Veganism

[Der Fuhrer]

Thanks for citing me a bunch of wiki articles. You certainly proved your point. Like I said if you don't want to agree with me, that's fine, be wrong then. Arguing with you is an effort in futility.

[Orgazmo]

It's tough to have a reasonable argument with someone who relies so heavily on holothetic logic (like Blonde).

[ninjaface]

Speaking on the availability of vegan food in Chicago, it can't really be that hard. I live in the suburbs and there is a vegan place called Shree about 2 or 3 miles from my house. My room mates have tried it and said it was really good. They aren't vegans or anything. They are just open to trying most any kind of food.

The website has a few points of interest. Number one being the small swastikas across the top. The other being the "People's Verdict" section at the bottom on the page.

I'm definitely trying to augment my diet with more vegetables and what have you, so the idea of a 3 or 4 day per week vegan diet interests me.

[Der Fuhrer]

Humans vs. Nature:

Humans and nature powerful - developmental logic
Humans powerful, nature vulnerable - compassionate logic
Humans vulnerable, nature powerful - tribal logic
Humans and nature vulnerable - hollothetic logic

A statement using hollothetic logic would make a claim that humans have, in some way, defiled the environment, and by doing so we are orchestrating our own demise. Hollothetic logic is synonymous with psychological dissonance.


Fun fact: 90% of all extinct species became extinct before humans existed.

However, if a species is to survive in a world with humans, it must prove to be worth money. Wild cows (Anguar) are not worth money, and therefore they are practically extinct.

The problem here, as I have stated before, is that people today, who are so far removed from nature view animals as either people or things. In fact, nature in general is perceived as either a thing or a sanctuary. For a logging company, a forest is a product, and the spotted owl is a manufacturing problem. For the Sierra Club, the forest is a sanctuary, defiled by man.

Laboratory animals, used in research, are either hapless victims, to be rescued in daring commando raids and bestowed names, or they are simply pieces of equipment to be ordered from a catalog along with Petri dishes. It is simply too hard to see them for what they are--animals that can suffer, but animals that are not people either.

It is a challenge for a society ever further removed from nature to retain a grasp on its place in nature. Yet the tendency of both those who would conquer nature and those who would save it is to draw a line and declare human society ever apart from nature.

If we come to see the domestication of animals not as a crime against nature, but as a product of nature, we will in the process confront something much more fundamental about man's part in nature. If life with man was a better evolutionary bargain for domesticated animals than was life in the wild, then it makes no sense to say that nature (really just another word for evolution) ends where man's presence begins. And it raises doubts about larger judgments based on the premise that whatever is wild is pristine, whatever is human is tarnished. Man is easily shocked by the horror stories of the laboratory and the barn in part because we are ignorant of the greater horrors of the wood and water, horror stories written by nature, the cruel bitch, herself.

The thing is that nature (or evolution) doesn't care about the individual plight of the cow being led to slaughter. All of nature's strategies for survival of a species, strategies that include domestication, include suffering and death of individual members of that species. Old moose fall to pursuing wolves so that the young might live; lambs die to an axfall behind the barn so that more don't die of starvation, hunger, disease, and predation.

Most of us are so accustomed to the notion that domestication was a human exploit that to suggest otherwise can make one sound more like a fool than a scientist. There are some fundamental scientific concepts, however, that underscore the argument for domestication as the evolutionary product of a mutual strategy for survival.

First, the ancestor's of today's domesticated plants and animals were, like the mice invading our homes, opportunists, not conservatives. They were species adapted by their evolutionary past to exploiting new terrain on the forest's edge, rather than specializing in niches in the forest center. The first domesticated animals--dogs, sheep and cattle--were social species that readily scavenged new food sources. The first plants domesticated were weeds, in effect--sunflowers and gourds that would invade any disturbed soil.

