Post a controversial opinion

I sometimes feel similarly about people who are vegetarians/vegans for animal rights reasons. Why don't they at least push for anti-meat legislation more often?

I'm (recently) vegan for a lot of reasons, not just animal rights, but I think greater public awareness of the consequences of factory farming and animal-based diets is more effective than legislation at this point. Also I'm not necessarily a bleeding-heart animal lover. I'm more interested in seeing people significantly reduce their consumption of meat/dairy/eggs/etc than in seeing everyone go fully vegan. Though at the rate humanity is trashing this earth, at some point most of us will be forced to give up animal consumption.

Or we'll populate the seas w/ plankton and consume vast amounts of fish?

people don't push for anti-meat legislation because it has absolutely no chance and it makes meateaters incredibly angry to even discuss the concept. otherwise reasonable people get visibly shaken and angry and begin yelling at good friends and ruining dinners and family gatherings, and even after the tension thaws out a little bit, during future gatherings there are countless side-remarks that fly around the room about how such and such was on the dinner menu to accommodate "the vegan" (even if you're not a vegan) and assumptions that the non-meateater is deeply disappointed at everyone around them and probably thinks they're a bad person because of how they eat meat. if somehow anti-meat legislation was ever seriously brought to the floor i'd strongly consider protesting against it just so that i didn't have to listen to the nauseating comments that everyone has on the issue. there's a stereotype about the vegetarian/vegan ruining everyone's good fun and lecturing everyone, but in my experience it's always been the veggies just eating their food and attempting to have a normal meal while numerous (well-meaning!) (?) friends and acquaintances interrogate them about what they are and aren't eating and why.

but i'm not bitter! i'm not bitter!

all of that was supposed to be read using the funny satirical jokey guy voice

ppl who get angry that vegans exist should be executed

basically

how about ppl who get angry that meat-eaters exist?

Humanity could relieve itself of anger, intolerance, resentment, guilt, associated defense mechanisms and much destructive cravings; while gaining humility, patience, forgiveness, compassion, benevolence, empathy, and equinamity; if only we could all concede contra-causal free will is a delusion.

everyone should eat their meals alone. it's a secret.

take it into the dark, cold woods. do what you have to do. then don't talk about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evkz3hgHQyM

listening to other ppl eat is the worst anyway

Meat eaters can go out to the woods and rub the juices all over them, have sex with it, whatever it is that they typically do with the meat. All I ask is that they keep me out of it and stay away from my daughter

Not everything in the respective threads are racist/sexist/antisemitism

whoa whoa whoa man how long you been here

I don't think that opinion is controversial. but you can take that tone to the dark, cold woods.

I like karl's plan, but we should just keep some loose meat in the woods.

bulgogi beef tree hollow

"loose meat"

karl, I know plenty of people who are still upset by the curly lightbulbs. Trying to imagine how butthurt they'd be by Meat Prohbition, gah. "So hard to get bacon across the border nowadays, because of the lib-nanny state, eleventy!!!11!" Yes, If I were veg*an I'd oppose anti-meat laws too, if only to avoid hearing forever about how much we'd ruined everyone's fun.

I saw and enjoyed Cowspiracy the other evening. Next day I ate a shit-ton of dairy and some meat. It cannot happen. The only way is emergency rationing during war or global meltdown, by which time t will be too late.

there's a With Bob and David about this

I don't have any kids (having children is way more environmentally damaging, long-term, than eating nothing but bacon cheeseburgers all day while coal-rolling the highways of America) so I eat what the fuck I want. Sometimes it's a salad, sometimes it's not.

that's not necessarily true.

really the only ways to significantly change your individual carbon footprint (really a symbolic and pyrrhic "victory" the way things are going to go) are not to consume animal products and not to travel by airplane.

so someone eating bacon cheeseurgers all day could cause more environmental damage than several people not doing that. cf. the consumption habits of individuals in rich countries v poor.

Isn't travelling by airplane greener than driving?

Not-having-children, as an environmentalist measure, means that a larger percentage of tomorrow's grownups will be people whose parents were not environmentalists.

That might mean a thing or two in terms of their values, and the resulting impact of their lifestyle choices. Just sayin.

