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<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta name="author" content="Teo Samarzija" />
<meta
name="description"
content="When people have their ears filled with political nonsense and they apply it to vegetarianism."
/>
<meta
name="keywords"
content="Vegetarianism, Veganism, Anti-Vegetarianism, Meat, Marxism, Socialism, Pain in Animals"
/>
<title>Anti-vegetarianism</title>
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</head>
<body>
<noscript>
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>
Please enable JavaScript!
</div>
</noscript>
<header>
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id="gornjiLijevi"
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Anti-vegetarianism
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</header>
<aside>
<br />
<center><b>Here are my online publications:</b></center>
<br />
<b style="margin-left: 5px">HTML5 stuff:</b>
<a href="sat.html"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">
A simple "grandfather clock" animation made in Javascript.
</div>
Analog Clock
</div></a
>
<a href="calculator.html"
><div class="link2 link1">
<div class="popup">
A simple HTML5 online calculator. Can solve parentheses!
</div>
Calculator
</div></a
>
<a href="fraktal.html"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">
A spiral fractal I've made by modifying the "Dragon Curve".
</div>
The Dragon Curve
</div></a
>
<a href="pacman.html"
><div class="link2 link1">
<div class="popup">
A Pacman game playable on touch screens. Made in Javascript using
the SVG graphics.
</div>
PacMan
</div></a
>
<a href="etymologist.html">
<div class="link1">
<div class="popup">
A flashcard game in which the goal is to guess the etymologies of
the words in simulated languages.
</div>
Etymology Game
</div></a
>
<br /><b style="margin-left: 5px">Webpages on this website:</b>
<a href="index.html"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">A webpage with a bunch of links.</div>
Homepage
</div></a
>
<a href="libertarianism.html"
><div class="link2 link1">
<div class="popup">What do I think about politics?</div>
Libertarianism
</div></a
>
<a href="vegetarianism.html"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">Why I don't eat meat.</div>
Vegetarianism
</div></a
>
<a href="Simulation.html"
><div class="link2 link1">
<div class="popup">Could the universe be a giant computer?</div>
Digital Physics
</div></a
>
<a href="linguistics.html"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">
Why I like languages.<br /><br />
See also:<br />
<u
style="color: #0077ff"
onclick="window.open('http://flatassembler.github.io/toponyms.html'); window.close();"
>Croatian Toponyms</u
><br />
<u
style="color: #0077ff"
onclick="window.open('http://flatassembler.github.io/Indo-Austronesian.html'); window.close();"
>Indo-Austronesian</u
>
</div>
Linguistics
</div></a
>
<a href="informatics.html"
><div class="link2 link1">
<div class="popup">Why I like computers.</div>
Informatics
</div></a
>
<a href="pseudosciences.html"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">
My advice on how to recognize and deal with false sciences.
</div>
Pseudosciences
</div></a
>
<br /><b style="margin-left: 5px">On Internet forums and blogs:</b>
<a href="http://linguistforum.com/outside-of-the-box/croatian-toponyms/"
><div class="link1">
<div class="popup">
The forum thread in which I explained my linguistic theories in
detail.
</div>
Croatian Toponyms
</div></a
>
<a href="https://atheistforums.org/thread-50241.html"
><div class="link2 link1">
<div class="popup">My parody of the conspiracy theorists.</div>
Airplanes Don't Exist
</div></a
>
</aside>
<section>
<p style="margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px">
<br />Compare this with the YouTube videos such as
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzS2K_-6PAQ">this</a>
one.<br /><br />I am well aware of the fact that this vegetarianism
debate is polluted by conspiracy theories and pseudoscience by both
sides of the story (both the vegetarians and the anti-vegetarians).
<br /><br />
Anyway, since I posted this, I have noticed there is yet another trend
in anti-vegetarianism, namely, to attempt to reject nutritional science
as not a real science. I've made a response video to one such video, you
can see it <a href="https://youtu.be/Lg-IBf5vtgM">here</a>.<br />
I've also posted a
<a href="https://youtu.be/-nvSi-NCfmw">video</a> response to the claims
made by Peer Ederer against environmental vegetarianism. Overall, I feel
like his claims are a huge red-herring, primarily because of not
addressing the problem of super-bacteria.
