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Quote by: StrongHeartsWin  Hi CoffeeSaint. This is an intro reply to your post #99 above which will have to come in several posts over a little time.
You put forth several ways or reasons in which one should promote vegetarians because you feel that I have not been gaining new believers to it by the way I have been putting it forth.
While I don`t agree fully with your thought on that, I do think your statements to that affect are fair enough and deserve to be considered.
First of all, I have to say my main purpose here on Volconvo is not to promote the agenda of vegetarianism or animal rights. My main reason for being here is to engage in debate because I enjoy debate and value it for improving my arguments and learning new ones against mine. But since my interests are in animal related fields, I do tend to focus on those issues for debate. However, I also am interested in religious debate and have in recent days been moving to engage in that topic as well.
All excellent comments!
(a) I have to ask: Here on Volconvo where people tend to hang out in certain topic forums that they are interested in and strongly opinionated on those topics, when these people enter into debate here, do they often change their opinions or their opponants'? or does the silent onlooking audience all of a sudden post after a flurry of assertions and rebuttals that they have been won over to a position? I haven`t come across that.
Those who hang out in the religion threads or the government threads are pretty dedicated to their opinions and you will see them fight for them tooth and nail -- and the silent audience of lurkers very seldom pops in to say they have been changed. I am not saying it never happens, but I would guess it is very seldom and rare. Wouldn`t you agree?
So, how could you even assume that I am not winning over an audience when that is seldom seen on any thread here on Volconvo or most other forums? Wouldn`t you think it would be unfair to hold my threads and arguments up for animals to a higher standard than others in regards to judging their success or not success? I think it is enough in forums on the internet for just the arguments themselves to be heard. It is so because there is no objective way to judge if an audience is being moved on their spectrum of belief at any moment. In addition, sometimes the information in arguments provided to the audience takes time to fester and grow within them. What they hear from an argument today may go unblossomed for weeks or months until they recall something from it and perhaps it causes them to rethink things.
I stick with my arguments on moral grounds and focus on reason being non-prejudicial because those are the points that I personally feel are most important to the issue of ending animal exploitation. Those are the reasons that caused me to change from a flesh eater. They and their reasoning rang true with me. I do not think I am so unique that only I have been or will be changed by those reasons.
Sure, I know the other arguments of health and for the environment, and I have posted on those as well. But, I tend to care more about the moral arguments. And to tell you the truth, the moral arguments are the ones that are often the ones best suited to meet the innitial comments of those who resist the argument for vegetarianism. Innitial comments usually hinge on "prejudicial reasoning" or "might makes right." We see this in comments about "top of the food chain, we are more intelligent, animals are here to serve us, etc..." |
You are right, I only rarely see lurkers come in and state that their minds have been changed by a debate. I do see some of the members admit -- usually grudgingly -- that they have been changed, but not often. I am not, however, holding your arguments up to a higher standard; I'm considering your purpose here in relation to my own. I, too, debate because I enjoy debating; I stick to a certain few topics that interest me, and that I feel I have some knowledge about. I no longer have an agenda, however, because I learned that my arguments were untenable and, more importantly, pushed people away from my side of the argument, rather than drawing them toward me. When I first started on this site, I argued for gun control, a position that I held as passionately as you cleave to hold animal rights, and though I still believe in gun control, I have stopped arguing for it -- bar some minor comments that slip out of me almost unconsciously -- for many of the reasons I named to you. To wit, I was arguing aggressively, attacking the moral and logical inconsistencies of my opponents' positions, and I was arguing for a very specific goal, which ignored many other pertinent issues, because I felt my goal was of tantamount importance.
I am not saying that you should learn from my example and stop arguing for vegetarianism and animal rights; you and I are different debaters, and our arguments are very different. But that was why I asked you what I did, because I saw parallels to my own experience, and I wondered if you were feeling the same things I did that made me give up.
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Quote by: StrongHeartsWin (c) You use the word "attacking" but I would call it "prosecuting." "Prosecuting" has more of a sense of deliberate and systematic approach to it in debate grounded with reason. Wouldn`t you agree?
Yes, I know people do not like personal beliefs strongly challenged or prosecuted, but that is the nature of debate and changing thoughts. Food is very personal because often it is part of family traditions or cultures and in the end it goes into us. Can`t get more personal than that!
But here is some reason with an analogy:
If something is believed by you to be morally wrong, aren`t you obligated to proclaim it is wrong and to fight it without apologising for it? I think you are. Were abolitionists wrong to strongly oppose with harsh words condemning the culture of slavery -- that which they viewed as morally wrong? I don`t think they were and "reason" cannot say it is ok to be strong about one moral belief but not so about another just because one`s opponant does not share the same moral measuring stick as you do. If one does say that then they are resorting to dismissive defense tactics as surely as most status quo sectors do when they are challenged for change. |
Changing "attacking" for "prosecuting" seems inappropriate because it assumes that you, as the prosecutor, are correct, and attempting to move the unacceptable behavior of others into a closer proximity to your own correct position; I don't see that your position has that much of the moral high ground. But I realize that you do feel that way, and so I won't argue the wording until I can argue the morality first.
You are obligated to point out things that are morally wrong, and I would never suggest that you should silence yourself. But I think you are making a mistake in your methods, in your prosecution, if you truly want to accomplish the goal of promoting animal rights. Of course, your other goals of debating for fun and the improvement of your arguments and skills are certainly achieved by aggressive debating, so by no means am I telling you that you must change your ways.
But I do believe that most people are almost totally ignorant in this area -- whether that ignorance is chosen or inadvertent, I can't say -- but they have not looked into factory farming and animal rights in the past, for the most part. And because the forces behind factory farming and other animal rights violations work in secrecy, knowing as they do (I would think) that their methods would put people off their product, people are not forced to confront the reality on a daily basis, as they would have been with slavery, or as they are with the war in Iraq, for instance. Animals, especially food animals, are not in our consciousness, they are not in our daily lives, except as food.
Thus you are not arguing with those who have confronted the reality, considered it, and formed an opinion opposite to yours; you are arguing with primarily ignorant people (though they may never confess that ignorance, of course) who are lashing out because, as you say, this is an intensely personal issue for them. When you are aggressive, I think you scare them off, shut them out -- and your ideas are not allowed in far enough to fester. As I said, I think your strongest arguments are your links; not because your written arguments are weak, by any means, but because the links, the videos, the facts, are fairly indisputable. The reason they have not converted more people until now is because they have not been seen, not because people have an anti-animal or anti-vegetarian agenda. I think your cause would have more success if you saw yourself more as a teacher, rather than a debater.
Whether you would have more fun that way, I can't say.
