@Zawash -- all true. And yet, just because Calvin and Hobbes and Bill Watterson are/were awesome, it doesn't make IP and copyright rules any more sensible.

My opinion: those respectful and well-done parodies and homages (say, Pants are Overrated's Hobbes and Bacon) are fair use. The person/people that drew Calvin peeing on things? Fair use also. There is a big difference between "tasteless" and "should be illegal".

Selling car decals with those images is different, because then you're treading all over the "not for profit" element of fair use. However, tracking down tons of small-scale infringers on that, or even worse, average people who simply buy the decals/shirts/whatever and likely don't know or care to know about IP and copyright laws is ... a losing battle at best, and punitive towards *fans* of the IP at worst.

There are many many examples of going to idiotic (IMO) lengths to protect IP. Disney suing local bakeries for drawing some character in icing on top of a kids birthday cake. Metallica suing Napster, University internet hosts, and even individual downloaders of their music. Teachers being sued for playing a clip of a TV show, movie, or song as part of their lessons. Etc. etc.

At some level, copyright is a good thing. Or at least a necessary evil. But the litigious zeal with which IP and copyright are "protected" these days seems like we've lost sight of the "art before commerce" element that is a huge part of why Calvin and Hobbes was so awesome. And why IP is something worth protecting (within sensible limits).

You can dance all you like, but you are still hypocritical. A war plane was never designed as anything other than a device to KILL. A hammer might have been used to kill, but it was not designed for it.

So, I am not trying to say you are less moral, I am just trying to get you to SEE that you are just as capable of making distinctions regarding your values as we are. We are all the sum of our parts, we choose moral stances and we choose to avoid others we consider to be less necessary. In choosing to follow the vegan dogma, you unfortunately have put yourself in a lifestyle that usually carries at least a thin veneer of "I am better than you", when in fact you have merely chosen to restrict your diet. It doesn't make you any better or worse than someone who chooses to quit smoking, or perhaps to only ride public transportation.

As far as winning, I have no intention of winning because this is an unwinnable discussion. I will neither be able to persuade you that you are being selectively moral and elitist, nor will you be able to persuade me that mankind should cease to partake in the flesh of other creatures (if we choose to). The most I can do is call you on your comments, you can take or leave my opinions the same way I would do yours.

I won't resort to a catchphrase like bacon, but the end result is the same, futile as you said.

There is nothing inherently immoral about creating weapons. The problem lies in what they are used for. Just like the most basic of tools, a hammer can be used to build or to kill. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have invented the hammer. The onus is on the person using it.

In either case, that has little to do with the factory farming holocaust.

What you did there is called an appeal to hypocrisy fallacy. You're saying vegans aren't morally perfect, so they have no place to tell us about morality. It's a derailment of the actual issue just like how you've previously used an appeal to nature, and an appeal history as well.

After that most people try the appeal to futility. And failing that they'll say something completely illogical such as "bacon tho" just to "win" the conversation, because it's not possible argue with something that unreasonable.

Like I mentioned in one of the other comments, I've said all of this myself in the past, I 100% believed it in the past, but eventually coming to the logical conclusion that I was wrong. I only had to accept that all of the animal exploitation I contributed to in the past was wrong, and decide that I no longer want to be apart of it. I can't take back the stuff I did, but to continue doing so knowing fully the extent of the consequences would be the poorer choice.

You don't need to morally perfect in order to solve a very obvious problem. As with war as well, it's often it's about choosing the less bad option, after weighing in all consequences.

@ahimsa

seriously?
quoting to rebutt an obvious sarcastic comment?
is it that hard to even attempt to be even a tad original?
do you REALLY think i am promoting actual violence?
really?
and you respond with a level of pretentious twattery that you should be ashamed of.

are you even remotely aware you literally made my point on how some vegans lack the basic self-awareness to realize they are being massive hypocrites and tools?

you trot out those tired,and boring,self-effacing morality/ethics tropes as if they were written on mount sinai,and then have the audacity to not even own your own egocentric bullshit.

jesus..vegans are such intolerable pussies.

because YOUR vegan philosophy is egocentricism on narcissistic steroids,and you lack the basic self-awareness to even have the skills to acknowledge that you are literally smelling your own farts,and calling it wisdom.

there is another vegan on this site that i really wish would put his two cents in,because he at least is aware of the hypocrisy and is an absolute delight to engage with.

but YOU...
self-awareness may be too tall an order it seems.
as you rant and rail against the inhumanity and suffering of the agri-animal on a fucking machine that 10 yr olds assembled to put together in a country where they dont even have the most basic of necessities met.

sitting at a desk dressed in clothes that ANOTHER 8 yr old sewed together,working 18 hr days at 23 cents an hr and is beaten if she slacks,is late..or complains.

the list of human oppression,slave labor and human trafficking that YOU benefit from is legion,and your lack of your own hubris,privilege and hypocrisy is,quite frankly,offensive.

so you can sit there in your own little smug fart cloud and self-righteously condemn the rest of us for choosing to enjoy bacon and convince yourself of your own superior morality and purity of ethics,but the reality is this:

you don't give two fucks.
you are an over-privileged,over indulged little shit and is no better nor worse than the rest of who travel through this life..making our own choices and being responsible for them.

the ONLY thing you truly care about is your little habitat and how others behavior affects your tiny,precious little world.so you go ahead an be a vegan for "moral" and "ethical" reasons,because it gives you the "feel goods".

and i say this with all humanity and honesty:
if you are vegan for moral and ethical reasons,then good for you mate.you made a conscious choice and have stuck to it.bravo my friend.

but don't try to push your own little inane philosophy on the rest of us.we may be assholes for eating meat,but at least we are not hypocritical,contradictory assholes.

now if you want to discuss the benefits of a vegan diet.
great...i am down.
if you wish to share why being a vegan for YOU is a philosophy that works for YOU and is a choice YOU made...then great.i love understanding why people chose to do what they do.

but if you keep attempting to make this purely a morality and ethical dilemma,while ignoring YOUR own philosophical and moral inconsistencies.

well..then we have nothing more to speak about.
enjoy the smell of your own farts.

