Is this actually news? Seems old to me, thanks OP though for bringing it up again.
The term flexitarian is new to me anyway. Happy this concept is getting more press anyway
Well... Raping is wrong, right? Say there is this guy, he doesn't always rape, just sometimes when he's in the mood. But not always. Should we applaud this flexi-rapist for doing something aweful a little less?
You're not technically wrong, but you'll never convert anyone with your attitude. You're doing veganism a disservice. Please stop.
Just planting seeds, some like it, some don't. I'll be a little less harsh next time.
Eating meat is not inherently wrong, raping is.
Life consumes other life to live. Humans have evolved to eat meat, we are living beings, a part of this planet just like a lion or hawk.
The lives we must take to live, whether they are plant, animal, or both, were not decided by us but by nature. Killing and eating to live is the only moral reason one has to harm another living being. This is not nice, it's just nature. Does the wild boar chased to it's death by a tiger not suffer a cruel death? Does that make the tiger evil?
Animal Agriculture and Massive Human Populations
Our modern animal agriculture industry is what's wrong, it is disgusting and evil and treats conscious beings as objects indifferent to their suffering. But feeding 8 billion people can only be accomplished using an industrial food industry.
The answer is not trying to turn 8 billion people into vegans, that is simply not going to happen. Rather, we should be striving to reduce our numbers and change culture to respect animals and their sacrifice for our food.
One of the more effective ways to do that are to eat like a "flexitarian" and reduce the amount of dependence on the animal agriculture industry. The other key way to reduce animal suffering is not something an individual has control over -- to have a human population that is not grotesquely oversized for the environment.
Our species has no entitlement to grow to maximum size and kill other beings to support this unnecessary growth. The Haber-Bosch process effectively caused human eutrophication, an imbalance, and like the overgrown algae causing fish kills in lakes, our numbers are causing the unnecessary death of a great many species in our environment and will lead to ecological failure if not taken care of. The solution to eutrophication in a lake is stop the overflow of nutrients.
While it's possible in modern times for a person to live on a vegan diet, it's not a normal, not healthy without significant effort and education, or more moral.
There will never be a time when no humans eat meat. Therefore, we should strive to reduce the suffering required to sustain our own life. Eating flexitarian is a highly practical way to do this. If an individual is willing to sacrifice their health and/or work to gain the knowledge required to be healthy without consuming animals at all (i.e. be vegan) then good for them, but this cannot be expected to occur globally.
...my wife eats meat: you know what she eats a heck of a lot less of since moving in with me?..you know what she'd've eaten a heck of a lot more of if i weren't tolerant?..
...don't make perfect the enemy of good; you'll do a heck of a lot less good and be surprised when you learn that your perfect isn't...
I'm vegan a long time now, sometimes I lose my patience because it feels like I'm talking to 8 year olds all the time. Carnism ia real, the fragile meat-egos, the bullshit bingo, the same lame arguments make me loose my patience sometimes. But obviously you have a point.
In my note app I've saved my old replies I'm fairly confident of regarding research, impact and links to sources and fire them up against the standard arguments. It's cheap but it would be madness to answer the age old cliches popping up in mass under a controversional vegan post with individual new answers. The definition of Sisyphus work. I refine the posts to take deviations from standard arguments into account. I don't spam them in a thread of full of the same cliche answers but tactically under one of them with a lot of upvotes/likes. This saves me some headaches and at least I know I countered the disinformation at least once and will maybe make some people see that the most regurgitated answers are not per se the most correct just because of their prevalence.
Damn, I am still sisyphussing!
Well rape is illegal, but honestly I see the equivalence, morally. That's the age old question posed by harm reduction, and I think, answered by it too. And this hardline viewpoint may work on some people, so it's a good one to bring up.
My take is that it's got nothing to do with rewarding less bad behaviour, but about reducing the amount of harm in the world. AFAIK there's no evidence that encouraging someone to be partially vegan actually props up modern horror farming any more than arguing for pure veganism.
Further, I think you can argue for both. Treat one as a gateway to the other.
The fact is we're unlikely to see animal eating outlawed in our lifetime, so we've got to work within the confines of rhetoric, or I guess terrorism.
Yeah I agree. Usually I am more patient and understanding as well, but today I decided to be a little confronting. There is no right way, as long as we do anything at all, I guess.
Is this actually news? Seems old to me, thanks OP though for bringing it up again.
