But you are saying that it’s silly to try to avoid killing animals by eating meat and using the validation “animals die because of our lifestyle anyway” as support for that, right?
In case you missed it, I’m saying that Veganism is an affectation which does more net harm than good.
First, because it is absolutely meaningless. Veganism creates just as much pain and suffering if not more than a more realistic worldview.
Secondly it is a profound ignorance of the way the world works, and like all ignorance represents a danger in that it occludes realistic and responsible consumption with its posings and posturings at righteousness.
I notice that website doesn’t use bee products. I have a hive of bees that I keep (our farmer wants me to and got me interested.) Beekeeping has a tremendous net positive effect on the plant and animal life in this country.
It is also absolutely integral to agriculture. Because of the spread of various diseases and parasites bees don’t do well in the wild. They must be kept.
Without moving hives in to fertilize, the veggies don’t grow and everybody starves.
Agriculture depends on beekeeping which Vegans are against yet directly rely on in order to grow their foodstuffs.
If you eat an apple you’re eating an animal product, because of the bees moved in. Squash, watermelon, you name it.
Any reasonable and knowledgeable party that was truly concerned instead of just engaging in disingenuous and ignorant feel good posturing would be promoting and consuming bee products to further the beneficial effect on both agriculture and the natural environment.
In fact the opposite is happening. Once considered a health food and actively used by the environmentally conscious, honey and beeswax are now shunned by these activists. It is no longer as profitable to keep bees, and less and less people are doing it.
The wild bees are succumbing to tracheal and varona mites , and their is no replacement.
It’s tough to find the bees needed to fertilize the crops, and the natural world as well as the agricultural world is suffering the folly of well-meaning but highly ignorant Vegans who think bee-products are wrong.
It’s sheer lunacy and stupidity, and it’s a single example of the unconscienable ignorance of people who make important decisions based soley on feelings instead of real knowledge.
If you want to do one freakin’ thing that will have more direct meaning and positive effect on life in general than any of the worthless vegan bullshit, than learn about keeping bees. Keep a hive and help your local environment and agriculture.
Do something to dispel the ignorance of the vapid empty headed well meaners who cause more harm than good.
I like bees. I also like honey.
Then again, I’m not vegan.
The way I see it when the non-meat eatin’ folk say that they don’t want to participate in the suffering and death, is more along the lines of reducing their personal participation in the suffering and death. Someone hacked up a cow so we could eat that flesh. They don’t want to eat that flesh because someone hacked up a cow for it. Thus, they had no part in that one bit of suffering and death. A small reduction, maybe, but a reduction nonetheless, and that seems real important to some people. So I say hey, go for it.
My personal rule of life is, if it dosn’t hurt anyone around you, go ahead and do it.
For the carnivores out there that have a big problem with so-called hypocracy of vegetarians (eg, not eating meat when it is convenient and using animal products like leather), you might want to check out the Jains and Jainism. This link will provide way too much info as a start. http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/jainh.html
I am not an expert, but practicing Jains in India make the vast majority of american Vegans look like elementary kids in short pants trying to take on Ali. For example, some Jains wear masks so as to not breath in and kill insects by accident, sweep the ground in front of them to avoid accidently crushing an insect, don’t eat or use any type of animal product.
Interestingly enough, the Jains are reknown as traders, stock brokers and various sorts of middle men in India.
VS Naipaul wrote a piece on a Jain trader in his Million Mutinies Now book. Rudyard Kipling writes in passing of a Jain temple in his classic Kim.
There are millions of people who in fact live up to the most strict accountability that could possibly be placed upon a vegetarian.
Should you perceive of someone’s dietary hypocracy, you could start a discussion on the Jains.
Scylla, could you do us all a huuuuge favor and tell us why you care?
Yeah, you say you are entitled to discuss this. But you are spending a lot of time discussing it, and with great vehemence, I may add. Why? I don’t get why you care as much as you apparently do.
So you think it’s stupid. I don’t care, just leave me the hell alone. I’m sure you’d think my religion is stupid too - you wanna tell me all about that too? You wanna tell me why my musical choices are stupid, or why I should or should not like football? Why do not just give us all a running commentary about all the stupid things we do or don’t do, while you’re at it? What’s it to you? Why this focus on vegetarianism? And don’t try to deny that you don’t have a special axe to grind about vegetarianism, because I remember your participation on too many previous threads. (Though I admit, you were never as vehement as this … perhaps Silo is right about you? 
