Some thoughts — the appeal to emotion is always going to be a turnoff here. Every time. I do get it, but if the people you were trying to convince cared about how fluffy and sad their food was, they would already be vegetarian.
Also, don’t think I won’t eat a human just because they’re sentient. Or an ostrich. Have you ever met an ostrich? They’re unapologetic dickheads. I’ll eat an ostrich’s babies on purpose. So mostly it qualifies as a guilt trip that goes nowhere, especially for those who hunt animals that need frequent culling like deer.
I think just trying to convince people to try recipes is more likely to hit, because who doesn’t want something new and inexpensive that they don’t have to feel fat about?
On that note, thank you for the reminder that I do really need to try tofu. I keep meaning to and forgetting, was not aware til last year how much protein it actually has (plants have a terrible rep), and I’m just gonna plan a dish at random and set a whole reminder for myself at this point. This is ridiculous. Would there be anything off the top of your head that’s your favorite?
Not everything that elicits emotion is an appeal to emotion. If I argue with a conservative and say that “anti-trans legislation leads to more trans suicides of the children you pretend to protect”, is that an appeal to emotion just because the conversative might get emotional?
An appeal to emotion is backed solely by the other persons emotion, nothing else. The very accurate description of what meat is backed by logic and the morality of most people, if we’re being honest.
Now, regarding effectiveness, I don’t know what’s better. All I know is that the people that aren’t activist always seem to know exactly how to do activism correctly. This applies to anti-racism, or feminism too. “I agree with your message, but your actions are too extreme/disruptive/emotional/etc.” Personally, I believe that the correct activism is ALL the activism: The loud, and the practical, and the friendly.
Veganism is not a diet, so just giving recipes without a philosophical backing will likely not create a lifelong lifestyle shift.
Regarding tofu I’d say think of it like plain chicken. It has zero real taste of it’s own, so just put it into stuff that’s tasty. Since it doesn’t have to be cooked for a specific time like chicken or lentils, I often just crumple a bit into whatever I’m making if it’s lacking “mass”. I would honestly recommend an actual, real life, paper cookbook over following youtube videos. They’re often more detailed, and better for beginners esp.
Not everything that elicits emotion is an appeal to emotion. If I argue with a conservative and say that “anti-trans legislation leads to more trans suicides of the children you pretend to protect”, is that an appeal to emotion just because the conversative might get emotional?
Yes.
Appeals to emotion are intended to cause the recipient of the information to experience feelings such as fear, pity, or joy, with the end goal of convincing the person that the statements being presented by the fallacious argument are true or false, respectively.
the statement “Look at the suffering children. We must do more for refugees.” is fallacious, because the suffering of the children and our emotional perception of the badness of suffering is not relevant to the conclusion.
If you cut out the part where they’re a terrible hypocrite if they don’t agree, that would be a logical argument instead of an emotional one. For the topic,
“You should switch because it costs less, is more environmentally sustainable, and carries much the same nutrition while being more advantageous to your health” is a logical argument. All of these are verifiable and the reader may decide on their own how persuasive the facts are.
“vegetarianism is cheap and healthy, you should switch because killing is wrong and you’re making poor, defenseless animals suffer and be repeatedly raped, and you’re a terrible person behaving immorally,” is a emotional argument, and laughably manipulative.
The problem is morals are subjective. You might think stomping bugs is mean. I might stomp all day. We can argue about bugs all day long and never get anywhere, because you’re trying to force me to feel something I don’t actually believe. I’m more likely to listen to data I can’t physically argue with.
Now, regarding effectiveness, I don’t know what’s better. All I know is that the people that aren’t activist always seem to know exactly how to do activism correctly. . . . Veganism is not a diet, so just giving recipes without a philosophical backing will likely not create a lifelong lifestyle shift.
