Profound articles of interest

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Profound articles of interest

Post by Jeremy » 26 Aug 2011 05:28

I know there are some people on modified with some pretty interesting and diverse interests, so I thought it would be good if we had a topic where we could share articles we find on the internet that are especially interesting. I guess with a topic like this though, it would good if people could post things that you at least think people not especially interested in specific topic would still find interesting. So for example if I read an amazing description of a new defensive theory in touch football, I wouldn't post that here, but if I read something about touch football that is really an analogy for working hard at life, perhaps I would. It would also be good if people only post things they find "profound" or at least very interesting, rather than just spamming the topic with every slightly amusing thing you see on the internet, as some other topics I've created have somewhat become.

Anyway I hope I haven't made too many rules. I guess if things look dead, post whatever you want :)


Also if you post a little about the article, that would be great too, and of course you can post about other people's stuff too.

Since it's my topic, I'll go first 8)


http://www.redditmirror.cc/cache/websit ... 10801.html

This is an article by Nate Phelps, who is one of the sons of Fred Phelps. If you haven't heard of Fred Phelps, you may not even believe this story, but Fred Phelps runs the Westboro Baptist Church. For people who don't know, I'm a pretty active member of a few atheist organisations in Australia, and we're all familiar with WBC, although we mainly view them with humour, which might be a little unkind (to their victims). Basically they protest everywhere, but most famously at the funerals of people like soldiers killed in Iraq, based on the philosophy that "God hates fags" and the people have died as punishment for the US policy of not executing or imprisoning homosexuals. This is the reason why Poe's Law exists (that any parody on the internet of religious fundamentalists is indistinguishable from the real thing without enough smilies).

This article really struck a cord with me for two reasons. Firstly I felt like I understood Fred Phelps and his church a lot better, especially when you realise how obsessive he is, something I think footbaggers can probably all relate too. You can really see that this somebody who is probably quite intelligent, and could have made an important contribution to society, but somehow was infected with poor religious beliefs, and ended up being a blot on humanity.

Secondly I found Nate's courage and rationality really inspiring. I think he clearly obtained his father's strength of character, but not the mental illness. Stories like this give me hope that one day the absurdity that is religion will go away. Not in my lifetime perhaps, but irrational memes can't win forever.

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Post by Jeremy » 04 Sep 2011 18:57

http://www.slate.com/id/2303013/

Simply Evil: A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida.
By Christopher Hitchens

Here is a great article by my hero, Christopher Hitchens about 9/11 Al Qaida and the political responses to it. I think Hitchens more than anybody else has changed my opinions about this issue (mainly in his book "Hitch-22").

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Post by etphonehome » 05 Sep 2011 04:52

For the sake of discussion. I've thought about religious beliefs a lot and if the world would be a better place without them and I really feel like it would not be a better place.

Sure, it would rid all of the religious extremists of martyring for religion and fighting for religion, however, in the rest of the world I think we would be worse off. It gives the people that want to believe in something, something to believe in and it gives people who might not be such a good person, a reason to change and become someone "better". I feel like there are some people who live their lives with good intentions, and some people that need a reason to have them.

This is purely personal opinion btw, I don't care to have a huge debate on religion but to see other peoples views on this would be interesting.
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Post by Jeremy » 05 Sep 2011 17:02

It's an interesting debate, although I guess philosophical, since religion will obviously never go away.

I think of it really as a trade off and a transition. If we moved to a completely irreligious world, there would probably be a point during the transition where some people would be negatively effected. But then, if you look at largely irreligious but reasonable societies, you can't really see significant groups of people who appear to be "missing" religion. In fact there are good correlations between happiness, healthcare, education, democratic health and a whole range of other societial traits and a lack of religion.

I think the evidence really demonstrates different stable states. You can have a religious society, where it's therefore advantageous for many people to confirm to the common beliefs, and not being religious leads to oppression, depression etc. or you can have an irreligious society which is overall more healthy - but it's very difficult to move from one state to the next.

The other question is the speculation about whether people who are finding or doing good things through religion would do those things without religion - is religion the cause or the justification? I think when you're looking at this question, it's important to differentiate between people engaged in "big questions" and not engaged. Being religious demands that a person be engaged in philosophical questions about the meaning of life, finding purpose etc. but being not religious doesn't - so you end up with two types of non-religious people (or, infact, a cline between them). There are engaged non-religious, who have a set of beliefs and philosophies beyond narcissism, but there is a really large class of people who I call "apatheists" who not only don't care about religion, but don't really care about anything beyond their own lives. These are the very shallow materialists who dedicate their lives to wealth accumulation, or hedonism, and I think are perhaps the majority of our generation. I prefer religious philosophy to this philosophy.

I would like to think, although I guess I don't have much evidence, that people who are religious and doing good things would move to the engaged non-religious group and keep doing good things. There's a lot of good psychological evidence to suggest that striving for goals beyond your own wellbeing, and helping others leads to greater levels of happiness and contentedness than hedonistic goals (I use the term hedonism loosely here, to just mean activities of personal gain). I'm sure that the religious who do good would know this, and so continue positive actions after giving up their religion.

But the big issue is what we define as "good." I try to give at least 10% of my income to charities that tackle third world poverty, while many religious people give 10% of their income to their church. Both of us probably get the same sense of satisfaction (not really the right word, but that's another conversation), but a lot of the activities churches do aren't actually "good," unless you accept the premise that God actually exists (especially in the Pentacostal churches that are most likely to have tithing). Putting on rock concerts and camps for children in order to convert them to your religion would actually be immoral if it turned out that your religion wasn't true.

