Dont Like...

[sing blue silver]

to be completely honest, the arguments are one of the only things that draw me to this section of the board anymore.

I couldn't agree more.

And this is vaguely related to the whole farming thing, have either of you seen DIRT! The Movie? It's a pretty interesting documentary on the de-evolution Earth's soil and the terrible, terrible things our farming processes do to it.

And I just wanted to say that while I agree that factory farmed meat is wrong, I don't believe that a handful of people saying "HEY MEAT INDUSTRY! You're doing it wrong so I am going to stop eating meat!" is going to change ANYTHING for the better. Vegetarians have existed FAR longer than factory farmed meat has and to think that going vegan or vegetarian will benefit anything other than your ego is pretty silly to me.

Word, I just don't see how people don't get that if farmers didn't have to give 30-50% of their income to the government that they would be able to afford to not fuck up the dirt or to be able to use more humane, environmentally friendly methods and still be able to stay in business and produce an affordable product.

oh, mmm, yes, quite right.



bewbs

[Now Im Nothing]

its been a while since ive been on but im not likin how this site is now back then ppl were actyally nice and chill now its filled with assholes.
y is it that ppl r bein mean to others this is supposed to bring us together because we all share somethin in common!
me and another member talked about this last night.

your grammar fucking sucks, dude.

[derekautomatica]

its been a while since ive been on but im not likin how this site is now back then ppl were actyally nice and chill now its filled with assholes.
y is it that ppl r bein mean to others this is supposed to bring us together because we all share somethin in common!
me and another member talked about this last night.

your grammar fucking sucks, dude.

your point?

[bright lights, big city]

its been a while since ive been on but im not likin how this site is now back then ppl were actyally nice and chill now its filled with assholes.
y is it that ppl r bein mean to others this is supposed to bring us together because we all share somethin in common!
me and another member talked about this last night.

your grammar fucking sucks, dude.

your point?

he's right. it does suck.

[derekautomatica]

 I locked my keys in my car outside of an abortion clinic the other night. It turns out they get really pissed when you go in and ask them for a coat hanger.

[blixa]

corey, i'm sorry this took ages but they were not kidding when they said honours year was HARD AS AN ERECT PENIS!

what i meant by sustainability is the coldly compelling rationale that the meat and dairy industries are the single biggest contributors to global warming worldwide. this, unlike many of the chemicals needed for production and transportation, such as gasoline, is quite unnecessary pollution. let's look at your country, in the united states, this is pollution produced so that americans can get cheap meat in large quantities – amounts consumed per person far above what americans consumed fifty or one-hundred years ago. so on both philosophical and realistic environmental counts (add to global warming the disastrous ecological consequences of trawling for sea life such as shrimp), there are strong, clear arguments that the current factory farming system is profoundly unsustainable. it takes between 6 and 26 calories of food input to get one calorie of meat from an animal. it's very inefficient, it's extremely wasteful and it's a very expensive way to make food.

vegetarianism is the only practical and philosophically satisfying means to influence the cruel, environmentally catastrophic industries of factory meat and dairy, and large-scale fishing. this is risky because only 3.2% of american adults are vegetarian, and even if a bigger percentage of americans are ambivalent about eating meat, for many it would be uncomfortable to be told that they need to make the step to completely stop eating meat. i know for omnivores reading this that the following statement is a provocation: eating meat is unethical and unsustainable. the excuses for eating factory produced meat are almost entirely disconnected from need. no one needs to eat meat. a vegetarian diet is often healthier, and – despite how cheap meat has become – still less expensive. and it isn't cruel. and it isn't contributing to global warming. and it isn't making us fat. but listen here, i'm not being biased entirely, i understand that a vegetarian diet is inconvenient. like other inconvenient environmental truths, the unsustainability of factory meat needs to be discussed and acted upon.

