Sarabi wrote:Eòghan wrote: Either use thought-through arguments and win your battle, or for all that I care, keep on saying stupid comments and end up being perceived as a national of cuckoo-land...
Your thoughts are so thought through. You haven't explained what is wrong with my analogies except to say "can NOT be compared." An egg doesn't seem extreme to you, but it does to me. They only "can NOT be compared" because you refuse to compare them, not because of anything inherently incomparable about them. Since you care so much about arguments, why don't you actually try to understand the argument in my analogy instead of pre-judging everything I say just because it's unpleasant to you? My arguments are not always well-thought through (I can point to some in this thread), but as I've just demonstrated, neither are yours. If you don't like my use of extremes, then ignore it or explain why instead of trying to make my argument look bad by attacking my character. I hope this response was "sane" enough for you, Mr. Sanity.
Sarabi, the reason why I react so strongly when you throw far-flung comments around, such as calling eg. Zorba a dictator, or compare others to concentration camps supporters is the fact that I see it as an insult towards everyone who suffered the hardships of concentration camps and the like. It has nothing to do with me not wanting to compare them, or them being incomparable, but they all make the rest of your arguments sound ridiculous as well, even though I somehow agree to many of them. In rhetorics, one would call this type of argumenting "guilty-by-assosiation" and "accuse-attack", and even though some people would fall for it, and stop arguing, others would just cringe at the accusations and stop listening to everything else you say. One little accusation can ruin your entire speech.
Sarabi wrote:Plants can't feel anything because they lack the apparatus we have to feel something, and they never evolved to have this apparatus because they probably didn't need it. It would be evolutionarily excessive for them to have emotions if they can't run away from anything (fear/pain), attack anything (anger), nurture their young (love), roam about in tribal bands or herds with the need to take care of injured beings (compassion). And the same with self-awareness. I don't think that plants have self-awareness in the sense of being able to think about their actions. They just have built-in reactions that they perform in certain contexts with no choice. An emotion is also a built-in reaction, but it is an emotion because of what it forces us to do psychologically: to CHOOSE to run away, to CHOOSE to attack something, to CHOOSE to nurture our young, to CHOOSE to take care of each other
The fact is that you're actually wrong Sarabi; it is a scientific fact that plants have feelings, and that they can choose to attack or defend themselves. A fly-trap can choose wether or not it want to eat a fly, it won't just swallow every single fly that lands on it, and the famous accacia tree knows how to warn other trees of feeding giraffes. It sends out a sublime signal which tells the other trees it's about time they start producing a highly toxine juice which can kill giraffes, thus defending the accacias.
Scientists have recorded ultra-sound screams from uprooted plants, they respond to heat and cold, and turn towards the sun by choice, not by instinct, and so yes, plants do have some sort of emotions, although rather primitive ones... I really do wonder why draw the line at plants, to be honest, if one really doesn't want to harm anyone you should be a practicing fruitarian, only eating fallen fruit.
In order to show you why I see your comparisions as bad ones, I'll do a similar one;
- Eating soja equals supporting the genocide of the Yanomami, the Enawene Nawe and other tribal peoples of the Amazon. Hence all vegetarians and vegans support the genocide of tribal peoples worldwide. Ergo; Vegans are bad people. Eating soja is harming the rain forests and forces indigenous peoples to run away from their ancestral lands as they're forced to by Brazilian farmers who estroy their homes and deliberately kill indigenous peoples, because they've chosen to use their lands to grow crops and soja or to farm cattle on...
But somehow you've decided it's okay to draw the line at plants, and that's your own decision and I'm perfectly fine with it and don't go around calling you a dictator. Just as it is my decision that I've decided to eat meat and egg, even though I do everything I can to buy ecologically produced products, as well as products produced according to fair-trade standards.