Let me start off by saying that I didn’t ever plan to do a post on faulty products.  I did want to do a post on “products I like”.  We’ll get there.

But I’m very observant.  I don’t miss much.

And I just noticed that I went into my first floor bathroom, which days ago I had closed the heat vent off and shut the door to save energy since I rarely go in there, and it is just toasty warm in there!  I noticed lately that the heat is always off and the door closed to my son’s bedroom, but every time I go in there, it’s warm.

So that’s my first defective product to list.  The floor-mounted close-able heat vents that appear to close but do not impede the flow of heated air.

More to follow.

The other night I happened across a discussion (one that didn’t qualify as a debate) about the ethics of non-vegans’ food choices in the comments on a close friend’s facebook page.  While I have no real interest in participating in that debate since it never really concludes, I did write up my opinion, which I’ll share here, a few paragraphs down.

One reason, but not the primary one, that I chose to write about this is because I am interested in ethics, especially medical ethics (which I studied in college), the ethical components of sexuality and relationship structures, and issues of free choice and free will.  I have a lot of thoughts in common with Peter Singer, Michael Shermer, and my brilliant friend and author Franklin Veaux (blog | essays | site), just to name a few places to start reading for those who like thinking too much!

The main reason I chose to write about this is because I’ve been hearing an issue I really don’t care for come up more and more often: people who have chosen to be vegan (for whatever reason) are increasingly asserting that anyone who is not vegan is unethical, supports animal cruelty and is complicit in the torture of animals.  I find this absurd.  I don’t deny that animals have the capacity to suffer and I don’t support their mistreatment.  That doesn’t mean that I accept the argument that just because a livestock animal, like any biological organism, can feel and respond to their environment that it is unethical to kill them as humanely as possible and for me to eat them if I so choose.  You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to make the same choices that I do, but it doesn’t make me “wrong” or a bad or unethical person.  I simply do not accept as valid the claim that a minimal level of sentience in animals, nor nociception in invertebrates is adequate to convey the same status as a human being entitled to the applicable substantive human rights and equal consideration of interests.

One thought I had which made me wonder how often it applies, is that my vegan friend (whose page this was on) really doesn’t like food.  She’s told me many times, though not recently, that she hates food and only eats because it’s necessary.  More recently, she’s said she doesn’t hate food, she likes food, but only healthy food.   (After I published this, now she says she loves food — healthy food.  So it appears I stand corrected, at least in the present.)   I, on the other hand, love food.  I do not eat to survive; I consider eating to be one of life’s real pleasures, and I love food so much that I not only learned to cook, I’ve learned to create my own original recipes and duplicate the secret ones of others, and I’ve become incredibly good at it and take it very seriously.  And somehow, miraculously, I’m not addicted to meat, cheese, or sugar.

Also, while I was thinking about topic and doing some research, I found a lot of really well-thought-out discussions and debates about the vegan/carnivore topic online.  I wish I had time to read more of them because I am very interested in logic and I’d really like to know specifically which informal logical fallacy is being committed.   On my long-term TTD list is to learn more about logical fallacy… I’ve run across them, and I recognize them quite well, but I never studied them and don’t know them apart, as much as I’d like to.

So here’s what I wrote, in reply to an ongoing, emotionally-laden argument trying to convince an omnivorous person that they only eat meat because they’re addicted to it and that their diet makes them unethical.  I refer to dear vegan friend using the appropriate feminine pronoun since her identity isn’t relevant to my opinion on the topic:

My brain is full.  I’m not receptive to “the vegan message” either.  That’s not the point.  I don’t want to be vegan either.   It doesn’t mean I’m stupid, unwilling to change my opinions, or that I hate animals.  Perhaps the contrived word (more accurately: pejorative neologism) “speciesist” fits; I don’t know and I don’t really care.  Because I choose to eat meat does not mean I support cruel conditions or torture of animals.  It doesn’t mean I hate animals any more than that South Park episode (“if you don’t support Prop10, then you HATE children” lol) makes logical sense.

