And I loves me some meat.

But I KNOW that eating animal products is not only extremely cruel, it’s also bad for the planet and terrible for human health.

So go vegan, already, people!
PLEASE. It’s the least you can do.

A: I didn’t denounce all vegetarians and vegans. I explicitly said I was talking about the subset of people I know and people in a certain scene who are vocally vegetarian/ vegan for what they consider moral reasons. My point, which I’ve made twice now, is that saying those people and their attitudes DON’T EXIST is factually incorrect. They not only exist, they exist in large numbers.

B: What cultural resentment? My wife is a veggie. Most of my good friends are veggies. I hardly ever eat meat myself. I made it quite clear that I was talking about a relatively small number of people, and I was specifically pointing out that saying “I don’t know a single veggie who thinks animals are morally equivalent to humans” may prove you don’t know anyone who thinks that, but it doesn’t prove they don’t exist.

That’s similar to someone from Focus on the Family trying to characterize gay men as if there’s a huge subset of them that are determined to get infected with HIV. They’ll point out that can go to just about any gay personals website and find a profile from a guy who says he’s looking for condomless sex, and that he doesn’t care about the HIV status of his partners.

But the fact remains that people like that represent an absolutely tiny percentage of gay men – less than 1 percent, I’m sure. Likewise, you’d have to search pretty hard among the vegetarian/vegan community to find someone who thinks that eating steak is morally no different from eating human flesh. If you actually know some of those people, that’s unfortunate – but the idea that they’re everywhere, and sane vegetarians are obligated to denounce them every chance they get, is ridiculous.

And I think it should be clear from this thread that most vegetarians/vegans, if actually confronted with someone like that, would be eager to denounce them.

That, or stop wearing what they eat as a badge of honor and a sign of virtue

And we’ve finally mined out the gold.
What underlies this argument, every time it is had, is the same resentment.

“Sure, vegetarians have some pretty compelling argument on the FACTS, but they feel moral about it and therefore they think I’m less moral and therefore they think they’re better than me.”

Cultural resentment, over and over again. It’s the animating force behind 90% of our politics. And it’s fucking juvenile. Get over it.

My point was that there are indeed people who believe that there is not only a moral equivalence between killing an animal and killing a human, but who believe it is worse to kill an animal than a human. I know it to be a fact because I personally know many people who believe this (not including my wife, incidentally). Whether all the vegetarians you’ve ever met have never said anything so silly is irrelevant. Pick up a copy of any PC punk magazine (MRR, Profane Existance, etc.) or album (Crass, Dystopia, etc.) and you will find these sentiments. I admit misspoke when I said that I find most veggie and vegan beliefs silly and/or hypocritical. I was commenting on the beliefs of the people I know personally and through this music scene, and not some larger movement, of which I really know nothing. Anyway, as I said, I think the diet is really a good idea.

“So? What, you expect a handful of people to radically alter the foundations of the most powerful society on earth? Or, I guess, it would be better if their beliefs and actions were completely in line with the status quo? It’s better to do nothing than to do something short of everything and thus appear a hypocrite?”

I expect people who wear their politics on their sleeves to do more than just buy soy-rizo for their tacos and lecture people when they aren’t willing to give up things that are just as destructive, if not more, for the sake of convenience. That, or stop wearing what they eat as a badge of honor and a sign of virtue. but again, I think a vegetarian diet is a GOOD IDEA.

As for which of my values I follow through to their logical extremes, I’ll give you one. I value art and music, and so I’m a working artist and musician with a huge portfolio, and I help other artists and musicians out as much as I can when I can. Does that help?