If engaged religious people become engaged non-religious people, hopefully the good work that they do will become better.

The other issue is the psychological good that religious people get from their religion. There's no doubt that religion offers comfort, stability and community to many people within religion, although the same can be said for any strong shared interest group (sporting clubs, footbag, WOW clans etc.) People who don't belong to some kind of community are definitely worse off (in general) than people who do, but the real question is whether the religious will move to find a new community, or will become isolated when they leave religion. Again, this is an issue only faced during a transition. Societies without much religion wouldn't face this issue because people already would have their alternatives to religion.

I think the other issue, which is to me more important, is the wider impact of religion. If you look at the main four "new atheist" books and read them carefully, the thing that all the critics miss is that 3 out of the 4 aren't really arguing against religion. Breaking The Spell, The End of Faith and The God Delusion are primarily arguing against unreasoned decision making. They're arguing that core problem of religion is that it accepts things as true without evidence, and this is really the root problem of most of the problems in the world - not religion, but bad reasoning. People often attack them for arguing against the extremes of religion, but that's not the case at all.

So for example;
The 9/11 suicide bombers believed that their actions were morally justified because of their religious belief. Not only that, but if they're religious beliefs are correct, then obviously their actions actually are morally justified. Now on what basis can we reject their religious beliefs? We can get in a long theological debate about interpretations of the Koran, which is making the same mistake that they make, or we can say; "what evidence is there that the Koran is true?" There is, of course no evidence, so the problem is that these people have come to believe something as true without good reason, and the same applies to all religion. If we could merely teach everybody effective critical thinking skills, not only would religion go away, but so would climate change denialism, partisan political dogmatism, alternative medicine scams, GMO denialism, and a host of other issues. I think Carl Sagan describes this problem better than anybody in the book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark.

Religion is really a symptom of a deeper social problem - accepting things as true without good reason. The only way that I, and the "new atheists" want religion to go away, is if it goes away because that deeper problem goes away. When you look at the nature of political debate in the US (and Australia), the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on useless medical "cures," the wars around the world, and for me most critically, the environmental crisis we're experiencing, and the flow on to food security etc. I have great confidence that the world would be a much better place if religion went away because we as a species learnt to think rationally, even with the benefits that religion offers some people.

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Post by Pasquar » 26 Dec 2011 09:37

Just perusing so full disclosure I have not yet read the article or other posts in depth, but I have more or less maintained the Marxist notion of religion; that it is the opiate of the masses. Though it can produce some good in the world and give people (for lack of a better phrase) "a reason to wake up in the morning", I cannot get over the notion that religion is mostly restrictive in nature and prevents people from acting on true injustices in the world. Once again, I know that this is not entirely the case across the board as there are countless religions and subsects all with their own unique worldview.

My main point I guess is that religion has historically been used as a justification for colonization of foreign lands and persons and has since served the role of keeping those people oppressed and not challenging the system as it stands. So much emphasis in the abrahamic religions is on the afterlife and the oppressed masses in Africa for example can go throughout their entire life basically accepting their shit position in the world because they basically view this life as a purgatory in a sense and that they will be rewarded in the next life.

If people abandon this notion and realize that this is our one and only life, IMO they will be drastically more prone to demand justice and challenge the systems that perpetually oppress them.
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Post by Jeremy » 28 Dec 2011 16:51

I really like the book by Clive Hamilton The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular world, although I have a few fundamental disagreements. The idea I like most from that book, is that "freedom" isn't just the right to able to do whatever you like, but having the ability to choose not to do things, and that it's this personal restrictiveness that is really key. Being compelled to smoke/buy fast food/watch TV is not "freedom." Choosing to not do things is a real expression of freedom.

Of course I concede that this may be unnecessarily redefining "freedom," but that's missing the point. So long as we live in a world where people are free to follow or leave religions as they choose (and we don't), I think the restritiveness of religion is, at least in some sense, a virtue, and despite being anti-religious, I try to live by "restrictive" moral codes, or at least vague moral notions :P

Edit; Although I largely agree with you, apart from the Marxist bit. I read (or watched) something interesting about that quote recently, which I will try to find now. Indeed I think I made the same point that you're making in my long post above yours that you are yet to read ;)

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Post by Jeremy » 05 Jan 2012 17:52

I can find the quote, but not the person who said (I think it was Richard Dawkins) :x

"Karl Marx said that religion "is the opium of the people". But many atheists forget (either deliberately or otherwise) that Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.... Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.""



Anyway, this is a little old (March 2011), but very interesting;

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/f ... _fbi/all/1


Basically a summary of the investigation into the anthrax mailings in the US in 2001, with the conclusion that we still can't be sure who did it, and that a number of experts think the person the FBI concluded did do it (who was both mentally unstable, and killed himself after years of investigation/harassment that was unable to prove him guilty) didn't have the ability or expertise to carry out the attacks.

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Post by Jeremy » 21 Jan 2012 02:41

I guess this my new blog :P

Anyway my city just got a mention in an unusual place; the Boston Globe :D

http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-15/t ... collection

Footbaggers are welcome to come here, and I'll take you to MONA, Garagistes and Pidgeon Hole. :) I thought people might be interested in this anyway. (I had the tripe tonight at Garagistes, it was amazing - I realise I may be the first person to describe tripe in such a fashion :P).

