And this speaks to the virtue of our producing animals for their meat? No. It speaks again to the amazing amounts of selfishness we in the U.S. act upon.
Your belief makes no sense at all (your belief that you can accuse people of being selfish if they don't choose to put themselves out of business by manufacturing a product that people don't want).
You do realize it costs millions in equipment, land, and infrastructure to grow grain the way we do in the US, right?
Then you have the recurring costs of land taxes, labor, fuel, chemicals, etc.
Don't you realize that you can be the most altruist person in the word can't afford to grow corn like, on this scale, at a loss? It's physically impossible. They will lose everything if they try.
And then no one's getting any food off that land because the farmer is out of business. And no one has any reason to go spend millions trying to do the same thing the last guy did if they are just going to go out of business too.
So on what grounds do you think you get away with calling these people selfish for not doing what you say they should, when what you say they should do would literally be impossible?
For as illogical and impossible as your expectations are, you may as well try to claim these farmers are also being selfish for not using their superman powers to personally fly the grain around the world and deliver it faster than a speeding bullet.
We aren't willing to pay for vegetable crop what would be a living wage for a normal farmer,
I don't see any logical connection with your statement and what you tried to argue should happen.
How would raising the price of food (which is what happens when you raise farmer profits), result in that fallow land getting farmed to feed people after you stop using it to feed animals?
You still have all the same issues I described to you which would prevent that from being a viable option.
If you raise the price of the crops you're going to price even more of the international market out of buying it, and you'll likely see a reduced consumption among Americas of that crop. So you're not getting the increased demand from human consumption you would need to cause people to go flock to farm the fallow land.
but instead expect the meat product we are informed that we simply "NEED" to survive.
And so the farmer has no choice but to be involved in the animal side of the business if he wants to make that living wage.
Your claim is demonstrably false. People in this country make a living running farm businesses that don't sell meat or sell feed to meat producers.
Your claim is also illogical. If selling other farm products weren't profitable then nobody could do it to any significant degree - And therefore we wouldn't have USA grown produce on our store shelves.
The cropland would lay fallow due to the selfishness and expectations of the greedy/picky/selfish populace not getting what they want - instead of taking the time to understand what the basest level of what they actually need.
You ignored an important fact which disproves your claim:
We are already producing a surplus of grains for human consumption.
It's not that people don't want to eat corn. It's that they don't need anymore corn than they are currently consuming.
And so it's nonsense for you to try to accuse them of being selfish for not demanding someone produce more corn than they need. That actually sounds more selfish - demanding someone grow more corn than you actually need, for no reason, at their loss.
You're not exactly making counter-points. Several times you have raised "points" that I supposedly made, and then attacked them, when I said nothing of the sort.
You've only tried to give one example of that, and I just disproved your claim.
I disproved it by showing that not only have you tried to argue what I said you did (trying to claim that feeding crops to animals was taking food away from people). You even helped me do that by proceeding to restate that same argument in your same post.
I suspect you are very confused and thought I was accusing you of something something different, when I actually wasn't. I was referring to exactly what you are currently trying to argue.
What you seem to be doing is producing such ridiculous walls of text that you hope to scare your opposition into feeling outdone. Good luck with that.
Logical fallacy, "Ad Hominem" or "Appeal to Mockery". Probably also "Appeal to Motive".
Unable to dispute the points I have made, you're just trying to dismiss them by calling them names.
And then further trying to dismiss them by making up accusations about my points supposedly having ulterior motives other than simply being valid arguments in support of the truth.
You could not, if you tried to, establish that a single point I made was not relevant or logically valid. Which you would have to do before you could even begin to try to accuse my points of being what you claim.
Considering that the intention of my post has been nothing other than to make a thorough and truthful response, the fact that you interpret it as an attempt to "cause you to feel scared and undone" frankly says more about you than it does about me. Don't be scared of the truth. The truth is what will set you free.
Like I said - I don't have a plan. I just call things like I see them.
Calling things as you see them doesn't do anyone any good if you are ignorant of what you are looking at and have a very skewed and limited perspective.
I have pointed out above and in prior posts reasons why from both an ecological and economic perspective you have both a skewed perspective from your privileged western position and no real understanding of how agriculture and trade function on a practical level.
People are greedy/selfish/picky/ignorant. YOU are helping to perpetuate this with all your talk about how fundamental a "need" it is to have meat...
I have already established that meat is a nutritional need for most people around the world. You haven't disputed the reasons I gave for that. Which makes any point you're trying to make right now null, because meat is in fact a legitimate need for many.
and basically arguing for status quo.
Logical fallacy, "Strawman".
You are misrepresenting what I have argued.
I actually don't believe we should raise beef in the USA using a feedlot system.
But that has nothing to do with any of the points I made about why your arguments are wrong.
The arguments you've tried to make are wrong for the reasons I've already given, regardless of whether or not the current system is good or bad.
Well there are problems with how some of the world raises their animals intended for slaughter. You keep saying "most of the world doesn't 'X'" - but that DOESN'T CHANGE THE FACT THAT SOME OF THE WORLD DOES. Get that into your skull.
Your statement is not relevant to any of the claims you've tried to argue.
The reason is because no one has tried to dispute the fact that some animals are fed crops. Therefore, pointing that fact out doesn't prove anything you've tried to argue nor disprove anything I've tried to argue.
What is being disputed is your claim that feeding animals those crops necessarily results in people not getting as much food.
That's false for all the reasons I outlined.
Logical fallacy, "argument by assertion".That pretty much takes the sails out of the rest of what you posted, so I am not going to bother replying to it.
Merely asserting that your argument disproves the rest of my post doesn't make it true just because you assert it does.
You would need to logically demonstrate why your claim disproves the rest of my post before you could make such a claim.
And considering that I just refuted your arguments in this post in a way that I can guarantee you won't have a valid counter argument to - you can't use a refuted argument as the basis for claiming you've disproved the rest of my post.
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