one of the big problems is that americans decided they wanted to eat more meat than any other culture in history and pay historically little for it. to achieve that dream they abandoned the ethical farmers dream farm and signed on with smithfield (the largest pork supplier in america) allowing (or causing) husbandry to leave the hands of farmers and become determined by corporations that positively strove (and continue to strive) to pass their costs on to the public. with consumers oblivious or forgetful or, worse, supportive, corporations like smithfield concentrated animals in absurd densities. in that context , a farmer can't grow nearly enough feed on his own land and must import it (which pushes up the cost). smithfields earnings in 2007 was $12 billion. we must look at the scale of the costs they externalise: the pollution (the amount of faeces they produce is as much fecal waste as the entire human population of the states of california and texas combined), and also the illnesses caused by that pollution and the associated degradation of property values. without passing these and other burdens on to the public, smithfield would not be able to produce the cheap meat it does without going bankrupt. as with all factory farms, the illusion of their profitability and "efficiency" is maintained by the immense sweep of its plunders.

i do see what you are saying and you are very well informed (and i'm learning a lot of stuff ). i think it would be great if we had a global conversation - that included people from the factory farming industry, and included veterinarians and included environmentalists, included philosophers and included all of us - and we made it very open, very transparent. if we open the doors to these farms and we simply said "does what we get justify the means and what we lose? and i'm convinced that most people, if they had a direct line of access to this information, would say "no, what we are getting does not justify what we are losing".

i think change needs to come from the government so that we don't need to clamour to get our basic necessities. our present way of eating - the dollars we daily feed to the likes of smithfield and other factory farms - rewards the worst conceivable practices. we need to eat less meat. it's what everybody says. it's what every environmentalist now says. greenpeace doesn't even serve meat at its functions anymore, not for reasons of animal welfare but environment reasons. the problem is not that anyone needs to find new values, it's that we need a clear line of sight to the process that brings us our food. that's my tangent. i don't know if i answered or addressed your questions. i am extremely exhausted right now but you have some good points and i am going to watch that video now. sleeping is so overrated.

[Necrocetaceanbeastiality]

Oh my christ, it's a fucking novella.

In short, tl;dr

[wheresmysnare]

Blixa do you copy and paste from online journals or stuff? that must have taken ages, props for having the effort

[alvarezbassist17]

corey, i'm sorry this took ages but they were not kidding when they said honours year was HARD AS AN ERECT PENIS!

what i meant by sustainability is the coldly compelling rationale that the meat and dairy industries are the single biggest contributors to global warming worldwide. this, unlike many of the chemicals needed for production and transportation, such as gasoline, is quite unnecessary pollution. let's look at your country, in the united states, this is pollution produced so that americans can get cheap meat in large quantities – amounts consumed per person far above what americans consumed fifty or one-hundred years ago. so on both philosophical and realistic environmental counts (add to global warming the disastrous ecological consequences of trawling for sea life such as shrimp), there are strong, clear arguments that the current factory farming system is profoundly unsustainable. it takes between 6 and 26 calories of food input to get one calorie of meat from an animal. it's very inefficient, it's extremely wasteful and it's a very expensive way to make food.

vegetarianism is the only practical and philosophically satisfying means to influence the cruel, environmentally catastrophic industries of factory meat and dairy, and large-scale fishing. this is risky because only 3.2% of american adults are vegetarian, and even if a bigger percentage of americans are ambivalent about eating meat, for many it would be uncomfortable to be told that they need to make the step to completely stop eating meat. i know for omnivores reading this that the following statement is a provocation: eating meat is unethical and unsustainable. the excuses for eating factory produced meat are almost entirely disconnected from need. no one needs to eat meat. a vegetarian diet is often healthier, and – despite how cheap meat has become – still less expensive. and it isn't cruel. and it isn't contributing to global warming. and it isn't making us fat. but listen here, i'm not being biased entirely, i understand that a vegetarian diet is inconvenient. like other inconvenient environmental truths, the unsustainability of factory meat needs to be discussed and acted upon.