Edit; I realise this is not a particularly profound article, but it's cool for Hobart to get a mention in a Boston paper, nobody else is posting anything, and I know most of the people in the article :P

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Post by Outsider » 23 Jan 2012 10:47

Footbaggers are welcome to come here, and I'll take you to MONA, Garagistes and Pidgeon Hole.
Throw in some hiking and I'm sold. I've actually been daydreaming about taking that trip for a while, and I finally figured-out how to make it work for me (its such a long way to go that I had to figure-out how to take a long-enough break from work to make it worth the long travel-time) -- it was gonna happen this year, 2012, but now Worlds in Poland has actually grown into a two-week trip for me, so I cannot then also take a 2.5 week trip to Aus in the same year. 2013 is looking good though. What's the weather like in Tas in late November / early December?
"The time has come to convert the unbelievers..."

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Post by Jeremy » 23 Jan 2012 21:06

Excellent. Hiking can definitely be arranged :) Weather can be a little variable at Nov-Dec, since it's the end of spring, but it's probably the best time to come, with mainly mild temps - average about 20 degrees C I think. There is a big festival in Hobart just after Christmas, going in to January - The Taste of Tasmania, which has a lot of gourmet local food and a big street performing carnival attached too. I'm always happy to give footbaggers somewhere to stay and to show them around too. If enough notice is given, we could arrange some kind of camping trip to The Bay of Fires, or one of the other top tourist destinations too. Bay of Fires was named the "hottest" destination of 2009 by Lonely Planet, whatever that means :)

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Post by Jeremy » 09 Feb 2012 19:23

I wasn't really sure where to put this, but people might find it interesting;

It's talking about design for space capsule, especially inflatable balls (bags?) to keep the capsule upright after re-entry when it lands in water. Design looks familiar...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/ ... Science%29

I wonder if Flying Clipper will complain about copyright violation for this too?

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Post by BainbridgeShred » 18 Feb 2012 10:41

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Post by Jeremy » 18 Feb 2012 23:05

Are you posting that article because you agree?

It's full of errors, misrepresentations of facts, unexplained assertions and poorly reasoned arguments. I am a meat eater (at least, an omnivore), and I've spent years struggling with the dilemma of eating meat, and have decided that it's ok (depending on the circumstances), but I think the article you've posted is unconvincing at best.

Edit; reading over the author's CV reinforces the lack of any kind of scientific knowledge of the biology of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores, and how they differ. The vegetarian debate is frequently full of these kinds of arguments, where people take particular aspects of humanities obvious omnivorous nature to argue that we should or shouldn't eat meat, or confuse evolutionary consequences with directions with what we should do.

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Post by BainbridgeShred » 19 Feb 2012 09:53

Yes, but more just because I miss getting an easy rise out of you my old friend.
It's full of errors, misrepresentations of facts, unexplained assertions and poorly reasoned arguments
Care to point out a few?
I've spent years struggling with the dilemma of eating meat
What dilemma?
Edit; reading over the author's CV reinforces the lack of any kind of scientific knowledge of the biology of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores, and how they differ.
You're right that the woman doesn't have a science background, but it's quite silly and elitist of you to think that only someone with training in the sciences can contribute to a discussion on vegetarianism/veganism. You're a product of the age that says that only "experts" and technocrats should be allowed to comment on societal issues, which is just hogwash. Now, if Lierre Kieth had written an article about how the Lectins in Legumes are terrible for you or if she had gone into detail about how grains effect the digestive systems of ruminants without citing sources, then you'd have a point. But since she isn't getting into an heavy science, your point is moot and you just sound like your grasping at straws.

But in that particular article, she doesn't go into any detail whatsoever about biology or nutrition, except to say that ruminants aren't supposed to eat grain, which if you disagree with, makes you pretty thick. So I dunno why her lack of a scientific background would make anything in particular she said any less relevant. Did you read the article or just skim it and then go immideatly to her CV so you could point out for everyone that she doesn't have a Chem major and a Bio minor, and instead is just a radical feminist and environmentalist. Say what you will about the lady, she is definitely a true believer when it comes to issues on the radical left.
The vegetarian debate is frequently full of these kinds of arguments, where people take particular aspects of humanities obvious omnivorous nature to argue that we should or shouldn't eat meat, or confuse evolutionary consequences with directions with what we should do.
I couldn't agree more. You might like this talk given by an organic chemist. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpfs6iT2nDw . He takes aim at a lot of "Paleo", animal product heavy people, who tend to be just as annoying as vegans/vegetarians, and tend to be just as faulty in their scientific methods. Skip to 1:30 for when it gets good. The 4:30 mark is good too.

But again, Lierre Kieth doesn't go in to any heavy scientific stuff, so I would genuinely like to see what in Kieth's article is so full of "errors, misrepresentations of facts, and unexplained assertions."

Edit: Also, out of curiosity, I was wondering if you were familiar with Harley Johnstone aka DurianRider?
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Post by BainbridgeShred » 19 Feb 2012 10:20

This is more a collection of articles, but I think it makes me and Lierre Kieth's point better than either of us could.

http://naturalhygienesociety.org/diet-veganbaby.html

If Veganism is a potentially healthy alternative to omnivorism, why do I seem to hear a story every few months about some nutcases starving their babies on a strict Vegan diet? I'm not saying you specifically agree that Veganism is a potentially healthy lifestyle, clearly you've come around on that issue, but this is good food for thought.
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Post by Jeremy » 19 Feb 2012 23:30

