Dude, it's a debate forum. People are debating with you. They aren't saying you should stop being vegan, they're saying one of your reasons (reducing/preventing the suffering of animals) doesn't make sense.
Exactly: well, for some of us I find it disturbing that all the vegetarians/vegans are claiming possible health risks from this thread, though.
Ok, let's compare how many animals die in the process of making a veggie burger versus a conventional burger.
Veggie burger:
* First, you have to till a field to plant grain. There's a tiny puddle in the middle of the field that you have to drain or fill in order to plow. The puddle is too small to have fish, but it contains dozens of mosquito larvae and water bugs. All of these are animals that will die. The pond water also contains thousands of microscopic animals like rotifers (yes, they're in the kingdom animalia) that will die when the pond is filled. Kill count: 1000+
* You have to till the soil, which contains many worms, burrowing bugs, and other microscopic animals. Tilling the soil will kill some of these, either by directly smashing them with the plow, or by upsetting the soil and allowing them to dry in the sun. Kill count: hundreds to thousands
* You're all-organic so you never use pesticides, but you still need to kill the bugs that want to eat your crops. Probably the best way is to use predators like ladybugs, each of which will slaughter around 5,000 aphids in its lifetime. Technically the ladybug is doing the killing, not you, but I'm sure you would have a moral problem eating chicken even if we used trained dogs to slaughter them rather than killing them ourselves. "Outsourcing" the killing doesn't absolve any moral responsibility, does it? Kill count: ~5,000 per ladybug.
* I'm not sure how many veggie burgers you can get out of a small field of grain, but any way you slice it we're talking at least a few hundred kills per burger.
Conventional burger:
* If we just graze cows on the field without tilling and without draining the pond, the cows might accidentally step on a few bugs or swallow a few rotifers, but nowhere near the scale of the bug-holocaust that we would be wreaking by planting crops.
* Slaughtering the cow yields around 2,000 burgers, so even if the cow killed a few thousand bugs in its lifetime, we're still at around one kill per burger, not hundreds or thousands like with veggie burgers.
So the point here is: if you're going to talk about animal suffering and death and say all life is valuable, you can't ignore life just because it isn't easily visible or isn't cute and cuddly. You need to be consistent.
On the last point, apparently some vegans/animal-rights activists think that beekeeping (e.g.) is slavery, so there's that. But anyway, I think you're taking the best-case scenarios here. Not every farm uses "organic" practices, and not every cow is grass-fed. So I could see someone adopting vegetarianism-in-practice unless and until the system changes.
***
Okay, while I'm at it, does this seem like a good rundown of the various arguments for veganism presented so far in this thread?
Ecological argument: The meat and dairy industry leave huge carbon, nitrogen, and methane footprints, and contribute to deforestation and loss of biodiversity. Therefore the environmental costs outweigh the possible of consuming meat and dairy.Moral argument: It's morally wrong to kill animals for one's own sustenance, or subjugate them for (lack of a better term) the fruits of their labor. Therefore the social or ethical costs outweigh the possible benefits of consuming meat and dairy.
Preferential argument: I don't like the taste of meat or dairy products. Therefore I'm a vegan.
Nutritional corollary: I can obtain all the necessary calories, vitamins, and nutrients from plant-based food sources, without recourse to meat or dairy products. Therefore I can stay healthy on a vegan diet. (Note: If this weren't true, the other arguments alone wouldn't be sufficient justification, IMO.)
I think the nutritional corollary is pretty solid, and the preferential argument is basically unassailable. The ecological argument is a fair reason to be vegetarian or vegan in practice, while the moral argument is a reason to be vegetarian or vegan in principle.
The simple question that you should ask yourself is: Do I value life?
If the answer is "Yes" then it is instantly recognizable that both killing an animal and killing a pig are ethically wrong. Why do either when it isn't necessary? Lots of people will answer "Because bacon is tasty!" which doesn't account for the aversion to cannibalism. Other people will answer "A pig is less than a human." which means that if they answered affirmative to the original question, they were lying. If you only value the life of a human, you don't value life as a whole.
Or I might put a different value on different kinds of life, as everyone does. Because bacteria, protists, fungi, and plants are all forms of life, and yet we don't assign the same value to their lives with respect to consuming them for food or whatever.
