-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
"Aggressive vegans" are putting off people from changing eating habits, study finds
- Thread starter DiipuSurotu
- Start date
Majukun
Member
no,you are not obligated..you can think you are,but you are not, and that's kind of the point.
our beliefs sometimes are so strong that we get offended by people that have not made our same life choices, but one of the main principles of cohabitation is to let other people be free to follow their own beliefs without imposing ours onto them
goldenpp72
Member
I'd try it as well, and hope it became widely adopted, but i'd still not jump down peoples throats if they didn't use the option.
Would you agree that that's an arbitrary line being drawn? It's based on majority convenience, not out of any sort of ethical code. "Kill a person = call the police. Kill a dog = maybe call the police. Kill a pig = don't call the police."
I eat meat. I'm cooking up some chicken for dinner right now. It's an immoral decision, but I admit it, and I accept that I'm doing something immoral. If something says to me, "hey, that's immoral," I'll respond with, "yeah, I should probably not be doing it."
I understand making decisions based on convenience over ethics. What I don't understand is getting defensive when someone calls you out on it.
(Well, I do understand. People don't like getting called out. I just think it's silly to do so when, if push comes to shove, people will freely admit their failing.)
I'm cool with that then. Personally, I disagree (I value individual rights less than the collective good), but that's a value call so I can't really begrudge you for it.
UserNotFound
Member
Vegetarian lifestyle is fairly achievable by leading a regular lifestyle. You can go to Taco Bell for example and have a decent meal.
Being Vegan means rejecting animal products and animal by-products. That's where life becomes much more difficult and costly.
BlackGoku03
Member
Imagine, one day there will be a group dedicated to this and a small minority will make it hell for anyone who won't eat it.
GrooveCommand
Member
Yeah, that's not really true about soy or mushrroms.. nuts do require a lot of water to produce though (nearly as much as meat).
BareKnuckle
Member
Vegan girl I used to sit opposite at work would huff and tut and push her food away when I ate lunch.
im a fucking vegetarian.
Yup. Surviving on sunlight is out of the question because we're not plants ourselves, so we gotta eat something to live. If you want to reduce suffering and not commit suicide, eating plants is the logical option since you're drastically reducing plant waste.
It becomes more difficult to eat at restaurants, true. But more costly? Lol beans are probably the cheapest source of protein around. Unless you like eating fancy and expensive meat substitutes, you can totally eat vegan on the cheap.
I doubt it. The advantage of lab-grown meat is that you could theoretically come up with a consistently perfect cut of meat every time, assuming we don't have to do stuff like provide it intellectual stimulation else it tastes like despair.
I have no ethical qualms about eating animals, but assuming you can make lab-grown meat as cheap and as tasty as the natural-grown thing, I don't see any reason to not change over.
Only reason there'd be a vocal minority is the old never-changers, young hipsters, and crazy anti-science new agers, but given that the latter group seems to include a lot of vegetarians and vegans anyhow I don't see them being a problem.
Lonewulfeus
Member
Now your getting to the meat (see what I did there?) of it. If we didn't eat the cow it wouldn't exist at all right? Is no life better than a life that ends with slaughter for food? Not all meat animals are treated cruelly, some of them are but that's because humans sucks and believe me if you want to argue that humans should be wiped off the face of the earth id sympathize, but you seem to be counting every animal killed for food as an animal who has suffered and that's patently untrue.
When you die, worms and bacteria and all sorts of shit are gonna feed on your corpse assuming you are buried in the ground. Your meat is being eaten but does that mean you suffered?
The sense of being more enlightened than us savage meat eaters is what feeds this zealous defense of veganism like its the only way right way to live and to you maybe it is. As a poster above brought up just by posting on NeoGAF you are contributing in some small way to great human suffering that's used to create all of our electronics, why is that different than eating meat? If you want to live a life where you cause as little suffering as possible better just go hole up in a cave somewhere (can't build a home with logs what about the trees! Oh shit that cave might have been home to an animal you ended up driving away!). Why is animal "suffering" worse than any other kind? Cause they're cute and cuddly?
GrooveCommand
Member
My wife and I are vegan and neither of us really see a problem with it. Some people online argue that because the product comes from research of real meat it's not technically "vegan". I say if it helps meat eaters eat something that didn't come from a living creature and is better for the environment, it's a step in the right direction!
I want to reduce a little bit of suffering, I'm not trying to reduce all of it. Guess that makes me a horrible person.
https://www.tacobell.com/feed/how-to-eat-vegan (I've never actually eaten at Taco Bell, so I can't say if any of it is decent)
It's actually not that difficult, or costly to be vegan, assuming you have the privilege of making food choices. Beans and grains are cheap, and most produce isn't that expensive if you buy in season.
goldenpp72
Member
There is no line, killing an animal is not a good thing to do, but it's what we as a society deem needed for our own personal survival and in turn has become a common thing, just like buying the cheapest goods instead of supporting local economies. Our species main objective seems to be to survive first and ask questions later, but in the case of a human, enjoyment and happiness are important parts to our own survival, to a point a person without happiness might in turn end their life.
I don't consider eating meat to be neutral, it's not a NICE thing to do just as not donating all my expendable income to charitable causes is also not the nice thing to do. I'll keep buying my entertainment knowing others aren't getting to eat, it's not a good thing, but I shouldn't have to be bitched out for it.
I don't try and pretend i'm doing a service when I buy a hamburger, that's for sure.
Lonewulfeus
Member
As a meat eater if lab grown meat was nutritionally equivalent and tastes like real meat and is cheaper than real meat I'm there!