Some of the errors from that article;
You can feed grain to animals, but it is not the diet for which they were designed.
This is an argument from evolution. The point of farming is generate meat, and grain feeding livestock creates that, regardless of the evolutionary history.
For most of human history, browsers and grazers haven’t been in competition with humans. They ate what we couldn’t eat—cellulose—and turned it into what we could—protein and fat.
She focuses on cellulose a lot. Only some herbivores rely on cellulose (ie. ruminants). If you break the meat we eat up like this; beef, lamb, pork, and chicken, only half eat large amounts of cellulose.
Grain will dramatically increase the growth rate of beef cattle (there’s a reason for the expression “cornfed”) and the milk production of dairy cows. It will also kill them. The delicate bacterial balance of a cow’s rumen will go acid and turn septic. Chickens get fatty liver disease if fed grain exclusively, and they don’t need any grain to survive. Sheep and goats, also ruminants, should really never touch the stuff.
Eating beef, chickens, sheep, and goats also kills them. I can't understand what the actual problem with grain fed animals she is arguing here is.
In fact, the disappearance of topsoil “rivals global warming as an environmental threat.”
I'd love to know who she's quoting here. The disappearance of topsoil is an expensive problem to fix, but can be fixed within a few years (if you have the money). It's clearly nothing like the problem of global warming, and it's been grossly overstated by some environmentalists for years. Google scholar brings up articles from 40 years ago predicting dire consequences, but the reality is that the problem is being managed around the world. In my state, the amount of arable land is going up, not down, thanks to some good interventions from scientists at my university.
It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else has to die.
And yet in some places around the world (such, again, as my state), former agricultural land that turned to essentially desert is being revegetated allowing for a return to farming, and an increase in wildlife. Restoration ecology, as well volcanic islands, and indeed the progress of life on the planet in geological time seems to completely contradict this philosophy. What evidence supports this assertion? Maybe I'm being unfair in taking this statement literally, but the article is full of this kind of washy language which is either wrong, or meaningless.
But one post marked a turning point. A vegan flushed out his idea to keep animals from being killed—not by humans, but by other animals. Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey. Killing is wrong and no animals should ever have to die, so the big cats and wild canines would go on one side, while the wildebeests and zebras would live on the other. He knew the carnivores would be okay because they didn’t need to be carnivores. That was a lie the meat industry told. He’d seen his dog eat grass: therefore, dogs could live on grass.

No one objected. In fact, others chimed in. My cat eats grass, too, one woman added, all enthusiasm. So does mine! someone else posted. Everyone agreed that fencing was the solution to animal death.
Sure, there are plenty of retarded people out there. I have seen many retarded people trying to make arguments why we should eat meat, and why we shouldn't. These kinds of anecdotes are pointless, but are clearly aimed at making her opponents look irrational. Do you think Peter Singer, Albert Einstein or Abraham Lincoln (all vegetarians) would agree with this argument? Picking the most ridiculous of views of a broad group of opponents is useless. It's the views that are most challenging to your position that are the ones that need to be addressed.
Lions and hyenas and humans don’t have a ruminant’s digestive system. Literally from our teeth to our rectums we are designed for meat. We have no mechanism to digest cellulose.
Lions and hyenas have completely different guts to us, and completely different diets. Lumping us with them is misleading at best. Not only that, but there are huge studies that show that humans that are vegetarians do not suffer any significant detriment to health. In fact if you grossly lump humans as meat eaters and vegetarians, studies continuously show that vegetarians live longer and are healthier. This is misleading because if you split the meat eaters up into those that eat balanced diets and get regular exercise and those who don't, the healthy meat eaters live longer than the same grouping of vegetarians (essentially eating a small amount of meat in a balanced diet, and getting plenty of exercise, is the healthiest lifestyle a person can have).

I also note that analysis of both the diets of our closest relatives, and of hunter gatherer societies demonstrates clearly that for most of our evolution meat has not been a major part of our diet, especially red meat. Try eating raw meat for a week or two and see what happens. Clearly we ate very little meat until the invention of fire, which is very recent. In fact you have to go back 85 million years to find an ancestor we share with a genuine red meat eating carnivore. We are not 'designed' to eat meat, we evolved eating a diet that mainly consisted of fruit and invertebrates (insects, worms etc.), with the occasional meat. This doesn't give us a reason to eat, or not eat meat. It's false to say that evolution suggests we are 'supposed' to do anything. Our biology tells us that we can eat meat, that we shouldn't eat too much, and that we don't have to. That's all.
The graveyard won’t end there. Without grazers to eat the grass, the land will eventually turn to desert.
You could consider Australia a natural experiment on this. All our megafauna are extinct, and the people that once controlled grasses through fire are ecologically functionally extinct. Has the landscape changed to desert? Not at all, rather, we have much woodier, thicker vegetation, less frequent (but more intense) fires, and a changed biology. Tim Flannery wrote a book on this subject a couple of decades ago (The Future Eaters), and my honours supervisor studies it, including in Africa.
But without ruminants, the plant matter will pile up, reducing growth, and begin killing the plants. The bare earth is now exposed to wind, sun, and rain, the minerals leech away, and the soil structure is destroyed. In our attempt to save animals, we’ve killed everything.
False, as I've outlined. In fact large areas of the Serengeti have had the amount of browsers and grazers removed, or functionally removed and yet continue to have grasses and vegetation. Having a layer of plant matter doesn't reduce growth, or kill plants. In fact many rainforests, the most productive forests in the world, exist with poor soils but thick layers of "humus" - the term for soil created out of piled up plant matter. Forests in my state have the tallest flowering plants in the world, growing up to 100m tall, and rely far more on piled up plant matter than soil nutrition (which is very poor) to exist. Studies have shown that the only thing preventing rainforest from existing on any of the poor soils that we have is water logging and fire regimes.
On the ruminant side of the fence, the wildebeests and friends will reproduce as effectively as ever. But without the check of predators, there will quickly be more grazers than grass. The animals will outstrip their food source, eat the plants down to the ground, and then starve to death, leaving behind a seriously degraded landscape.
Probably false. This is a typical "bottom up" ecological approach, but most ecosystems rely on both bottom up, and top down mechanisms, and complex interactions. This question has been studied by an ecologist at my university, who used to work in Africa, and many African herbivore populations do not correlate with predator numbers. Hardly any animals are capable of reducing their carrying capacity in the manner described here, and this is especially true for seasonal animals, which have their population massively culled by food shortages and dry seasons, regardless of predators. Most animals live at levels relating to the carrying capacity of their regular worst season, rather than their highest, and can't breed fast enough to ever exist in populations capable of destroying themselves (K species). Other animals exist on boom/bust cycles, massively reproduce in good years, and then mostly die, regardless of predators (r species).
That was my last visit to the vegan message boards. I realized then that people so deeply ignorant of the nature of life, with its mineral cycle and carbon trade, its balance points around an ancient circle of producers, consumers, and degraders, weren’t going to be able to guide me or, indeed, make any useful decisions about sustainable human culture.
Ironic.

