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"You can't say you love animals if you still eat meat."

Discussion in 'Off-topic Discussion' started by dogeatdog, Aug 31, 2020.

  1. Well, that's interesting to know, although if fish is the only meat most people are eating, then my point about plant-based food going to feed people and not animals still stands, unless the fish are chowing down on popcorn or Weetabix. Farmed fish might be another matter - what do they actually eat?

    If the argument is that vegetarians are easier to look after than carnivores, and your population is around a quarter vegetarian ('only' is a relative term; I'm sure that number's high compared to Western countries, and it amounts to a lot of people in India) then the argument still stands that there should be less hunger due to the smaller livestock industry.

    I'm getting out of my depth - I'd need to look up some facts and figures to carry this conversation on properly.
     
    idonthaveaname likes this.
  2. Oh okay. It's still the case that practically 100% of dairy cows are slaughtered.
     
    used19 likes this.
  3. Lmao India has the second-highest amount of cattle in the world. Stop saying "my argument still stands" when you admittedly don't know what you're talking about. Hunger is not always a food issue. It is very often a class and socio-economic issue.
     
    eagle rising and The Passenger like this.
  4. thinking_differently

    thinking_differently Fapstronaut

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    Haha not exactly lol.

    Any data anyone cites won’t really give you an approximate view of the reality because:
    This “No Non-Vegetarian” concept belonged only to a certain caste of people called “Brahmins”(There’s also a grouping of Brahmins who eat Meat and Fish), or the “Open Category” which constitutes only about 30% Of our population(Check Wikipedia)
    All other castes are Non-Vegetarian.

    And speaking of the Brahmins,
    It’s an outdated belief for many. They may not directly admit they eat Non-Veg, but every once in a while, people’ll go to their fav restaurants to have some Chicken. ;)
     
  5. :emoji_thinking::emoji_thinking::emoji_thinking:
     
  6. SeaChange

    SeaChange Fapstronaut

    Countries with poorer, lesser educated people without access to proper medical services statistically have far more children than educated people with more money and better medical services. These families that are poor now suddenly have a large number of mouthes to feed with no money to do so. People tend to say "lol just have less children" or maybe use racist language to describe this phenomenon (if you do this you're a fool), but it's been pretty universal across continents and cultures.

    One of the more interesting studies I've read theorizes that world hunger and over population may just end itself eventually with more and more countries of the world becoming developed and educated. We imagine that there is just an infinite number of people to be born but in truth declining birthrates around the world are pointing to humans reaching a "peak" population in this century and then declining or staying stagnant afterwards.
    The whole point is that India's population would be impossible if they ate meat at the same levels as people in the West, particularly Americans. They suffer from the same issue I highlighted above in terms of reasons for hunger.

    I have a degree focused on International Political Economy and Development and I've done coursework on the environmental and health impacts of diets heavy in meat, what I've just said are things everyone in the field knows to be true. If you were to write on a paper "but Indians are vegetarians and they are still hungry" you'd be laughed out of the university. And please don't start that professors are marxists or something, professors in econ related disciplines are all pretty conservative (comes with the territory).
     
    eagle rising and The Passenger like this.
  7. My point: There should be relatively less hunger in India because there are more vegetarians.
    Your point: The Indian population would be unsustainable if there were fewer vegetarians.

    That's a non-sequitur.

    You're also taking as a base assumption that meat is no more nourishing ounce for ounce than vegetable products and vitamin supplements, which is a point I've taken issue with.

    Just as you're not open to challenges to your argument from authority, I'm not open to challenges against my argument from my own experience, so this debate is likely to be a stalemate.

    Also, by 'conservative', do you mean 'Keynesian'?
     
  8. That's interesting, Thinking. I'll have a look for the relative percentages of vegetarian by country. I might not use Wikipedia, though. It's too much of an automatic go-to for everything at the minute, and you should see the way it portrays nofap.com if you want to get an idea of its editorial bias.
     
    thinking_differently likes this.
  9. SeaChange

    SeaChange Fapstronaut

    Why are you ignoring the part where I talk about how hunger is a result of economics, NOT diet? Please don't chop up and ignore parts of my posts to fit your needs. Your statement about vegetarians and hunger makes no sense.

    Please cite your evidence about meat being more nourishing than non-animal products beyond just how you feel. I did not start this claim, it falls on you to back it up.

    I am trying to say that my arguments and views are based off of coursework and actual study. What are yours from beyond just you uhh feeling good because you ate a piece of meat?

    Keynesian economics is not conservative. Please try again.
     
