Childhood indoctrination

[thesummerqueen]

You just have to get to know the personalities of the longer running members, sugar.

[Eric9001]

Congrats on being over 9000 posts, btw :-D

So I was right?
Maybe people used to carry about deep conversation but got bored/sick of it and decided to give up? Are threads just personal playgrounds for the long term members once they feel the threads no longer have any more valid points to offer? Kind of a 'seen it all, who gives a shit, let's wreck it' kind of attitude? Is this just a special case..?

[thesummerqueen]

Nah, we ramble a bit, then come back. Sometimes if the thread is an obvious troll, we trash it. Sometimes we get spanked by the staff. Rhythm and I have a lot of bad behaviors, but we'll let you have it back now.

[Whateverist]

Some of the long time members honestly seem to enjoy a spanking.

[thesummerqueen]

Atheists Behaving Badly

[Sal]

Alas, I was mostly indoctrinated in the woo of a denomination of Christian Protestantism, and that pretty much overclouded any non-religious indoctrination as a result, not to mention that my mother was bipolar like me.

[The Grand Nudger]

Perhaps take a look a few pages back, before I played gigglesticks (thank you summer) and took a crack at helping someone to see an issue from an entirely alien light, in response to their justification for some dietary right.

I think that "the morality of food" as important as some may find it - is more often a fairly shallow exploration of "serious 1st world problems". That's right, I'm actively and strongly suggesting that the experience of anyone who has ever agonized over whether they should have the foie gras or the tofu salad -and which is the more moral decision- is being a self absorbed cunt. I can solve all dietary conundrums of this sort with one fell swoop - by giving all of their liver and curdled beans to someone who actually has a pressing food related issue - namely those who have neither (and often so that we can have either).

So obviously, between deeply exploring such an important issue - I take the time to make jokes. Don't let that fool you into thinking I'm not interested in the serious discussion, I very much am.

[Forbinator]

I'm still waiting Forbinator to define what he means by ethical. I guess not only The Germans are coming is at fault here.

I thought I'd already made my position pretty clear from previous posts. But I'll try to summarise: Ethical is a subjective quality, but there are some aspects of ethics that (practically speaking) are objective and accepted axiomatically. I listed four things earlier:

1. Murdering humans for pleasure
2. Stealing from humans for pleasure
3. Harming or physically violating humans for pleasure
4. Senseless animal cruelty

If you think any of those four things are not ethically wrong, then I probably have to concede any moral argument with you, as there would be no ethical reference point to base any argument on, and ethics is a relativistic topic.

If we combine the above four "ethical wrongs" with some facts, we can logically determine that our exploitation of animals cannot be justified:

5. The animals that we exploit have a survival instinct, and therefore an interest in living, as evident from their "fight or flight" responses, production of catecholamines and corticosteroids in response to stress (particularly when predators are visible), and ability to feel pain and suffering as evident from their central nervous system and pain receptors. Since the nervous system of birds, fish and mammals is effectively the same as ours, the burden of proof is with you to show that it has a different function from ours given that the anatomy is virtually the same. It's a bit like trying to claim that an animal uses his/her ears for something besides hearing; the burden of proof would be with you, and in the meantime we assume their ears are used to hear.

6. Animal farming necessarily involves cruelty, although it wouldn't be considered "senseless" as it serves the purpose of producing food and clothing. But the cruelty is still unnecessary, since we can use plant-based resources for the same outcome, and with much less land use (which, among other arguments, offsets the environmental arguments against veganism).

Given what was stated in (5), we must apply (1), and by extension, (3), to other species including birds, fish and mammals, and almost certainly to crustaceans as they have pain receptors but as part of a different nervous system. The key is that while other species are different from us, they are the same as us in the ways that pertain to wanting to live.

Given what was stated in (6), and if we accept that the distinction between "senseless" and "unnecessary" cruelty is negligible, and irrelevant to the outcome for the victim, we must apply (4) to all cases of cruelty, including those which inevitably occur as part of the farming and slaughter process. http://www.earthlings.com shows the different types of cruelty that occur, and explains why they are not "one-off" events, but are intrinsic to production.