The story told time and time again in the archaeological record is one of long, loose associations between the free-living partners before full-fledged domesticated relationships appear. The rise of agriculture, long viewed as a revolution, was really a long evolution. Man, animals, and plants engaged in thousands of years of close association before domestication blossomed.

At Tepe Ali Kosh, an early food processing site in what is today southwestern Iran that has yielded some of the best archaeological data, domestic plant species account for around 5% of of the seeds from 9,000 years ago, 1,000 years later they account for only 40%. At Tel Abu Hureyra, one of the first permanent settlements in the world, located on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria, bones of domesticated sheep and goats appear 9,500 years ago. They account for 10% of the bones found at the site (the rest are entirely wild gazelles) until finally growing to 60% around 8,500 years ago.

Wild cats, which probably invaded the granaries of the first agricultural settlements of the Near East some 9,000 years ago in pursuit of rodents, lived in free-association with humans for thousands of years before the Egyptians, who associated the male cat with the sun god Ra and the female cat with the goddess of fertility Bast, began confining them to the temples and deliberately breeding them, around 4,000 years ago. Over the next several thousand years they began spreading throughout the Near East and into Europe.

Man is far from the only species to practice domestication. Cooperative associations between some unlikely pairs appear throughout nature. In almost all there is one reoccurring pattern: the defense mechanisms that allow a species to survive on its own, but likewise make it fearful of associating with others, are dropped; in return, tangible benefits in the form of protection or food are gained. The state of dependency of one species upon another is not degeneracy, it is a finely tuned evolutionary strategy for survival. Nature has with surprising frequency, in a world so competitive, cast upon the solution of cooperation.

Finally, all domestic animals, in both behavior and appearance, retain juvenile traits in adulthood. One of the very first hints in the archaeological record of an animal's domestication is the jawbone of a wolf from southwest Asia, dated 12,000 years ago, in which the face and muzzle have begun to shorten. In other words, an adult with the face of a puppy. It is a process that has been repeated in every domestic animal. And that one fact of their evolution speaks volumes about what they are and how they came to be. Domestic animals are dependent, permanently juvenile, by nature, not just by circumstance or training. And, according to fossil evidence that long predates the age of domestication, they are completing a process of genetic evolution that was initiated not by man's captive breeding, but by the need to adapt to an environment racked by giant glaciers in the Ice Age that lasted a million years and ended only 10,000 years ago.

[Der Fuhrer]

There is also evidence to suggest that life with humans has increased the intelligence of domesticated animals. For example, the dog was one of the first animals to be domesticated and the cat was one of the very last. If you point at something in front of a dog, it will look to where you are pointing. On the other hand, if you point at something in front of a cat, it will stare at your finger and never look to where you are pointing.

[Mr. Blonde]

Originally Posted by Der Fuhrer

There is also evidence to suggest that life with humans has increased the intelligence of domesticated animals. For example, the dog was one of the first animals to be domesticated and the cat was one of the very last. If you point at something in front of a dog, it will look to where you are pointing. On the other hand, if you point at something in front of a cat, it will stare at your finger and never look to where you are pointing.

Just keeping this here for permanence.

[Mr. Blonde]

Originally Posted by Der Fuhrer

Humans and nature vulnerable - hollothetic logic

A statement using hollothetic logic would make a claim that humans have, in some way, defiled the environment, and by doing so we are orchestrating our own demise. Hollothetic logic is synonymous with psychological dissonance.

How? Explain that last part further please. I've already stated this earlier in the other thread we had this discussion in, as well as earlier in this one. Somebody else echoed it. Natural disasters and mass extinctions, of course, have happened many many times before humans came around. But we are definitely expediting the process.

Do you think humans will be around in a thousand years, DF? Because I do not. I think that the Earth will be fine, eventually. I don't think nature is weak. I guess i'm still stuck in the tribal phase.

P.S. I have a feeling you pulled that post out of a paper you wrote or a book by the my avatar's namesake. Where are these "________ logic" definitions coming from?

