Emerald

The fact of the matter is that these ideologies are dangerous in multiple ways to women. And they represent a real political and relationship threat to us. I know that I tend to feel quite uncomfortable around men who hold these types of ideologies. Where 10+ years ago, I wouldn't have been as aware of these issues. But the past 10 years have really sensitized me to these patterns. So, it stands to reason that it's probably a lot of women who feel have developed the same type of sensitivity. But it's not a matter of hatred but moreso of preservation of one's own sovereignty and well-being. You just can't have a good life with a man who operates off of Red Pill ideologies. Lots of women are aware of that, and will tend to just avoid guys that show signs of that.

I have toyed with the idea that certain societally harmful traits are being weeded out of the gene pool through all these Red Pill and Incel movements coming more prominently into the collective consciousness. And women who are and will be of child-bearing age are more aware of these patterns in men more than any other generation of women has ever been... just because of social media and being able to read everyone's private thoughts. And these manosphere movements and the anonymity of the internet have really amplified those socially degenerative voices that were more "only in his head" or "only talking with my buddies at the bar" voices 15+ years ago. But now it speaks through a megaphone because there's so much coalescence of movements around them... And about 10 years later, guys are struggling more with finding partners and the birth rate is declining. I'm sure the latter fact is for other reasons as well. But part of me suspects that women's increased awareness of the dysfunctional ways that a sizable minority of men operate under make contemporary women a lot more cautious than women of previous generations when selecting for a partner.

That's only because the consumption of dairy past infancy (and from another species) is only something that humans do. So, both Vegetarianism and the standard Omnivorous diet aren't found in nature. That said, it doesn't mean that human beings are able to consume these diets. Humanity is also part of nature. And our nature is different from the nature of other species. So, the notion of something "natural" being synonymous with "good for you" isn't scientifically sound. You actually have to look at meta-analyses that cross-reference many studies on how different diets tend to impact human beings to find out the optimal diet for human beings.

What if the overlords of society come up with something that you don't like personally? Are you still going to follow this state religion?

I'm not familiar with Simon Hill. But I originally went Vegan for the ethical reasons as it pertains to animals, and being better for the climate was a secondary boon. And I'm only recently focusing more on eating solely a whole food Vegan diet. Do you plan on going all the way Vegan one day?

What is it that motivates you to eat a more plant based diet?

@Something Funny @Scholar Methinks the ladies doth protest too much.

That's definitely important to question. But the majority of farmland isn't used to produce ethanol. I forget the exact statistics on it, but I think it's only like 10%. Though look that up because it's been a while since I looked at the breakdown. But depending on which region, anywhere between 60% and 80% is used to grow mono-crop grains to feed cows, pigs, and chickens in factory farms. So, that's how the vast majority of our agricultural land is being used.

I only take and have only ever taken a daily Muti-vitamin. The only thing that actually needs to be supplemented is b-12, and you don't even need to take that every day. And I've never been prescribed "doctor pills" because I'm Vegan. I don't have blood checks. I don't have health problems or hospital bills... and statistically I'm less likely to because I eat a Vegan diet. Vegan diets are associated with lower instances of all-cause mortality... especially heart attack and stroke compared to an omnivorous diets. That's because there's less saturated fat in the diet which leads to lower levels of LDL cholesterol. So, Veganism is a great way to avoid the #1 killer in wealthy nations. And higher consumption of plant foods and lower consumption of animal food is associated with health and longevity. Also, avocados aren't more expensive than meat, unless we're talking about bologna and hot dogs. And most people who eat meat, eat it with every meal. And I currently eat about 1800 calories per day and I'm always stuffed because there's a lot of fiber and protein in my diet. There's also a lot of variety because 95% of whole ingredients are Vegan friendly. And no... it isn't just rice and legumes. That would be boring. There's lots of different dishes that are Vegan or easily turned Vegan.