So, why are we wasting land, water, and resources to create silage? So we can waste even more resources to turn a cow into food?
The point is that maybe the agricultural program that would feed everyone in America (say) on a vegetarian diet might require some possibly difficult land-use redistribution.
I'm calling you out on this one. The benefits of raw milk are quite real, but they have nothing to do with probiotic bacteria.
That's why it'd be a flawed argument but the public-health benefits of pasteurization sort of outweigh the benefits of not. Either way that's off topic so I'll drop it.
Nope. The folk in India are vegetarians. They enjoy milk, butter, ghee, and lots and lots of yogurt in their diet. Remember, sacred cows? They wouldn't be sacred if their products weren't highly valued.
Oh yeah, I was thinking there was some form of Hinduism or Sikhism or Buddhism that went one step further, but wiki says that veganism is pretty much a uniquely Western idea. Noted!
I'm not even sure to respond to this. Killing a plant is nowhere equal to killing an animal. Mostly because plants do not feel pain. The most they do is respond to physical stimuli, that's about it. Plants don't spurt out pints of blood and kick in agony on a concrete floor while they choke on their own blood.
I want to say that's sort of a straw-death. It's possible to instantly kill an animal, so that it's gone by the time the blood starts spurting. Also
At the very bottom line, vegan/vegetarian vs. omnivore comes down to if you see the value of life and can recognize another living thing as having the same right to life that humans do and that it doesn't need to die for humans' sake.
So you say that every other "living thing [has] the same right to life that humans do." Yet, again, you single out animals. Why stop there if every living thing has the same right to life?
Right, because there's nothing objectionable about veganism as a behavior. However, there are (as we've seen) plenty of arguments for veganism, and those can be objected to: it's very possible to do something (of any ethical value) for bad reasons.
Similarly, there's really nothing objectionable about the mere act of prayer, but there are reasons for praying that can be objected to.
IE one family has $100 a week for food and another has $1000, equality says give both families $50 a week for food, so $150 vs. $1050. Justice says maybe all of that should be allocated to the family that needs it, more, $200 vs. $1000.
Unless you want to approach equal utility, in which case the poor family would get more (maybe not all of it, but still), since there's a decreasing marginal utility of money. So I guess it's all about perspectives... which is sort of the theme of the whole thread, isn't it
Eating the meat of one animal (pig, for example) and being appalled at the meat consumption of another animal (human (whose muscle tissue makeup is quite similar to that of a pig (cannibalistic tribes from the Marquesas Island of Polynesia actually referred to human meat as "long pig"))) is not a "completely logical response".
Right, but I don't think that's the objection. Rather, it's whether killing a pig for meat is ethically equivalent to killing a human for meat. Even if you think that both are ethically wrong, I don't think you can say they're the same level of wrong. But feel free to prove me wrong.
Having to tamper with our food to make it edible doesn't sound like we eat it naturally does it?
It's more that we sort of grew out of eating raw meat. Our hominin ancestors could well have eaten raw meat without problems. They also couldn't have digested lactose, but modern humans increasingly can. Ch-ch-ch-changes!
Just for a second consider the hell that women describe pregnancy as and consider the hell it wreaks on the mother's body (weight gain and hormones and pains, etc etc).
But those are human problems. You see other mammals popping out a calf and being only slightly worse for wear (and the calf walks around almost immediately). Moreover, some animals (reptiles, e.g.) do just fine in confined spaces, and in fact prefer it since they "feel" more secure.
I guess what I'm seeing is a general statement about not eating animals on the one hand, but specific statements only about the big, mammalian (and avian) ones we eat. What if it was, as Captain_Morgan suggested, mostly bugs and (as I suggested) arthropods and crustaceans?
I didn't touch on your insect argument because it wasn't really relevant to the points I was making. But, since you mention it, the fact of the matter is that the consumption of animals, be they mammals, insects, reptiles, what have you, is not necessary to sustain human life. Taylor knows what's up.
But then again, most of that grain is corn and alfalfa and stuff that doesn't really make for a balanced diet. We have enough corn in our food already, some say.