) So what’s the big deal here?
And while I’m at it, I remember earlier in this thread you mentioned how you’d “had enough” or something like that. Like we crazy vegetarians had been pestering you too much. And I’d like to remind you ONCE AGAIN, you don’t even know the beginning of pestering, cupcake. I believe meat-eaters have cornered the market on pestering - they do it to us far more than veggies do it to you. (Opal’s horric story is a prime example - I have heaps more less drastic but still boorish examples - want me to start a thread so we can compare notes?) So please, please don’t act as if you’re all put out by us, because once in a while a vegetarian pesters you. YOU HAVE NO CLUE what kind of assholishness meat-eaters dish out all the time to us. And do we start these kind of ranting threads to tell you all about it? To lump all meat-eaters in with the assholes, and whine about them? No, as a rule, we don’t. But some of you meat-eaters start threads about us on a regular basis. What gives? Why the big hard-on about vegetarianism?
So pardon me if I don’t feel one iota of sympathy for you because you feel you’ve “had enough” or whatever. We’ve vegetarians have gone WAY past enough when it comes to enduring crap.
No one forced you to read this whole thread. It was your choice to subject yourslef to it. If you don’t care what Scylla thinks, why are you responding?
You know, reading through this thread, I am reminded of the words of the great and wise prophet, Dennis Leary…
I trust that settles the matter.
There’s an awful lot here to argue but the basis of your argument seems to be that we are doubtless going to kill animals at some point so why not just go on a rampage and do it whenever we please, wherever we please? Yes, i’ve probably stepped on bugs without realising, yes animals may be displaced when farmers create fields and (I can’t be believe i’m even taking time to respond to this part it so fucking ridiculous) yes plants feed on nutrients from dead animals. (sigh) The point is i see no reason for me to take an animals life when i don’t need to so i do my best to avoid it when i can. I can’t do anything about when i don’t realise i am doing it but that doesn’t mean i shouldn’t bother at all. This is a totally defeatist attitude and makes no sense. We’re probably never going to eliminate rape for society or murder either so should we not bother trying to stop it where we can?
Yeah, it’s like those goddamned lousy Protestants–what, “Catholic” just isn’t good enough for them? And how about “Reform Jews”? What’s the deal with that? Plain old “Jew” just doesn’t cover it? And for that matter, what’s this crap about “conservative Republicans” and “liberal Republicans”?
Could you possibly be more of a moron, Milo? DO you honestly think you were made “People-Labelling Arbiter” at some point?
I don’t know anyone who ever became an herbivore. Do you? I also have not at any time in this thread used the words “all people who became X,” with the exception of just now. Moron.
Of course, there’s a non-trivial difference between “not bearing the thought” and “wanting to contribute as little as possible,” and a further non-trivial difference between “suffering” and “unnecessary suffering,” but as you’ve already shown yourself incapable of recognizing the differences between things that are, well, different, it’s no surprise that you’d recast the argument in terms that suit you rather than the terms that people are really using. Moron.
“If done correctly” != “factory farming,” which you almost stumbled on at the end there, but decided to miss to make a rather vague point. I can only assume that you yourself would rather be rendered partially unconscious by a bolt to the forehead, then skinned and eviscerated alive, then to die in your own environment. Moron.
Isn’t veganism a matter of faith?
Um, yes. Repeatedly. “IF someone is a vegetarian because of X, THEN I give them my approval (‘more power to them’); but IF they are a vegetarian because of Y, THEN I feel the need to get in their face.” Moron.
Scylla made a very funny rant about vegetarianism. I don’t think it was intended to change lives.
- I didn’t say “conservative=meat eating.” I said that certain types of conservatives feel threatened by vegetarians. Way to read. Moron.
- Also, way to self-identify as a “knee-jerk conservative fuckbag.” That was smooth. Moron.
Nope. Just a little amused, depending upon their attitude.
