From: charless@sco.COM (Charlie Stross)
Subject: Re: Harpoon 'em if they can't take a joke
Organization: SCO Technical Waffle and Blurb Department
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 07:52:13 GMT


In article <1992Oct7.230807.21313@netcom.com> rickg@netcom.com (Rick Gordon) writes:
>
>Ah, Peevetown: home of the Sacred Cowburger.

This is a peeve and a half.

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.)

Here is an experiment.  Go into your nearest staff canteen,
restaurant, or burger bar, and ask for a portion of ``dead cow''
or ``dead pig.'' Observe the reaction of the staff (typically
nausea, disgust and disbelief at your crass behaviour).  Do it
totally dead-pan and follow through on it.  From their reaction
you'd think you were asking for a basket o' turds in custard.
*WHY* ?  Don't they know that the delicious succulent burger
they're serving is actually a hunk of muscle tissue hacked from
the thigh of a dead cow and burnt out of recognition so as not to
offend the sensibility of the family diners?  Do they think
burgers grow on trees or something?

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.

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.  Well, colour me a Nazi but don't accuse me of
hypocrisy.  I'm too old to change into an ideologically sound
lentil-lover ...  being a vegetarian is problematical if you
_still_ don't like your greens.

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.

And this leads me to the most succinct expression of my real
peeve, insofar as it can be expressed in a single sentence:

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






-- 
Charlie Stross aka charless@scol.sco.com ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals.