Relevant to the discussion about whether humanity ought to look to their own home before seeking another, here’s a problem for the techno-fetishists. Solve this very human vexation:
That’s a group of hunters from Mississippi gloating over their kill: a 910 pound alligator. They sportingly converged on it and shot it dead with 6 .50 caliber bullets — they weren’t exactly playing with pop-guns here, and there was about zero threat to them when they’re hunting with cannons.
Afterwards, poking around the corpse, it was discovered that it was 185 years old, and that it had survived the Civil War — its hide contained 9 musket balls that had been shot at it by Confederate troops. And the hunters are smiling, without a hint of shame or guilt or even doubt that it was appropriate to butcher such a magnificent beast.
We don’t teach respect for this world, and we don’t condemn the people who wreck it. What hope is there for humanity?
Fuck those guys.
They are exactly what’s wrong with humanity
Not sure how I feel about this. Humans have always hunted, it’s our nature — part of our originally evolved niche. The Civil War era soldiers who shot at the gator were presumably in need of food; these guys can get meat elsewhere but that still requires exploiting animals, and in a worse way than just shooting one that got to live a normal life in the wild. They couldn’t have known this particular creature was that old. My rural town is overrun with white tailed deer and I’m more than encouraging of hunting. Now that the Indians, the cougars and the wolves no longer hunt them, somebody has to do it.
Hunting wild creatures doesn’t wreck the world, unless of course they are over-hunted and thereby endangered (viz. elephants). However, eating industrially produced meat certainly does. Therefore I don’t eat it. However, I have no ethical objection to eating wild game as long as its population is healthy.
Did the alligator threaten homes which were too close to its hunting grounds or did the hunters kill him only for fun and the opportunity to gloat?
(that’s a rhetorical question, by the way)
***
Well, if there’s no hope, why not going all the way toward this premise logical conclusion and advocating for self-inflicted extinction?
@2 cervantes
When the hunter gets a huge thrill and is jubilant from snuffing out the life of these creatures, that’s when I have a problem with it.
Otherwise, I can’t argue too heavily with your viewpoint. I’m a vegan wannabe (not for health, but due to my love of nature), but I enjoy meat at just about every meal. I’m aware of my hypocrisy.
Yes, many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of hunting for sport. But I can’t see why it’s more objectionable than snuffing cattle in a slaughterhouse for profit. If somebody can give me a good explanation of the moral distinction, I’ll be listening.
You’re human* and you condemn the people wreck it. We’ll have to make some hope out of that, because god’s not coming to save us. Or even to condemn us to hell for our acts.
*As far as I know.
Three total coincidences in a row. Who would have thunk it. ;)
@cervantes
” But I can’t see why it’s more objectionable than snuffing cattle in a slaughterhouse for profit.” precisely because it’s massacre for fun. You can argue that slaughterhouse is outsourced survival, but there is no other thrill in hunting and killing than killing.
@tarhim
“because it’s massacre for fun” – So you’re saying it’s the attitude of the actors and not the act itself that’s the problem. I’ll give you that – I will cheerfully condemn almost every aspect of Southern culture. But otherwise I’m with cervantes: hunting wild game, as long as said game is not endangered, is more humane than raising pigs for slaughter. The alligator had a good life (presumably). The pigs don’t.
It’s pretty obviously not real, guys I mean dang.
In reality, I’m sure different people derive different kinds of enjoyment from hunting. Killing the animal is like any other accomplishment, probably, for most people. It’s satisfying for some people to hunt wild mushrooms, or climb the highest peak in every state, or run a marathon, whatever. I don’t think hunters are necessarily any different or that the thrill of killing per se is what motivates most of them. On the other hand, I don’t see why it matters. What’s going on inside their heads is irrelevant to me.
Trophy Kill is all it is. “They Got the Hugest Alligator Ever!!!1!” is what makes them happy, and what they’re gloating about in that pic, up there. Cervantes, to me, that is the moral difference between this kill and the slaughter of food animals. The meat from those abattoirs feed somebody; i.e. “life giving life”, etc. But the Trophy Kill is nothin but a trophy, essentially a photo that these guys can point to and say, “That’s me right there, I was on that team that killed that monster!!”
@cervantes
“On the other hand, I don’t see why it matters.”
I don’t really know how to explain it to you in other words. They killed living creature without a very good reason when they should know better. It’s unethical.
I took a tour of the East Alligator River (misnamed — it’s full of crocodiles, not alligators) in the Northern Territory of Australia and the guide, who was Aboriginal, was complaining about hunters, usually American, who came to “hunt” the big saltwater crocodiles in a modern boat with high-powered rifles. He said that he was all in favour of hunting crocodiles as a test of one’s prowess so long as you did it the traditional way — using spears and a bark canoe.
That actually seems like a good argument for not living on this planet any more. Let’s just get all the progressive people to another world and leave this festering pit behind. If you think it’s a systemic problem that will follow humanity around, that’s an argument for “upgrading” humanity.
Nature is interesting, but it could use improvement. I wouldn’t mind an enlightened form of humanity taking direct control of the entire biosphere through nanotech, managing the entire system down to the microbe and what eats what. Now, as to how feasible that is…. likely not in a million years.
@joel
Sure, but let’s maybe start by condemning and curbing most destructive human behaviours? If we achieved technical civiliisation, maybe we can try to upgrade our code of conduct a little, too?
Four fools not worth the turd that floats in the flowing sewage. That’s all I see. I still cannot get this fascination for hunting animals with guns. Animal that men cannot stand face to face against… and I am talking deer.
# 10 Sally Stearns
Yup. Although one could still discuss the ethics surrounding the original (real) trophy photo, I guess.
I sometimes hunt for food or to get rid of a particularly pesty pest. As a kid I thought it was clever. Once I got over 12 or so and realised there was very very little ‘skill’ in it I found I could not gain any triumphant pleasure from it any more. Most people I know who hunt are the same.
Trophy hunting really is the lowest of the low especially against something that can be killed with absolutely zero threat to the hunter.
cervantes @ 5;
As pointed out by tarhim and twas brillig (stevem), the slaughter of animals for meat at least serves a practical purpose in the production of food, even though it can very persuasively be argued that that means of producing food is problematic in itself. Conversely, sport hunting is killing another living creature for no better reason than the notional ‘glory’ of the act of what twas brillig (stevem) accurately describes as a trophy kill, or in all too many cases for the personal gratification the hunter draws from the destruction of another creature, which is even worse.
The inflcition of death and suffering on other creatures for pleasure seems pretty clearly unethical to me.
@ 11;
Perhaps it should matter – the kind of mentality that places a premium on blasting away at effectively defenceless animals with high powered rifles as ‘sport’ does not exist in a vacuum. America is well known to be a firearm saturated society that is suffering an ongoing epidemic of gun violence, and here we have a subset of people who seem to enjoy killing living creatures with firearms for its own sake, with no greater purpose behind their actions. That sounds like it should ring alarm bells to me, because it seems at least possible that a minority of those people who seem to enjoy the death of other living things as recreation might one day decide to turn their guns on other human beings at the slightest (perceived) provocation.
Perhaps I am overreacting here, but it seems worth considering, at least.
That article may be bogus, but this one isn’t:
“Mice with half-human brains four times smarter than their peers: scientists” http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/mice-with-half-human-brains-four-times-smarter-than-their-peers-scientists/
(thinks) “Transgenic, super-clever crocodilians infiltrating human habitats” BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
More rodents: Evil genius capybaras holding up people for their cellulose supplies?
Sinister super-cats tripping up humans as they sit by the stairs?
I always knew some day mice would be smarter than scientists, but it’s really grand to still treat them as their peers.
Okay, my problem is the lack of reflection.
“Hey, let’s go hunting. We’ve always gone hunting,” is an okay and reasonable thought. “Gee, that’s a big alligator; let’s bag and trophy it” is somewhat understandable. It’s not *my* culture and I find it a bit distasteful but that’s just a culture clash. But then the discovery that this alligator was one of the oldest living animals on earth and a near-mythical magnificent bit of (no longer) living history, the proper response should be “gee, maybe we shouldn’t have done it” or at least “Wow, we’re in awe; we’re in the presence of something greater than us” or even a “gee, it makes you think”. All of which were lacking.
The white-tail deer are a year or two old tops and, as long as it isn’t socially acceptable sadism (which I’m not convinced it isn’t entirely), hunting them is fine. But this alligator is magnificent and killing it for the sake of killing stuff is … gauche.
birgerjohansson @21:
There’s a film there! Deep Green Swamp?
Okay, so I guess I’ll be the third “it’s fake”…
It was a satirical news site that reported it was “alive during the civil war”. They killed a giant alligator, yes, but they did not find Civil War bullets in it.
Survival across deep time and interstellar distances are really the same thing, and both of those are problems that require long-term planning and strategic thinking. Humans flat out suck at that. We also suck at multi-thousand year systems reliability; short-term thinking – like those grinning goons in the picture – is predominant. We’re not big enough to fill the shoes we can imagine.
Good Eye Sally Stearns.
I’m pretty sure condemning shooting animals for fun is classist or something.
My sister said once the only difference between hunters and serial killers is the choice of prey. That has always stuck in my mind.
Good to know it’s not a true report though. 185 seemed really old for an alligator?
I’ll add #notallhunters.
No. He’s not saying anything about attitude. What he’s talking about is purpose.
Fuck any and all sport hunters. I have no objection to hunting for food or other utilitarian products (pelts/skin, sinew, bladders, etc.) or population management of species that pose threats to other species. This is one case where motivation very much does matter because it informs one hell of a lot of the context and indeed whether certain killings will ever be carried out (there’s a lot less killing of things if we do it only out of necessity – though we will inevitably argue about what’s necessary – and never for sport).
