Emerald

In the China study, the blue zones where people live the longest are places associated with the lowest levels of meat consumption.

Veganism is just Vegetarianism minus two ingredients (milk and eggs). They're about the same level of restriction, which is not restrictive at all. Vegetarians and Vegans can eat most things and there's plenty of close or better substitutes. And 95% of whole foods are Vegan friendly anyway. And I honestly prefer the Vegan dairy options compared to the regular dairy options with the exception of cheese, which is difficult to imitate with plant-based ingredients. Yet again, I've only tried a few brands of Vegan cheese. Maybe there are some great ones out there. But on the Vegan diet you can eat pretty much the same thing as in the omnivorous diet. Like if I wanted to go to the store and get ice cream or pizza, I could do that now. So, there's no sense of restriction. And the ice cream is genuinely better than dairy ice cream (as is the yogurt, oat milk, and the coffee creamer), and the pizza is proximal to non-Vegan pizza. I can even have meat that tastes and feels like meat, though I don't really enjoy Vegan or non-Vegan hamburgers or sausages. So, I don't eat them much unless they're the only Vegan option at a restaurant. There's even Vegan salmon and tuna sushi that I get every now and again, which is pretty good. That said, I've been trying to keep my diet as a whole food diet as much as possible unless I'm eating at a restaurant. And I am plenty satisfied with that. But going Vegan was really only giving up 4 foods that I really enjoy... salmon, eel, steak, and cheese. The rest either have adequate or better substitutes, or I never liked them much in first place.

It's borne out in many studies organized into a greater meta-analyses that meat consumption is associated with higher all-cause mortality and the less meat and the more plants in a diet, the more it's associated with lower instances of all-cause mortality because of specifically because of meat's impact on LDL cholesterol. Here's an example of an abstract of a meta-analysis that includes 9 studies... https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/179/3/282/103471?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false#no-access-message But there was also another meta-analysis that included thousands of studies that showed the same thing. I just couldn't find the article, but I have linked it on another Veganism-related thread. And the conclusion of the larger meta-analysis is that diets lower in meat are associated with lower levels of all-cause mortality.

That's just a fantasy. It's not a real solution. Plus, 60-80% of farmland is used to feed the meat the we eat. And those are the big mono-crops like corn and soy. So, animal agriculture in any form is going to decrease biodiversity because the only way to feed the volume of cows, pigs, and chickens humans eat every year, we need lots of mono-crop farmland. And it takes 16 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef. So, meat is a very inefficient food to produce.

Meat consumption is linked with an increased risk of all-cause mortality primarily because of the saturated fat consumption. And that's borne out in many studies and meta-analyses. That's why Vegans bring it up, because it's the #1 death bringer to humans in wealthy nations. The issues people bring up with the Vegan diet only happen if people aren't eating enough calories. And you don't find many Vegans dying because of "nutrient deficiencies" unless the person has an eating disorder. Those who eat a plant-based diet tend to live longer lives with fewer strokes and heart attacks compared to meat eaters.

Factory farms are not part of the circle of life. And if we all hunted our food and consumed the same level of meat that factory farming currently enables us to, every land mammal would be hunted to extinction in a very short time frame. Also, if someone literally has no other option but to eat meat, then I don't have a problem with it. I disagree with people eating animals for pleasure and convenience and habit... but not for ACTUAL survival. But most privileged modern folk are not in that position. And a whole food Vegan diet is cheaper than a whole food diet with meat, dairy, and eggs. So my perspective is that our greater levels of privilege and power behoove us to take on greater levels of responsibility. And the prevalence of the Vegan diet shows how far we've grown as a species in terms of infrastructure and technology.

