From: geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Harpoon 'em if they can't take a joke
Keywords: bleeding-heart bunny huggers, water cannons
Date: 15 Oct 92 17:44:22 GMT
Followup-To: alt.peeves
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: purplehaze.corp.sun.com



In article <1992Oct09.075213.23250@sco.COM> charless@sco.COM (Charlie Stross)
writes:

>I do not believe in shying away from the nasty realities of meat
>eating.  This is not to say that I'm vegetarian; just that I
>don't like hypocrisy.  (I once went through a phase of only
>eating animals I was willing to kill with my own hands; after six
>months of sharing a house with a pair of militant vegans I was
>prepared to go all the way to cannibalism.)

You have my admiration; I never would've lasted through the first day
without committing mayhem.

------

>No they don't, but sacred cowburger it is -- and anyone who
>admits publicly that the emperor has no clothes and then
>goes and *EATS* one of the things must be some kind of monster.

As I've said before, I revel in the knowledge that the meat I eat probably
cringed in terror, lowing pitifully at its miserable fate, before being
hacked up and dismembered for my consumption.

------

>I've heard all the militant vegetarian propaganda.  I agree with
>it, but I'm strangely unmoved by it.  Yes, it's true.  Millions
>of animals are cruelly confined and mercilessly slaughtered every
>week; the resources they consume could feed the starving
>millions; eating their by-products is probably bad for you; it's
>an artefact of patriarchal society; by participating in it you
>are participating in an act of genocide directed at another
>species.  

Now what the bloody hell does the meat industry have to do with patriarchal
society?  That's stretching things a bit, don't you think?  It sounds like
somebody is going through all kinds of intellectual gymnastics, trying to 
cobble together a specious Unified Field Theory of political correctness.

As for animals being "cruelly confined, come on; if they never experience 
any other kind of existence, how bothered could they possibly be by whatever
condition they have to endure during their short, meaningless lives?  Besides,
they're only dumb animals, only a notch above plants in the greater scheme of
things; it's not like they might develop a cure fo cancer or write immortal 
literature, if they were only allowed to live.

I think guilt and angst would be better spent in worrying about the plight 
of our *own* species: famine in Somalia, bloodshed in what used to be 
Yugoslavia, that sort of thing.  Personally, the lower life forms are *way* 
down on my list of priorities.

------

>Nevertheless, I can do without the hypocritical cant that says
>that a burger or a nice steak has nothing to do with animals that
>moo and look at you with big brown eyes.  I can do without the
>shit-headed denial that insists that it's good to eat burgers but
>bad to strange small furry animals.  I can miss the idiocy that
>assigns rights to non-sentient organisms that are incapable of
>reciprocating (rights being a bilateral process -- part of a
>social contract).  I can also do without the dumb ``them and us''
>mentality which insists that one is either a militant bunny
>hugger or an ecocidal Part Of The Problem. As far as I'm concerned,
>the vegetarians have won the argument; the other side wimped
>out on a self-deluding hypocrisy trip.

Oh, come on Charlie; I'd have expected far better from you.  People
generally support the idea of modern sanitation, too, but that doesn't
mean that they should be expected to be interested in the details of
sewage treatment plant operation.  I see no contradiction in liking
the end product or result of a process while not caring to witness
the procedural details.  There's no hypocrisy there at all.

------

>Sod it, if we're going to make ourselves ill eating flesh, why 
>can't we at least revel in the depravity of it?

>-- Charlie (who hugs bunnies*) Stross

>[*] To death; then he skins and eats them

I knew I could count on you...



Geoff


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Geoff Miller                    + + + + + + + +        Sun Microsystems
geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM  + + + + + + + +     Menlo Park, California
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