What I would like to see are the citations to open/public (not ‘pay for this’ jstor) peer-reviewed scientific papers to support some of these arguments, like that humans are not ominivorous , that these animals are “sentient”, and meat is addictive.  I’d like to see organized political movements, letter writing campaigns to Congress, things that I could be a part of to improve the conditions of food animals to the levels of the farms I grew up on, and bring criminal penalties to people who violate them.  The photos I see of the poor conditions bother me, but I believe these are exceptions to the rule (like criminals, in a world where people like me who find a cell phone in the grocery parking lot pick it up and call “Mom” to say I found your daughter’s smartphone and I’d like to return it), and I have too much to do now already.  I care more about my income and finding a way to pay my bills than activism, but I’ll support reasonable ideas.

It hurts me that she believes I hate animals and support animal cruelty because I’m not vegan, but I neither can nor will try to change her opinion of me, nor will I ever not love her, because I respect her, and the foundation of our relationship is not because of what we eat.  It is because of who we are, and what we can accept.  I’ve seen increasing extremism, but it doesn’t affect that…. I’m sure she’s seen that I’ve had increasing extremism in my love for music over a period of decades, which has improved my life much as veganism has improved hers.  Love can be extraordinarily accepting.  I don’t identify her or vice versa by our choices (we’ve both made some very good ones, and some very bad ones).  Isn’t it okay to just be different?

Some of this is part of one’s definition of cruelty.  I happen to think that it’s wrong that humans, who are beyond a doubt sentient, do not have the right to decide to take their own life when faced with a horrific death or are in intractable pain.  I don’t see vegans showing any interest in supporting *my* end-of-life rights, or my desire to assign those rights to someone I love and trust, something that would directly reduce real cruelty.  The vegans are going after the core issue at the wrong level.  This one will never fly as grassroots, by trying to convince or guilt people into not eating meat.  There will never be a vegan majority.  The “insects are more nutritious than meat” argument is a tough sell too.  I’m not interested in that either.  But the animal right to not be treated cruelly (and that doesn’t mean the Right to Life argument either) is a different issue.  It will only fly as legislation.  Vegans will always be a minority (but they can still have rights, and influence).   I stopped eating all products that can only be produced in unacceptable conditions (like veal), but I won’t be a vegetarian because I don’t believe the claims.  So why don’t you find a way to make someone like me an advocate for your legislation that makes progress on the real root cause?  I would do *that*.
I still don’t like to be labeled as someone who hates animals, especially from someone I love.  That conclusion is logical fallacy.  Animals (esp. if you consider the easy case of one that doesn’t need to be killed to produce a sustainable product, like chickens) do not need to be in poor conditions or tortured (in fact, I read that if you torture hens, they do not produce) so the engineer in me respectfully requests more evidence in peer-reviewed journals and less appeal to emotion.

That all led to a barrage of more insults, condescension, and logical fallacy (which was really my only original interest in the whole thing), including a whole load of “references”, all of which originate on pro-vegan websites without a single citation to anything in an unbiased peer-reviewed journal.  There were some articles and presentations, some of which had names with “M.D.” behind it, which makes it gospel to a vegan but does nothing to address my skepticism (see Argument from authority), my challenge of the data, and refusal to accept a shift of the burden of proof (Onus probandi) onto myself for not “seeking out the information.”  All of that was enough for me to gracefully exit with no further comments and no intention of ever engaging in this topic where militant vegans are present.

I was told I’m “like the person who is so intelligent that they have no interpersonal skills.”  Followed by that it is only the “meat eaters attempting to justify their choices”.   Who else is engaging one in that discussion?  Why would a vegan put themselves in a discussion whereby their intelligence was questioned, now that most choices of sexuality are somewhere between accepted and legally recognized?  I never felt the need to justify anything or to make excuses.  I don’t care that the militant vegans call what I eat “carcass.”   (Sometimes, it even makes me want to respond, “Yum!” when in most cases I just keep quiet about my meals).   I don’t feel bad or guilty for what I eat, and I think if someone meets the definition of a bigot, and someone calls them a bigot, it’s not wrong.  But I do have an opinion how I should be treated as a person, and by extension, how everyone should be.

