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, have captured the world’s conscience. Much of the blame for the fires has rightly fallen on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for directly encouraging the burning of forests and the seizure of Indigenous Peoples’ lands.

But the incentive for the destruction comes from large-scale international meat and soy animal feed companies like JBS and Cargill, and the global brands like Stop & Shop, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart/Asda, and Sysco that buy from them and sell to the public. It is these companies that are creating the international demand that finances the fires and deforestation.

The transnational nature of their impact can be seen in the current crisis. Their destruction is not confined to Brazil. Just over the border, in the Bolivian Amazon, 2.5 million acres have burned, largely to clear land for new cattle and soy animal feed plantations, in just a few weeks. Paraguay is experiencing similar devastation.

After years of remarkably successful conservation initiatives that cut Brazil’s deforestation rate by two-thirds, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has reopened the doors to rampant destruction as a favor to the agribusiness lobby that backs him. That industry is accountable for the atmosphere of lawlessness, deforestation, fires, and the murder of Indigenous peoples that followed. According to data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon in July 2019 increased 278 percent over the previous July. Bolsonaro responded to this news by firing the head of the INPE. 

I would like to close this post by saying that I understand this may leave nonvegans with some questions; What can consumers do about this? Should consumers be expected to do anything, or would that simply be misplacing the blame for these things? Aren’t all industries awful in similar ways since there is no ethical consumption under capitalism? If you have these questions, I am more than happy to engage in a good-faith conversation about them. The purpose of this post, however, is not to answer such inquiries. I made this purely to raise awareness about these issues because the only people I ever see discuss them are vegans, and these are extremely important topics that I think deserve far more attention than they receive. 

[midrashic]

[headcanon] a map of hidden places i: new york city

{ a map of hidden places }

the first time james visits new york is more accident than anything; there’s a weapons expo and it’s january, and surely new york in january can’t be any more unpalatable than scotland in january. there are restaurants and boutiques whose names were, even then, synonymous with luxury, but james spends most of his time in the hotel room with the nanny playing with the puzzle ball he’d received that christmas. enid takes him to the natural history museum to see the mammoth bones, to central park to stare at the bare, shivering tree skeletons while he mounds old snow into various blobby shapes.

he doesn’t remember any of this; by the time he’s ten, new york is just a vague smear of concrete and solitude in his imagination, a glimpse of a faded marble facade that blends into all the other glimpses of all the other cities of everywhere else his father has ever had a conference.

for years, there’s the odd holiday abroad with his aunt, a trip with a school friend whose father owns a major hotel in the city or something. then there’s the navy. he learns new york in thirty-six hour stretches of shore leave, and he learns new york through the eyes of dozens of royal navy sailors, which mainly means that he learns very fast which bars near the harbor serve something roughly as strong as paint thinner for a measly two dollars per drink, or a dozen for a twenty.

but he learns other things, too. he saves up the days of walking on solid earth for the weeks when his feet won’t touch dry land and wanders into the neighborhoods that his well-to-do parents and guardians never let him anywhere near: bushwick, the lower east side, basically all of the bronx. new york city’s just hit its peak for violent crime, though someone only attempts to mug him once and gets a broken jaw for his trouble besides. the strangest thing for a brit is the gunshots that will ring out randomly, multiple times a night, but that’s true for every american city he’s ever visited.

he experiments with the subway. the tube in the 80s and 90s was no picnic, but hell, he learns, is a suspiciously empty new york subway car.

one strange thing: over the course of one particular weekend, he runs into a girl he slept with on shore leave in kingstown in a pizzeria named something uncreative like “48th street pizza,” an old university professor in a rare book store, a boy who was in the class above him at eton in bryant park, and then the girl again at a bar that night. (there is indeed a repeat performance.) this is a statistically accurate sampling of how often he recognizes a face from his past. back then, it was the third-largest city in the world, after tokyo and osaka, but it could sometimes feel very fatalistically small.

& then he’s in new york fairly often as a junior agent, but he doesn’t really tap the veins of the city until he’s a double-oh.

the thing about new york is that, for all that you tend to run into people you haven’t seen in years fairly frequently, it’s a great place to disappear. there’s no way to cover every possible exit when planning an ambush and a thousand laundromats, bars, and, hell, magic shops to duck into when you’re being tailed. vaguely seedy fleatraps that bill themselves as “youth hostels” where you can rent a room for four months and leave without anyone having asked you your name. the city seems to boast a disproportionate number of people sitting alone in the corners of coffeeshops, bars, hotel lobbies. it’s the first thing he thinks of when the name shows up in a mission briefing or news article: the pure relief of being quietly ignored, of being anyone, of being no one. he kills a drug kingpin and sips espresso at a café patio ten feet away as the police begin to boredly take statements. he garrotes a man in a bodega bathroom and no one notices for three days because it’s always out of order anyway. new york makes it so easy, so very easy to let a face become a file become a statistic. it has a carelessness with its people that he’s used to seeing in the third world, in places where the corruption is overt, in places that don’t even pretend to have a functioning police system. new york doesn’t care about you.

it also makes it so very easy to pick people up.

in a lot of ways, new york is a lot like london. it’s not every city in the world where you can get a sandwich at four am because the son of a bitch you were surveilling spent five hours haggling over uranium shipments with his contact, which was four hours and fifty minutes longer than he needed to spend. there’s a certain level of mercenary profit-seeking required to keep a sandwich shop open all night, damn circadian rhythms.