Originally Posted by Der Fuhrer

Thanks for citing me a bunch of wiki articles. You certainly proved your point.

At least i'm citing things. Also, that argument is the oldest in the book. Scroll to the bottom of any wiki page if you want more concrete sources. Were you not aware of that, or just don't trust them?

[Ugly Bastard]

Wouldn't it be really funny if they made a Food, Inc style documentary on the organic food industry that was like Food, Inc in that you were like, "oh man!! You are doing it to?!" And then there was like one more hippie movement that was like, "okay, okay, just kidding. We'll do it right this time."

[Orgazmo]

^ Similar thought: When I was watching Food, Inc, I was watching the Perdue chicken guys throw the chickens around into trucks and being general dicks. I thought to myself, "Wow, that seems unnecessary." A couple of scenes later, I saw some guy taking chickens, stuffing them into inverted down cones, and slicing their necks. I thought to myself, "Wow, that's even worse than the guy throwing the chickens!"

...and then it turned out that was the organic farm.

Ahh well, what can ya do?

[Mr. Blonde]

Hey gaz, what's an inverted down cone? Is it anything like a funnel?

[Dent]

.

[ninjaface]

Der Fuhrer, it seems Dent and Mr. Blonde are questioning the legitimacy of the word "holothetic". Care to refudiate their assertions?

[zebrazebrazebraSHAFT]

Originally Posted by Dent

what would happen when the animals got smart enough to fuck us up, I doubt they would feel compassionate towards us.

yeah, I don't wanna have to worry about my grandkids getting beat up by their animal peers at school, into the inverted down cones you go future a-holes!

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

Originally Posted by ninjaface

refudiate

Oh the irony, this isn't a real word either. It was made up by Sarah Palin.

refudiate - Google Search

Let me Google that for you...

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

Originally Posted by Der Fuhrer

There is also evidence to suggest that life with humans has increased the intelligence of domesticated animals. For example, the dog was one of the first animals to be domesticated and the cat was one of the very last. If you point at something in front of a dog, it will look to where you are pointing. On the other hand, if you point at something in front of a cat, it will stare at your finger and never look to where you are pointing.

Most dog's don't do this, and a dog must be trained to do it.

Cats are more resistant to training. They could fucking care less about pleasing you by obeying some kind of order or trick. Assuming they were domesticated after dogs as you claim, this would make it harder to domesticate them.

Your logic is circular and your perceived correlation between intelligence and domestication is baseless.

[Mr. Blonde]

I'm close to 100% that is the only person who has ever used the term "holothetic" logic. Even if i'm wrong about this, it's even worse, because it would have to come from someone I at least haven't heard from, instead of one of the great climate scientists of our time, Dr. Paul Chandler.

Originally Posted by Dent

Blonde, should we feel compassion towards other animals and want them to evolve in their own way, to get smarter?
what would happen when the animals got smart enough to fuck us up, I doubt they would feel compassionate towards us.

Man, last night I ate a pound and a half of beef and pork mixed together. I'm not going to be giving up meat anytime soon. But I can't help but think that as/if civilization advances a lot and we don't kill ourselves, the way we treat animals will advance as well, and hopefully not in the way of more efficiently killing them.

But, that might just be a case of pretty extreme optimism. It's not like we have any precedent for how we're "supposed to act" as an intelligent, sentient species. Should we allow for other races to evolve and gain sentience? Think about Neanderthals; they weren't as smart or as developed as humans, but they were the closest separately-evolved species on the planet (that we know of) TO humans. The last common ancestor we had with them was 500,000 years ago. That blows my mind every time I think about it. A separate primate came out of Africa, evolved to be a Neanderthal, developed the ability to "think", wear "clothing", make tools, hunt...and evidence shows that we came around as latecomers and basically wiped them out of existence, likely a combination of battling each other for hunting areas and them dying of starvation because of this.

