Not true, at least in my case.
I’m about to head out to the gym, but when i get back later on i’ll explain why. art of it has to do with Qadgop’s observation about the difficulty of ethical absolutism, but there are other reasons too.
I just want them to stop preaching at me. I also don’t want to constantly hear about how deathly sensitive they are to the least little molecule of fat or flesh, and I don’t want to hear about how calling chocolate candies “buckeyes” makes them sick.
Where the hell are these self-righteous vegetarians? I live in California, in the San Francisco Bay area. I’m ten minutes away from Berkeley, and twenty from the Haight Ashbury. If there’s anything we’ve got in spades around here, it’s vegetarians and self-righteousness. And yet, somehow, in over thirty years of living here, there have been precisely two occasions where someone got judgmental on me for eating meat. Both times were when I was in high school, and the attitude was coming from other high school kids.
I got to figure, if self-righteous vegetarians are so thin on the ground here, of all places on God’s green Earth, they’ve got to be damned near mythical just about anywhere else.
On the other hand, I’m not the sort of person to refer to someone else’s personal preferences as “fraudulent,” and then act all bewildered when they get pissed off at me, either. So maybe that has something to do with it.
mhendo, your indignant flailing is not doing your argument any good. You’re the one who turned this whole thing into a series of personal attacks.
This goes to everyone here: Since this became a debate on vegetarianism, obviously the people who disagree with it are going to say as much. The problem started when you took that as a personal attack.
DoC said he/she (not good at tracking genders here yet) disagrees with vegetarianism, listing some personal opinions.
Then mhendo whipped out the “go fuck yourself,” and turned this whole thing into a brawl.
Everybody needs to grow the fuck up. If you cant get involved in a discussion about vegetarianism without taking every argument against vegetarianism as a personal insult, don’t get involved in discussions about vegetarianism.
You’re talking about a genetic difference there. There’s a difference between what alcohol does to people with the gene, and to people without it. There is (presumably) no genetic difference between people who do eat meat and peoplewho don’t. The animal is just as dead.
If anyone can explain why it’s ethical for me to eat meat but not them, I’m willing to listen.
Yeah, that was just asinine, I’ll grant you.
I hereby promise not to behave like that.
Oh good, it turns out the oversensitive bullshit is justified based on things you can assume I think even though I don’t say them and don’t call your attention to them. Thank you, Polerius, for making the world safe for ninnyism.
I am acting according to my own views on ethics. Other people have different views and priorities. As long as they’re not hurting anyone else, I don’t much care. It’s a disagreement, and I don’t consider disagreements and judgments to be the same thing.
would “deer nuts” be better ?
I want to agree with you, and I even had an awesome joke I was dying to post about mhendo taking the stick out of his ass and putting some ranch dressing on it, but I can’t in good conscience say Dio was only attacking vegetarianism and not vegetarians themselves.
I still don’t think anyone should take Dio or themselves that seriously, but mhendo ain’t the only offender here.
Eating meat makes them feel lousy and miss work, & not fully participate in a rich family life, so they opt to not eat it.
What I don’t get is why anyone needs to “disagree” with vegetarianism. Some people don’t like to eat meat. Why does anyone else give a shit about that? How is this even a debate? I don’t like to drink coffee. Do we need to open a GD thread to discuss the geo-political ramifications of my breakfast beverages?
I didn’t say I assume you think these things. I say that they follow logically from the position “Killing animals for meat is unethical”. You, as a vegetarian, may or may not contemplate on the logical inferences of that statement, but the inferences are there.
BTW, if you guys are saying that your statement is specific to yourself, i.e. “If I kill animals for meat it is unethical, but it is ethical for others to kill animals for meat”, I don’t see how that statement makes any sense.
It’s like someone saying “It’s unethical for me to own slaves, but it’s ethical for others to do so”
I should note that, even if the inference that meat-eaters are acting unethically is there, it doesn’t give the right to asshole meat-eaters to harass vegetarians. I was simply trying to explain why some meat-eaters may feel uncomfortable around vegetarians, causing the asshole variety to lash out at vegetarians. Of course a lot of these assholes are simply of the “I don’t like people different than me” variety, and don’t think at all about ethic systems and their implications.
[Bolding mine]
But, according to some vegetarians, people who eat meat are hurting someone else, namely the animals they are killing. You may not feel like that, but many vegetarians are vegetarians because they don’t want to take the life of a sentient [not sure if that’s the right word] being.
People disagree with vegetarianism because it, like pretty much everything in the world, is based on ideals, opinions, and/or ethics. Ideals and opinions can be disagreed with ad infinium, and ethics can be debated ad infinium because they contain no absolutes. Anybody can disagree with anything.
If you didn’t drink coffee, and there were a thread (started by a guy who starts 900 threads a day about mundane topics or to ask obscenely vague questions about conservative politics) about how people who don’t drink coffee are _______, people would agree and disagree.
Anybody who can think of a topic about which there could never be a reasonable amount of disagreement and debate wins a prize from me.
But some vegetarians are clearly so because of ethical reasons (compassion towards the animals), and not because of personal health issues.
How can someone who is a vegetarian on ethical grounds not think that when others eat meat it is unethical?
Perhaps they recognize that their particular ethical stance is personal to them and refuse to impose it on others?
Many women would never consider aborting a pregnancy because of their personal ethical beliefs but uphold the right for others to have one.
You beat me to it.
While I think eating meat is unethical, I am not so convinced of the obviousness of my reasoning that I negatively judge those who do not share it. I’ve tried to explain that in three posts so far, and now I’m going to quit trying.
What do chocolate candy buckeyes have to do with this debate? Chocolate is a vegetable. 
I think we had a thread about that. Someone asked the origins of the term buckeye and then when they found out it’s supposed to look like a deer’s eye (like, after the hunter’s shot it, I guess) they said they thought it was a gross term and we had an insanely long pit thread about it.
In practice that’s pretty much the same thing. But the position is not necessarily “killing animals for meat is unethical,” it’s “I’ve decided killing animals for meat doesn’t fit with my ethics.”
Correct. And the bottom line is that these people need to get over it, the same way people who believe in god need to get over this idea that all atheists are calling them stupid, for example.
I’m well aware. But I was speaking for myself. In most cases I don’t care if other people have a different sense of right and wrong than I do.
Close. Someone asked about the name of a particular dessert, and upon being informed that in some places, they’re called buckeyes, she flipped out about how gross it was. The kicker was that the “looks like a deer’s eye” thing was entirely her interpretation of the term.