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jkaufman comments on Pay other people to go vegetarian for you? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (92)
"Vegetarianism isn't really rational in the first place"
You're throwing around "rational" in an unhelpful way. The question at issue is: does going vegetarian make the world better? There's a good argument that the number of animals living on factory farms is proportional to the number of meat eaters, so if you value the suffering of animals then decreasing the number of people who eat meat should be helpful.
"probably having a net negative impact by encouraging terrorist groups like PETA."
PETA may sometimes get classified as terrorists but they're clearly not what most people will think of when they hear "terrorist"; they don't go around blowing things up. This is the noncentral fallacy. While I think PETA isn't going about things well, if you value the suffering of animals I have a hard time seeing how "maybe encouraging PETA a bit" can outweigh many fewer animals living on factory farms.
PETA is without question a terrorist organization. They act as a front for recruitment for terrorist groups such as ALF, they give money to such groups, they support their activities, they send out large amounts of propaganda, they have significant overlap in membership with said terrorist groups and put terrorists in leadership roles... the list goes on. They DO, in fact, go around burning stuff down, commit arson, and I know on at least one of those occaisions left their dog locked up in their truck on a hot day while they were out "liberating' rabbits (who mostly ended up hiding under their hutches anyway). They have destroyed scientific research in pursuit of their insane ideology.
They oppose the use of genetic engineering to improve food crops, indeed destroying specimens of GMed plants in their terrorist activities, and try to terrorize people into believing GMed plants and animals are more dangerous than anything else we eat. They promulgate scams like organic foods, and thus are considerably worse for the environment and society - there's a reason why GMed foods are cheaper, after all.
PETA is a terrorist front organization, and obviously so to those who are familiar with them, their history, and the people involved with them. They are without question evil, and I oppose them quite strongly. And you should too, if you actually believe in a better future. PETA doesn't.
Factory farms aren't a bad thing anyway. Animals aren't people. I eat them. They are delicious. If they are produced more efficiently via factory farming methods (and they are; if they weren't, then factory farms wouldn't exist), then whatever. Killing them is much worse than everything else that happens to them, and in the end, I don't really care. They aren't randomly being "tortured". They're being kept in stark conditions in order to be produced more efficiently.
I'm not really for someone going out and just randomly hurting animals for no reason, but I'm okay with things that cause harm to animals which actually have legitimate purposes. Factory farming has a legitimate purpose.
It is possible (and preferable) to give reasons why you don't approve of PETA and why you like eating animals without inflationary use of the term 'terrorist'.
A terrorist is someone who uses terror in order to coerce a reaction out of people.
PETA's propaganda's purpose is to horrify people into not eating meat.
PETA's funding and relationship with ALF has the purpose of terrorizing scientists, agribusiness, and other groups that they want to cause harm to by threatening to or actually destroying research, burning down buildings, destroying crops, freeing animals, ect. They give people who have engaged in such activities leadership positions, portray it as a reasonable response, give them money, recruit members for them, ect.
Ergo, they are a terrorist front group. I felt that this was pretty clear from the whole "they do in fact go around burning stuff down, commit arson" and I threw in the dog thing because it was from a personal encounter with such "activists" (they tried to "liberate" the rabbits from a rabbit farm down the street during the summer; the guy who noticed their truck with their dog locked up in it came back with a baseball bat to smash in the window to let the dog out after passing it twice, but they had taken off by then). And arson, murder, and jaywalking constructions are always fun. Their association with various ecoterrorist groups, and comembership with such lovelies, and funding... well, it all speaks for itself. But its usually good to say it out loud.
It is entirely appropriate to label people as terrorists when they are, in fact, terrorists. Its like calling a member of the KKK a white supremacist; it might be a [i]negative[/i] term, but it is also without question a [i]correct[/i] term and a [i]descriptive[/i] term. A lot of people are unaware of the fact that PETA is, in fact, a terrorist organization, so I generally feel obligated to mention it.
Unless it is site policy not to use the word terrorist, in which case I will... probably fail to remember the next time it comes up, and then get in trouble. Ah well.
The set of people who do that is not the same as the set to which 'terrorist' applies. In fact, it isn't even a superset.
There is no rule. Just a general tendency to think less of the contributions of sloppy thinking. In fact political advocacy of this kind is somewhat discouraged in general due to the near inevitable nature of such conversations.
Is it? Or do we simply not call some such organizations terrorist organizations out of politeness?
I suppose one could argue that the proper definition is "A non-state entity who commits criminal acts for the purpose of invoking terror to coerce actions from others", which will capture almost all groups that we consider to be terrorist groups, though it really depends - is a group who creates fear about the food supply for their own ends a terrorist group? I would argue yes (though one could also argue that this is equivalent to crying fire in a crowded theater, and thus a criminal act).
Legal nitpick - the issue is falsely shouting fire
Arguing about definitions isn't very useful. Discussion is much more likely to go in a positive direction if you point to specific actions and describe why they're harmful.
Just because many animals are living on factory farms doesn't mean that they have to. I would rather use my money to encourage things like free ranging chickens, grass fed cattle, etc. than to be someone proudly paying others to "Do as I say, not as I do."
How about non-proudly paying people to do it?
Admittedly, since it's not an efficient way to purchase fuzzies, you probably shouldn't do it unless you think it's the most efficient way to purchase utilons, which is not a conclusion I personally endorse, but you'd still probably be getting a significantly better rate per dollar on reduction in harm to animals and the environment.
I think we're thinking about it differently. The rate per dollar calculation is so linear. I'm thinking of things more like an ecosystem. Yes, at this moment in time you would get a better return on your investment, but there are costs to that decision that aren't taken into account in the equation. There are also benefits to the other path (investing in local, sustainable, ethical farming) that show up down the line as the movement picks up momentum. There are also potential harms to vegetarianism, such as vegetarian parents starving their children to death.
That's a pretty fringe harm.
Increasing the number of vegetarians is also effectively an investment in sustainable, ethical farming. You can only make the raising of live animals for their flesh so resource efficient, the floor on resource consumption is still going to be above that for farming produce.
You could invest in the research on vat meat, which could bring the floor down a lot lower than is possible with live animals, but it'll probably be decades before it reaches a point where anyone would want to eat it.
If you want to take about resource efficiency, we should probably start by eating what we produce. A quick Google turned up this report that 40% of the food produced in the US is thrown out as waste.
You know, I read that back in college, was properly outraged, resolved to eat all the food I served myself for every meal and never serve myself more than I would eat from then on, have done so ever since, and then proceeded to forget my original reason for doing so? That figure had passed out of my mind until you brought it up just now.
That said, the efficiency gap, while large, is still considerably less than that between raising meat and produce, so a person would actually be wasting fewer resources if they were eating only produce and served themselves a 40% excess beyond what they could eat and then threw it way than if they were eating a meal where meat constituted a significant proportion of the serving, and took only as much as they could finish.