Bicycling wastes gas ?

I found this interesting and thought I would pass it on. I never considered the fact that what and how I eat had this much of an impact on anything more than my own health and well being. Chalk one up for the Veggiemonster :)

http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/energy.html



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Permalink Reply by Dr. Doom on October 1, 2010 at 3:56am
There are technical names for these kinds of logical fallacies, but I'll just say that this is the same line of reasoning that leads one to conclude that since it takes oil to manufacture and ship a bicycle, one may as well drive a Hummer.

I'll also note that in your screed you didn't address the point that even someone so morally vacant that he can't tell the difference between a roach and a pig, or between incidental and deliberate death, would probably not want to eat, say, ammonia-drenched cow dick if he took the two seconds to realize that's what he was doing.

Anyway, I love the idea of people who are posting online from Chicago posing as Real Men who understand the Way of Nature... doubtless after firing off another post explaining The Way It Is you're off to kill something with handmade tools and consume it before raping someone, that being after all what evolution made you fit for.
Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on October 1, 2010 at 4:16am
Nice ad hominem there -equating the eating of meat with rape.

As we are talking about logical fallacies let's talk about the difference between sapience and mere sentience. Humans are animals -but animals are NOT humans. My whole "manly" (as you call it) philosophy springs from the non-aggression principle. I will not aggress on the Life, Liberty, or Property of any Sapient being -for doing so immediately invalidates my own claim to these things.

Rape is a behavioral pattern of just about every species of animal from about the time sexual reproduction first appeared in life on this planet. We are all evolved from that early ancestor so we all have a pretty good chance of retaining those patterns in our genes. But rape is an aggression of force upon another's Life, Liberty & Property and therefore is NOT a moral behavior.

Raising, killing, processing, selling, and eating of animals does not inherently violate the Life, Liberty, or Property of another Sapient individual and therefore is NOT immoral in any way in my personal philosophy. If your philosophy differs then that is your right to believe any crazy stuff you want to as long as you don't violate my own Life, Liberty &/or Property in the process. Go ahead and be a vegetarian or vegan if you wish. My own wife is a vegetarian and I respect that -even as I prepare her meals and buy the groceries (I've gotten really good at reading ingredients and I bet many vegetarians don't even know how many foods are subtlety NOT vegetarian, or know what rennet is and how it is used in many foods and in other cheese-making). But neither does she interfere with my own meat-eating. I've also cooked for vegans which is even more difficult but can be done. Cross-contamination issues are also something I respect regarding my wife's philosophical beliefs.

Go ahead and call me a redneck-rapist if you wish. If that is the entirety of your "logical" argument against my philosophy then I will have to yawn and move along. I've got a busy day ahead hunting and cleaning my game.

Murder is delicious!
Permalink Reply by Mark Kenseth on October 1, 2010 at 4:46am
i hope for a less carbon fuel oriented transportation system in the future, and i won't feel so guilty about where my food comes from. oil is so...stone-age.

eating very little meat and less and less dairy makes me feel healthier. for me, meat, dairy and bread are hard for my body to process. but i'm also not doing physical labor all day.
Permalink Reply by Craig S. on October 1, 2010 at 4:51am


Gabe said:
Filet Mignon wrapped in bacon is the shit! ;-)

Is there ever too much bacon?
Permalink Reply by Dr. Doom on October 1, 2010 at 4:53am
You seem to be missing the point of invoking rape here—probably, given your ramblings on previous threads and your references here to a philosophy that seems to be a kind of chromosomally deprived take on Ayn Rand, because you're dim. The point is this: That a behavior is a product of evolution does not make it right.

There is a reason why you can't take Fido down to Lincoln Park, shoot him with a bolt gun, and barbecue him despite his lack of sapience. There is probably also a reason why you seem more eager to invoke your philosophy, the mice who are killed in a turnip harvest, and non-existent people who want to interfere with your meat eating than to ponder the implications of eating chemical-laced chicken eyes.
Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on October 1, 2010 at 5:03am
I tend to have more issues with carbs myself -bread especially, but I can eat almost unlimited amounts of meat and dairy (protein and fat) without any measurable ill effects as long as my activity level corresponds to my caloric input. Working in a highly-physical construction-related field makes that easy when we aren't in the middle of a depression. But I tend to really bulk up with muscle-mass which is a real bitch when laid-off as it always tends to turn to flab very quickly regardless of how hard I exercise. Meh, hoping the economy pulls out of the double-dip soon...

