J’adore sa réponse, car son tweet initial ce n’est effectivement qu’une réalité. Qu’on l’accepte ou non c’est une question de point de vue dont l’acceptation (l’acceptation, je ne parle pas du partage) ou non reflétera l’ouverture d’esprit de ceux qui pensent autrement…

Je reproduis le texte ici (le gras sur certains passages est de moi) :

After my Tweet of August 7, 2017, in which I described Cows as “biological machines” many people reacted negatively to the concept. Preeminent among them was popular musician Moby, with a scathing Instagram reaction reproduced above, and followed by a fascinatingly diverse comment thread, to which I offer the following reflections...

Many people with high social media following are pundits trying to get you to change your ways, or simply to get you to agree with their opinions. For me, as an educator and as a scientist — in a free country — I actually don’t care what your opinions are. Instead, I care that you know objective truths, especially the kind that carry fresh or uncommon perspectives, empowering you to make informed decisions in your life and in your politics. Compare the contents of my Twitter stream to that of any pundit, and this contrast will be immediately apparent. I also greatly value humor, which carries its own risk for how a Tweet lands from one person to the next.

My cow Tweet was intended to expose a blunt reality: A cow is not a mechanical machine. It’s a biological machine. A biological machine with one purpose (actually, of course, two purposes if you include it as a source of milk), and that is to eat grass (or, of course other food stocks), grow big, and be slaughtered for food. They are generally not kept as pets. They don’t rescue people in trouble. They do not assist the handicapped. And what’s remarkable here is that cows don’t exist in the wild. They have never existed in the wild. Farmers genetically engineered them ten thousand years ago from now-extinct ox-like Aurochs in the service of civilization. So the Tweet is 100% truthful and accurate. The intensity of reactions to it tells me that people presumed I was trying to get them to agree with some opinion I carry. But the Tweet is fundamentally opinion-neutral. (The last time I can remember posting an opinionated tweet was a couple of years ago: “In @starwars #TheForceAwakens, BB-8 is waaaaay cuter than R2D2”, written of course just to stimulate argument.) Curious that only a few people took the opposite reaction to the cow Tweet, of how diabolical we are to do this with animals, and that it should stop.

I noticed something similar when I posted this opinion-neutral tweet after one of the horrific school shootings some years ago: “At WalMart, the nation’s largest gun seller, you can buy an assault rifle, but company policy bans pop music with curse words”. The reaction that followed was highly illuminating to me. Again, presuming me to be an opinion-forcing pundit, people angrily interpreted it their own way, passing judgment on my intent. The reactions divided evenly on whether they thought I was defending (or attacking) free market, the first amendment’s free speech, or the second amendment’s protection of gun ownership. A smaller percentage of people, perhaps 20%, saw it as written, with reactions such as, “Thanks. I never thought about that inconsistency!”

If anybody cares about my opinion, I note here that in a countries founded on freedom, and where there is resistance to government control of its citizenry, such as the USA, it may be easier to engineer solutions to problems than to get a hundred million people to change their behavior. In a YouTube clip that was offered in Moby’s comment thread, at the end of a 2-hr lecture on astrophysics in Austin Texas, I was asked about the devastating effects of agriculture on the environment and the net effects of its huge carbon footprint on climate change. I suggested that an engineering solution may one day come from industrial scrubbers that control CO2 levels in the atmosphere to our own needs, rendering anyone’s carbon footprint irrelevant to climate change. Another engineering solution, for which there has been great progress, is the laboratory manufacture of meat proteins, where a person can enjoy a steak that never came from any living creature. A topic explored in this highly popular episode of StarTalk, featuring the one-and-only Temple Grandin and Paul Shapiro, VP of the Humane Society.

So, I don’t quite know what to say to people who react explosively in the face of objective truths, attacking the person who delivers the information. But what’s clear is that we now live in a world where differences of opinion lead to fights rather than conversations.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, New York City

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