Comment by ThrowawayR2
14 days ago
People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
The research and reporting, which looks at actual people's experiences says otherwise. This issue has been coming up for years.
People live through war, murder, torture, rape, etc. We can always find something worse but that doesn't make the current situation better. Human experience of pain and trauma isn't scaled relative to the worst possible pain and trauma.
I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.
[flagged]
> Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer.
"Eat your dinner, there's kids starving in Africa."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed.
However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise.
But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
3 replies →