So what makes a cricket dunked in a deep-fryer ethically equivalent to a steer headed for the slaughterhouse?
Don't want to get involved with the debate because I think the whole veganisim thing is ridiculous, but isn't this bit impossible? I wasn't aware that we had the technology to simulate the human body with even close to 100% accuracy.
Digital simulation of human physiology isn't possible (to my knowledge) at the moment, but I didn't want to limit my imagination However, rapid advances are being made in tissue cultivation. Growing kidneys and such, for example.
Imagine this whole scenario, replacing cows (which is what you were probably picturing) with humans. Specifically, non-consenting humans (because really, who would consent to this kind of life?).
And are you really comparing the experiences of people during the Holocaust to animals in slaughterhouses? Really?
Yeah...because it was a parallel.
But I guess that's the real question. Is there a one-to-one correspondence between humans and non-human animals? Pigs might be close. Certainly apes and cetaceans (and we've recognized this). But, say, shrimp?
Even imagining a worldwide vegan utopia for a moment, there's a somewhat knotty issue of domesticated livestock: sheep and cattle (especially) are stupid. Like, probably incapable of surviving in the wild. So we can't just let them go, but organized extinction doesn't sound palatable either. So what do?
Equality should come secondary to justice though, otherwise it risks maintaining status quo hierarchies as people push for equality in treatment without realizing that disparities exist now. That's one of the largest problems with equality discussions, people presuming that we have already reached a level of equality and therefore any attempt to help one group should be mirrored to all other groups even if disparities DO exist.
Hm, I think there might be a disparity between short-term and long-term thinking here...
Example, affirmative action and any race based discussion. Sure AA would be a terrible idea IF everyone was already treated equally in hiring practices, but it isn't the case so AA is a means to the end of equality, yet others see it as discrimination against whites.
... and this is a perfect example; well, take the sub-example of education-AA. The best critique of affirmative action in education I've heard is that it should be based on socioeconomic status, not race, since that's a far bigger factor in education disparity. But another reason to consider this mode of AA is that in the hopefully not-too-far-off future when race and gender discrimination are negligible, there will probably still be socioeconomic disparity. Then AA will still be effective. And even now, as it stands, higher education is rapidly becoming inaccessible to the middle class, of any ethnicity.
Not to mention microscopic life. Pasteurization has got to be a curious dilemma for vegetarians.
Raw-food vegetarians tend to come at it from either an anti-Big Ag or "raw milk is full of probiotic bacteria!" (flawed) belief, probably not the same one that turned to vegetarianism.
I just so happened to have started the first week of an entry-level college class about nutrition. Here is a page from the lecture:
Huh, the paleo diet in a nutrition class? Interesting. I was under the impression that it's been sort of discredited as being particularly good (though it doesn't seem particularly bad).
In all seriousness, it's a first-world luxury that is not possible in much of the world, mainly due to people who are over-educated or are simply doing it for cool-points with other people.
Er, there are probably more vegans in rural India than there are in America.
Meat is just a substance. If we could synthesize steaks it'd be no less ethical than any other manufacturing process. (That includes "human" meat, but there are strong cultural taboos against that.)
This is basically the go-to argument for omnivores. First, show me your resources on how many animals are killed by harvesting. Second, consider how much that imaginary number would be multiplied by when you consider how much harvesting is needed to fuel the meat industry.
That's... a really good rebuttal. Moreover, the ecological effects of livestock production (including the overuse of nitrate fertilizers and the release of methane) are pretty staggering.
Another is "do you understand what veganism means?" What kingdom do bacteria fall under? Moving on.
Hm. Why exactly is there a distinction between Animalia and the other kingdoms? I don't think the otherwise-solid trophic argument (it takes more plants to feed a cow than it would to just feed you) holds with, say, shellfish, since humans can't really eat plankton.
You're choosing to have an unusual diet and it's going to constantly create uncomfortable social situations. There will be houseguests who will be offended if you don't provide meat. When you visit other people's house there will be those who will resent making a special vegetarian dish for just one person.
I'm sorry, but you're saying that I shouldn't be vegan/vegetarian because it will make people mad or cause uncomfortable social situations? Like playing Magic does to some people? You think that's a better reason to eat meat than thinking killing animals is excessively cruel and unhealthy? Cool story, bro.