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Post by BainbridgeShred » 20 Feb 2012 09:59

This is an argument from evolution. The point of farming is generate meat, and grain feeding livestock creates that, regardless of the evolutionary history.
I'm not following you. You're right in saying that the hypothesis "ruminants didn't evolve eating grain and thus they shouldn't be eating grain at all" is on faulty scientific grounds, but luckily it has been tested again and again to be true.

The point of farming is to generate meat? Is that a typo? The point of farming is the generate crops. The point of ranching and silvopasture is to generate meat.
She focuses on cellulose a lot. Only some herbivores rely on cellulose (ie. ruminants). If you break the meat we eat up like this; beef, lamb, pork, and chicken, only half eat large amounts of cellulose.
You're right, but it doesn't take away from her larger point that we haven't been in evolutionary competition with any of the animals you listed above.
Eating beef, chickens, sheep, and goats also kills them. I can't understand what the actual problem with grain fed animals she is arguing here is.
Well, she is a radical environmentalist and animal rights activist, so I imagine her problem with grain feeding ruminants is the same problem I'd have if my little brother was living off of Burger King. It leaves the cow (For example) in terrible physiological shape, and if you really love cows, I guess you'd have a problem with that. Her bigger problem more is the fact that we treat cows as big piggy banks, that we just try to get as fat and stuffed full of meat as possible in order to make a profit off of them, instead of treating them like the sentient beings they are and letting them graze in a nice open healthy field.
The disappearance of topsoil is an expensive problem to fix, but can be fixed within a few years (if you have the money). It's clearly nothing like the problem of global warming, and it's been grossly overstated by some environmentalists for years.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know whether or not top soil erosion is as big a problem as global warming is. I think the problem with top soil erosion is the fact that we might reach a tipping point where yes, we still have plenty of top soil around the world, but not quite enough to feed all 7 billion people. The ripple effect off of that could be tremendous.
And yet in some places around the world (such, again, as my state), former agricultural land that turned to essentially desert is being revegetated allowing for a return to farming, and an increase in wildlife. Restoration ecology, as well volcanic islands, and indeed the progress of life on the planet in geological time seems to completely contradict this philosophy. What evidence supports this assertion? Maybe I'm being unfair in taking this statement literally, but the article is full of this kind of washy language which is either wrong, or meaningless.
Uh, no, you're not taking her literally enough. You can talk about restoration ecology and sustainable agriculture and how great they are all you want. That doesn't change the fact that the VAST majority of the worlds food comes from clear cut, monocrop agriculture. Until the VAST majority of the world is using sustainable practices, you can point to all the great things people are doing all you want but it's still the exception to the rule. And again, even if you are growing food sustainably, it doesn't mean you aren't killing something when you exploit a plant for its produce.

You might be interested in this video of some Brit's reforesting a patch of desert in Jordan. Again though, as warm and fuzzy as it might make you feel inside, it is the exception and not the rule. You have to remember, this book is addressed to the vegetarian community at large. This isn't the woman's Ph.D she's defending in front of a board of hard scientists. As any good author does, she speaks to her audience and that occasionally involves her dumbing down the message. It's the same thing as when Paleo people say "Humans evolved over millions of years eating meat, fruit and vegetables, but not grains and legumes, and thus we should eat the former and not the latter". From a scientific perspective, that argument will get you laughed out of the room, but from a laymens perspective, the point hits home and indeed is quite valid.

Regardless though, not everyone lives in England or Australia, where their is a huge scientific community capable of doing restoration ecology. I suppose you could send out proselytizing missionary groups of western ecologists to go around the world to show people techniques such as these, but I could only imagine someone like you, Jeremy, arrogantly going to Southeast Asia and telling farmers who have been tilling the same patch of land for generations how to grow their food. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Not everyone is susceptible to your amazing intellect after all.

Here is the video of them greening the Jordan desert. You should check it out you'd like it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpq6s34Q67Q
These kinds of anecdotes are pointless, but are clearly aimed at making her opponents look irrational. Do you think Peter Singer, Albert Einstein or Abraham Lincoln (all vegetarians) would agree with this argument?
Hahaha this cracked me up dude. You bash anecdotal evidence, and then in the next line ask me without sarcasm what "Abe Lincoln, Einstein, and Peter Singer" would thing about an issue. Do you knot recognize the implicit irony in this? You're right though that anecdotal evidence is the worst kind of evidence to have, but simply listing off a bunch of notable historical figures who agree with you is a really sophomoric way of trying to make your point. Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian? Did you know Pol Pot was a big proponent of sustainable agriculture? I think that means all vegetarians are evil and sustainable agriculture is just the NWO's way of making us all their automatons.

