TheTechnician27

Actually, vegans care about those insects too! The logic goes as follows:

• Plant-based diets not only don't kill and torture animals who have a higher capacity to suffer than insects, but just as importantly
• Plant-based diets use substantially fewer crops than animal-based ones. This is just a consequence of thermodynamics that every step of the chain loses more and more energy, and thus more crops are needed at each stage. This is a major reason (other than prions) why you won't usually see carnivores raised for food: it'd be wildly inefficient because you'd need way more crops and way more resource usage. The land usage for animal products is massive, and even the most "efficient" animals like chickens take 1.5 to 2 kg of crops for 1 kg of growth (we're talking about cows here, though, where the ratio is fucking enormous: around 4.5:1 to 7.5:1), and even then a lot of this growth goes toward things like bones which are used for byproducts rather than food.

Vegans don't eat insects because we care about insects. Vegans don't eat honey because we care about insects. And logically, we don't eat meat, milk, eggs, etc. because we care about insects. Veganism is about excluding animal exploitation "as far as is possible and practicable", not about being literally perfect. And the difference in scale here is enormous. This argument is made all the time without realizing that if you care about insects, the first and most effective thing you can do is not to use animal products.

Answer:

• The water-intensive farming is absolutely fucking the ecology of the American southwest in a way that's effectively irreversible on human timescales.
• The money being generated by this farming is going to a select few completely undeserving, morally bankrupt people who know the damage they're doing and are hoarding swathes of land and water rights they were given for effectively nothing generations ago.
• This alfalfa is then shipped internationally to Saudi Arabia literally halfway across the world, generating greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution.
• This alfalfa is then used to grow cattle, meaning that value is being extracted from the US – at a meager cost compared to the externalities we bear – and given to the theocratic shithole whose entire economy is based on destroying the planet that is Saudi Arabia.
• Edit: the cows produce a bunch of methane over their lifetime.
• The cows are then brutally murdered for food despite extensive evidence that cows can feel pain and do feel emotions like fear.
• This cow meat is then fed to people despite the fact that 1) red meat is a class 2a carcinogen (and frankly in light of evidence that vegetarian and vegan diets reduce risks of certain cancers by double-digit percentages, we're all just waiting until it's confirmed rather than heavily suspected as a carcinogen), 2) it substantially increases the risk of heart disease, and 3) it elevates the risk for diabetes when compared to plant-based foods which are cheaper and less resource-intensive to create.

It's a benefit to essentially everyone if alfalfa farming becomes less profitable. The entire chain from water to cow meat is unjust, cruel, and otherwise fucking terrible.

It makes complete sense if you work from the angle that Trump is a Russian plant working to destroy America from within.

From your source:

I cited 1(c) because it's the one that actually makes any sense with what they were saying. I did read the entire thing, and yes, saying they were using sense 3 would very obviously be a bad-faith interpretation of what they were saying; that's why I pointed to 1(c).

In terms of “sentience” or “consciousness” these also cannot be applied black and white to animals or plants

True to an extent. The line is fuzzy. Plants aren't sentient; we're not doing this. Plants don't have a nervous sytem and aren't conscious. It's a bad-faith attempt at equivocation not accepted by science. If we're talking about animals, sure there's a fuzzy line somewhere, but that fuzziness keeps getting moved back year after year. What we can say with certainty though is that that line isn't around what a typical omnivorous diet eats such as cows, pigs, birds, etc. and hasn't been for a very long time. There's increasingly robust evidence for fish's abililty to feel pain. I draw the line at no animals because I don't know exactly where in the animal kingdom that line really is and so don't feel comfortable choosing (and I have no interest in eating sponges), but rational minds can disagree when we're talking about bivalves, about echnioderms, etc. However, yes, we can easily apply things like consciousness to animals like pigs and have been able to for well over a decade now.

There is [are*] animals which show a quite complex consciousness and there is [are*] animals, where we couldn’t observe these (yet).

Correct. For example, humans have quite a complex consciousness among the consciousnesses we've found (maybe some advanced civilization out there totally dwarves us; who knows). Meanwhile, sponges likely aren't conscious, and we have zero evidence for their consciousness. Again, though, the most common land animals farmed for food are sentient, and it's increasingly evident that's also true of fish.

At the same time we see more and more examples of plants showing what could be called “pain” or “social life”.

Nope. Sorry, just nope. There is a wide scientific consensus that plants do not feel pain, let alone are conscious. The pseudoscientific discourse around antiveganism has begun turning away from health now that vegan diets are healthful and demonstrably confer substantial health benefits compared to omnivorous ones and away from the environment because climate change is demonstrably very real and caused in large part by animal ag and now toward "plant pain" because it's just enough to give scientifically illiterate laypeople another excuse to bury their heads in the sand.