The philosophy part seems to fall short a lot those reasons. Most meat-eaters are well aware, they just value something else more. Be that finances/accessibility (hunters), self-image (Red-blooded American Tradition, Grrr, Manly Caveman), or simplicity/dependability and the transient comfort of familiarity (me @ the horrors of life).
If you’re like me and giving more energy to struggling, your instinct might be to go, “Ooh, animals are suffering? Food is sad? Mfer I’m sad too, I can’t even afford laundry.”
With their values elsewhere, the likelihood any will go Full Plant forever is small at best. But if I continue eating eggs/steak and replace burgers and chicken with their just-as-good meatless counterparts, I still consider it a partial win vs a total loss. More open to the idea. Less money to the industry.
It has to be far and beyond exhausting to have the people you’re convincing correct your speech instead of ever focusing on the content. I grant you that.
I’m not pulling it out of my ass because I want The Activists to leave me alone, it’s my stance because years of perceived bitching never swayed me any more than it seems to persuade anyone else in this thread. Being nagged and told you’re a bad person isn’t going to make most people want to hear about all the ways they’re bad.
What got me to consider it was a former friend who never pushed the issue except to offer me some of her plate. It was fucking delicious. A bit expensive, still, since that’s just where fake meat is right now, but I’d buy it again.
Asking a vegetarian sub about an unidentified dish in a wedding spread didn’t net me answers, sadly, but for someone whose main concern is a tendency towards anemia, a user showing me tofu has slightly more (non-heme) iron than meat put it on my radar. Way more fun than the 40% chance of being dogpiled and called a murderer.
I will admit that “on my radar” turned out to be more “info my handicapped brain filed away to be accessed only if I ever saw it in a section I associate with ice cream,” so that will be rectified.
Regarding tofu I’d say think of it like plain chicken. It has zero real taste of it’s own, so just put it into stuff that’s tasty. Since it doesn’t have to be cooked for a specific time like chicken or lentils, I often just crumple a bit into whatever I’m making if it’s lacking “mass”.
I’ve heard that, not surprised. A bit sad, but easy to work around. If there’s no set cook time, is there…a disadvantage to cooking it? As in, it’s easily burned or something…? Maybe I’m asking too many things. The only cookbook I’ve ever owned was an heirloom from WWII, so I have some stuff to look up 😅
Completely agree with you, I was finding the comment lovely until that part and making mental notes, but that just felt like unnecessarily provocative.
A bit off topic, but I just want to say I really appreciate how your comment provided disagreement and criticism but in a friendly and polite tone that’s often lacking these days. Please continue to be this sort of person even if you get a bunch of down votes from people who just disagree.
For tofu, I’ve never cooked it myself, but am a fan of the fried tofu from my local Japanese restaurant. Maybe a simple pan-fried recipe is a good place to start?
I always try really hard to do that, and even more so now that I’ve left reddit. Now and then, I still find myself backspacing ingrained reddit snark or editing and re-editing things to make them more neutral and concise.
Sadly, the rambling is clinical, I still tend to get in my own way if I’m talking about something personal, and I’ve found that nothing. Absolutely nothing. Will piss people off faster than telling them to be nice to or even hear each other. I just want things to be better, and in all but the most dire cases, anger doesn’t do that.
For the recipe, I already have one saved to my phone :3
You’d be surprised how many people don’t make the connection that nonhumans aren’t just flesh robots. Also a basic syllogism:
Causing unnecessary suffering is wrong
nonhuman animals are sentient, the things we do to them cause them to suffer in huge numbers at an industrial scale
it’s unnecessary to eat them, we can thrive on a plant based diet (in fact, the environmental impact of animal ag means we’re making ourselves less likely to thrive in the future if we keep eating them)
therefore, eating them causes huge amounts of unnecessary suffering
Ok, but. I would still eat a dead human pretty readily if they didn’t taste like veal, so. Not to mention, my overly-literal ass can confirm from everything I know of every area of medicine and mechanics, we definitely are meat robots, yes. The distance as a consumer helps, but if I had to kill something myself, all it would take is getting hungry enough. An empty stomach knows no morality.