I made the last one up just to show how stupid your argument is.
Lions and hyenas have completely different guts to us, and completely different diets. Lumping us with them is misleading at best
You're right, but it is not misleading to say that for the AVERAGE human being on this planet, meat is a much more easily digestible calorie source when compared 1 to 1 with any grain or legume.
Not only that, but there are huge studies that show that humans that are vegetarians do not suffer any significant detriment to health. In fact if you grossly lump humans as meat eaters and vegetarians, studies continuously show that vegetarians live longer and are healthier. This is misleading because if you split the meat eaters up into those that eat balanced diets and get regular exercise and those who don't, the healthy meat eaters live longer than the same grouping of vegetarians (essentially eating a small amount of meat in a balanced diet, and getting plenty of exercise, is the healthiest lifestyle a person can have).
Well yes, as you said your own point is very misleading. Comparing vegetarians/vegans (Who tend to be very health conscious, if also very wrong) to your standard American Joe who eats a steak or a burger a few times a week along with a backs of Cool Ranch Dorito's isn't going to get you any reliable results. People who simply can't digest meat excluded, their are no vegetarians/vegans in the world who wouldn't benefit from eating responsibly grown meat 1-2 times a week. That is a very broad statement, but I'm going to stick to it and I assume you will agree with me based on the fact that you too consume meat occasionally now?
I also note that analysis of both the diets of our closest relatives, and of hunter gatherer societies demonstrates clearly that for most of our evolution meat has not been a major part of our diet, especially red meat. Try eating raw meat for a week or two and see what happens. Clearly we ate very little meat until the invention of fire, which is very recent.
Absolutely untrue. You're right in the idea that we weren't hunting down herds of Mammoth's with Atlatl's early in our evolutionary history, but that doesn't mean we weren't eating meat. Next time you're around a bird or a lizard or a frog or something of the like, notice how little attention they often pay to you, and how easy it would be to nail one with a rock. Indeed as Jared Diamond points out, this is the way many modern hunter-gather societies operate today. They talk a big game about going out and bagging big game, but it's usually very small game and insects and the like as you pointed out (I consider insects meat personally, though I'm not sure that's taxonomically corect or whatever).

Also, fire is not at all a recent invention, and certainly predates modern Homo Sapiens by AT LEAST 200,000 years, which is longer than we've even been on the planet. Please dude, if you're going to argue this shit with me you need to go take a evolutionary anthropology class or something. This is basic shit.

You're also wrong to think that we didn't eat meat until the invention of fire. It's pretty well accepted today that what allowed humans brains to grow to the size they are today was the scavenging of meat on the African Savannah, specifically cracking the bones of prey animals with crude tools, and sucking the bone marrow out. Bone marrow is EXTREMELY nutritious, and their would have been a ton of it available thanks to the fact that a lion can't pick up a big stone to crack a Gazelle's femur open to get to the good stuff, whereas a human or proto-human could. This video, though anecdotal, shows just how badass of scavengers humans are when they chase a pride of lions away from their kill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNeNTMmltyc

A human's brains accounts for about 2% of body weight, but receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization, aka a HUGE part of our metabolism. The question that I've already answered though is, how did we get enough nutrients to evolve such a massive and energy expensive brain when we were still basically just Apes running around the African Savannah with no knowledge of fire and no complex tools. The answer, as I've already given, is that we were great scavengers, and used our crude tools to access an energy source that was available only to us. This gave us the nutrient surplus required to continue making further use of more complex tools, and the ball gets rolling from their.

So your assertion that animal products weren't an early part of the human diet is completely false. It's true that we probably weren't eating a lot of large game, but that doesn't matter when you consider the fact that we had all the bone marrow and small game we could have wanted... Tropical fruits alone wouldn't have given humans of 150,000-200,000 years ago enough of a nutrient surplus to become what we are today. You need to go back and study your biological anthropology, because this is really 101 type shit.

As far as eating red meat every night for a week or two, I can say that over the summer I BBQ almost every night for a few months straight, and even after factoring in the amount of beer I drink, I still wake up feeling awesome. Sometimes I grill burgers for breakfest and I can honestly say that I feel super alert and energized for the rest of the day. Granted, I tend to eat responsibly raised, grass-fed meat, but that's what our ancestors would have been eating anyways. Add in the fact that our ancestors were eating the leanest, healthiest animals possible, and it makes sense that our later ancestors (Especially in cold Europe) would've been eating red meat for almost every meal. So yeah, you're wrong.
In fact you have to go back 85 million years to find an ancestor we share with a genuine red meat eating carnivore. We are not 'designed' to eat meat, we evolved eating a diet that mainly consisted of fruit and invertebrates (insects, worms etc.), with the occasional meat. This doesn't give us a reason to eat, or not eat meat. It's false to say that evolution suggests we are 'supposed' to do anything.
I'm glad you put "designed" in scare quotes and clarified it, because this is the dumbest shit I've read in a long time. Besides, Jane Goodall proved that our closest primate relatives (Chimps) eat meat any chance they get, and relish the opportunity to.

