Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 33 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Ah yes, the old "I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere" defense

[–] ignotum@lemmy.world 24 points 2 months ago

"our new cancer drug is 99% effective!"

"So it doesn't work in 1% of cases? Then what's the point, throw it away, we just have to accept that cancer is going to happen"

[–] mildlyusedbrain@lemmy.world -5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

These arguments are exactly why people hate vegans. It's nonsense.

Not only do you jump to an insane straw man. You showcase that you ignore a clear increasing contradiction around your world view and choose reactionary nothing.

If you care about life realize the harder question. If you care about the environment realize clear inefficiencues. Currently, you showcase nothing more than crude thoughtlessness.

[–] BarrelAgedBoredom@lemm.ee 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not a vegan but it's foolish to think that vegans aren't objectively correct. Let's even say that plants are conscious beings on the level of cows or pigs. The conditions these plants are grown in are a million times better than that of the average factory farm animal. Additionally, in order to sustain ourselves on cows and pigs, exponentially more of these conscious plants need to be killed to fatten the conscious animals we are eating.

If we just ate the plants instead there would be several orders of magnitude less suffering in the word, antibiotic resistant bacteria would be a less immediate issue, a significant amount of our greenhouse gas emissions would disappear, and we'd all probably be healthier to boot.

Yes, something has to die in order for any organism to continue it's existence. Let's not pretend that only plants dying aren't a better alternative in every way to animals dying in order to further our collective existence. You accuse vegans of being reactionary but your comment smacks of knee-jerky defensiveness for something you seem to understand is wrong

[–] potpotato@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Devil’s advocate: are they a million times better?

Monocultures, moldboard plowing destroying soil structure and creating an Ap horizon, organics depletion and excessive application of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides…

Suspending any personal beliefs in the matter, it is truly easier to empathize with people, mammals, then others animals because we better understand their experience. We cannot understand the abstractions of a plant’s lived experience. Humans are only just starting to examine the intricacies of plant familial systems through root and mycorrhizal networks.

[–] BarrelAgedBoredom@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

Fair enough. I'm not going to sit here and claim that out current agricultural structure is perfect or even ideal. I personally think a decentralized and highly local system of food production and distribution would be better for the products themselves as well as the environment, human health, and community strength. A million times better is hyperbole but I think it's fair to say industrial agriculture is better for the plant than it's equivalent for livestock.

Fertilizers aren't great, pesticides aren't great, soil erosion isn't great. If we waved a magic wand and turned everyone vegan we would still see a net decrease in these harmful agricultural practices simply because people need less food than cows or pigs (among others), especially in the numbers were raising these animals in. If we're going to care for the wellbeing of the plants we eat, it would still be better to stop raising animals for food from a purely mathematical perspective.

I also agree that animals are easier to empathize with, and as such, we may overlook other (possibly intelligent) forms of life as a consequence. Perhaps one day we will achieve a thorough understanding on the lived experiences of plants and that knowledge may create another paradigm shift. But we need a planet that is capable of sustaining life for that to happen. Reducing our collective meat consumption is one of the myriad tools we have to ensure that end. Sorry if I'm coming off as confrontational or anything. I'm sick and my brain is foggy so I wasn't paying much mind to tone in this comment haha. Not trying to start shit or anything, just too lazy to edit

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I'm not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.

[–] BlackDragon@slrpnk.net 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not only do you jump to an insane straw man.

It wasn't an insane strawman though? It was literally the argument they made. Something has to die for you to eat, therefore it doesn't matter how many things you kill or how necessary those deaths are. The fact that you must kill something absolves you of any guilt for any amount of killing, is the ridiculous argument the person made (and which carnists often make) which we are making fun of for being obviously evil and wrong.

[+] mildlyusedbrain@lemmy.world -6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It is - it's a super affirmative position. It takes an extreme position within the sphere it's trying to criticize to make an exaggerated point to attack. It's literally a classic strawman.

Your follow up is in the same vein. Its empty rhetoric

[–] Objection@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months ago

That's called Reductio Ad Absurdum and is a valid, classic form of argumentation. If you take their premises to their logical conclusion, the result is absurd, so their premises must be false.

You don't get to arbitrarily limit where a premise gets applied in order to pick and choose which conclusions to stand by. It isn't a strawman to show that someone's premises lead to conclusions that they would disagree with, that's literally the point.

[–] AlexanderTheDead@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Lol I despise people not knowing what a strawman is. Go back to english class.

[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Or maybe there's happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.

Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don't kill ourselves this decade or the next.

[–] Objection@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 months ago

This logic doesn't make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize it.

[–] SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 months ago

We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these "facts of life".