This isn't accurate at all on Columbus either.

Every educated person knew the Earth was round, they even had a pretty good idea of how BIG it was. Which is why nobody was insane enough to try the trip to the East over the Western sea. It was too far, they would simply die.

Columbus was an idiot who got the math wrong and thought the Earth was a lot smaller than everyone else knew it was. He didn't even really convince the Queen he was right, she just had lots of ships and on the off chance he might be right, she gave him three because the reward was worth the risk.

He then went on to slaughter a few million islanders in the Caribbean because they wouldn't tell him where the gold was (they had no gold).

So... he was basically an idiot and a homicidal maniac, responsible for one of the largest genocides the world has ever known. Yay, let's celebrate a day for him, America! (oh and he also never set foot in what is now the United States AND the first Europeans to come to the Americas were several hundred years earlier).

@Mordhaus, you're not understanding the point I'm making here. I didn't say mankind in general isn't shitty to each other, it is very much. What I'm talking about is how as soon as Europe reached a technological tipping point (gaining an advantage), we started to fuck with every continent on the map. Our culuture shaped how we treated the rest of the world, which meant wiping out every other culture we could dominate.
Look at the Mongols, sure, extremely violent assholes. But what happened to those that didn't oppose them? Did they try to eradicate conquered cultures? Here's the funny part, the Mongols we're known for their religious tolerance. They didn't give a shit about your culture, as long as you surrendered and accepted their rule, you had a chance to be ok. Basically, the Mongols are Negan.
Say, what happened to those cultures that came into contact with the spanish Empire or the british? Oh right, we pretty much destroyed them as well as we could. We did this in the Americas, Africa and tried it in Australia. Europeans aren't Negan, they're the Wolves.
That's why I mention Zheng He. He shows up in Africa with a giant fleet and says "Gimme some of your shit!" and fucks off right home. Comes back a couple off times and the new chinese Emperor goes "Eh, it ain't worth it!"
I'm sure ol' Zheng could be quite the bastard but he didn't set up shop in Africa and he didn't start slaughtering people because they refused to embrace Buddha.
You're absolutely right, there are mad men to be found everywhere, there's genocide and slavery all around the globe all through human history. However, there's only one group of people that made all of it an export article. Our ancestors left their neighbourhood to mess up everybody else's. We're special in that regard.
With the exception of the Mongols of course. But they've always been exceptional. I mean, they're the only empire to successfuly invade Afghanistan. You gotta respect that.

I would say that Stalin, the Kin Jong's, Various African Tribal Genocides, and Pol Pot might disagree with your account of wholesale slaughter being reserved for the 'white' Europeans and their descendants. That is just to name a few. Also, what is a 'white' European? I mean the southern Europeans have quite a bit of Moorish blood in them, do they still count as 'white'?

All sarcasm aside, your argument is extremely flawed. Conquerors tend to lay waste to the societies they conquer, not always in terms of total lives lost, but in terms of cultural death. The reason why 'white' people are vilified for this lately is because for the past several hundred years they have been the ones expanding and taking over the regions you speak of. This is not exclusive to a skin color or originating locale, it is absolutely a core of our human nature.

I gave some examples earlier of non-European conquerors, but they are fairly recent. If we look in history at other groups, we find the same meme. The Steppe Horse Tribes were BRUTAL to cities and countries that did not capitulate. Look up "Measuring against the linchpin". That saying came from the fact that if you resisted Mongol rule, they would slaughter every male taller than the linchpin of a wagon wheel. The Aztecs and Mayans ruled southern American empires through great brutality, including human sacrifice for 'religious' purposes. Recent discoveries even indicate that it was considered a good omen if the sacrifices were crying in pain before they were to die. Remains recently found showed "All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry."

Slavery originated as early as human recorded history, if not sooner. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Although slavery in some form or another existed in most European countries, it wasn't until after contact with the Arabic African slave traders that it soared in the 15th and 16th centuries.

tl;dr

You are referring to recent history to make an example while completely ignoring THOUSANDS of years of similar history. All humanity is flawed, narrowing it down to a singular group with cherry picked data is not going to persuade anyone with a brain.