Not-having-children, as an environmentalist measure

Actually, my not-having-children is directly related to my not-liking-children. Nothing to do with environmentalism at all.

Isn't travelling by airplane greener than driving?

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Wednesday, December 2, 2015 4:25 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think there are cases where flying the same distance is greener than driving that distance by yourself, especially in a less fuel efficient car. On the whole, though, absolutely not. Especially since air travel is largely done across distances that people wouldn't drive, i.e. just wouldn't travel at all otherwise (going halfway around the world for a vacation, etc.)

Another thing that has a big impact on carbon footprint is the size of your living space and how you heat/cool it -- moreso than driving IIRC.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/sep/09/carbon-emissions-planes-shipping

(tl;dr - car v air travel in environmental terms actually rather complex)

No beef with yr stance, top man etc. Having kids is not for everyone of course.

Hate to belabor the obvious, but no children = no future grownups. Everybody you've ever had sex with, every one of your friends, and everybody who's ever made a record/written a book/painted a painting that you liked? That was once a snot-nosed poop-covered brat. And they all had parents who had to curtail, to some extent, whatever they previously thought of as their lives (clubbing, meth, whores, golf, whatever).

Pretty much, on Kantian grounds, somebody has to have children, and I'd rather it be Us (broadly speaking) rather than Them (broadly speaking).

Climate change can only be fought through state action, however I have come around to think individual choices accompanying calls for state action mutually strengthen each other.

Not having kids for environmental reasons kind of stretches the logical limit of ethics imo. I'm fine with people not having kids but that strikes me as an odd reason.

There's tons of good reasons not to have kids let's not get silo'd here

yeah, like given the infinitesimal impact having a kid will have on environment, if it will bring you great joy please have a kid

Just keep your joy to yourself where possible.

How.many things mentioned itt have less of an environmental impact than a kid that lives to idk 75?

To whom are you doing your ethical duty by not having kids except other people's presumed future kids? Unless you think the most ethical think humanity can do is to die out, in which case your ethics places other species ahead of humans.

Ugh v human centric not cool man

trimming back is good. raising children is not the only way to have an impact in the world. lots of sources of joy out there incl. adoption.

let's be real - there are no potential parents out there that are going to change their mind on having kids bc of fear of overpopulation

if you say so. i honestly have no idea but would rather give them the benefit of the doubt.

i would say mordy is otm but tbh i can easily imagine some slate article pitched as "i always wanted kids...then i started thinking about overpopulation. here's why you should too!"

one of my envirofascist college professors actually did change their mind on having kids because of climate change/resource constraints. he and his wife limited themselves to one kid (don't know if they adopted more or not)

but yeah, not too common

I can kind of see someone having the feeling of "not wanting to bring a child into this world to suffer" assuming climate change is going to massively fuck up the planet, but the results seem so indeterminate and unknowable, and so much human suffering has occurred in so many eras that it sees presumptuous to think you can guess whether your own offspring will suffer particularly badly in the coming decades.

my wife and i have thought about environmental concerns when talking about having a kid but def more in terms of "hey the world is going to be screwed when our hypothetical kid grows up" rather than "hey our hypothetical kid is going to contribute to screwing up the world".

here's a controversial opinion. or not a controversial opinion but like a serious consideration i've been having recently which is that despite my fervent wish for more gun control that could successfully bring down the murder rate in the US i keep thinking about asking a gun-rights promoting friend to initiate me into the horrors of gun ownership. i can totally get how these things reinforce themselves - ppl are afraid and they want to defend themselves and naturally if just you own a gun it's not a problem. like it's a categorical imperative issue. obv a society full of guns doesn't work but it's easy to think that you are not contributing to that problem. or like why ppl don't vote. so i guess i will continue to vote + to not own a gun bc kant.

xp the world is going to be screwed up for the next couple generations i assume unless humanity miraculously pulls itself out of this nose dive like a hero in an adventure pulp but tbh most eras of history seem pretty bleak and humanity has survived and i assume there was even happiness and great satisfaction in the most horrific of times and those people continued to have kids knowing how shitty their lives would be

I know plenty of people who are still upset by the curly lightbulbs

CFLs have already been overtaken by LEDs fyi