this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
67 points (95.9% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
990 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
solves nothing. you eliminate a negligible amount of carbon emissions. focusing on our individual impact is a waste of time when there are companies and their leaders doing orders of magnitude more damage.
Companies and their leaders are paid by individuals, lol. Going vegan definitely does help.
Even still, why did you only mention carbon emissions? The question was about making a better society. Did you forget that veganism is about animal rights?
going vegan doesn't help animals much either. we live in an overproductive society that wastes most of what it produces anyways - even if your personal choice marginally reduces demand, the abuse is ongoing. we need systemic solutions. we need to destroy the meat industry. veganism will never be popular enough to create systemic change on its own.
How do you plan to destroy the meat industry without anyone going vegan? You realize the meat industry is funded by non-vegans, right? And tax payers, of course, who also eat meat and won't support policy that challenges their freedom.
Destroying the meat industry isn't going to have the beneficial impact you think it will.
Most of the food we grow we can't eat, most of the farmland we use exclusively to support livestock isn't suitable for anything else. These animals are eating food that is otherwise biological waste that will simply decay and contribute to carbon emissions.
I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement, I am saying elimination isn't improvement, it only creates more problems.
This sets aside the problems created by eliminating animal fat and protein from our collective diet, which causes a health and nutrition problem on top of a pretty significant caloric deficit that again, we don't necessarily have the agricultural land to replace.
If being vegan is your jam then more power to you, but it isn't the answer for society's problems.
While animals can eat waste from crops grown for humans, that's a minority of their feed. Almost all new corn and soy cropland is cut to meet growing animal agriculture demand.
How does eliminating animal fat and protein cause health and nutrition problems? Humans are perfectly capable of living on vegan diets at all stages of life.
about 85% of the of the global soy crop is pressed for oil, and the industrial waste from that process is the vast majority if what is fed to animals. only 7% of the global soy crop goes directly to animals. ruminants live almost entirely on grass, even if they are grain finished.
every paper i've ever read about it spends the bulk of the paper explaining the risks and giving ways to mitigate them.
no. it doesn't.
please point to the year you went vegan on this chart
What a stretch! The last time I saw this line of reasoning was from actual holocaust deniers. Did you know that the population of humans has rapidly increased over time?
pigeonholing me with holocaust deniers is a hamfisted ad hominem.
Nothing about you. Just the argument! It's quite plainly stupid, you see.
this is an appeal to ridicule, not a refutation.
I already refuted it, but you never addressed that aside from the non-sequitur "What's your excuse?"
I didn't ask you for an excuse. I refuted your claim with facts.
you have not refuted it at all, and I don't have an excuse: I have facts.
whatever your excuse, being vegan hasn't helped.
Excuse?
you said it helps. i pointed out the proof that it hasn't decreased meat production at all. you made an excuse for why your tactic isn't working.
I see! Maybe you've never before encountered the concept of opportunity cost before. It's something like this: if I don't murder someone on a given day, I'm not actually decreasing the total number of real murders on that day. But contrasted against the hypothetical day where I made the inverse decision, it does. Does that help?
so being vegan doesn't actually help. which is what I said.
Which part remains unclear? Is it the use of a hypothetical? Specifically, this hypothetical asks you to imagine a world with no vegans. Do you think that, in such a world, there would be more animals killed for consumption or fewer animals killed for consumption, compared with reality?
I have no reason to believe the industry could produce any more than it does, and so no reason to believe it would.
Exactly! In a world with more vegans, fewer animals are killed. Hence, vegans help.
what do you mean "exactly?" I said your hypothesis doesn't seem intuitive to me. but even more dire: it can't be proven.
Put people above animals, always and forever.
I do! But I also value animals, and consuming their dead corpses is completely unnecessary and on top of that is wasteful, hurting humans in the process.