they're pictures of nothing at all

[dragonladyflame]

Vegetarian Deconstruction

Okay. So I'm standing by the refrigerator in my vegetarian co-op and I open the door to see what I can eat and I see, what do I see, but some sausages. Apparently, I discover, we have tons of sausages. And chicken. Vast quantities of meat have stuffed the co-op to the gills -- all of it left over from a local art

Comments

Re: I'm gonna get Zeno-Phobic on your ass.

[agnoster]

I was just having a discussion about the dangers of Manicheanism and telling someone not to look at the world in black and white, because the world isn't just grayscale but full color. So this comment tickled me. :-)

My mom's a vegetarian, but eats meat on occasion. She says basically no matter what you do, there's indirect consequences that lead to some being somewhere suffering, she's just trying to be as innocent a murderer as possible (to quote Camus). Of course, you could always be *less* of a murderer than you are, but there's a sort of cost-benefit thing there too. I read an article a while back talking about how much bigger an impact it would have, in terms of oil consumption, to get the gass-guzzlers to be replaced with cars that are twice as efficient than replacing Civics with Priuses (or whatever). I'm of the mind that, pragmatically, the vegetarian movement is shooting itself in the foot when it acts all high and mighty and strict because that's the last way you win people over. If you got people to realize they don't have to be vegan, they can just maybe not eat meat at *every goddamn meal* and they'd be doing some great things for their health, the environment, and cute little (and big) animals... well, I think it'd probably have a bigger impact overall. But then it's also sort of a question of trade-offs between pragmatics and principles, which in *principle* you should never have to make, but is sometimes pragmatically useful, and there you go down the fractal rabbit-hole of balancing extremes and means, which is really something I'd want to write my dissertation on someday except I don't think that it's considered an AI problem (yet!!)

Further consider, if you eat the meat that will spoil anyway, and it satiates you, and you consume less *insert other product here* as a result, you're free of the moral implications of consuming *other product* - because even vegetarian food comes to you at a cost in environmental and human terms, more likely than not. Which means it's not just pragmatically excusable, but quite possibly *desirable*.

Well, to make a long story short I don't think you could make a wrong decision here (or could have - I'm way behind on LJ so I imagine you've made your choice). To everything there is a season, right? Sometimes you have to take a principled stance even if it makes no practical sense, sometimes you need to do the pragmatic thing even if it doesn't conform to your ideal version of reality. I think maybe there's something to the whole Malcolm-Gladwell-Blink-thing - maybe our snap decision in those situations is the right one... or rather not "right" (because there isn't a wrong answer here) but the appropriate one for the time and place and whatnot. If thy mind dislike anything, obey it?