Your argument of killing "the most defenseless form of life on the planet" is not receivable. For a start, as you kill plants AND animals, you definitely don't get to have the moral high ground. As I kill less beings than you, your argument would still give me the moral higher ground. That is, if it was not a trollish one.
I talked about killing sentient beings. Demonstrate a salad's fear of impending death and its survival-based reflexes to avoid it. Right.
Simply, plants do not have feelings as we or/as animals do (with varying levels of complexity). They are aware to some extent of their surroundings, but do not have nerves, conscience or pain as far as we know. If they did, well they would be classified in the proper kingdom, namely the animal kingdom. Like us or other mammals or fish. But so far they are in another kingdom. Plantae. I would not start assimilating different biological kingdoms. Unless you also dismiss evolution?;)
As for the space needed for food, maybe I should have worded it differently. The current western meat-based, meat-centric diet if adopted by the rest of the World (which it is, China's cow consumption has gone up 150% percent over the past 28 years, source: FAO) is not sustainable given the finite amount of space we dispose of on this planet. "Period."
Now the issue of overpopulation is a real one, and I agree, it is solved by reducing the number of people on the planet. The same way the issue of fading resources is solved by questioning the validty of today's demand, not only by betting everything on the idea that supply should and will adapt.
The question is not only of reducing the population, it is also of providing decent living for people in the process. So we might as well give ourselves a bigger chance of survival and decent living, properly feeding everyone.
Now talking about survival, considering that cattle emits more greenhouse gas than all of the world's transport put together.... well, that might be why Rajendra Pachauri, the president of the Expert Group on Climate Change who just got a Nobel price, has publicly asked people to eat less meat. Then again, for all I know you might not value the Nobel Price or could be a global warming negationist.
Oh, so you can't eat grain? Or more simply, you can't eat soy?
Most of the USA's cattle is fed GMO soy, which is eadible by humans (not considering the GMO bit, as we don't trust it yet where I live).
Anyway, it's really annoying everytime there is a vegetarian related story to see so many smart people on slashdot state so much bullshit.
No, as human beings, we DO NOT need to eat animals to survive. People have been proving it for centuries, be it as cultures or as individuals.
It's incredible in fact that we still need to even mention it.
Meat is only a question of culture at best, taste at worse. Or rather, the first pressure is harder to escape than the second.
Ever wondered why quite a few of the good ol' Greek philosophers were vegetarian?
Pythagorus, Epicurus, Aristotle, Diogenese, Plutarch, Plato etc. Or even Kant, Tolstoy or Voltaire in more recent times...
As thinkers searching for Truth, searching for the things that are right, they reached the moral conclusion that killing animals, sentient beings, for the sole enjoyment of eating their flesh was wrong. As it is not needed, it cannot be morally justified.
Of course, I don't think you're simple enough to be impressed by some "big names" and of course, you could find philosophers that were not vegetarian.. but even some great men and women were in favour of slavery, so it really is a question of thinking ahead of your time.
Some will then say that anyway it's natural, so we should not argue about it... and will argue so while wearing polyamide based clothes, browsing the web or talking on the phone with another person in another country. All of which, like marriage, highways, and writing books, are highly natural, as we all know.
Let's start being honnest for once, the very thing that makes us humans is that we spend our time trying to escape our natural state and have done so ever since we started burying our dead. So using that "natural" argument as a means of justifying something that has become far from natural is hypocritical.
And it silences the fact that we happen to be the only animal (as far as I know) that posesses a sense of morality.
So rather than allow us to do whatever, it should rather give us more responsability.
We all know the old Uncle Ben saying.
Anyway to finish this off and going back to what the parent poster was saying, how equiped are we to eat meat? Can we even eat meat with our bare bodies? Can we hack a pig to pieces with our teeth and hands? We can digest meat, it does not mean we should base our entire diet around it, the way we have. Even if yes, meat is good.
The same way it's not because we can kill all the sharks in the sea that we should. (And actually, we really should not and should try to prevent it from happening, but that is another issue, cf. the film Sharkwater for that).
But as we were saying, nature does justify what we do, the goal and the consequences of our actions do.
And saying all this, we don't even dive into factory farming and it's inherent horrors, the whole environmental issue and the resource allocation problem that is very real.
Like the fact that half of the water used everyday in the USA is for cattle, or that decreasing proteinic ratios mean that 12 kg of cereal are needed to obtain 3 l of milk -if my memory serves me well-, or to obtain 500 g or meat in the case or beef... meaning we don't even have room on the planet for the crops to feed all the cattle that would be eaten by 6 billion human beings if humanity followed an american/western diet, and that's not even counting the crops still needed to feed humans the rest of the plant based food they need anyway.
To sum it up, it's really annoying when people who give the issue little thought if any act like they know better than people who actually look into it and make informed, rational, and well-thought decisions. (not thinking about the parent poster in particular)
Vegetarianism is not dumb or for tree-huggers, it's a very logical position.
My father, who was a french Catholic and believed in it to a marge extent had no quarrels saying that "religions are nothing more than succesfull cults/sects".
So I think it's quite clear to many people.
It is extremely hard for me to believe as a European that you have TV reports like that in the States.. only after I read about that report on wikipedia did I start accepting the possibility that this was NOT a joke.
By no means do we have perfect journalism on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, but this.. this can not even be called "journalism".
Amazing, simply amazing. I am in awe at the methods used in this "informational" program.
Slashdot Mirror
modded troll? seriously?
sheesh, let's see some meta-moderation here..
if this had been intended as a troll, then I would have a lot of time on my hands to troll with such long posts..