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I think that "the morality of food" as important as some may find it - is more often a fairly shallow exploration of "serious 1st world problems". That's right, I'm actively and strongly suggesting that the experience of anyone who has ever agonized over whether they should have the foie gras or the tofu salad -and which is the more moral decision- is being a self absorbed cunt. I can solve all dietary conundrums of this sort with one fell swoop - by giving all of their liver and curdled beans to someone who actually has a pressing food related issue - namely those who have neither (and often so that we can have either).

But if we actually use our land efficiently to produce plant-based food, which is fed directly to humans, we can solve the human hunger crisis that you base your argument on. I agree that wasting food is unjustifiable in today's world (regardless of the food), but there is no bigger waste of food going on right now than cattle grazing. Whether it's grain or grass or soy or corn, the land used to produce the food that gets filtered through the animals could be used to produce food that humans eat directly, and much more of it. This is where food wastage is really occurring.

[The Grand Nudger]

But if we actually use our land efficiently to produce plant-based food, which is fed directly to humans, we can solve the human hunger crisis that you base your argument on. I agree that wasting food is unjustifiable in today's world (regardless of the food), but there is no bigger waste of food going on right now than cattle grazing. Whether it's grain or grass or soy or corn, the land used to produce the food that gets filtered through the animals could be used to produce food that humans eat directly, and much more of it. This is where food wastage is really occurring.

We'll need to do quite a bit more than simply use land efficiently. The land that's used to feed animals allows us to turn a commodity that is not nutritionally available to us into one that is (and no, I'm sorry to be the one to inform you of this, but prime cattle country is not sufficient to produce food for human consumption - let alone more food than the cattle themselves provide). Nevertheless, I think you've misjudged "my argument" insomuch as I offer none. I'm not telling you that we should eat meat because people go hungry, I'm telling you that people eat meat because they otherwise -do- go hungry. Im also alerting you to the brutish fact that your veggies are killers as well, killers of animals of all kinds, including ourselves-all the while being quite efficient..btw...and yet still not enough to keep us from starving on a grand scale.

By the by, no, we cant solve our hunger crisis by producing "plant based foods" any more so than we do now (we already produce enough food - that's not even remotely the problem) who told you this...?

(the next time that someone calls a cow inefficient or wasteful I'm gonna blow fucking gasket)

[Forbinator]

We'll need to do quite a bit more than simply use land efficiently. The land that's used to feed animals allows us to turn a commodity that is not nutritionally available to us into one that is (and no, I'm sorry to be the one to inform you of this, but prime cattle country is not sufficient to produce food for human consumption - let alone more food than the cattle themselves provide).

I agree that hunger is a very complex issue with many causes, and many possible methods of alleviating the problem. Using our land to produce more food than it currently does would have to help though! Foreign aid is a concept that already exists, and by producing more kg of food per hectare by using crop systems, particularly in high rainfall areas, would be one means of increasing the amount of food produced per hectare.

(the next time that someone calls a cow inefficient or wasteful I'm gonna blow fucking gasket)

Whether the cow can be considered wasteful depends on which land is used, and whether cropping would be possible on that land. I can only speak for agriculture in Australia; here we have prime arable land in high rainfall areas, which is wasted on beef and dairy production. The soil and weather support fast crop growth, but instead the land is being squandered on grass. The cattle shit most of it out, so obviously whatever is left to go into food production is less than what went into the animal. We also have areas in the dry central/northern regions of Australia where cropping is not feasible, and the only productive way to "use" this land is by having cattle eat the low quality sporadically growing grass, which grows so poorly that the stocking density is something like one animal per 1.5 hectares. So I have to acknowledge that the latter form of cattle grazing is actually justifiable from a resource optimisation perspective, but not justifiable to the victims of the production. What we need to stop first is the squandering of prime arable land in high rainfall areas. Produce high crop yield there, and we will have no need to exploit cattle in the dry northern regions.

I'm not telling you that we should eat meat because people go hungry, I'm telling you that people eat meat because they otherwise -do- go hungry.