I think you’re underestimating how little emphasis most really place on this over making their own survival as simple as possible. Myself and others are not unaware that dying is painful or we’d likely be kept in a room somewhere, and acting otherwise is infantilzing.
Deriving enjoyment from being talked down to is so far from the norm it’s a distinct fetish, so it rarely accomplishes more than making the target dig in their heels. It’s by far the main reason that every time a vegetarian/vegan is at all vocal, they tend to get laughed out of the room.
Unless they’re six, people already know animals suffer and they eat them anyway. It’s just what they’ve always done, they already know it’s available and delicious, and it’s easier not to change anything more than they absolutely have to.
So make the change simple. The empathy route isn’t playing to strengths, here, the way just getting someone to try and hopefully integrate vegetarian meals would.
Horrendous? Yes. Also true. Mostly what people do is suck. If you want someone to do something for you, make it worth their while.
I have no moral problem eating a human or nonhuman if they’re already dead. Kinda weird but whatever. The issue comes when you are the one who took their life from them without consent.
We’re meat robots worth moral consideration, because we’re sentient. If a metal robot was sentient they’d be worth moral consideration as well, since they could experience what was done to them.
We’re a social species, i think it’s worth voicing dissent. Let them know that what they’ve been doing should change and that other people think they’re doing something terrible. Get them to reflect on it more deeply and see if they’re really ok with hurting others for the sake of convenience and taste and if they are, they should know that about themself rather than living in ignorance
I have no moral problem eating a human or nonhuman if they’re already dead. Kinda weird but whatever. The issue comes when you are the one who took their life from them without consent.
But…then wouldn’t the activism be directed solely at slaughterhouse workers? Who…obviously won’t listen, given they chose to work there, and the only one of them I ever knew still has a special hatred for chickens decades later?
I’m not the one killing anything. Only thing I’ve ever killed is bugs, and I stopped enjoying that when I hit ten. I still inarguably fund the ones who do. Those who hunt by themselves and do kill tend very much to be poor enough to make hunting a welcome option, which I wouldn’t take issue with until they have others available.
This ideally has to range beyond the killing part if it’s to reach literally anyone whose financial situation does not depend upon continuing to kill things.
As for other people telling me they think I’m terrible, I get that all the time already, whether I’ve actually done anything or not. If you’re on the internet, stuff like that becomes noise. I don’t like me either.
Sorry, i didn’t word that well. Funding the killing is still a big ethical issue, and trying to find different jobs for those people is an important thing to do, since there’s also a good chance they’d rather not do that if they had better options. For example, iirc ptsd rates are high among slaughterhouse workers
another major funder of animal agriculture is the US government, which is why i support the agricultural fairness alliance which lobbies against unethical farming and in favor of transitioning animal farmers to plant farming https://agriculturefairnessalliance.org/
trying to find different jobs for those people is an important thing to do, since there’s also a good chance they’d rather not do that if they had better options. For example, iirc ptsd rates are high among slaughterhouse workers.
Which will be difficult since they tend by nature to be the only available work far out in the middle of nowhere. Rural areas are highly resistant to urbanization and in my experience their council members are openly hostile even as their town is visibly breathing its last. I believe you’re also right about the PTSD, I’d forgotten about it.
Appreciate the link, I’m…you know. Overall dumb about these things. And also shocked to find the amount they’re asking for one single lobbyist — which I think would feel exorbitant to most — is lower midtier for their average salary. I don’t really know what I expected.
Yep, and this is where we start getting to the limits of my knowledge and the weeds of politics. Generally speaking i think as a species we have a lot of jobs that don’t need to exist or shouldn’t exist, and a lot of people who would be left in poverty without them (and many who already are in poverty simply because there are more people than profitable things to do). I think there has got to be some way of meeting everyone’s basic needs without a pretty binary choice of working a traditional job or living in poverty, but exactly what that looks like idk. I have some ideas, but they’re probably not worth getting into here/now
No problem, and i wouldn’t say you’re dumb about these things. More accepting of injustice than i’d like maybe, but not dumb. I couldn’t find those numbers on their site, how much is it?