I have known many responsible hunters who truly care about the environment, the health of the animals in the ecosystem, and took no actual thrill in the taking of a life – maybe a solemn sense of accomplishment – but no 12 yr old glee at murdering something. I agree with many here that trophy hunting is despicable. I also agree that hunting for food is far better for the animals, our environment, and our health. However, I am totally one of those hypocrites that prefers their meat pre-killed, pre-cleaned and wrapped in plastic. I sometimes feel if I am not willing to kill and clean it myself, then I have no business eating it. It also puts overeating and waste into perspective – if you had to raise or hunt your meat, it would bee a lot more traumatic if you overcooked that ham or let the leftovers in the fridge spoil – there would be more of a sense of responsibility for sure. My problem is I can’t stand being around guns (and I think bow hunting is beyond cruel), and it would truly break my heart to kill something. But then, I gloss over all the suffering and damage of the factory farms….so yeah….fuck me.
I saw a TedTalk once by a guy who was a total liberal, tree hugger type -but he himself couldn’t stay away from meat – so he came up with the idea of “Weekday Veg”. Nothing with a face Mon-Fri. I think it’s a brilliant idea. But I haven’t implemented it. So yeah….again…fuck me.
Here is the real article:
http://abclocal.go.com/story?section=news/bizarre&id=8831591
There’s nothing about the alligator’s age. The typical lifespan of a wild alligator is about 50 years, so the fake story is implausible on that count. There’s also nothing about why the men chose to hunt it. They may have eaten it for all we know.
The original picture is also marked as coming from the MS Dept. of Wildlife, so these guys definitely weren’t poachers.
#31, John Horstman
What are your thoughts on whaling… perhaps by people who state that it is part of their culture?
#32, phere
Must be quite a few shellfish that fall under that category, no?
Oh look, PZ made it into Rawstory. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/viral-carl-sagan-film-about-space-exploration-espouses-destructive-philosophy-of-locusts-biologist/
I’m probably just being touchy this morning, but I’m not sure I see the connection with the other post.
I mean, criticism of these guys for callously killing an ancient and harmless creature. Great. I second that. (Hypothetically at least. Notwithstanding the source of the story, or Cervantes’ good point about the relatively greater aggregate harm of various types of factory slaughter.)
But there’s also a shot taken in the vague direction of “techno-fetishists”.
Whoever they are.
I mean, normally I’d read “techno-fetishists” as, say, silicon valley types who wear their google glasses and iUnderPants into the shower or whatever. But that doesn’t really seem connected to shooting alligators. And anyway, it’s a reference to the Sagan ‘locusts’ post somehow.
That post was criticizing the, ahem, well-known exploitative, anti-environmental message of the late Carl Sagan, and taking to task his followers who invariably advocate burning our own stupid planet down to the mantle and then setting off on the trivially easy (so they say) voyage to, say, a moon of Jupiter. Someplace where humanity’s billions can finally live the easy life, free from the constraints of a low radiation environment, oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, outdoor temperatures where water remains liquid, or a robust biosphere.
Of course, the confusing thing there is that Sagan advocated no such thing. Nor, AFAICT, is there any indication that the maker of that video was advocating that position. Or any of Sagan’s other fans.
Now, it’s possible that a few people do exist who hold that position, or at least a slightly less cartoonish version of it. There’s certainly a broad strain of obnoxious (and noxious) libertarianism running through some sectors of the science fiction and space enthusiast community, for example. That’s more than ripe for criticism. There are also some individuals who are perhaps rather too optimistic about the scientific, economic, and engineering challenges of the colonization of space. (I’d argue that’s usually a pretty benign malady, at least when not coupled with the libertarianism. But if optimism really gets your goat, fire away.)
The problem is, no such positions or individuals are actually identified in the ‘locusts’ post. The ones who are identified are the ones we must assume are the targets: Sagan himself, and those, like the maker of the video, who feel inspired by the idea that mankind might one day occupy, in addition to Earth, prosperous outposts in more distant and hostile places. Neither of them appear to be excessively sanguine about the difficulties of exploration, or advocating careless exploitation of Earth’s resources before, during or after those efforts.
Yet these are the “techno-fetishists” identified for criticism. Practically speaking, I imagine they’re the ones who might join me to modestly suggest that humankind everywhere could benefit from, for example, allocating something more than one tenth of one percent of GDP toward pursuit of a space program (please, sir). Possibly the astronomical sum of two or three times that amount. Which budget might even allow for an expanded human exploration component, and research into establishing more permanent and sustainable human presence elsewhere in the solar system. (Research which obviously would have <sarc>zero</sarc> spillover effects into things like health sciences, sustainable agriculture, manufacturing, energy, etc.)
Clearly an outlandish position. And, obviously, before anyone should be allowed to call for, say, moving a rounding error or two from the defense budget to the space program, we must go forth to the swamps and end the epidemic of alligator hunting, child hunger, and perhaps ignorance in general.
Alas, the ignorance part is probably true, inasmuch as that’s part of what might lead people toward, say, euthanizing the space program to help pay for a couple more killer drones or tax breaks. The rest is not valid.
Then why do they do it?
anym@34: Bivalves don’t have faces, but shrimp, lobster, and crabs do. (And the glorious squids, of course. Mmmm, calamari.)
I suppose bivalves feel pain, in the sense that they have a nervous system of some sort that indicates when they’re being damaged or have been removed from the water to a less ideal environment? (I’m not a biologist, much less a biologist who studies these animals.)
Now I want oysters for dinner.
I think the point is that while “techno-fetishists” like to tell the human story as one of indominable spirit casting off the shackles of terrestrial confines and experiencing unlimited glory of our noble endeavors. Yet the true human story is told in the alligator story; we are a bunch of short-sighted idiots perpetually shitting in our paradise and choking the glory around us we are too stupid to even value.
At leas what I the point was supposed to be.
#38, frog
Do squid count as shellfish? Its a terrible term, really. Bivalve was probably the term I was looking for, but there are other things which don’t have faces as such… urchins spring to mind (and given how well they’re protected, I’d have expected them to taste a lot better). I guess ‘don’t eat anything with a nervous system’ doesn’t quite trip off the tongue so easily.
Here’s a nice scallop photo, though: http://web.augsburg.edu/~capman/photoofmonth/scallop-eyes-menacing-close.jpg
These are the type of human who would have no trouble dressing in black uniforms and herding millions of people into gas chambers just because.
not so sure about black uniforms or any thing like that but I doubt very much there is very much admitted deep thinking about much of anything at all. creature comforts first and foremost followed by the good opinion of their friends (bro’s) all on a short term basis naturally.
uncle frogy
Uh, I don’t want to end up in the position of actually defending those guys, but:
#29, Julie
#41, abusedbypenguins
Sport hunting may be wasteful, destructive, pointless, cruel… but I’m pretty certain it is not equivalent to the calculated slaughter of human beings. The capacity to kill an animal does not even begin to equal the capacity to kill a person.
The original site is supposed to be a satire site. But this article is some really fucking shitty satire. D- work at best.
jack lecou: The point isn’t that Sagan was anti-environmental or anything. The point isn’t even about Sagan. The point is that the idea of colonizing new worlds doesn’t juxtapose well with our collective fucking up of this world.
If I got their gist correctly, the idea is to create fake, shocking news and then capitalize on the clicks. The “satire” label is just an excuse.
Alright, maybe. That man still tastes awfully straw-like to this alligator though.
Again, such people may exist. But Sagan, and I expect most of those in his camp, are not, by any stretch, the glassy-eyed ‘techno-fetishists’ of this description. Sagan, for one, seemed pretty aware of our human stupidities. If anything, the story they tell is more like the inverse of this: it’s about science and rationality being tools which may help us master, slowly, in gasps and spurts, our failings and ignorance.
So reaching for big, noble goals is about fighting our longstanding propensity toward wallowing in our own shit, not denying it. It’s not a blind optimism which is controverted by observations of actual human nastiness – it takes that as a given. And it’s a cautious optimism inspired by the hope of one day overcoming it.
In other words, it’s the answer to the question at the end of the OP, and a billion posts like it: What hope is there for humanity? Why, to recognize our failings and to do better. To make discoveries instead of war. To help one another instead of making a few richer. To build great things instead of leaving huge messes. To learn and explore and grow.
anym #43,
What are you basing that on? I’m not going to argue that humans and other animals are equal or that killing them is equally wrong (I don’t believe that), but having the capacity to commit extreme violence (even against animals) and regularly practicing it does seem to have an effect on whether someone has the capacity to commit violence against humans. The correlation between people who abuse animals and people who abuse children or spouses has been part of common knowledge for a long time, as is the fact that many serial killers start by abusing animals. 30 seconds of google brought me to an APA paper on the link between animal abuse and child abuse, and there are many others out there like it.
https://www.apa.org/education/ce/pet-abuse-family-violence.pdf
With their cultures’ traditional rocket propelled grenades?
I agree with #14’s guide.
doki:
That explains that, don’t it?
toska:
QFT.
But that doesn’t make sense. The point – Sagan’s point, I think – is they aren’t just juxtaposed, they’re inextricably linked. You can’t colonize domes on Iapetus without understanding, on a very deep level, how – and why – to not fuck up your biosphere, whichever one it happens to be.
There is something deeply wrong with 1) enjoying killing and 2) not realizing the beauty that this destroys.
We also 3) think we are immune to nature and we can wreck it without suffering consequences.
Still, PZ, I’ll stick to be a Sagan fanboy AND a rabid environmentalist, and see no contradiction whatsoever in this.
PZ, did you read the disclaimer on that fake news web site?
Other than that, I totally agree that humanity, at least the current civiluzation, is doomed.
Jack lecou: I don’t even understand how your response to me was supposed to make any sense. PZ’s point is precisely that we HAVEN’T reached the point where we are not fucking up our own biosphere. (Also, if we did, that kinda obviates the need of colonizing new planets). Do you not get that?
And?
I mean what’s the logic? The fact that we haven’t learned how not to fuck up our own biosphere yet means… learning more about/how to colonize other planets is somehow in conflict with learning how not to fuck up our own (and vice versa)? It’s one or the other? Please elaborate, because they seem pretty related to me.
And how exactly would having a not-fucked planet obviate the
needurge (ftfy) to colonize others?The torture and slaughter of billions of animals for meat is a far greater evil than sport hunting.
Both are done for enjoyment, but there’s a vast difference in scale.
jack lecou, let me type slowly for you:
We do not know how to properly steward a planet that is bountiful and already is capable of sustaining human life.
IF we attempt to colonize another planet, we will either fail or fuck up a new brand new planet.