But anyways, ya you're right to say that it's false to say that "Evolution suggest we are supposed to do anything". To bring it back to the bone marrow, when proto-humans first started eating that stuff, it was probably a totally novel food source for us, which allowed us to become what we are today. Just because we hadn't evolved eating it doesn't mean that we weren't adapted to consume it. Similarly with grain and legumes, just because we didn't evolve eating that stuff, doesn't mean it's all bad for you. Empirical research however, shows that much of it is quite bad for you.
Our biology tells us that we can eat meat, that we shouldn't eat too much, and that we don't have to. That's all.
Again, I'll refer you to the article I posted about vegan families killing their young infants by forcing them onto a vegan diet. Sure their are a lot of variables present in each individual case, but when it's a clearly demonstrated pattern of babies dying on a vegan diet, that is pretty good circumstantial evidence that we need meat and are healthiest when we have it. Again, if you think of eating meat as a "dilemma", then why do you eat meat at all? Are you just not strong willed enough to resist, or do you admit the nutritional necessity of it?
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Post by C-Fan » 21 Feb 2012 11:38

I haven't followed this argument particularly closely, but this one point by Dan stood out as particularly weak:
BainbridgeShred wrote: I'll refer you to the article I posted about vegan families killing their young infants by forcing them onto a vegan diet. Sure their are a lot of variables present in each individual case, but when it's a clearly demonstrated pattern of babies dying on a vegan diet, that is pretty good circumstantial evidence that we need meat and are healthiest when we have it.
From my brief skimming of this thread, I think Jeremy's point is this:
Our biology tells us that we can eat meat, that we shouldn't eat too much, and that we don't have to. That's all.
Assuming that's his point, then pointing to a story about babies dying on a vegan diet isn't "pretty good circumstantial evidence" for anything. Two main reasons why are:

1. Vegan is not the same as vegetarian. If those babies would have survived on a vegetarian diet, Jeremy's point would be valid (i.e., humans do not need meat to survive). While veganism is one diet that excludes meat, it is an extreme subset. Fruitatarianism is another extreme subset. If babies who are only fed fruit also die, does that prove that humans need meat? Not if vegetarian babies survive on a meat-free diet. Is a nuts-only diet meat free? Yes. If babies die on a nuts-only diet, does that provide "pretty good circumstantial evidence that we need meat?" Clearly no.

2. If babies on vegan diets die, I'd take that as evidence that mammals need milk, not meat. There are plenty of vegetarian mammals that feed their babies milk. Does that mean they "need" meat? No. It doesn't even mean they eat meat.

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Post by BainbridgeShred » 21 Feb 2012 15:27

I think your points are valid Ken. I think some of your problem has to do with my poor semantics though, which I am guilty of.

Do humans need meat to survive? Absolutely not. That's demonstrated every day by the millions of people who survive on nothing but rice. However, the effects of surviving on nothing but rice or grain is demonstrated by the scores of African children you see with afflicted with Kwashiorkor, characterized by the bloating of the belly that you see every time those commercials come on asking you to sponsor a child. Kwashiorkor is simply a fancy word for a long-term protein deficiency.

So when I say humans "need" meat, I'm definitely not being as clear as I need to be. I should say that the vast majority of humans need to consume meat to be at their athletic and physiological peaks. If you simply want to "survive", then certainly you can live off black beans and spinach, and indeed for much of the world that'd be a pretty luxurious diet. But most people do best on a diet that contains plenty of high quality meat.

1. Vegan is not the same as vegetarian. If those babies would have survived on a vegetarian diet, Jeremy's point would be valid (i.e., humans do not need meat to survive).
Indeed again, if we're talking about mere survivability, then both vegans and vegetarians are perfectly capable of surviving off their respective diets. Some can even do it for a long period of time without suffering very many consequences. However, for the vast majority of human beings, having meat in your diet is a big net benefit.
2. If babies on vegan diets die, I'd take that as evidence that mammals need milk, not meat. There are plenty of vegetarian mammals that feed their babies milk. Does that mean they "need" meat? No. It doesn't even mean they eat meat.
All of the vegan families whose children died were also breast feeding them. The problems started when they weened the babies and continued feeding them a vegan diet. I figured people would make this assumption on their own. Even most Vegan's aren't crazy enough to deny their child breast milk.

Anyways, you're right Ken in that I should be more clear in how I phrase things, even if I do think you're being a bit nit-picky. Sometimes I word things in a simple fashion expecting people to understand the more esoteric meaning behind what I'm saying. From now on I will try to be more accurate with my wording. Obviously no human needs meat to survive, at least long enough to pass on their genes which is all that matters in terms of evolutionary selection. When most Vegans/Vegetarians start to experience problems is when they hit the 30 year mark or so, and their bodies start revolting against them.

Here's my main point though: Humans became what we are in terms of cognitive ability and physical ability thanks to our early ancestors ability to use tools to access bone marrow and hunt small game. Our evolution continued through our later ancestors ability to use more complex tools to kill massive amounts of large game. Their simply would not have been enough fruits and vegetables around (Even in a tropical environment such as parts of paleolithic Africa) for our metabolism's to be able to develop and support such an energy intensive organ as the brain without access to the nutritional powerhouse that is animal flesh/marrow/organs/blood/milk/eggs. Now, this is not proof that meat is good for you, but thankfully plenty of studies support the claim that it is (Fallacious "China Study" notwithstanding, but that's another thread topic).
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Post by Jeremy » 21 Feb 2012 19:26