but new york takes it to excess. in london, you can probably find 24/7 takeaway within a reasonable walking distance, but in new york, you’re guaranteed to have at least five in the immediate neighborhood and eight more if you’re willing to go a little further for a substantial uptick in quality. during a particularly frustrating bit of downtime not longer after the quantum incident, bond strolls into a midnight karate class for no other reason than he’s bored and wants to see what kind of people can only do karate in the middle of the night. it’s a surprisingly friendly bunch, two night shift workers, a sleep-deprived college student, a jumpy little tweaker, and a single mother who decides to do this with her scant two hours of free time weekly. it’s taught by a petite woman who hits with the precision of an architect and used to practice jiu-jitsu competitively until a back strain caused her to switch to a sport with more standing and less rolling around on the ground.

he does try to sleep with her, but they actually end up sharing a platter of nachos in between (fittingly) manhattans at a bar and chatting about differences in karate conditioning techniques and shitty b-movies. the bartender joins in for the latter. he walks away that morning to another endless round of negotiation with the cia feeling strangely refreshed for a man who got no sleep and no sex.

bond ends up censoring his new york reports more than any other locale, not because missions go wrong in new york more often than anywhere else, but because they tend to go wrong in utterly baffling and sometimes embarrassing ways when he’s in new york. in the reports, he changes the timely plague mask-wearing flash mob that allowed him to escape his pursuer to a traffic jam, the girl wearing a dress made of lettuce that beat a terrorist into submission with her tomato purse into a well-placed police officer, the message he got painted on his nails in gold glitter to a simple note (it worked, the fsb searched him and found nothing and apparently manicured men in brioni are common enough in the city that no one even gave him a second look). new york is many things, but it spits on the dignity of the profession.

felix hates new york, hilariously. he calls it “the big asshole.” he hates the garbage sitting out on the streets, the way you can never tell whether a puddle is rain or urine, the flimsy little metrocards, the food deserts, the traffic, my god, the traffic. (bond has to agree: it’s bad. he once walked to laguardia instead of waiting for a taxi.) the only places he hates more than new york are minnesota and south sudan, which are the foreseeable consequences of a boy from texas spending his first winter away from home in the midwest and being a sane person with a functioning sense of smell. but for some reason, international criminals turn up in new york a lot more often than they do in ann arbor or south sudan, so felix has no choice but to spend sometimes weeks or months at a time in his third-least-favorite place in the world.

(bond knows why he really hates new york: in 2003 he was chasing a jewel smuggler and ran straight into a fruit cart. he was washing fruit juice out from behind his ears for a week and he lost the target. after that, anyone would hate this place.)

when bond is in midtown west, he makes a point of stopping by the trenta tre pizzeria, which boasts pizza that isn’t oily, isn’t too chewy or crisp, and boasts a sauce with a salty-to-sweet balance of flavors that make his eyes roll back in his head. he’s had the real deal, pizza lovingly crafted by hand, topped with buffalo mozzarella, and wood-fired in a tiny neapolitan back room. he knows better than to tell an italian--or anyone who he needs to think of him as a well-traveled sophisticate--but he prefers this.

coincidentally, the pizzeria is located next to a bodega that displays its fruit on wooden stands on the sidewalk. behind the peaches lives a cat, well-fed and sleek and a shameless thief of chicken parm pizza toppings. he doesn’t know her name--the owner is from rural ethiopia and doesn’t speak english, mandarin, arabic, french, german, spanish, russian, or any of the four other languages bond speaks--but in his head he’s named her selina after that greatest of feline burglars, catwoman. selina is good company after a violent mission, and almost never sheds on him, which is more than he can say about the other cats in his life. if he lingers after the pizza to pet her a little longer, no one needs to know.

the events, the new trends, the previews, the releases, blah blah blah. the access is touted more than it actually matters. he’s sure that- if he actually lived in new york he would appreciate the convenience of dwelling in the obligatory stop of every tour and the go-to place to drum up media attention. but he doesn’t and he has enough frequent flier miles that his grandchildren will probably be getting complimentary upgrades and if he really wants to be at the premiere of a much-hyped performance of la traviata he’ll make it there somehow. he does notice that the access has given new yorkers a strange sense entitlement--when a fashionable event happens someplace other than new york, the resentment is deeper, the sense of loss sharper--as if everything important should happen in new york. still. he brings home a tea flavored with the newly discovered ruby chocolate months before it becomes widely available as a souvenir for q. there are compensations. 

when q finally punches down his fear of air travel for long enough to make it to new york, bond keeps him out of manhattan. they drift around brooklyn and queens, wandering streets balanced on the knife edge of an existence that is almost suburban--dogs everywhere and strollers between the specialty shops and markets. they sit in a soda fountain famous for its egg creams and share a sundae named after elvis. q orders three different sodas--he’s a connoisseur of exotic beverages--and pronounces the house blend the best cherry soda he’s ever tasted. bond smiles at him around his ice cream float. the place is packed, every seat filled, but here, at a little round table tucked into the corner, he and q might as well be invisible, being aggressively ignored by everyone except the soda jerks. just two people, forcefully alone together. the last two people in the world.

[wineanddinosaur]

How Black Lives Matter Made a Mexican-American Beer Writer Rethink Her Role in Craft Beer

The first time I experienced a brew festival more than 10 years ago, my only expectation was to see a lot of people, try some new and interesting beers, and to enjoy myself. My vantage point was as a volunteer, serving beers to the masses along with my husband. Two of the first things I noticed immediately were: 1. The disproportionate number of men compared to the women in attendance; and 2. The fact that I was one of the very few people of color in attendance. As a second-generation Mexican-American from upstate New York, I have always been aware of my social surroundings wherever I am, and this was no exception.