We're morally superior to them because we do it in an abattoir and have a modern drainage system. God we're so civilised.

If only right wingers gave half as much of a shit about innocent kids getting bombed/killed/raped in Aleppo and elsewhere as they do about animal sacrifice when it's done by a Muslim.

I look forward to seeing the same commitment to comments about seal cubs being beaten to death by blood thirsty Americans, Canadians, Swedes, Fins, Russians, Norweigans. Or when whales and dolphins are slaughtered in open water in Japan. Bulls tortured in Spain.

If you read my other reply two posts up, it's clear that I'm not left leaning.

Your linked slaughter statistics are for the USA alone, and as far as I know GLOBAL warming affects the whole globe....so we should count the global amount of farmed animals.

Your statistics also only count slaughtered animals, and not farmed animals like dairy cows, which there are more of at any one time. Around 9 billion dairy cows in the USA. So already in the US alone we have 13.9 billion farmed animals(4.9b slaughtered + 9b dairy cows). It's not hard to see worldwide that figure reaching 50 billion.
And that's still not counting a bunch of animals (read the small print of your link).

The thing with methane too, it traps over 29 times more heat that co2....and most trees don't absorb methane. So even if we had enough trees to absorb co2 (which we don't) then all of methane from farmed animals would remain up there anyway.


80% of tree's aren't gone, 80 % of forests are gone:
https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how%20much%20of%20the%20world%27s%20forests%20have%20been%20destroyed


How much renewable energy tax do you pay BTW? Where I live I pay $0. But the government does give some $4 billion of our tax money to the coal industry. So if anything the big tax scheme is from non-renewable.


EDIT:
Oh I forgot the most important bit. Scientists can tell between natural co2 and man-made co2. They have differing amounts of carbon. So it's actually really easy to tell between how much carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere vs naturally occurring carbon dioxide.


Also lions and bears are going to live in nature regardless of human activity - we've added 50 billion large, methane producing animals to the world that wouldn't be there otherwise. Granted the destruction of habitats might have reduced the lion and bear populations, but not by 50 billion. Perhaps a few million at most.

For starters, I have to oppose the implied thought that Saddam's reign of terror was preventing this sectarian violence. His rule through the Suni minority to wage genocides against the Kurdish and Shia majority and decades of brutal repression of same all served to make the sectarian hatred and violence worse. Tally up the hundreds of thousands he killed through genocide, the million plus he killed in the Iran-Iraq war and everyone that died by direct execution or deliberate starvation level poverty and compare it doesn't stand out as starkly and objectively a desirable alternative to today.

Now if you ask what would I do differently it depends on what level of power I've got to act with. Ideally, we can go back to first Iraq war and have Bush senior march on Baghdad. This would've aborted one of Saddam's genocides. Equally importantly, this would have kept the Shia Iraqi population's view of America as a liberating force. The standing in the desert and watching Saddam slaughter them thing still carried their mistrust of American forces after Saddam's actual removal later. That singularly stupid move of leaving Saddam in power, at the urging of most of the planet, drove the Shia population of Iraq back to Iran as their sole sympathetic ally.

Next step, after the removal of Saddam, whether we can do it back then, or only a few years ago as it really happened is to truly setup an occupation government. You don't bring stability to a region by immediately trying to transition to a democracy before the shooting has even stopped. The occupation government would be run by somebody with actual knowledge and experience with Iraq, rather than as Bush senior did by sending in a guy with zero experience and a two week lead to brief himself. The task you should place on this leader, is to setup a federated Iraq, with distinct and autonomous Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states. The occupation government would dictate things after taking input from Iraqi's rather than holding them to the tyranny of the majority as Bush and co allowed. The occupation would setup an initial constitution defining what laws and agreements spanned all three Iraqi provinces/states and what extent of autonomy they had to define their own systems of government. The American military's job would be to enforce this very basic constitutional framework. Each Iraqi state/province would be aided in setting up their own governments with a transition plan again dictated not voted upon. The transition plan would define the point in time when each state transitioned from occupation rule to a self determined future and rule of law.

