Why vegans are simply better people

[citizenzen]

I really don't get the argument for veganism. Are they going to stop every predator prey relationship? If not what makes us different?

Could have something to do with human intelligence.

Being able to make complex moral choices.

Not merely act on instinct.

Never mind.

 

[stilicho]

I do suspect in a century or so folk will look back on our behaviour regarding animals breed and reared for meat production like we look back on those great people from the past who kept slaves!

This is always possible but it's not exactly due to moral reasons. Cultural norms are shaped by basic economic and political realities. They tend to become institutionalised throughout generations and the morality is tacked onto them later.

 

[epepke]

This is always possible but it's not exactly due to moral reasons. Cultural norms are shaped by basic economic and political realities. They tend to become institutionalised throughout generations and the morality is tacked onto them later.

Yes, and the invention of the steam engine and industrialization, as well as the cotton gin, probably had orders of magnitude more to do with getting rid of slavery than all the moral arguments combined.

When it becomes possible to get stuff that is as effectively nutritional as animal products without at least enslaving and/or killing animals, I'll be the first in line to try it. Currently, there ain't no such animal.

I seriously doubt that this is even possible without at least using the genetic material of animals, and I doubt that would make vegans happy, either. Back when they were putting the first plasmids from cattle into tomatoes, the vegan owner of the New Leaf Market made such a stink about it, you'd have thought they were barbecuing kittens.

 

[RandFan]

Yes, and the invention of the steam engine and industrialization, as well as the cotton gin, probably had orders of magnitude more to do with getting rid of slavery than all the moral arguments combined.

When it becomes possible to get stuff that is as effectively nutritional as animal products without at least enslaving and/or killing animals, I'll be the first in line to try it. Currently, there ain't no such animal.

I seriously doubt that this is even possible without at least using the genetic material of animals, and I doubt that would make vegans happy, either. Back when they were putting the first plasmids from cattle into tomatoes, the vegan owner of the New Leaf Market made such a stink about it, you'd have thought they were barbecuing kittens.

Interesting, being a meat eater I'm inclined to agree, then I wonder, what technological advance led to the end of segregation? Women's rights? Perhaps morality is not as black and white as we might think.

 

[epepke]

Interesting, being a meat eater I'm inclined to agree, then I wonder, what technological advance led to the end of segregation?

While I'm on a roll...

Segregation ended because of the Second World War and the GI bill. Lots of Black people from the South joined the military. When they got out, a lot of them decided that they didn't want to go back to the South again. After that, it was just a matter of conflicts and time.

Women's rights?

Same as slavery, though a bit more delayed as it was necessary to get electricity into homes. Labor laws also helped.

I just re-watched Babies. Great movie. It tracks the first couple of years of four babies in San Francisco, Tokyo, Mongolia (in a yurt, albeit one with a satellite dish), and remote Namibia. The presence of fathers in the movie seemed monotonically related to the technology and urbanization of the culture.

Of course, the guy in Tokyo played with his cell phone and the kid at the same time, but that isn't a surprise.

I do suspect that it isn't that simple. There's evidence that some hunter/gatherer cultures are more egalitarian. But once you get farming and ranching, you get division of labor, until it's obviated by technology.

 

[Stomatopoda]

I can't wait until science gives us cows with no brains and 30-40 tenderloins.

 

[caniswalensis]

Yes, and the invention of the steam engine and industrialization, as well as the cotton gin, probably had orders of magnitude more to do with getting rid of slavery than all the moral arguments combined.

Interestingly, it was the cotton gin that actually caused the market for cotton to explode.

The cotton gin allowed for the economical separation of the seed from the fibers for the first time ever. Before that, it was a laborious hand operation.

The availability of cheap cotton fibers increased cotton's popularity. As demand grew, So did the size & number of southern farms & plantations devoted to growing it. As those grew, the need for slaves and the ready cash that planters & owners had to buy them increased.

As the agrarian economy of the south enjoyed the cotton boom, slavery as an institution became more important that ever for maintaining their way of life.

The problem of slavery in America was increased many times over by the cotton gin.

It could almost be said that Mr. Whitney's invention single-handedly caused the American civil war.

 

[Cayvmann]

Hmm...

Vegans are better people.
Soylent Green is people.
Ergo, vegans are a posher version of Soylent Green.