</p>
<br />
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</section>
<main class="main1" id="glavni" style="display: block">
<a name="vrh"></a>
<h2 style="text-align: center">My parody of the anti-vegetarians</h2>
<div
style="
text-align: justify;
margin-left: 10px;
margin-right: 10px;
margin-bottom: 100px;
"
>
<b>TL;DR</b>: Think of all of those horrible things animals in factory
farming have to go through in their lives. Then imagine a pandemic of a
superbacteria caused by factory farming (and the science behind how that
is bound to happen is way easier to understand than the science of
global warming). Then, try to imagine the most insane comments somebody
can make about those things. You know, weird ways of trying to deny it
is even happening, insane ways of trying to justify it... Well, chances
are, some blogger out there has actually said those things you
imagined.<br /><br />
<b>UPDATE</b> on 06/06/2022: This article was written pre-COVID, back
when neither side tended to take the
<a
href="https://flatassembler.github.io/vegetarianism#VegetarianismAgainstPandemics"
>danger of zoonotic pandemics</a
>
seriously. My guess is that the vegetarianism debate is going to change
significantly after COVID. Anti-vegetarians are probably going to insist
that COVID-19 is an artificial virus (which is unlikely at best, and,
even so, you cannot claim the same of other pandemics that came from
meat, such as HIV) and that eating farmed animals is not dangerous like
eating bats not examined by a veterinary is (which is wrong, it is
dangerous just in a different way: factory farming might not lead to
virus pandemics, but it leads to super-bacteria). My guess is that the
"<i>I don't want to take any vitamins.</i>" mentality is going
to disappear once we have seen how COVID-19 pandemic was made
significantly worse by widespread Vitamin D deficiency (which could have
been easily prevented just by people taking vitamins).<br /><br />
<i
>By "anti-vegetarians", I don't mean people who eat meat, I mean
people who spread pseudoscience supporting eating meat (whether or not
they actually eat meat). They sound crazy to vegetarians, and I guess
to many other people. (If you don't like sarcasm, you can skip to the
serious part by clicking <a href="#serious">here</a>.)<br /></i
><br />
I've been taught my whole life that I could both love animals and eat
them, and that eating meat is somehow necessary. Now I'm made
uncomfortable by someone pointing me to one of the few obvious facts of
ethics, namely, that I can't do it, and to one of the few obvious facts
of nutrition, that is, that I don't have to eat meat to be healthy (<i
>UPDATE on 23/06/2022: Apparently, one of the common arguments against
vegetarianism is that a significant portion of the population is
supposedly ill in such a way that vegetarianism would make their
health worse. I have no idea how somebody looking at the evidence
could think that. A high-carbohydrate diet with little-or-no meat
appears to help against heart disease (being lower in saturated fat),
it appears to help against type-2-diabetes (either because saturated
fats increase insulin resistance or because omega-3-acids decrease it,
very likely both), it appears to help against cancer (containing no
heme iron) except possibly breast cancer... And even if milk and soy
do indeed increase the risk of breast cancer (which I am not sure how
well that's supported by evidence), they are easily avoided even on a
vegetarian diet. Maybe if you have epilepsy then you should not switch
to a high-carbohydrate vegetarian diet (though the evidence even for
that is thin). But we cannot pretend that's a significant portion of
the population. And let's not forget a vegetarian diet does not really
have to high in carbohydrates.</i
>).
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<i
>I am going to pretend<br />
this is where an average<br />
animal raised for meat<br />
lives.</i
><br />
</div>
What should I do now? I can't just admit I've been wrong my whole life.