If I'm ever starving to death and someone gives me a steak, I promise I will eat it.

Im also alerting you to the brutish fact that your veggies are killers as well, killers of animals of all kinds, including ourselves-all the while being quite efficient..btw...and yet still not enough to keep us from starving on a grand scale.

So what constructive advice can you offer on this?

By the by, no, we cant solve our hunger crisis by producing "plant based foods" any more so than we do now (we already produce enough food - that's not even remotely the problem) who told you this...?

Logic says that more food would surely help, but as I acknowledged above, it's a more complex issue than this.

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It's how life functions. Organisms eating other organisms has been among the top methods for life to continue to exist for billions of years and at this day. The house cat when let outdoors will kill thousands of animals over its life. People seem to place unnecessary morals into the process of eating other organisms. They feel the pain of the animals. But what is pain? It's a response by the nervous system to say that something is bad. Other animals do not let pain stop them from killing each other, why do we?

Using the behaviour of wild animals as an ethical reference point is not logical as an ideology, since it would also allow us to rape and steal. When discussing ethics, we have to decide if we're operating as part of a civilised society with rules, or if we're operating as wild animals. People who justify carnism (http://www.carnism.org/index.php/2012-05-09-15-00-33) flip-flop between the two whenever it's convenient to justify the position they already hold.

Well, that comes from our own humanistic nature which developed – creating an appreciation and understanding of other humans, feeling their pain. Morality.. We take that morality we have for other human beings and apply it to animals because we see humanistic qualities in some species and realize that many animals, biologically, are not too far off from ourselves. The most noble thing to do would to be not eat at all. But because we realize eating is a necessity for out living, and because we value our living more than anything else, we consume something, but what? So with morals, people decide that the further away from human that something that they are consuming is, the better. So naturally, we find people eating only plants.

I view the world realistically. I take this idea to be arrogant because I realize that Earth exists as a joined effort, and all life, even non-living material, plays an equal role on supporting it. Rather than view my eating as what's best for humanity I view it as what's best for the continuation of life planet Earth. We lower plants to such a low level because they are so different from us, but we should realize that plants are and have been so important in sustaining balanced life on Earth. So all that's do it then is which has a worse impact on it all, eating a part of a chicken or eating a bunch of plant material? To be honest, there's negatives to both, they both have a very similar, negative, insubstantial impact. Eating an endangered species would probably have a larger impact on the world, so I view this as one of the worst things to do. Eating a bald eagle would have bad impacts on my life socially, so I would not eat that. If I was truly unmoral I would probably view humans as the best thing to eat, since they have a large negative impact on Earth, comparably to others. But I am moral.

Plants certainly do play a role in ecology, but the difference is that they do not have the capacity to be individual victims, as they are not sentient. The logical obligation of our civilisation's structure is not to behave in a way that involves innocent victims. But yes, we have to acknowledge that all food consumption is harmful to some extent, but we need to do it with as little harm as possible. Committing direct acts of violence in order to eat each day, when this is clearly not necessary to obtain the level of nutrients needed, is not consistent with any model of harm minimisation.

Well then you asked about clothing right? The most noble thing to do would be not wearing clothes. But this has a very substantial impact on a person's life. The same principles apply... But there is much more non-animal clothing products available to the public. Celebrities that wear fur coats do so to display wealth. I don't think that is a good choice because people do not like the fur coats, and the celebrities get poor opinions about them, affecting their lives.

I could definitely argue that it's not feasible for me to not wear clothes, but it certainly is feasible to wear clothes that don't require violence to produce.

Entertainment is something people do not usually see the use of animals as necessary for, which is why you'll see more people apposed to using animals for entertainment than you would see people apposed to eating animals.

This is true, but also ridiculous. Part of it is due to the misinformation out there, and propaganda spread by Weston A Price Foundation and others trying to tell us that we need animal products. There are millions of living, walking examples to show us that we don't. Given that we don't need to eat animal products, they have to be placed in the same category as animal-based entertainment; that is, exploitation purely for our enjoyment.