Mistoffelees had a pretty good write up here a while back regarding other intelligent species evolving on Earth, and how we might react in such a situation. Are we destined to compete with every other species and destroy them in the great race for resources? I mean shit, humans can barely get along with each other. How would we react if we found another intelligent species evolving on our planet thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands (if we're still around by then) from now? I have no clue.

Regardless, humans at this point have kind of stopped evolution in it's tracks in regard to ourselves (medicine, compassion, anti-eugenics). Could an animal species on Earth even evolve in the first place with us around?

[zebrazebrazebraSHAFT]

Originally Posted by Mr. Mistoffelees

Most dog's don't do this, and a dog must be trained to do it.

Cats are more resistant to training. They could fucking care less about pleasing you by obeying some kind of order or trick. Assuming they were domesticated after dogs as you claim, this would make it harder to domesticate them.

Your logic is circular and your perceived correlation between intelligence and domestication is baseless.

Some cats are capable of being trained, isolate those cats over hundreds of years and you'll have more intelligent cats, you haven't increased the intelligence of a given cat but you have raised the average intelligence (relative to humans) of the species.

This is exactly what happened with dogs, its believed that dogs were domesticated from foxes in a very short amount of time, by selectively breeding the foxes that made eye contact with their human captors. I don't see why the same couldn't be done with cats given the variability in cat to human relations.

Also, you don't have to train a dog to look where you are pointing, they can learn that on their own.

[Orgazmo]

Originally Posted by Blonde

Hey gaz, what's an inverted down cone? Is it anything like a funnel?

No sir. Maybe my explanation was a bit off. It was like if you took a road cone, painted it metallic silver, cut off the top, turned it upside down, and then squished it a bit.

Originally Posted by ID

Oh the irony, this isn't a real word either. It was made up by Sarah Palin.

refudiate - Google Search
Let me Google that for you...

I do believe that was Ninjer being a witty motherfucker. If he had a, "I GOT YOU! I'm a witty motherfucker and I did that on purpose" post, he would probably link you to it right now.

Originally Posted by Zebra

Also, you don't have to train a dog to look where you are pointing, they can learn that on their own.

Fact. I just pointed to a toy and John pounced on it. Then I pointed to his food and he ate. Then I pointed to my dick and he gave me head with his sexy little snout.

[Der Fuhrer]

Too much bullshit to sift through all at once.

Holo - Greek root word meaning "whole", "all" or "total".

Thetic - Presented dogmatically; arbitrarily prescribed.

[ninjaface]

Originally Posted by Mr. Mistoffelees

I don't see what you did there.

I fixed your post.

[Mr. Blonde]

Yeah, I didn't want to interfere before Ninja got his say, but the "refudiate" thing seemed intentional to me. Protip: Whenever I make a joke like that that i'm not sure people will get, I usually add a black-font disclaimer that you have to highlight to see, kind of like a secret code.

understand, cocksuckers?

[Mr. Blonde]

Great segment on animal intelligence, bout 2 minutes in. Much more convincing than pointing and dogs.

YouTube

YouTube

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

I looked for secret text, but didn't see any. I had to make a judgment call. I stand by my decision.

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

Originally Posted by Der Fuhrer

Too much bullshit to sift through all at once.

Holo - Greek root word meaning "whole", "all" or "total".

Thetic - Presented dogmatically; arbitrarily prescribed.

Is this somehow supposed to justify making up bullshit?

homocockholoeater:

Homo - means attracted to butts

Cock - what you put in your mouth

Holo - Greek root word meaning "whole", "all" or "total".

Eater - presented homothetically; enthusiastically in your mouth

[DJ FC]

Originally Posted by Ugly Bastard

FC, veganism would be tough in any city when you're going out to eat with your friends. Let's not act like anywhere you go in glorious London and mention the word vegan that a bunch of progressive, open-minded people are going to run out of the kitchen with vegetables to give to you. I'm sure it's no easier to do it there than in Chicago or Houston for that matter.

What kind of crack are you smoking?

It's much, much easier. And I know because I have experience.