Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[overseer05-15]

Eat all the meat you want.
It's bad for you, sure the body can take nutrients from it and all but it has compounds in it that when interacting with oxygen they damage your cells badly, carcinogens too. It makes you smell and express the smells of the animal you eat.
If that doesn't bother you then the lowering of your general frequency should.

The real shame is its not the cows, pigs, chickens etc that are being farmed.
Just like a cow you can't even see your own reflection either.

Uh, no? Meat isn't bad for you, it contains a number of nutrients and such that are vital to your health (sidenote, all of these are also available in plant form for vegan consumption.) There's a reason it's a staple of the human diet. It also doesn't make you smell like the animal, I don't think that's possible. Unless it gives you gas, I guess?

As to the second part, what? I'll admit to not being philosophically fit, but I'm not blind, and I can indeed see my own reflection. Need to shave my sideburns.

[Castlecliff]

Thats cause you smell like you have for your whole life and think its normal.
I noted the nutrients in meat. I've done nutrition studies.

To help with your lack of fitness. I advise you exercise

[Reelya]

Well you see, that's just a basic lack of empathy. At least that (whilst horrifying) is easier to comprehend than Bleep_Bloops theories.   

Yep, i think bloop_bleep is reaching too far with the mirror test thing.

The mirror test tells you whether an animal can recognize it's own reflection. That just tells you it's aware of what it looks like and smart enough to work out that the reflection isn't real, so capable of abstraction. However, the animal reacts to the image as if it's another animal, so the animal might still be aware of the concept "another animal like me", meaning that it still possesses some concept of self.

[scriver]

Eat all the meat you want.
It's bad for you, sure the body can take nutrients from it and all but it has compounds in it that when interacting with oxygen they damage your cells badly, carcinogens too. It makes you smell and express the smells of the animal you eat.
If that doesn't bother you then the lowering of your general frequency should.

The real shame is its not the cows, pigs, chickens etc that are being farmed.
Just like a cow you can't even see your own reflection either.

I dunno, arrogance smells worse

[Castlecliff]

Ahh yeah it must. Its good to self review your own scent though isn't it scriver.
You can do it you will smell good if you want to, I belive in you

[Yoink]

For one thing, I do not think it's an insult. It was an (admittedly snarky) response to an actual direct insult.

It wasn't intended so much as a direct insult, more... an expression of the weariness arising from being dragged into these discussions whenever they crop up.
There are never many folks arguing from my viewpoint (i.e., that of reason), so I feel compelled to throw in my $0.02 as much as I doubt it will have any effect. Probably for the best that there were these buffer posts in between your response and my checking the thread, otherwise I might well have responded heatedly myself, haha.

Eh, maybe. It's not the being bred for food part that's awful so much as the conditions in modern factory farms. Those conditions are more easily changed then the deextinction of a species is.

I think the very idea of creatures being bred for food is irredeemable no matter how cushy the conditions they live in are.
And, depending on who you listen to, we may have already damaged/polluted the planet past the point of no return... why should other species have to suffer through the death of the planet along with us?

Far as I can recall there are populations, but decent isn't how they're generally described... and it's only going to get worse going forward.

I didn't necessarily mean wild populations... obviously there isn't a whole lot of room for wild populations of any species in most parts of the world. Fortunately there are a fair few "farm sanctuaries" along with nature reserves, etcetera. But on the whole they'd be better off dead than repeating the endless cycle of being, y'know, farmed and killed.   

Uh, no? Meat isn't bad for you

^{[citation needed]}




Okay, new unrelated WTF: had a massive anxiety attack earlier as I walked down the street to get cash out. Heavy traffic, car after car after car all sittin' in a row waiting for a light to change, each one full of unseen eyes doubtless staring at me with hostility. Eep. Doubtless there are various coping mechanisms or meditation techniques or whatever that I should have employed to calm myself, but no such ideas occurred to me.

I think my anxiety has been getting seriously worse lately. All the various nonsensical hoops I've been having to jump through are taking their toll, or something.
Also I need to get a new smartphone, it occurs to me that my old one had become something of a modern-day security blanket. Also Why TF does the stupid new Steam Friends window always pop up to tell you it can't connect or whatever? Freakin' annoying, man.

[Castlecliff]

Also to point out something. Why am I attacked and called arrogant?
Like an addict attacking someone who says smoking is bad for them.

I can handle this kind of attack but it is what it is. I wasn't being any more arrogant than a person pointing out the truth.
Its ok to like meat and smoke herion. But its bad for you so dont attack people who are just stating facts

[overseer05-15]

Uh, no? Meat isn't bad for you

^{[citation needed]}

[citation provided]

Tl;dr: don't eat large amounts of red meat, don't eat overly fatty or processed meat.