No, I will make a blog-post (or a series of them) spreading rivelous
misinformation about nutrition, animal psychology, and other things more
or less relevant to vegetarianism.<br />What should I start with? Yeah,
I probably need to make myself sound non-authoritarian, and to make
vegetarians sound authoritarian.<br />So, if you happen to be a
vegetarian, I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with
are people who think they are more of a person because they don't eat
meat and who are vegetarian because they think eating meat is somehow
immoral. In other words, I have a problem with people who are thinking
about ethics and sometimes choose what they eat based on that. Eating
meat is moral, because...<br />
Well, I was told by my parents many times that it was nutritionally
necessary. I haven't really looked much into it, but I will nevertheless
go with that. So, let's look up some nutritional arguments against
vegetarianism on-line.
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<i
>I am going to pretend<br />
this is what an average<br />
vegetarian looks like.</i
><br />
</div>
There we have it: the vitamin B12. Allegedly, vegetarians are more
likely to suffer from its deficiency, which causes mental illnesses. Of
course, I will even bring up some mockery about how vegetarians are too
stupid to realize that because they don't have enough vitamin B12 in
their brains. Of course, I will forget to mention the fact that about a
third of the world population today suffers from vitamin B12 deficiency,
not because we are not eating enough meat, but because of the way meat
is produced today. Vitamin B12 is produced by bacteria in the intestines
of some animals (including humans, but the amount that's produced by
bacteria in human intestines is not even remotely enough to keep us
healthy), and those bacteria are usually killed by the antibiotics the
farmed animals are regularly fed with. The meat you buy in a supermarket
(apart from fish) probably doesn't even contain vitamin B12. How come I
didn't know that? Well, I probably did, everyone who knows what vitamin
B12 supplements are probably knows that, I was probably just being
dishonest.<br />
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<i
>I am going to pretend<br />
those people are<br />
living ideally healthy lives.</i
><br />
</div>
Of course, I have some more arguments, even less sensical to people
informed about relevant things. For instance, I can find and link to
some quacks claiming that the Inuit people, whose traditional diet is
mostly meat, don't get heart disease. That's supposedly because the
omega-3 acids prevent heart disease. Thereby, I can claim vegetarians
have a higher risk of heart disease. Of course, again, animals raised
for meat never see grass to get the omega-3 acids from. Also, if I did
even a tiny bit of research on-line, I would have known that all or
nearly all studies done about it have found that vegetarians have a
slightly lower risk of getting heart-disease compared to the rest of the
population, and that it's been known since the early 1930s that the
Inuit people don't really have lower risk of getting heart-disease
compared to other American Indians. Furthermore, the evidence for the
well-known "fact" that omega-3 acids prevent heart-disease in humans is
almost non-existant. But, yeah, I am going to take meat-industry
propaganda as a reliable source of information about nutrition.<br />
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<i
>I am going to ignore<br />
the fact that there is<br />
food that's rich in<br />essential amino-acids,<br />
but poor in methionine.</i
><br />
</div>
I might even bring up the long-debunked myth that human beings need
around a third of their energy-intake to be protein (in reality, it's
less than half of that, if not way less than half of that). That might
convince some people. Needless to say, for those who are willing to do a
minute of research on-line, I might make up some unfalsifiable
conspiracy theory to explain why the research doesn't seem to support
that myth.<br />
Naturally, I have arguments that extend beyond nutrition. I can claim
that eating meat is moral because it is natural. That is, even if human
beings don't need to eat meat to be healthy (which is still being
debated because people are idiots), some animals, such as wolves or
lions, actually have to.
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<img
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<i
>This is whom<br />I take my moral values<br />from.<br />(By the
way, wovles<br />don't actually want<br />to eat people.)</i
><br />
</div>
Therefore, if it's morally acceptable for them to eat meat, it should be
morally acceptable for us too. Of course, by that logic, you can justify
quite a lot of things almost nobody would agree are moral. Most of the
species of praying mantis have eating an animal of the same species in
their instinct. That obviously doesn't justify cannibalism. Rape is also
very common in nature, even in the species relatively close to us, such
as dolphins.<br />
And, of course, I'll claim that it is natural for human beings to eat
meat, even though they don't have to to be healthy. This raises an
obvious question: How could the first humans hunt game, before the
invention of the tools and before they found out how to cook? But I am
too delusional to see that question in the air.
