Your 3 most hated THINGS

[Induane]

A person needs to strike a balance between considering the wellbeing of another and getting something done.

If a person leaves the window to their nursery open, they assume the risk that a multitude of things could enter.  I\'m not sitting outside the window of the nursery deliberately blowing smoke at their children.

By your logic I should also refrain from using the restroom because my feces could contain a terrible bacteria, and when it goes through the sewage system it grows on the insides of the pipes infecting them and eventually moving throughout the sewage system and returning to the toilets which contaminate everyone in every home who then all die.

I should also probabily not drive a car because I could inadvertently kill someone.

I should also not ever leave the house because there is the possibility that I could inadvertantly do harm to another... in fact the real solution is suicide because that is the only way I know I will not physically damage another person... wait I have a family - they might not be able to eat or have a house... so I would be doing them harm.... what a delima.  

Seriously - its one thing to take care to not harm others, its quite another to be paralized by that fear.  

/rant

Wow I don\'t think I\'ve been so angry at such a statement... probabily it was simply designed to instigate a response which it did

[zanzibar]

Right.  You don\'t intend to hurt others with your actions, but you end up doing it anyway.

That\'s how many vegetarians feel about those who eat meat.

[lanser]

Originally posted by zanzibar
Right.  You don\'t intend to hurt others with your actions, but you end up doing it anyway.

That\'s how many vegetarians feel about those who eat meat.

am I right in  assuming that you also have no leather products nor any other animal derived materials, that you use no form of IC powered transport and your PC is solar powered?

[zanzibar]

Originally posted by lanser

Originally posted by zanzibar
Right.  You don\'t intend to hurt others with your actions, but you end up doing it anyway.

That\'s how many vegetarians feel about those who eat meat.

am I right in  assuming that you also have no leather products nor any other animal derived materials, that you use no form of IC powered transport and your PC is solar powered?

I\'m not vegan.  And no, you aren\'t the first non-veg*an to use the \"leather wallet\" argument.  It falls apart though, because vegetarians tend to focus in on the meat industry for the reasons I\'ve given earlier in this thread.  A vegan would definately agree with you though and say that any foot print which we can make smaller is too big.

[lanser]

Originally posted by zanzibar
Right. You don\'t intend to hurt others with your actions, but you end up doing it anyway.

I\'m not vegan.  And no, you aren\'t the first non-veg*an to use the \"leather wallet\" argument.  It falls apart though, because vegetarians tend to focus in on the meat industry for the reasons I\'ve given earlier in this thread.  A vegan would definately agree with you though and say that any foot print which we can make smaller is too big.

but by your own quote you are doing what you accuse meat eaters of doing, a slight bit of hypocrisy don\'t you think?

[zanzibar]

Originally posted by lanser

Originally posted by zanzibar
Right. You don\'t intend to hurt others with your actions, but you end up doing it anyway.

I\'m not vegan.  And no, you aren\'t the first non-veg*an to use the \"leather wallet\" argument.  It falls apart though, because vegetarians tend to focus in on the meat industry for the reasons I\'ve given earlier in this thread.  A vegan would definately agree with you though and say that any foot print which we can make smaller is too big.

but by your own quote you are doing what you accuse meat eaters of doing, a slight bit of hypocrisy don\'t you think?

What you\'re putting forward is the \"leather wallet\" argument:  \'If you have any footprint at all, then you aren\'t allowed to comment on the footprint of others.\'

[lanser]

I am sorry but that just doesn\'t wash, if you are prepared to use a product of the meat industry then you may as well be eating the meat.

I refer you back to your original quote with one of your analogies and no I am not comparing the meat industry with rape you did that

During a rape some jewellery is stolen, would you buy the jewellery? If not then with your point of view why buy leather?

Right. You don\'t intend to hurt others with your actions, but you end up doing it anyway.

[zanzibar]

Originally posted by lanser
I am sorry but that just doesn\'t wash, if you are prepared to use a product of the meat industry then you may as well be eating the meat.

Nope.  Eating a marshmellow which contains gelatin does not leave the same environmental footprint as eating a steak.

[Induane]

Really I\'m not even sure what you are exactly trying to say Zanzibar.  Is it that the meat industry is a threat to the environment?  And can you really say that it is more a threat than agriculture, which is the most destructive force we have come up with yet.  

Do plants have feelings? Well... they have no nerves, but they are certainly capible of reacting to stimuli and injury, even in real time.  Smash certain types of ferns and the plant quivers and curls up.  We may not be able to understand a plants suffering in the way we relate to animals because we are more similar to animals than we are to plants.  Most people would hate to eat any animal that we consider pets, as suddenly we relate to them on a different level.  They aren\'t food they are pets.  Thats the reason we have so many jokes about asians eating cats.    If we were more like plants we\'d be able to relate to them as well.  

Fruits are a different story, as they simply are the reproductive body of a plant, and usually drop off the plant on their own.  Vegitables, which are all other plant products, are a different story.  Its ok for us to cut them up in any way, slaughter fields of them, etc...

I\'m not saying plants have to be put on the same levels as animals, but I just don\'t think personally it really matters.  The way we relate to things dictates how we think they should be treated.