Here in the states, $37,000 per year as a couple with kids is quite difficult to live on. The average individual person's salary is around $50,000... and my husband and I made less than that combined prior to 2020 when my business took off. To give some context, we were in the lowest 20% of income earners when I went Vegan. And because of summer months being my off-cycle as a substitute teacher and summer being the slow months for his job as a server, we were always struggling through lean times in summer and fall where we were below the poverty line. And I am mostly advocating for Vegan diets for people who live in wealthy nations who are at liberty to have some degree of choice over what they eat.... which is probably 80%+ of people who live in the states. If someone's struggling to eat, then I don't recommend being selective. If I were in a situation where I was dealing with food scarcity, I would at least drop back to Vegetarianism. And if I were truly starving for multiple days on end, I would eat meat. The issue comes about when someone uses the "Veganism is expensive" argument when they themselves are in a position to save money on their groceries by going Vegan. At that point, it's just not an honest argument because it frames a diet with an average grocery cost as more expensive that a diet with a higher grocery cost.

First off, I've never been to a Whole Foods in my entire life. And I went Vegan when we were making less than $40,000 per year combined. I was making $12k per year as a substitute teacher and he was making around $25k per year as a waiter, and we were always scraping the bottom of the pot. But I was still able to be Vegan because most Vegan foods are cheaper than foods with meat and dairy. And I'd do all of the shopping at Walmart back then. And currently, I'm making a bit more money. But I still spend an average amount on groceries because I mostly eat rice, potatoes, beans, legumes, tofu, bananas, frozen veggies, and a few other fresh/frozen fruits and vegetables. So, a whole food Vegan diet is actually much cheaper than a whole food diet with meat, dairy, and eggs. If I were buying a bunch of meat instead of beans, our grocery bill would be much higher. That said, eating a healthy diet is more expensive than eating a junky diet. And a junk omnivorous diet is the cheapest diet you can do if you're getting cheap snack cakes, ramen noodles, cheap lunch meats, pudding cups, etc. There are plenty of accidentally Vegan foods that are quite cheap too like Oreos, potato chips, sugary drinks, etc. that fall into this category as well. So, processed omnivorous diet foods and processed accidentally Vegan foods are the cheapest foods. And I understand that it takes some extra funds to deliberately eat a healthy whole food diet, so that's where the there is an element of truth about there being privilege to the Vegan diet. It means you don't have to eat the cheapest and unhealthiest foods in the store. Processed Vegan foods that are deliberately Vegan are quite expensive, but most Vegans treat processed Vegan foods as an extra thing... not as the main thing that's being consumed. Also, I don't expect anyone to go Vegan who isn't getting consistent meals. If someone has to focus on just eating, then I understand. But if someone is in a wealthy nation and has access to enough funds to pick and choose what they eat, these are the people who have the power to go Vegan. And if someone's eating a more expensive diet because they're eating a bunch of steak and porkchops, they can save some money by going Vegan. So, I ascribe the responsibility to people in this position.

In the China study, the blue zones where people live the longest are places associated with the lowest levels of meat consumption.

Veganism is just Vegetarianism minus two ingredients (milk and eggs). They're about the same level of restriction, which is not restrictive at all. Vegetarians and Vegans can eat most things and there's plenty of close or better substitutes. And 95% of whole foods are Vegan friendly anyway. And I honestly prefer the Vegan dairy options compared to the regular dairy options with the exception of cheese, which is difficult to imitate with plant-based ingredients. Yet again, I've only tried a few brands of Vegan cheese. Maybe there are some great ones out there. But on the Vegan diet you can eat pretty much the same thing as in the omnivorous diet. Like if I wanted to go to the store and get ice cream or pizza, I could do that now. So, there's no sense of restriction. And the ice cream is genuinely better than dairy ice cream (as is the yogurt, oat milk, and the coffee creamer), and the pizza is proximal to non-Vegan pizza. I can even have meat that tastes and feels like meat, though I don't really enjoy Vegan or non-Vegan hamburgers or sausages. So, I don't eat them much unless they're the only Vegan option at a restaurant. There's even Vegan salmon and tuna sushi that I get every now and again, which is pretty good. That said, I've been trying to keep my diet as a whole food diet as much as possible unless I'm eating at a restaurant. And I am plenty satisfied with that. But going Vegan was really only giving up 4 foods that I really enjoy... salmon, eel, steak, and cheese. The rest either have adequate or better substitutes, or I never liked them much in first place.