The above plan on the whole would work, but Bush and co couldn't have managed post Saddam Iraq more poorly if they had actively tried to.

If zero time travel is allowed and we are to 'fix' things today, you need a lot MORE power. You need an army the size of America or Russia's and the political will to spend several years doing things the public will hate you for. The end game is still the same as above, a federated Iraq kicked off under a dictatorial occupation. To get there from today though you need to create stability. You need to take an army and march it across the entire country. As each city is cleared of militants you take a census of everybody and keep it because you need it to track down future militants. In entirely hostile locations like were ISIS has full rule, you bomb them into the stone ages before marching the army in. The surviving population is given full medical treatment. Now, as for sorting militants from civilians though, you do NOT use American style innocent until proven guilty justice. Instead, any fighting age males are considered guilty until proven innocent. This level of rule of law needs to remain in place until stability can be restored. You of course guarantee lots of innocent arrests, but your trying to prevent massive numbers of innocent deaths so it's required. As you stabilize the nation you can relax back to innocent until proven guilty and work on re-integrating the convicted.

You'll note that although the methods I'd declare necessary above are by any count 'brutal', they do not extend into Saddam's usage of genocide, torture and rape as the weapons of choice.

I just translated the lyrics. Damn, I forgot how difficult translating poetry can be. It took me quite some time. I tried to translate it as closely to the German meaning as possible, while still upholding or at least emulating some aspects of the poetic style of the original.

"Spring Greeting

1. (intro)
One beautiful spring day
A spring greeting – a little flower
Lay dying by the wayside

The poor thing had been plucked
Its existence doomed – Thrown away
To feed Death alone

2.
As I bowed down
To eye this misery
That bespoke brutal workings
Suggesting no remorse
A word escaped my throat
– Murder!

For this flower, so fragile
Was appallingly, purposely plucked
By the wayside, I assume
In a rush of ecstasy, absent-mindedly,
Someone bowed down
And bemused, elated, blushed,
In spring rapture, deeply delighted,
Discovered, clutched and killed it

Chorus:
And I asked myself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Oh forbid

3.
The fool, he was so moved
That he had no doubt
His mind was captivated
By its splendor, which he abducted
And unscrupulously corrupted
As he took it – gave himself to it
Only then he became aware - it was dying

And suddenly the realization
Flashed through his mind and all too honestly
Comprehension became confession
Into his heart, painfully,
His misdeed crept, all too gravely

Chorus:
And he asked himself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Oh forbid

4. (Bridge)
Shocked by his fallibility
He threw the beauty into the sand
Irritated by his misdeed
He retreated from his disgrace
‘Though he had desired the little flower,
Loved, adored, admired it,
He had not respected it
And this splendor by the wayside
Is now concluded and passed

Chorus:
And he asked himself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Oh forbid

And he asked himself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Man forbid

5. (outro)
One beautiful spring day
A spring greeting – a little flower
Lay dying by the wayside

Bereaved of the beautiful springtime
Of existence – doomed – of lust itself
A victim of vain humanity

It was me. It was me. I'm sorry.
It was me. It was me. Now I'm sorry."

Ok I'll try to divide up my wall text a bit better this time

I totally acknowledge that people in the past, and even in present day, some people have to live a certain way in order to survive, but for the vast majority of people that doesn't apply.


Taste:
Like most of the senses in the human body, the sense of taste is in a constant state re-calibration. It's highly subjective and easily influenced over mere seconds but also long periods of time. They say it takes 3 weeks to acclimatize from things you crave, from salt to heroin. That's why most healthy eating books tell you go to cold tofurkey (see what I did there ) for 3 weeks. It's all about the brain chemistry. After 3 straight weeks you aren't craving it. (The habit might still be there but, the chemically driven cravings are gone).
Try it yourself by eating an apple before and after some soft drink. First the apple will taste sweet, and after it will taste sour. Or try decreasing salt over a 3 week period, it'll taste bland at first, but if you go back after 3 weeks it'll be way too salty.