On another note, have you ever flown in an airplane Zanzibar?  I\'m not asking to be condescending, but I ask because it always makes me kind of sad when I do.  so much of america no longer looks at all like it hasn\'t been ruined by humans.  The landscape is polygonal, full of rectangles sliced into the earth making a wholy unnatural scene.  I look down and I\'m hard pressed to find land that we havn\'t affected in some way.  While some nature preserves are still around, we\'ve been the most destructive force to ever walk this earth.  Nothing escapes our existance.  We plow the soil, cutting trenches to sow our seeds, for the entire purpose of feeding on them - just like we do with cattle.  They are raised for death.   The agricultural practices threw the entire midwest of America into the \"Dust Bowl\" a time so dry that rain evaporated before it hit the ground, and giant dust storms plowed across the plains, followed by grasshopper swarms which devoured even leather wagon tongues, and anything else they could manage to chew,

I\'m not sure what gigantic catastrophic events the cattle industry has caused, but it is certainly possible.  The illusion is that the solution is eating plants, but FACT: agriculture is the most destructive force we humans have unless we were to set off all the worlds nukes simultaneously.

[lanser]

Originally posted by zanzibar

Originally posted by lanser
I am sorry but that just doesn\'t wash, if you are prepared to use a product of the meat industry then you may as well be eating the meat.

I refer you back to your original quote with one of your analogies and no I am not comparing the meat industry with rape you did that

During a rape some jewellery is stolen, would you buy the jewellery? If not then with your point of view why buy leather?

Nope.  Eating a marshmellow which contains gelatin does not leave the same environmental footprint as eating a steak.

Since you didn\'t answer my question directly does that mean the because the theft did not leave as big a \"footprint\" on the victim as the rape itself it is ok?

[zanzibar]

Plants are not concious, sentient, emotional, self aware, or capable of sensation.

Originally posted by lanser
Since you didn\'t answer my question directly does that mean the because the theft did not leave as big a \"footprint\" on the victim as the rape itself it is ok?

I answered your question directly.

[Induane]

Plants are not concious, sentient, emotional, self aware, or capable of sensation.

Conscious: a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one\'s environment.

Sentient: the capacity for basic consciousness ? the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness.

Self Aware: having or showing knowledge or understanding or realization or perception, aware of ones own existance; \"was aware of his opponent\'s hostility\"; \"became aware of her surroundings\"; \"aware that he had exceeded the speed limit\"

Emotional:  the language of a person\'s mental state of being, normally based in or tied to the person\'s internal (physical) and external (social) sensory feeling. Love, hate, courage, fear, joy, sadness, pleasure and disgust can all be described in both psychological and physiological terms.

So... Consiousness, self awareness, and sentience are basically the same thing, or at least interdepenant on each other.  They are also human only qualities as far as science can show so far.  No animals besides humans are sentient.  

As for emotional, emotion is something that animals have the capacity to posess.  It is a more primative mental state, but humans are endowed with it as well.  So are you saying that it is only cruel to eat animals that are complex enough to possibly have emotions?

As for react to stimuli, the notion that plants do not react to stimuli is pure rubbish.  Suggesting otherwise really surprised me as I would assume someone of your intelligence (no trace of sarcasm - I certainly do consider you intelligent, otherwise I\'d not post back so often  ) would be aware that not only do nearly all plants react to stimuli, but that reaction to stimulus is an essential part of plants.

Plant stimuls reactions are divided into two main categories, tropism, and Turgor Movements.

Tropism is a reaction to stimuls that changes the growth pattern of a plant.  A common example would be phototropism, which causes plants to grow towards the best light source.

Turgor movements are the plants equivilant to muscle movement, and works similar  to the starfishes water pressure based movement system.  The changes in pressure allow plants to move very rapidly.  A venus flytrap can close its jaws around an insect, certain plants close their flowers at night time, and sunflowers follow the suns path across the sky (hence the name). Also as I mentioned earlier plants can sense touch, - certain ferns shrink away and fold up when you touch them.  THey also close up when damage has been done to help heal.

[zanzibar]

Someone essentially said:  Hurting plants is just as bad as hurting animals, because plants can suffer.

My point is that this is bunk.  Plants do not experience pain.  Plants do not experience.

As far as sentiency, a definition I like of sentiency is \"thinking about thinking\".  When you think of it that way, some humans aren\'t terrible sentient and some humans are more sentient than others.  And who knows what animals truly think?  Can we say with certainty that they have no level of sentiency at all?

That, however, is a tangent and it distracts from what\'s really being said here.

[Induane]

My point is that this is bunk. Plants do not experience pain. Plants do not experience.

That is quite possible, but just as we may not know on what level there is a possibility that animals have some level of sentience, we really don\'t know exactly on what level plants do or do not expirence.  If you are willing to speculate that some animals could be sentient on some level it is just as possible to speculate that plants can expirence on some level.  

That, however, is a tangent and it distracts from what\'s really being said here.

Well it does define some of what is being said within the discussion and frame some things in so its not totally useless.  Useless tangents are the worst.

What do you think about the negative aspects of the agriculture industry?  You didn\'t respond to that point either time I made it, and only snagged a small detail out of the posts to disgree with.

[burned man]

1. Spam
2. meaning this thread
3. meaning people like you