The term flexitarian is new to me anyway. Happy this concept is getting more press anyway
Well... Raping is wrong, right? Say there is this guy, he doesn't always rape, just sometimes when he's in the mood. But not always. Should we applaud this flexi-rapist for doing something aweful a little less?
You're not technically wrong, but you'll never convert anyone with your attitude. You're doing veganism a disservice. Please stop.
Just planting seeds, some like it, some don't. I'll be a little less harsh next time.
Eating meat is not inherently wrong, raping is.
Life consumes other life to live. Humans have evolved to eat meat, we are living beings, a part of this planet just like a lion or hawk.
The lives we must take to live, whether they are plant, animal, or both, were not decided by us but by nature. Killing and eating to live is the only moral reason one has to harm another living being. This is not nice, it's just nature. Does the wild boar chased to it's death by a tiger not suffer a cruel death? Does that make the tiger evil?
Animal Agriculture and Massive Human Populations
Our modern animal agriculture industry is what's wrong, it is disgusting and evil and treats conscious beings as objects indifferent to their suffering. But feeding 8 billion people can only be accomplished using an industrial food industry.
The answer is not trying to turn 8 billion people into vegans, that is simply not going to happen. Rather, we should be striving to reduce our numbers and change culture to respect animals and their sacrifice for our food.
One of the more effective ways to do that are to eat like a "flexitarian" and reduce the amount of dependence on the animal agriculture industry. The other key way to reduce animal suffering is not something an individual has control over -- to have a human population that is not grotesquely oversized for the environment.
Our species has no entitlement to grow to maximum size and kill other beings to support this unnecessary growth. The Haber-Bosch process effectively caused human eutrophication, an imbalance, and like the overgrown algae causing fish kills in lakes, our numbers are causing the unnecessary death of a great many species in our environment and will lead to ecological failure if not taken care of. The solution to eutrophication in a lake is stop the overflow of nutrients.
While it's possible in modern times for a person to live on a vegan diet, it's not a normal, not healthy without significant effort and education, or more moral.
There will never be a time when no humans eat meat. Therefore, we should strive to reduce the suffering required to sustain our own life. Eating flexitarian is a highly practical way to do this. If an individual is willing to sacrifice their health and/or work to gain the knowledge required to be healthy without consuming animals at all (i.e. be vegan) then good for them, but this cannot be expected to occur globally.
...my wife eats meat: you know what she eats a heck of a lot less of since moving in with me?..you know what she'd've eaten a heck of a lot more of if i weren't tolerant?..
...don't make perfect the enemy of good; you'll do a heck of a lot less good and be surprised when you learn that your perfect isn't...
I'm vegan a long time now, sometimes I lose my patience because it feels like I'm talking to 8 year olds all the time. Carnism ia real, the fragile meat-egos, the bullshit bingo, the same lame arguments make me loose my patience sometimes. But obviously you have a point.
In my note app I've saved my old replies I'm fairly confident of regarding research, impact and links to sources and fire them up against the standard arguments. It's cheap but it would be madness to answer the age old cliches popping up in mass under a controversional vegan post with individual new answers. The definition of Sisyphus work. I refine the posts to take deviations from standard arguments into account. I don't spam them in a thread of full of the same cliche answers but tactically under one of them with a lot of upvotes/likes. This saves me some headaches and at least I know I countered the disinformation at least once and will maybe make some people see that the most regurgitated answers are not per se the most correct just because of their prevalence.
Damn, I am still sisyphussing!
Well rape is illegal, but honestly I see the equivalence, morally. That's the age old question posed by harm reduction, and I think, answered by it too. And this hardline viewpoint may work on some people, so it's a good one to bring up.
My take is that it's got nothing to do with rewarding less bad behaviour, but about reducing the amount of harm in the world. AFAIK there's no evidence that encouraging someone to be partially vegan actually props up modern horror farming any more than arguing for pure veganism.
Further, I think you can argue for both. Treat one as a gateway to the other.
The fact is we're unlikely to see animal eating outlawed in our lifetime, so we've got to work within the confines of rhetoric, or I guess terrorism.
Yeah I agree. Usually I am more patient and understanding as well, but today I decided to be a little confronting. There is no right way, as long as we do anything at all, I guess.
it's pretty crazy that no one in this thread has mentioned that going vegan would have a larger impact.
Being vegan would have a much larger impact!
I am vegan and I would say that but it would result in a big circle jerk as always of "hurr durr bacon".
Of course.
But don't let perfection be the enemy of good.