Food science:
One of the major things stopping me from not being vegan, was the health concerns, so I read a number of books about plant-based eating.
There is a new book "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger. If you want scientific proof of a plant based diet this the one stop shop. 500 pages explaining tens of thousands of studies, some going for decades and involving hundreds of thousands of people. I was blown away at the simple fact that so many studies get done. Most of them are interventional studies also, meaning they are able to show cause and effect (unlike observational or corrolational studies, as he explains in the book). 150 pages of this book alone are lists of references to studies. It's pure unbiased science. (It's not a vegan book either in case you are worried about him being biased).

At the risk of spoiling the book - whole foods like apples and broccoli doesn't give you cancer, in fact they go a long way to preventing it, some bean based foods are as effective as chemotherapy, and without the side effects. I thought it sounded it ridiculous, but the science is valid.
Of course you can visit his website he explains all new research almost daily at nutritionfacts.org in 1 or 2 minute videos.
He also has a checklist phone app called Dr.Greger's Daily Dozen.

There are other authors too, most of these ones have recipes too, such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr Joel Furhman.
Health-wise it's the best thing you can do for yourself. And if like me you thought eating healthy meant salads, you'd be as wrong as I was I haven't had a salad for years. My blood results and vitamin levels are exactly what the books said they would be.

Try it for 3 weeks, but make sure you do it the right way as explained in the books, and you'll be shouting from roof tops about what a change it's made to your life. The other thing is, you get to eat more, and the more you eat it's healthier. What a weird concept in a world where we are constantly being told to calorie count (it doesn't work btw).

Environmental:
I've read a lot about ethics, reason and evidence based thinking, as well as nutrition and health (as a result of my own skepticism). So I could and I enjoy talking about these all day long. On the environmental side of things, I'm not as aware, but there some documentaries such as Earthlings and Cowspiracy which paint a pretty clear picture.
Anyone can do the maths even at a rough level - there are 56 billion animals bred and slaughtered each year. Feeding 56 billion animals (many of which are bigger than people) takes a lot more food than a mere 7 billion. Therefore it must take more crops and land to feed them, not to mention the land the animals occupy themselves, as well as the land they destroy by dump their waste products (feces are toxic in those concentrations, where as plant waste, is just compost)
The other thing is that many of these crops are grown in countries where people are starving, using up the fertile land to feed our livestock instead of the people. How f'd up is that?
It's reasons like that why countries like the Netherlands are asking their people to not eat meat more than 3 meals a week.

Productivity and economics:
Countries like Finland have government assistance to switch farmers from dairy to berry. Because they got sick of being sick:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-from-dairies-to-berries/

The world won't go vegan overnight, and realistically it will never be 100% vegan (people still smoke after all). There will be more than enough time to transition. And surely you aren't suggesting that we should eat meat and dairy to keep someone employed? I don't want anyone to lose their job, but to do something pointlessly cruel just to keep a person working seems wrong.

Animal industries are also heavily subsidized in many countries, so if they were to stop being subsidized that's money freed up for other projects, such as the ones in Finland.

The last bit:
If you eat a plant based diet, just like the cow you'll never have constipation, thanks to all of the fibre
When it comes to enzymes, humans are lactose intolerant because after the age of 2 the enzyme lactase stops being made by the body (unless you keep drinking it). Humans also don't have another enzyme called uricase (true omnivores, and carnivores do), which is the enzyme used to break down the protein called uric acid. As you might know gout is caused by too much uric acid, forming crystals in your joints.
However humans have a multitude of enzymes for digesting carbohydrate rich foods (plants). And no carbs don't make fat despite what the fitness industry would have you believe (as the books above explain).
Appealing to history as well, when they found fossilized human feces, it contained so much fibre it was obvious that humans ate primarily a plant based diet. (Animal foods don't contain fibre).

