Way to put words in his mouth! The dude has a point, and really if you want to say which one is worse, the raped child is still alive.

No. As I've said several times, this isn't just about the death. If you look through the 12 welfare issues that I listed relating to the dairy industry, you start to build a picture that is morally comparable to rape.

Also, I would rather be raped than have this done to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDayT3mLoHQ

I didn't put words in his mouth; on the contrary, I basically gave him the opportunity to state that no, the humanity of the raped child isn't an afterthought, and he clarified that it is and that species don't matter. Also, see his latest post, he agrees with the child rape equivalency.


So you're okay with hunting then? Really?

I repeat: wow.

So then, here's a little thought exercise for you: if you were both a witness to a rape and the pig castration in the video, but could only intervene in one of the two to stop it, would it be safe to assume you would prefer to intervene in the latter?

Hunting is certainly better from a welfare perspective than nearly all farming, but I never said I was ok with it.

Also, the choice you have just provided me is unrealistic and does not reflect anything that occurs in real life. Given that both acts are reprehensible, it doesn't serve any purpose to argue about which act is more reprehensible.

Evasion noted.

Ok I'll bite. Otherwise I'd be no fun, right?

Given that all species have a programmed bias towards individuals that are genetically similar to themselves, my personal bias would be towards saving the human.

This in no way condones the act perpetrated against the piglet though, as you may be trying to trap me into doing.

I'm not trying to trap you condoning anything, I'm trying to show you why your moral equivalence is fallacious. If you wanted a more realistic example, I could simply have said, "You see a house on fire. You hear a dog barking and a 2-year-old toddler crying from inside the house, and only have time to save one; which would it be?". And if you want to remove your alleged "personal bias", then ask yourself if you would be okay with a person choosing to save the dog over the toddler.

But thanks for showing us that species is irrelevant... except when it's not.

Forbinator, I seriously hope that whenever you're about to get raped by someone who easily overpowers you and you are absolutely helpless against, an "animal-rights-idiotic-fanboy" as hardcore as you decides to feed a fucking pigeon instead of helping you out. I'm positive that you'll agree that the pigeon's hunger is more important morally than your safety and life.

No, I have shown that it's only relevant in two cases:
1. when personal bias is used, or is forced upon a person by an unrealistic scenario
2. when genuine species differences exist (eg. it's probably ok to hold a bat upside down for an extended period, but not a cat)

Can you explain why it would be relevant in other cases?

This is just uninformed hogwash, the whole lot of it. The cholesterol that deposits in our arteries (that would be the "bad cholesterol - LDL) IS the stuff created by the body, NOT dietary cholesterol. It's often created in response to damage of the arterial walls, which can be caused can by the ionic charge of free-radicals as they move around the bloodstream. The enemy here, again, is processed crap... Not dietary cholesterol. The high cholesterol content of eggs is one of the reasons they're so good for us. Cholesterol is a building block for hormones; it's really important, and to say our livers produce all that we need is such a ridiculous generalization. Your liver uses cholesterol for all sorts of shit, including making bile. Bile helps emulsify fats, but I suppose you think fat is bad too. Either way, I do not want the bare minimum of cholesterol.

Surely you have seen that no one here is brainwashed. A lot of us are pretty informed about the issues, and many of us find the conditions that factory-farmed food animals (that is, the vast majority of food animals) horrendous. For me, I want to see the industry change, but I don't think this makes meat bad for me; it makes THAT meat bad for me, yet I'm still not going to harp on about that to people. As Morrigan very clearly indicated in her first post in the thread, this is a moral discussion, and nothing more. You have a tendency to see things as very black and white. There is no one cholesterol, there is no one type of egg, and there are many different metabolisms out there that digest foods differently. There is good and bad cholesterol, there are good and bad eggs, there are good and bad diets that include meat, and there are good and bad diets that don't include meat.

And for fuck's sake, can you not just admit that you value the life of a baby girl more than the life of a baby pig? C'mon, man.

I, for one, would rather watch my own mother die in a house fire than be forced to eat an egg against my will.

OpsiusCato: No need for the vitriol. I have admitted that I would preferentially save the human.

swayze: Thankyou for the information on cholesterol. I will have to look into it more. As far as it being a moral discussion and nothing more, megalowho explains things better than I ever could:

Also, with every fibre of my being, I feel that the life of a baby girl is more important than the life of a baby pig. I just can't think of any logical reason why. Perhaps there isn't one.

