Whenever western meat-eaters get up in arms over barbarous foreigners eating cute animals, it’s easy to throw around accusations of gross hypocrisy. Easy, because such accusations are often true. But responses to the dog meat festival in Yulin, China, which draws to a close today, merit more careful consideration. The double standards at play here are numerous, complicated, and not always obvious…
ReadVegetarians have tended to see themselves as on the side of history, in the vanguard of moral progress. In their imagined future, meat-eating would be seen as being as barbarous as slavery, racism, homophobia and the subjugation of women. It seems much more likely, however, that we have already passed “peak vegetarianism” and that the movement has grown as large as it ever will.
ReadThe public image of charities has become dominated by their means, not their ends. When people think of charities today, they tend to think less of the good works they do than of direct mailings, cold calls and preternaturally chirpy young fundraisers accosting them on the street.
ReadIf we don’t think about it too much, we are easily deluded into thinking it’s obvious and unproblematic what life after death means. We all know what it means to be alive, so surely life after death simply means that we carry on living like this on the other side of the grave. But if you think about for more than a few seconds, this quickly becomes nonsensical.
ReadOn Thursday the nation decides. Each one of us will be free to choose how or whether to vote. But if you’ve been paying any attention at all to the findings of modern psychology, you might doubt whether your vote is truly free at all. There is a mass of compelling evidence that all our choices, including our electoral ones, are strongly affected by myriad unconscious and often irrational factors…
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