It's borne out in many studies organized into a greater meta-analyses that meat consumption is associated with higher all-cause mortality and the less meat and the more plants in a diet, the more it's associated with lower instances of all-cause mortality because of specifically because of meat's impact on LDL cholesterol. Here's an example of an abstract of a meta-analysis that includes 9 studies... https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/179/3/282/103471?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false#no-access-message But there was also another meta-analysis that included thousands of studies that showed the same thing. I just couldn't find the article, but I have linked it on another Veganism-related thread. And the conclusion of the larger meta-analysis is that diets lower in meat are associated with lower levels of all-cause mortality.

That's just a fantasy. It's not a real solution. Plus, 60-80% of farmland is used to feed the meat the we eat. And those are the big mono-crops like corn and soy. So, animal agriculture in any form is going to decrease biodiversity because the only way to feed the volume of cows, pigs, and chickens humans eat every year, we need lots of mono-crop farmland. And it takes 16 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef. So, meat is a very inefficient food to produce.

Meat consumption is linked with an increased risk of all-cause mortality primarily because of the saturated fat consumption. And that's borne out in many studies and meta-analyses. That's why Vegans bring it up, because it's the #1 death bringer to humans in wealthy nations. The issues people bring up with the Vegan diet only happen if people aren't eating enough calories. And you don't find many Vegans dying because of "nutrient deficiencies" unless the person has an eating disorder. Those who eat a plant-based diet tend to live longer lives with fewer strokes and heart attacks compared to meat eaters.

Factory farms are not part of the circle of life. And if we all hunted our food and consumed the same level of meat that factory farming currently enables us to, every land mammal would be hunted to extinction in a very short time frame. Also, if someone literally has no other option but to eat meat, then I don't have a problem with it. I disagree with people eating animals for pleasure and convenience and habit... but not for ACTUAL survival. But most privileged modern folk are not in that position. And a whole food Vegan diet is cheaper than a whole food diet with meat, dairy, and eggs. So my perspective is that our greater levels of privilege and power behoove us to take on greater levels of responsibility. And the prevalence of the Vegan diet shows how far we've grown as a species in terms of infrastructure and technology.

Factory farms don't waste anything. They sell all sellable product because it's how they make money. They use every part of the animal. It's just a myth that they don't. And they're operating off of razor-thin profit margins and are subsidized by the government to stay in business because it's so difficult to run the business in a way where it turns a profit. But yes, harvesting animals is inherently savage. There isn't a nice way to do it. Even the Halal method is a slitting of the throat. That's as nice as it gets, and having your throat slit is a violent death. Don't believe me? Look at videos of cows and pigs being killed in the "humane" way. Also, the plant and rocks thing is a common defense for an omnivorous diet, but probably the silliest and most dishonest one because no one who says it actually believes it when the rubber meets the road. If someone offered you $1000 to stab a stalk of broccoli or to stab an animal, I guarantee that you'd choose to stab the broccoli (unless you're a psychopath and like stabbing animals for fun) and you wouldn't even feel bad for stabbing the broccoli. And you'd probably think the people who choose to stab the animal over the broccoli are psychopaths. So, I'm sure that you intuitively understand the difference between sentient and non-sentient life.... and living things with a nervous system that can feel pain and living things with no nervous system that can't feel pain.