Is this thread really happening right now?

Me too. What I don't respect is people who are so fucking full of themselves, wearing "the right thing" like it's a badge of honor, completely tarnishing the legitimacy of their own decisions.

I don't make important life decisions for the sake of being able to lord it over people and feel superior. Only assholes do that... OP's post being a prime example of what I'm talking about. It reads like someone who took a semester of some course in college and suddenly thinks they're a fucking expert on the subject.

Not to mention, it's flat-out moronic and borderline insane... What the hell does "Pop Music" have to do with fucking vegetarianism? Listening to Metal doesn't make you interesting (much less more intelligent or perceptive), bro.

And Pop Music RULES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGzuTifFD7E

The OP makes vegan/vegetarians look like a bunch of idiots.

Forbinator, just a couple observations:

1. You're continuing to engage a group of people who've accused you repeatedly of preaching, proselytizing, and being a whiny, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou douche, a cunt, etc.; told you to fuck off; expressed the desire to have you raped and hunted for sport, etc.

2. You haven't done a thing to defend veganism against the charge that it requires you to give up tasty food. I'm doing it right now with a nice plate of baingan bharta.

1. Yes, that is actually insane now that I think of it.

2. Hopefully after I've spent a bit longer as a vegan I will learn how to engage with others better. A good start would be for me to not have the image of that piglet in my head while talking to them. The animal welfare side of things is where my knowledge is mostly, and is the main reason why I don't consume animal products. The other stuff I need to work on, including what you've said about how you don't have to give up tasty food.

Those are accurate observations, not accusations.

I myself cannot go without meat, even though I live with many animals, including ducks. Chicken, turkey, pork, bacon, beef or fish, just love it. I am hopelessly addicted to the tastiest savoury food in existence and I wouldn't have it any other way. Sometimes I wonder if knowing that folk like Forb are so against it and belittle those that enjoy it, makes it taste just that much better.
My best friend and cousin is a staunch vegetarian, but I brought him back a bag of Beef Jerky (which he used to adore - and still does) from the states. When I presented it to him, he took it from me without a word and ate it all. Deep down inside, years of poor meat substitutes couldn't sate his desire for that special flavour and texture that is meat.

I want to eat cows. Cows don't want to be eaten by me. We can't both win. One of us has to not get what we want. Why should I prioritize the cow's wishes over my own? What makes the cow's goals more important than mine?

Every life form that survives on this planet does so at the expense of some other life form. If you want to live, something else has to die. I guess you were born with overactive sensitivity towards this fact, but that's your problem.

I've gone veg for long stretches of time, and tend to do so. I eat little meat, and the meat I used to eat was from my family's farm, so when I found myself out on the East Coast, it's been pretty much fish if I do have meat. I love vegetarian dishes and spices go a long way with just about anything (plus, eggplant is wonderful). That being said, I don't think eating meat has anything to do with social brainwashing, or any form of communal rejection of the natural order. Maybe how we do it (I try not to eat things where I don't know what happens to it or how it got dead....) is terrible, but to suggest that meat-eating is just a product of capitalism or the Western world or the detatched social values seems, on the face of things, entirely ridiculous.

Is it just me, or is the "preachy" thing peculiar to vegans?

I don't recall ever being evangelized by a vegetarian. Only vegans.

I don't know. There might be something to that. I know some vegans who view ethically motivated vegetarianism as commendable but still an indicator of weakness of conviction; "I'll consume some products that require animals to be abused for the sake of our taste buds, but not meat" is for them tantamount to "I'll attend white supremacy rallies, but never on Mondays". (And, even though I'm a vegetarian, I think this is basically correct; it's why I plan to go vegan.) So there is the possibility that with the weaker conviction comes the decreased likelihood of trying to persuade others of your moral viewpoint.

I think the "preachiness" accusation is frequently off-base anyway, and frequently suggests a failure to empathize with someone who has a moral opinion (whatever its merits) that's violently at odds with what's commonly accepted, and who supposes that others are likely to be at least somewhat moved by the same considerations that moved them to embrace that opinion. One of the key purposes of moral discourse is to identify the ways in which we're making the world a shittier place for others to live in, and not only to draw from this the motivation to improve our own practices, but to encourage others to make the same choices as well. And "preaching" is often just what people say about someone whose opinion implicates them as being in the wrong somehow; it's easy to resent the implication, but obviously, there are tons of people out there who have such opinions, and it'd be a shame if they all just decided to shut up for fear of being resented. Things would probably stagnate.