Later, as I attended fest after fest across the Northeast, the disparities became hard to ignore. I’d say to my husband, whose family hails from Eastern Europe, “Do you notice that I’m the only brown person here?” to which he would reply, “No, I hadn’t really noticed.” Was I uncomfortable? No. Did it bother me? Somewhat. My observations were always there, nagging me to speak up about the industry’s lack of diversity. Later, I started a beer blog, but chose not to write about racial inequalities in an effort to “stay out of it” and let others tell their stories if they chose to do so.

Over the past decade, I’ve immersed myself in the craft beer world. I’ve worked for several breweries as a brand ambassador, as a bartender, and as a sales rep throughout the Northeast and in South Florida. The racial disparities have felt most pronounced to me in the Northeast, as I had more Latino colleagues while working in Miami. In New York, I wanted to capture the essence of the craft beer community I was a part of in Florida — partly pachanga (party atmosphere), mixed with a common understanding of beer, community, and acceptance. In the Northeast, I longed for the inclusivity that seemed to automatically come easily to my white counterparts who put on a brewer’s shirt, wore a long beard, or looked like the St. Pauli girl serving to the masses at Oktoberfest.

For my first gig as a brand ambassador, I worked for a brewery in Ohio with Irish American roots. While going through training, I was the only non-Irish-American employee. I felt awkward, like a sore thumb. It was a friendly enough environment and everyone was nice, but I still felt a sense of marginalization. My presence was certainly acknowledged, but I felt like more of an afterthought. I was the last person to be addressed and the last person to get handed a glass while sampling. I tried so hard to prove my worth; I was the person who always engaged, asking questions and starting conversations because the others would not.

In seeking recognition and acceptance, I pushed harder than my colleagues. I memorized every detail of the brewery’s beer profile, its history, and interesting anecdotes. Customers were gracious, inquisitive, and appreciative of my advice and conversation. I felt really good about my position and I loved talking about craft beer to anyone who would listen. During my time as a brand ambassador, I also became a writer for a local newspaper. Strangers recognized me and complimented me on my informative articles on beer. Things seemed to be going well.

Over the years, I built a reputation in the industry for knowing beers inside out, and for my friendly, can-do attitude. None of this took away the fact that I still noticed the lack of women and BIPOC at events. More and more it was starting to bother me, but I went on about my business and poured beer after beer. There never really is a “getting used to it” feeling about being the only minority in the room or the only female in a sea of beards — or in my case, both. I really wanted to see some diversity in the field but didn’t think I could do anything about it. Other than representing myself, I didn’t see how I could make an impact.

Over time, my desire grew to connect with BIPOC and women beer professionals and enthusiasts. In 2014, I started a Meetup group in Syracuse, N.Y., for like-minded women who wanted to learn more about craft beer and socialize. My goal was to see more women interact with each other, to meet local brewery professionals, and to grow a noticeable female representation at local events. More than 100 women came out of the woodworks and were grateful to have a “safe space” to congregate. I was ecstatic that my idea would get such a response! For a time, we gathered regularly, set up information tables at beer festivals, sold pretzel necklaces, and recruited other women to join the group.

This type of group had not been done before in my community, and members looked forward to our monthly meetings where we would get together at local breweries and beer businesses, learn something new, and enjoy a few pints with one another. Our voices were heard, our questions were answered, and our taste buds were satiated. Yet, despite the success of the group, there was still something lacking — while I had tapped into a vein of women who loved beer, they were largely white. I was still unable to find beer professionals or enthusiasts who looked like me, a brown-skinned American woman.

Fast-forward to 2019, I landed a job representing a craft brewery from Kilkenny, Ireland. This was an international brand looking to find American fans that weren’t necessarily craft beer snobs. My goal was to reach 35- to 50-year old men and women who were accustomed to a pint of Guinness or Killian’s. My bosses and colleagues were wonderful people who looked to sell this unknown name in America. And I was ready for the challenge. After 10 years in the business I felt confident that I could represent the brand well. Despite the fact that I was neither Irish nor Irish-American, I was comfortable in my role.

That’s until I experienced racism first-hand from a consumer. While serving samples of an Irish red ale at a local Irish-American bar, a patron said to me, “You’re not Irish. Shouldn’t you be Irish or Irish-looking if you’re going to represent that beer? Why did they hire you?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but deep down, the racist customer tapped into my feelings of not belonging, of “otherness.” The only response I could give to this guy was, “Because I know my stuff.” But he didn’t care. He didn’t want to see a brown girl talk European beer. Normally I would brush off such a crude question but I couldn’t.

I began to doubt my validity to everyone and everything. I had worked hard to get into the industry and knew that my gender and race shouldn’t matter when it came to doing my job. Logically, I knew that I was an educated, smart woman who entered the beer industry on her own merits. I knew that I worked hard to switch careers from being a higher-educational professional to a beer writer and brand representative. Nobody could take that away from me, but in that one exchange, my pride turned to shame. Shame for not being able to control my outer appearance, shame for being born the “wrong” color, shame for not being someone I will never be. However, I continued on, with a little less pride for working in beer. Despite a company trip to Ireland and tremendous support from my Irish superiors, I didn’t feel a sense of belonging or teamwork in what I was doing. Unfortunately, my career as a brewery representative ended shortly thereafter.

I have never really spoken or written about the subject of race, mostly because it makes me uncomfortable. Just like religion or politics, I also lumped the subject of race as one of those things we do not speak of with others unless we’re looking for a fight. I’m usually an assertive, well-spoken woman with a lot to say. While I most certainly take the lack of diversity in most settings, until recently I have sort of shut my eyes and covered my ears like a child who tries not to see the monsters in the bedroom. I don’t want to highlight the things I feel I have to apologize for like my race or gender to anyone when really, there is nothing to apologize for.