You know that animals that eat a strict vegetarian diet are the tastiest, right? Soylent green will be better because of the vegans. Let's give them thanks.

 

[bigred]

Is the arrogance, smugness, rudeness and lack of understanding of others common to all vegans, or is it just you?

I would hope the answer is obvious but 5 pages of replies makes me wonder. It makes about as much sense as saying all meat-eaters are good/bad people, or all atheists are good/bad, or Christians, or whites, or blacks, or redheads, or fat people, or liberals, or conservatives, or.....................

But congrats to the OP for a cute little trolling excursion.

 

[stilicho]

Interesting, being a meat eater I'm inclined to agree, then I wonder, what technological advance led to the end of segregation? Women's rights? Perhaps morality is not as black and white as we might think.

Women's rights were almost purely a combination of expansion of the franchise for political reasons and various conflicts requiring women to take the place of conscripted men to keep factories going.

Racial integration (a process still underway) was another empowering of a community finding new economic strength it hadn't had previously.

I don't think new cultural norms are exclusively underpinned by a specific technology or political/economic power. Veganism is a pretty good example of this but modern agriculturalism allows us the leisure to pick and choose among a variety of diets. Go back in your own family tree even two or three generations and you'll probably observe anecdotally that your own ancestors had no choice but to farm as their father and father's father did.

 

[RandFan]

Women's rights were almost purely a combination of expansion of the franchise for political reasons and various conflicts requiring women to take the place of conscripted men to keep factories going.

Oddly enough following WWII women largely left the work force.

Racial integration (a process still underway) was another empowering of a community finding new economic strength it hadn't had previously.

I don't think new cultural norms are exclusively underpinned by a specific technology or political/economic power. Veganism is a pretty good example of this but modern agriculturalism allows us the leisure to pick and choose among a variety of diets. Go back in your own family tree even two or three generations and you'll probably observe anecdotally that your own ancestors had no choice but to farm as their father and father's father did.

I don't care to debate your points. We can disagree as to the contribution of any single factor. My point is simple. It's not black and white. To grant your premise we would have to assume that protests were simply correlated and not causative and simply coincidental to change. I think that nonsense. Convention rarely changes without a fight.

I'm happy to grant that there are multiple factors. Though I'm dubious as to the degree of contribution of the factors you assert but it just doesn't matter as that is not my point.

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

When I watch people who smoke, I often ask myself how can they do it. What is it that makes these people tick. They deliberately engage in a vice that they know will probably hasten their own death.

Is it because they really don't enjoy life and dying early is OK with them.

Is it because they don't believe in the science that shows how dangerous smoking is?

Or it it because they are selfish. They think of themselves and their enjoyment and don't worry about the consequences until they occur. They don't care that smoking arround their kids infuences their kids to smoke. They don't care that others often have to foot the medical bills in the form of higher insurance premiums, and they don't care about secondary smoke.

I believe that people who don't smoke are better people than those who do. Because I believe those who smoke do it for the last reason.

Now lets talk about meat eaters. That veal you ate last night. A young holstein bull calf was taken from its mother at day one. Kept in a cage to prevent him from moving and fed bucket milk for a few days until he was butchered. A newborn highly evolved consciousness was bought into this world to be tortured basically, a torture we would not perfrom on a prisoner of war, all for your veal.

Chickens kept in cages, debeaked to prevent pecking each other after they go insane from not being able to move for the short one year life span they are given to furnish you your eggs.. the list goes on.

Heart disease. We now know the cause. Meat and oil do not just contribute to heart disease, they are the cause. thats right they are the cause.

I dare you meat eating smart asses to actually take time to read this link:

http://www.thechinastudy.com/PDFs/ChinaStudy_Excerpt.pdf


When you go out into public, it is impossible not to see fat slobs wherever you go. Basically fat footballs with a head on top. Why are they such, just like the smokers.... they eat excessively because they enjoy it and will worry about the consequences later.

They are ugly. Not just because they are obese. But their fat, disgusting bodies are a testimony to their own extreme selfishness and complete lack of discipline. Their bodies are testimony to the worst afflliction one can posess....selfishness, glutony, overindulgance, lack of empathy, and refusal to set an example on how to live well for others, especially our children.....whatever you want to call it...if its bad,,,,baby you go it.