Plus, people who are actually committed (and not just fad-committed) to a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle tend to know some pretty great recipes.
As for animal testing, vivisection is a ****ing joke. If we really need to test all these dangerous chemicals and medicines, do it on humans. It's just as ethical as strapping a chimp onto a metal table and feeding it poison. Plus, the results would be better, because we're testing on who the product is intended for.
Or, option #3, synthesize (or digitize) the relevant physiology to test it on. That way no sentient creature is harmed in the testing, so it's a win-win. Technology!
I think there's a distinction between eating meat (or milk, or eggs) and harming animals to obtain these things. Veganism makes sense if the latter is too ethically unacceptable. Alternatively one might become de facto vegan if the economic/environmental costs of raising animals for meat seem too high, though I think those kind of people tend to be raise-your-own-chickens-and-goats vegetarian.
Once synthetic meat becomes a practical reality we'll see an interesting philosophical split among the vegans and vegetarians of the world.
I wasn't saying that he exposed something new or dangerous - I was saying that, if he had a conviction that this information was important to get out, those were his options. If you want to make the case that he didn't actually have any such conviction, well, fine, then you can argue that he's a hypocrite attention-seeker, but if those are his convictions, he isn't one.
Oh, gotcha. According to the SCMP he had the intention of finding "secrets" before he even took the job at Booz Allen. I think that changes the calculus a bit, but maybe that's debatable too. I guess my point is that his mindset was apparently quite a bit different from a whistleblower's (who tend to be surprised at what they find).
Incidentally, the reaction to PRISM this time around suggests that it wasn't really public knowledge prior to Snowden, even if it technically had been outed in 2006.
Corporate media is 100% on the side of the government. That they don't expose surveillance programs doesn't necessarily mean that it would've been a bad idea to do so. It really just means that they're a bunch of bootlickers.
They were the front figures of enormous social movements. Both were murdered.
Okay, take Thoreau or Sinclair then. But what's your point? Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu zealot, and MLK was murdered by some guy. Not "the government."
You're confusing "being a true advocate of free speech" with "being an advocate of the geopolitical goals of the current US government." They are not the same thing.
The usual criticism of Wikileaks (e.g.) in this vein is that they claim to be "true advocates of free speech" but in practice are more like "opponents of the geopolitical goals of current Western governments." Not that that's bad, just that it's a bit dodgy when diplomatic cables are presented as more of a triumph for liberty than, say, human-rights-abuse videos smuggled out of North Korea.
Snowden had effectively 3 options:
1. Don't expose the information that he (correctly) thought people would be outraged if they knew about.
2. Expose it, remain in the US, and end up spending the rest of his life in prison even if it was the right thing to do.
3. Expose it, but flee to countries in which he'd have a chance of remaining free, albeit on the run and isolated from everyone he's ever known for the rest of his life.
He chose 3. Who can blame him for that, given his conviction that this information was crucial to get into the hands of the US public?
But it largely wasn't information that wasn't known already. PRISM had been outed in 2006, IIRC, but nobody said anything. The other stuff was details about foreign surveillance, which it would be the height of naivete to be shocked about (and which, moreover, every nation does). Can you name a criticism of the American security/surveillance state that didn't exist prior to Snowden?
If Snowden was a spy he wouldn't have revealed himself to the world. That's pretty ****ing bad work. You're rambling.
Or maybe I'm not sure what word to use. It seems like he was motivated by a desire to sabotage the US government. That more of the documents he took have been seen by foreign governments than by ordinary citizens is troublesome. Not only that, but a lot of the stuff he gave to the Guardian and Washington Post was never published, which suggests it was too sensitive and inappropriate to publish.
If I knew that the US was out to get me and would do whatever it could to use secret evidence and closed courts to toss me in torture prison forever, assuming they wanted to catch me alive, I'd run too. It's only sensible.
And yet people like MLK and Gandhi faced similar peril but found the moral fortitude to stay and fight. Nonviolently of course.