As far as using oil for fuel -I have to agree that it is stupid. We are living in the nuclear age and there is no reason other than illogical fear not be be taking advantage of that. Oil is a great "mineral" resource that should be saved for making plastics and other fairly closed-loop carbon-neutral plastics and other high-tech materials needed as the building blocks of our modern society -and then subsequently recycled as necessary. Burning it is definitely a backwards thing for a supposedly "advanced" society to be doing at this point. If a certain group of fear-mongers hadn't retarded the growth into the nuclear age we might have already been past this step. I know exactly who to point the fingers at for that unwise technological retardation.



Mark Kenseth said:
i hope for a less carbon fuel oriented transportation system in the future, and i won't feel so guilty about where my food comes from. oil is so...stone-age.

eating very little meat and less and less dairy makes me feel healthier. for me, meat, dairy and bread are hard for my body to process. but i'm also not doing physical labor all day.
Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on October 1, 2010 at 5:09am
Doctor Doo,

I can't eat Fido?

Didn't seem to have stopped me. She tasted very good too. But I don't anymore because of personal choice -not because it is wrong.

You seem to have a problem differentiating between that which is merely unwise and that which is morally wrong, just as you seem to not understand the principles behind the non-aggression axiom. Look it up -I'm done trying to teach a toddler how to split atoms.
Permalink Reply by Dr. Doom on October 1, 2010 at 5:13am
Bro, I'll bet your copy of The Virtue of Selfishnessis, like... so marked up.

That shit is deep, bro. Let me hip you to some Steve Ditko. You'd really dig him, bro.

Permalink Reply by Michael Perz on October 1, 2010 at 5:26am
Dr. Doom said:
Men also evolved with a biological imperative toward rape.

Not to completely derail this discussion, but I'd like to see some supporting evidence for this rape-as-biological-imperative allegation; citations preferably attributed to evolutionary biologists and not Andrea Dworkin.
Permalink Reply by Jason on October 1, 2010 at 5:52am
To James: bro, try to look a little bigger picture. Not everyone who is meat free is doing it because they think the death of an animal for human consumption is morally wrong. There are political, economic, environmental and even national security concerns at play. You've made it pretty clear that you're only interested in approaching this topic in outdated terms: "dirty hippy limp wristed whiners vs. real American man meat eaters". That's unfortunate, because I think it's probably the context that much of America still views this debate in, which is willfully ignorant. But because I'm easily baited I guess I'll throw some arguments out there against commercial meat production and consumption for you to destroy with your rapier wit (Don't worry if you get bored and check out James, this is just as much for anyone else's info as it is yours):

Without going into inordinate amounts of detail-

Commercial farming requires that animals (and we'll just stick with beef/cows here) be kept in confined areas rather than grazing on open pasture and that they be fed grain (mostly corn). So lets start at the beginning:

Corn-
To talk about why beef is "bad" you have to talk about corn because that's what we feed cows in a commercial beef production model. Corn is a huge topic but in a nutshell we grow too much of it and we rely too heavily on it. We have to use nitrogen based fertilizer derived from off shore natural gas plants, the creation of which not only generate vast amounts of carbon dioxide, but also emits millions of pounds of toxic chemicals each year. Much of that fertilizer also runs off into the Mississippi river and into the Gulf of Mexico where it creates a "Dead Zone" roughly the size of New Jersey where nothing can live. Screw you fisherman. This commercial consolidation and govt. subsidization of the monoculture of corn farming has destroyed the American farmer, propped up a system that subsidizes unhealthy food at the cost of healthy alternatives and has fueled the obesity and accompanying Diabetes epidemics in our country due to the overuse of High Fructose Corn Syrup (or Corn Sugar as the industry would now like you to call it, Corn Sugar, so sweet, so harmless).

Not to mention the fact that should anything go wrong with our extremely genetically engineered corn crop we would be woefully screwed. When a society begins to predominantly rely on one crop it is putting all it's eggs in one basket. Ask the Romans about wheat.

Think of this: From a list of the top twenty agricultural products of the United States by value as reported by the FAO in 2003 (ranked in order of value with volume in metric tons):
1. Corn 256,900,000
2. Cattle meat 11,736,000
3. Cow's milk, whole, fresh 78,155,000

And then consider this: According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production.

