Everything we eat screams

[Al_Estok]

I respect vegans and vegetarians who do so on an ethical or health basis. When the pseudoscience and/or cultish mystical explanations come out, so does my mockery.

[LutherBlisset]

You don’t need to go this far. Nature is far more inventive than human imagination.

Acacia (ok, sorry, Senegalia. Or was it Vachellia? Oh FFS, taxonomy, you’re drunk!) and Giraffes come to mind. Note the date:

Antelope activate the acacia’s alarm system

Beans and caterpillars, too. Or aphids.

W001_Biology-Medicine_060_065.pdf

Tobacco, anyone?

Calling All Predators: Caterpillar Saliva May Be a Component in Plants' Chemical...

Now, just imagine a tree in a forest, communicating severe ecological stress to its neighbours by its roots.
A stretch, you say? We’ll, told you our imagination was limited…

Fuck yeah, evolution!

[Peter_Singer]

Same here with carnists: I respect it when people eat meat, dairy and eggs because they don’t give a f*ck about animals. But when the pseudoscience and/or cultish mystical explanations of why they eat animals come out, so does my mockery.

[Rei_Nori]

@LutherBlisset

Now, just imagine a tree in a forest, communicating severe ecological stress to its neighbours by its roots.

A stretch, you say? We’ll, told you our imagination was limited…

Oddly enough I had a dream last night of coming upon a fallen tree deep in the woods. I could not help but ask myself was it more human to wonder if it made a sound when it fell, or if it was laying there crying as it was dying?

The 4:00 am answer and the 8:00 am answer are the same: Both questions have some merit, and I am glad I can ask both honestly.

“What am I not asking?” As my next question just occurred to me as I read your post. Thank you.

[Medievalist]

@TobinL

Carrot Juice Is Murder

Came here for that, leaving satisfied

[Medievalist]

@Mister44

I wonder how worm ridden modern burials are, especially when one is embalmed.

If you’re not very squeamish, this is worth your time to investigate. Short version: Modern burial turns corpses into a foul, toxic sludge that lasts longer than we can yet determine for sure. You aren’t returning to the soil, you’re creating a concrete lined poison pocket, bequeathing wasteland to later generations rather than fertilizing their fields.

Could go the “natural” burial route, but you gotta be quick about it.

Nowadays that’s not as much of a problem in the USA as you’d think; the observant Jews have worked it out for the rest of us, basically. (Thank you concerned Jewish people! Mad props!) You can get refrigerated pretty quickly almost anywhere. If there’s any mystery around cause of death you’ll get autopsied, or if you have donated organs you’ll get parted out, but otherwise your corpus can be kept on ice until burial time.

[anon61221983]

@Medievalist

Modern burial turns corpses into a foul, toxic sludge that lasts longer than we can yet determine for sure.

Green burials for the win! Just wrapped me in a shroud, maybe pack me in one of those tree or mushroom thingies, toss me in a hole, and call it a day.

@Medievalist

the observant Jews have worked it out for the rest of us, basically

Muslims have similar rites. Straight into the ground.

[LutherBlisset]

@Al_Estok

When the pseudoscience and/or cultish mystical explanations come out, so does my mockery.

Fair enough. However, in this thread, and this context - are you aware you come across as intolerant, do you?

[emo_pinata]

@Mister44

Could go the “natural” burial route, but you gotta be quick about it.

Not really, the preservation industry has grossly overstated the need for it. Many places bury and re-bury their dead with no embalming and the body isn’t some rotten soup when it’s moved week(s) after its initial burial.

Now if you died in a swamp and were found a few days later that’s a different story.

[semiotix]

@kingannoy

according to Bentham you also have to factor in the pleasure (and arguably health benefits) we humans get from eating animals.

Sure. I guess I’d say that the question I was responding to is about whether the animals themselves would be better off not existing, on their own terms without factoring in benefits to humans.

The larger question of whether it is ethical to eat this or that piece of meat, or indeed whether it is ethical to forbid the eating of meat, yadda yadda, just isn’t something I want to wade into.

[Al_Estok]

True, I am fairly intolerant of certain aspects of vegan rhetoric. When my 17 year old decided to investigate Rastafari, I was more than happy to accommodate his vegan diet, help him in the kitchen, etc. Look at B. Clinton, went from obese to lean on a vegan diet. Totally cool with that. When people are droning on about “the dying eat the dead” or intestine length comparison, I get a little stabby.

[Al_Estok]

Get it right, a carnist goes and buys meat in a store. I track critters in the woods, stick arrows in them, bring them home to butcher, then feed myself and my family. I am a predator. I also like gardening and long walks on the beach with a fishing pole.

[TobinL]

@emo_pinata

Now if you died in a swamp

Oooh put me a place where I can turn into soap!

[Seurat]

@girard

Ugh. Someone spilled unexamined personification and overreaching metaphor all over this science. Now it’s ruined.

One day, when science finally peers over the crest of the mountain, it will find that stoners have been sitting there all along.

@girard

Call me back when plants have a central nervous system.

Philip Goff, The Case for Panpsychism:

Physicalists believe that consciousness can be fully accounted for in terms of physical entities and processes. But many scientists and philosophers agree that at present we have not the faintest idea how to make sense of experience being generated from material activity such as the firings of neurons. This is the difficulty David Chalmers famously called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. Physical mechanisms are well-suited for the explanation of physical behaviour; but it’s hard to make sense of a mechanistic explanation of subjective experience. No matter how complex the mechanism, it seems conceivable that it might have functioned in the absence of any experience at all, which seems to imply that mechanistic explanations shed no explanatory light on the existence of experience.

[anon62577920]

@girard

How is this in any way relevant? All sorts of entities transmit information all the time. That doesn’t mean they have anything resembling consciousness, or that they are capable of anything resembling suffering that would obligate us ethically.

I don’t care what you say sir, I will NOT eat my modem