Factory farms don't waste anything. They sell all sellable product because it's how they make money. They use every part of the animal. It's just a myth that they don't. And they're operating off of razor-thin profit margins and are subsidized by the government to stay in business because it's so difficult to run the business in a way where it turns a profit. But yes, harvesting animals is inherently savage. There isn't a nice way to do it. Even the Halal method is a slitting of the throat. That's as nice as it gets, and having your throat slit is a violent death. Don't believe me? Look at videos of cows and pigs being killed in the "humane" way. Also, the plant and rocks thing is a common defense for an omnivorous diet, but probably the silliest and most dishonest one because no one who says it actually believes it when the rubber meets the road. If someone offered you $1000 to stab a stalk of broccoli or to stab an animal, I guarantee that you'd choose to stab the broccoli (unless you're a psychopath and like stabbing animals for fun) and you wouldn't even feel bad for stabbing the broccoli. And you'd probably think the people who choose to stab the animal over the broccoli are psychopaths. So, I'm sure that you intuitively understand the difference between sentient and non-sentient life.... and living things with a nervous system that can feel pain and living things with no nervous system that can't feel pain.

@Buck Edwards I can see why that's distressing. People who care about animals who aren't Vegan have a lot of unconscious inner turmoil buried under lots of different beliefs that enable them to maintain the status quo without becoming viscerally aware of the contradiction between their actions and values. And when someone challenges a non-Vegan who has Vegan values but who's not yet in a mental space where they're ready to make a change, it brings to the surface a lot of really uncomfortable feelings that can be quite overwhelming. And that person can start to feel a lot of shame and like they're the bad guy. And it produces a tendency to go into defense mode and to try to find reassuring narratives that show why Veganism is wrong/short-sighted/impractical/bad/unhealthy/etc. and that the status quo is okay. But you're not a bad person for not being Vegan. It's just that you might be a bit out of integrity with your own values and the commenter you mentioned probably drew your attention to the typically unconscious feelings of internal contradiction of being a non-Vegan who cares about animals. And shaming tends to backfire because it hits people with this awareness before they're ready for it. So, it's not a good rhetorical tactic to shame people unless they're already teetering on the edge of Veganism... and even then, it's not very effective and can backfire. When I first went Vegan, I had to deal with a lot of these uncomfortable feelings because I had to face with the reality that I'd been living out of alignment with my values for 27 years. And the dietary change gave space for those intellectual contradictions and the emotions they hid from me to make themselves known without any intellectual defense or cognitive dissonance on my part. And for about a week or two after I went Vegan, I felt really emotionally terrible because I couldn't unsee what I'd seen in myself. I also watched Earthlings, which was God-awful. So, that brought things really front and center to me to see how out of alignment my actions had been, as I cannot even watch animals be slaughtered on a computer screen without feeling totally traumatized and upset at how the world is. But I don't agree with using any kind of insults or shaming to convince people to go Vegan because people have to be in alignment to make that kind of change, and no amount of shaming will change that. It will just prematurely make a person become aware of all those unpleasant feelings and they'll feel like the bad guy... and then feel the need to defend their identity of goodness, which is a fundamentally human thing to do. But going through the posts on this thread, there are more anti-Vegan judgments than anti-omnivore judgments because Veganism is the minority stance. Some of the insults that I saw were things like the "spiritual ego" and "Stage Green oafs" and "those morons" and "Typical Vegan. They should have their own children" and "makes them look like a cult" and "misanthropic". But these judgments don't really bother me because I understand why people are saying these things... which is the same reason I used to say things like this before I went Vegan. And I currently feel a sense of alignment with my actions in this area of life. I've thought deeply on this choice. So, no amount of Vegan shaming is going to make me feel bad and reconsider because I feel solid in my values. So, it might be uncomfortable but this dynamic may have brought to your awareness a shakiness in your own value system. If you felt solid, the shaming probably wouldn't bother you so much and would just be mildly annoying. That said, he shouldn't be doing that if he wants to be effective in his activism.