Finally, I feel that the tide is turning. This time, it’s different. In 2020, the manifestations of racism are front and center. The Black Lives Matter movement, its protests, and the scores of new initiatives to empower people of color are taking shape. These are for people like me. I can now say with emphasis that I am proud of my Mexican heritage. I am proud to embrace it as a part of my identity. I am proud of all my accomplishments.

I love working in craft beer and have no regrets about changing careers. For me, the beer industry can be (and usually is) one of the friendliest and supportive communities. However, there are times when that one customer, that one distributor sales rep, that one colleague can take it all down with a word or a gesture.

Finally, I’m seeing more faces of color and hearing the voices rise in the industry, clearer than ever before. I’m drinking Black Is Beautiful beer knowing that it’s more than just the beer. While for the moment those faces and voices are on Zoom and YouTube because of the pandemic, I’m looking forward to the time when I go to my local brewery in upstate New York and see more people like me. I can’t wait to attend craft beer conferences and interact with new BIPOC colleagues in the audience and on the podium.

Yes, we most certainly have a ways to go when it comes to inclusivity in the beer industry. But now, I know that it’s time for me to speak, because I do belong to the community and what I have to say does matter. I’ve learned that in order to see change, you don’t wait for it to happen. You speak your truth, and your message will be heard.

The article How Black Lives Matter Made a Mexican-American Beer Writer Rethink Her Role in Craft Beer appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-beer-diversity/

[johnboothus]

How Black Lives Matter Made a Mexican-American Beer Writer Rethink Her Role in Craft Beer

The first time I experienced a brew festival more than 10 years ago, my only expectation was to see a lot of people, try some new and interesting beers, and to enjoy myself. My vantage point was as a volunteer, serving beers to the masses along with my husband. Two of the first things I noticed immediately were: 1. The disproportionate number of men compared to the women in attendance; and 2. The fact that I was one of the very few people of color in attendance. As a second-generation Mexican-American from upstate New York, I have always been aware of my social surroundings wherever I am, and this was no exception.

Later, as I attended fest after fest across the Northeast, the disparities became hard to ignore. I’d say to my husband, whose family hails from Eastern Europe, “Do you notice that I’m the only brown person here?” to which he would reply, “No, I hadn’t really noticed.” Was I uncomfortable? No. Did it bother me? Somewhat. My observations were always there, nagging me to speak up about the industry’s lack of diversity. Later, I started a beer blog, but chose not to write about racial inequalities in an effort to “stay out of it” and let others tell their stories if they chose to do so.

Over the past decade, I’ve immersed myself in the craft beer world. I’ve worked for several breweries as a brand ambassador, as a bartender, and as a sales rep throughout the Northeast and in South Florida. The racial disparities have felt most pronounced to me in the Northeast, as I had more Latino colleagues while working in Miami. In New York, I wanted to capture the essence of the craft beer community I was a part of in Florida — partly pachanga (party atmosphere), mixed with a common understanding of beer, community, and acceptance. In the Northeast, I longed for the inclusivity that seemed to automatically come easily to my white counterparts who put on a brewer’s shirt, wore a long beard, or looked like the St. Pauli girl serving to the masses at Oktoberfest.

For my first gig as a brand ambassador, I worked for a brewery in Ohio with Irish American roots. While going through training, I was the only non-Irish-American employee. I felt awkward, like a sore thumb. It was a friendly enough environment and everyone was nice, but I still felt a sense of marginalization. My presence was certainly acknowledged, but I felt like more of an afterthought. I was the last person to be addressed and the last person to get handed a glass while sampling. I tried so hard to prove my worth; I was the person who always engaged, asking questions and starting conversations because the others would not.

In seeking recognition and acceptance, I pushed harder than my colleagues. I memorized every detail of the brewery’s beer profile, its history, and interesting anecdotes. Customers were gracious, inquisitive, and appreciative of my advice and conversation. I felt really good about my position and I loved talking about craft beer to anyone who would listen. During my time as a brand ambassador, I also became a writer for a local newspaper. Strangers recognized me and complimented me on my informative articles on beer. Things seemed to be going well.

Over the years, I built a reputation in the industry for knowing beers inside out, and for my friendly, can-do attitude. None of this took away the fact that I still noticed the lack of women and BIPOC at events. More and more it was starting to bother me, but I went on about my business and poured beer after beer. There never really is a “getting used to it” feeling about being the only minority in the room or the only female in a sea of beards — or in my case, both. I really wanted to see some diversity in the field but didn’t think I could do anything about it. Other than representing myself, I didn’t see how I could make an impact.

Over time, my desire grew to connect with BIPOC and women beer professionals and enthusiasts. In 2014, I started a Meetup group in Syracuse, N.Y., for like-minded women who wanted to learn more about craft beer and socialize. My goal was to see more women interact with each other, to meet local brewery professionals, and to grow a noticeable female representation at local events. More than 100 women came out of the woodworks and were grateful to have a “safe space” to congregate. I was ecstatic that my idea would get such a response! For a time, we gathered regularly, set up information tables at beer festivals, sold pretzel necklaces, and recruited other women to join the group.

This type of group had not been done before in my community, and members looked forward to our monthly meetings where we would get together at local breweries and beer businesses, learn something new, and enjoy a few pints with one another. Our voices were heard, our questions were answered, and our taste buds were satiated. Yet, despite the success of the group, there was still something lacking — while I had tapped into a vein of women who loved beer, they were largely white. I was still unable to find beer professionals or enthusiasts who looked like me, a brown-skinned American woman.

