The survival of the fittest narrative was debunked almost as soon as it existed, and that debunking is what forms the ideological basis of mutual aid. That people continue to spread this toxic misinformation over a century later is a testament to the unfortunate tenacity of lies.
Even in the most brutal depths of the natural world, cooperation is still the overarching basis of ecosystem health. It’s known in Permaculture, for instance, that too much competition results in resource depletions.
A vegan ethic is inline with a growing awareness and need for us all to learn to expand our capacities of empathy and compassion, from those who are most like us, to those who are most unlike us.
On the topic of wilderness areas, vegans are divided on what the right approaches are. Some of us compare natural biomes to sovereign nations - while we dislike the harms that occur in those places, we feel a need to allow other species their independence to have their self-determination, if for no other reason than the fact that nature is the basis of maintaining a habitable planet, and interference in ecosystems should only be done with the utmost care.
But there are other vegans who do believe strongly that we should be intervening in wild places as well, with the goals of eliminating predation all together, and managing wildlife populations in more ethical ways.
It’s a highly contentious topic to be honest.
I feel like this is the “attack helicopter” joke of veganism
Isn’t that every joke on veganism?
Let the Bullshit Bingo begin!
The human brain is fueled by about 20% of your caloric intake. We’re evolved to be omnivorous. This isn’t prescriptive but descriptive. It’s going to take development to make vegan food delicious and something we want to eat (and then all the other features we want out of food: cheap, storage-safe, easy to prepare, etc.
For those of us who still eat a meat diet, it usually takes a chef to make something actually enjoyable from strictly vegetables. Otherwise, we’re used to receiving oddly-spiced bland much from our vegan friends. But we could do better if we were putting billions into it, and not the more-addictive cheeto.
But we live entrenched in capitalism, so no one is going to take this seriously until we’re already dropping dead from natural disasters and famine.
Imagine being this much of a naive child.
https://kellyjonesnutrition.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/manure-lagoon-1024x608.jpg
Humans “i dont rape because i respect other humans”. Meanwhile nature …
And in before “but i need to eat”, you dont need to eat animal products. You can have a healthy life with a vegan diet, arguably an even healthier life. And to go back to my original point, just because you need to cum, doesnt mean that you have the right to cause suffering and death to other sentient beings.
Just masturbate. Just go vegan.
But what about my sharp canine teeth? Check mate.
Those are to hold on to your victim more tightly
Telling boys to just go masturbate got us the Immorten Joe’s Warboys † that are the alt-right, that got Trump into power twice. The boys we told to literally go fuck themselves when they raged over their sexual frustration got us the army of militants and voters behind the white Christian nationalist movement. I was among them in the 1980s, when the society gave a meager few more fucks about them than they do in the twenty-first century.
I suspect similar movements exist through Europe, which is generally rejecting neoliberalism for fascist-thick movements towards one-party autocracy.
No, I don’t have a solution, and I’ve been working on it for thirty years. Christianity’s proscription against sex (later limited to non-reproductive sex) figures largely into the problem and it’s served so far as a sufficient distraction from class consciousness and effective response to industry’s effect on climate, and the imminent climate crisis.
We don’t have a way to let our young guys sow their wild oats, while we’re careening towards multiple great filters we are unprepared to navigate.
I know: 🧶📌📇
Maybe even: 🐰🎩🫖☕
And yet, very few people think about it, still. Those who do ponder the angry-young-men problem discount them as ineligible or feel they are too repugnant to civilized folk to consider. I’ve heard otherwise rational content creators actually say (I paraphrase) these guys were mistreated as kids and are now a societal problem. But they suck, so fuck those guys.
It might be a failing of the human species itself, that we are compelled to cast our young men out the way gorillas cast out their adolescent females (but welcome strange females), and capitalism intentionally only has limited seats where they can pick themselves up, so the system teaches them from the beginning to be aggressive, ruthless and transactional. Not to get completely nihilist, but maybe our capacity for civilization is limited and we just can’t overcome the paradigms that served us as migratory bands of hunter-gatherers.
In the meantime, our boys are taught they suck in our Christianity-heavy abstinence-only sex-ed, ‡ from which they descend into the incel movement, the manosphere, gamergaters, etc and from there into the transnational white power movement. Our society gave Trump his instant army, and it was ready for him the moment Trump went into politics. And our lack of interest or concern about the new batch of warboys we churn our from the US education system every year, is going to literally kill us all.