Universal basic income, basically, yes. Which would ideally revolutionize a lot, so while I’m drooling over the idea in a perfect world, I’m also banking on something about it being horribly twisted before they ever consent to do something close to that. They’d have more money to put back into the economy than they are, but people scrambling in poverty don’t have the energy to take an active interest in the doings of the elite.
Their site lists:
For every 50 Champions contributing $200/month each, AFA will hire one more DC advocate!
So $120k per year. Googling the current salary of a DC lobbyist gets me anywhere from $56k - $210K. Should have just done that instead, huh. Getting into political arguments with strangers could have been a paid gig.
Some thoughts — the appeal to emotion is always going to be a turnoff here. Every time. I do get it, but if the people you were trying to convince cared about how fluffy and sad their food was, they would already be vegetarian.
Also, don’t think I won’t eat a human just because they’re sentient. Or an ostrich. Have you ever met an ostrich? They’re unapologetic dickheads. I’ll eat an ostrich’s babies on purpose. So mostly it qualifies as a guilt trip that goes nowhere, especially for those who hunt animals that need frequent culling like deer.
I think just trying to convince people to try recipes is more likely to hit, because who doesn’t want something new and inexpensive that they don’t have to feel fat about?
On that note, thank you for the reminder that I do really need to try tofu. I keep meaning to and forgetting, was not aware til last year how much protein it actually has (plants have a terrible rep), and I’m just gonna plan a dish at random and set a whole reminder for myself at this point. This is ridiculous. Would there be anything off the top of your head that’s your favorite?
I love that - suggesting good vegan/vegetarian recipes instead. Much smarter! You cant argue with a good meal :)
Not everything that elicits emotion is an appeal to emotion. If I argue with a conservative and say that “anti-trans legislation leads to more trans suicides of the children you pretend to protect”, is that an appeal to emotion just because the conversative might get emotional?
An appeal to emotion is backed solely by the other persons emotion, nothing else. The very accurate description of what meat is backed by logic and the morality of most people, if we’re being honest.
Now, regarding effectiveness, I don’t know what’s better. All I know is that the people that aren’t activist always seem to know exactly how to do activism correctly. This applies to anti-racism, or feminism too. “I agree with your message, but your actions are too extreme/disruptive/emotional/etc.” Personally, I believe that the correct activism is ALL the activism: The loud, and the practical, and the friendly.
Veganism is not a diet, so just giving recipes without a philosophical backing will likely not create a lifelong lifestyle shift.
Regarding tofu I’d say think of it like plain chicken. It has zero real taste of it’s own, so just put it into stuff that’s tasty. Since it doesn’t have to be cooked for a specific time like chicken or lentils, I often just crumple a bit into whatever I’m making if it’s lacking “mass”. I would honestly recommend an actual, real life, paper cookbook over following youtube videos. They’re often more detailed, and better for beginners esp.
Yes.
If you cut out the part where they’re a terrible hypocrite if they don’t agree, that would be a logical argument instead of an emotional one. For the topic,
“You should switch because it costs less, is more environmentally sustainable, and carries much the same nutrition while being more advantageous to your health” is a logical argument. All of these are verifiable and the reader may decide on their own how persuasive the facts are.
“vegetarianism is cheap and healthy, you should switch because killing is wrong and you’re making poor, defenseless animals suffer and be repeatedly raped, and you’re a terrible person behaving immorally,” is a emotional argument, and laughably manipulative.
The problem is morals are subjective. You might think stomping bugs is mean. I might stomp all day. We can argue about bugs all day long and never get anywhere, because you’re trying to force me to feel something I don’t actually believe. I’m more likely to listen to data I can’t physically argue with.
