Vegans: exist People like OP: how dare you make your own choices about your own life that don’t hurt anyone in any way whatsoever
Ah yes, the anti-vegan. Nearly as annoying as the vegan.
I have the same advice for you as I have for vegans: let people eat what they want to eat, mind your business, and keep your preferences to yourself unless you’re asked.
That said there is some irony here because you’re framing this as unreasonable, but we do this all the time with other humans. As an outsider you should treat members of a group differently than they treat each other - unless you’re saying white people should be allowed to drop N bombs lol
I have the same advice for you as I have for vegans: let people eat what they want to eat, mind your business, and keep your preferences to yourself unless you’re asked.
It seems you fundamentally misunderstand what veganism is
Our species were shaped as omnivores, meaning we have a choice of what we want to eat. Don’t forget where we don’t live anymore: the jungle. Just because we used to live in caves doesn’t mean we should live in caves now. Also, they didn’t have McDonald’s in the jungle.
First and foremost: You are correct.
Now allow me to try to be funny: Well… Apartments are just pretty square-ish caves.
(Note that I said “try to be funny”)
After the second world war we also said “never again” but apparently some people missed that memo too.
My man cave is so much more sophisticated than caves from the stone age. I have cats, instead of mountain lions. I have some paintings on the wall… Oh wait, no, that’s not much different. I have central heating instead of a camp fire. And I have to pay a ludicrous amount of rent. So yeah, my cave is much better than ancient caves. I guess…
We’re destroying the Amazon for cattle but haha birds eat rodents lmao gottem
Yeah I like meat but that is a stupid argument unless you hunt all your meals yourself.
Where with all the animals if all went vegan now?
Why are the vegans sounding more like cavemen than the meat-eaters?
I think the problem isn’t that we eat meat. It’s that we torture the animals and have them live in deplorable conditions before we eat them. If we all hunted or raised our own animals or had the animals live in decent conditions it would be less of an issue for most REASONABLE vegans and vegetarians. I used to be vegan and vegetarian a decade so I get it a bit. I hated it when anyone would bitch about other people’s food choices, but then complain when they did the same to them for their food choices. Both sides I mean. I had some non-veggies once they found out I didn’t eat meat would attack me for it. When I did start eating meat again some vegans and vegetarians would attack me for it.
I know that the industry is horrific. I have battled internally with becoming a vegan. And this isn’t a but, it’s just something i thought about once when thinking about the argument that whilst in nature, animals eat other animals, its not the same as what we do as we farma dn torture animals to get the meat…
Its cats…
Cats torture their prey…
They play with it, and maim it and keep it alive for as long as possible so they can chase it, for fun…
And sometimes they just fucking leave it there when it dies.
And we love cats. Even vegans love cats.
And that sort of makes me laugh a bit.
Well fed house cats that don’t need to bother eating their prey and don’t necessarily entirely understand hunting will do that.
I wonder if a wildcat in an environment that had plentiful mice would start to do the same?
For me, I think the difference is that I have the means and opportunity to reduce (an incredibly minor amount, I know) the suffering of animals everywhere by not eating meat, so I feel somewhat an obligation to do so.
Whereas a cat does not have the knowledge or information or desire to make that sort of decision making. So I love them anyway…I just don’t let them outside so they can’t murder every living thing nearby for fun.
To each his own, that’s just my personal impetus to be meat free.
that’s what the cats want you to think, dummy!
Yeah, I think this is the big difference. We have the capacity to rationalize and introspect. If we can make a change for the better (and know we can), how do we justify not making it?
Sometimes the reason is “it’s hard” or an apathetic “it doesn’t matter”. But I think it’s very difficult to come to the conclusion that it’s (consumption of meat) the correct thing to do.
I say this as someone who commonly falls into the “it’s tough” bucket.
Actually, humans are animals. Once you view them in that light, the “I don’t want to stop eating meat” becomes “I can’t stop eating meat, because I am actually an animal who believe it is above instinct”.
I feel like this ignores the point many are making here.
The statement that we are animals is true. But as many have pointed out, we have the extra layer of reasoning, introspection, and empathy.
We can see the pain and torture subjected on other animals and reson that it is unjustified and empathise with the pain by thinking about how we would feel if in the shoes of the animals being slaughtered. We can look at outlr actions and decide to make a change.