Fast-forward to 2019, I landed a job representing a craft brewery from Kilkenny, Ireland. This was an international brand looking to find American fans that weren’t necessarily craft beer snobs. My goal was to reach 35- to 50-year old men and women who were accustomed to a pint of Guinness or Killian’s. My bosses and colleagues were wonderful people who looked to sell this unknown name in America. And I was ready for the challenge. After 10 years in the business I felt confident that I could represent the brand well. Despite the fact that I was neither Irish nor Irish-American, I was comfortable in my role.

That’s until I experienced racism first-hand from a consumer. While serving samples of an Irish red ale at a local Irish-American bar, a patron said to me, “You’re not Irish. Shouldn’t you be Irish or Irish-looking if you’re going to represent that beer? Why did they hire you?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but deep down, the racist customer tapped into my feelings of not belonging, of “otherness.” The only response I could give to this guy was, “Because I know my stuff.” But he didn’t care. He didn’t want to see a brown girl talk European beer. Normally I would brush off such a crude question but I couldn’t.

I began to doubt my validity to everyone and everything. I had worked hard to get into the industry and knew that my gender and race shouldn’t matter when it came to doing my job. Logically, I knew that I was an educated, smart woman who entered the beer industry on her own merits. I knew that I worked hard to switch careers from being a higher-educational professional to a beer writer and brand representative. Nobody could take that away from me, but in that one exchange, my pride turned to shame. Shame for not being able to control my outer appearance, shame for being born the “wrong” color, shame for not being someone I will never be. However, I continued on, with a little less pride for working in beer. Despite a company trip to Ireland and tremendous support from my Irish superiors, I didn’t feel a sense of belonging or teamwork in what I was doing. Unfortunately, my career as a brewery representative ended shortly thereafter.

I have never really spoken or written about the subject of race, mostly because it makes me uncomfortable. Just like religion or politics, I also lumped the subject of race as one of those things we do not speak of with others unless we’re looking for a fight. I’m usually an assertive, well-spoken woman with a lot to say. While I most certainly take the lack of diversity in most settings, until recently I have sort of shut my eyes and covered my ears like a child who tries not to see the monsters in the bedroom. I don’t want to highlight the things I feel I have to apologize for like my race or gender to anyone when really, there is nothing to apologize for.

Finally, I feel that the tide is turning. This time, it’s different. In 2020, the manifestations of racism are front and center. The Black Lives Matter movement, its protests, and the scores of new initiatives to empower people of color are taking shape. These are for people like me. I can now say with emphasis that I am proud of my Mexican heritage. I am proud to embrace it as a part of my identity. I am proud of all my accomplishments.

I love working in craft beer and have no regrets about changing careers. For me, the beer industry can be (and usually is) one of the friendliest and supportive communities. However, there are times when that one customer, that one distributor sales rep, that one colleague can take it all down with a word or a gesture.

Finally, I’m seeing more faces of color and hearing the voices rise in the industry, clearer than ever before. I’m drinking Black Is Beautiful beer knowing that it’s more than just the beer. While for the moment those faces and voices are on Zoom and YouTube because of the pandemic, I’m looking forward to the time when I go to my local brewery in upstate New York and see more people like me. I can’t wait to attend craft beer conferences and interact with new BIPOC colleagues in the audience and on the podium.

Yes, we most certainly have a ways to go when it comes to inclusivity in the beer industry. But now, I know that it’s time for me to speak, because I do belong to the community and what I have to say does matter. I’ve learned that in order to see change, you don’t wait for it to happen. You speak your truth, and your message will be heard.

The article How Black Lives Matter Made a Mexican-American Beer Writer Rethink Her Role in Craft Beer appeared first on VinePair.

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[sinrau]

The White House’s new science adviser says: nothing. The science disagrees.

6:00 AM ET

Getty / The Atlantic

A new philosophy of COVID-19 is circulating through the Republican Party and conservative media. If you look closely, you might notice that it resembles an early philosophy of COVID-19 that circulated through the Republican Party and conservative media: If young people get this disease, it won’t be so bad —and it might even be good.

Scott Atlas, the new White House science adviser and Trump-whisperer, seems to be the ringleader of this emergent corona-stoicism. A neuroradiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, Atlas is not an expert in epidemiology or infectious diseases. As a Fox News regular, his relevant credentials seem to be more televisual than scientific.

“It doesn’t matter if younger, healthier people get infected,” Atlas said in a July interview with San Diego’s KUSI news station. “I don’t know how often that has to be said. They have nearly zero risk of a problem from this … When younger, healthier people get infected, that’s a good thing.”

The reality is that, so far, COVID-19 has killed fewer children and teenagers than seasonal flu in a normal year, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (COVID-19’s fatality rate is much higher than influenza, but school closures and lockdowns have reduced teenage exposure to all sorts of infectious diseases.) A 25-year-old who contracts this disease is approximately 250 times less likely to die than an infected 85-year-old, according to the most sophisticated estimates of infection-fatality rates. For every 1,000 people infected with COVID-19 under the age of 35, the average expected death count is just under one. These facts might give you the impression that, as Atlas said, “it doesn’t matter if younger, healthier people get infected.”

But it does. It really does. Here’s why.

Many young people navigating this pandemic are asking themselves a two-part health question: What are the odds that I get infected? And if I do get infected, is that really a big deal?

Much of my reporting has focused on the first question. To summarize that work in a sentence: People are at highest risk of infection in communities with a sizable outbreak, when they spend long amounts of time in closed, unventilated spaces where other people close by are talking or otherwise emitting virus-laden globs of spit, and everything is worse when people aren’t wearing masks. This advice is easy to give, because the best practices hold across the board, for everybody.

“What’s the big deal?” is a harder question, because the person-to-person outcomes of this disease are so maddeningly variable. The most universal answer must begin with the observation that death is not a synonym for risk.