The philosophy part seems to fall short a lot those reasons. Most meat-eaters are well aware, they just value something else more. Be that finances/accessibility (hunters), self-image (Red-blooded American Tradition, Grrr, Manly Caveman), or simplicity/dependability and the transient comfort of familiarity (me @ the horrors of life).
If you’re like me and giving more energy to struggling, your instinct might be to go, “Ooh, animals are suffering? Food is sad? Mfer I’m sad too, I can’t even afford laundry.”
With their values elsewhere, the likelihood any will go Full Plant forever is small at best. But if I continue eating eggs/steak and replace burgers and chicken with their just-as-good meatless counterparts, I still consider it a partial win vs a total loss. More open to the idea. Less money to the industry.
It has to be far and beyond exhausting to have the people you’re convincing correct your speech instead of ever focusing on the content. I grant you that.
I’m not pulling it out of my ass because I want The Activists to leave me alone, it’s my stance because years of perceived bitching never swayed me any more than it seems to persuade anyone else in this thread. Being nagged and told you’re a bad person isn’t going to make most people want to hear about all the ways they’re bad.
What got me to consider it was a former friend who never pushed the issue except to offer me some of her plate. It was fucking delicious. A bit expensive, still, since that’s just where fake meat is right now, but I’d buy it again.
Asking a vegetarian sub about an unidentified dish in a wedding spread didn’t net me answers, sadly, but for someone whose main concern is a tendency towards anemia, a user showing me tofu has slightly more (non-heme) iron than meat put it on my radar. Way more fun than the 40% chance of being dogpiled and called a murderer.
I will admit that “on my radar” turned out to be more “info my handicapped brain filed away to be accessed only if I ever saw it in a section I associate with ice cream,” so that will be rectified.
I’ve heard that, not surprised. A bit sad, but easy to work around. If there’s no set cook time, is there…a disadvantage to cooking it? As in, it’s easily burned or something…? Maybe I’m asking too many things. The only cookbook I’ve ever owned was an heirloom from WWII, so I have some stuff to look up 😅
Completely agree with you, I was finding the comment lovely until that part and making mental notes, but that just felt like unnecessarily provocative.
A bit off topic, but I just want to say I really appreciate how your comment provided disagreement and criticism but in a friendly and polite tone that’s often lacking these days. Please continue to be this sort of person even if you get a bunch of down votes from people who just disagree.
For tofu, I’ve never cooked it myself, but am a fan of the fried tofu from my local Japanese restaurant. Maybe a simple pan-fried recipe is a good place to start?
I always try really hard to do that, and even more so now that I’ve left reddit. Now and then, I still find myself backspacing ingrained reddit snark or editing and re-editing things to make them more neutral and concise.
Sadly, the rambling is clinical, I still tend to get in my own way if I’m talking about something personal, and I’ve found that nothing. Absolutely nothing. Will piss people off faster than telling them to be nice to or even hear each other. I just want things to be better, and in all but the most dire cases, anger doesn’t do that.
For the recipe, I already have one saved to my phone :3
You’d be surprised how many people don’t make the connection that nonhumans aren’t just flesh robots. Also a basic syllogism:
Ok, but. I would still eat a dead human pretty readily if they didn’t taste like veal, so. Not to mention, my overly-literal ass can confirm from everything I know of every area of medicine and mechanics, we definitely are meat robots, yes. The distance as a consumer helps, but if I had to kill something myself, all it would take is getting hungry enough. An empty stomach knows no morality.
I think you’re underestimating how little emphasis most really place on this over making their own survival as simple as possible. Myself and others are not unaware that dying is painful or we’d likely be kept in a room somewhere, and acting otherwise is infantilzing.
Deriving enjoyment from being talked down to is so far from the norm it’s a distinct fetish, so it rarely accomplishes more than making the target dig in their heels. It’s by far the main reason that every time a vegetarian/vegan is at all vocal, they tend to get laughed out of the room.