You seem to be one very assertive person.
;)
Your argument of killing "the most defenseless form of life on the planet" is not receivable.
For a start, as you kill plants AND animals, you definitely don't get to have the moral high ground. As I kill less beings than you, your argument would still give me the moral higher ground.
That is, if it was not a trollish one.
I talked about killing sentient beings. Demonstrate a salad's fear of impending death and its survival-based reflexes to avoid it.
Right.
Simply, plants do not have feelings as we or/as animals do (with varying levels of complexity). They are aware to some extent of their surroundings, but do not have nerves, conscience or pain as far as we know. If they did, well they would be classified in the proper kingdom, namely the animal kingdom. Like us or other mammals or fish.
But so far they are in another kingdom. Plantae.
I would not start assimilating different biological kingdoms. Unless you also dismiss evolution?
As for the space needed for food, maybe I should have worded it differently.
The current western meat-based, meat-centric diet if adopted by the rest of the World (which it is, China's cow consumption has gone up 150% percent over the past 28 years, source: FAO) is not sustainable given the finite amount of space we dispose of on this planet. "Period."
Now the issue of overpopulation is a real one, and I agree, it is solved by reducing the number of people on the planet.
The same way the issue of fading resources is solved by questioning the validty of today's demand, not only by betting everything on the idea that supply should and will adapt.
The question is not only of reducing the population, it is also of providing decent living for people in the process. So we might as well give ourselves a bigger chance of survival and decent living, properly feeding everyone.
Now talking about survival, considering that cattle emits more greenhouse gas than all of the world's transport put together.... well, that might be why Rajendra Pachauri, the president of the Expert Group on Climate Change who just got a Nobel price, has publicly asked people to eat less meat.
Then again, for all I know you might not value the Nobel Price or could be a global warming negationist.
Oh, so you can't eat grain? Or more simply, you can't eat soy?
Most of the USA's cattle is fed GMO soy, which is eadible by humans (not considering the GMO bit, as we don't trust it yet where I live).
Anyway, it's really annoying everytime there is a vegetarian related story to see so many smart people on slashdot state so much bullshit.
No, as human beings, we DO NOT need to eat animals to survive. People have been proving it for centuries, be it as cultures or as individuals.
It's incredible in fact that we still need to even mention it.
Meat is only a question of culture at best, taste at worse. Or rather, the first pressure is harder to escape than the second.
Ever wondered why quite a few of the good ol' Greek philosophers were vegetarian?
Pythagorus, Epicurus, Aristotle, Diogenese, Plutarch, Plato etc. Or even Kant, Tolstoy or Voltaire in more recent times...
As thinkers searching for Truth, searching for the things that are right, they reached the moral conclusion that killing animals, sentient beings, for the sole enjoyment of eating their flesh was wrong. As it is not needed, it cannot be morally justified.
Of course, I don't think you're simple enough to be impressed by some "big names" and of course, you could find philosophers that were not vegetarian.. but even some great men and women were in favour of slavery, so it really is a question of thinking ahead of your time.
Some will then say that anyway it's natural, so we should not argue about it... and will argue so while wearing polyamide based clothes, browsing the web or talking on the phone with another person in another country. All of which, like marriage, highways, and writing books, are highly natural, as we all know.
Let's start being honnest for once, the very thing that makes us humans is that we spend our time trying to escape our natural state and have done so ever since we started burying our dead. So using that "natural" argument as a means of justifying something that has become far from natural is hypocritical.
And it silences the fact that we happen to be the only animal (as far as I know) that posesses a sense of morality.
So rather than allow us to do whatever, it should rather give us more responsability.
We all know the old Uncle Ben saying.
Anyway to finish this off and going back to what the parent poster was saying, how equiped are we to eat meat? Can we even eat meat with our bare bodies? Can we hack a pig to pieces with our teeth and hands? We can digest meat, it does not mean we should base our entire diet around it, the way we have. Even if yes, meat is good.
The same way it's not because we can kill all the sharks in the sea that we should. (And actually, we really should not and should try to prevent it from happening, but that is another issue, cf. the film Sharkwater for that).
But as we were saying, nature does justify what we do, the goal and the consequences of our actions do.
And saying all this, we don't even dive into factory farming and it's inherent horrors, the whole environmental issue and the resource allocation problem that is very real.
Like the fact that half of the water used everyday in the USA is for cattle, or that decreasing proteinic ratios mean that 12 kg of cereal are needed to obtain 3 l of milk -if my memory serves me well-, or to obtain 500 g or meat in the case or beef... meaning we don't even have room on the planet for the crops to feed all the cattle that would be eaten by 6 billion human beings if humanity followed an american/western diet, and that's not even counting the crops still needed to feed humans the rest of the plant based food they need anyway.
To sum it up, it's really annoying when people who give the issue little thought if any act like they know better than people who actually look into it and make informed, rational, and well-thought decisions. (not thinking about the parent poster in particular)
Vegetarianism is not dumb or for tree-huggers, it's a very logical position.
On this subject, this was posted last summer, so some of you probably read it. Quite worth the read though, it makes valid points.
"I have nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2054219
My father, who was a french Catholic and believed in it to a marge extent had no quarrels saying that "religions are nothing more than succesfull cults/sects". So I think it's quite clear to many people.
It is extremely hard for me to believe as a European that you have TV reports like that in the States.. only after I read about that report on wikipedia did I start accepting the possibility that this was NOT a joke. By no means do we have perfect journalism on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, but this.. this can not even be called "journalism". Amazing, simply amazing. I am in awe at the methods used in this "informational" program.