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A Vegan No More

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141–150 of 275 posts

Re: A Vegan No More

#141
post #54
post #31

That was kind of eye-opening. Not because it shows how bullshit veganism is; I knew that already. But because it reminds me of this friend I have, who is always complaining that she feels tired and weak. She goes to the doctor at least monthly, who diagnosis her with some new deficiency. She's always taking some new pill or food type. I always thought she was a hypochondriac. But it just occurred to me that she might…

> because she's a vegetarian. 400 million Indians are vegetarian (milk and/or eggs): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_in_India and I've been a vegetarian all my life. Last year I ran 50 miles non-stop in Grand Teton at 10,000ft elevation so I can say from personal experience that it is certainly possible to be healthy on a balanced vegetarian diet. I can't say the same about veganism though and it's not pop…

while I agree with your base assumption (living without eating meat is not a health drama) pointing out to vegetarian indians is a fallacy that people should stop making.

We have no knowledge of related/correlated facts about those 400M people, so you can _for example_ follow the fallacy and say:

Life expectancy in india is lower than the world average and a lot lower than other "poor" countries where vegetarianism is not common, such as north korea, brazil or the palestinian territories. Thus vegetarianism leads to at a shorter life.

Proof by underanalyzed example is not a good one.

Re: A Vegan No More

#142
post #133
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be downvoted into oblivion for saying this but there are lots of ways that the average vegetarian or vegan every day supports killing animals for their own personal benefit. Animals are killed every day so that we can live a better life. It's not a big deal. Get over it or get off the grid. I hope you don't drive on roads, or use anything produced by the petrochemical industry. Hell, somewhere between your compu…

> I hope you don't drive on roads, or use anything produced by the > petrochemical industry. I've yet to hear that humans have successfully produced crude oil from livestock. Do you have a source of this? > Also, have you EVER considered how many field animals die to produce > vegetables? 1. You're creating a false dichotomy. Either a person eliminates all things in their life that affect animals, or they eliminate n…

Regarding producing oil from livestock, you'll want to look into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

I believe that ConAgra has a plant for doing this to left over bits of turkey.

More to the point as far as we know oil deposits are created by thermal depolymerization of plants and animals on geologic timescales. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation Therefor anything produced from petroleum very likely contains dead animals.

1. There are definitely shades of grey, but I tend to think that putting animals in your tank and on your plate are largely the same. If you think that eating dead animals is wrong, then why would consuming any product of which a component was dead animals be any different? Would it be ok to just kill an animal for no reason and not consume it?

2. I'm primarily attempting to point out that your actions and your moral code are hypocritical and thus you should be ignored as someone who advocates a standard for which they are unable or unwilling to meet themselves.

3. I don't really care how it comes across, if it effectively communicates to anyone else that the lifestyle choice and moral code of people who practice veganism or vegetarianism for moral reasons are hypocritical, then it has served it's purpose. If people who are not vegans or vegetarians for moral reasons laugh at the hypocrisy then it's also effective. Sometimes you have to make Modest Proposals in order to communicate effectively.

4. I think that voting is largely ineffective and that the electoral system produces results that are far more influenced by lobbying and money than by casting votes.

5. The entire point of the post was to convince you and others that don't eat meat for moral reasons that you are NOT living your life according to your own moral code. Or that your moral code contains arbitrary exceptions for the consumption of animals for whenever you find it convenient.

Re: A Vegan No More

#143
Considering how this submission got voted and how the discourse is going, this is a good example of how powerful the USA are.

I wonder how the discourse will continue now that it's dark night in the USA and the day is starting for Europe and India.

Re: A Vegan No More

#144
post #76
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the story is that not everyone can do a Vegan diet and still be healthy. While this is just one example it does demonstrate the principle that meat is a necessary and vital part of some peoples healthy eating. I sometimes wonder if Vegans worry about Lions on the savannah eating antelope. Do they want prevent that as well. Humans are Omnivores. We are built to get nutrients from both meat and plantlife.…

> The point of the story is that not everyone can do a Vegan diet and still be healthy. When you hear a story about how some substance 'cured cancer' do you instantly conclude that the claims are necessarily correct - even for the cured person in the story? Would you expect the story to become popular on HN? The problem with one-off anecdotes like this is that they don't even conclusively demonstrate anything. > I so…

Being a strict vegan and getting all the required nutrients to maintain optimal health is almost mutually exclusive. You can take pills and shots to make up for the missing parts but these use animal products. It can be an insane amount of work for normal people. To say it would be easy if more people do it does not reflect the realities of nutrition. I wish you luck but it is not and can not be for everyone at leat not strict vegetarianism I also think that people who are pregnant and maintain the diet are amoral there is no shortage of research that show it can harm the infant.