one of the big problems is that americans decided they wanted to eat more meat than any other culture in history and pay historically little for it. to achieve that dream they abandoned the ethical farmers dream farm and signed on with smithfield (the largest pork supplier in america) allowing (or causing) husbandry to leave the hands of farmers and become determined by corporations that positively strove (and continue to strive) to pass their costs on to the public. with consumers oblivious or forgetful or, worse, supportive, corporations like smithfield concentrated animals in absurd densities. in that context , a farmer can't grow nearly enough feed on his own land and must import it (which pushes up the cost). smithfields earnings in 2007 was $12 billion. we must look at the scale of the costs they externalise: the pollution (the amount of faeces they produce is as much fecal waste as the entire human population of the states of california and texas combined), and also the illnesses caused by that pollution and the associated degradation of property values. without passing these and other burdens on to the public, smithfield would not be able to produce the cheap meat it does without going bankrupt. as with all factory farms, the illusion of their profitability and "efficiency" is maintained by the immense sweep of its plunders.

i do see what you are saying and you are very well informed (and i'm learning a lot of stuff ). i think it would be great if we had a global conversation - that included people from the factory farming industry, and included veterinarians and included environmentalists, included philosophers and included all of us - and we made it very open, very transparent. if we open the doors to these farms and we simply said "does what we get justify the means and what we lose? and i'm convinced that most people, if they had a direct line of access to this information, would say "no, what we are getting does not justify what we are losing".

i think change needs to come from the government so that we don't need to clamour to get our basic necessities. our present way of eating - the dollars we daily feed to the likes of smithfield and other factory farms - rewards the worst conceivable practices. we need to eat less meat. it's what everybody says. it's what every environmentalist now says. greenpeace doesn't even serve meat at its functions anymore, not for reasons of animal welfare but environment reasons. the problem is not that anyone needs to find new values, it's that we need a clear line of sight to the process that brings us our food. that's my tangent. i don't know if i answered or addressed your questions. i am extremely exhausted right now but you have some good points and i am going to watch that video now. sleeping is so overrated.

I'll have more time to respond later, but I did want to make a few quick points.  

1. Man-made climate change/global warming is not real.  Let's get that straight from the get go.  It's complete politicized garbage passed as an excuse for science, and the policies that have been derived from it are going to have no effect but to impoverish our global society.  I could go on about this at length, and have, but I'm against using anything but the courts to adjudicate environmental and pollution disputes.  That does NOT mean I'm for pollution, but rather that I'm for people taking infringements on their property by pollution to the court rather than having some overarching bureau regulating society in the most politically correct manner.  You have to take history into account: during the Industrial Revolution, the leftists took away power from the US (and quite probably other country's) courts to adjudicate these disputes in the name of the "public good," which in that time meant that manufacturing was good for society and could infringe/pollute on people's property in pursuit of this public good.  So as of that time, and in our current state, with our current laws and socialized waste management, people and companies are not being held completely liable for what they pollute (mind you, I am NOT NOT NOT talking about carbon dioxide, I'm talking about particulate matter and real, genuine pollution and dumping) and are not paying the correct market costs to dispose of pollutants and garbage.  So it's that previous intervention that needs to be corrected, not more government regulation and intervention on top of it.

2.  I also think most of the things you are illustrating are bad, but you just have to look at how the situation came about.  Because of government policy for years on end, it is now less expensive/convenient for people to hit up the dollar menu at McDonald's than to go to the farmer's market.  This is completely incongruous because it makes more sense that it should be cheaper to buy locally rather than have everything shipped in.  This is because of central farm regulation, and farm subsidies, specifically ethanol subsidies.  Farmers get subsidies to produce corn for ethanol rather than producing other food.  This and other farm policies have caused the pricing system to go completely haywire, and now we are forced to rely on these corporations that have the ability to cut costs in the many ways you have described in order to eat food in the way we desire.  So essentially, if you really want to make these options you speak of sustainable and viable, you have to make them cheap, which they would be anyways if our global farm system wasn't so fucked up because of what I just described.