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Vaniver comments on Pay other people to go vegetarian for you? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.