Still, I've been trying to think of what sort of thing would make the "preachiness" accusation legitimate, since it clearly is sometimes. Obviously, if the person's uncivil, and tries to make people feel bad just for the pleasure of doing so, then they open themselves to the charge. Likewise if the person is aware of the fact that others have thought through the issue well enough of their own accord, and that there really is room for intelligent disagreement, yet persists in monopolizing people's time by expressing their opinion anyway. But Forbinator hasn't been uncivil, and many contributors to this thread haven't provided evidence that they've adequately thought about the issue. Unless you somehow consider such posts as this to be evidence:

The "eat or be eaten/kill or be killed" argument is a silly one.

Regarding the so-called "vegan preaching", an interesting thing happened here in Sweden over the summer. One of the festivals decided to have a "vegetarian-only" menu. Not vegan, vegetarian (though I'm sure they had plenty of vegan options - I don't know, I didn't go). For something like three days, festival-goers, if they ate on the grounds, only had vegetarian options to choose from, and not the "tofudog" in a packet options, either. Things that were edible, and looked delicious. Do you think there were some outraged, and, dare I say, "preachy", meat-eaters? It was the who "preachy vegan" argument reversed.

It's interesting how food has become so politicised, in that it's almost as polarising to discuss one's eating habits, as it is to discuss one's politics or views on religion. And it's not necessarily because the individual who chooses not to eat animal products is "preaching" - there's instances where mere mention over why someone isn't eating something, a heads up before a dinner party, or whatever else common courtesy scenario/mention in passing, makes people feel they have to react.

YES, the child's only dead inside. Meanwhile, unless they suicide (and they do), they carry that "dead weight" around their whole fucked up lives.

I'm sure most children who've tasted their own father's semen only wish he'd killed and eaten them after.

Idiot...

This has been pretty well established from your first post.
"I TURNED VEGAN A WEEK AGO, LET ME TELL YOU WHY I THINK YER SCUM."

Once again: YOU. GIVE. VEGANS. A. BAD. NAME. STOP. WHILE. YOU'RE. AHEAD. JESUS. FUCKING. CHRIST.
I dunno if this is all some elaborate joke or what, but you're pretty fucking hard to take seriously.

EDIT: I always forget about the foe function.
idiot problem solved.

As horrible a burden rape memories are, you know you can treat and recover from psychological trauma, right?
It's always pretty stupid when people act like rape victims have no reason to live.

Disclaimer: This doesn't mean I agree with that other crap. I'm a speciesist in that regard - trying not to be is absurd.

Now that I can't see the stupid posts here and have had some time to clear my head (they were cluttering my thoughts and making me dumber as a result), let me make some fucking common-sense, logical, level-headed points about vegan/vegetarianism. No biased bullshit, just my sincere views on both sides of the argument:

-Factory farming is bullshit. It's sick. it's inhumane... it's frankly unsanitary and just plain gross (I mean putting the shit in your mouth after it's been rolling around in shit and pumped full of hormones).

-Hyperbole hurts. Remember that. it's easy to remember because it's got, like, alliteration and shit, and it's also fucking common sense in any debate. You are not convincing anyone of anything by talking about RAPE MILK. That does nothing but alienate, and only an idiot wouldn't realize that.

Guilt-tripping is fucking stupid too. Trying to make a meat-eater feel bad is exactly like telling someone who;s depressed to stop being depressed: It only makes them more depressed and self-loathing, and it only makes a meat-eater want to eat a burger just to spite you for being such a prick about everything.

-Any fucking idiot knows what "kill them with kindness means" (DON'T WORRY! I don't mean LITERALLY kill them, it's an expression!). You'd be a lot better off not treating your opposition like a retarded child. Again, that just alienates and pisses people off. DUH. Engage people. Be up-front and honest and sincere and POLITE, not a smarmy, sarcastic cunt or someone who tries to make others feel inferior for having different views.

