I think you're just deliberately being obstructionist and entirely avoiding the point I'm trying to make. Calling the core point of the argument a "distraction" is very convenient for you.

Torture is bad no matter how you cut it, and it's especially bad if you torture a sentient being for your own pleasure. Can we agree on that?

Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions.

When you kill an animal, you can see it struggle, cry, suffer, die. You can hold and see its pain in your hands. To do so for your taste buds is another level of evil. To make it live an entire life of suffering? That's really not much different in terms of badness.

The fact that you can't acknowledge this highlights the double standard you apply to people that came before you but not yourself. Everyone is wrong to participate in the systematic torture and murder of 70,000,000,000 sentient beings a year. Does that make all the participants evil?

> Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions.

I'm not trying to engage in oppression Olympics, I'm just saying, slavery is basically the worst things people can do, so far beyond the morality of whether or not it's ok to kill animals, or even torture them, that I'm just confused why it's brought up as if it's relevant.

I don't think killing animals is a great thing to do, and factory farms are awful. But humans are humans, and constantly just hitting this "what about animals" things is bizarre to me. I'm not trying to be rude, I just simply don't see the relevance. Slavery being just about the worse thing humans can do means that all the other bad things pale in comparison.

I'm not saying it's always valid to apply modern ethics to people from various time periods - it's bad, but understandable, that people used to beat their kids, or waste food by sacrificing animals and leaving them out to rot "for the gods." My point is that slavery simply is a massive exception, it's second-to-second murder, taking a human and trying to make them not-human. So that's why anything you could throw at me that we do today that people in the future might say is wrong - jailing people, not housing the homeless, killing animals for sport, engaging in capitalism, you name it, none of them come close to slavery in terms of sheer evil. And my point is that this isn't modern ethics, this is as self-evident a moral fact as is possible for morality. Many things in morality are grey, debatable. Not slavery. It's the One of Two things that are bad in every century, alongside rape. The wrongness of slavery, and rape, are immediately evident no matter what culture or era you come from.

And the reason people do this is usually to justify slavery. "Well they didn't know any better, so they had slaves." Justifying slavery with ANY reason is also bad. So I refuse to accept any attempt to do so, including comparisons to other things that happen to be bad, or possibly considered bad in the future.