You're viewing part of a thread.
I’ll reiterate my initial question: if this is the case, then what did you hope to get out of this discussion? Because as I’ve already said: either people agree with you or they don’t. There’s no wiggle room, here. The best course scenario was people going “I agree” or “I disagree” and then never talking to you ever again.
I thought this comment chain would go a lot like the other comment chain I made in this exact thread, where it was civil and constructive instead of targeted critique of the way I decide to present what I know without so much as attempting to offer things that could change my mind, because you so deeply think 'i wouldn't listen anyway' which to me sounds like you got nothing to say except you don't like how I speak, yet you choose to keep engaging which is the funny part to me.
and you responding with “yes, but I know a lot of vegans who have that as their definition, therefore it is more legitimate than your definition,
Never said it was more legitimate, only that it was legitimate. And as long as it's legitimate the qualified statements holds up. People even pointed out land clearing and we went back and forth on that, you make it sound like there was no argument to be had whatsoever but the thread tells a different story, and you sure don't suffer of picking out things that are unacceptable to you.
you believe the definition of veganism you are applying is valid, common, and, in some ways, universal.
Because any evidence anyone has given me to the contrary has been as worth, or worthless as the evidence I gave that it was. Would you like me to imagine a definition I haven't heard before on the basis that you don't like the one I'm using but refuse to supplant it? I really don't know what it is you want me to do with conflicting evidence of similar origin? I dismissed it as quick as you dismissed my anecdotal stuff, is that not fair? Especially when I qualified my whole comment on that definition. If you really think the premise is such an issue then challenge me to change it instead of just repeating it's an issue. I said what I said, within the bounds I said, because that's how I can be sure of my conclusion, within those conditions. Sorry you seem to take such offense to narrowly defined declarations on a hypothetical question online.
My entire argument is founded on two points: one is that the definitions of veganism are fluid and open to interpretation and that the particular definition of veganism to which you subscribe is so central to your hypothetical as to render the hypothetical largely pointless as a topic of debate.
If you really think the definition of vegan is so fluid then there's no answer to the question at all, because for some it will be and some it wont be. My narrow qualified statement pointed out a subset of Vegans for whom it wouldn't be okay, did it not? Then I proceed to defend it with things like how Vegans know land clearing kills animal, so in practice many make the choice to reduce animal suffering wherever possible, to imply that it logically follows that many vegans would not eat human farmed fly traps because that would almost necessarily imply they were human fed for disease control reasons. Even there I qualified my statements, at every turn I was acknowledging that there is no one way to be a vegan which you 'supposedly' agree with, but still think it's problematic when I talk about one of those definitions to analyze a hypothetical.
I just don't understand how if your premise is that veganism is fluid you'd have such an issue with a statement that outright says its not about every vegan. You already know, or claim to know, the definition is fluid, and you know my conclusion logically follows my premise, which is why you attack the premise. So let me ask you this, do you believe my premise, the definition of veganism I gave, somehow falls outside of your spectrum of veganism? Because unless you do, to me it seems the biggest thing your mad it is that I phrased a comment in a way that didn't invite argument or logical fallacy, but oh boy that didn't stop you now did it.
I made a narrowly defined claim and responded logically to counter arguments. Why are you so upset with my specificity? What does the thread gain from me making a claim that obviously overreaches and is not correct other than giving you an opting to say that it's wrong? Because for the life of me it doesn't sound like you want discussion, it sounds like you want to say someone else is wrong. If you wanted discussion I'd imagine we'd be talking about definitions of veganism in any capacity other than an anecdotal rebuttal of an anecdotal assertion, or that we'd be talking about the land clearing, how many flies these things actually eat, basically anything but what you're actually talking about. Instead, you refuse to give a definition even just as a framework to speak within, say the definition of veganism is fluid, however my definition which I from the start said was simply one way of many, is a problem and somehow outside your spectrum?
I can't in good faith believe you're upset that there's no discussion to be had, when your objection to my framework contradicts your supposed first point of your argument and you've been pulling discussion out of semantic and linguistic composition rather than focusing on any kind of substantive arguments about veganism and flytraps. The only inference I can walk away with is you have much more to say about semantics and linguistics than you have to say about veganism and flytraps which brings me back to the question what is you really want to talk about?
yet you choose to keep engaging which is the funny part to me.
Yeah, because I like arguing with people on the internet. I'm fairly up front about that.
you don’t like how I speak
Indeed I do not. I don't think you're very good at it. But life's all about the destination, not the journey, and we all have to start somewhere.
People even pointed out land clearing and we went back and forth on that
This seems tangential to the initial topic. I'm glad you got something productive out of it but if you wanted to talk about industrial farming and the impact of human agricultural practices on the environment, which is a fine topic of discussion, you could have, y'know...lead with that.
there was no argument
There were plenty of arguments to be had, but they weren't good arguments. Nobody's perspective or understanding of the world was improved by it, and I'm pretty sure nobody's mind was changed.