Ken's right in that Dan missed the point, on almost everything he wrote. I don't think it's nit-picky, but rather I made completely different points to what you thought I was making. I'll cover a few examples, but this is tiresome.
You're right in saying that the hypothesis "ruminants didn't evolve eating grain and thus they shouldn't be eating grain at all" is on faulty scientific grounds, but luckily it has been tested again and again to be true.
Rubbish. Most of the meat you eat is fed on grains, and the animal puts on an amount of weight that makes it the most economical manner for carrying out this kind of farming. Feeding ruminants grains produces large quantities of meat that is perfectly healthy to eat (in reasonable portions), which is the point of farming the animals.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know whether or not top soil erosion is as big a problem as global warming is. I think the problem with top soil erosion is the fact that we might reach a tipping point where yes, we still have plenty of top soil around the world, but not quite enough to feed all 7 billion people. The ripple effect off of that could be tremendous.
Rubbish. You should have stopped at "I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know." There is no "tipping point" which you talk about. Loss of top soil is an addressable issue around the world. We currently have far more than enough top soil than we need for feeding 7 billion people, if we choose to get rid of the forests across Asia, Australia, and South America. I suggest you read the scientific literature on this topic, there are a number of good text books on soil science that I'd be happy to recommend you if you want to stop posting ignorant and false information and want to actually learn about how soil forms, why it goes, and what can be done to change this.
I suppose you could send out proselytizing missionary groups of western ecologists to go around the world to show people techniques such as these, but I could only imagine someone like you, Jeremy, arrogantly going to Southeast Asia and telling farmers who have been tilling the same patch of land for generations how to grow their food. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Not everyone is susceptible to your amazing intellect after all.
Ah, the noble farmer logical fallacy. You'll find that the scientific agricultural revolution has already hit South East Asia, especially in growing rice, and in some places yields have more than doubled, despite the thousands of years of previous history carried out by people who had no clue what the internal physiology of plants was, and could only improve things through trial and error. It turns out knowing why and how plants grow actually helps to grow plants.
Hahaha this cracked me up dude. You bash anecdotal evidence, and then in the next line ask me without sarcasm what "Abe Lincoln, Einstein, and Peter Singer" would thing about an issue. Do you knot recognize the implicit irony in this? You're right though that anecdotal evidence is the worst kind of evidence to have, but simply listing off a bunch of notable historical figures who agree with you is a really sophomoric way of trying to make your point. Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian? Did you know Pol Pot was a big proponent of sustainable agriculture? I think that means all vegetarians are evil and sustainable agriculture is just the NWO's way of making us all their automatons.
This is probably the stupidest thing you wrote. If you read the full quote, rather than what you posted, I clearly make the point that the philosophies behind vegetarianism are very broad, and focusing on *any* particular group doesn't lead to a good response to the philosophy. I used those three people to demonstrate the logical fallacy of anecdotal evidence (by using the same methods to produce a completely alternative conclusion), and clearly was not drawing a conclusion about the value of vegetarianism based on those people.

I also note, and I think this is important, that the comments about fencing African animals that she's talking about are pretty clearly joke comments. Perhaps that is why she didn't reference them. An argument based on assuming a joke is serious is pretty low.
Absolutely untrue. You're right in the idea that we weren't hunting down herds of Mammoth's with Atlatl's early in our evolutionary history, but that doesn't mean we weren't eating meat. Next time you're around a bird or a lizard or a frog or something of the like, notice how little attention they often pay to you, and how easy it would be to nail one with a rock. Indeed as Jared Diamond points out, this is the way many modern hunter-gather societies operate today. They talk a big game about going out and bagging big game, but it's usually very small game and insects and the like as you pointed out (I consider insects meat personally, though I'm not sure that's taxonomically corect or whatever).

Also, fire is not at all a recent invention, and certainly predates modern Homo Sapiens by AT LEAST 200,000 years, which is longer than we've even been on the planet. Please dude, if you're going to argue this shit with me you need to go take a evolutionary anthropology class or something. This is basic shit.
I'm talking about a much longer term evolutionary history. You only need to look at our phylogentetic tree to see my point. Humans - omnivores, Chimpanzees - omnivores, Orangutangs - omnivores, Gorillas - vegetarians. We're clearly not carnivores, and so this woman lumping us with carnivores was an error. I didn't say that we never ate meat, I said that it wasn't a big part of our diet, and I especially stressed red meat, which makes me wonder why you talk about frogs, birds and lizards.
It's pretty well accepted today that what allowed humans brains to grow to the size they are today was the scavenging of meat on the African Savannah, specifically cracking the bones of prey animals with crude tools, and sucking the bone marrow out.
Bullshit. Provide some evidence for this claim please. It's clearly not "well accepted" at all. There are actually multiple competing and complimentary theories about why our brain development is so big - tool use, cooking, increased life spans, increased social behaviour due to decreased time needed to search for food, development of language, etc. Yes there are people who think it was an increase of meat in our diet, but that's not the accept view at all - the issue is still widely debated.
I'm glad you put "designed" in scare quotes and clarified it, because this is the dumbest shit I've read in a long time. Besides, Jane Goodall proved that our closest primate relatives (Chimps) eat meat any chance they get, and relish the opportunity to.

But anyways, ya you're right to say that it's false to say that "Evolution suggest we are supposed to do anything". To bring it back to the bone marrow, when proto-humans first started eating that stuff, it was probably a totally novel food source for us, which allowed us to become what we are today. Just because we hadn't evolved eating it doesn't mean that we weren't adapted to consume it. Similarly with grain and legumes, just because we didn't evolve eating that stuff, doesn't mean it's all bad for you. Empirical research however, shows that much of it is quite bad for you.
You understand the difference between an omnivore and a carnivore right?
So when I say humans "need" meat, I'm definitely not being as clear as I need to be. I should say that the vast majority of humans need to consume meat to be at their athletic and physiological peaks. If you simply want to "survive", then certainly you can live off black beans and spinach, and indeed for much of the world that'd be a pretty luxurious diet. But most people do best on a diet that contains plenty of high quality meat.
Bullshit. Provide some evidence for this please.
When most Vegans/Vegetarians start to experience problems is when they hit the 30 year mark or so, and their bodies start revolting against them.
Any evidence, or is this another claim you just made up?

Edit; Also I note that I don't live in the US, and I'll continue to call all farming, including beef farming, "farming," as is done in most variations of English.

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