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Suffering is literally foundational to life friend, you can't end it. The vegan utopia is a dead planet.

aziaziazi 2y ago
How do you manage to conclude vegan utopia being a dead planet ? Please develop your point, without explication it just look angry meaningless bashing. Veganism does not reject suffering but states that avoidable suffering is better to be avoided (opinion shared by many non vegans). An analogy is a dog in the middle of a street, if you can’t avoid it nobody will blame you to crash on him. If you can avoid, why would you kill that poor dog ? That’s what everybody do, not just vegans. The discovery of B12 source in the 50’s and modern nutrition understanding made avoidance of many suffering very easy.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  Because in order to not have suffering animals, you must control their populations, which in itself causes suffering. The only way to not have suffering is to not have life. I laugh at the thought of a vegan future where cow population control has become so extreme that they're an endangered species you can only find in zoos. As for wanting to reduce suffering, natural, pasture raised humane farming can achieve that. Vegans always make this "factory farming or nothing" argument which just seems silly on its head. Humans controlled animal populations and thinned herds for thousands of years in humane ways before the advent of factory farming, we just need to dial back the clock on our mechanized monstrosity.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    > The only way to not have suffering is to not have life Did you read my previous posts ? Vegans don’t try to remove all suffering but to avoid cruelty. Not having cows won’t make each cow less suffering. But don’t worry for them to go extinct, they represent 35% of the world mammal biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > As for wanting to reduce suffering, natural, pasture raised humane farming can achieve that. Not on the scale of demand. > Humans controlled animal populations and thinned herds for thousands of years in humane ways before the advent of factory farming, we just need to dial back the clock on our mechanized monstrosity. 1) What we did to animals was never humane. There's a reason that it is bad when humans get treated "like animals". For one, the traditional methods of slaughter don't involve a bolt gun to stun them, so by going back to the old ways we go from saying "who is to blame if the bolt gun doesn't stun them before slaughter?" to "what bolt gun?" and them being exsanguinated starting while conscious. 2) The mechanised monstrosity is the result of all the people who want to eat meat and for that meat to be cheap. If you want to enforce idilic meadows for all cows, and that they only get to be turned into food when they die of natural causes, be prepared for riots — "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" style, because that's expensive and a lot of people (e.g. in the UK) are struggling to pay rent and use food banks already. May also need to severely reduce the human population to achieve that due to lack of suitable land, given how many cattle are fed crops grow elsewhere. Can't tell how you feel about that, I've seen people go both ways in these kinds of arguments — even though it seems inconsistent to call for a reduction of human population while being not OK with a reduction of the livestock population. Also: > The only way to not have suffering is to not have life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duḥkha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duḥkha
deleted 2y ago
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ben_w 2y ago
> Suffering is literally foundational to life friend, you can't end it. Says who? In a counterfactual world where those things were done to a group of humans, from puberty to menopause, one could say exactly the same as your comment. And yet, human chattel slavery is illegal, and anyone attempting what I've just described would be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and/or genocide — a newspaper or historical report saying a group of people "were treated like animals" is a sign of something horrific, and if someone is known as "a butcher" because of what they did to humans then we don't wave it away as "suffering is literally foundational to life". And we don't like it when other things eat us, be the other bacteria or shark. Instead, we make the world safe for us… because we don't accept "suffering is foundational" when it is us doing the suffering. Even in a counterfactual world where humans really did need to consume flesh — we know we don't, biologically, need to consume the flesh of others — the subject of this entire thread is growing meat in a vat, just the flesh without a mind to suffer with it. Other people are doing similar things for dairy. Also: if you really think that "suffering is literally fundamental" is a good argument, you shouldn't have any problem with humans being forced to, as you said previously, toil away in artificial light in a giant industrial facility to make their food. > The vegan utopia is a dead planet. Says who? There was a time on this world when all life was photovore or chemovore. Predation is a strategy, but one of evolution not of engineering. Predation is the "defect" strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. You wrote previously about diversity: this world has about 1.5 billion cows. This displaced all the other flora and fauna that used to exist in the same places. This is a very real loss of (bio)diversity, directly caused by what you think is giving you (dietary) diversity.