GrooveCommand
Member
And to make things even worse, a LOT more plants go into making a serving of meat compared to an equivalent portion of salad.
Lonewulfeus
Member
Why chose animal suffering over human suffering though? Because it's convenient and you like electronics more than meat. It doesn't make you a horrible person it makes you a very hypocritical one.
Mammoth Jones
Member
I'm choosing environmental consciousness as something I can address.
And everyone is a hypocrite, including you. What a pointless thing to say. Should everyone just stop trying to do good things?
_/¯False dichotomy. Also, not unimportant to observe that some aspects of industrial animal farming do have an impact on humans.
You Are Viewtiful
Member
Being hypocritical in this case is still morally superior to the opposite, where you're just causing suffering and destruction indiscriminately, but not feeling guilty about it because at least you're consistent.
And there isn't even anything morally wrong with buying electronics. Those people chose to be there. If they don't like it, they are free to work elsewhere. Animals do not have this choice.
edit: as a disclaimer, I'm not a vegan/vegetarian. I'd consider myself to be in the group who want to make the jump, but haven't yet.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
We're all hyppcrites to a degree.
To be fair a lot of people don't truly have a choice.
A human did something a bit hypocritical, let's stop the press!
I say it's better to never try to do anything because at least you won't risk being, gasp, hypocritical, which is certainly the worst thing of them all.
Majukun
Member
it's more like they are the noisy part of the demographic by definition
This actually leads to a very interesting, and very hard to discuss, argument over the question of "nonexistence vs. negative existence" - is it better to live, suffer, and die, or to never live at all? At that point it's a value judgement, I would say, since it's not a decision anyone can really make on a global scale.
Like, given the choice between the following options (going to the absolute extreme for simplicity's sake):
- All cows forever are allowed to live freely and die of natural causes, but the number of cows born diminishes by a huge number.
- Cows continue to be bred and slaughtered in as ethical a way as possible.
I think we can all agree that the hierarchy of lives is as follows:
1) A long, full life with minimal suffering.
2) A life cut short with minimal suffering.
3) A life cut short full of suffering.
So then it's a question of scale. Less cows with better lives, more cows with worse lives. I dunno. How can we possibly measure that when the only perspective we have is one brief human life?
This argument though, doesn't really make any sense. "You can't eliminate suffering, so therefore you shouldn't try to reduce it." It doesn't follow from any real coherent ethical framework that posits suffering as a negative.
All of that is, again, stuff I'm fine with and would agree with. Eating meat is bad, but it's a "bad" that we as a society are mostly okay with.
The only place we're differing is whether other people have the right to complain about it. I think you would agree that people are free to feel bad about you eating meat, and I would agree that verbally or physically assaulting you for it is something that a person doesn't have a right to do.
However, do you have a right to be free of ALL criticism ever?
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Can we all agree that meat eating is slowly going out the door like gas cars? And just like gas cars it will take a while because you can't uproot an industry that big without causing waves. No harm in advocating a world with less suffering but people will be hesistant to your ideas if you're so militant about them.
"Aggressive" is pretty rare.
Smug? A good half of vegetarians, and a solid four fifths of vegans.
That's not how it works.
That's not how any of it works.
A mammalian species evolving SENTIENCE in a hundred years is about as absurd as creationism. (Okay, a pinch less)
Smug? A good half of vegetarians, and a solid four fifths of vegans.
That's not how it works.
That's not how any of it works.
A mammalian species evolving SENTIENCE in a hundred years is about as absurd as creationism. (Okay, a pinch less)
MagicWithEarvin
Member
Aggressive vegans also leave in the middle of a family dinner (with dead fish on the table) to go outside.
cpp_is_king
Member
Err, no? I don't think we can agree about that at all. Gas cars will be gone in 20-30 years. Meat? Not in the next 200, if ever.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
You missed the point.
Meat is tasty as hell. It is never going away. it's nothing like using a gas car.
The climate argument for not eating meat is a good one, the morality argument is a laughably bad one.
I think the word you want is "sapience". Most animals are sentient.
Lonewulfeus
Member
You can choose not to support electronics companies as well but you don't. I'm not the one advocating for livin a life where I cause a little suffering as possible. I accept that in the world we live in there will be suffering and I don't pick and choose which suffering is ok and which isn't because none of it's ok. The veganism is just assuaging your own feelings of guilt. Cant you see the similarities to veganism and religion?
So that's what they call virtue signaling.
Lonewulfeus
Member
Do you have any empathy for the people forced to work in mine for next to no pay in brutal conditions to dig up the rare earth metals used to create the computer and or phone you are posting on? No? Then stop whining about meat eaters.
FinalStageBoss
Banned
No. Meat isn't going anywhere. It's too delicious tbh.
So, you don't care about anything, you're such a badass.
Sorry, I'll now start eating meat again, buy a car and pollute a ton, litter to my heart's content... Hell, I might even start voting for a far right party. There's no point in trying to do any positive change if you can't fix all of the world's problems at once, so let's go all in. Maybe then I'll be as enlightened and cool as you.
The necessity of electronic devices is a lot higher than meat. I'd advocate better working conditions for them, there's nothing about electronics that requires cruelty to be made.
People that go around unwilling to cut back on meat despite the catastrophic effects on the environment, thinking that animal's don't deserve any better than factory farms are absolutely disgusting. You don't have to stop eating meat, just be mindful of how much
cpp_is_king
Member
Are they really? People survived without electronics just fine before electricity was invented.
People also lived until 40
Similar threads
- Locked
- Locked