None of this, as far as we know, is possible for any other animal.
This is a huge distinction and one that, as i said, you have either missed or ignored whilst reading these comments.
Sure, we’re animals. Being able to reason and rationalize sure are something too, though.
An important addition is that saying “we are animals” isn’t supposed to cut what we judge to be morally right or wrong.
If anything, “We are animals” must be used to know that other animals may probably have similar introspection as us and we are unaware, thinking o ourselves as special kind of creature when it is far from being true.
If, let’s say hypothetically, a cow do have not only feelings but also moral thought, thinking of a sacred "cow god/goddess) and having moral argument with fellow cows, then it just makes butchering them even more of a “crime” that it is already.
Most of the time, adults don’t torture their prey. Kittens aren’t born with the ability to hunt, and their instincts need to develop too. So the mom brings home live prey for the kittens to play with. Sometimes adults keep this behaviour.
Yeah I was thinking this kind of thing too, but also house cats have all the food they want anyway. Not sure how much each is a factor in this.
Boredom really.
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Absolutely, the meat industry needs to be clamped down on hard
But, there are plenty of vegans who also rail against alternatives like lab grown beef which is still meat but bypasses all the problems with the meat industry of today
If lab grown meat were readily available and affordable, I would switch in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I know for a damn fact I dont have the discipline for veganism, bad as the industry is. Also milk and eggs have to be produced somehow no matter what or the animal dies because we bred them like that millennia ago so like might as well eat those anyway
Doesn’t have to be all/nothing. You don’t have to become a vegan, you could still cut down on how much meat you buy. Or only eat what you can kill?
So we domesticated fire, that’s one step out of the swamp and steppes.
Then there was agriculture and animal husbandry, we became sedentary.Writing developed, accelerating growth in the arts, math and engineering, the sciences… we had domesticated knowledge and memory - data storage.
Before we knew it, the printing press popped up and soon after we domesticated something abstract and invisible, awesome and truly fundamental - electromagnetism. That’s is the big game changer right there.
We have figured out our physical place in the universe.
We can image distant supermassive black holes, we have mapped the farthest, faintest reaches of the visible universe using the oldest light there is - the Cosmic Microwave Background (which started out as orange light 13.7 billion years ago).We are now in the process of harnessing sunlight and the wind; the genome; we can now even perform data operations using quantum superimposed electron states, harnessing the subatomic wave function itself.
Surely we can now domesticate cruelty-free protein chemistry. So many steps away from the swamp and steppes already, so far we can’t turn and go back again. What’s one more step?
Next step is extreme longevity IMO. Such a bummer people only have a couple of decades to perfect their skills before it all runs out in the sand.
Get me a lab grown steak any day though!
you cant be cruel to cattle.
I feel like this is the “attack helicopter” joke of veganism
Isn’t that every joke on veganism?
Humans “i dont rape because i respect other humans”. Meanwhile nature …
And in before “but i need to eat”, you dont need to eat animal products. You can have a healthy life with a vegan diet, arguably an even healthier life. And to go back to my original point, just because you need to cum, doesnt mean that you have the right to cause suffering and death to other sentient beings.
Just masturbate. Just go vegan.
But what about my sharp canine teeth? Check mate.
I’m not your waiter, and this isn’t Australia
Oh, then, whatever you say when you win checkers 😎
Look at this carnivore devouring their prey.
I 100% agree with you, that the existence of canine teeth does not mean that we must eat meat, but pandas are famously bad at living. The species only exists at this point because humans think they’re cute
Panda’s are omnivores tho
From all the animals thst feed only on plants and have huge canines, you chose the bear?
Those are to hold on to your victim more tightly
Telling boys to just go masturbate got us the Immorten Joe’s Warboys † that are the alt-right, that got Trump into power twice. The boys we told to literally go fuck themselves when they raged over their sexual frustration got us the army of militants and voters behind the white Christian nationalist movement. I was among them in the 1980s, when the society gave a meager few more fucks about them than they do in the twenty-first century.
I suspect similar movements exist through Europe, which is generally rejecting neoliberalism for fascist-thick movements towards one-party autocracy.