I dismissed it as quick as you dismissed my anecdotal stuff, is that not fair
Of course it's fair. But it's also a waste of everyone's time because you should have known before starting the discussion that this was what was going to happen. Like, this is so obviously going to occur and it's going to waste most people's time. If you ever go into a debate, you have to anticipate your opponent's responses and have arguments prepared ahead of time. What was your plan for dealing with the obvious response to your hypothetical for "I have a different definition of what constitutes veganism?" Because you either didn't anticipate that, or didn't care. You also didn't provide a lot in the way of initial details of the hypothetical. Seriously, you know you can fill out the body of a text post with quite a lot of text, right? You literally just asked the question in the title "Settle a debate: would eating a Venus fly trap be considered vegan?" and then, in the comments, clarified that your hypothetical was couched in a definition to which most people did not subscribe. If you had lead with "Settle a debate: would eating a Venus fly trap be considered vegan [if your definition of veganism is this specific definition of veganism]" we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because the entire argument I'm making is that you went about engaging with this topic in a way that is, quite frankly, annoying. You posed a hypothetical and then moved the goal posts in the comments by adding additional criteria after the fact. Just ask the entire question up front next time.
the biggest thing your mad it is that I phrased a comment in a way that didn’t invite argument or logical fallacy
You literally asked a question with the intent of "settling a debate." Of course it's annoying that you phrased your comment in such a way that didn't invite argument, because it reduces the debate to a pure difference of subjective definition. It seems like you just wanted to be right, so you moved the goal posts to include your definition, saying "well, if you look veganism like this, it's not okay to eat this particular plant or other plants grown as a result of industrial farming." Which...yes, we are all culpable for the iniquities of the world in which we live. There's a reason so many vegans are also anti-capitalists. This is not a new perspective. Fuck, the t.v. show The Good Place has this facet of modern human life as one of its foundational premises in the later seasons, that people are so wrapped up in a web of causality that their actions have innumerable unforeseen and unintentional negative affects on the world, rendering all of us incidentally guilty of a host of accidental evils. And having a discussion about that topic is all well and good. But you didn't do that. You asked people if venus fly traps as a food would be considered vegan. Which is, by comparison, a stupid fucking question.
If you wanted discussion I’d imagine we’d be talking about definitions of veganism in any capacity other than an anecdotal rebuttal of an anecdotal assertion. Not even a proposed definition in it stead, simply “that’s not a correct definition” which is a really weird thing to say for someone who thinks the definition of veganism is on a continuum
Do me a fucking favor: cite me. Seriously. Quote the exact phrase where I say your definition of veganism is objectively wrong in ANY reply I've given to you. In fact, I will do you one better. I will give you the links to my replies in this thread.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/5331374 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5331573 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5338345 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5344857 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5376311 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5385702 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5397623
I've commented on my perspective of how you've expressed your understanding of the lifestyle. I've said it seems superficial. That's my reading of it. But something being superficial or shallow and being "objectively wrong" are fundamentally different. You can't have an "objectively incorrect" opinion on a topic like this. You can have one that comes across as underinformed or which others think is weird, but those are themselves just opinions about your opinion, and they can't be objectively right or wrong, either.
In fact, I think we should try to make something very clear: I am not talking to you at any point about the actual topic of debate (which is to say the nature of veganism or, for some reason, venus fly traps). I agree that veganism is a fluid concept and its definitions muddled. But, once again, that's irrelevant.
Rather, think of me more as an English teacher commenting on how you have elected to construct (or perhaps more accurately, failed to construct) a logical argument or provide a well structured discussion, at the very least, of a particular topic that you yourself chose. You are approaching this like a student who thinks that your teacher disagrees with your conclusions: maybe you didn't like the book you were writing about and said as much and you feel you got a bad grade on your essay because the teacher disagrees with your criticism because it's a book she really likes. The reality is that she doesn't really fucking care what you think; she cares how you think, and how you construct and present your ideas. Nobody likes reading a shitty paper. I'm similarly annoyed by someone who starts a thread and fails to present a full argument up front and then proceeds to add additional qualifying information when they get responses that they don't like because they (presumably) just assumed everyone would be working off of the same definitions as them.
I did not add qualifications later to the statements I made, they started like that,. how many times can I say that from the beginning I was talking about one type of Vegan. I also never assumed everyone was working off the same definition, only that the one I used was eqully valid. Again you seem upset I started with a clearly defined a scope, and i don't think you'd find an actual teacher that would take issue with that. Knowing you like to argue online makes plenty of sense for how much issue you take with that. Thers absolutely nothing wrong with speaking within a scope you've defined from the very beginning.
I did not add qualifications later to the statements I made, they started like that
Text posts on Lemmy have a "Body" field to them. You did not put anything in the body of this text post. Ergo, you added qualifications later to the question in comments. Which is classic goalpost moving, by the way.
I also never assumed everyone was working off the same definition, only that the one I used was eqully valid.
If you pose a question like "Is doing X vegan" and you don't immediately provide a working definition, you are implicitly assuming everyone shares the same definition as you. That's how language tends to work. Like, imagine if someone asked you "what's the largest planet in our solar system" and you said "Jupiter" and then they responded "Actually, no, the largest planet is the Sun," you would probably say "the Sun is not a planet." If they said, "well, my definition of a planet is anything round and in space, so according to my definition the Sun is a planet," then you would probably say, "okay, then we have different working definitions of what constitutes a planet. Maybe you should have lead with that."
Again you seem upset I started with a clearly defined a scope
I'm annoyed by the fact that you clearly didn't and made it up as you got push back from people who gave you an answer you didn't like.
Thers absolutely nothing wrong with speaking within a scope you’ve defined from the very beginning.
Except, you didn't. You added that in replies after people answered your question in a way you didn't like. Like I know taking criticism is hard, especially from strangers on the internet, but you didn't frame this conversation correctly initially and then added important details after the fact, which is just not productive. You may not like it, but I'm trying to help you be a better conversationalist. Also, if you wanna have real discussions, don't do it on mobile. Bust out something with a real keyboard.
Text posts on Lemmy have a "Body" field to them. You did not put anything in the body of this text post.
Well the main reason I didn't put anything in the body of this text post is because im not the one who made this text post lmfao, but at least know I know where this disconnect im perceiving is coming from. You think im someone im not. Oh man thats a hoot, have a good one.
Oh, then why the fuck are you talking to me?