@Buck Edwards Have you ever personally had a Vegan get onto you about eating chicken? Or is it just the way this video made you feel? The thing is, nobody likes to feel like they're being called out on doing something unethical. And no one likes to question the ethics of their behavior, especially when it's one as ingrained as eating. So, Vegans feel very threatening to people for that reason, because I'd wager that over half of people already had Vegan values. They just don't live in integrity with those values. So, the presence of Vegans in the world makes non-Vegans with Vegan values feel very defensive about their eating habits ad it draws attention to the cognitive dissonance of behaviors not matching up with values. As a Vegan, one of the most uncomfortable dynamics is going out to eat with an animal-loving omnivore friend. Then, telling the waiter that I'm Vegan for the purposes of food modification, and then the friend going into explaining themselves to me like they're on trial as to why they still eat meat. Always makes me feel super uncomfortable because I feel like they feel I'm judging them. But I'm really not. I ate meat and dairy for 27 years of my life. Then, even though most Vegans are pretty non-judgmental, there's this stereotype about all Vegans being in your face about it because that's what the mere existence of Vegans makes people feel. And you can find the odd example on the internet of the judge Vegan, so it puts a face to that feeling. I heard a statistic recently that there was a study done on people to rate how negatively they viewed different groups of people. And Vegans were the ones viewed most negatively at 74% of people having negative associations. I think that's precisely because people who agree with Vegans deep down feel uncomfortable around people that are walking the talk.

The reason why we're oriented towards social connection is because it's a inextricable need and instinct... not an addiction. And loneliness comes up if we lack human-to-human connection in the same way that thirst comes up when we're thirsty and hunger comes up when we're hungry. There's never been any time in the entirety human history (up until the past 100 years) that we haven't relied on a community of people to survive. So, it's wired right into our physiology. And the logic behind it is this... a human being alone in the wild is a dead human. So, it's wired right into you to seek connection with other human beings. Your entire biology is involved in the matter because community has always been how we meet the vast majority of our physiological, safety, and connection needs. And that's the 3 bottom levels of Maslow's Hierarchy.

That's a very specific high pressure hypothetical situation that is super cinematic and unrealistic. In most cases, it's just interacting with someone that gives off that vibe that "There's something about this person that feels a bit red flaggy." And in those cases, I just stay away and/or create distance. And it could be someone who's genuinely nice. There are plenty of nice people that give off red-flag vibes that their life might cause some drama.

That's a bit of straw man about the "defund the police" sentiment. Though I also know that some lefties are too lost in the sauce of their ideology and don't believe that the police are necessary at all. The idea that I've heard most often in lefty corners of the internet with regard to "defund the police" is to divert some of the money from overly-bloated police budgets that are used towards greater levels of militarization (like some police forces have a tank and military grade gear and weapons)... and instead to divert that spending towards other types of interventionists that are a better fit than the police in some cases. So, instead of it being the police that comes out in every single instance of public disturbance... if it's something like someone who's got mental health issues or someone is reporting a sexual assault case after the danger has passed to send a different kind of intervention team. It happens too often that the police end up swatting flies with cannons because they're handling cases that their MO doesn't fit very well within. And so, "defund the police" for many lefties is about diverting funds away from militarization and putting more funds towards a more multifaceted approach to intervention. Now, I'm not saying that that's the way I think about reforming the criminal justice system because I have some different ideas. But if you're thinking that most lefties don't recognize that crime happens and needs to be dealt with, you are uninformed.