/cockpunched

It's pretty hard to have a sense of humor about this subject matter after you've seen a dog moving around right after it got skinned alive so that some douche nugget Kanye wannabe can wear a fur coat.

This whole video seems to fall under the misconception that vegans are vegan because they don't like meat. When the reality is that it's from an ethical stand point. Otherwise you aren't vegan, you're just eating a plant based diet. People are vegan for all of the same reasons you guys aren't eating dogs and cats.

You really do have to have a disconnect once you realise that people love eating a creature that has the intelligence of a 3 year old child, has it's testicles ripped out, tail chopped off, and teeth pulled out all without anesthetic. Lives a tortured life for about 6 months in a small cage with a concrete floor where it hasn't got enough room to turn around, until it finally gets either forcibly impregnated, to keep the cycle going or just killed, so someone can eat smoked bits of it's flesh. Because apparently they've never heard of smoked paprika powder.

It does get pretty tiresome when you can speak pure logic and reason, and people brush it off with something like "bacon tho". Especially when they're otherwise intelligent people. But when it comes to this issue, they throw up a wall, because years of advertising has done it's job very well.

It's now proven fact that bacon gives people cancer. Yet people are still eating it. I have a feeling people would still eat bacon if it made their dicks fly off.

"I smell bacon. Do you smell bacon? But all I see is this little piggy. What the hell?"

Pollute the water and then sell the clean stuff in bottles. Why not the air we breath as well? In Spaceballs (1987) they stole other planets air, and enjoyed a nice can of Perri-air. A company called Vitality Air sells cans of Canadian air to China. Next we'll be taking the Coke vs. Pepsi air challenge. Which brand has that real healthy air flavor? Now comes in bacon, cotton candy and Grandma's house scents.

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!

That's certainly your choice. I'll roll the dice any day if it means bacon. I respect your right to take or avoid the risks you wish until you try to remove my right to make my own choice.

It would be nice, but no, wild boar are notoriously dangerous and aggressive, and also incredibly destructive and fertile, I don't think a sterilization program would work for many reasons. What they really need is a huge, repeating, mass hunt with big prizes (to get enough people to join for a clean sweep) so they actually eradicate them. Leaving them alive in the wild, even if neutered (which I don't think could work on pigs, since one missed female can repopulate so quickly) means years of horrendous destruction of the already endangered habitats in Hawaii.
BUSTED!!! I knew it. I've wanted to ask one of you...do pigs know what to say to someone who says to them "When pigs fly"?
.
.
.
A: 2009 buddy....swine flu.

I'll disagree that's it's perfectly fine food. Bacon is a type 1 carcinogen. Which means there is no doubt that it causes cancer. Non processed pork, is a type 2 carcinogen, which means it causes cancer, but they need more data to confirm it.
The risks aren't quite as high as with cigarettes but it's an extra set of dice I'm not going to roll. That's information from the W.H.O.

I'm not sure if this method would work in Hawaii, but they've had a lot of success in Europe with stray animals by using a catch a release program http://carocat.eu/the-catch-neuter-and-release-approach/. It's a little slower, but not that much since cats and dogs have a pretty short life-cycle when they are stray. I think you could make a few alterations and, the invasive boars instead of running away from hunters, would begin to approach them instead, and you could register, and neuter them.

Damn you blew my cover. I'm am indeed a pig, hence my bias in this thread. Here's a picture of me and my boat driver in the bahamas http://www.tecnologia-ambiente.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/maiale-isola.jpeg

You're right, they often get either just the flavor or just the texture, but not often both at the same when it comes to mock foods. Although it seems like every other week a new company is coming up with products that get closer and closer to real thing. Gardein "chicken" tenders for example. I actually find they taste better than the real ones(yeah I didn't think it was possible for chicken to taste any better either!) And hey no cholesterol

I don't see it as a sacrifice, not when I'm the one reaping all of the benefits. The knowledge that I haven't doomed a sweet piggy like the one in the video to stand in a 2x3 foot cage until it collapses is more satisfying than the flavor of the best bacon . Not to mention health benefits, environmental (and some asshat farmer gets less money too is pretty satisfying too haha)

Lions in a cage most certainly wouldn't eat you. They would attack you and kill you out of fear and protection of their territory, perhaps even out of the fun of it, being feline. Assuming they were well fed of course which most animals in captivity are. But they would not bother wasting the energy to eat you when they are fed much tastier and healthier food.
There are also plenty of documented cases were a lions maternal instincts take over and they protect an infant animal. such as this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRUXU172vGg (there is a similar few where leopards save monkeys by returning them to trees etc)
It goes to show that even carnivores with strong killer instincts are able to see compassion, and that they only kill out of necessity to survive. When survival isn't factor anymore the rules are completely different.