You're confusing popular sentiment with actual differences in looks. There are very large differences between good looking and the best looking people, though clothes and makeup can close the gaps

I might have confused this post with another of his, he actually did an ok job here. 

The "mechanized mass murder" and the call to action to stop paying for the "murder of more animals" do make the article seem much less serious and a bit confused.

Killing millions of animals is a positive that people are happy to pay for so they can eat those animals.

Torturing those same animals makes people unconfortabke

After reading most of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature (will finish the last hundred pages at some point), my views on this topic are softened.

Pinker depicts humanity as primitively highly inclined to violence, with norms and culture throughout our lives working to suppress our tendency to violence, civilize us, and bring us to internalize that violence is inappropriate. 

While the correct, mature view for civilization could eventually be to have violent punishments as part of the tools in order, having norms of violence may strip us of our cultivated abhorrence of violence which stops us from living like cavemen. 

When being good or bad is binary, perfect rational citizens unless crime suits them, consistent visceral punishment makes more sense. 

When you have a constant mob for a civilization, with the occasional rioter, making violence explicitly legitimate might be a bad idea. 

The point isn't the rioters - the point is how the mob acts

So the $1 -> 10 years is based on estimates for historical funding of advocates vs impact of those advocates? 

Seems nice but not sure about the marginal use.

Your article generally seems confused/hysterical when it comes to eating meat, which weakens the vibe for factory farming. 

This is unfortunately common, people who care about factory farming enough to make it an issue are also against earing meat period, and it simply confuses the issue.

Same as the crusade against meat for health reasons, infested with moral-based vegans and vegetarians who are clearly not unbiased

Dojo storming.  Tournaments.

Essentially ritualistic exposure to the outside world, with different norms from internal interaction

The norm is you should give each person the treatment they deserve based on the social norms. A high status person treating a lower status person with less respect than is appropriate is exactly the same, except they can often get away with it due to might makes right.

Similarly, stealing from rich people is pretty similar to stealing from poor people, and the fact that rich people will be protected from thieves -with violence if necessary - is a feature not a bug. 

That thieves don't respect property rights does not make the rich protecting themselves with armed guards "might makes right".

Higher status individual is socially decided, communication doesn't happen in a vacuum. 

If you wish to not treat them as higher status that's leaving the social default.

You can call this "might" but in fact it's  attempting to change the default context (according to society) to lower the other person's position. 

Good analysis of the dynamic the original quote is discussing. The authority figure is expecting 'respect appropriate to their station' and will give in return 'respect appropriate to the other's station'. 

The non-authority expects to be able to reject the authority's framework of respect and unilaterally decide on a new one. 

The authority, quite naturually, does not take the lower status individual as their authority figure on the meta respect structure. 

Unless the meta respect structure of multiple disconnected layers is imposed societally by high status decouplers (as most people are not much for decoupling, and decoupling is probably bad for your status a lot of the time), the authority figure is correct and the low status individual is wrong. Status is mostly bundled, respectful behaviour follows status and is mostly bundled, and demanding a higher status individual lower themselves to their status behaviourally by accepting the low status individual as an authority (or higher status) conceptually is highly disrespectful of not only the hierarchy but the individual as well

Hanson writes about birds that give up food and take guard duty for prestige.

I mostly use it for syntax, and formatting/modifying docs, giving me quick visual designs...