I also discovered that a week earlier, another of my friends had been attacked by the same group, in much the same way.   The statement was made that “This is my [Facebook] wall” … “if you don’t want to see what you see, kindly remove yourself…”.  Anyone who has been online as long as I have can relate to this, but that’s not the solution when the real problem isn’t that someone (perhaps someone like me) doesn’t like what I see, but rather the problem is I don’t like being treated poorly, judged, and insulted by someone I don’t know… and I like it even less when it’s by someone I do know, someone who should know better and put an end to the “asleep”, “willfully ignorant”, “indoctrinated” into my “incorrect beliefs”, “uneducated”, “unwilling to be educated”, “I am better than you” rhetoric directed at someone just like me.  Or at me.

While all this was happening, someone else who, like me, was on the receiving end of all this disgusting behavior, decided to write her own articles about it.  She said this experience “was the worst interaction [she’s] had online in 20 years” and wrote two brilliant articles about it, which I highly recommend:
We All Have Convenient and Fluid Morals
and
Your Communication Style Can Kill Your Message

They are very well-written and thought out.  I particularly liked the parallels to real human conditions, groups that have no voice, and the deconstruction of some judgmental visuals, memes used to promote “the vegan message” that make people like me abandon with haste.  The one that is “missing a panel” is spot on.  I could deconstruct many others, but why bother?  It won’t make my points more clear.

The other good part of those articles is how she disputed the mutual exclusivity that I could not be vegan, and still care about reform for the quality of life of animals, just like I care about the quality of life for the others who “do not have a voice”, which is a different but very real and very human issue that as
far as I’m concerned is as relevant now as the changes that led to the
elimination of (some) absurdity in law (i.e. charges of witchcraft and debtor’s
prisons).

I’ve also been thinking about it more, and here are some more thoughts I have:

Humans, primates, companion animals, livestock animals, and less complex animals are not equivalent.  They are distinct groups (arbitrarily classified by me) and those groups do not deserve equal rights.  This does not mean they deserve no rights.  [I also think that human children should have rights, although the courts have repeatedly ruled that — child support money excepted — they do not, especially in schools.  Reminder to self to write about that one day.]

So what’s next, defending my right to keep a carnivorous companion animal (which I customarily call a “pet”) and let it freely travel in and out the cat door?

When someone who is not vegan makes a reference to “plants are alive too”, this is generally not to convince anyone that plants have rights.  It is to call out the absurdity of some of the arguments and the use of a logical fallacy, one that extends a premise beyond its boundaries.  I didn’t identify the name of this yet, but I will.

I see many vegans writing online about how much harm that the production and consumption of livestock causes to the environment (and I tend to agree; this is a different issue).  Speaking of the environment, I ask two questions: Do you recycle?  Have you made an effort (like I have) to encourage your friends and family to recycle?  I know more than one vegan with very close friends who just throw everything in the trash (“I can’t be bothered.”).  That’s the same as making the environment “somebody else’s problem”.   Recycling doesn’t require a lifestyle change like veganism, so isn’t that the low-hanging fruit?  I even paid more for trash service that provided recycling.

I don’t like it when someone doesn’t recycle their own trash.  I think it is lazy and irresponsible, and I may tell them I don’t like their decision to not do something easy and not cause a problem for someone else, but I certainly don’t treat them with gross disrespect nor assert the conclusion,

“If you don’t recycle, then you HATE the environment”.

My position doesn’t imply the environment is unimportant.  It doesn’t even matter that our trash and our environment isn’t sentient.  Or is it?  All depends on your definitions and how you choose to treat others.  Calling yourself “abrasive” is a poor excuse for the behaviors I saw that led to this.

Respectfully submitted by one of “the droned masses”…. who just can’t seem to “wake up”… apparently.