COVID-19 presents an array of health challenges that are serious, if not imminently fatal. The disease occasionally sends people’s immune system into a frenzy, wreaking havoc on their internal organs. Several studies of asymptomatic patients revealed that more than half of them had lung abnormalities. A March study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that 7 to 20 percent of sick patients showed heart damage associated with COVID-19.

As my colleague Ed Yong explained, many COVID-19 patients experience protracted illness. These “ long-haulers ” suffer from a diabolical grab bag of symptoms, including chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, unrelenting fevers, gastrointestinal problems, lost sense of smell, hallucinations, short-term-memory loss, bulging veins, bruising, gynecological problems, and an erratic heartbeat. And according to the neuroscientist David Putrino, chronic patients are typically young (the average age in his survey is 44), female, and formerly healthy.

We don’t know how many long-haulers are out there. But by combining the conclusion of several well-regarded studies, we can arrive at a decent estimate.

For men in their 30s, like me, about 1.2 percent of COVID-19 infections result in hospitalization, according to a July study published in Science. Once the disease has progressed to this point, the risk of chronic illness soars. Research from Italy found that roughly nine in 10 hospitalized patients said they still had symptoms after two months. A British study reported a similar risk of long-term illness.

Now the math: When you multiply the hospitalization rate for 30-something men (about 1.2 percent) by the chronic-illness rate of hospitalized patients (almost 90 percent), you get about 1 percent. That means a guy my age has one-in-100 chance of developing a long-term illness after contracting COVID-19. For context , the estimated infection-fatality rate for somebody in their 60s is 0.7 percent, according to the same study in Science.

You might be used to thinking of 30-somethings as safe and seniors as at risk in this pandemic. But if a man in his 30s and a man in his 60s both contract COVID-19, it is more likely that the 30-something will develop a months-long illness than that the 60-something will die, according to this research. (The calculation above doesn’t even include the countless long-haulers who never went to the hospital.)

More frightening than what we’re learning now is what we cannot yet know: the truly long-term—as in, decades-long—implications of this disease for the body. “We know that hepatitis C leads to liver cancer, we know that human papillomavirus leads to cervical cancer, we know that HIV leads to certain cancers,” Howard Forman, a health-policy professor at Yale, told James Hamblin and Katherine Wells of The Atlantic. “We have no idea whether having had this infection means that, 10 years from now, you have an elevated risk of lymphoma.”‪

Why would Scott Atlas, the White House, or anybody for that matter dismiss the threat to young people? One answer is that they want to convince Americans that if a bunch of teens and 20-somethings get infected, the U.S. will move closer to the ultimate goal of achieving “herd immunity.” Briefly, that means the point at which a disease, like COVID-19, can no longer trigger an epidemic outbreak, because enough of the population has already developed immunity. Atlas has argued that, if herd immunity is an inevitable destination, we should perhaps put our foot on the accelerator.

But the case for herd immunity rests on two dubious assumptions. The first is that the disease isn’t risky to the people it doesn’t kill—which we know to be false.

“If you’re signing up for herd immunity, you’re also signing up for a huge number of hospitalizations, and a substantial fraction of those people will be sick for months,” says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious-disease researcher at UC Santa Cruz. “Do the symptoms last three months? Six months? Three years? Nobody knows, but I wouldn’t want my pandemic plan to be, Let’s have hundreds of thousands of young people with lifelong illnesses. I wouldn’t want to tell 30-to-50-year-olds that we’ve signed them up for a high risk of heart disease and chronic organ damage.”

The second dubious assumption is that it’s easy to distinguish between the high-risk group and the low-risk group.

“The most simplistic way to protect the vulnerable is to divide the population by age, but you can’t choose an arbitrary cutoff and say ‘Let’s protect everybody under age 65,’ because nothing magic happens at age 65,” says Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth. “The average person who is 64.9 years old has the exact same health risks as somebody who is 65. So it’s very difficult to divide populations into safe and not-safe categories.”

Besides, the U.S. is not, for the most part, spatially segregated by age. Restaurants and stores serve old and young patrons, and there are tens of millions of multigenerational households. Evidence that young and old people mingle constantly can be seen in the recent COVID-19 death data: A southern surge that started among young people spread to older populations, who died in disproportionate numbers. “There is the assumption that we can start cocooning the elderly, but we have no new innovation here,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant biostatistics professor at the University of Florida. “Are they saying we should try harder to protect old people? What does ‘trying harder’ even look like, compared to now? I just don’t understand the argument.”

Herd immunity is an inoperable plan, teetering on a false assumption of elderly-cocooning, which encourages young people to play craps with the long-term health of their internal organs. The choice is yours. You can listen to the scientists. Or you can roll the dice with your guts.

What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear From COVID-19

[melon-kid]

some thoughts

So, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it’s surprising to me that nobody ever seems to talk about it. And this is about the nature of argumentation itself, liberal vs conservative ‘ideologies’ in particular here.

I should first mention that the idea behind this reflection is to point out the fact that both sides are driven almost purely by emotion, not by data and hard facts like some people like to believe, and I’ll be talking about why exactly that is and why that’s so important to understand.

The key word in the discussion here is ‘empathy,’ because this is what the issue seems to boil down to - those who have more of it, versus those who have less of it. To break this down, let’s identify some big talking points on both sides.

On the left wing, protection and support for minorities is one of their big issues. On the right wing, we have major concerns about white people being thrown under the bus just because they’re white. Now on either side, their opponent would look totally blind to them and ignorant to the truth, but. . . how can that be? ‘The facts are right here!’ you say. ‘Why are you ignoring these obvious truths?’ So, let’s talk about empathy.

Why are minorities such a hot button issue on the left wing? In a majority of cases, people who support these issues either grew up facing heavy discrimination due to being a minority, intimately knew people who faced discrimination, or simply have the empathy to comprehend these issues.