@Buck Edwards I can see why that's distressing. People who care about animals who aren't Vegan have a lot of unconscious inner turmoil buried under lots of different beliefs that enable them to maintain the status quo without becoming viscerally aware of the contradiction between their actions and values. And when someone challenges a non-Vegan who has Vegan values but who's not yet in a mental space where they're ready to make a change, it brings to the surface a lot of really uncomfortable feelings that can be quite overwhelming. And that person can start to feel a lot of shame and like they're the bad guy. And it produces a tendency to go into defense mode and to try to find reassuring narratives that show why Veganism is wrong/short-sighted/impractical/bad/unhealthy/etc. and that the status quo is okay. But you're not a bad person for not being Vegan. It's just that you might be a bit out of integrity with your own values and the commenter you mentioned probably drew your attention to the typically unconscious feelings of internal contradiction of being a non-Vegan who cares about animals. And shaming tends to backfire because it hits people with this awareness before they're ready for it. So, it's not a good rhetorical tactic to shame people unless they're already teetering on the edge of Veganism... and even then, it's not very effective and can backfire. When I first went Vegan, I had to deal with a lot of these uncomfortable feelings because I had to face with the reality that I'd been living out of alignment with my values for 27 years. And the dietary change gave space for those intellectual contradictions and the emotions they hid from me to make themselves known without any intellectual defense or cognitive dissonance on my part. And for about a week or two after I went Vegan, I felt really emotionally terrible because I couldn't unsee what I'd seen in myself. I also watched Earthlings, which was God-awful. So, that brought things really front and center to me to see how out of alignment my actions had been, as I cannot even watch animals be slaughtered on a computer screen without feeling totally traumatized and upset at how the world is. But I don't agree with using any kind of insults or shaming to convince people to go Vegan because people have to be in alignment to make that kind of change, and no amount of shaming will change that. It will just prematurely make a person become aware of all those unpleasant feelings and they'll feel like the bad guy... and then feel the need to defend their identity of goodness, which is a fundamentally human thing to do. But going through the posts on this thread, there are more anti-Vegan judgments than anti-omnivore judgments because Veganism is the minority stance. Some of the insults that I saw were things like the "spiritual ego" and "Stage Green oafs" and "those morons" and "Typical Vegan. They should have their own children" and "makes them look like a cult" and "misanthropic". But these judgments don't really bother me because I understand why people are saying these things... which is the same reason I used to say things like this before I went Vegan. And I currently feel a sense of alignment with my actions in this area of life. I've thought deeply on this choice. So, no amount of Vegan shaming is going to make me feel bad and reconsider because I feel solid in my values. So, it might be uncomfortable but this dynamic may have brought to your awareness a shakiness in your own value system. If you felt solid, the shaming probably wouldn't bother you so much and would just be mildly annoying. That said, he shouldn't be doing that if he wants to be effective in his activism.

@Buck Edwards Have you ever personally had a Vegan get onto you about eating chicken? Or is it just the way this video made you feel? The thing is, nobody likes to feel like they're being called out on doing something unethical. And no one likes to question the ethics of their behavior, especially when it's one as ingrained as eating. So, Vegans feel very threatening to people for that reason, because I'd wager that over half of people already had Vegan values. They just don't live in integrity with those values. So, the presence of Vegans in the world makes non-Vegans with Vegan values feel very defensive about their eating habits ad it draws attention to the cognitive dissonance of behaviors not matching up with values. As a Vegan, one of the most uncomfortable dynamics is going out to eat with an animal-loving omnivore friend. Then, telling the waiter that I'm Vegan for the purposes of food modification, and then the friend going into explaining themselves to me like they're on trial as to why they still eat meat. Always makes me feel super uncomfortable because I feel like they feel I'm judging them. But I'm really not. I ate meat and dairy for 27 years of my life. Then, even though most Vegans are pretty non-judgmental, there's this stereotype about all Vegans being in your face about it because that's what the mere existence of Vegans makes people feel. And you can find the odd example on the internet of the judge Vegan, so it puts a face to that feeling. I heard a statistic recently that there was a study done on people to rate how negatively they viewed different groups of people. And Vegans were the ones viewed most negatively at 74% of people having negative associations. I think that's precisely because people who agree with Vegans deep down feel uncomfortable around people that are walking the talk.