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<i
>Early humans could<br />
easily eat raw meat<br />
with those teeth.</i
><br />
</div>
And I will claim that eating meat is moral because it supposedly helped
our ancestors survive, that it gave us bigger brains. Of course, there
is not much evidence of that (there is evidence that cooking increased
our brain size, that's not the same as saying that eating meat did
that), and even if there is, so what? How is it going to help us now?
Eating meat obviously isn't going to make us smarter.<br />
Related to that, I could claim that eating meat is moral because it's,
well, considered normal by the society. Of course, not so long ago,
slavery was considered normal by the society, yet hardly anybody would
argue that it was moral because of that.
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<i
>This was once normal,<br />just like slaughtering<br />
animals for food is.</i
><br />
</div>
Oh, but slavery required a government to be profitable, and slaughtering
animals for food doesn't! It's the free market that decides what is
moral and what isn't, and it decided that eating meat was moral. Well, I
mean, I don't really know that. Without the government subsidies, meat
would obviously be significantly more expensive to produce. But saying
that might convince some people who are a bit more libertarian than the
rest of us not to apply their ethical principles to animals.<br />
But let me resort to something else. When I made so many ridiculous
claims, and some people still follow my blog, I might claim that animals
actually don't feel pain. That's how I can feel comfortable while
knowing that my dietary choices require animals to be killed at a rate
at which they cannot be ensured to die painlessly. And I will try to
prove it using the arguments that, if applied to something else, would
read like this:
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<i
>This guy knew<br />
about animal<br />
psychology more<br />
than any<br />
neuroscientist<br />
of today.</i
><br />
</div>
"I am a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Moon doesn't exist. Why
would I need to provide evidence of that? Claim that the Moon exist is
an unfalsifiable statement, so the burden of proof is on you who claims
that the Moon does exist. Yes, you can see it, but how do you know what
it is that you are looking at? For all you know, it could be a hologram
projected on a big balloon, right?" I know that all the qualified
neuroscientists agree that most of the birds and mammals feel pain, but
I am not convinced by that any more than a conspiracy theorist who
claims that the Moon doesn't exist is convinced by all the qualified
astronomers agreeing that it exists. If I do a bit more research
on-line, I can cite Descartes, a 17th-century philosopher who supposedly
claimed animals didn't feel pain. Even he probably didn't claim that, he
said that only thinking beings could feel "pain". By "pain", he probably
didn't mean physical pain, but emotional suffering (since he probably
wouldn't have claimed animals didn't have other physical senses such as
vision). But misinterpreting all the known science and philosophy is
allowed here. The real question is what made Descartes think animals
aren't thinking beings. Because they don't talk? Well, for a computer,
it takes by orders of magnitude more intelligence to say 2+2=4 than to
compute it, and who knows about animals.<br />
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<i
>This plant<br />is in extreme pain<br />when we eat it.<br />And
presumably also<br />
when farmed animals<br />
eat it.</i
><br />
</div>
Or, equivalently, I can make a virtually psychotic claim that plants
feel pain. Likewise, I can discard all the evidence that the nervous
system is needed to feel pain. Therefore, eating meat would somehow
cause less suffering than eating plants. Of course, the obvious problem
is, what do the farmed animals eat? Naturally, they eat plants. They eat
countless plants during their lifetime. But, if I deny that, hardly
anybody would know how to prove me wrong. Just like, if a creationist
claims that he (or some other creationist) had discovered a precambrian
rabbit fossil, hardly anyone would know how to prove him wrong, even
though everyone knows that he is wrong.<br />
Or I could point out to the inconvenient things that might happen if
everyone became a vegetarian tomorrow, blowing them beyond any
proportions.