How do you manage to conclude vegan utopia being a dead planet ? Please develop your point, without explication it just look angry meaningless bashing. Veganism does not reject suffering but states that avoidable suffering is better to be avoided (opinion shared by many non vegans). An analogy is a dog in the middle of a street, if you can’t avoid it nobody will blame you to crash on him. If you can avoid, why would you kill that poor dog ? That’s what everybody do, not just vegans. The discovery of B12 source in the 50’s and modern nutrition understanding made avoidance of many suffering very easy.

CuriouslyC 2y ago
Because in order to not have suffering animals, you must control their populations, which in itself causes suffering. The only way to not have suffering is to not have life. I laugh at the thought of a vegan future where cow population control has become so extreme that they're an endangered species you can only find in zoos. As for wanting to reduce suffering, natural, pasture raised humane farming can achieve that. Vegans always make this "factory farming or nothing" argument which just seems silly on its head. Humans controlled animal populations and thinned herds for thousands of years in humane ways before the advent of factory farming, we just need to dial back the clock on our mechanized monstrosity.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  > The only way to not have suffering is to not have life Did you read my previous posts ? Vegans don’t try to remove all suffering but to avoid cruelty. Not having cows won’t make each cow less suffering. But don’t worry for them to go extinct, they represent 35% of the world mammal biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
- ben_w 2y ago
  > As for wanting to reduce suffering, natural, pasture raised humane farming can achieve that. Not on the scale of demand. > Humans controlled animal populations and thinned herds for thousands of years in humane ways before the advent of factory farming, we just need to dial back the clock on our mechanized monstrosity. 1) What we did to animals was never humane. There's a reason that it is bad when humans get treated "like animals". For one, the traditional methods of slaughter don't involve a bolt gun to stun them, so by going back to the old ways we go from saying "who is to blame if the bolt gun doesn't stun them before slaughter?" to "what bolt gun?" and them being exsanguinated starting while conscious. 2) The mechanised monstrosity is the result of all the people who want to eat meat and for that meat to be cheap. If you want to enforce idilic meadows for all cows, and that they only get to be turned into food when they die of natural causes, be prepared for riots — "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" style, because that's expensive and a lot of people (e.g. in the UK) are struggling to pay rent and use food banks already. May also need to severely reduce the human population to achieve that due to lack of suitable land, given how many cattle are fed crops grow elsewhere. Can't tell how you feel about that, I've seen people go both ways in these kinds of arguments — even though it seems inconsistent to call for a reduction of human population while being not OK with a reduction of the livestock population. Also: > The only way to not have suffering is to not have life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duḥkha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duḥkha

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ben_w 2y ago

> Suffering is literally foundational to life friend, you can't end it. Says who? In a counterfactual world where those things were done to a group of humans, from puberty to menopause, one could say exactly the same as your comment. And yet, human chattel slavery is illegal, and anyone attempting what I've just described would be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and/or genocide — a newspaper or historical report saying a group of people "were treated like animals" is a sign of something horrific, and if someone is known as "a butcher" because of what they did to humans then we don't wave it away as "suffering is literally foundational to life". And we don't like it when other things eat us, be the other bacteria or shark. Instead, we make the world safe for us… because we don't accept "suffering is foundational" when it is us doing the suffering. Even in a counterfactual world where humans really did need to consume flesh — we know we don't, biologically, need to consume the flesh of others — the subject of this entire thread is growing meat in a vat, just the flesh without a mind to suffer with it. Other people are doing similar things for dairy. Also: if you really think that "suffering is literally fundamental" is a good argument, you shouldn't have any problem with humans being forced to, as you said previously, toil away in artificial light in a giant industrial facility to make their food. > The vegan utopia is a dead planet. Says who? There was a time on this world when all life was photovore or chemovore. Predation is a strategy, but one of evolution not of engineering. Predation is the "defect" strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. You wrote previously about diversity: this world has about 1.5 billion cows. This displaced all the other flora and fauna that used to exist in the same places. This is a very real loss of (bio)diversity, directly caused by what you think is giving you (dietary) diversity.