Hey, hostile visitors! Do you have an opinion about, for example, Mary Koss’ rape research? Do you want to discuss it even though the topic has not actually come up by itself in any of the threads and none of my recent posts really have much to do with the specifics of anyone’s rape research? Well, from now on you can discuss it here with anyone who wishes to follow you to this thread.
Added bonus: If you continue to try to discuss it in other threads you’ll be banned!
This also applies to future derailers riding hobbyhorses of their own having nothing to do with Koss.
Happy discussing!
Note: If you wish to discuss the topics at hand, you know, topics directly related to my posts and/or to what other people are discussing and that aren’t, you know, personal hobbyhorses of yours that involve long screeds and various things that you’ve probably already cut and pasted into the comments sections of various other websites until you were banned from them for endless derailing and general asswipery, feel free to remain in the original threads.
@ Bob
Thank you. BTW, I’m fine with you advocating for vegetarianism, and I’m not telling you to shut up about it (sorry if it came across that way, I’m kind of lacking sleep). Thing is, though, coming at it from the perspective that of course your moral choices are the correct ones is guaranteed to get some people’s backs up, especially when the subject is something as heavily tied up in cultural and family stuff as food. Whether or not you want to deal with that level of confrontation is up to you, but you kind of have to expect thst if you present things in a way that suggests that other people’s choices are unethical it’s going to cause some heated discussion.
On a practical level, the perspective I’m coming from is that I’ve lived on 4 different continents and the tendency for people to be very attached to the way they grew up eating and very reluctant to make major changes seems to be a universal human trait. Veganism is a hard sell for people who didn’t grow up with it. Persuading people that animal welfare is important and therefore trying to minimize cruelty in meat production is an easier sell, I think, especially if you back it up with discussion of why eating a bit less meat might be a good thing from a health perspective and the fact that meat raised under more ethical conditions also tends to be of higher quality. I don’t thing there’s any way to get the world to go vegan, but I do think that shifting to a system where people eat less meat, and the meat they eat is produced in less cruel ways, is possible (hard, but possible). If it happens it will be a slow process, and it’s probably going to be more effective to use the carrot (ethically produced meat tastes better, eating less meat of higher quality is better for your health) rather than the stick (you are a horrible person who doesn’t care that you’re hurting animals). Figuring out ways to sell people on the idea that vegetarian food can taste great needs to be a big part of that strategy, too, because on a very basic level eating is about pleasure.
BTW since this seems to have become the stuff about animals thread (and the one about the Cleveland kidnappings is incredibly depressing), I thought it was a good excuse to drop this link. Rottweilers are misandry!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11413740
(In that apparently they don’t think rape is OK.)
Oh my god a paleobiology undergrad showed up to try it on about biology and veganism and I missed it?
*a single crystal tear*
Cassandra, while on holiday Dr Glass and I witnessed some Duck Misandry. A male mallard had attempted to rape a female mallard, as they sadly do, and as we arrived she and her mate were drowning him. The mate had swooped down and knocked him off her back and then she’d jumped on top of the rapist and held his head under water.
We are a cold-hearted meat-eatin’ pair of evil biologists and we were like SHOULD WE DO SOMETHING, but the female duck seemed to be working out her rage quite well, so we held hands and watched and said NATURE IS SO BEAUTIFUL.
Ah, a woman who shares my sense of humor. I will admit that the thought of the rapist in the story I linked to potentially peeing himself in terror upon being charged by an enraged, fully grown Rottweiler while he had his pants down filled my Grinchy little heart with glee.
Thirding the YAY JAKE cheers, Rotty hero, and YAY DUCK AND DRAKE!
Bob: Argenti — I see your point there, but I always hope to start from a place of common ground
Don’t. If you have a place of common ground, the odds are you don’t need to preach. More to the point, this isn’t really the forum for evangalism. That should be done one on one.
The problem with your, “common ground” position is that it’s, at root the “anti-pacifism” argument (actually, it’s the anti-anything argument). If you set the ground, and then work from there, then the only “rational” conclusion has been predecided.
It may not have been, when you decided it, but when you start to map how you got there, all that goes away.
Here’s how it works in the anti-pacifism scenario.