Just go vegan is going to end the same way, especially since the food industry cares not about actual nutrition but profit. Taking a page from Fourth International Posadism, we may have to end capitalism before we can create an ethical food production system (probably incorporating farming invertebrates as well as vegetables), but the problem right now is not what’s the end result ( Fully Automated Gay Space Communism ) but how the heck we get there and not crash and burn with the global ecology.
Totally open to ideas, but I’m not the guy you have to convince.
† Not to be confused with Warboyz of W4K fame.
‡ Twenty six states mandate abstinence-only sex ed, that stuff that teaches girls they are chewing gum, or someother one-use safety-sealed metaphor, and that boys aren’t allowed to think about sex until they have a salaried job and a ring. Seriously, this is still what is taught.
Three states mandate comprehensive sex ed: The west coast. And none of them require discussion of consent. (Some teachers include it anyway, as an elective topic). Of course, if we demanded opt-in consent in our sexual relationships, we might demand opt-in sex in our other contracts as well, say our jobs, our devices, our software, etc.
Non-vegan, hearing that vegans exist: “Hey, these people are different from me! I hate them!”
I’m a vegetarian and also native. Humans have this weird hubris where they think they’re not part of the natural world. Humans are designed to be omnivores, meat jumpstarted our evolution. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with eating meat, but what’s wrong is the ease and disregard for meat and the animals that provide it through the factory farming industry.
But at the end of the day there’s no more wrong with a person eating meat, than with that Hawk eating a mouse. We’re part of the circle. We just have the privilege to live in a time and place where not eating meat is a realistic choice
Humans are part of nature, but what call nature is the mostly well balanced group of ecosystems and food chains. Humans turned nature into a devilish food machine. There’s very few animals that hunt and kill for pleasure the way humans do, and even then the vast majority of humans could never kill an animal. So we pay someone else to do it. Killing meat for pleasure is evil, buying it at the supermarket is both evil and cowardly.
Where we came from is less important than where we are going. The problems with veganism are not that they don’t eat animals, in fact I don’t think the problem is with veganism at all but with moral imperatives in general that promote black and white, oppositional political positioning. But moral imperatives are one of the most popular and effective rhetorical methods to make a point (and split opposition) so we are just kind of raised in it. If you’re someone who has strong opinions you learn to express them in a certain way.
But veganism is good, but primitivist “return to nature” types have a dubious track record aka they tend to be chuds or on their way to chuddening. “Retvrn to the past” is a conservative talking point, but what separates us from nature is capitalism, not veganism.
Veganism is not return to nature. Quite the opposite. And it’s definitely not a return to the past. Veganism is a modern view of society where we look at the possibilities we have today, granted to us by technology and science, and decide to spare the lives of animals. We have a surplus of food and supplements that makes meat consumption less healthy, efficient and ethical than plant based. It’s was virtually impossible to do be 100% plant based 100 years ago in full health.
Wait that isn’t what I meant at all, I was contrasting the “return to nature” view with the vegan view.
I tried editing for clarity
Nature according to people who use that argumentI invented a fictional society for stories in which you are allowed to buy and consume meat, but only if you have a “carnivore’s medallion”. The only way to obtain one is to have witnesses observe you personally slaughter a living being (eg, a chicken) with no assistance.
Ideologically, seems like a good way to put friction on meat obsessions and get people to think about it.
90% alive today would not eat meat if they had to kill. You can grow up used to it of course.
Isn’t this just hunting?
Well, hunting involves the whole orange vests, ensuring legal permission, stalking an animal, etc. The idea would be if this world has hunters, any of them certified as a witness can get their colleagues a medallion without going the whole chicken route.
But obviously, most people who eat meat today don’t hunt. So they would need to go through the experience of taking life once before reaping the benefit.
I like this idea. We’re raising chickens and probably rabbits this spring. If you’re going to eat meat, you should face the reality of the life you are consuming.
Sounds interesting.
Well if the ants can do it, why can’t we?(Btw, I’m opposed to caged chicken egg cultivation, and even had my own chicken in the past before I couldn’t anymore for eggs. Now I just pay the premium and researched which were the most ethical eggs in the store available. Happy hens make better eggs anyway. I’m just pointing out we’re not the only ones that raise animals for consumption in nature).
ants can do it, why can’t we?
(Btw, I’m opposed to caged chicken egg cultivation
lol. Classic carnism.
Why would what ants do have relevancy to what we should do?
It tracks the logic of the meme then counterpoint, this is the counterpoint to the counterpoint.