If we knew how to live on our current planet in a sustainable fashion without causing significant damage to the planet itself, we would not need to create colonies on other planets to escape the damage we are dealing to this one.
What exactly is hard to follow here? Please, explain. IT seems like you are deliberately missing the point.
Anders Kehlet:
It depends on whether you give equal weight to necessary evils versus evils done without need and purely for pleasure.
That said, the meat industry, even if you consider meat necessary, is STILL gratuitously evil in how the mistreat animals throughout life and death, so you still have a good point.
anteprepro: Humans don’t need meat. It’s not a matter of opinion.
@57, anteprepro (and so many others)
I keep seeing this claimed. “Meat industry”, “evil”. But can anyone back this up?
Agreed, so far as it goes. (I’d say the knowledge more or less exists already as to what we ought to do, but not as to how to get everyone to actually do it. That’s the tricky part.)
Which is obviously why any sensible person couldn’t/wouldn’t propose actually going for it (as opposed to researching it) until we knew how to do it .
Living on earth sustainably would not obviate the desire to colonize other worlds because escaping the damage we’re doing to our own planets is not a (serious) reason to colonize others in the first place. Outside of some silly, and generally plot-hole-ridden movies, escaping from a fertile world to a barren one to avoid self-inflicted environmental destruction is… not actually a thing. That’s the fundamental strawman in these posts.
As you keep quite correctly pointing out, no thoughtful person would suggest ignorantly haring off to some new planet when the one we’ve got, no matter how badly damaged it might be, is probably still much closer to habitable than some lifeless, asphyxiating rock. Hence no one has.
Stop assuming everyone who proposes working toward colonizing other worlds is thoughtless and illogical, and I think the mystery will clear right up. There exist people who would like to figure out humans can live sustainably on AND off earth.
#59 brianpansky:
*mind boggles*
You do know that producing meat involves the slaughter of sentient beings, right?
tarhim @8. 13
Your point about slaughterhouses being outsourced survival is moot since the meat from this alligator will also go to feed someone. It might not be the hunters, but someone will get use out of whatever edible meat there is. It’s not just tossed in the garbage.
As for the ethics of it. I see no ethical difference between hunters killing an animal for the thrill of it and the system our industrialized farms and slaughterhouses use. If you really think that forcing animals to live horrible lives inside cages that barely fit them only to be marched into their own death chamber never having known anything but the cruelty of humans simply so that corporations can increase their profit margins is any less unethical than hunting, then honestly I feel sorry for you. Hunting might be killing for thrill, but slaughterhouses are simply genocide for profit.
@61, Anders Kehlet
Oh that’s all…
Here you go.
jack lecou: I think you are trying to read too much into PZ’s cynical (though not as cynical and pessimistic as antepesto’s) scoff. I think PZ is scoffing at how space colonization is presented in glowing, idealistic, romantic visions much as a teen-ager dreams about his first apartment and taste of freedom. PZ is just a cynical parent who points out this fifteen-year old is wading neck deep in dirty underwear and can’t even microwave leftovers.
Careful, PZ: http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/disclaimer/
Anders Kehlet:
That didn’t address my point at all so congratulations.
brianpansky: I keep seeing this claimed. “Meat industry”, “evil”. But can anyone back this up?
I am fucking astounded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_animal_farming
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/slaughter/slaughterhouse.html
http://www.mspca.org/programs/animal-protection-legislation/animal-welfare/farm-animal-welfare/factory-farming/pigs/pigs-on-a-factory-farm.html
Warning: some auto-play features:
http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/belly-beast-meat-factory-farms-animal-activists
jack:
Considering your completely unartful dodging in an attempt to say Elon Musk isn’t doing exactly that, I’m gonna take your declaration of “strawman” with a grain of salt.
brianpansky: Carrier isn’t always right, but he always writes at great length. At a glance I can tell that very little of that essay is relevant to what I wrote, so I’ll ask you to address my argument specifically.
Just so we’re clear, my position is as follows:
P1: It is immoral to slaughter sentient beings.
P2: Cows, pigs, et.c. are sentient.
C: It is immoral to slaughter cows, pigs, et.c.
Exactly what is expected from a presuppositionalist like animal rights activists. And why it isn’t worth the time and effdort arguing with you. You are hushfiled with the rest of the preachers. Your message is ignored.
anteprepro:
What, this?
Eating meat is not a necessary evil because eating meat is not necessary. Eating meat is therefore purely done for pleasure and is in that aspect equivalent to sport hunting.
Yeah. I’m probably overgrumping.
But I don’t know about that analogy. There isn’t any ‘adult’ in this. It’s not a ‘mature’ civilization chiding the adolescent one about their dirty underwear, both secure in the knowledge that it’s just a phase regardless. Instead, all we’ve got is the one angsty adolescent, engaging in serious internal debate about whether they deserve to ever try to leave the room at all. Adding a voice to one or the other side of that has consequences.
Nerd: Wow.
Being immediately othered like that is just… wow…
I’m not even quite sure what triggered you. Was it one of the premises? You do know that it’s fair game to challenge the premises of an argument, right? I was prepared for that.
For the record, I’m not an activist and I eat meat on a regular basis.
@cervantes:
The alligator was an autonomous, venerable creature. Cattle are raised by humans for their meat. It’s sort of like equating the clearcutting of an old growth forest and harvesting a field of broccoli.
On Carrier’s article… Leave aside the rest dealing with concerns about the environment or human health. That’s a long discussion, and it isn’t relevant to the point Anders raised in this thread (as was already mentioned).
His point about sentience (which he puts in terms of “compassion”) is just absurd. He says essentially that vegetarians can’t really believe it’s bad (not at all?), because they’d have to be utterly horrified and act accordingly. What must that acting be like? It must be like his straw-vegetarian. It is like nothing else in the world matters to them. There must be pure, unfiltered outrage at every moment, treating it as the exact moral equivalent of Nazi genocides, with no sense of trying to act diplomatically around others to nudge them in the right direction, no concern for trying to reduce meat consumption but only ever to completely abolish it, no sign of any conflicting feelings about what other good things their friends/family might do, etc.
In other words, the people he was thinking of must not be actual people, or they must not be in a complicated world filled with all sorts of complicated problems that can’t generally be solved in the most ludicrously simple fashion. Since neither of those is true, he’s got no defense there. But I’m sure it looks like a knockout blow to some people anyway.
Eating FOOD is necessary, shitwit. Eating meat is NOT equivalent to killing just to get a brofist or a fucking trophy on your mantle, you disingenuous fucker.
Also, did you fail to notice in the whopping two fucking sentences I gave you?
I don’t consider meat necessary per se, but it definitely would not be an easy task to feed an entire nation or entire fucking planet without it either. This ain’t fucking candy we are talking about.
David Suzuki explains exponential growth, how it has limited the (very near) future of the human species, and why it may be pointless for us to colonize other planets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15mJEwcdrIA
We should take care of this planet.
Nerd @68:
Was The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals also presuppositional?
@67, Anders Kehlet
See his last paragraph in this comment.
Which has nothing to do with eating meat as a biological omnivore. If you decide to take it to a conclusion, that supports the animal rights activists, do so, and like with religion, do so privately, and don’t preach to others.
anteprepro: Fine, we can be all antagonistic if you want, even though we largely agree.
Not all food is meat.
Fuck you.
Both are done for pleasure and are equivalent in that respect.
Fuck you.
The construction you used implies that it’s a matter of opinion, which was what I initially objected to.
Hurray. We agree.
Also, fuck you.
brianpansky: I take it you are willing to argue that position?
Fine.
Provide evidence for the claim that cows, pigs, et.c. are not “valuing agent[s]”; That they are simple “pain-pleasure software routine[s]” and little more.
Okay, this part is awfully suspicious:
First, this claims either that there’s literally no consequence other than stopping their brain functions (which is clearly false), or that all of the other consequences are morally irrelevant. I’m going to figure it’s not the first option.
So how did he determine the latter, how far is this supposed to be extended in various directions, and why? If you killed me while I was in a deep non-aware state of sleep, or while I was in a coma, etc., is it the case that there’s no harm done (to me or anyone else)? Do we have to start talking about potentialities or something, and where the hell did those start creeping in to our discussion of facts? Or maybe there’s a risk that I’d come out of the coma, so in that case it presumably has something to do with some probability of that happening, instead of what in fact is actually the case. How are we supposed to even make sense out of the idea that this is “all you do”? Is self-awareness some distinct thing that’s either entirely present or not in some organism, rather than shades of gray or different capacities which contribute to being aware of oneself at some level? If it’s less black-and-white than it’s being presented, which ones are the morally relevant kinds of self-awareness and how do we know that? And before we get to any of that, is it even safe to assume that there is literally no suffering at all when an animal is butchered; and if not, why isn’t that even a part of the discussion?
Lots of questions there and plenty more where that came from. But brushing it all off, as if Carrier had somehow given the final word on the matter, is just not taking the issue seriously.
Nerd @78: Ah, so it’s the “immoral to kill sentient beings” that you consider presuppositionalist? OK, if a bit confusing.
#82 Rob Grigjanis: That’s one way to put it. Personally, I have not a fucking clue what Nerd is on about or why s/he has such a hate-on for animal rights activists.
Would a sufficiently advanced species regard us in the same way? I doubt we could plead our case to them by appealing to logic, as they’d just view that as an inadvertent rationalization of a doomed creature with sentience and forethought. After all, those traits which we hold as necessary to a life’s qualifying for continued existence may be as deterministic as the ant following a pheromone trail.
Also, if you tell Nerd that he’s wrong, or even might be wrong so that the matter can be discussed intelligently, it’s called “preaching.” These are at least the sort of sounds which are made and how they’d be understood by nearly everyone else, whenever he gets barking like this, but I can’t vouch for them actually having any definite meaning.