I've seen how the bottom half of mankind lives. I know a lot of people from my hometown who have a very low level of standards for their own behavior. It was all pretty normalized in my hometown to not think very much about the ethical implications of things. And criminality-wise, I've known people who have been in and out of jail for a variety of petty crimes to more serious crimes. I even know someone who's in jail for life because he shot a convenient store clerk... and I have a friend from high school who recently got caught a couple years ago making kiddie porn with his 4 year old daughter. To my perception, you'd have to be living under a rock to not encounter people doing very dark and evil things. Maybe some people are sheltered from this, but I really don't understand how. It's right out in the open. Back when I was 20, I was technically homeless for a few months. And I was busking in the pedestrian area to make money. And there were tons of people who felt very comfortable showing me their evil side because I was downtrodden and young. So, I am quite aware that human beings are capable of so much darkness. And most people do behave in evil and stupid ways. But in my medicine journeys, I sat once as God and myself at once... with thick book of transparent pages sitting on my lap. And I could understand the life of each person that came to my mind by looking at the top of the transparent pages. And I could see the patterns of ignorance and pain that mangled the pure goodness into neurosis, foolishness, and evil. And in other journeys, I have recognized very clearly the inherent goodness that sits underneath all negative actions. And from that state, no judgment was possible. And so, I had temporarily resolved my own stupidity and evil during those experiences because I came into a deeper alignment with truth and love. And any claim that "humanity is evil" will put us into state of consciousness that's antithetical to truth and love. And it will cause us to over-focus on the symptom as "just part of our nature" and we will make no effort to resolve the root. But it is only because we are stupid and evil that we make this mistake. Humanity hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of our potential for goodness that sits as the foundation of our nature.

That's true. We do need more immediate solutions in terms of policy, institutions, and economy to manage the symptoms of what we have now and to shift to better systems. My point to the OP was not to discount the impact of greater degrees of psychological and emotional awareness over time. But that's never been the way I've conceptualized of the story of Jesus. I've never heard it framed as him taking God with him in any context. Maybe there could be some correlation there. But I've tended to see him more as a divine scapegoat figure to serve as the infinite in a finite body. And we individually don't need to bear the burdens of the infinite because he as already played the role of the finite who bears the infinite.

They either disliked it or were neutral about it. But I don't ever recall him saying that they hated it. They just didn't believe in any of the pageantry around it and saw through it. Though, lots of older folks had a hard time transitioning away from Communism because they'd gotten used to the way it worked. My sense is that, by the 80s, all the Soviet stuff had become background noise in Hungary.

I do have quite a lot of hope that human beings will create a lot of great macrocosmic shifts through deeper levels of psychological and somatic understanding... as well as deeper understandings of how to utilize emotions properly and how to have better relationships. Think about all the trauma that's coursing through our species. And most people have no idea how to handle that trauma, so it manifests individually and collectively in negative ways. And this impacts our institutions and structures and the way that human beings relate to them. So, my sense is that over the course of centuries there will be a lot more collective psychological understanding and more consciousness when it comes to raising children. And from the collective trauma healing, improved child rearing paradigms, and the rise of new technologies, better systems will be possible that far exceed any currently proposed solutions. That said, this will likely take 3+ generations to really start seeing the effects of our more trauma conscious and emotionally intelligent 10% of people leading the charge. But that ripple effect will keep rippling out more and more and will work itself out in subsequent generations. If you want something more immediate, then other solutions would be necessary. In our lifetime, people will be mostly at the same level we are now. But I do see this very new psychological and emotional awareness as VERY promising for the systems and institutions that we will create in the future. The old frontier was outer world. And now we're just starting to explore the inner world.

Yeah, it's a common pattern that most women experience fairly early on in their dating life. And it mostly comes from guys who are attached to the self-identification with niceness and never consider that they could be perceived as not so nice. And I think it has to do with the societal and pop-cultural association of shame and self-deprecation with being a humble nice person. But shame doesn't actually translate to nice behavior. Shame often gets expressed as bitterness and vengeance towards the perceived aggressor (in this case women). Like, I've never heard an actually nice guy complaining about how women don't give him the time of day because he's nice. But it's one of those common gender patterns that make people jerks without realizing it. Like, most women go through a "not like the other girls" phase where they want to conceptualize themselves as "more like the guys because guys are less drama" and therefore different and superior to other girls. I used to be like this when I was between the ages of 10 and 13, and had no idea that I was being a jerk because this was a popular trope in movies and shows at the time for female protagonists. And most men go through a "women don't like me because I'm nice" phase where they go into victim's mentality about how women only like assholes. And they start going on about how they're a victim to women friend zoning them. And a big part of it comes from misunderstanding what it means to actually be nice. And also thinking too logically and transactionally about relationship and thinking niceness is or should be the currency that buys relationship. These patterns were around when I was in middle school... and I'm sure before then too.

