But either handling your personal mindkillers, or at least just quietly sitting out and not making a fuss while other people talk about them is the price you pay for sitting at the grown-ups table, and in return you don't have to be super-careful about stepping on everyone else's toes.
Generally speaking, it's not my personal mindkillers that I'm trying to avoid; I do have some, but they aren't the ones I mentioned and I know well enough to leave them alone. Nor do I much care about the occasional isolated outburst from someone else that I can downvote and ignore. It's the thousand-post threads that could have been summarized without loss of generality in ten good ones. It's the extended bouts of ideological angst that recur every few months without bringing up any new information. It's a community phenomenon, not a personal one.
Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn't trigger that sort of thing, as evidenced by the fact that I am not now defending myself against a howling mob. (Incidentally, neither does death as such; it's too abstract.) Torture used as part of an extended thought experiment, without hemming it in plenty of obligatory hand-wringing, does. So do a number of other things that I'm sure you can remember from experience. I'm not trying to suggest a precautionary principle here; I hate those things and I'm sure you do too. But we do have that experience to draw on, and it now seems to me that persisting in the use of language and concepts we know that we as a community can't handle in an adult manner is symptomatic of either gluttony for punishment, of bloody-mindedness to the point of pathology, or of some truly outstanding cluelessness.
I'd like it too if LW could reliably be treated as the grown-ups' table. But that isn't the world we live in.
Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn't trigger that sort of thing.
When I hear the word, 1-3 images of tortured animals usually briefly cross my mind, and I know there are much more emotional vegans than me. Speak for yourself. And even if torture mindkills some people, like I said, you can't properly discuss some important topics without it, so if it spawns 1000-post threads that aren't worth reading, too bad. (When I've used torture thought experiments so far, it hasn't.)
Edit: Actually, I probably would stop talking about torture if every ti...
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.