The reasons why you wouldn't want a whale to eat krill for you is:
1. Food is a packaged deal - there is nothing harmful in something like a potato. But feed a lot of potatoes to a pig, and eat the pig, you're getting some of the nutrients of a potato, but also heaps of stuff you're body doesn't need from the pig, like cholesterol, saturated fat, sulfur and methionine containing amino acids etc And no fibre. (low fibre means constipation and higher rates of colon cancer).
2. Your body's health is also dependent on the bacteria living inside you. (fun fact, most the weight of your poop is bacteria!) The bacteria inside you needs certain types of food to live. If you eat meat, you're starving your micro-organisms, and the less good bacteria you have, the less they produce certain chemicals and nutrients , and you get a knock on effect. The fewer the good bacteria also makes room for bad bacteria which make chemicals you don't want.
Coincidentally, if you eat 3 potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have all the protein you need - it worked for Matt Damon on Mars right?

Let's be realistic, most of the work our war planes do has collateral damage. We don't simply use them on 'the bad guys', but again that is a simplification to allow you moral latitude.

Non-smokers are no better than smokers, I know since I used to be a smoker. Just because I decided that I no longer wanted to smoke doesn't mean I feel the need to go up to someone smoking and start telling them how much better I am that I quit. Again, I'm not any better of a person than they are, I just chose to do something different. That is one of the things you can't seem to grasp, because you continue to say that morally you are more good than someone who does not practice a vegan lifestyle. You aren't.

As far as the functional capacity for feelings, of course animals feel pain, it is a stimuli that helps in their survival instinct. That instinct is what drives them to avoid pain because it means they might not survive. It doesn't mean that they have the logical thought capacity to relate pain to more than an instinctual response. I am pretty sure that no pig ever felt pain and said to itself, I feel pain therefore I exist as a being, they felt the pain and instinct told them to get away from it. Plants even have stimuli that they will respond to in order to grow or try to avoid damaging forces, but they aren't self-aware. Neither are animals until you get to a certain level of intelligence, like dolphins or great apes.

I grew up in the country, I have seen first hand and used my hands in regards to the butchery you speak of. Never once have I had a pig who had seen another be slaughtered do anything that would give me the belief that they were responding in any other fashion than a "shit, flight time since I might be next" natural instinct that is in all prey animals. Factory farms may not be totally humane, and that should be reformed, but all they are doing in the end is killing prey animals on a much larger scale than I did growing up.

it is not "my" way or "our" way that is at issue but rather the fundamental questions of morals, ethics, violence and non-violence. when one has a choice in the matter, is not doing less harm always better than doing more harm? just as i do not consider myself superior for choosing not to harm or kill other humans or puppies and kittens, but instead look at it as the minimum standard of decency of not treating others the way i would not wish to be treated.

anyone who supports the killing of non-human animals is only looking at things from the human perspective-i.e. that of the oppressor. just as in the case of any form of violence and exploitation, the foundation of all of the false justifications against veganism are based on ignoring any consideration of the victims point of view. this is all too easy when one is not a victim of oppression themselves.

it is truly a very sad thing when mercy, compassion and empathy are considered as extreme while supporting torture, cruelty and death in the name of pleasure and profit is considered as normal and a matter of personal choice.

“For hundreds of thousands of years the stew in the pot has brewed hatred and resentment that is difficult to stop. If you wish to know why there are disasters of armies and weapons in the world, listen to the piteous cries from the slaughter house at midnight.”- Ancient Chinese verse

*quality

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The ten-dollar Founding Father without a father
Got a lot farther
By workin' a lot harder
By bein' a lot smarter
By bein' a self-starter
By fourteen they had placed him in charge of the trade and charter
And every day while slaves were being slaughtered
And carted away across the waves
Our Hamilton kept his guard up
Inside he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg steal borrow or barter
Then a hurricane came and
Devastation reigned and
Our man saw his future drip drippin' down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple
Connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain
A testament to his pain
When the word got around, they said, "This kid is insane, man!"
Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
Getcha education, don't forget from whence you came
And the world is gonna know your name!
What's your name, man?