Note meat little meat and almost shurly less than optimal for health. I don't like the people that go against research.

Re: A Vegan No More

#145
post #124
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about 'rules' or 'regulations.' For some it's about morality. If I find it immoral to eat a dead animal, then why would it be 'ok' because it's 'only chicken broth?' I've still supported (with my money) the death of an animal. [ Please don't break down into some 'but animals die all the time in the wild,' argument. It's slightly different when we created the animal just for the purpose of killing it for meat…

I'll be downvoted into oblivion for saying this but there are lots of ways that the average vegetarian or vegan every day supports killing animals for their own personal benefit. Animals are killed every day so that we can live a better life. It's not a big deal. Get over it or get off the grid. I hope you don't drive on roads, or use anything produced by the petrochemical industry. Hell, somewhere between your compu…

If I'm following, your reasoning is that because (a) it's effectively impossible to live in the modern world without benefiting from the deaths of animals that (b) any attempt to limit the number of animals we kill to support our daily lives, or the kind of animals, or how they lived or died, must be pointless.

I find that jump from (a) to (b) is unfounded. There's a qualitative difference between (i) a mouse killed accidentally by a combine, (ii) a lab rat killed by a drug company, (iii) a pig raised and killed to be eaten, (iv) a mink killed for its fur and (v) an endangered mountain gorilla killed so a collector can stuff its head and hands. Different people draw their moral lines at different places.

A lot of people might have a problem with (v) but be okay with (i) through (iv). I can personally live with (i) and (ii), but have a problem with (iii) especially given the messed up fact that while almost a billion people on the planet are malnourished, the US has enough excess to give the majority of its soy and corn crops over to feeding livestock. As in, we're literally choosing to feed the pigs, cows and chickens we're going to kill before we feed the poor. I know of people who will accept (ii) if the research is for a compelling medical cause, but not if it's for something like cosmetics. I know plenty of people who can live with leather, but won't accept fur based on the crazy cruel stuff that happens on fur farms.

This stuff isn't black and white. You can't just equate animals that died millions of years ago that turned into oil with animals that we raise to kill; not all animal deaths are equal. The ethical and moral questions get complicated, and there's a lot of grey areas encountered when balancing human needs and desires against the potential suffering of creatures whose subjective experience we can't understand. And then there are health arguments and environmental arguments, and it never ends. Given that it's complicated, please have a little respect.

You write as though you expect that vegetarians and vegans must not be aware of natural predators or animals killed unintentionally by humans for reasons other than meat, or the weird, myriad ways we use highly processed animal products in the modern world -- and that if we had been aware we should obviously have come to the same conclusions you did. That presumption, that vegetarians and vegans must have made their life decisions out of simple ignorance of the facts, is a bit offensive. I'm not saying you should believe anything different about eating meat. But please don't flippantly talk down to people who have chosen to draw their moral distinctions in different places than yours.

Re: A Vegan No More

#146
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are Omnivores. We are built to get nutrients from both meat and plantlife. Our metabolisms work best when we eat both in moderation. Please let's not resort to "appeal to nature", because that can certainly be abused both ways (and frequently is). There are certainly all sorts of sketchy vegetarian and vegan bogus arguments about why not eating animals is natural (and certainly eating dairy and chicken eggs is…

> We weren't built for anything Swap out built with adapted and I think you'll have a hard time finding a dentist that agrees with that.

Swapping 'built with adapted' doesn't avoid the naturalistic fallacy. Just because we have adapted to cope with something doesn't imply it is good for our current circumstances. Any source of calories would have desirable for our early ancestors - now we have the opposite problem. Instead gazing backwards to our primitive forbears for advice, we need to use science to guide us as to what the best foods to eat are.