@80, Anders Kehlet
Well no, I’m not willing to spend time right now, hence being terse thus far.
enough with the attempted gotchyas.
fact is, that is a REAL picture of a REAL gator caught in 2012 by REAL hunters… the guys in the picture.
only the article linked to was faked for fun.
if you’re gonna try and play gotchya, at least do your background research first.
i don’t know about Nerd, but I can explain exactly why I have a passionate hatred for animal “rights” activists if you like.
and I scarequote “rights” for the literal, legal meaning of the word. Got no problem with people for the compassionate treatment of animals, and people who push for good animal husbandry, as I’ve done that myself for decades. If for no other reason that it has been shown time and again that if you’re doing research on animals, especially behavior, good, consistent husbandry is key to getting good results.
meh, you probably don’t want to hear me rant about it for a page and a half of exposition covering my last 30 years of experience with animal rights activists though.
really.
brianpansky: Figured as much. So when can we expect your brilliant response to the points made by myself and the ever eloquent razor?
Ichthyic: Is there a short version? ^^
Okay. Mussels and oysters are okay to eat.
But seriously, who in fuck could possibly make an assumption that a *pig* is not self-aware. Has the writer ever *seen* a pig?
It’s a real picture of a *50* year-old alligator. 50 years is a less than 185.
Well, did they eat it, or just let it rot?
I’m kind of okay with this if the animal was put to good use.
In my experience, it is usually the massive holier-than-thou attitude that shits me. Personally, I’m coming round to the idea that leather is fine if it comes from an animal already being slaughtered for food, on the principle that more of the animal is being put to use.
One shooter I knew treated killing feral goats in South Australia’s Gammon Ranges as an exercise in skill. The qualifications for even being allowed to participate in the shooting team at all were pretty onerous. Everybody had to be a current member of a shooting club and had to demonstrate accuracy, repeatedly, that equated to killing with a single headshot at a fair distance (I don’t recall the details) every single time. One inaccurate shot in the qualifying trial meant that a shooter wouldn’t be on the team that year. (They went for a 3 week period at a specified time of the year.)
@89, Anders Kehlet
Your premises in 67 were assertions. If you back them up, I might reply. I came to this thread asking for information, and I dealt with your first unhelpful response out of annoyance. (Note to self: I really need to be more careful and stop letting these things turn around, I really don’t have time.)
@Consciousness Razor
hmmm I”m not sure Carrier has all the stepping stones of reasoning he needs, though I recall he commented on (some) criticisms similar to yours somewhere…
…I dunno, I just saw that he’s also opposed to killing fetuses after third trimester O_o
@90, woozy
odd, he says basically the same thing in reverse.
I’m looking at both of you like “um thanks -_____-“
brianpansky
Like you, I’m not sure how much time I want to spend on this one, but here are my thoughts anyway.
Assuming pigs are not self aware, as Carrier argues, is it possible to do any harm (or beneficial action) to a pig? Is it possible for any action against an animal to be considered moral or immoral in and of itself? I ask because the thing that disgusts me so much about the modern meat industry isn’t so much the death of animals, but the deplorable conditions they live in for their entire lives in most cases. Even if animals are to be considered simple pleasure/pain programs, the ag industry relies on activating the pain side of that program almost exclusively for the sake of efficiency. Their methods of denying this tend to be lobbying for “ag gag” laws that make it a felony to take any pictures or videos of their facilities, which is skeevy as hell.
If we’re talking about just the death aspect of meat production (assuming a perfect system where animals are given the best possible care), I’d still have trouble calling meat production morally neutral. Infants and very young toddlers are equally or even less self aware than some animals (depending on species), so if it is morally wrong to kill them, even for resources (which I’d obviously say absolutely it’s fucking terrible to kill young children), is it completely morally neutral to kill animals with roughly equal mental abilities?
I don’t want anyone to misread me and think I believe killing children and killing animals are morally equal, because I don’t believe that, but I think the main reason to weigh children’s lives much more heavily than animal lives is because, as humans, it’s instinctual to do so, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I still can’t in good conscience say that killing children is an absolute moral wrong while killing animals is absolutely morally neutral.
What to do about it? I have no clue. I disagree that the meat industry is completely unnecessary (most people seem to be able to sustain themselves healthily without meat, but some people can’t because of medical conditions, and some of our domesticated animals certainly can’t. Ending meat production would effectively mean wiping out domesticated and captive felines), so I think it is a necessary evil, but one that can be greatly improved by giving the best possible care to animals raised for slaughter, and maybe someday technology will even make it completely unnecessary, which I would prefer.
And he is utterly and completely wrong. And completely baseless. To wit:
There is absolutely no reason to believe this is true and just a simple observation of a single higher animal existing and interacting in the world should make it obvious to anyone that it probably isn’t true.
So, um, does he ever give a reason why he believes this to be evident and universal? He seems to say something about animals having no sense of “I” or any sense of future. But anyone who has ever had a pet knows neither of these are probably so.
Surely by his reasoning, we ought to be allowed to kill children up to age two and a half years. Pigs are more self-aware than dogs, and dogs are more self-aware than toddlers. So…
Well, but where are others supposed to go to get away from folks like this? And isn’t it kind of unfair to judge humanity based on a handful of hunters and similar folks?
Also, it’s not like we expect to encounter life everywhere we could go, on the contrary. At worst space colonists would destroy the natural beauty of rock formations and other landscapes, right? Bad enough, perhaps.
Lastly, by the time our grasp is long-reaching enough to find other life – if we ever do so – humanity as a whole may have changed massively.
I’m not an optimist, but I just can’t share overall anti-human sentiments (“Oh, look how evil and destructive we are, humanity is such a cancer upon the world…”) despite the negative things humans are also capable of.
@97, woozy
He claims that the science shows that infants, even newborns, have the relevant faculties/processes which most other animals lack.
I’m now thinking he’s confused. I’m fairly familiar with his moral ontology, and I’ve agreed with basically everything he’s said on the subject until now (which is quite a lot if you google his name and “morality”), and I still think he’s wrong here.
Setting Carrier aside, I still don’t see how killing most animals is wrong.
I have started writing something substantial (I should have been in bed a few hours ago!), and so maybe I will end up posting it here to get feedback.
#47, toska
I wasn’t arguing otherwise. The fact that ‘it does seem to have an effect’ absolutely does not imply the capacity to kill another human being, as was being suggested above. A quick and dirty look at some stats in the US suggests that there are tens of thousands of firearm deaths a year, and over 10 million people who hunt with gun. There may be a link, but it is a very weak one, and certainly not one where you can look at a photo of a bunch of guys with a dead animal and confidently state ‘yep. buncha murderers and psychopaths, right there’.
Stop right there. Hunting does not imply abuse. Slaughter of an animal for food and material also does not imply abuse. Hunting does not imply either the ability or the desire to kill humans! You are making huge leaps of logic here. It is just as irrational as looking at that photograph and coming to the conclusion that yup, those folk are clearly one bad afternoon away from building gas chambers.
#98, saganite
#notallomnivores
@96, toska
Of course it isn’t. And literally every position I’ve seen advanced in this thread agrees that such a thing wouldn’t be ok.
anym #100
I thought the comments you were responding to were over the top, and I wasn’t trying to defend them. I was responding to the particular statement you made about the capacity to kill animals being no where near the same level as the capacity to kill people.
Hunting isn’t the same as abuse, but the parallel I see is that just as someone who abuses an animal tends to more easily abuse people, someone who regularly shoots a gun to kill an animal would probably be more capable of shooting a human, even just as a reflexive response or justifiable self defense. That does not mean that everyone who kills animals will kill humans (just like not all children who torture animals grow up to be serial killers. I would guess that number is proportionally small as well), or even that this applies to all hunters, but I do think it’d be easier to transition to killing a person if you’ve used the same exact method to kill an animal.
By the way, I don’t think hunting is completely evil. I have family members who hunt and have eaten game that they killed. I’m just talking about the psychological effects and how killing animals–though not equal to killing humans–seems to be related.
brianpansky
Arguing that killing animals isn’t wrong or evil would be saying that it’s morally neutral, yes? Unless you mean animals can’t have similar mental capabilities as very young children.
I thought this was the entire question you guys were discussing–is it wrong to kill animals (for food or resources). Perhaps I was mistaken? I wasn’t trying to assign a viewpoint to anyone in the thread. I was more asking the question and addressing it myself: it’s necessary to kill animals for food, but not completely morally acceptable either (particularly with our current system).
also not full of revolutionary war musket balls.
SO?
seriously, get over yourselves.
I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly doubt that many, while not all other animals, are definitely sentient.
I’m against hunting….for several reasons, one of the main ones being that “trophy” animals are always the fittest, healthiest individuals, which is the worst fucking selective pressure ever. The entire system is bloody stupid back to front.
I’m however not against captive production as long as welfare is guaranteed and the methodology used to sacrifise the animal is adequate. I look at it this way….if i were a cow, or a chicken, i would currently be presented with two options, i can either face hardship and die in pain, or i can live in relative contempt and die painlessly. There’s no third option where i’m dancing across a meadow in slo-mo and i end up dying of old age surrounded by my family…. Of the two possible options, i think the second one sounds significantly better. Granted, it needs to meet those two conditions, a life of relatively high welfare and a quick, painless death that destroys my brain so there can be no experience.
The people who argue that we shouldn’t eat any meat, no matter how the animals are kept and sacrifised are essentially saying that it’s better for those animals to die suffering, which i find strange. Of course some could argue that we should be working towards making the third option available for all life on earth, except it turns out that’s impossible, so no, only options one and two, either death by tiger or death by gunshot, basically.
I’m pretty sure this is a supermarket tabloid of the kind that announce aliens are poised and ready to invade Earth. Hopefully the article is false. Is it even legal to hunt with a 50 cal? I think one shot would kill an animal that size for a 50 cal. They can stop many vehicles.
#94 brianpansky:
You objected to P1 by claiming that:
1. Not all sentient beings are “valuing agents”.
2. It is not immoral to kill beings that are not “valuing agents”.
I asked you to provide evidence for 1, specifically in regard to common livestock.
I believe the burden of proof is on you because: Humans aren’t magic. Anything that is true of humans could also be true of other animals and as moral agents we should err on the side of caution. This is especially true of close relatives that we know possess much of the same brain circuitry as humans (i.e. most, if not all, mammals).
I really could do without your condescending bullshit.
