throwaway94857

This is true, but it's a matter of abstract ideals vs concrete benefits. Who are we to tell people in a poor community that certain economic development cannot take place because it will harm certain animals or plants?

This is a very real problem for communities in Africa and the Amazon basin; they are unable to build the infrastructure necessary for further development because privileged Western animal rights activists are more concerned with protecting animals than other humans.

It's perfectly reasonable to consider cost - which is what this move entails - when deciding whether or not to protect a species. We already employ this calculus, in that we are not spending our entire national budget on protecting some endangered subspecies of river fish in Arkansas. Anyone suggesting we do such a thing would be laughed at, because it's not worth it to spend all that money protecting fish.

The protection of obscure species concerns a small portion of activists very much, and they are very loud in their activism, but there are other large portions of the population that don't care nearly as much and would prioritize economic growth over protecting endangered species. The activists' personal convictions are not more important or more valuable than those of people who don't care as much for endangered species. They're just different, and the activists tend to be louder and more passionate in voicing them.

Some try, fewer truly succeed. It's one thing to reject your nature, it's quite another to not live in some lingering dissonance as a result.

What? We're far wealthier in the US than the vast majority of the world. It's not propaganda, it's data and fact.

Healthcare and education are generally more expensive here than in Europe, but people also get paid more here and keep more of their salaries than in the rest of the developed world. Goods are much cheaper in the US than in Europe and we generally enjoy more material wealth than the Europeans.

You are deluding yourself with your bigotry against the US.

Competition is as innate to animal life as is breathing. It's naive to think we can simply ignore our drive to compete with one another, as naive as thinking we can ignore hunger thirst or sexual desire.

But violent revolutionaries almost never have credible or effective alternatives to the current system. That's why they have to resort to violence, their arguments for why things have to change usually aren't good and they're more motivated by anger than anything else.

It's not just the journalists who tend to be anti-male. The psychological and sociological establishments have been subtly anti-male for a long time.

An example of how this anti-male bias manifests is in the very language used in academic work on men. So often there is talk about "toxic masculinity" when discussing boys and men, and discussions of how male traits are problematic - described as 'aggressive' and 'uncooperative' - while female traits are almost universally described in more positive terms.

Of course both genders exhibit destructive behavior, but women do not have to suffer the same harsh treatment in the academic literature as men.

We could speculate on the reasons for this bias, but I believe it can be tied to the overall anti-male climate, which in itself is an overreaction by the rest of society - but the intellectuals in particular - to the unequal treatment of women for most of history.

More speculatively, I believe the high numbers of women and effeminate men in academia, especially the social sciences, have biased the field.