I don't agree with this, at least not entirely. Stuff is happening now. The debate is being had, and had publicly -- even if it is tainted by all of the negative consequences of Snowden's indiscretion. Prior to this, as has been said, it was back page news at best. I don't understand why it takes an Assange or a Snowden causing this kind of havoc in order for this to enter the public consciousness. Our government was never meant to be able to operate behind a veil of complete and indefinite secrecy, nor was it meant to be able to withhold information from citizens that is relevant to them in the voting booth.
Fair enough. I agree exactly on that last bit. I guess my point was that Greenwald/Snowden started a mostly-inaccurate firestorm about PRISM, made up hyperbolic statements, and generally distracted from legitimate but less crisis-seeming issues. More generally it's the problem of (lack of) transparency and openness in government, as you say, but too many people are content to just say "no" and hope that nobody goes behind their back. Then another Snowden or Manning comes along and people get outraged again, but unproductively.
It doesn't require a war. Just help an enemy, so probably any other state.
(...nothing requires a war anymore because of Congressional/Presidential power grabs...)
I'm more inclined to think he's a traitor in the colloquial sense: a citizen who acts to directly harm the country of his citizenship. I think he's set to be charged under the Espionage Act---though maybe not with espionage proper, and not with treason.
The only substantial thing that Snowden revealed was our "watchdog" media's utter incompetence. The NSA's surveillance program was known as of several years ago but it was backpage news. It took a "celebrity" to bring it to the fore.
Then he goes and runs off to China very coincidentally at a time when China would benefit most from that. And he shares classified documents, wholesale, to the South China Morning Post... effectively straight to the Chinese government.
Then he goes to Russia with intent to fly to Ecuador (that bastion of anti-sec freedom... not), but gets detained, apparently. Because no way is Putin giving up such an asset.
Then it gets revealed by the SCMP that Snowden went into his job with the intent to steal secrets. Yeah, this smells more like espionage than whistleblowing. Manning was a whistleblower, although even his leaks were mostly irrelevant/small potatoes.
Finally, Snowden and his handler Greenwald have totally poisoned the privacy/security debate, and for that I'm livid.
So if an all-white town--and these are very common, because our nation still has de facto segregation in terms of housing--has an all-white Veteran's Day parade, and no-one thinks that's strange, that's normal?
A charitable interpretation says that Veteran's Day celebrations would include the veterans of that particular locality, so if the population is entirely (or almost entirely) one ethnicity, you would expect only that ethnicity represented among its veterans. If a local parade or whatever doesn't represent the national reality, no big deal, as long as everyone knows it.
So i decided to google Steve Moxon and i was sent to a blog post of his on the antifemininst.
I would like to share one part of one of his blogs
Feminism does not represent the final flowering of Western liberalism or of Enlightenment values. Rather, it is an aggressive counter-reaction intended to protect the threatened reproductive and sexual interests of middle-class, middle-aged women in a free sexual marketplace.
Women have completely overturned a 10,000 year + ‘patriarchal’ system in the space of a generation, and they have done so (in my opinion and the opinion of respected authors such as the anthropologist Lionel Tiger) as soon as they needed to. That is, when the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960′s revolutionised the dynamics of the sexual marketplace and impelled women to take on an independent political and economic role to secure their reproductive needs.
Emphases mine:
This, for me, is really what this argument is about. Feminism is so successful that it has failed. At best you could make an argument that feminism has overreached in some goals and/or that feminists have ignored issues where men have less power. Yet to claim that feminism failed in its primary goal of bring more power to women is absurd. Even this leader in the antifemininst movement admits it.
I think he's being a bit too charitable in his "completely overturned" statement. The women's rights movement has largely dismantled the big misogynistic institutions in our society, but that's not to say that we're "post-sexist." It's also been notably harder to advance that cause than racial equality: you don't see politicians trying to sneak anti-miscegenation laws through Congress anymore (the whole race-inequity aspect of the War on Drugs is a different story) whereas seemingly every other day some idiot legislator is pushing an anti-abortion or "legitimate rape" agenda. Maybe it's because racism per se is a lot younger than bad gender norms, I dunno.
Do people in Africa celebrate black history month?
Do people in China celebrate Asian Pacific heritage month?