Alexander Hamilton, his name is Alexander Hamilton
And there's a million things he hasn't done
But just you wait, just you wait

When he was 10, his father split
Full of it, debt-ridden
Two years later, see Alex and his mother, bed-ridden
Half-dead, sittin' in their own sick, the scent thick
And Alex got better but his mother went quick
Moved in with a cousin, the cousin committed suicide
Left him with nothin' but ruined pride
Somethin' new inside
A voice saying Alex, you gotta fend for yourself
He started retreatin' and readin' every treatise on the shelf
There would've been nothin' left to do
For someone less astute
He would've been dead or destitute
Without a cent of restitution
Started workin', clerkin' for his late mother's landlord
Tradin' sugar cane and rum and other things he can't afford
Scannin' for every book he can get his hands on
Plannin' for the future, see him now as he stands on
The bow of a ship headed for a new land
In New York you can be a new man
The ship is in the harbor now
See if you can spot him
Another immigrant comin' up from the bottom
His enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him
And me? I'm the damn fool that shot him

Alexander Hamilton
We were waiting in the weeds for you
You could never back down
You always had to speak your mind
But Alexander Hamilton, we could never take your deeds from you
In our cowardice and our shame
We will try to destroy your name
The world will never be the same, Alexander!

Yeah, I'm the damn genius that shot him

Just to point out, I didn't say that. I'm not taking a moral cue from how animals behave. I'm saying our species and precursors have a long history of eating meat and it turned out pretty good for us.

(aka - my ancestors are smiling down at me imperial, can you say the same?!)

For the record if i had to kill my own food, i would have no problem with that. I'd rather pay someone to do it for me - yes. But if i needed food and could get my hands on an animal, you better believe i'm sleeping on a full stomach that night.

But as for eating less bacon if you had to slaughter the pig - if you were a farmer, settler or nomad or something and you had pigs you'd probably eat lots of bacon. In society right now, it's pretty unrealistic to slaughter your own pig if you live in an average suburb. It makes more sense to buy bacon than slaughter a pig for most people right now, but there are situations when the opposite would be true and i don't think it would bother me (or you).

I find your second point more convincing.

Animals are serial rapists. I'm not sure why our diets should be informed by them. Clearly our teeth, and a great many other things, are pretty good clues to what we have historically eaten.

However. I love bacon, but I'm pretty sure I'd eat a lot less bacon if I had to occasionally slaughter a pig to get it. I don't have a moral objection to eating meat, I have an objection (and I am a hypocrite here to boot) with the almost hedonistic way we pay others to do the dirty work so that we might satiate our appetite. Where once our appetite for meat served as the necessary motivation in the face of the considerable effort we had to expend to get it, now I walk for 10 minutes, pay the equivalent of perhaps 10 minutes of my wage, and voilà, chicken ready to eat.

All of this would be "so what" if it were not for the environmental and health impacts this imbalance might cause, as well as the suffering we cause animals in our pursuit to ever drive down the price of flesh.

But yeah, if you have a small list of things you can eat affordably, and meat is one of them then, yeah, it's a bit different. I am fortunate enough to be fairly unrestricted in what I can eat...and yet I still choose to buy animal corpses wrapped in plastic. I'm trying to cut down though!

These videos just make me sad. When you see animals playing, showing affection for human babies when we have in the past so mercilessly slaughtered and taken away their own offspring.... it makes it very hard to forget that they are ALIVE and CAGED.

But of course, if they weren't, would they still be here? Are they better protected and alive than free and dead? I don't know, and there's no way to know what they'd prefer, but it's sad anyway.. sad we can't control ourselves at the very least.