Debating Stories: On Vegetarianism

So someone posted a debate topic on forandagainst.com reading "Eating Meat Is Not Wrong. Vegetarianism Is Unnatural". I posted a pretty lengthy reply, and realised that since a) it pretty much constituted a blog post and b) I don't blog enough about vegetarianism, I should copy-paste it here. Enjoy! 


Their Argument:
Meat = protien [sic] (And B12). Big brains need those substances to survive. And yeah, you can get that protien from plants, but not B12. Thats why vegetarians have to take supplements, which is further proof that vegetarianism is unnatural. True, you can say that eating life is wrong, but its kind of hypocritical. Plants are living creatures too. To sustain life, you have to take some form of life. There is no getting around that. Now shut up and eat your cheeseburger.


My Response: 

-You've already accepted that protein can come from vegetarian sources, so I'm not going to go into that. Not really sure why you even brought protein up.

-Vegetarians obtain more than enough b12 from eggs and dairy. Vegans, yes, have to take supplements, but since those supplements exist it is still possible to have a vegan lifestyle and live a healthy life.

-The question of whether or not vegetarianism is natural is a little ambiguous. Our bodies are designed for an omnivorous diet, it's true. But the majority of humans throughout history (nearly all prehistoric peoples and most historic and modern Asian cultures) have been vegan, and most humans outside the Western world develop lactose intolerance after early childhood.

-Regardless, the question of whether or not something is "natural" is irrelevant. It is not natural to fight disease with anything other than our immune system. It is probably not natural to stay with the same sexual partner our entire lives. It is not natural to wear eyeglasses, dye our hair, transport ourselves in wheelchairs or install pacemakers. I could go on. Just because something is natural does not automatically mean that that thing is good or bad, you still need to examine the nature and consequences of the thing before you can pass judgement. With meat-eating, it is not good enough to say that since eating meat is determined by our genes, it must be good, and disregard the abuse of animals, rapid consumption of resources, health risks and pollution which are a result of the animal rearing industry.

-With the whole "eating plants is just as bad" argument, yes you need to destroy life in order to sustain life, but there is a clear and marked difference between destroying something that is alive in the way plants are alive and causing suffering to and then killing a sentient creature. You would not say that there was no moral difference between pulling up a weed and drowning a dog, or destroying a colony of bacteria and shooting a horse. So while it is possible to apply vegan/vegetarian logic to say eating plants is also wrong, it is clearly the lesser or two evils.

-I don't currently possess a cheeseburger.

Hey, Emo!

The demonisation of people with mental health problems is widespread, destructive, and largely unchallenged.  Discriminatory words like "retard", "spaz", "downie", "scitzo" are in common usage, and words like emo (and to a lesser extent goth) have taken on a secondary meaning as a derogatory term for anyone suffering from depression.

Mental illness is rarely taken seriously. People with chronic mental disabilities such as Down's syndrome and cerebral palsy are forced to endure mockery and intolerance their entire lives, and people who show permanent or temporary symptoms of depression or anxiety are often met with unsympathetic "just get over yourself" attitudes, which often pave the way for full-scale harassment. Those willing to help people with mental illness are the minority, and they generally have either had professional training or some kind of personal experience in the matter.

This intolerance comes from fear and a lack of understanding. As a species, we have been able to study and treat physical illness for millenia, but we are only really just beginning to understand how illness of the mind works. Detailed knowledge of depression, schizophrenia, down's syndrome etc. is uncommon, and mental illness is a huge gap in most people's understanding of the world. People's reaction to the void, including the void around their field of knowledge, is to laugh.
Prejudice against mental illness can also come from the same root as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Some people (well, all people to a certain degree) simply need to think bad about others in order to think well of themselves, and sectioning off groups of people which it is okay to 'hate' is a convenient way of doing this. Those who show obvious symptoms of chronic or recurring mental illness are easily marked as being a) different and b) vulnerable, so are an easy target for this tendency towards prejudice.

The reason prejudice against the mentally ill is so damaging, perhaps even more so than other prejudices, is that mental illness is already colossally difficult to deal with. Being stigmatised and made to feel shame about your illness piles the pain onto an already tortured mind, and often deters people from seeking the help they need. This is especially true for depression, where if your peers find out that you self-harm or have suicidal tendencies, you will be lumped into the high-school "emo" stereotype (a different thing from the actual emo scene) and systematically made to feel even worse about your state of mind.

Mental illness is one of those prejudices, like transphobia, and until recently homophobia, that has not been discussed or challenged enough for people to realise the damage it causes. Understanding and compassion needs to be spread, and this is already being done through campaigns such as this one.