Do any of those places have a long history of melting-pot immigration? Or maybe the opposite--a long history of trying to squelch separate tribal identities?
The issue is that white isn't a culture and while celebrating American culture would be cool, that isn't (exclusively) white anymore. Public July 4th celebrations can have black people at them now and everything.
Hee hee. It seems that whenever people try to define "white" culture (or any other broad-brush culture, for that matter) they just reaffirm their prior belief about the label. So when some white nationalist group talks about "defending white culture," they mean Protestant Christianity, the English language, a patriarchal nuclear family, their right to be intolerant, and all the "good" stuff. When some SJW on Tumblr talks about "white culture" they mean racism, sexism, slaveholding, imperialism, colonialism, logic, and all the "bad" stuff. When some random person thinks about "white culture" they probably think of green bean casserole, bad dancing, and all the "funny" stuff.
Similarly "black culture" (though arguably there is a distinct culture among urban minorities, but that's a product of geography and economics, not ethnicity). The whole exercise is actually, now that I think about it, pretty racist in general.
Exactly: well, for some of us I find it disturbing that all the vegetarians/vegans are claiming possible health risks from this thread, though.
On the last point, apparently some vegans/animal-rights activists think that beekeeping (e.g.) is slavery, so there's that. But anyway, I think you're taking the best-case scenarios here. Not every farm uses "organic" practices, and not every cow is grass-fed. So I could see someone adopting vegetarianism-in-practice unless and until the system changes.
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Okay, while I'm at it, does this seem like a good rundown of the various arguments for veganism presented so far in this thread?
Ecological argument: The meat and dairy industry leave huge carbon, nitrogen, and methane footprints, and contribute to deforestation and loss of biodiversity. Therefore the environmental costs outweigh the possible of consuming meat and dairy.Moral argument: It's morally wrong to kill animals for one's own sustenance, or subjugate them for (lack of a better term) the fruits of their labor. Therefore the social or ethical costs outweigh the possible benefits of consuming meat and dairy.
Preferential argument: I don't like the taste of meat or dairy products. Therefore I'm a vegan.
Nutritional corollary: I can obtain all the necessary calories, vitamins, and nutrients from plant-based food sources, without recourse to meat or dairy products. Therefore I can stay healthy on a vegan diet. (Note: If this weren't true, the other arguments alone wouldn't be sufficient justification, IMO.)
I think the nutritional corollary is pretty solid, and the preferential argument is basically unassailable. The ecological argument is a fair reason to be vegetarian or vegan in practice, while the moral argument is a reason to be vegetarian or vegan in principle.
Or I might put a different value on different kinds of life, as everyone does. Because bacteria, protists, fungi, and plants are all forms of life, and yet we don't assign the same value to their lives with respect to consuming them for food or whatever.
The point is that maybe the agricultural program that would feed everyone in America (say) on a vegetarian diet might require some possibly difficult land-use redistribution.
@Essence: Sick devil's-advocacy. I'm impressed.
That's why it'd be a flawed argument but the public-health benefits of pasteurization sort of outweigh the benefits of not. Either way that's off topic so I'll drop it.
Oh yeah, I was thinking there was some form of Hinduism or Sikhism or Buddhism that went one step further, but wiki says that veganism is pretty much a uniquely Western idea. Noted!
But cows (e.g.) don't just eat grass, in fact most cows eat corn that could be used more directly to benefit humans (maybe not as food).
I want to say that's sort of a straw-death. It's possible to instantly kill an animal, so that it's gone by the time the blood starts spurting. Also
So you say that every other "living thing [has] the same right to life that humans do." Yet, again, you single out animals. Why stop there if every living thing has the same right to life?
Right, because there's nothing objectionable about veganism as a behavior. However, there are (as we've seen) plenty of arguments for veganism, and those can be objected to: it's very possible to do something (of any ethical value) for bad reasons.
Similarly, there's really nothing objectionable about the mere act of prayer, but there are reasons for praying that can be objected to.
Unless you want to approach equal utility, in which case the poor family would get more (maybe not all of it, but still), since there's a decreasing marginal utility of money. So I guess it's all about perspectives... which is sort of the theme of the whole thread, isn't it
Right, but I don't think that's the objection. Rather, it's whether killing a pig for meat is ethically equivalent to killing a human for meat. Even if you think that both are ethically wrong, I don't think you can say they're the same level of wrong. But feel free to prove me wrong.