1: There will always be people in the world who decide to prey on others.
2: Some of them will be willing to kill/extort/terrrorise to get what they want.
3: The only way to stop them will require violence, because they will not refrain from violence.
QED pacifism isn’t possible, on a large scale (no matter what personal preference one might have).
First corrolary: Advocating pacifism is, at some level, immoral, because if it were adopted as a societal practice then the predators would be able to take over.
Second corrolary: pacifists themselves are, no matter how pure their purpose, and well-managed their lives, they are living off the violence they know others will have to do in their behalf.
Which is all bullshit; but internally consistent; and drawn, inevitably from the start condition (and yes, I’ve heard every one of those arguments, lots, and lots, and lots of times. No, I’m not a pacifist. I am pacifisitic, yes, but so much not an actual pacifist).
For diputational advocacy to be be a working method of persuasion the possibility of the other side being right has to be entertained.
It’s why the local trolls all fail. They 1: refuse to accept that any other interpretation of events can be right and 2: (more critically) refuse to believe we can possibly be persuaded.
They refuse to believe that our calls for citation, and data, are honest. This problem (more than the first) is why the get such short shrift. When the desire is, “accept that I am right”, not “see why I think this is best”, the conflict in viewpoints is likely to end in acrimony.
And it may be that what you were trying to do was, “see why I think this is best”, but your start condition (i.e. we all have the same base rules for determining this sort of moral question) made it much more of, “see why I am right”.
It may be premature to ask this, but can katz or cloudiah or someone with manboobz related blogs compile this all into a “how to have a reasoned discussion about things you care deeply about”?
Because I’ve seen so much fail over the years (lol, back in HS, class debate over executing the mentally handicapped, I got “but what if it was your mother (ze) killed?!” And no, that is not the sort of appeal to emotion that’s going to help matters)
That class is also the source of “and then queen Victoria got all pissy” (an answer about the history of the insanity plea…a correct one even)
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a foodie in the first place. Doesn’t that just mean a person loves food that tastes good? That would be the vast majority of people. Loving food is human nature, not a sign of entitlement. Now if you’re talking about food snobs, I agree. It can be annoying when someone brags about having wine that’s a hundred years old for makes a big deal about eating salmon from Alaska.
I know one way to not go about spreading a vegetarian message, and that’s what this guy did All he ended up doing was make people panic that animal rights people want to take the food away from our grocery stores. If he wants to talk about animal rights and food to a bunch of people who hunt and fish, then he’s going to need to use different tactics.
I guess I’m just seeing things from a different perspective here anyway. My dad used to hunt until he was 49, when he had a stroke and can no longer handle rifles. My brother still hunts. We all love fishing. My brother goes frog gigging, and I clean and cook the frog legs. The idea of giving up all of these activities is really sad, because I have so many warm memories from it.
By the way, I also agree that it’s wrong for meat eaters to be pushy or rude to vegans. Sometimes meat eaters are assholes to vegans, like the things people in Joplin said to that protestor, calling him a hippie or telling him to stay in California. All of that was wrong, so I can understand vegetarians being defensive.
There definitely are a lot of asshole meat-eaters that feel the need to bully vegetarians, and they actually bother me even more because they don’t even have a justification for why their preferred lifestyle is superior.
Something I noticed back when I was going on dates with people I didn’t know well was that a lot of guys would find out I was vegetarian, tell me categorically that they couldn’t be with me long-term and then start pestering me for sex really aggressively. Like, a really normal date suddenly having a bucket of ice water thrown on it, and then remarkably shifting in tone towards creepy sexual aggression. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe once these dudes knew I wasn’t “long-term material”, they wanted to get in my pants while they (thought they) could? Maybe they thought being vegetarian was associated with being soft-hearted or a pushover?
Whatever the reason, being vegetarian turned into a pretty good asshole filter. Happened four or five times.
“I was not previously aware that bigotry was a sandwich spread that one could slather oneself in. Is that why angry men keep telling us to make them sandwiches?” Made me think of this.
?1
This will almost certainly get lost, but our current thread necromancer necro’ed the thread with the link about how female judges give harsher sentences to women — http://www.olma.vt.edu/courses/5115d/readings/week3-4of4.html