    FellatiousD likes this.
  10. Even given some wiggle room for inaccurate statistics, this is pretty damning:

    https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-highest-rates-of-vegetarianism.html
    https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/hunger-statistics

    It's almost certain there are factors beyond diet influencing the matter, but why should we assume this is only the case in India? If I missed evidence supporting this idea in any of your posts, my bad. But why am I not at liberty to draw the conclusion that, statistically speaking and in the pronounced case of India, a proportionately larger slice of the population consuming plant-based diets does not correlate with a lower incidence of hunger per head of population?

    When I eat steak, I get morning wood. Reliably. And things like my skin healing noticeably faster, and being less hungry throughout the day are additional, unexpected results. This hasn't taken place under laboratory conditions, but then I don't know who's on the faculty at your university, and I trust my own judgement here. It also doesn't have anything to do with the way I 'feel'. What is that even supposed to mean? You clearly just use the word to undermine my own experience, as if I need a peer-reviewed journal to tell me what's going on with my own body. If it doesn't persuade you, then that's fine, but there's nothing particularly convincing about your own insistence that you go to a good university with decent staff. Why should I take your own judgment as gospel when you dismiss mind out of hand?

    You know, you could answer the question as if it were a question and not a rhetorical device. Would that just blow your mind?

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/keynesian-cons/

    "But though Keynesianism tends to be associated with big-government “liberalism”—in its original form, liberalism stood for small government in all realms—many who take Keynes’s approach to economics are nevertheless self-identified conservatives. In practice, “conservative Keynesian” is not a contradiction in terms."

    Whether or not your particular locale or institution considers Keynes to be the mouthpiece of fiscal orthodoxy isn't an a priori matter. Different economies function differently. This is your own point regarding the causes of hunger. And the traditionally liberal and the traditionally conservative have undergone something like an inversion over the past couple of decades in Western politics at least, if not in economic theory. But it may be the case for the latter too. Where's the need for the attitude?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 17, 2020
  11. As a biologist, I can tell you the exact reason for vegetarianism providing more food than that of a carnivorous diet. It's very simple: it's based on a principle of conservation of energy. Essentially all food energy on the planet comes from the sun, and is converted to chemical energy in the process of photosynthesis. Plants are major contributors to this process, naturally, and they are, therefore, a direct food source. When an organism eats a plant, the organism gets most of the available energy from the plant directly. When an organism eats another organism that ate the plant, i.e. one step further down the food chain, only about 15% of the original energy from the plant is transferred on down the line, the first organism having used around 85% of the energy for its own purposes (movement, body warmth, cellular and metabolic processes, etc.). Each step down the food chain reduces the conserved energy from the plant by that same 85% cut. So if someone eats a plant-eater, he or she will get about 15% of the plant's energy. If someone eats a carnivore, let's say a fish, it will depend on how many steps back from the plant that carnivore (fish) is as to how much of the original energy remains. Suppose we have some microorganisms (copepods) that ate the original photosynthetic algae in the water, then those microorganisms were eaten by slightly larger animals (e.g. shrimp) which were then eaten by minnows which were then eaten by a salmon: that would be algae (100%) --> copepods (15%) --> shrimp (2.3%) --> minnows (0.34%) --> salmon (0.05%) --> HUMAN CONSUMER. The human would be receiving about 0.05% of the original energy produced via photosynthesis.

    Naturally, if we eat cows, the food chain looks a little better: grass (100%) --> cow (15%) --> HUMAN CONSUMER. In this case, only one step between the plant and the person exists, and the person receives about 15% of the original energy. On this basis, we can estimate that carnivores require about 7 times more land space to feed themselves than a vegetarian needs.

    When you eat steak, you get far more than some protein. You get hormones. Not only did that cow produce hormones in its body, it was also either fed or injected with other hormones to promote its rapid growth and market value. Those hormones, though bovine in nature, do have an effect on the human body as well, and can stimulate the body in similar fashion to that of our own hormones. (Heavy reliance on meat is also one of the reasons for the trend in early menarche among girls in Western countries.)

    As for being less hungry, this would be because it takes longer to digest meat (4-6 hours) as compared to vegetables (3-4 hours) or to fruits (2-3 hours), etc. The tradeoff is that, while less hungry, your stomach also has less rest, and you may sleep less well on account of it, or develop other bowel-related symptoms.
     
  12. I've just realised you're full of it.

    You want evidence and argumentation from other people, but you want other people to take what you say as true just because you say it. That's an indication of someone who's been indoctrinated and doesn't have an argument beyond faith in their own teachers.

