Friday morning roundup and ramble

The Sri Lankan government is not being held accountable for its human rights violations.


Oh, the made-for-mockery Lululemon saga. Even the modestly talented Alexandra Petri pulled off a very decent riff. (The only funny thing about her age-of-the-universe post is the caption on the photo, but do check out Phil Plait's helpful post, to which she links). Not that you were wondering, but I do yoga in shorts (I can't pull off tree pose if the heel of my foot has to rest on fabric rather than skin) and those shorts cost me $5-$15.

There're lots of books on happiness, and there is much overlap in the themes among them.

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I was having a conversation with someone--don't ask me who, even though I think it happened this week--about the ethics of eating meat. I said that I did not believe that eating meat was inherently unethical, which is not to say that it's not inherently cruel (which is why I nonetheless prefer not to do it). And I'm able to not do it because I have a choice, and I acknowledge that not everybody has a choice. But I did not initially become a vegetarian out of compassion for farm animals; I initially became a vegetarian out of compassion for the planet. And I continue to distinguish between the consumption of animal flesh in general and the production of food from animal flesh through industrial agriculture.

I've been a vegetarian (sometimes pescatarian, most recently vegan) for over twenty years, and I've heard it all: all the silly comments about why plant-based eating makes no sense. The misguided nutritional protestations and the even more misguided philosophical arguments, the most misguided of which is the idea that eating meat is natural--we're entitled to kill our animal cousins to survive.  And I agree that we have to kill to survive--like it or not, the space we take up on this planet comes at the expense of the space of others. But we're not animals, and we--especially we in the developed world--have a choice about how much to kill. I'm not going to tell anyone else how to make that choice and I don't want to hear anyone else tell me how to make that choice, but I will argue that we have a choice. And I'll argue that the ways of industrial agriculture is worlds away from how our ancestors managed the ethics of killing animals in order to live.

Animals--animals for food--were not historically seen as chattel. They more often had spiritual and theological symbolism. Ancient hunters were not without guilt at the taking of animal life and they engaged in rituals to show respect for their prey, and to allow them dignity in the way they died. We had a profound connection to the food that nourished us, kept us alive. That connection is not any less important because there's a more populous world to feed; if anything, it's even more important.