Its been known for years now how dangerous sugars and simple carbs are,,,but I bet your reading this with a dougnut stuffed in your mouth and one in your kids...,now our overindulgance in meat and oil has become our biggest killer. But that won't stop you from eating damn well what you want will it and taking the kids for a bigmac later too. After all, its all about you. And if all this ***** about nutrition is true, you worry about it later.

Thats why vegans are better people...we aren't you.

again....http://www.thechinastudy.com/PDFs/ChinaStudy_Excerpt.pdf

I dare you to read it...

Whilst anecdotes are not evidence it's interesting to note that when my vegan friend and I (meat eater extraordinaire that I am) had our health check-ups, I was at the lower end of the ideal weight range and with a low Cholesterol level whereas he was several stone over-weight with a dangerously high cholesterol level (beer's full of calories and nuts are full of fat/oil, and he consumed both in large quantities!).

Your argument, as is mine above, is way too simplistic.

 

[Comrade Raptor]

*pfft*

My diet plan makes me better than anybody.

See, as the last surviving member of my species I sometimes have a spot of difficulty understanding the modern world.

So while I was interrogating asking a human a few things a dinosaur might want to know about, the subject of vegetarianism came up.

I asked what it was, an it was explained to me that a vegetarian is a human who doesn't eat meat, only vegetables.

Makes sense.

So when the human asked me what I was, I could answer with complete honesty that I am likely the greatest humanitarian the world has ever known! I've been devouring your kind since before you learned agriculture!

I win the thread.

 

[Complexity]

*pfft*

My diet plan makes me better than anybody.

See, as the last surviving member of my species I sometimes have a spot of difficulty understanding the modern world.

So while I was interrogating asking a human a few things a dinosaur might want to know about, the subject of vegetarianism came up.

I asked what it was, an it was explained to me that a vegetarian is a human who doesn't eat meat, only vegetables.

Makes sense.

So when the human asked me what I was, I could answer with complete honesty that I am likely the greatest humanitarian the world has ever known! I've been devouring your kind since before you learned agriculture!

I win the thread.

I agree.

 

[RandFan]

Segregation ended because of the Second World War and the GI bill.

No. It was a factor but hardly THE factor. Not even close. If it were that simple we wouldn't have had bus strikes, sanitation strikes, marches, protests, assassination, lynching, etc., etc. All following WWII and the GI bill.

 

[stilicho]

Oddly enough following WWII women largely left the work force.

Why is that odd? Women didn't also suddenly surrender the franchise or request to be escorted by a gentleman upon entering a pub after the end of that war, either, even if that's the wrong war to reference in this case.

The main point upon which we agree is that there are ample economic and political mechanisms in place for the transformation of our own omnivore society into a vegan society without any moral tinge to it whatsoever. We have a choice now whereas our recent ancestors did not.

That's the parallel with ethnic group empowerment, gender equality, or virtually any other issue you think is a moral one but is really a matter of economics and political reality.

 

[stilicho]

No. It was a factor but hardly THE factor. Not even close. If it were that simple we wouldn't have had bus strikes, sanitation strikes, marches, protests, assassination, lynching, etc., etc. All following WWII and the GI bill.

Every social transformation is not rooted in violence just because a couple you selected have been. Violence can galvanise change but you'd have a tough time arguing that's a morally correct choice. It's more like the desperation of a fringe group of agitators or the result of demagoguery.

 

[epepke]

No. It was a factor but hardly THE factor. Not even close. If it were that simple we wouldn't have had bus strikes, sanitation strikes, marches, protests, assassination, lynching, etc., etc. All following WWII and the GI bill.

As I said, what remained was conflict and time, but I don't think that it would have happened without the diaspora of African Americans, which was directly attributable to WWII.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Oddly enough following WWII women largely left the work force.

...

Well, duh.. Men became available to fill those man jobs that women had been doing during the war...

 

[Hazel]

*pfft*

My diet plan makes me better than anybody.

See, as the last surviving member of my species I sometimes have a spot of difficulty understanding the modern world.

So while I was interrogating asking a human a few things a dinosaur might want to know about, the subject of vegetarianism came up.

I asked what it was, an it was explained to me that a vegetarian is a human who doesn't eat meat, only vegetables.

Makes sense.

So when the human asked me what I was, I could answer with complete honesty that I am likely the greatest humanitarian the world has ever known! I've been devouring your kind since before you learned agriculture!

I win the thread.

"Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings." (anonymous). Sorry. I couldn't resist.