Asklemmy

yet you choose to keep engaging which is the funny part to me.

Yeah, because I like arguing with people on the internet. I'm fairly up front about that.

you don’t like how I speak

Indeed I do not. I don't think you're very good at it. But life's all about the destination, not the journey, and we all have to start somewhere.

People even pointed out land clearing and we went back and forth on that

This seems tangential to the initial topic. I'm glad you got something productive out of it but if you wanted to talk about industrial farming and the impact of human agricultural practices on the environment, which is a fine topic of discussion, you could have, y'know...lead with that.

there was no argument

There were plenty of arguments to be had, but they weren't good arguments. Nobody's perspective or understanding of the world was improved by it, and I'm pretty sure nobody's mind was changed.

I dismissed it as quick as you dismissed my anecdotal stuff, is that not fair

Of course it's fair. But it's also a waste of everyone's time because you should have known before starting the discussion that this was what was going to happen. Like, this is so obviously going to occur and it's going to waste most people's time. If you ever go into a debate, you have to anticipate your opponent's responses and have arguments prepared ahead of time. What was your plan for dealing with the obvious response to your hypothetical for "I have a different definition of what constitutes veganism?" Because you either didn't anticipate that, or didn't care. You also didn't provide a lot in the way of initial details of the hypothetical. Seriously, you know you can fill out the body of a text post with quite a lot of text, right? You literally just asked the question in the title "Settle a debate: would eating a Venus fly trap be considered vegan?" and then, in the comments, clarified that your hypothetical was couched in a definition to which most people did not subscribe. If you had lead with "Settle a debate: would eating a Venus fly trap be considered vegan [if your definition of veganism is this specific definition of veganism]" we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because the entire argument I'm making is that you went about engaging with this topic in a way that is, quite frankly, annoying. You posed a hypothetical and then moved the goal posts in the comments by adding additional criteria after the fact. Just ask the entire question up front next time.

the biggest thing your mad it is that I phrased a comment in a way that didn’t invite argument or logical fallacy

You literally asked a question with the intent of "settling a debate." Of course it's annoying that you phrased your comment in such a way that didn't invite argument, because it reduces the debate to a pure difference of subjective definition. It seems like you just wanted to be right, so you moved the goal posts to include your definition, saying "well, if you look veganism like this, it's not okay to eat this particular plant or other plants grown as a result of industrial farming." Which...yes, we are all culpable for the iniquities of the world in which we live. There's a reason so many vegans are also anti-capitalists. This is not a new perspective. Fuck, the t.v. show The Good Place has this facet of modern human life as one of its foundational premises in the later seasons, that people are so wrapped up in a web of causality that their actions have innumerable unforeseen and unintentional negative affects on the world, rendering all of us incidentally guilty of a host of accidental evils. And having a discussion about that topic is all well and good. But you didn't do that. You asked people if venus fly traps as a food would be considered vegan. Which is, by comparison, a stupid fucking question.

If you wanted discussion I’d imagine we’d be talking about definitions of veganism in any capacity other than an anecdotal rebuttal of an anecdotal assertion. Not even a proposed definition in it stead, simply “that’s not a correct definition” which is a really weird thing to say for someone who thinks the definition of veganism is on a continuum

Do me a fucking favor: cite me. Seriously. Quote the exact phrase where I say your definition of veganism is objectively wrong in ANY reply I've given to you. In fact, I will do you one better. I will give you the links to my replies in this thread.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/5331374 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5331573 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5338345 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5344857 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5376311 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5385702 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5397623

I've commented on my perspective of how you've expressed your understanding of the lifestyle. I've said it seems superficial. That's my reading of it. But something being superficial or shallow and being "objectively wrong" are fundamentally different. You can't have an "objectively incorrect" opinion on a topic like this. You can have one that comes across as underinformed or which others think is weird, but those are themselves just opinions about your opinion, and they can't be objectively right or wrong, either.

In fact, I think we should try to make something very clear: I am not talking to you at any point about the actual topic of debate (which is to say the nature of veganism or, for some reason, venus fly traps). I agree that veganism is a fluid concept and its definitions muddled. But, once again, that's irrelevant.

Rather, think of me more as an English teacher commenting on how you have elected to construct (or perhaps more accurately, failed to construct) a logical argument or provide a well structured discussion, at the very least, of a particular topic that you yourself chose. You are approaching this like a student who thinks that your teacher disagrees with your conclusions: maybe you didn't like the book you were writing about and said as much and you feel you got a bad grade on your essay because the teacher disagrees with your criticism because it's a book she really likes. The reality is that she doesn't really fucking care what you think; she cares how you think, and how you construct and present your ideas. Nobody likes reading a shitty paper. I'm similarly annoyed by someone who starts a thread and fails to present a full argument up front and then proceeds to add additional qualifying information when they get responses that they don't like because they (presumably) just assumed everyone would be working off of the same definitions as them.