Unless they’re six, people already know animals suffer and they eat them anyway. It’s just what they’ve always done, they already know it’s available and delicious, and it’s easier not to change anything more than they absolutely have to.
So make the change simple. The empathy route isn’t playing to strengths, here, the way just getting someone to try and hopefully integrate vegetarian meals would.
Horrendous? Yes. Also true. Mostly what people do is suck. If you want someone to do something for you, make it worth their while.
I have no moral problem eating a human or nonhuman if they’re already dead. Kinda weird but whatever. The issue comes when you are the one who took their life from them without consent.
We’re meat robots worth moral consideration, because we’re sentient. If a metal robot was sentient they’d be worth moral consideration as well, since they could experience what was done to them.
We’re a social species, i think it’s worth voicing dissent. Let them know that what they’ve been doing should change and that other people think they’re doing something terrible. Get them to reflect on it more deeply and see if they’re really ok with hurting others for the sake of convenience and taste and if they are, they should know that about themself rather than living in ignorance
But…then wouldn’t the activism be directed solely at slaughterhouse workers? Who…obviously won’t listen, given they chose to work there, and the only one of them I ever knew still has a special hatred for chickens decades later?
I’m not the one killing anything. Only thing I’ve ever killed is bugs, and I stopped enjoying that when I hit ten. I still inarguably fund the ones who do. Those who hunt by themselves and do kill tend very much to be poor enough to make hunting a welcome option, which I wouldn’t take issue with until they have others available.
This ideally has to range beyond the killing part if it’s to reach literally anyone whose financial situation does not depend upon continuing to kill things.
As for other people telling me they think I’m terrible, I get that all the time already, whether I’ve actually done anything or not. If you’re on the internet, stuff like that becomes noise. I don’t like me either.
Sorry, i didn’t word that well. Funding the killing is still a big ethical issue, and trying to find different jobs for those people is an important thing to do, since there’s also a good chance they’d rather not do that if they had better options. For example, iirc ptsd rates are high among slaughterhouse workers
another major funder of animal agriculture is the US government, which is why i support the agricultural fairness alliance which lobbies against unethical farming and in favor of transitioning animal farmers to plant farming https://agriculturefairnessalliance.org/
Which will be difficult since they tend by nature to be the only available work far out in the middle of nowhere. Rural areas are highly resistant to urbanization and in my experience their council members are openly hostile even as their town is visibly breathing its last. I believe you’re also right about the PTSD, I’d forgotten about it.
Appreciate the link, I’m…you know. Overall dumb about these things. And also shocked to find the amount they’re asking for one single lobbyist — which I think would feel exorbitant to most — is lower midtier for their average salary. I don’t really know what I expected.
Yep, and this is where we start getting to the limits of my knowledge and the weeds of politics. Generally speaking i think as a species we have a lot of jobs that don’t need to exist or shouldn’t exist, and a lot of people who would be left in poverty without them (and many who already are in poverty simply because there are more people than profitable things to do). I think there has got to be some way of meeting everyone’s basic needs without a pretty binary choice of working a traditional job or living in poverty, but exactly what that looks like idk. I have some ideas, but they’re probably not worth getting into here/now
No problem, and i wouldn’t say you’re dumb about these things. More accepting of injustice than i’d like maybe, but not dumb. I couldn’t find those numbers on their site, how much is it?
Universal basic income, basically, yes. Which would ideally revolutionize a lot, so while I’m drooling over the idea in a perfect world, I’m also banking on something about it being horribly twisted before they ever consent to do something close to that. They’d have more money to put back into the economy than they are, but people scrambling in poverty don’t have the energy to take an active interest in the doings of the elite.
Their site lists:
So $120k per year. Googling the current salary of a DC lobbyist gets me anywhere from $56k - $210K. Should have just done that instead, huh. Getting into political arguments with strangers could have been a paid gig.