    Quote the statistics. You want stats from others, provide your own.

    Which people tend to say this? You're invoking the Marxist concept of race and using the ad hominem insult 'fool' to try to undermine the person you're responding to, and then you want him to accept your assertion of the universality of the point you're making, without question, and without any evidence on your part. Such arrogance!

    And if you're going to use Wikipedia to justify your eye-rolling attitude towards the influence of Marxist intellectuals since the 30's have had on contemporary thought, including economics, spare me. Just because Jordan Peterson injected it into mainstream discourse doesn't invalidate the reality. You just don't want your faith in your own institution undermined because you don't actually know how to argue your point.

    Look at it from other people's perspective. You're talking like an LSE undergrad, and citing coursework we'll never see, but for all we know you go to a parochial polytechnic and you're failing your class. This is an anonymous internet forum, yes?


    Which study? I want to see it. Theorizes? Well, cool story bro. Does it prove anything? Is it published in a good journal? Or do you just want me to be awed by the fact that you read a study?


    Argue your point or stop insisting other people do the same.

    So what? More bogus argumentation from authority. If "everyone" in a social science "knows" something "to be true", then you can rest assured there's no robust research or discourse going on, and you're being fed a line so your university can cash in on you. You're talking like economics is a hard science, and it's not.

    Oh, would I? Well, I wouldn't want to be laughed at. Nossir, not me. I care way too much about what people think to draw a logical inference from supporting data, even if it does inevitably turn out to be overly simplistic because it was an off-the-cuff comment on an internet forum.

    And if being conservative 'comes with the territory' of being an economist at your uni, then you might want your money back, because that's more a sign of institutional complacency than it is a sign that there's no room for differing perspectives on the functioning of economic systems, which are complex and constantly changing.

    Well, unless they're centrally planned, of course. But that would mean someone in power's read Marx, and we all know that's just conspiracy bullshit, don't we?
     
  13. SeaChange

    SeaChange Fapstronaut

    Here goes nothing. I promise you that I haven't been indoctrinated by any system (maybe the U.S. military but that's another story for another time).

    In regards to poorer nations with low education and poor medical services having a lot of children, I'd highly suggest you read Thomas Bollyky's recent book "Plagues and the Paradox of Progress". His chapter on childhood diseases (pages 84 to 106) use China and Kenya as examples of places with high fertility rates and explores their causes. The idea was that if you just fixed causes of childhood mortality people would have less children because more would survive and more women would enter the work force.

    It was neither the case in Kenya or China where each country kept a high fertility rate coupled with more children surviving. Researchers discovered that women who had dropped out of schooling early to have children struggled to return to the workforce. China's strict one child policy was a direct result of this failure of the fertility rate to drop.

    This paper's opening remarks sums everything up pretty well:

    "Fertility rates tend to be higher in poorly resourced countries
    but due to high maternal and perinatal mortality, there is a reduction in birth rates. In developing countries children are needed as a labour force and to provide care for their parents in old age. In these countries, fertility rates are higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives and generally lower levels of female education. The social structure, religious beliefs, economic prosperity and urbanisation within each country are likely to affect birth rates as well as abortion rates. Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life"

    In regards to my point that people use racist language to describe overpopulation in other countries...A thread was just deleted on this very forum about white pride in which people described non-whites as this large horde threatening to sweep in and wipe away American and European society. I'm not going to name names out of respect but it's all over this forum.

    Doing a search of the book "Camp Of the Saints" on this forum has it popping up on two book lists of users, a book which again, describes countries like China and India as overpopulated hells because of the races of the people who live there. White genocide is another term seeing more and more use here - again playing up the trope of foreign unwashed masses coming for Europe because they've overpopulated and ruined their countries and the West wants to let them in.

    Look, if you're convinced I'm a Marxist because I don't like the amount of racist language I see on this forum then I don't know what to tell you. My econ professors either were apathetic about politics or quietly said they voted for Trump because they were conservatives and favored lower government spending and less government involvement. If they're Marxists to you then again, I don't know what to tell you.

    The study is from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. It details everything I was talking about a decline in world population after the mid-century mark. I'll admit that I read it after hearing about it in this economist article which combined its findings with works from demographers to give theories about why this is happening. It was publish by The Lancet, one of the best known medical journals in publication since 1823. I hope this is a "good journal".