The reason why we're oriented towards social connection is because it's a inextricable need and instinct... not an addiction. And loneliness comes up if we lack human-to-human connection in the same way that thirst comes up when we're thirsty and hunger comes up when we're hungry. There's never been any time in the entirety human history (up until the past 100 years) that we haven't relied on a community of people to survive. So, it's wired right into our physiology. And the logic behind it is this... a human being alone in the wild is a dead human. So, it's wired right into you to seek connection with other human beings. Your entire biology is involved in the matter because community has always been how we meet the vast majority of our physiological, safety, and connection needs. And that's the 3 bottom levels of Maslow's Hierarchy.

That's a very specific high pressure hypothetical situation that is super cinematic and unrealistic. In most cases, it's just interacting with someone that gives off that vibe that "There's something about this person that feels a bit red flaggy." And in those cases, I just stay away and/or create distance. And it could be someone who's genuinely nice. There are plenty of nice people that give off red-flag vibes that their life might cause some drama.

That's a bit of straw man about the "defund the police" sentiment. Though I also know that some lefties are too lost in the sauce of their ideology and don't believe that the police are necessary at all. The idea that I've heard most often in lefty corners of the internet with regard to "defund the police" is to divert some of the money from overly-bloated police budgets that are used towards greater levels of militarization (like some police forces have a tank and military grade gear and weapons)... and instead to divert that spending towards other types of interventionists that are a better fit than the police in some cases. So, instead of it being the police that comes out in every single instance of public disturbance... if it's something like someone who's got mental health issues or someone is reporting a sexual assault case after the danger has passed to send a different kind of intervention team. It happens too often that the police end up swatting flies with cannons because they're handling cases that their MO doesn't fit very well within. And so, "defund the police" for many lefties is about diverting funds away from militarization and putting more funds towards a more multifaceted approach to intervention. Now, I'm not saying that that's the way I think about reforming the criminal justice system because I have some different ideas. But if you're thinking that most lefties don't recognize that crime happens and needs to be dealt with, you are uninformed.

I've seen how the bottom half of mankind lives. I know a lot of people from my hometown who have a very low level of standards for their own behavior. It was all pretty normalized in my hometown to not think very much about the ethical implications of things. And criminality-wise, I've known people who have been in and out of jail for a variety of petty crimes to more serious crimes. I even know someone who's in jail for life because he shot a convenient store clerk... and I have a friend from high school who recently got caught a couple years ago making kiddie porn with his 4 year old daughter. To my perception, you'd have to be living under a rock to not encounter people doing very dark and evil things. Maybe some people are sheltered from this, but I really don't understand how. It's right out in the open. Back when I was 20, I was technically homeless for a few months. And I was busking in the pedestrian area to make money. And there were tons of people who felt very comfortable showing me their evil side because I was downtrodden and young. So, I am quite aware that human beings are capable of so much darkness. And most people do behave in evil and stupid ways. But in my medicine journeys, I sat once as God and myself at once... with thick book of transparent pages sitting on my lap. And I could understand the life of each person that came to my mind by looking at the top of the transparent pages. And I could see the patterns of ignorance and pain that mangled the pure goodness into neurosis, foolishness, and evil. And in other journeys, I have recognized very clearly the inherent goodness that sits underneath all negative actions. And from that state, no judgment was possible. And so, I had temporarily resolved my own stupidity and evil during those experiences because I came into a deeper alignment with truth and love. And any claim that "humanity is evil" will put us into state of consciousness that's antithetical to truth and love. And it will cause us to over-focus on the symptom as "just part of our nature" and we will make no effort to resolve the root. But it is only because we are stupid and evil that we make this mistake. Humanity hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of our potential for goodness that sits as the foundation of our nature.

That's true. We do need more immediate solutions in terms of policy, institutions, and economy to manage the symptoms of what we have now and to shift to better systems. My point to the OP was not to discount the impact of greater degrees of psychological and emotional awareness over time. But that's never been the way I've conceptualized of the story of Jesus. I've never heard it framed as him taking God with him in any context. Maybe there could be some correlation there. But I've tended to see him more as a divine scapegoat figure to serve as the infinite in a finite body. And we individually don't need to bear the burdens of the infinite because he as already played the role of the finite who bears the infinite.