Anders Kehlet @ 107
They wouldn’t appear to be. Metacognition in rats, similarities in dog caudate activation with humans, pigs using mirrors to learn about their environments? Viewing them like fleshy robots as Carrier suggests is a might big leap when you look at the actual evidence of their awareness of themselves and their environment. There are clearly differences in other animals from humans, but a lot of it looks to be a difference of degree rather than kind.
For me, personally, I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of an animal being killed for my pleasure. I, personally, don’t need meat to survive and therefore whether it was hunted or kept in a feedlot or left to frolic joyfully on an organic rainbow farm, any animal I eat was killed for pleasure and not my survival. So until it’s proven that humans are actually magical and all other animals are meat machines, I prefer to err on the side of caution.
I have mentioned this before in other places and the reaction I was met with ranged from stupidity to disgust to outright hostility.
Here’s my hope for the future: lab grown meat.
Yeah, it’s a LONG way off to make something tasty, nutritional, AND easily/cheaply massed produced.
However, let’s assume there are two ribeye steaks in front of me: one is lab grown and the other is harvested from a live animal. I am assured the taste and texture are indistinguishable between the steaks. In addition, the lab grown option contains more nutrients, no antibiotics or hormones and caused no direct suffering to any being (perhaps there is some environmental impact of lab produced meat – but I’d be truly shocked if it rivaled the environmental devastation of the meat ag industry). Long term studies have shown that this lab meat is safe to eat – aside from the caloric impact which is a end user issue. At that point, it would be morally reprehensible to choose the “real” ribeye.
However in my experience when broaching the subject, people refuse to contemplate the possibility. There is such a distrust of science and disgust at “science meat”. Laughably, we pretty much are eating science meat…the only difference is it still has to come from an animal. Then there are those that defend the meat industry as a way of life and income for hundreds of thousands of people – yet our current factory farm methods a unsustainable. We all know this. So it just baffles me that they would seriously choose to eat the suffering animal raised in cramped, vile conditions until slaughter – which we can only hope was done humanely – but we have no assurance that any particular animal we are eating died peacefully and painlessly.
IMO, the access to affordable, safe, nutritious lab-grown meat will be a game changer – for the entire world.
Is PZ a vegan? If not, I think he should shut his fat mouth.
Moral status is not determined by how “magnificent” a sentient creature is.
So? The article claiming that the alligator was 185 years old and full of civil war musket balls was false. The article was a hoax. You claimed the article doesn’t qualify as a hoax because it was an actual photograph of an alligator and the actual words and claims that the alligator was 185 years old and survived civil war musket balls don’t really count as a significant aspect of the article because, hey, alligators really exist so an article showing a photograph of one but with a thouroughly fictional caption and text was more or less true because alligators are real.
No. The article claimed that hunters caught an 185 year old alligator with civil war musket balls in its hide. In actuality, hunters did not catch an 185 year old alligator with civil war musket balls in its hide. In other words:
The article was not true.
Sheesh.
Um, what exactly is it you think we are trying to claim?
The fact that people talk about vat-grown meat as the answer to the problem of animal exploitation instead of, you know, choosing to not be morally infantile, flabby assholes to satisfy their degenerate taste buds.
… should make us question what hope humanity’s future has, not that some idiot got fooled by a tabloid article.
“Related posts:
USA: Clairvoyant Woman Helps Police Resolve Baby Kidnapping”
PZ Myers, king of rationality. I fear for the future of the atheist community if this is our prophet.
I see trolling troll is trolling again. How quaint.
Back to the topic: It’s really not fair to condemn the entire species because of a single slip up (Mississippi)……….
How is it trolling to point out hypocrisy?
The fact that the atheist community has clamped down hard on misogyny, homophobia and racism but still sees human supremacism and meat-eating as completely acceptable is just fucking pathetic.
Get this into your head, PZ: All oppression is the same fucking oppression. That we’re having polite debates about the issue is sick. Why should I take PZ Myers more seriously as a modern, rational person than I take any regular old misogynistic racist fuck?
Anyone who in the modern day, in the West, makes a conscious decision to keep stuffing their fat bodies with the tortured bodies of sentient beings is a moral joke. It becomes extra obvious when idiots like that fake outrage over some “magnificent beast” being killed.
Not everyone who eats meat is eating farmed animals.
@ #112 – what the fuck would it matter to YOU if someone chose to eat vat-grown meat? You know, modern non-animal agriculture has its own share of burdens which contribute to the degradation of our environment and our health. Both the meat and agriculture industries will have to be redesigned from the bottom up in the coming decades – it’s mission critical. You are exactly the type of vegan that makes it easy for us meat eaters to roll our eyes at and disregard. You can bark and whine and mew at us -but until you contribute something other than insults, you will not be taken seriously.
Hmm, my first reaction was that they might be smiling because the alligator they had killed had killed or at least attacked people.
& #118: Yeah, and John Brown was the kind of abolitionist that made it easy for slave owners to roll their eyes. Feminists didn’t get where they did by being polite, civil rights activists didn’t get where they did by considering the feelings of racists, abolitionists didn’t get where they did by telling slave owners that of course slavery was okay if it felt right for them.
Any community that hates misogyny and sexism to the point of arguing loudly over shirt choices but thinks that the torture and murder of innocent sentient creatures is a fine lifestyle choice is rotten to the core. Why is human supremacism considered a-okay when misogyny, racism, homophobia and other structural forms of oppression are not?
If you don’t have enough fat in your diet, one of the first things to go is brain function.
John Lindberg @ 110;
Firstly, appeals to authority are considered rational fallacies for a good reason. One does not have to be a vegan to be able to make reasoned and worthwhile arguments about the moral dimensions of food production. Arguing otherwise conveniently delegitimises the vast majority of those who might argue against you, and could very easily be interpreted as an attempt to poison the well.
Secondly, body shaming is frowned on here. If you can’t make your argument without trying to use body morphology as a weapon, then the Horde will take you task, and you will deserve it. You also might want to bear in mind that it is far from impossible to become obese while eating a strict vegan diet, and indeed diet and lifestyle are not the only factors to be considered when dealing with the problems presented by obesity.
@ 112;
If vat grown meat can be sustainably and economically produced while the animals providing the stem cell lines are kept in an environment with high standards of welfare (if you contest the possibility of any of the above, I would be interested to hear your arguments and evidence), then why would you find the practice morally objectionable? There would be no need for mass animal husbandry, no need for slaughter. The meat could be grown without any central nervous system, and thus with no conceivable capacity for any suffering whatsoever. All the animal welfare concerns would be answered, and human health concerns fall within the purview of bodily autonomy – it is not for you to tell others how to treat with their own bodies, or what steps to take with regard to their own health. It would simply be none of your business.
What is your reasoning here?
@ 114;
What makes you think anyone here views PZ as a ‘prophet’ or a ‘king of rationalism’?
You will probably see variants of ‘no gods, no masters, no heroes’ written by various people on various threads on this site – it is not just for show. We concern ourselves with the value of a person’s ideas, we do not put people on unassailable pedestals.
There are no secular saints here.
@ 116;
and @ 120;
You do understand that gay people victimised by homophobes, members of minority groups oppressed by racism and women who have suffered under the lash of misogyny their entire lives, not to mention rape survivors, all frequent Pharyngula? How do you think they are made to feel when you use their taruma and oppression as a plank in your argument about animal rights? When you act as if what happened to them has no import beyond your personal issue of choice? The animals who suffer in the meat indistry are indeed sentient, but these people who have suffered and are suffering, who are dying every day due to bigotry and hatred, are not only sentient but sapient – we know they are fully conscious and able to experience dreams, aspirations and suffering to the same degree we do, and yet they are maimed and killed to satiate the hatred of bigots and in the name of patriarchal privilege. You might want to consider that human cost in blood and pain before you so lightly disregard the importance of that struggle.
Has it occured to you that you are straying dangerously close to the territory of your own variant on a Dawkins-style Dear Muslima here? That dealing with the oppression of vulnerable human groups is somehow unimportant or should be delayed because the mistreatment of animals is ongoing? It is not unheard of among animal rights groups, a case in point being PETA’s ongoing use of images that sexually objectify women and even make light of domestic violence in order to promote their message. Ask yourself; is that acceptable?
If you think it is acceptable, then I submit that you have a serious problem with misogyny that you need to address urgently, since no matter how much moral weight you attached to animal rights it should never make the objectification and dehumanisation of women acceptable.
If you think it is not acceptable, then you need to take a long, hard look at what you have written on this thread, and really ask yourself how your actions here differ from what PETA has done – you are still minimising and dismissing the suffering of human beings in your rush to promote animal rights, afterall.
I think you should look again at your own words @ 116;
What does that say about you, given that in this very thread you scolded and belittled the experiences of people who have experienced very real oppression, thus employing your own relatively privileged social position to contribute in your own turn to that oppression? In that light, are you sure your rather self righteous sense of moral superiority is entirely justified?
I eat plenty of nuts, seeds and the occasional avocado. But thanks for the concern.
All you assholes are gonna look real silly once society progresses beyond what you myopically think is the height of empathy civilization is capable of. Luckily, reactionary fucks like you will once be a thing of the past. Have fun on the ash heap of history, “progressives”.
John Lindberg
Now you’re just raving.
Because the former does not involve the suffering and death of actual people, whereas the latter do.
@ #128 “Arguing otherwise conveniently delegitimises the vast majority of those who might argue against you, and could very easily be interpreted as an attempt to poison the well.”
I consider the opinion a slave owner might have on the ethics of slavery irrelevant. I do it now and I would do it in the 19th century.
“I would be interested to hear your arguments and evidence), then why would you find the practice morally objectionable?”
I don’t. Eat vat-meat all you want. I just find it sad that meat-eaters say that they would totally stop torturing sentient beings if only they could still get cheeseburgers. It’s kind of like a misogynist saying that he would stop harassing women if only he could buy a fully functioning sexbot. It’s pathetic.
“How do you think they are made to feel when you use their taruma and oppression as a plank in your argument about animal rights?”
Oh, the old “appropriation” canard. I’ve heard it from TERFs before. People who talk about trans rights are totally offensive to people who care about cis women’s rights, because reasons. Women’s rights was offensive to civil rights for racial minorities, and civil rights was offensive to women.