My husband is from Hungary which was under Soviet rule when he was born. He was born in 1977, so he experienced growing up under Soviet rule until he was 12 or 13. He said that the Soviets were already pretty weak by the time the 80s rolled around. And he says that everyone knew it was bullshit. He didn't know anyone who was idealogical in their allegiance to the Soviet Union. But they had parades and Soviet rituals stuff in school. Everyone complied but no one really took it seriously. The thing with the Soviet Union is that there was a lot of top-down force to pressure people into being patriotic. And less so in the later days. And so, it didn't quite take hold of people. It was just the government that was enforcing the allegiance. At least that was evident from his perspective... which may have been limited since he was a kid when all the Soviet stuff was happening. He moved to America in the year 2000, and he was really shocked at how nationalistic we are with every other house having an American flag out front because he wasn't used to people being patriotic by choice. And he thinks that America is a far more effective in its nationalist propaganda in that sense.

When I have that feeling, I just stay away or create more distance. People give off vibes. And you can sense important things about their potential tendencies through those vibes. That said, you'd also want to consider that you could be projecting onto them. So, it's worth questioning. But if someone's vibe is making you feel uncomfortable and you aren't sure if it's a projection or not, a little bit of distance would still be wise... just paired with some contemplation.

I notice that you didn't tag me in your reply to my post, which is something I find quite interesting. If you're not going to tell me what happened, then what reason do I have to believe what you said at face value? Your claim is that you have been denied education, internships, and jobs because you are a white male. And that is the core evidence that you've provided to show why you're critical of wokeness. And yet, you won't tell me about the education and work opportunities that you lost because you were a white male. I find that quite telling that you don't have any concrete stories about that.

This is just more victim's mentality and blaming the other to shift the burden of responsibility for your own desires and life onto others. And that's what's repellent to women... and men alike. Stop caring about what other people have going on, and focus on building your life in the way you want it. There are tons of toxic men and women out there. But I don't worry about them and what they're doing because they're not going to affect anything in my own life as long as I have healthy boundaries and I proactively build relationships with people that feel good to be around.

I understand that you don't like what I said. But you should be aware that that's the way you come off with your victim narratives. People will not interpret you as nice. They'll interpret you as a potential emotional and physical danger because of your victim's mentality. People who identify as victim's see others as villains. And then, they try to become the hero that defeats those villains. And that's what makes them end up playing the villain role. So, people will stay away from people who are in victim's mentality for that reason. People with victim's mentality can be dangerous because they don't see the vulnerabilities of the other... only their own vulnerability. I recommend really pondering into this dynamic. It's a bitter pill. But it's true.

My experiences are that guys who go "I'm too nice, I need to be an asshole." are usually already giving off some 'not so nice' tendencies. And they come across as desperate and needy... and potentially emotionally and/or physically dangerous because of that. And Narcissists often go underneath people's radar because people are susceptible to being seduced and charmed. And Narcissists are more detached. So, people don't catch on unless they have really developed that kind of radar. With the "Self-Identified Nice Guys", they're usually not as smooth socially and they're attached. And they believe their lack of assertiveness and self-deprecation makes them nice. It's kind of like awkward everyman male protagonist syndrome, where they define neutral qualities as nice. And so, they operate from a place of bitterness. And people can tell both before and after they decide to "become an asshole" that they're not very nice.

Okay, I thought you meant literally.

Why frame it as such an extreme rarity? It's probably more like 30% of people (men and women both) are capable of having a functional relationship. And the only reason why that number is low is because the general populace has a lot more to learn about relationships, emotions, trauma, and authenticity in interdependent relationships.