vick

[Smellyoldgit]

Professor Chaos wrote

So what do meat-eaters here say when confronted about the ethics of eating delicious juicy flesh and potential hypocrisy in certain areas? (Dolphin-safe tuna!)

This essay is a little long - but puts the point well as to why vegetarians should be made to eat lard

[Rhinoqulous]

ninjaxlikewoah__ wrote

Peta2 is mainly for vegans who are younger, but Peta is not terrorist. It's the animal rights organization.

It's an animal rights organization that bombs research facilities (or at least provides funding and support to ALF, who DOES bomb and raid scientific institutions). It really is amazing, with every post you make you come off as more and more of an uneducated idiot.

[Rhinoqulous]

Professor Chaos wrote

So what do meat-eaters here say when confronted about the ethics of eating delicious juicy flesh and potential hypocrisy in certain areas? (Dolphin-safe tuna!)

Tuna has to be dolphin-safe, as dolphins are very promiscuous. You don't want to catch some aquatic VD from a tuna-salad samitch now, do ya?

[Professor Chaos]

[Professor Chaos]

Rhinoqulous wrote

Tuna has to be dolphin-safe, as dolphins are very promiscuous. You don't want to catch some aquatic VD from a tuna-salad samitch now, do ya?

Fucking whore dolphins!

[Rhinoqulous]

Professor Chaos wrote

Terrorist!

I actually worked for one of the writers of that Alf a few years back. He was a fucking idiot.

[Choobus]

Rhinoqulous wrote

I actually worked for one of the writers of that Alf a few years back. He was a fucking idiot.

I don't know why, but this is extremely funny to me.

Lily wrote

This is not a new debate by any means. In Shakespeare's Cymbeline there is a rather famous passage in which the Queen proposes poisoning dogs as a test of the efficacy of the toxic compounds she has procured from the Doctor. He says to her:

Your highness
Shall from this practice but make hard your heart;
Besides, the seeing these effects will be
Both noisome and infectious.

In other words, we (humans) have known for a long time that there is a rather direct correlation between hardening our hearts towards animals and a later lack of empathy towards human beings. Samuel Johnson and many other fought vivisection on those grounds:

"Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins."
Johnson: Idler #17 (August 5, 1758)

He denied in that same essay that any medical knowledge so gained was worth it.

And if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of lacteals at the expense of his humanity. It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart, extinguish those sensations which give man confidence in man, and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or stone."

Well, medical experimentation has been marked by cruelty and there is no getting away from that. I think there is a lot more oversight and regulation today but, I won't kid you, I don't like it, even though I have benefited from it.

Don't even get me started on the issue of the way we treat animals that we consume. I can't eat pork-- the way pigs are slaughtered is the stuff of nightmares. I can barely bring myself to eat chicken. I think the only thing that makes it possible is my knowledge that chickens are not nearly as intelligent as pigs. But even so...

What the psychiatric literature shows I don't know. It seems unlikely that anyone who can inflict pain needlessly on an animal, is going to prove to be a real mensch when it comes to humans.

Why does chicken's lower intelligence as compared to pigs reduce the extent of the cruelty in your mind? Is it okay to torture a mental retard but not Stephen Hawking? So far as we know, chickens experience pain in pretty much the same way that pigs and humans do.

There is absolutely no doubt that animal testing has yielded lots of useful medical knowledge. It would have been very difficult to arrive at much of the knowledge we currently possess without animal models. If you don't think that's true just take a quick read through medical and biological sciences-related literature.

While I do enjoy poetry, it doesn't demonstrate that harming animals necessarily leads to one being more prone to hurt other humans. Humans were once hunter-gatherers and civilization could not exist without the domestication (i.e. enslavement) of various species.

[Choobus]

Metman07 wrote

Is it okay to torture a mental retard but not Stephen Hawking?

you leave Francis alone.....

Choobus wrote

you leave Francis alone.....

But what if I ship him over to Gitmo and imprison him as an "enemy combatant"?

[Kate]

Metman07 wrote

But what if I ship him over to Gitmo and imprison him as an "enemy combatant"?

The carrot patch? That'd work. Vegetables taste like ass. He'll fit right in.

[Choobus]

Metman07 wrote

But what if I ship him over to Gitmo and imprison him as an "enemy combatant"?

well, ok, if its for freedom

Metman07 wrote

While I do enjoy poetry, it doesn't demonstrate that harming animals necessarily leads to one being more prone to hurt other humans. Humans were once hunter-gatherers and civilization could not exist without the domestication (i.e. enslavement) of various species.

Poetry has been the vehicle of passing on human wisdom for millenia. I would pay attention to the lessons it teaches. Otherwise, why waste time reading it?

However, that is a bit off-topic. It has been we moderns who have perfected the art of cruelty in the name of progress. In the days when people raised their own livestock and slaughtered it for their own consumption, there simply was not the cruelty associated with it that has been imposed by modern commercial farming. Pigs were not confined in lots, chickens roamed loose-- they weren't packed on top of each other and confined in tight spaces, ducks were not force fed, so as to enlarge their livers, etc. I can't even bear to write more. If you know these things and are satisfied that it should be so, well, it isn't my wish to try to spoil your dinner.

[Choobus]

Lily wrote

It has been we moderns who have perfected the art of cruelty in the name of progress.

don't get carried away. If I had to choose between gitmo and the spanish inquisition it'd be waterboard city every time

Lily wrote

However, that is a bit off-topic. It has been we moderns who have perfected the art of cruelty in the name of progress. In the days when people raised their own livestock and slaughtered it for their own consumption, there simply was not the cruelty associated with it that has been imposed by modern commercial farming. Pigs were not confined in lots, chickens roamed loose-- they weren't packed on top of each other and confined in tight spaces, ducks were not force fed, so as to enlarge their livers, etc. I can't even bear to write more. If you know these things and are satisfied that it should be so, well, it isn't my wish to try to spoil your dinner.

I actually agree with you. The way they treat the farm animals now are just acts of cruelty. They confine chickens into small square spaces, where they can't even move. They overfeed the cattle to get them big and fat, only to knock them out and basically torture them to the death. Horrible.