No, I don’t have a solution, and I’ve been working on it for thirty years. Christianity’s proscription against sex (later limited to non-reproductive sex) figures largely into the problem and it’s served so far as a sufficient distraction from class consciousness and effective response to industry’s effect on climate, and the imminent climate crisis.
We don’t have a way to let our young guys sow their wild oats, while we’re careening towards multiple great filters we are unprepared to navigate.
I know: 🧶📌📇
Maybe even: 🐰🎩🫖☕
And yet, very few people think about it, still. Those who do ponder the angry-young-men problem discount them as ineligible or feel they are too repugnant to civilized folk to consider. I’ve heard otherwise rational content creators actually say (I paraphrase) these guys were mistreated as kids and are now a societal problem. But they suck, so fuck those guys.
It might be a failing of the human species itself, that we are compelled to cast our young men out the way gorillas cast out their adolescent females (but welcome strange females), and capitalism intentionally only has limited seats where they can pick themselves up, so the system teaches them from the beginning to be aggressive, ruthless and transactional. Not to get completely nihilist, but maybe our capacity for civilization is limited and we just can’t overcome the paradigms that served us as migratory bands of hunter-gatherers.
In the meantime, our boys are taught they suck in our Christianity-heavy abstinence-only sex-ed, ‡ from which they descend into the incel movement, the manosphere, gamergaters, etc and from there into the transnational white power movement. Our society gave Trump his instant army, and it was ready for him the moment Trump went into politics. And our lack of interest or concern about the new batch of warboys we churn our from the US education system every year, is going to literally kill us all.
Just go vegan is going to end the same way, especially since the food industry cares not about actual nutrition but profit. Taking a page from Fourth International Posadism, we may have to end capitalism before we can create an ethical food production system (probably incorporating farming invertebrates as well as vegetables), but the problem right now is not what’s the end result ( Fully Automated Gay Space Communism ) but how the heck we get there and not crash and burn with the global ecology.
Totally open to ideas, but I’m not the guy you have to convince.
† Not to be confused with Warboyz of W4K fame.
‡ Twenty six states mandate abstinence-only sex ed, that stuff that teaches girls they are chewing gum, or someother one-use safety-sealed metaphor, and that boys aren’t allowed to think about sex until they have a salaried job and a ring. Seriously, this is still what is taught.
Three states mandate comprehensive sex ed: The west coast. And none of them require discussion of consent. (Some teachers include it anyway, as an elective topic). Of course, if we demanded opt-in consent in our sexual relationships, we might demand opt-in sex in our other contracts as well, say our jobs, our devices, our software, etc.
Am I supposed to read more than a sentence of this
Not if you don’t want to. Maybe you think I’m wrong after a couple of sentences. That’s okay. The majority of American voters voted for an autocratic usurper. We can’t expect everyone to get it or care.
Lost my interest after scrolling down to see a footnote about Warhammer.
The survival of the fittest narrative was debunked almost as soon as it existed, and that debunking is what forms the ideological basis of mutual aid. That people continue to spread this toxic misinformation over a century later is a testament to the unfortunate tenacity of lies.
Even in the most brutal depths of the natural world, cooperation is still the overarching basis of ecosystem health. It’s known in Permaculture, for instance, that too much competition results in resource depletions.
A vegan ethic is inline with a growing awareness and need for us all to learn to expand our capacities of empathy and compassion, from those who are most like us, to those who are most unlike us.
On the topic of wilderness areas, vegans are divided on what the right approaches are. Some of us compare natural biomes to sovereign nations - while we dislike the harms that occur in those places, we feel a need to allow other species their independence to have their self-determination, if for no other reason than the fact that nature is the basis of maintaining a habitable planet, and interference in ecosystems should only be done with the utmost care.
But there are other vegans who do believe strongly that we should be intervening in wild places as well, with the goals of eliminating predation all together, and managing wildlife populations in more ethical ways.
It’s a highly contentious topic to be honest.
“fittest” in “survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean strongest or most dominant.
It means “best adapted”.
It can be rephrased as “the species most likely to survive are those best adapted to their environment”So it wasn’t really debunked, per se, the strange perversion of “alpha” survival was debunked. Mutual aid is absolutely an excellent environmental adaptation that leads to survival.