It’s all the same bullshit oppression. A misogynist is a racist is a homophobe is a human supremacist. You can’t pick a few from the list to oppose and then consider yourself a progressive, moral person. And they are not in conflict. In fact, approving of one kind of oppression is tacit approval of the overarching system of oppression, no matter if you claim to dislike certain parts of it.
“The animals who suffer in the meat indistry are indeed sentient, but these people who have suffered and are suffering, who are dying every day due to bigotry and hatred, are not only sentient but sapient”
After many year studying neuropsychology, cognitive science and (on my own) ethology, one thing is blindingly obvious to me:
There’s no such thing as “sapience”.
Humans are good at a few things, like language, and we have arbitrarily drawn a line around those things we are good at and called it “sapience”. But it has no deeper foundation in any science. There’s syntax, and problem solving, and even moronic tests like if you can figure out who you are in a mirror. It has nothing to do with moral standing. Nothing to do with suffering. It’s bullshit.
Animals dream. Animal are conscious. Those are not uniquely human things.
Regarding PETA: I’m not American, I have no interaction with PETA and barely know of their existence. I’m not fit to make judgments on their actions.
But of course, an animal rights organization doing things that might be seen as misogynistic invalidates all animal rights activists’ struggle against the torture and murder of sentient beings. PZ Myers supporting the torture and murder of sentient beings, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with his attitude towards misogyny.
“What does that say about you, given that in this very thread you scolded and belittled the experiences of people who have experienced very real oppression, thus employing your own relatively privileged social position to contribute in your own turn to that oppression? In that light, are you sure your rather self righteous sense of moral superiority is entirely justified?”
I have not scolded or belittled anyone’s experience of oppression. I have scolded and belittled people engaging in oppression. You thinking yourself oppressed does not give you the right to torture and murder sentient beings.
“Because the former does not involve the suffering and death of actual people, whereas the latter do.”
Who decides who counts as “people”? Are women people? Are Afro-Americans people? Once upon a time the answer was not a resounding yes. There are already projects to extend legal personhood to non-human animals. You are on the losing side of history, reactionary.
And before the inevitable blather about “Oh, so you’re saying that women and Afro-Americans are as dumb as koalas?!”:
There’s a difference between legal personhood and the “equal rights” we give to adult humans. We don’t allow children to vote, but they are still considered persons, not things
But at least my last meal will be a tasty one.
Hurr hurr hurr. Failed attempts at humor is often the last resort of conservatives with no logically coherent arguments for their oppression and exploitation of those weaker than them.
Given that humor is subjective, I imagine a lot of unfunny people must be conservatives then, no? Quick! To the hasty-generalization-mobile!
There is no point in arguing with idiots on the Internet. I can’t convince this brand of evil people to change their ways any more than I can convince the pathological misogynists that stalk the Manosphere. They even have the weight of civilized society crushing down on them, you people are so convinced that you are truly what counts as “progressive” in your slice of spacetime that you refuse to see the vertigo-inducing system of oppression you’re perpetrating.
There is no difference between a meat eater and a homophobe. There is no difference between a human supremacist and a white supremacist. You’re all part of the same system. A system where the strong not only subjugates and feeds, often literally, on those weaker than them. And, to top it off, brands their wickedness “moral” according to a self-serving delusion. At least when the Roman legions or Mongol hordes killed you and took your shit they didn’t brag on their blogs about what good people they were.
Fuck you. You’re what’s wrong with humanity. And these words aren’t even penetrating your thick skulls.
AFAICT, Elon Musk has said no such thing.
As I thought you had acknowledged on the other thread, a couple hours before you wrote the above:
Head scratch.
If you’re genuinely confused, note that there’s a critical difference between a suggestion that we escape (after the fact) and a suggestion that we proactively colonize some new places (in order to have two or more habitable places just in case something goes wrong down the line).
Those are very different things:
Proposal A: “Whelp, getting kind of warm here. Looks like planet Earth’s just about had it. Let’s just go ahead and head off to Mars/Ceres/Europa/newly-discovered-dwarf-planet-beyond-the-Kuiper-belt where the living is easier.” = dumb as rocks stupid/ignorant.
Proposal B: “We should do everything we can to take care of what we’ve got, but it would also be a good idea to work on putting an egg or two in a different basket, just in case.” = colorable argument.
Folks here (including PZ) have been directing a lot of criticism toward A – which is admittedly quite silly, but not a proposal I can recall anyone (hollywood writers aside) having actually made.
The only authority-ish type personage anyone here has pointed to as purportedly making a proposal somewhere in this vicinity is Elon Musk. However, AFAICT, his statements have all been solidly in B territory.
It is moments like this when you should really reflect upon how privileged your life is, given that omnivorous humans are apparently the worst thing in it.
John Lindberg @ 126;
And you think that comparing people who aren’t strict vegans to slave owners isn’t the least bit hyperbolic? At least you haven’t quite Godwined the thread yet so… congratulations, I guess.
That isn’t what you said @ 112;
This baldly states that using vat grown meats is not an acceptable alternative, and still renders one ‘morally infantile’ (even though no animal is being harmed), ‘flabby’ (because it is somehow impossibe to eat meat and not be overweight?), and acting to satisfy ‘degenerate taste buds’ (implying that the mere act of eating meat, even where there is no animal suffering involved, is inherently ‘degenerate’, and apparently specifally speaks to the moral standards of one’s taste organs).
If what you meant to say was ” it is morally reprehesnisble to use the posited future development of vat grown meat as an excuse to fail to engage with the animal suffering caused by contemporary meat production methods”, then you need to use words to that effect.
The fault with a failure to communicate rarely lies with the audience rather than the orator. Your post @ 112 used words that seemed to state that eating meat was an inherently morally offensive practice whether it was vat grown or not.
So, yelling at a community full of rape survivors, gay people, and members of oppressed minorities that they are “reactionary fucks “, and comparing them to slave owners, all because they do not prioritise the fight you have chosen on an equal footing with or above the social injustuices that have blighted their own lives or killed people they care about is OK in your mind? When they express anger that you are ranting about animal rights and dismissing them as progressives despite the many years of work they have put into advancing the cause of social justice, it is just like TERFs engaging in transphobic bigotry under the veil of feminism? Really? You honestly see no difference?
The Oppression Olympics is a waste of time. Not everyone has the energy or knowledge to fight every fight at the same time. Nothing is stopping you focussing on animal rights without cussing out other progressives with a different focus, and yet you seem to be far more invested in telling us how morally superior you are rather than actually doing anything constructive.
This seems to be far more about your ego than anything else.
Has it occured to you that you don’t get to tell others what is ethical as if you have unassailable moral authority? You understand that the simple act of claiming that animals are in all regards morally equivalent to humans doesn’t automatically make it so? You don’t get to just declare the terms of discussion by means of autodictat. You don’t get to tell others how to think or feel. You don’t get to tell the oppressed whether or not their oppression was legitimate enough to count in the world according to you, or act as if they should stop talking about their experiences because you have a different agenda.
Animal rights and human rights may not be in conflict (a position I do not entirely consider accurate, as I will explain later in this post), but that doesn’t mean that one can’t have priorities. For myself, I have only have time and energy enough to help fight so many battles, and I chose to focus my effort on those areas that help minimise human suffering and death. I am not asking you to do the same, but if you want to judge me for placing human suffering at the top of my priority list, then don’t be surprised if I don’t take you seriously.
Citation needed.
And what about the notion of degree? Animals may share essentaily similar attributes to humans in many regards, but the magnitude is so vastly different that at some point a fundamental difference should surely be acknowldged. A rock can be a tool, so is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but are they really exactly the same thing?
I am all in favour of maintaining animal welfare to the highest degree possible, but I am just not the kind of absolutist you are. I would not sacrifice human life to preserve animal life, so certain forms of medical research, while morally challenging, still have my support. Vegan diets are one thing, but not everyone can employ one. Transitioning the entire planetray population to a vegan diet would be no simple task, especially when global hunger and poverty are still such pressing issues. Starving people are unlikely to care much for your arguments. Can you honestly say that you would starve to death, or even simply experience significant food privation, rather than eat meat? You may think you would now, but that is because you, like me, have probably never known real hunger. The kind that brings its very own kind of pain, and feels like your stomach is eating its way to your spine. The kind that distends your belly with gas. The kind that saps your strength like blood flowing from an open wound. Hunger like that would make you do all kinds of things you don’t think yourself capable of, and millions of people live with that kind of hunger every day. Telling them not to eat food that might keep them alive because it offends your sensibilities might be… let’s just say a hard sell.
Even in the more prosperous parts of the world there is still poverty such that veganism would not be an option for everyone. And then there are some people who have health conditions that are incompatible with a vegan lifestyle, and there are the troubling implications of trying to do anything to use law to mandate veganism – you can’t do that without compromising fundamental civil liberties, and so it must always be a choice, and at some point you have to try to actually persuade people of the moral force of your argument. Florrid comparisons to slavery don’t achieve that.
This isn’t comparable to other civil liberties battles, because there progressives were demanding that people recognise the common humanity of all human beings irrespective of skin colour, gender, gender identity, sexuality, non-neuraltypical physiology or other minor differences. In this case, it is asking people to extend the category of person to include what are unambiguously non-humans, and that is asking for a lot more, especially given the inescapable fact that to do so would force radical changes in medical research and food production world wide, and as a result human beings would inevitably die preventable deaths at some point – whether you care to acknowledge it or not, you are asking that innocent people (who are not commited to your cause enough to die for it, lest we forget) be made to shed their blood in the name of animal rights, and that is no small thing.
Let’s try a hypothetical to illustrate my point. You come across a burning building. Inside there is a child in one room and an animal in another. Neither can escape on their own, no other help is available, and there is only time to reach and save one – which do you save?
If you save the child, you have just acknowledged a fundamental moral difference between the child’s life and the animal’s life, undermining you whole position on this thread.
If you save the animal, then what do you say to the parents of the child when they recover from their injuries? How do you explain to them that you placed greater value on the life of an animal than on their child? When they showed outrage and anger, when they called you a monster, would you understand why?
If you would save neither, then why argue in such passionate terms about the morality of society’s treatment of animals, when if the chips were down you would take no moral stance at any potential cost to yourself whatsoever?