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one thing that always bugs me in this area is that we are assigning worth to animals or life but we;re doing it from a human point of view. We say that intelligence is a value to be judged against but why should this be so? And if so, why is it unacceptable to say that retarded people are less valuable human beings than Harvard graduates? What i see time and time again is a relationship to sexism and racism - we start out with the basis that “we” are better and we being white, male and/or human. Then we come up with reasons to back this up. HUmans display the most intelligence of known species therefore we say that that is what we should be judged against. But i have a feeling if we WEREN’t then it would be the number of legs or emotional capacity or ANYTHING as long as we possessed it and others didn’t
Spoofe, thanks for the quote. We should all pay close attention to what Denis “Operation Dumbo Drop” Leary says, oh yes…
You forgot Demolition Man… ugh.
'Sides, Dennis Leary’s real genius lies in his stand-up work. Ever see Lock and Load?
Oh, and I forgot…
Beef: It’s what’s for dinner. [sub]Not rice, not beans, not cabbage… beef![/sub]
WE kill the cows to make jackets out of them and then we kill each other for the jackets we make out of the cows.
I eat meat. Other people don’t eat meat. I respect that.
Its the whiney-ass mutherfuckers that come up to me and say “meh-meh-meh, that was once an animal, meh-meh-meh, how could you, meh-mehmeh”
I’m glad you have Ideals, but how am I supposed to argue with you while my mouth is full of well-done animal flesh?
Scylla, much of your posts seem to proceed from the idea that you are privy to a revelation about the “right” way to do things that the rest of us are not, not to mention presumptions that we are stupid and “waste” our lives.
I do the best I can to minimize suffering and uphold my personal code of ethics. Beyond that, I don’t need to make excuses to you or anyone else.
If I don’t eat a hamburger, I’m wasting that animal’s suffering? Hardly. I didn’t ask for the hamburger, I am not the market for the meat processor, and I don’t want it. If another animal can live off of it, fine for them. I don’t have to. And yes, I have often gone hungry when unable to find vegetarian fare. It’s called “principle.”
I’m more than aware that life involves both living and dying. I acknowledged that in my previous post to you. I do what I can to minimize unnecessary suffering. The culture I live in demands that I do certain things. Using paper is one of them. Eating meat is not.
Each morning, when I get up, I take 20mg of Prozac. I’m well aware that the development of that drug, at some point, involved adminstering it to animals, then killing them and dissecting their brains to monitor serotonin levels. I accept that as a consequence of the fact that I have to take the medication. But when I go to lunch, I can be as happy, healthy and fulfilled with the penne pasta as I would be with a pork chop.
My ethics. My decisions. In personal discourse, that means, as I said before, tough but fair–the best solution to multiple rounds of the prisoner’s dilemma. I give like I get. Treat me respectfully, and receive respect in return. Treat me disrespectfully, and get disrespect in return. In the realm of nutrition, it means I don’t have to eat animals and I’m not going to when I can at all avoid it.
I could, I suppose, fly to every slaughterhouse in the country and see if each meets my criteria for “humane,” as well as every poultry and dairy farm, but that’s prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. I could hunt all my own food and ensure humane killing, but I’m not inclined to do so.
As far as the stuff about chickens, I’ve been around chickens. My grandfather raised chickens. (He raised fighting cocks, too, but that’s another story and it’s illegal in 48 states.) I’ve eaten more than my share of chickens that I had seen alive only moments before. I don’t need to be lectured on chicken behavior. By the criteria advanced by you, it would be acceptable for me to kill and eat anencephalic human infants.
The only thought I can leave you with is this: Remember your thread a while back, when you talked about the kid you interviewed for a position who asked you why your hands were so ugly? Think about that every time you call a vegetarian “flaky,” and find yourself confronted with a need to assault their ethics.
Most? Not if they obey the laws of thermodynamics. Which makes me wonder…what is the maximum 2nd Law efficiency of a cow, anyways…?
Looks like the energy issue was addressed already. I tried to read the whole thread, but the %&#^**@# server would not respond…sigh.
Milo, it just occurred to me, since you don’t feel the need to acknowledge the difference between “vegetarian” and “vegan” despite the fact that they believe and eat different things, that unless part of your diet is feces, styrofoam, automobile parts, and 300 thread count sheets, you can’t call yourself an “omnivore.” Sorry, you’re going to need another word.
Yosemitebabe:
Suffering and death are not inherently bad.
That’s all.