If they went to live naked in the woods and used their apex predator canines to tear out a deer’s jugular, I’m not judging.
This is for real shit post
Veganism isn’t about respect for nature. It is a philosophy and way of living against animal cruelty and exploitation.
Congratulations on a legit shitpost.
Whoosh.
E: For those downvoting, remember this is a shitpost and some level of inaccuracy is almost required. It’s the shit part of the post. Like, c’mon guys…
Vegans have to deal with arguments like this but unironically on the daily. That hits a nerve, wether it’s meant as a shitpost or not. Don’t take it personally.
Mayhaps it is the vegans who need to avoid taking things personally
Yeah, it’s totally unreasonable to get tired of hearing the same shitty comments and warmed over “jokes” every day.
It can be both
And it gotten so bad, that some people will accuse you being a vegan if you’re not doing keto/carnivore diet, and thus an extremely militant and unpleasant one.
I wonder how people arguing with them know they are vegans… 🤔
Ooh I know that one! They are in a social situation that involves food and the vegan politely declines an animal product. Then they make an anti vegan joke and the vegan politely disagrees. Have been there many times.
Really? Because I have seen quite a few times vegan claiming that eating meat is a “murder” when people were trying to enjoy their steaks.
Here on Lemmy one idiot even claimed that cutting sheep wool or something similar is a sexual assault
Have you seen how wool is actually collected? It’s quite violent.
Are you one of the idiots claiming sheep are sexually attacked during wool cutting?
You know mate you get people with extreme opinions in all walks of life.
No doubt about it, but I am yet to see someone who eats meat calling for vegans to be forcibly fed meat - and I have seen vegans saying that eating meat should be forbidden.
Have you ever tried to not eat in front of people ever? Turns out it’s pretty hard to do. Sometimes, if you’re nice to people, you get invited to go out to eat to a place. Often those places have no vegan options, and you have to explain why you can’t eat there so people don’t just think you’re blowing them off constantly. We don’t just go around telling everyone we’re vegan like all the hate memes like to say.
Most vegans I’ve met, myself included, don’t pick fights with people about veganism. We just live by example. It’d be cool if more people went vegan, but arguing with people about doing it doesn’t help. Doing that is like trying to push religion on people or make people experience empathy. It isn’t easy to go vegan (getting easier at least). Food is tied to a lot of people’s culture who have a hard time relearning how to cook/eat and make generational recipes or comfort foods they’ve always eaten.
Tell them to find a vegan inclusive place next time and go anyway, the animal is already dead and being a patron this one time to satisfy a friend and have a good time is fine
By putting a post on the interwebs making fun of them and waiting for them to arrive? Not what you are implying, but also a quite effective method.
Lmao. Look at OPs comments. They actually believe this shit. Based on all the other shitposts they post here and all throughout lemmy, they probably picked it up on reddit or some other trash site, thought it was funny, and came here to share.
I’ll take “things actual vegans never say” for $500!
it’s not even a contradiction. One can respect something and not emulate it.
does this look natural to u?
What ever horror humanity has done, we are still holding the beer of invertebrates.
And yet nature’s is is not a justification for aught. The fruit of the tree of wisdom (mythically) gave us empathy that we may live in harmony with neighbors, and in the late game, we have learned the imperative to see value in the fallow wilds.
A century ago, a vegan diet for humans as extremely difficult, possibly impossible. And to quote Saruman the forests will burn in the fires of industry! And they have.
We are not a vegan culture today because the food industry focuses on sales and profits, not on nutrition and health.
Though to be fair our massive land-hungry industrial farms will affect the biomes around them regardless of whether we grow plants or ranch livestock. Veganism is part of a solution towards a more harmonious civilization, but misses several pieces.
Pretty horrifying if you let yourself think of it.
I can side with the vegans that the meat industry needs to be clamped down on hard
But eating meat in of itself is not wrong, that is what is natural
Murder and rape are also “natural.”
Yo this seems to be a bad take
I think something that defines humanity is that we really try not to follow the “rules of nature”, ie. the rule of the stronger over the weaker
There are plenty of things that are ‘natural’ that are wrong to do, why is eating meat any different?
Homosexuality has been observed among a great many species, particularly birds and mammals.
What where we talking about again?
Killing and eating your children has been observed among a great many species, particularly reptiles and mammals.
What where we talking about again?
Eh, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t at one point or that it can’t be part of our reproductive strategy in the future. I’d even say that murder and cannibalism are very normal aspects of our species.