You are misrepresenting what I am saying again – @ 116 you wrote;
and in this very post I am replying to you added;
I am not saying that PETA’s actions invalidate the entire animal rights struggle, and yet PETA’s actions are clearly misogynistic, demonstrating that it is possible to be opposed to (to use your own term) human supremacism while still being a misogynist, and that the pursuit of animal rights does not and cannot excuse that misogyny.
You are angry with us for not privileging animal rights to the same degree as human one’s, but we are leery of organisations like PETA, and people like yourself, who seem all too eager to use animal rights to try to bump opposing the bigoted mistreatment of vulnerable human groups down everyone’s priority list, whetever their stated intentions for doing so may be.
We have seen a lot of homophobes, MRAs and racists try to wrap themselves up in the flag of another cause to excuse their existing bigotry, so we are obviously going to be cautious when someone arrives here seemingly trying to use another cause as a premise to attack our concern with the mistreatment of vulnerable human minorities. Even though you may well be acting in good faith, it still fits a pattern of behaviour we have seen all too often before from all flavours of bigot.
Opening your arguments with a personal attack on PZ’s body morphology, and then later comparing us all to slave owners didn’t really help in that regard, since it smacks of excessive, hyperbolic terms like ‘feminazi’, and serves only to make us more suspicious.
Really? How would you characterise this remark from your post @ 110;
and @ 120;
(Emphasis added)
If not as scolding and dismissive? I have already addressed fat-shaming, and if you have read the thread about the Philae comet landing you would know why the shirt choice and associated sexist phrase were considered so problematc in the situation in which they occurred – it was not ‘arguing loudly’ in some irelevant fashion over some pointless trifle. It was addressing the structural sexism that still blights the lives of billions of women worldwide. That is important to many people here, and some of them (myself included) place it as a higher priority than animal rights. You may not like that, but you have yet to provide one cogent or even coherent point as to why it is so morally offensive for us to put stamping out the oppression and mistreatment of humans first.
What an incredibly stupid attempt at making a cute little point. That “blog”? It was called ROME.
Gregory Greenwood @ 135
It’s far grosser than that. Fuck being compared to slave owners: it implicitly likens Black people to non-human animals.
Nich @ 136
We totally fragged those Gauls! Hell yeah! We’re the best. Those stupid barbarians will be grateful to us when they get Roman roads and baths.
Chicken. It’s what’s for dinner.
The Mellow Monkey @ 137;
You are absolutely right – I can’t believe I missed that.
I am trying to give John Lindberg the benefit of the doubt as far as I am able, but comments like this are difficult to read as anything other than thinly veiled racism.
I just want to point out that John Lindberg is just the sort of person who Carrier claims doesn’t or can’t exist. So, with that counterexample, it’s been summarily refuted, right here in this thread. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Also, looking at the reception, thinking about the kind of general social isolation that often entails because of the widespread and entrenched and irrational resistance to such a change, you should be able to see why it’s difficult for vegetarians/vegans to make the strongest, most idealized case, and live out their lives that way on a daily basis while interacting with others. We’re stuck with you people, for better or worse, and cooperation is not so easy.
Gregory Greenwood:
What about the notion of relevance? You don’t have to claim that sapience doesn’t exist to notice that, if it’s relevant in this discussion at all, it isn’t to nearly the same extent that sentience is. You may not be smart or understand numerous things, making you not especially “sapient” or wise, but you can have experiences, making you sentient. That’s most certainly a valid first step, if not the only one, at putting you into moral consideration. So dismissing them out of hand on that basis is out of the question, because they’ve already been included — it’s a question of how much.
Maybe you (or a chimp, dog, etc.) aren’t going to make very great moral decisions of your own, because you don’t understand certain kinds of things, but you can feel and I am capable of understanding my decisions of my actions toward you and what the consequences of them will be. This is how we ought to think about our treatment of children, people with cognitive impairments (temporary or chronic), etc. There plenty of very good reasons for that. However, there is no sense at all in mistreating them because they aren’t “sentient” or “agents” or “knowledgeable” or “responsible” in every conceivable sense of the words. The more you say you rely on that as some hugely important distinction, the less sense you’re going to make and the less relevant it will be to any actual decision you’re making in real life.
consciousness razor @ 140;
I see your point. Arguments over relative sentience aren’t actually necessary to make the point I am trying to make, so I would be better off just avoiding them and the dangerous ground they can lead to.
I meant “sapient” there, obviously. The words are too much alike. Since “intelligence” has no definite meaning as it stands, I would rather use that or something similar in its place, even though it’s still questionable whether it’s useful or refers to anything or is even coherent. At least, the literal meaning of “sentient,” having sensations, should already be fairly clear and doesn’t seem to be problematic in the same ways.
Fucking pieces of shit, those guys.
@ 107, Anders Kehlet
Maybe you missed it, but I reviewed Carrier’s reasoning and found it lacking, so I withdraw my support of the specific premises you attribute to me in your post number 107.
But I still also find support for your premises lacking.
The outrage progressives show when people dare suggest that rights should be extended to, yuck, animals is more or less identical to the outrage shown by some early feminists when they suggested that rights should be extended to, yuck, colored folks. Did you just dare suggest that honest white women are in any way comparable to those n*ggers?
Yes, I am comparing non-human animals to black people. And white people. And Australian Aboriginals. And women. And trans people. And gays. Old folks, young folks, sick and healthy, tall and short, happy and sad. And hell, green and purple people if we ever run into aliens. We all feel. We’ve all been hurled out into a shitty world filled with pain and oppression until we day we die. The least fucking thing we can do is to at least try to not hurt each other.
My best friend in the entire world is a bi trans woman of color. She’s a vegan. She hasn’t had my privileged life, her life has been a non-stop cavalcade of transmisogyny, homophobia and racism. And that’s the exact reason she’s vegan. She knows what it feels like to be trampled beneath the kyriarchic boot of the Nonconsensual Submission Machine. She doesn’t want to be part of that, she doesn’t want to oppress others the way the system is continually oppressing her.
“I am trying to give John Lindberg the benefit of the doubt as far as I am able, but comments like this are difficult to read as anything other than thinly veiled racism.”
Be my fucking guest. It’s the kind of intellectual honesty I expect from this community.
I have mastered my gut, but not simple HTML tags. Ugh.
And regarding if I would eat meat to survive: Of course I would. I’m a deeply selfish person. I would kick an infant like a football to survive.
On the topic of infants, and the whole talk about “sapience”: A human infant is, in pretty much all ways people pretend to measure it, less “sapient” than many animals we use for food. Should I therefore be allowed to eat infants? (If, say, the child is my own or an orphan, so there’s not question of “ownership”.)
No. The very thought is repugnant. Because the infant would kick and scream and cry because it doesn’t want to be fucking cut up by a knife. It has a right to live.
What part of this is so hard to understand?
“You may not like that, but you have yet to provide one cogent or even coherent point as to why it is so morally offensive for us to put stamping out the oppression and mistreatment of humans first.”
Go ahead, stamp out oppression and mistreatment of humans. I care about a whole lot of other things that aren’t animal rights, things that from a purely “pain minimization”-perspective seem trivial. I’m not a utilitarian optimizer.
All I ask is that you don’t oppress one group while fighting for the rights of another group. Don’t oppress anyone. Just stop. You fighting for the rights of women does not excuse you trampling on the rights of animals, any more than a person fighting for the rights of African-Americans should get away with transphobia or misogyny.
I keep saying this: It’s all the same oppression. And if you oppose one little cog in that machine while embracing another, you’re a hypocrite. I don’t want you to fight for the rights of animals to the exclusion of the rights of women, I want you to stop actively oppressing animals. All I ask from you is a cessation of active malevolence, not that you drop everything you care about to care about something else.
John Lidberg, you certainly care much more about insulting us “progressives” than you are about making a coherent case for why eating any meat is necessarily a moral issue.
The bit about people whining about a shirt says pretty much all there needs to be known about you, really…
I have one request from you and your rabid absolutist assertions: demonstrate that the animals i eat are tortured.
Also, it seems you are a vegan, is that correct? So i assume you don’t consume any animal products as food, and presumably clothing, etc. But do you use vaccines or medicines?
And perhaps more importantly, what the flying fuck makes you think, for even a fraction of a second, that the food you eat doesn’t involve any animal suffering and torturing?? We are all absolutely monstruous pieces of shit because some of us eat animals that have been sacrificed in a way where no experience of pain is possible. Meanwhile, there is a vole with its guts out, dying slowly on a field where broccoli is produced. But hey, you didn’t eat it, so it’s alright.
“I have one request from you and your rabid absolutist assertions: demonstrate that the animals i eat are tortured.”
I don’t know where you live, so I can’t demonstrate that. But this is from my own home, Sweden, a country widely acclaimed for its strict animal welfare laws. We tell ourselves we’re the best, which might or might not be the case. But we still do this:
http://www.ettlivsomgris.se/
Just go there and watch all there is to watch. Then come back and tell me how wonderful the meat industry is.
“Also, it seems you are a vegan, is that correct? So i assume you don’t consume any animal products as food, and presumably clothing, etc. But do you use vaccines or medicines?”
To the extent that I need it, yes. I’m selfish. I would drink baby tears if it would keep me alive. But don’t think it doesn’t make me feel like shit.
“And perhaps more importantly, what the flying fuck makes you think, for even a fraction of a second, that the food you eat doesn’t involve any animal suffering and torturing??”
I don’t think that. I know very well that my life is built on oppression of human and non-human animals alike.
But I try to minimize my dependence on it, and minimize the suffering I cause. Instead of raising crops, which kills some animals, and then feeding those crops to other animals that are kept in horrible, stressful, painful environments to later be killed, I eat the crops. And I try to do my research concerning which forms of agriculture are the least destructive. Again, don’t think it doesn’t affect me.
There’s a difference between Buddha-like purity and simply not giving a shit. To draw some kind of moral equivalence between the animals killed in agriculture and the animals killed in agriculture plus the animals killed in meat factories is simply lazy. A vegan diet is in every way morally superior to a meat-eating diet. But of course an honest vegan feels shitty about the suffering zir diet does cause. And they try to minimize it.