-Veganism is the product of a privileged society. Accept it. It doesn't make it bad, but you're an asshole if you treat working class/poor/undereducated individuals like retarded, subhuman shit because you lack the perspective to realize they couldn't benefit from your lofty, privileged white male status/opportunity/education/sensitivity training. Again: Don't talk down to "them", engage them in open, honest, non-fucking-passive-aggressive, FRIENDLY, conversation/debate.

-Stop making people think you're insane. Calm the fuck down. Acting like a whackjob and posting cutesy, unclever, inefective PeTA fliers everywhere just makes people think you're fucking stupid. (Yelling "RAPE MILK!!!"/"MILKING A COW IS LIKE RAPING A CHILD" at people in the grocery store, for instance, is not really an effective means of spreading your ideas). It really gives off the impression you're new to this and just a young idiot who's all gung-ho about their new cause because it makes them feel good about themselves. It gives the impression that you're desperately trying to give your life meaning by being so fucking over-zealous in the one thing you've finally found some purpose in... Sort of like a cult member.

-There is nothing wrong with eating an animal. There is something wrong with the land-toxifying luxury of Capitalism out of control which allows for factory farming for the sake of convenience ad clean hands. It's very ironic how we as a society have been so institutionalized to be horrified of killing an animal when we happily gobble them up, just so long as they come chopped into unrecognizable pieces and wrapped in plastic for our convenience. It's absurd. I don't support factory farming (or agriculture, for that matter)... but I also don't see any moral dilemma with choosing to live independent of this system as a "hunter/gatherer". Why? Agriculture is just as damaging to ecosystems as factory farming... but it's not like you can expect a person to survive on one blackberry bush their entire life... in this situation, sometimes your food options run short.

-There's nothing wrong with eating dumpstered/roadkill meat. If anything, I think refusing to consume found flesh is a bigger moral crime than choosing to let a killed animal go to waste because someone threw it away when they couldn't eat the giant sausage pizza they ordered. Dumpstering food sustains you without you contributing to the waste and consumption, and it's FREE.

It's funny how vegans are actually more damaging to veganism than the idea itself... Funny, it's the same with obsessive, unbalanced Morrissey fans.

You're an idiot if you assume therapy and/or mind-numbing drugs are A). affordable for MOST people and B). a miracle cure for psychological trauma. Furthermore, unless you've been dad-fucked, your opinion is meaningless. I know a lot of fucked up people who have been thru all the "therapy" shit and are still monumentally fucked.

Foe function = best invention ever.

I'm going to take the advice of some wise people here and stop posting in this thread once I've made this reply. Really, I've presented enough information about the animal welfare issues throughout this thread.


I never referred to it as rape milk. What I did was post a well-thought-out numbered list of 12 welfare issues relating to the dairy industry. Someone else made a comment about rape comparisons, and the only parallel I drew was the infliction of a high level of suffering for a transient pleasure. This doesn't mean that I was trivialising human rape victims. The suffering these victims go through is probably beyond what I can comprehend. Still, noone has actually refuted either premise; the suffering, or the transient nature of the pleasure, yet I get painted as being absurdly ridiculous for making the comment.


It's not possible to make someone feel guilty. These feelings must already be within. It seems impossible to mention the suffering of the animals without someone thinking it's a guilt trip, but the solution isn't to keep the suffering swept under the rug just in case it makes someone feel guilty.


Actually in certain poorer countries the people are "vegan by default" because they can't afford expensive stuff like steak. Also, last time I checked fruit and veg was pretty cheap compared to other options. I'm not sure if that only applies where I live. And if the world somehow did turn vegan, the first to benefit would be those in starving countries, because instead of feeding mountains of grass and grain to our animals, the paddock space could actually feed people, at much greater food conversion efficiency. I explained this earlier and posted links. In a lot of cases the poorer countries actually ship their own grain overseas so we can feed it to livestock. I accept that other factors come into play here like politics and food distribution, but surely having more food that can feed more people would be beneficial.


I guess this is all hyperbole since I never really said this stuff. Also, I am new to this cause. That doesn't make the information any less valid though.


Everything you've said here is reasonable.

Carcass are vegitarians I do believe!
I am not...but wish I had the disipline to not eat meat I don't hunt myself. The torture these animals go through for us is horrendous ...I feel very shitty about it. But I have no self contol of anything.

My reasoning for eating meat has nothing to do with any of those "corporate myths" listed above, but rather because I think meat tastes really fucking good. I'll say it again and again until you get it. MEAT TASTES DELICIOUS!!