Please refrain from the casual use of words such as retard, the implication that self-harm and attempted suicide are attention seeking strategies (which they aren't), and from laughing along when someone makes an emo joke. It will lead to a better world for all of us.

Politician Logic Strikes Again

Today at Prime Minister's Questions, the regular tiff between David Cameron and Ed Miliband went down something like this:

Miliband: Why are train ticket prices so high when you promised they wouldn't rise 1% above inflation?
Cameron: Because Labour introduced that policy.
Miliband: No, we changed it, your government introduced the policy.
Cameron: No, it's Labour policy. BTW, have you heard of all this awesome stuff we're doing like electrifying railways and building HS2?
Milliband: Admit it, the train companies' power over ticket prices is your policy.
Cameron: Well, yes, okay, Labour introduced it and then reversed it in 2010, then we brought it back. But Labour were going to bring it back after election year anyway, so it's really their fault!

Uh. Right.
So Labour introduced a law then got rid of it. Cameron's government then made the decision to bring back the law once they got into power. And yet the fact we now have the law is Labour's fault, according to Cameron's impeccable display of Politician Logic.
Even if Labour was going to bring it back (not that there's any way Cameron could have known that), it doesn't mean the Tories didn't have the option not to.

I just can't believe how stupid he thinks we must be, to swallow this horrifically badly thought out attempt to shove responsibility over to the opposition. That seems to be the main Tory propaganda tactic at the moment: blame Labour for every unpopular decision we make, and if that's completely impossible, let the Lib Dems function as a human shield.

Not that Labour are much better. But still.

Pronounciation Doesn't Matter

So something very specific has been irritating me. It's when people get all heated up over the way that people other than themselves pronounce words.

You know how it goes. One only has to say the word "scone" for half of the room to shudder dramatically and say "that's not how you pronounce scone!". The other half of the room will then invariably rise to the insult, saying "yes it is! I don't what kind of weird way you're pronouncing it!" The entire conversation will then descend into passive-aggressive tribalist madness, and you will sit there nibbling at your scon/scoan, silently ashamed for bringing the matter up.

The passion with which some can slug out verbal battles over the way people say words completely baffles me. I mean, pronounciation, literally, doesn't matter. Grammar matters. Spelling, usually, matters. Word choice matters, if only  because it serves as an interesting way to view the soul of mankind. But the variation in the way people pronounce words, literally, has no significance. It does not affect the quality of interpersonal communication, since we always know which words the other person means (granted, if someone did something like pronounce "house" as "hoo-say", we might have a problem, but this never happens, so it is unimportant). It's not interesting to discuss, either: we learn that people from different places or with different regional ancestry say things differently at the rough age of five, and there is no grander conclusion that scon vs scoan arguments reach. It's a complete waste of time and brain power.

I'm concerned that people's concern for "correct" pronounciation may come from nothing but a delusional sense of superiority. It's difficult for any of us to get rid of the gut reaction of "how dare these people have ways different from mine! My [accent/politics/religious views] are a result of how I was brought up, and no-one can have been brought up better than I!" Etc. Which is silly. There is no "better" way of pronouncing scone, or vase, or whatever the other points of contention are.

Really, there are just better things to spend our energy discussing. Blogging about it probably isn't helping on that front. But whatever.

Re: Racist Train Lady and freedom of speech

So firstly, the BNP released this in support of Emma West, the woman who went on a racist rant on a public train in front of various non-white people and their children, which then got filmed and Youtubed. She is currently being prosecuted under hate speech laws, which the BNP is taking as an affront on the freedom of the nationalist community.

Secondly, the story was covered on JoeMyGod, which is possibly the most liberal-left-wing American blog on the whole of the internet. Surprisingly (to me), many of Joe's readers agree with the BNP that prosecuting Emma West is an unacceptable restriction of freedom of speech.

I want to be clear about this. I do not think that there being legal consequences for someone who engages in a profane rant against fellow train passengers is in any way a restriction of freedom of speech. I think that the BNP are (somewhat ironically) playing the minority card and trying to rouse sympathy for their cause by crying oppression, and that many decent non-racist people are falling for it.

No political viewpoint is warrant enough to treat fellow human beings with the level of contempt that Emma West had for those on the receiving end of her tirade. If she hadn't said anything about race, if she had started yelling at train passengers and making high-volume personal remarks about their weight or facial features, then no-one would be defending her. But somehow, the British right wing have been able to mystify her comments as a legitimate expression of a reasonable political viewpoint.

Prosecuting Emma West has no bearing on freedom of speech. As always, those who hold a nationalist or racialist point of view will be free to state their political opinions. But they cannot use those opinions as an excuse to slander strangers in public.