But hold on! What does that have to do with people on the right wing? They can totally have empathy! And that’s true, that isn’t what’s being argued - however, their level of empathy typically does not extend as far as they think it does.

You see, the left and right wings both hold a sense of injustice when approaching these concerns, but what injustice looks like is completely different to either them. It’s not that a majority of conservative people are incapable of understanding the minority discrimination issue, they simply don’t care, they don’t see it as an issue because they don’t think it affects them and by extension, they don’t think it affects other people.

No matter how logical or sound you make your arguments, you will have a very hard time swaying your opposition - it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because their arguments have a basis in emotion, not logic. That’s why people are stuck in an infinite loop of confirmation bias, looking only at the data that supports them and willfully dismissing everything else, because they just don’t care about that data.

Let’s take a step back and say you are someone who has little attachment to this heated political climate - someone with virtually no empathy. What’s stopping you from being objective and looking at both sides equally? Nothing! You don’t have emotional involvement in either side. But emotion is extremely blinding and that’s not something that people can easily see within themselves - people will only see what they want to see.

That’s why it is so difficult to sway someone with logic or evidence, because what you ACTUALLY have to do is appeal to their emotion. But because the foundation of their beliefs are so far removed from each other, these people will never see eye to eye - they are empathetic about different things and they see injustice in different things.

Take for example, a hypothetical situation in which you can either make a change that will benefit the livelihood of one population, or a change that will benefit merely the convenience of a separate population. Normally you’d choose the former, right? Now, let’s say we assume that ‘hypothetical situation’ in this scenario refers to the promotion of political correctness: Suddenly, opinions change.

Then, let’s put it this way - in light of this new development, the only reason why you would take the latter side is if you believed that the former has no credence to it. The only reason why you would take the latter side is if you don’t believe that supporting it would actually benefit the livelihood of people, therefore leaving you with the other choice to benefit your convenience.

When you look at the side of conservatives, they absolutely despise political correctness. Because they refuse to see things from the perspective of their opposition, it becomes easy to dismiss them as being ‘too sensitive’ or ‘offended about nothing.’

Another common argument is when people say ‘I’m a woman and I don’t think we need extra help! That’s belittling to all of us!’ or ‘I’m a black man and I don’t think discrimination is really a minority-only issue in the United States!’ The fact that you are a woman or a black man is not an argument, because there are an incredible number of other women and other black men who are just waiting to tell you that you’re wrong.

Much of the basis for these arguments comes from personal anecdotes and exceptions, and they tend to think, ‘so this should apply to everyone!’ But again, these are exceptions, they don’t speak for an average, why would you cite personal experience as evidence for that? But because these anecdotes exist, BECAUSE these exceptions exist, people feel more justified in following others who share these ideologies because in their mind, this is confirmation.

Again, it’s not about the logic, it’s about perspective and your emotional standing - often people think that racism exists on a two way street because they either were not discriminated against (or at least nowhere near the level of others) so they cannot comprehend where the opposition is coming from, or because they failed to identify it as discrimination. Obviously a person who has experienced racism and said that people have been racist to them would not tell you that racism doesn’t exist  because of how clearly contradictory that statement is.

It is not that white people cannot ever face discrimination because of their skin color, people are extremely quick to make strawmen out of arguments by twisting their meaning to become literal or to encompass the entire demographic. They don’t understand that when people say ‘privilege’ they are not saying that they can’t experience those problems, they are saying that it has a foundation not only in history but in social and cultural norms that are extremely prevalent even today. They usually they fail to address or accept the underlying reasons behind such discrimination, they fail to see the disproportionate level of oppression that people are facing.

That’s why they can say that they have faced discrimination for being white, and that’s their reasoning for why people can be racist against them - but to say that white people are oppressed in America is an argument that they simply cannot make. The failure to see the difference between discrimination and systematic oppression/racism is what is provoking so much ire here.

So, let’s talk about white people in America. They don’t face many of the issues that minorities face so even if they can see and understand these problems, because it doesn’t affect them, oftentimes they fail to properly empathize. That’s why they think liberals are making such a big deal about issues that are supposed to be relevant to everybody, not just minorities; that’s why they think it’s okay to say racist things or express racist viewpoints without actually thinking of themselves as racist - their definition of racism has literally changed to suit their convenience because they have not been facing the same struggles as other minorities.

Racism does not always mean calling somebody a slur on the street, sometimes it means pushing an agenda that will drive these people into corners. Why would a person who has experienced and identified these issues try to refute its existence? If it is not because of their upbringing, it’s because there is a lack of empathy here - they are more concerned about how it affects them personally, and by extension, the people close to them rather than society as a whole.

While the relation to empathy and a person’s political stance will not always be consistent (e.g. a lower empathy liberal / a higher empathy conservative), there is an observable trend among both sides that reflects their emotional foundation.

A person with a decent amount of empathy does not tell people suffering from oppression ‘Get over it, life is hard.’ A person with a decent amount of empathy does not make fun of mentally ill people and call them or others ‘retarded’ or ‘autistic’ because they think it’s funny or holds some kind of ground in their argument against somebody. They can say it because they just don’t care about how it affects them. They aren’t willing to comprehend the issues those people face, so to them, those issues barely even exist.

In the same vein, that’s where a lot of conservatives get off feeling so ‘logical’ and ‘civil.’ You are not more logical, your emotional investment in your belief is shallow enough that it doesn’t get the better of you. But, it’s all you have to root yourself in so that’s where you pour all of your emotions into anyway.

Why are they being so angry about political correctness? About the plight of the white man while being so quick to dismiss the hardships of minorities? Well, all of that emotion has to go somewhere.