That’s a personal choice that people are allowed to make for themselves.
That misses the question a bit, no? Everything that is wrong to do is a personal choice. It’s not relevant to whether or not it should be done
Not really, some things are objectively bad and wrong and other things are merely subjective.
The problem we’re having here are people who hold their subjective beliefs very strongly are then adamant that it makes said beliefs objective, just because they believe them.
even things like killing being bad is not objective in my opinion, it just simply stems from our minds and societies’ process of growth through natural selection.
We believe that killing is bad only because we share the majority of their DNA and we are close genetically to what we’re killing. It was evolutionarily incentivised to not kill those that are genetically close, as they and we share common ancestors from which such thoughts evolved.
this is imo why we value humans more than other animals, animals more than vegetables and relatives over strangers. Friends being valued more than strangers make sense as well, as they share ideas in the place of the shared genome.
in a wider scope none of this matters anyway, our lives and deaths are irrelevant to the universe and our lives don’t actually matter outside what our minds tell us.
What is the ‘objective’ source of your morality?
There is none. It’s just my view based on how people see things. You’re allowed to not agree, it doesn’t have to be combative.
Killing someone who’s done nothing to you and doesn’t want to die is pretty objectively bad.
Yes, killing other people is objectively bad. Thank you for agreeing with me.
Could you tell me how you measured that badness and how I can repeat the experiment?
Yes, but most people in the west don’t have the option to eat meat that are not from the meat industry.
That is exactly why veganism is attractive in the west.
Exactly as a vegan ex explained it to me.
Yeah, I wash shocked to find out that Squirrels hunted and ate smaller mice when they felt the urge.
Almost all herbivores are opportunistic carnivores. Cows are known to eat rats found in the hay. Horses sometimes gobble down a chick if they feel like it.
All these strict rules people believe about biology were prescribed by scholars of old who believed in a perfect creation where everything had its place, but reality is very messy.
Carnivores, not cannibals lol
Thanks 😅
All cannibals are carnivores but not all carnivores are cannibals.
99% of vegans dont say eating meat in itself is wrong and this bullshit narrative needs to stop
Edit: I wrote “in itself” to make it especially clear, but it seems people are skipping that part. The act of eating meat can not be evil, carnivorous animals do it for survival. The context is always what matters.
You haven’t been here long, have you?
Youre saying vegans want to stop animals from eating other animals? I dont think so.
🤣 go to the Lemmy vegan community and say that. I’m sure you’ll easily get 99 upvotes and only a single downvote
It’s all about assumed context. If you ask that question in English on the internet, most readers assume you’re talking about in the US, or failing that, in a developed country in the West. Therefore if you buy a pound of beef, it’s from a factory farm.
They’re not going to assume you’re a scavenger harvesting meat from already dead caribou in the artic.
I can go to a conservative community and say liberals have horns and get the same result. It proves nothing.
As much as I admire the morality and overall health of vegetarian/vegan folks, I would also super respect anyone who got all their protein by monstering whole live mice that they caught by hand.
I’d support a “you can eat all the meat you can catch and kill with your bare hands” diet.
Great, now I have to replace all my beef with veal.
I’m vegetarian and my partner is vegan but neither of us are strictly against the “hunter and gatherer” approach.
Where I live traditional hunting is almost nonexistent, but fishing and other ocean-based “hunting” (crabs, crays, oysters etc) is super popular. I’ve considered taking up spearfishing as it’s more intentional than throwing in a hook and dragging up whatever, and requires more (in my opinion) skill and nerve to pull off successfully. But even if I actually caught something the thought of cleaning it puts me off and I’d more than likely ruin it and waste a life for nothing.
No issues with anyone that can fairly catch and prepare their own meat for themselves, but I’ll stick to my tofu and seitan for now.
Hell yeah
Our ancestors have been using sharp sticks, heavy sticks, and sharp rocks since they could walk upright, so I’d support that, too.
Well… I’ll allow a sharp rock but only hand chipped.
Vegans and vegetarians are not often more healthy than meat eaters. In fact a lot of them subsist mostly on junk food and ultra processed shit.
I dunno about their morals. For me it depends on whether they are opposed to meat because they think it’s murder (absurd notion: see op) or because they opposed the treatment of living animals in industrial meat farms, which is the real issue.
However you gotta justify your choices I guess.
There is not only a treatment problem, but also that livestock eats a lot of calories that could be used elsewhere