OP could have just talked about “animals” instead of “beings”. Talking in terms of “beings” only muddies the water both between plants and animals but also animals and humans.

Humans are animals. Objectively. Objectively Homo sapiens are hominids, which are primates, which are mammals, which are chordates, which are animals. We are separated from the genus Pan by about 7–9 million years of evolution. This is like saying that talking about "vehicles" only muddies the water between cars and my 1987 Chevy Malibu. That you're expressing notions of plant pain and delineating humans biologically from animals really tells me you don't understand biology. They shouldn't change their language just because you don't understand basic taxonomy.

And the latter is highly problematic, which is why we must not be careless with these words.

Why is treating a basic biological fact as factual in a completely neutral way (which you're already weirdly extrapolating that they're comparing humans to other animals? when in reality they're just saying that non-human animals can be sentient?) problematic or careless?

Some Fascists work to infiltrate movements such as veganism or animal rights precisely with the goal to devalue human life through weakening the perception of value of human life over animal life.

Give me even the slightest shred of evidence that ecofascism is a serious problem that's so prevalent in veganism it warrants such a prominent mention here (let alone one at all) and that it's caused by treating other beings (I am going to use that word and use it proudly) as sentient/conscious or absolutely piss off with this fucking gutter trash. What the fuck are you fucking talking about trying to distract from the obvious ethical good of veganism through rhetorical whiplash to this nonsensical "um, actually, what about ecofascism?" Would you bring this up in a discussion about solar panels? "Um, just be careful not to talk about global warming or the spooky ecofascists might show up."

I don’t think this is the case for OP

NO SHIT.

or the majority of people in these movements

Okay?

but they need to be vigilant against it.

Vigilant against what? Basic scientific literacy? My dude, my guy, veganism is one of the most leftist movements you can imagine which has the express intent of reducing suffering and unjust hierarchies. We're constantly vigilant against fascism and refuse to let it infiltrate our spaces. I can think of few places other than an ancom protest rally that are more resilient to infiltration from fascists. I'm genuinely disgusted that your arguments were so flimsy that you felt the need to compare calling sentient animals "beings" to fascism.

They said "being", not "living being", so I think it can be safely assumed they're talking about conscious life here (see Merriam-Webster's definition 1(c)). Like I think we both know that they're not talking about plants, but in an age where being vegan (especially in the first world) is easier than it's ever been by a wide margin, where the overwhelming majority of people in the first world wouldn't have to eat sentient life if they didn't want to and live perfectly healthy (or often healthier) lives, and where it's only continuing to become easier, more popular, and more widely understood to be healthful and ethically more sound, it's a lot easier to quip "haha whaddabout plants dum-dum??" than to confront what they're very obviously saying about eating sentient animals.

This exactly. You need a reliable source of fuel for the baseline, which is where nuclear energy can supplant fossil fuels instead of or in addition to relying on batteries.

Huh? Modern nuclear power plants automatically stop the reaction. In addition to other safety features monitoring things like temperature, radiation, etc. for automatic shutoff, the rods are held in place via electromagnetism. In the event of a power loss, the reaction will stop because the rods fall out of place. (This may just be one type; other modern reactors have ways of automatically stopping the reaction in the event of a power loss.)

I hope this pressure leads to just getting rid of algorithms altogether.

And other things spoken by someone who never learned what an algorithm is.

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they're trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

Lmao what? The Nazi Party publicly and loudly identified with religion and persecuted and purged the Jews who had been treated awfully by Christians in Europe for centuries. Sure Hitler wanted to see the end of Christianity, but he was quite religious himself per the Goebbels Diaries: "The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of their religious rites. Both (Judaism and Christianity) have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end they will be destroyed." So privately Hitler was religious, and publicly the Nazis were religious, and one of the most sickening, widespread, and prominent atrocities they committed was the persecution and genocide of a religious minority.

Thanks for admitting to profile stalking I guess?

I spent about 40 seconds clicking on your profile and scrolling through a few comments to make 100% sure it wasn't worth my while to keep arguing with you. Hope that helps. And my point is that I'm done arguing the facts because it's clear you either don't care about them and/or you're woefully incapable of understanding them. I don't know which is worse, but I'm leaning toward the latter.

no actual argument

I've already made the argument; the rest is just a waste of my time. I've given up trying to play pigeon chess. Your conversations with taipan@lemmy.world and recall519@lemm.ee show a pattern of being a confidently incorrect moron with no understanding of how anything works and then baselessly accusing people of strawmanning you – when the reality is that what you've said really is just that stupid.