Non-vegan, hearing that vegans exist: “Hey, these people are different from me! I hate them!”
It’s because the very existence of veganism implies that a) eating animals and the things they produce is harmful and b) you don’t need to eat animals or the things they produce. Omnivores have to argue against one or both of those claims, or acknowledge that they’re doing something wrong, and humans will commit a lot of evils to convince ourselves that we’re not doing anything wrong
“I’m a good person, good people don’t do bad things, therefore nothing I do is bad”
Nah I think most ppl honestly don’t care. We don’t even care about each other as the western world’s entire lifestyle is based on the exploitation of other countries and their ppl.
You expect someone to suddenly give a damn about a cow 500 miles away?
The redditization of lemmy.world is finally complete. Congratulations, you have ruined the internet.
This is a reddit as fuck comment. Just have fun. Goddammit
it’s been Reddit bro. as much as some still wanna deny, it was cut from the very same cloth.
Nature according to people who use that argument
Well if the ants can do it, why can’t we?(Btw, I’m opposed to caged chicken egg cultivation, and even had my own chicken in the past before I couldn’t anymore for eggs. Now I just pay the premium and researched which were the most ethical eggs in the store available. Happy hens make better eggs anyway. I’m just pointing out we’re not the only ones that raise animals for consumption in nature).
ants can do it, why can’t we?
(Btw, I’m opposed to caged chicken egg cultivation
lol. Classic carnism.
You vegan? Apparently y’all are fine with meat too according to some:
Why would what ants do have relevancy to what we should do?
Those ants are farming aphids. They keep them in close quarters. Ants are nature. Ergo the meme
Everything is nature. But which closed quarters are they kept?
The ones where of the aphid strays too far from the closed in pack it becomes an instant snack (hey that rhymes).
At least we cook our chickens first (/s)
It tracks the logic of the meme then counterpoint, this is the counterpoint to the counterpoint.
I invented a fictional society for stories in which you are allowed to buy and consume meat, but only if you have a “carnivore’s medallion”. The only way to obtain one is to have witnesses observe you personally slaughter a living being (eg, a chicken) with no assistance.
Ideologically, seems like a good way to put friction on meat obsessions and get people to think about it.
Isn’t this just hunting?
No assistance would be no guns, no bows, no knives, no traps, right?
Literally using your bare hands or something you find on the ground.
I mean humans have always used tools but sure, you could take a chicken bare handed. Fish might be easier for a first go as I have seen a few people catch fish out of the water bare-handed after a few tries
Well, hunting involves the whole orange vests, ensuring legal permission, stalking an animal, etc. The idea would be if this world has hunters, any of them certified as a witness can get their colleagues a medallion without going the whole chicken route.
But obviously, most people who eat meat today don’t hunt. So they would need to go through the experience of taking life once before reaping the benefit.
I like this idea. We’re raising chickens and probably rabbits this spring. If you’re going to eat meat, you should face the reality of the life you are consuming.
90% alive today would not eat meat if they had to kill. You can grow up used to it of course.
Sounds interesting.
If they went to live naked in the woods and used their apex predator canines to tear out a deer’s jugular, I’m not judging.
I had thought that veganism was more of a beliefs thing: to not eat products of exploitation, but then I heard the honey thing. The honey thing might be just from an overbearing vegan, or I just don’t know the details, but beekeeping just looks so peaceful
OTOL honey thing?
Oh, you haven’t heard about “bee enslavers”? 🤣
AFAIK many (?, please correct) vegans don’t eat honey, and that’s consistent with most of the people I know IRL. It tends to sway between “I try not to eat animal products” and “harvesting honey hurts/exploits bees”, the latter of which may be true for industry-scale honey, but I don’t see why local honey isn’t an option
Local honey isn’t an option for largely the same reason that locally sourced human breast milk isn’t. Even if harvesting it doesn’t hurt the ones producing it, a lot of vegans find it conceptually gross anyway
Edit: a better comparison may be to locally sourced roadkill. You aren’t paying into a system that intentionally runs over squirrels and cats to feed you, but it’s just conceptually bad. I think most vegans would agree that peeling a dead squirrel off of the road and throwing it on the grill is, at the very least, significantly more defensible than buying meat from the store, but they still wouldn’t partake if you offered it to them