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<i
>Those people<br />
might starve<br />
if everyone<br />
stopped smoking.</i
><br />
</div>
You know, if everybody stopped smoking tomorrow, some things we are
unprepared for might happen, therefore it is immoral to stop smoking.<br />
Or, equivalently, I could make up some lifeboat scenarios and claim that
it would be better to eat meat in them than to eat plants. You know, by
pointing to the stories of the people ignorant of survival skills who
were poisoned by plants and, of course, ignoring the stories of the
people ignorant of the survival skills who were poisoned, by, for
instance, eating a dog's liver. Or the relatively well known fact that
the Great Chinese Famine was made worse by people trying to feed
themselves by hunting birds and therefore increasing the number of pests
that would otherwise be eaten by those birds.<br />
But, you know, actually, I do feel bad about eating meat. But I think I
have a better solution to that than going vegetarian. Perhaps we could
legislate some laws that will ensure the animals on the factory farms
are treated humanely. Or perhaps even legislate some economically and
ecologically completely unworkable solution involving hunting (as if
there were even remotely enough game meat in the world to feed the
population with it). And why are the animals treated so badly? Oh, it's
the government, of course the animals would be treated better if the
government didn't subsidize the meat industry and made the animals be
killed at a rate at which we cannot ensure they die painlessly. And if
the government didn't mandate testing drugs on animals, which has very
little scientific value and almost always fails to predict the most
important adverse effects in humans, but makes countless animals suffer.
Animals need to be protected from the government, not the government to
protect them, but they have no voice. But, no, I have a political
agenda, I want the expansion of government, and I will use the supposed
protection of animals from capitalism as a justification. And that, to
be honest, is what this is all about.<br />
<i
><br />I hope you now see why vegetarian bloggers don't respond more
rationally to the arguments made by their opposition. Because, if our
opposition doesn't write anything more sensical than this parody is,
how should we reply? The fact that I happen to be a vegetarian doesn't
mean I don't have other interests, such as third-way politics,
linguistics and computer science. I don't have much time and interest
figuring out what is the best response to those nonsensical arguments,
any more than I, just because I am interested in linguistics, want to
spend time figuring out what is the best response to the phonosemantic
hypotheses and other obviously pseudoscientific fringe theories in
linguistics. And I hope you see why vegetarians consider
anti-vegetarians to be ignorant bigots: because the only explanation
for what they write is that they are either willfully ignorant or are
lying, all in an effort to support some (probably political) agenda.
I, and most of the vegetarians, don't have a problem with other people
eating meat. What we do have a problem with are people who are
promoting pseudoscientific claims such as that vitamin B12 deficiency
or heart disease can be prevented by eating meat. Because that's
called a fraud. I've studied quite a few controversial issues, and the
truth has never been so obvious and there has never been so much
politicization of science as with vegetarianism.<br
/></i>
<br />
UPDATE on 1/11/2018:<a name="serious"></a><br />
<b>Serious discussion:</b> Is this blog-post just an example of the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Structure"
>straw-man</a
>
fallacy? Well, I don't think it is. I linked to an example of an
anti-vegetarian blog-post on the right-side section of this web-page,
and most of the "arguments" brought up here are also brought up there.
The author makes the claim that thinking that vegetarianism is the right
ethical choice is somehow authoritarian (comparing people who hold that
notion to Stalin and Hitler), that eating meat is somehow natural and
therefore somehow justified, and that, if everyone suddenly became a
vegetarian, some terrible things (though he doesn't exactly specify what
he thinks would happen) would happen and that it's therefore morally
right to eat meat. Though he didn't bring up those dangerous lies (or,
at best, half-truths) about nutrition, it's not hard to find blog-posts
using them to make a case against vegetarianism. So, it's clear that a
significant number of people active on the Internet believe (or at least
claim to believe) those things.<br />
The real question is why. Some people may believe some of those things
(though I don't think anyone who knows what the word "meat" means can be
ignorant enough to believe those things about ethics) because they are
ignorant, but I don't think many people active on the Internet would
belong to that category. The reason is something else.<br />