The co-founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX pleaded not guilty to a seven count indictment charging him with wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.
An attorney for FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried said in federal court Tuesday his client has to subsist on bread, water and peanut butter because the jail he’s in isn’t accommodating his vegan diet.
I’m all for improving conditions in the prison system. However, with how bad we know it is, expecting a vegan diet is a bit laughable. I’m surprised they offer vegetarian options at all.
I disagree. It’s a moral issue. What if someone was wrongly convicted? Force them to go against their moral system? I personally couldn’t bear to eat the flesh of an animal. I get this dudes a criminal but like, I don’t think the issue itself is laughable.
Even if they weren’t wrongly convicted. Murderer happens to follow any one of the religions that forbid pork? What’s feeding them bacon going to accomplish, exactly? It’s purely out of spite when the object is supposed to be to discourage reoffending. Treating people humanely makes them act human. Call them a dog and they’ll act like a dog.
Even the more progressive can be like this. People have weird ideas about human worth being something measurable and thus rescindable.
Just playing devil’s advocate here:
When a person does crime, they’ve decided to violate a Social Contact that says we all agree to abide by a body of laws for the benefit of us all. They’ve opted out of that system at some scale, be it stealing a loaf of bread, to fleecing thousands of people out of billions of dollars, to (on an orthogonal dimension) depriving people of their safety, civil rights, and very life. It is an abhorrent notion to many, but to many others, it’s just a way to “get ahead.” To crime is to assault the fabric of modern society.
It’s not an unreasonable response, then, when the abiding party (I.e., those who DIDN’T crime) say “this guy deserves to be treated the way he treated us.” Eye for an Eye is a VERY old code of punishment. Its also effective because it puts things in concrete, unambiguous terms.
But, ostensibly we are modern and cultured now. Now we can discuss where the lines are between where brutality must meet brutality and where compassion must meet intransigence, but really it’s all just academic. Not everyone can be rehabilitated, and not everyone deserves to be dignified when they have so befouled the social contract. Some people are truly, fundamentally broken and just need to be listed from Society for our collective good.
All to ready to pronounce social death, people are squeamish about what to do about the corpus of the Self they’d already damned. Capital punishment is cruel, lifetime incarceration is cruel, and while rehabilitation is preferred, it is intensive, time-consuming and perhaps ultimately fruitless for the most incorrigible among us.
So what do you do? Someone’s will has to be broken here. For the good of us all.
There was nothing to disagree with. I didn’t say I don’t think they shouldn’t supply vegan. I just know what the US prison system is like and wouldn’t expect them to. It’s fucking criminal gladiator college. There are some prisons that barely feed the inmates and make them need money for commissary food to not be hungry constantly.
I’m sure where SBF is being kept is a white collar low security place where they treat them better. They’re still treated like caged dogs though.
At what point do you consider something not an animal? Is it a size consideration? Like, you’d eat a hummingbird but not a chicken? Warm versus cold blooded? Is it vertebrae versus endoskeleton? Would you eat ants and crickets?
Because I get the whole no animal by products, but fermented foods are animal by products. Most breads have yeasts in it, those are animals. Beer and wine, same.
This is a completely different topic but okay.
Since you want specifics, veganism isn’t actually about animals, its about sentient beings. I wouldn’t eat a cow or a dog or a human, because they each have the capacity to suffer and the desire to live. Anything that has this capacity is off the table for vegans. Even bugs, while obviously being less sentient than a cow or human, still demonstrate this in some capacity. So no, I just eat plants and fungi. Technically I could eat a jellyfish or even an oyster (although vegans debate it), since this capacity has not been demonstrated by them. Why would I harm others for my own pleasure/sustenance when there is an alternative, especially an alternative that is cheaper, healthier, and far more sustainable?
Yeast is a fungus by the way.
…expecting a vegan diet is a bit laughable. I’m surprised they offer vegetarian options at all.
“Surprised” is the wrong word, but this thread has me wondering why all prison food isn’t vegan. Never mind respecting people’s religious/ethical/whatever preferences; why are we wasting meat on folks who don’t deserve it? Just making everything vegan would be (a) the simplest “lowest common denominator” of dietary restrictions, and more importantly (b) the cheapest/most environmentally sustainable option (disregarding subsidies to the meat/dairy industry).
(On the other hand, this is half rhetorical because I’m also remembering about a documentary I watched about Alcatraz, which mentioned that the food was intentionally good in part to stave off prison riots.)