I think a reason so many people balk at the thought of extending care to non-human animals is that the magnitude of institutional moral apathy can be overwhelming, if you stop to think about it. That doesn’t mean you can simply throw up your hands and claim that since absolute purity is impossible, you might as well support torture factories.
I am not aware of a single item found in a typical “vegan” diet that did not, in its production, involve the deliberate or covertly acknoweldged infliction of agonizing pain and death upon a large number of animals, large and small.
To plough a field to plant a crop means shredding, without anesthetic, uncounted numbers of mice, rats, voles, earthworms, insects and birds, under the pitiless combine blades. It means removal of key habitat and death by slow starvation of entire populations of deer, foxes, rabbits, and wolves. It means the deliberate poisoning (typical poison being one which causes death by uncontrolled hemorrhaging out of every orifice) of countless rodents who would otherwise eat and foul the crop in storage as well as in the field.
Every lumen of sunlight taken in by our crops for their growth is a lumen of sunlight taken away from a wild plant that would have been the food of some wild herbivore, and thus an act of deliberate starvation of that wild herbivore.
And the main reason I attack progressives rather than regular ol’ self-proclaimed conservatives is that most conservatives are open with their complete disregard for people other than a small group of homogeneous homo sapiens. They don’t give a shit, and they proudly proclaim how they don’t give a shit.
Progressives talk loudly about how they care deeply about this group and that group, but at the end of the day most of them would rather pay for a cow to be tortured and killed than not eat a fucking cheeseburgers. It’s hypocrisy, pure and simple. It’s signaling behavior, concerned with the maximum amount of self-righteousness with the minimum amount of actually doing something. I’m self-righteous too, but at least I have enough moral backbone to deny myself fucking cheeseburgers.
If you’re a meat eater, you clearly advertise to the world that you simply don’t give a shit. It’s not about achieving perfect non-harmfulness in every aspect of life, it’s about showing the bare minimum of caring that should be dictated by common decency. I bring up the shirt thing not because sexism in the workplace is not a valid discussion, but because it perfectly illustrates the amount of shits given by “progressives”. It is really easy to talk about shirts on Twitter. It requires no skill, no dedication, no effort, no self-control. So if talking about shirts in Twitter is your contribution to the fight against oppression, I question if you’ll ever have enough of a spine to actually achieve anything.
Yeah, and your diet involves all that, in much larger quantities, plus the even more horrifying evils of factory farming. Your point?
To make a finer point, there’s a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, the animals harmed in agriculture and in hunting (which I, it might surprise you to find out, am relatively fine with) and the animals harmed in milk , egg and meat factories.
The first can be likened to one tribe’s invasion of another tribe’s territory, or a predator killing prey. It is the evil of aggression, of taking something from someone who is not your kin.
The second is in a category of wickedness of its own. These animals have been raised and bred and fed, in generations, by humans. Confined by humans, forced to reproduce by humans, moved and controlled and manipulated by humans. They have lived in our houses, eaten our food, given birth under our roofs.
And then we keep them under torturous conditions, in stress and agony until the day they are put in a row to be murdered in an organized fashion.
The first is a cruelty as old as life. The second, it takes the brilliantly twisted mind of a human to come up with. They are our family. We have brought them into the world, and we are responsible for them. The difference between killing a moose in the wild and killing a pig that has lived its entire life with us is the difference between not giving food to starving children in Africa, and not giving food to your own child. It’s the difference between manslaughter and filicide.
This discussion is wearying. I’m selfish enough to know that my time is better spent with my family than with self-proclaimed “progressives”. Have a good day, and do continue patting each other on the back for being caring people.
So basically you are chastising us because we tell others that the suffering they cause is horrible but we trivialise and accept the suffering we cause……while you are telling us that we are horrible people for causing certain forms of harm, but you are fine with the harm you cause….yeah, makes perfect sense.
All of that while admitting that you would kick a baby if something you want depended on it.
Oh, but i forget, in your case it is totally ok to harm sentient animals because you feel bad about it. Like you are the only one who does.
How much less suffering are you responsible for than i am? No, seriously, i want data. Because otherwhise you are just supossing that i am responsible for more than you are and using this as the basis to consider me a horrible human being.
Does a chicken being stunned and killed suffer more or less than a wild bird poisoned with pesticides? Since you need to ingest larger volumes of your foods than i do to maintain weight, how does this skew the valance of suffering we are responsible for? Surely if you eat more broccoli than i do, you’ll be more responsible for all the death and suffering happening in the process than i am, right?
Also, how much suffering is it ok to cause as long as you feel bad about it? Is there like a threshold value below which you stop being a piece of shit? Does saying “i feel bad about it” do anything to eliminate or minimise the actual, real suffering of those creatures? Does species matter? If i cause some degree of suffering to a cow, but have meat for several months, but you cause suffering to 15 birds, 32 voles and mice and 10 toads in order to obtain enough tofu to last you that long, which one of us is a bigger piece of shit?
I’m a meat-eater, and i’m clearly advertising the world that i do give a shit. Animal welfare matters to me. I want my meat to come from animals that had a high quality of life and were sacrifised painlessly and with as little stress prior to that as possible. I also want my veggies to come from a source that doesn’t exterminate millions of lifes in horrible, gory ways. Furthermore, i want artificial selective pressures applied to the breeding of any captive animal to be geared towards health and welfare rather than productivity or aesthetics.
You don’t get to tell me that i don’t give a shit or that i’m a despicable hypocrite because you think the harm i’m causing is damning, but you are fine with how you cause suffering.
It’s one thing to say, hey, we are all guilty of this, we should be doing something to reduce it. It’s quite another to come in here foaming at the mouth about how disgusting and hypocritical we are for doing the same shit you do and not propose a single meassure to actually do anything about it or even ask if others are doing anything about it, just assume they don’t and that you are better than them. You are here just to get your rocks off by shouting incoherently about how horrible and disgusting we are. It’s pointless and extremely annoying. Fuck off.
This is a distinction you made up wholly in your own imagination, and has no more real world foundation than the distinctions between Allah and Yahweh.
A flat out lie. As well as a physiological impossibility.
“Much larger quantities”?
Only if my metabolic rate is an order of magnitude greater than yours. Otherwise we eat the same number of calories, roughly.
And the amount of animal suffering per calorie of food produced is not significantly different whether that food is plant or animal in origin.
That was the WHOLE POINT, which you, Mr. Lindberg, in your transparent intellectual dishonesty, deliberately ignored.
Can i just point out that the whole point of captive production is that we can actually control the conditions? I can do very little about a mouse being trampled to death by a tractor, but as a society we can certainly do something about how cows, pigs and chicken are treated, raised and sacrifised. That control means that we get to set the terms and conditions, but it also creates upon us the moral obligation to prevent suffering. I’m all for working towards that goal, both in animal derived products and any other product…i want control so that i’m responsible for what happens, because then i can and must do something about it.
azhael @ 154;
And what John Lindberg is doing is actually worse than that – ze comes here to stand on hir sense of moral superiority, and in so doing immediately body shames PZ @ 110;
(Emphasis added)
As if body morphology determines the worth of one’s opinions
And ze goes on to minimises and dismiss the forms of oppression experiencerd by human beings, including members of this very community, as can be seen @ 120;
(Emphasis added)
As if the discussion of the sexism surronding the Philae landings was some irrelevant non-issue set against hir own hobby horse, a position that is edging close to being hir very own version of a Dear Muslima.
And of course @ 126 ze wrote;
Not only employing hyperbole by comparing people who eat meat to slave owners, but as Mellow Monkey correctly pointed out to me @ 137, effectively implictly compares Black people to non-human animals, a replication of a common form of bigoted attitude used to oppress Black people for centuries. When confronted with this use of a form of language that perpetuates oppression of a vulnerable group in society, ze doesn’t even consider moderating hir language or apologising to those ze has offended, but instead doubles down @ 145;
Completely ignoring the point that our culture has no particular history of comparing White people, young people, old people, or hypothetical green and purple people to animals as a means of oppressing and disenfranchising them, but it most certainly does have a long, storied and hideously ugly history of doing exactly that to Black people, and indeed there are still many bigots who continue to use the claim that Black people are somehow not fully human to maintain ongoing social injustices, as can be seen from some of the responses of racists (including those in uniform) to the recent events in Fergusson.
Ze even wheels out one of the most suspicious forms of language of all when dealing with someone who is beginning to walk like a racist and quack like a racist, but totes isn’t a racist – ‘some of my best friends are’…
Which leads to the inevitable question; does ze even let her use hir bathroom…?
Ze is even cute enough to respond to my point @ 139 that it is difficult to read hir language as anything other than racially problematic with this little gem;
Not only is Mellow Monkey’s interpretation of what ze wrote @ 126 entirely reasonable and hardly intellectually dishonest, but I also feel that any reasonable review off my discourse with John Lindberg over the course of the thread would show that I have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt on several occasions, but have not been extended the same courtesy in return.
I also feel that if ze has something to say to me or about my notional personal lack of intrellectual honesty, then ze should go ahead and say it, but ze shouldn’t try to use it as an excuse to tar the whole Pharyngula community with the same brush.
Taking all that into account, I think that you are being very restrained indeed when you describe John Linberg’s antics on this thread as merely annoying.
It wasn’t very clearly or diplomatically phrased, but at least on the narrow technical point, Lindbergh’s actually more or less right on that one.
I think he pointing out that not all foods are equally efficient to produce. Which is true. For every calorie of meat, it takes several times that number of calories in input to feed the animal over the course of its life, with higher ratios in larger animals (e.g., beef is much less efficient than eggs or fish). Furthermore, with factory farming especially, much of the feed is just ordinary grain, grown more or less the same as any other, which could as well have gone into a human mouth.
(That’s not to say it’d be nutritionally a sound idea to just substitute corn flakes for steak in everyone’s diet – it’s obviously more complicated. Nor, if meat production were halted, would the surplus calories necessarily become available to those who needed them. Still, at least calorie wise, the basic point was correct.)
John Lindberg’s hyperbole will no longer be gracing the Pharyngula comment section.
(By the way, I am a vegetarian.)
I did end up writing out my views, here’s a link to where I posted it in the Thunderdome. Responses can occur there at the Thunderdome.