On the flip side, in what world is that comparable to the incarceration after incarceration and the murder after murder of people who are less advantaged than them because of a social norm that they are not only enabling, but encouraging?

Empathy. Their emotional investment lies somewhere else, they don’t care about these problems. Sure, they can make the ‘black friend’ argument all they like, but that is caring about a person individually, not caring about social and political issues that deeply affect them and people like them. Their empathy doesn’t reach that far.

It’s easy for conservatives to paint liberals as violent and overly emotional while painting themselves as civil when the issues that affect them inflict much greater wounds than any amount of ‘political correctness’ that might annoy some conservative. Their emotional investment in their cause, their EMPATHY is being invoked by a long and deadly history of injustice.

It isn’t that white people should always kneel down and give up the things that they have to minorities like some people like to believe. They are asking for respect, to understand the issues they are facing, to support them because they have been disadvantaged by the system that is in place, they are asking them to have the EMPATHY to help them as human beings and relieve them from this system of oppression.

. . . Or at least, that’s the idea - the problem with this is that this kind of tunnel-vision way of thinking goes both ways. Many far end liberals will refuse to respect white people, refuse to respect straight people, refuse to respect cis people - they often think, ‘why should I respect somebody that can’t see this cycle of suffering that we’re facing?’ It’s a terrible trend and a terrible justification to spread hate toward people - the generalizations that they love to make not only don’t apply to a great number of these people, but a lot of these people are trying to support their movement and yet suffer insult after insult in doing so.

There are other ways to vent your anger, you are literally not helping anybody by doing this: You are chasing away potential supporters and creating new enemies because you refuse to step down from your moral high-horse and you refuse to think objectively.

Conservatives are not wrong when they say that liberals tell them ‘white people should sit down and shut up’ or ‘white people can’t do this’ or ‘white people don’t experience this that and the other thing.’ So, many of these white conservatives are prone to think, ‘why should I respect somebody that doesn’t respect me?’ A good number of people who are minorities will feel inclined to agree, ESPECIALLY when liberals act in such an elitist and militant manner.

The thing about having less empathy is that you have more room to be open to other experiences and adopt new perspectives because your emotional involvement isn’t so deeply rooted in one place, you have more room to objectively look into both sides of an argument. As a result, there are conservatives (often youths) who actually wind up as liberals over time - you almost never hear about this happening the other way around, why?

Empathy. Because of their naturally higher level of empathy (on only one side of the argument, mind you), the first root that they take hold with and invest in effectively becomes an immovable object. It becomes virtually impossible to convince them of anything they don’t already believe in; whatever method you try to use, their emotional grounding in their belief is so ingrained that anything going against them feels like a personal attack and an attack against the good of society, all matter of opposing logic be damned. Herein lies the danger of prioritizing empathy over reason.

When you are in this position, you legitimately start to believe that your viewpoints should be the basis of all moral standards. It becomes ‘obvious’ to you which things are right and which things are wrong - essentially, you totally lose the ability to see things from more than one perspective (aka critical thinking) and it instills a dangerous level of confidence in everything you think and say because everything you think and say is absolute in your mind.

No, you aren’t somehow enlightened with the ultimate moral code that should be followed by everyone. You are a confirmation-bias nightmare.

To further explore this dilemma, liberals also love to fear monger and spread lies to make conservatives look bad because they are so strongly emotionally driven. Because of this, they often elect to abandon logic and good faith - many of them start to push the narrative that minorities can do no wrong and severely silence and admonish any kind of opposition (even the slightest bit of speculation can get you burned at the stake), and other such far end liberals feel the intense hatred that they do because they feel like they are perpetually surrounded by their oppressors.

Conservatives don’t feel the need to witch hunt and fear monger to that level because they usually don’t have the empathetic capacity for it in this context - their concerns do not run deep enough for them to go to those kinds of lengths. They rarely ever feel the same kind of intense hatred, because for them, the problem at hand is fundamentally different. But here’s one very prevalent emotion that most of them seem to express: ‘Annoyance.’

Because so many of them think that ‘annoyance toward political correctness’ or ‘annoyance toward generalizations of white/straight/cis people’ is in some regard a valid comparison against ‘hatred due to systematic oppression,’ it’s easy to see that outrage is being begged for here. In an example like this, the divide in empathy becomes incredibly clear. . .

. . . although it happens to be a gross reduction of the argument at hand, pitting a core issue from one side against what is basically a complaint from the other side - however, I do find it relevant because of how persistent the idea seems to be. It’s an easy target to exploit after all, if you want to minimize your argument to obscene levels to try and strengthen your own. It’s a poor practice, but when people make such a big deal of it, it’s hard not to use it as fodder.

To reiterate, left vs right is hardly a conflict of ideologies and logic.

Left vs right is a conflict of empathy.

-

[Off-Topic Extension]

If it wasn’t clear earlier, I would like to make a distinction between ‘little to no empathy’ vs ‘some empathy/a ton of empathy.’ A lot of conservatives don’t acknowledge that they are emotionally charged and thusly take the ‘logical’ stance on things, when in reality that tends to be quite far from the truth.

I am a person with very, very little empathy overall, so I have no real emotional attachment to either side of the argument (but I still do support one over the other), and as a result, I can freely explore both of those sides with a far more objective lens without being too offended or too annoyed to see past my bias.

As such, I find it telling that with the objective of seeking a better society for people, that I would lean more toward being liberal. Of course, part of being objective means taking a statement like that with a grain of salt - it’s likely that there are people in a similar boat who have found themselves right leaning instead. In a case like that, it would be both interesting and helpful to see what viewpoints might be presented in order to make more informed decisions.