On the subject of the former, I wrote:

I’ve written more than once on my belief that the world will one day be a meatless — although not necessarily vegetarian — place. I agree that it’s wrong to cause animals undue pain. I agree that our current industrialized livestock management practices are abhorrent. And, from a purely practical standpoint, I think we’ll have a much stronger moral footing with our AI descendants if they see us treating weaker / arguably inferior life forms with as much kindness as possible. In short, I think I’m just about ready to be persuaded that I should give up eating dead animals altogether.

On the subject of the latter, I wrote:

Here we have a world-class futurist taking an “I’m good; you’re bad: be like ME” approach that even the most backward fundamentalists dropped decades ago. You see a lot of this kind of thing among “progressive” thinkers when dealing with the great unwashed who haven’t yet achieved their level of enlightenment. (An example — for whatever reason, atheists seem particularly prone to these excesses when arguing against belief in God. This could be a reverse application of the old adage that “converts are the worst.” Which would also apply to George, I suppose, what with his five-year tenure as a morally superior being.)

But then Dvorsky fired back with what I think was a fairly sound defense of his approach:

Let’s imagine for a moment that I had written an article titled ‘Racists are bad people,’ or ‘Homophobes are bad people.’ Do you think I would have received the same kind of negative response? Hardly. Aside from a few anachronistic and unenlightened perspectives I’d get a slew of comments saying, ‘right on, brother.’

But the fact that I didn’t get these sorts of supportive comments, aside from a small minority, indicates to me that our transition to a mostly meat-free society is a process still in its infancy.