Re: A Vegan No More

#147
post #130
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All animals are in one way or another a food source for other animals. It is in no way evil if an animal suffers unless that suffering is intentionally caused by a human. Our sin is in the mass production and mis-treatment of livestock while they are alive, not in the actual killing or eating. Not eating mass-produced chicken or wearing leather makes sense, refusing free-range eggs or seafood does not. Not that there…

You're inferring the feelings of an animal to make your judgement. No one actually knows the living preferences of a chicken or a cow. Since you posit that huamn beings can infer the feelings of animals I posit that animals prefer to be factory farmed than spend what existence the animal has being constantly chased by predators. Therefore wearing leather and eating mass-produced chicken makes perfect sense and is in…

While we can't be sure to of the preferences of livestock, we can make pretty good guesses. If the responses of animals in a factory farm are more similar to the responses of an animal that is being injured than an animal that is not being interacted with, then the posterior probability of the factory farm situation being dis-preferred by the animal is reasonably high.

Factory farming or "wild" existence is a false dichotomy. There is the option of having pastured animals. And, critically, there is the option of not existing at all. Furthermore, I'd suggest that domesticated animals are different enough from their wild forebears that spending their existence being chased by predators isn't the default "non-factory farm" option.

From what I know of factory farms, pastured animal husbandry, and the probable preference functions of animals, I would guess the preferences would be: pasturing > non-existence > factory farm

largely from The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Re: A Vegan No More

#148
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are Omnivores. We are built to get nutrients from both meat and plantlife. Our metabolisms work best when we eat both in moderation. Please let's not resort to "appeal to nature", because that can certainly be abused both ways (and frequently is). There are certainly all sorts of sketchy vegetarian and vegan bogus arguments about why not eating animals is natural (and certainly eating dairy and chicken eggs is…

> We weren't built for anything Swap out built with adapted and I think you'll have a hard time finding a dentist that agrees with that.

In line with my point above that nature is irrelevant in a discussion about what's good or right, I'd like to point out that because of such unnatural practices as cooking our food, it kind of doesn't matter what our teeth are adapted to eat. I don't want to eat whatever foods our savanna ancestor ate, because now we have farms and kitchens and supermarkets, and I have better options, and better criteria to guide my choice than some interpretation of what's 'natural'.

Re: A Vegan No More

#149

Look, veganism is a preference, not a religion. For me, the salient facts are that eating animals and animal products is a) ethically questionable and b) avoidable. But it's just a choice. If I go round someone's house and they've cooked me an otherwise vegan meal but put cheese on top, I'm not going to be a dick about it, I'm going to eat it. Food isn't magic. Maybe this makes me not really vegan, or a "bad vegan" o…

> "Look, veganism is a preference, not a religion."

The line between preference and religion can be awfully thin. See: Urban vs. suburban, Nikon vs. Canon, Vi vs. Emacs, etc.

All of the above are contentious issues that are, at the end of the day, incredibly asinine to argue about. And all sides in the above suffer from incredibly poor signal to noise ratio - both defending their ego more than they are any notion of reason.

Re: A Vegan No More

#150
post #142
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope you don't drive on roads, or use anything produced by the > petrochemical industry. I've yet to hear that humans have successfully produced crude oil from livestock. Do you have a source of this? > Also, have you EVER considered how many field animals die to produce > vegetables? 1. You're creating a false dichotomy. Either a person eliminates all things in their life that affect animals, or they eliminate n…

Regarding producing oil from livestock, you'll want to look into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization I believe that ConAgra has a plant for doing this to left over bits of turkey. More to the point as far as we know oil deposits are created by thermal depolymerization of plants and animals on geologic timescales. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation Therefor anything produced from petrol…

I think you're attacking a straw man who you want to represent all vegetarians and vegans. Different people make the choice to give up meat for different reasons, they define veganism and vegetarianism with differing boundaries, and they practice with various levels of consistency. There's no one vegan or vegetarian moral code for you to find hypocritical, or one set of goals that vegans and vegetarians are all trying to achieve.

But in point #1 above, I think you drifted off course; the problem from my perspective isn't dead animals but rather killing animals needlessly. An animal which was dead eons before I was born is not my moral responsibility. It is my responsibility if an animal dies so that I can eat steak, if I could have just as easily had beans.

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