(on rereading it I now notice that the article includes pork as a red meat, what)

[Cathar]

I had a psychology teacher once who believed some baffling shit. Practically preached nihilism and meaninglessness, and that nothing matters and altruism and goodness don't exist. Even feeling good about doing a good deed or feeling that you need to do a good deed for nothing in return is an evil ulterior motive that destroys the concept of altruism.

Tho the question "why does altruism exist ?" is a legitimate question for an evolved specy. Why would a gene "purposefully lower your survival chances for the sake of other" would survive and thrive in an evolved specy, it's quite baffling.
I kind of like Dawkins answer ; it's not about the survival of the individual, it's about the survival of the gene. If you sacrifice 100% of your offspring chances but that sacrifice does allow for the survival and (relative, in comparison with family who don't share it) reproductive success of all your siblinghood who statistically share the gene, then having an altruistic gene becomes beneficial and allows it to spread.

[Kagus]

Cows and sheep would die horrible, slow, painful deaths if immediately released from human-supervised husbandry. This is because they've been bred to overproduce, and without someone else around to remove the excess milk/wool, they will keep on producing and destroy their own bodies.

Chickens are surprisingly robust even in their ultra-refined genetic state. It really just comes down to what kind of predators are involved, but chickens will happily take to the wilderness and never look back. Hawaii has a very large population of wild chickens, thanks to a lack of particularly threatening natural predators (aside from tourists, that plague known as the multicolored death!). Goats are also reasonably capable of taking care of themselves, but dairy goats can run into the same sort of problems as cows.

Pigs don't really give a shit, and will gleefully go feral and eat everything.


Yes, industrial farming practices are awful for everyone involved, often in wide-reaching ways. I do feel it's possible for farming to, with different methods, provide a full, comfortable life for the animals. And as for whether or not it's ethical to (painlessly) kill and eat them afterwards, I suppose that depends a fair deal on how sacred you feel life is. Stuff like production of wool, eggs, and milk (and cheese, when not using rennet or just using non-animal rennet) is a bit less ethically loaded in my opinion, as you're not ending something's individual existence (and thus its potential capacity to experience further happiness) in order to get the product.

As has been touched on earlier, we are an exploitative species, and there's not much of any way around that except by spontaneously developing photosynthesis, and we'd probably find a way of making that exploitative too. All we can do is try to exploit other animals, plants, and land as nicely as possible.

I mean, hell, even yeast is technically a living organism...

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Kagus]

Don't eat poets, they're stringy and you'll get quills in your nose.

Toddlers are the perfect combination of physically active muscles and baby fat marbling.

[CABL]

My nose insist on telling me that my cat has vomited, yet he hasn't. What the fuck is wrong with my nose?

[Cathar]

And as to altruism: this causes litterally no dissonance at all for me. Helping others can be self-centered if you define your self-worth by being altruistic. Or simply put: if you do it to feel good is it really altruistic?

Well you need to evolve that brain connection that gives you an endorphin shot each time you do something good, and for that trait to evolve, the strain of (proto-) humanity that carries it has to outbreed the strain of (proto-) humanity who doesnt, and it only can happen if this is beneficial to its reproductive success. But yes of course I agree with you, there is no transcendent, unevolved drive to do good.

[Reelya]

I had a psychology teacher once who believed some baffling shit. Practically preached nihilism and meaninglessness, and that nothing matters and altruism and goodness don't exist. Even feeling good about doing a good deed or feeling that you need to do a good deed for nothing in return is an evil ulterior motive that destroys the concept of altruism.

Tho the question "why does altruism exist ?" is a legitimate question for an evolved specy. Why would a gene "purposefully lower your survival chances for the sake of other" would survive and thrive in an evolved specy, it's quite baffling.
I kind of like Dawkins answer ; it's not about the survival of the individual, it's about the survival of the gene. If you sacrifice 100% of your offspring chances but that sacrifice does allow for the survival and (relative, in comparison with family who don't share it) reproductive success of all your siblinghood who statistically share the gene, then having an altruistic gene becomes beneficial and allows it to spread.

Altruistic genes are needed to explain why creatures don't merely murder and eat their own children. We don't need to speculate about siblings and groups for why such genes would exist.

Also, the genes for "don't eat this, it's a relative" can't be too specifically encoded since what your children will look like isn't hard-coded either, so even a gene which only exists to stop parents instantly killing their children would have some spill-over effect into how you treat various other creatures. This explains the human propensity to taking pets, which clearly didn't "evolve". It's an emergent property, not a deliberately encoded thing.

As far as siblings go, however, remember that siblings share about 50% DNA. So, siblings are equally closely-related as your own children are, so caring about them makes as much genetic sense as caring about your own children does. I think we've internalized this idea that "parents love their children and wouldn't hurt them" as if that in itself doesn't need explanation, and we act like some big and entirely separate explanation is needed into why organisms aren't murderously callous to organisms which aren't their direct offspring. In fact, no other explanation is needed. Organisms are altruistic to similar organisms because of the exact same systems which make them altruistic to their own offspring.