That's an enormous amount of corn grown (i.e. land, resources, chemicals, fuel to transport on and on and on) to feed cattle to produce meat and dairy. It's an extremely inefficient use of resources, but one that makes a very few number of people very rich while making unhealthy food the only affordable option for huge swaths of the population.

Beef-

So all those cows are now eating all that corn in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) that look like this:


What's that dust in the air? I'll give ya a hint: It's shit. There's no way to deal with the waste from that many animals in one place, there's not enough crop land in the region to safely spread it on as fertilizer so CAFOs mix it with water and make waste "lagoons". Ahh, a lagoon, sounds inviting, lets go get our swim trunks and some lemonade shall we?!:

That of course leaks into waterways or even better gets onto neighboring spinach crops and gives people food poisoning. Weird how what used to be a loop: grass grows, cow eats grass, cow poops, poop fertilizes more grass, repeat, is now a line starting with a non renewable resource like natural gas
which comes from someplace like Tobego, which gets tuned into fertilizer (and toxic pollutants), to grow corn to feed cattle which then shit and piss it out in such quantities that we can't do anything else with it other than store it in festering polluting poop swamps.

Oh and since you brought up evolution and digestive tracts let's talk about the evolution of a cow's digestive tract. See they're not built to eat grain, they're supposed to eat grass. All that starch in grain creates a lot of acid, which creates ulcers, which will lead to infections which kill the cattle. So they have to be pumped full of antibiotics just to live long enough to make it to slaughter. These are antibiotics which commercial meat eaters later ingest, which leads to an increased risk of antibiotic resistant infections in humans. Hey there super bug, come on down!

Another tid-bit: The injury rate among meatpackers is the highest of any occupation in the United States. Working in a slaughterhouse is three times more dangerous than working in an average American factory.

Anyway, I'm running out of steam. You're being a dope James. I'm not down on meat because I saw Bambi. I've killed and butchered my own venison. Stop living in a bubble and start making a team effort, think about how your decisions affect others and what role you play in a greater chain of events. Or don't.
Permalink Reply by Dr. Doom on October 1, 2010 at 6:03am
I'd like to see some supporting evidence for this rape-as-biological-imperative allegation

There is none at all for the strong version involving, essentially, a "rape gene" that was kicked around a few years ago when "A Natural History of Rape" was briefly controversial. In fact, a recent-ish study of an isolated tribe showed that rape is a bad adaptation once you factor in the odds of a rapist being killed by a woman's relatives and such.

There is, though, reason to think that a weak version of the claim is right—a woman is twice as likely to be impregnated by a rape as by consensual intercourse, for instance, and the practice of mass rape is a constant in the history of war. In this line it's a curious byproduct of evolution, like bicycle riding or poker playing. Strictly speaking that doesn't mean much, but that's the point—claiming that rape or tramp stamps are alright because of evolution is ridiculous, and the same is true of making that claim about meat eating or volunteering in an orphanage.
Permalink Reply by Michael Perz on October 1, 2010 at 6:23am


Dr. Doom said:
I'd like to see some supporting evidence for this rape-as-biological-imperative allegation

There is none at all for the strong version involving, essentially, a "rape gene" that was kicked around a few years ago when "A Natural History of Rape" was briefly controversial. In fact, a recent-ish study of an isolated tribe showed that rape is a bad adaptation once you factor in the odds of a rapist being killed by a woman's relatives and such.

There is, though, reason to think that a weak version of the claim is right—a woman is twice as likely to be impregnated by a rape as by consensual intercourse, for instance, and the practice of mass rape is a constant in the history of war. In this line it's a curious byproduct of evolution, like bicycle riding or poker playing. Strictly speaking that doesn't mean much, but that's the point—claiming that rape or tramp stamps are alright because of evolution is ridiculous, and the same is true of making that claim about meat eating or volunteering in an orphanage.

I completely agree that certain behaviors cannot be justified by evolutionary happenstance, but the notion of rape as a byproduct of the evolutionary process is demonstrably false by just about any reasonable metric. Civilization has grown increasingly peaceful. Human beings fight less wars and for shorter duration. Family size in developed and developing areas of the world is shrinking because the necessity of survival through sheer propagation has diminished. If the tendency toward rape is to be considered a human characteristic developed from biological or cultural necessity - whether for survival or dominance - then human beings are definitely evolving away from, not toward it.

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