Anyway as far as metal musicians who are vegan, there is Bobby Rock, former drummer of Nitro and apparently one of the most muscular Vegans in the world.

+1

Yeah it sucks for the animals who get mistreated and all but... Id rather have my slice of bacon in the morning. Besides if a company is fucked up raise awareness locally about it. Start a petition.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94260&p=2160516#p2160516


Nice cherry-picking.

We're omnivores. You didn't forget that we didn't have nutrition and medicine way back then?

A vegan argument can be how we have the technology and know how now to live a perfectly healthy vegan life, but I just don't get why Creationists and some vegans want to deny our evolutionary ancestry.

We ate meat. Humans have 2 advantageous over all other animals to make us really good hunters. Our big brains so we don't have to evolve claws. We can just make sharp things. Also it makes pack hunting very efficient when we have language to communicate. And our endurance. A cheetah gives up after a minute. Almost all other carnivores go for the quick kills. A human can run a marathon to chase down wounded prey.

Also we're mammals. We do need milk. You can argue that kids should drink human breast milk instead of cow milk. That's perfectly legit. But you can't deny a need for milk.

Sentience is a bit of philosophy and neuroscience. So I don't even wanna hear a vegan say animals are sentient when we don't get how it works yet. Again, a good vegan argument might be "We don't know yet how self aware certain animals might be so I like to fail safe and avoid eating the ones that may be"

Animal slaughter is not always done humanely. Nothing we do is ever always humane. It's dumb to say it always is or it never is. If I find some organization that tortures the animals before we eat it, I'll be sure to boycott them and take action. Just as I would if some company operated sweatshops and harmed humans.

I don't get why preachy vegans always push for no meat. Isn't less meat helpful to your cause? That's certainly easy to push. Too much meat is very unhealthy for us. It's in our best interest to eat less. Keep pushing for less and less as best as you can. And that's about it.

But that's rarely what I see from vegans who bring it up.

This is something I have read a little bit about and it is very interesting to me as someone who enjoys running. To elaborate, the research highlights several factors that favor humans as endurance hunters that would exhaust their prey. The primary advantage appears to be our ability to dissipate heat at a greater rate and more efficiently than most animals. Having much thinner hair and the ability to sweat are the more obvious differences. While the hair is visually obvious we also apparently have more developed sweat glands, eccrine sweat gland being found only in primates and used in humans primarily for cooling. In what was to me a surprising contrast, humans in hot dry conditions can dissipate heat while running by breathing through the mouth where other animals must stop to pant. The idea is that we hunted by attrition by running after prey must faster at sprinting than us until they eventually overheated after several miles of chasing.

I know this is germane only to the argument of whether meat is natural which may not necessarily correlate to whether it is moral depending on your viewpoint.

Here is a silly source showing that this is possible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
Here is an article citing more academic explanations: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html

I can't find the article but I recall reading something which credited human endurance with how we started eating meat well before the widespread use of tools to kill prey without boring them to death with our endurance.

(I'll post a full reply when I get around to it)

I don't see why that is any less to be taken seriously than the proposition that someone who fails to rescue a drowning child has made a moral failure.

does any human 'have to'? I can understand the concept that a shark has to, since it has no concept of a hunger strike (potential suicide over moral principles), but does any human adult get this exemption?

there's no other kind.

if you wear woolen socks and leather shoes, you're not a vegan, you're just a vegetarian. and I've yet to find anyone with a non-moral reason to avoid wearing wool/leather/etc. (maybe there's one allergic guy one there, but probably not declaring veganism as though it were a choice).

well, imagine if I ate babies and toddlers (anyone scientifically regarded as equal to or lesser than a pig, cognitively), and wore bracers made of human skin on my arms... you'd probably think I'm a monster, but it's just a difference in dietary practices. ...I eat some meat you don't; I wear some skins and furs you don't.

I'm an amoralist, I think "human rights" are a joke, and of course I don't think of myself as a monster. But, I can appreciate why some people would feel the need to preach at me if I set up a nation that legalized these practices. ...and since they're only words, what do I care? I don't believe they're correct, so I don't feel insulted; and if I'm wrong and they persuade me of that, it does me no harm; and if they're wrong, the only way they'll learn to accept me instead of merely tolerate me is if I get the chance to respond to their complaints... so what's the big deal?