    This is a really great and thorough article about the effects of meat consumption on both health and the environment. I guess I should specify that if Indians ate meat at the rate of Western nations, particularly Americans who eat the most meat per person a year, the world wouldn't be able to take it. We're already, as cited in the science mag article, chopping down large parts of the rainforest in order to either make room for cattle or soy beans to fead the cattle. And never mind the massive drain on water resources. I'm going to cite this study from The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition for the fact that "producing 1 kg of animal protein requires about 100 times more water than producing 1 kg of grain protein". India is a country already going through a massive water crisis, as detailed in this paper written in 2017 with the support of the German government, and a large part of this problem is already its agriculture. Now imagine them trying to convert more of that farmland into trying to raise more cattle?

    Truthfully, I'm also going to apologize for being mean before. I let my own anger and judgements get the best of me and I took it out on somebody on an internet forum. At the end of the day, we're all here for the same reason: we want to better ourselves and overcome our addictions and failings.

    I'll admit that I've been frustrated with the amount of disparaging comments about race, women, and queer people I see on here. I remember coming across a thread where people joked about gay men deserving to be killed and just feeling sick. I think I took that frustration out on you and I apologize.
     
    The Passenger likes this.
  14. If you don't workout meat is heavy on the body .
    But can you name a army of vegetarians ?
    Any ..

    Spartans made blood soup as their main dish . Ancient Greece army was based on fish and hunting meat .

    I friend of mine comes back from Iraq and says soldiers eat several steaks a day .


    So, If I am spending hour of really intense workout a day, or 2 ? What to eat ? an apple ? Some bread ?
    I struggle with my calories intake without meat, fish, dairy . I cannot eat bean, bread and cabbage and expect to be well . Well, If I stack up on bullshit junk, calories will be sufficient but nutrients won't be .

    All in all, unfortunately life is not a fairy tail and animals are for food, just as when we die we are eaten by the worms . (Oh, and when we are alive we are eaten by predators but because of the comfort zone, we tend to take that for granted ) . When a meet a Tiger in the jungle I look him straight to the eyes and say : Mr Tiger I love you, I don't wanna kill you with the gun I am carrying, would you be so kind not to kill me too ? Like, do you love me too? I am animal just like you ?
     
  15. AtomicTango

    AtomicTango Fapstronaut

    This whole thread reminds me of an exchange from an early episode of Star Trek The Next Generation between two Enterprise officers and some alien delegates. It goes like this:

    TASHA: Sorry to call you, sir. Not strictly security. It's about the dietary requirements of the Antican delegates.
    RIKER: I thought that had been taken care of in advance, Tasha.
    TASHA: So did we, sir. Their live animals were beamed aboard. We were going to preserve the meat for them, but they say we must bring it to them alive.
    RIKER: Then do so. Lieutenant Yar was confused. We no longer enslave animals for food purposes.
    ANTICAN: But we have seen humans eat meat.
    RIKER: You've seen something as fresh and tasty as meat, but inorganically materialised out of patterns used by our transporters.
    ANTICAN: This is sickening. It's barbaric.


    It later turns out Picard keeps his own private stash of caviar, exposing this whole exchange as not only smug and arrogant but also hypocritical as all hell.
     
  16. embodiment of luck

    embodiment of luck Fapstronaut

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    Well as far as I've seen you started with the assumption that it vegan lifestyle is the best one, yet you haven't
    commented on food distribution. Do you believe that entire population can be maintained with similar lifestyle you live?
    Regarding of our impact on the earth's atmosphere due to our meat consumption, this is very bad argument because people have very small impact on earth's atmosphere. It is other natural forces that are out of our control like magnetic field,
    natural gases in nature, volcanic activity as so on.
     
  17. Idk what to tell you man. Just read the Wikipedia pages on human pollution lol. Yeah if a massive volcano opens up and spews shit, that's way worse than anything we are doing right now, but we are nuking the air and sea with our waste. It is a fact that removing animal farming would reduce these numbers significantly.
    upload_2020-9-24_10-48-47.png
    "Not only is the agricultural sector the biggest consumer of global freshwater resources, with farming and livestock production using about 70 percent of the earth’s surface water supplies, but it’s also a serious water polluter. Around the world, agriculture is the leading cause of water degradation. "
    Source https://www.nrdc.org/stories/water-pollution-everything-you-need-know#common
     
    Last edited: Sep 24, 2020
  18. Lmao yes. Easily. Are you trolling?
     
  19. SickSicko

    SickSicko Fapstronaut

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    What about bioavailability, tissue storage, and nutrient density Mr biologist?

    Go eat some sun, 0% waste LOL
     
    Anakin66 likes this.
  20. So you agree with him?
     

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