Daggy judgements

261a:

My attitude to you as a meat eater: when I seem to show antipathy towards you, it’s guaranteed things will go badly wrong between us. As soon as you feel I’m judging your values, you go antithetical. You’ll probably neither like me nor what I’m saying, you probably won’t trust me and you’ll want to catch me out.
When I’m starting out (talking Animal Rights) I should fix up this trust thing before I open my mouth. I need to assess where you stand, and see if this is a volatile subject for you. I need to listen ... and you need to know if I’m an all round listener, a proper listener not just someone pretending to be interested, waiting for my turn to counter attack. It’s at this point where you and I may not know if we will jump down one another’s throats.
Whatever I think about your point of view I’ll try to hide it. But something is sure to give me away and that ends my chances of dialogue with you. I give myself away because I want to make you wrong and to make me right, probably it’s my need for revenge, my need to make you feel guilty. I’ll say to myself “There’s nothing else I can do to stop you doing what you do, but to impose my judgement on you”. But to you that wouldn’t make sense, since what you do is quite legal, “Everyone’s ‘exploiting animals’ in one way or another, so why pick on me?” So these two opposite judgements exist over this subject of ‘the use of animals’.
Perhaps the most extreme judgements are the most justified - here in Australia, a hot and dry land, bushfires are a constant threat especially because many of them are lit deliberately ... and so the arsonists are reviled. They act illegally and immorally ... everyone in the community can ‘come together on this one’, to condemn them. It’s a justified judgement, and because it’s so easily justified it brings out the worst judgements – “the arsonist should be locked up ... and throw away the key”. It shows our need to feel right or even righteous ... and I’d liken that to myself or to other vegans in search of any powerful argument to back up our judgements ... we judge but in doing so lose our compassion. When we hear about the latest coronary heart-disease statistics being associated with consuming large amounts of saturated fats (mainly from meat), we may be happy to hear this … because of the usefulness of these statistics, for backing up our arguments, concerning the need to avoid meat? We fall into the most obvious trap ... if we don’t express concern for those with heart disease we seem callous. Our very motives seem dodgy. We seem untrustworthy. Our judgement looks uglier than the thing we are judging.