It's more that we sort of grew out of eating raw meat. Our hominin ancestors could well have eaten raw meat without problems. They also couldn't have digested lactose, but modern humans increasingly can. Ch-ch-ch-changes!
A... dare I say it... final solution?
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
But those are human problems. You see other mammals popping out a calf and being only slightly worse for wear (and the calf walks around almost immediately). Moreover, some animals (reptiles, e.g.) do just fine in confined spaces, and in fact prefer it since they "feel" more secure.
I guess what I'm seeing is a general statement about not eating animals on the one hand, but specific statements only about the big, mammalian (and avian) ones we eat. What if it was, as Captain_Morgan suggested, mostly bugs and (as I suggested) arthropods and crustaceans?
But then again, most of that grain is corn and alfalfa and stuff that doesn't really make for a balanced diet. We have enough corn in our food already, some say.
So what makes a cricket dunked in a deep-fryer ethically equivalent to a steer headed for the slaughterhouse?
Digital simulation of human physiology isn't possible (to my knowledge) at the moment, but I didn't want to limit my imagination However, rapid advances are being made in tissue cultivation. Growing kidneys and such, for example.
But I guess that's the real question. Is there a one-to-one correspondence between humans and non-human animals? Pigs might be close. Certainly apes and cetaceans (and we've recognized this). But, say, shrimp?
Even imagining a worldwide vegan utopia for a moment, there's a somewhat knotty issue of domesticated livestock: sheep and cattle (especially) are stupid. Like, probably incapable of surviving in the wild. So we can't just let them go, but organized extinction doesn't sound palatable either. So what do?
Hm, I think there might be a disparity between short-term and long-term thinking here...
... and this is a perfect example; well, take the sub-example of education-AA. The best critique of affirmative action in education I've heard is that it should be based on socioeconomic status, not race, since that's a far bigger factor in education disparity. But another reason to consider this mode of AA is that in the hopefully not-too-far-off future when race and gender discrimination are negligible, there will probably still be socioeconomic disparity. Then AA will still be effective. And even now, as it stands, higher education is rapidly becoming inaccessible to the middle class, of any ethnicity.
Raw-food vegetarians tend to come at it from either an anti-Big Ag or "raw milk is full of probiotic bacteria!" (flawed) belief, probably not the same one that turned to vegetarianism.
Huh, the paleo diet in a nutrition class? Interesting. I was under the impression that it's been sort of discredited as being particularly good (though it doesn't seem particularly bad).
Er, there are probably more vegans in rural India than there are in America.
Meat is just a substance. If we could synthesize steaks it'd be no less ethical than any other manufacturing process. (That includes "human" meat, but there are strong cultural taboos against that.)
That's... a really good rebuttal. Moreover, the ecological effects of livestock production (including the overuse of nitrate fertilizers and the release of methane) are pretty staggering.
Hm. Why exactly is there a distinction between Animalia and the other kingdoms? I don't think the otherwise-solid trophic argument (it takes more plants to feed a cow than it would to just feed you) holds with, say, shellfish, since humans can't really eat plankton.
Plus, people who are actually committed (and not just fad-committed) to a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle tend to know some pretty great recipes.
Or, option #3, synthesize (or digitize) the relevant physiology to test it on. That way no sentient creature is harmed in the testing, so it's a win-win. Technology!
Once synthetic meat becomes a practical reality we'll see an interesting philosophical split among the vegans and vegetarians of the world.
Oh, gotcha. According to the SCMP he had the intention of finding "secrets" before he even took the job at Booz Allen. I think that changes the calculus a bit, but maybe that's debatable too. I guess my point is that his mindset was apparently quite a bit different from a whistleblower's (who tend to be surprised at what they find).
Well, PRISM wasn't secret, among other things.
The Guardian is British...
Okay, take Thoreau or Sinclair then. But what's your point? Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu zealot, and MLK was murdered by some guy. Not "the government."
The usual criticism of Wikileaks (e.g.) in this vein is that they claim to be "true advocates of free speech" but in practice are more like "opponents of the geopolitical goals of current Western governments." Not that that's bad, just that it's a bit dodgy when diplomatic cables are presented as more of a triumph for liberty than, say, human-rights-abuse videos smuggled out of North Korea.
But it largely wasn't information that wasn't known already. PRISM had been outed in 2006, IIRC, but nobody said anything. The other stuff was details about foreign surveillance, which it would be the height of naivete to be shocked about (and which, moreover, every nation does). Can you name a criticism of the American security/surveillance state that didn't exist prior to Snowden?
Or maybe I'm not sure what word to use. It seems like he was motivated by a desire to sabotage the US government. That more of the documents he took have been seen by foreign governments than by ordinary citizens is troublesome. Not only that, but a lot of the stuff he gave to the Guardian and Washington Post was never published, which suggests it was too sensitive and inappropriate to publish.
And yet people like MLK and Gandhi faced similar peril but found the moral fortitude to stay and fight. Nonviolently of course.
Depends. Iceland surely isn't our enemy but they were (are?) prepared to grant him asylum.
Fair enough. I agree exactly on that last bit. I guess my point was that Greenwald/Snowden started a mostly-inaccurate firestorm about PRISM, made up hyperbolic statements, and generally distracted from legitimate but less crisis-seeming issues. More generally it's the problem of (lack of) transparency and openness in government, as you say, but too many people are content to just say "no" and hope that nobody goes behind their back. Then another Snowden or Manning comes along and people get outraged again, but unproductively.
I'm more inclined to think he's a traitor in the colloquial sense: a citizen who acts to directly harm the country of his citizenship. I think he's set to be charged under the Espionage Act---though maybe not with espionage proper, and not with treason.
Then he goes and runs off to China very coincidentally at a time when China would benefit most from that. And he shares classified documents, wholesale, to the South China Morning Post... effectively straight to the Chinese government.
Then he goes to Russia with intent to fly to Ecuador (that bastion of anti-sec freedom... not), but gets detained, apparently. Because no way is Putin giving up such an asset.
Then it gets revealed by the SCMP that Snowden went into his job with the intent to steal secrets. Yeah, this smells more like espionage than whistleblowing. Manning was a whistleblower, although even his leaks were mostly irrelevant/small potatoes.
Finally, Snowden and his handler Greenwald have totally poisoned the privacy/security debate, and for that I'm livid.
A charitable interpretation says that Veteran's Day celebrations would include the veterans of that particular locality, so if the population is entirely (or almost entirely) one ethnicity, you would expect only that ethnicity represented among its veterans. If a local parade or whatever doesn't represent the national reality, no big deal, as long as everyone knows it.
So it's just a symptom, not a cause.
I think he's being a bit too charitable in his "completely overturned" statement. The women's rights movement has largely dismantled the big misogynistic institutions in our society, but that's not to say that we're "post-sexist." It's also been notably harder to advance that cause than racial equality: you don't see politicians trying to sneak anti-miscegenation laws through Congress anymore (the whole race-inequity aspect of the War on Drugs is a different story) whereas seemingly every other day some idiot legislator is pushing an anti-abortion or "legitimate rape" agenda. Maybe it's because racism per se is a lot younger than bad gender norms, I dunno.
Do any of those places have a long history of melting-pot immigration? Or maybe the opposite--a long history of trying to squelch separate tribal identities?
Hee hee. It seems that whenever people try to define "white" culture (or any other broad-brush culture, for that matter) they just reaffirm their prior belief about the label. So when some white nationalist group talks about "defending white culture," they mean Protestant Christianity, the English language, a patriarchal nuclear family, their right to be intolerant, and all the "good" stuff. When some SJW on Tumblr talks about "white culture" they mean racism, sexism, slaveholding, imperialism, colonialism, logic, and all the "bad" stuff. When some random person thinks about "white culture" they probably think of green bean casserole, bad dancing, and all the "funny" stuff.
Similarly "black culture" (though arguably there is a distinct culture among urban minorities, but that's a product of geography and economics, not ethnicity). The whole exercise is actually, now that I think about it, pretty racist in general.