May 14, 2001

5:25 PM

Meatfilter?Mistyped URL's usually serve you up a porn site, annoying ads, or endless spawning windows. This one though, gave me a chuckle.

note: you probably don't want to click on any of the links 'cept for the meatfilter one
posted by skwm (25 comments total)

Previous meatfilter news.

Still waiting for Meatlifter and Metatrifle to show up. . .
posted by rodii at 5:34 PM on May 14, 2001

Has anyone noticed the page that pops up if you go to MetaTalk.com? Maybe this is the solution to our user problems: professional psychic help!
posted by darukaru at 5:50 PM on May 14, 2001

Is anyone else vaguely annoyed by sites like Meatfilter? I'm a vegetarian, but for purely personal reasons, as all sincere vegetarianism has to be -- it seems like all of this "vegetarian news and community" is composed of people buying into the idea of vegetarianism as an ideology. I'm a vegetarian because I don't think meat is necessary to my life, and therefore not worth killing animals for -- but that's my priorities. I couldn't care less about what other people choose to eat, much less any kind of "vegetarian movement." Anyone agree/disagree with me on this?
posted by tweebiscuit at 6:16 PM on May 14, 2001

Being a nefarious baby-killing-meat-eating person, I can only shoot my mouth off on this topic. That said,

it seems like all of this "vegetarian news and community" is composed of people buying into the idea of vegetarianism as an ideology.

Why does having an ideological base mean that someone is "buying into" something? Everyone has a set of ideological assumptions that shapes the way they think/feel in some way. I don't think that like-minded people are necessarily "buying" into an ideology. Perhaps a more appropriate way of seeing this is as a group of like-minded people discussing common ideas and feelings and creating a community through this connection...(and it's done with all sorts of ideologies in society)

Many people do see vegetarianism...or lifestyle choices in general...as not just personal but also political, Which seems to be your deeper point of contention, tweebiscuit.
posted by Ms Snit at 7:28 PM on May 14, 2001

tweebiscuit: It's not usually the groups themselves that bug me, (live and let live?) so much as the people who will associate you with them straight off the bat.
I have been in situations dozens of times where I have had to mildly state my vegetarianism, and get an aggressive and offensive reaction from people. You know the sort of thing...they have a preconception of you...they start to foam at the mouth...wish I could think of an example....
I wish more people saw polite manners as a lifestyle choice in general.
posted by Catch at 7:56 PM on May 14, 2001

Ms Snit, you're right -- but really, any vegetarian group more or less has to be political in nature, unless they're just exchanging recipies and whatnot. Unfortunately, I know plenty of "evangelical" vegetarians/vegans -- they hand out pamphlets on the street! That just strikes me as obnoxious, and missing the point entirely. (Evangelism in general is obnoxious, of course.)

And Catch -- I know exactly what you're talking about.
posted by tweebiscuit at 8:53 PM on May 14, 2001

Missing what point? There's a strong moral argument, a stronger environmental argument, and an even stronger medical argument for a vegetarian diet. What's wrong with a group of people organizing politically around a common interest and common goal?
posted by sudama at 9:40 PM on May 14, 2001

Tomorrow on Metafilter: a discussion of the relative merits of Doric vs. Corinthian columns somehow morphs into a heated abortion debate...
posted by yalestar at 9:47 PM on May 14, 2001

There's a strong moral argument for becoming a fundamentalist Christian, from their viewpoint. How does this differ? In each case, someone is trying to ram their ideology down someone else's throat (literally, in the militant vegs' case), and each group would love it if its opposition's way of life was eliminated.

So, the point is live and let live--if you want to behave in a certain way, just do it. If your way of life has obvious benefits, people will notice and be converted of their own accord. Going around banging a superiority drum earns you no friends (except among the already converted), and discredits your cause.
posted by darukaru at 10:00 PM on May 14, 2001

Arguably there are strong health arguments for occasionally eating meat, such as that only eating vegetables will cause missing out on some essential vitamins.

As a meat eater, I'm sympathetic to the vegetarian cause. I believe it's a fine lifestyle choice, but you couldn't make me side with you on moral issues. After all, as any philosopher can tell you (except maybe Peter Singer) there is no one true moral or ethical background. regards...
posted by drezdn at 10:42 PM on May 14, 2001

Quick, time to register "metameatfilter.com" !!
posted by muppetboy at 11:21 PM on May 14, 2001

sudama -- I agree with you. Those are some of my reasons for vegetarianism. But a) morals are relative, so lobbying for them is evangelism. b) unfortunately, not everyone is capable of caring about the environment. it's just not a priority for some people, and that's fine with me. c) no one's ever going to be convinced that eating meat period is going to radically worsen your health. "Hey, my grandfather's been eating meat all his life and he's 80!"

The point: no one is ever going to accept anyone else's morals just because of advertisement. "Hey, you know what? Eating beef is wrong! I just never thought of it that way before!" Those that do are just bombarded by exterior feelings of guilt that they don't really interally agree with. The only reason anyone will ever become a sincere vegetarian is if they make personally based on their own morality.
posted by tweebiscuit at 12:22 AM on May 15, 2001

This reminds me of one of my ol' favorite failed companies.. typo.net -- they registered a bunch of misspelt domain names and redirected you to your intended destination (and showed a banner ad in the process). They had yaho.com and microsorft.com i believe.. Too bad they went away, I would regularly use yaho.com just to support them.
posted by dennis at 2:22 AM on May 15, 2001

On topic dennis! This thread is about vegetarianism.
posted by crasspastor at 2:35 AM on May 15, 2001

Well, you know, personally I have been a cannibal for most of my adult life. I feel a lot healthier eating plenty of human flesh. That's why I hang around outside schools and malls and abduct people and kill them.

Look, don't go trying to ram your ideology down my throat - I understand that you don't like eating human flesh, and I can appreciate your viewpoint. But don't try to tell me that it's wrong to kill young people and stack them in my freezer like cordwood to eat later. That's a personal decision, alright? It's just up to me.

I find it extremely annoying that non-cannibals have turned this from a personal issue into a political one, banding together into a movement, to make cannibalism a crime and then persecuting those who make the choice to eat human flesh. My morality tells me that it's alright to eat stupid people. Your morality might tell you something different. But your bogus sentimentality and squeamishness about eating people does not give you the right to tell me how to live my life. And anyway you eat animals; how do you know that animals don't have feelings?
posted by riddley at 6:56 AM on May 15, 2001

Everyone here who thinks we evolved to have huge brains, posable thumbs, bipoedal motion, and peripheral vision so that we could outwit and hunt down potatoes please raise your hand....




...just stokin the flames ya'll. Be nice.
posted by glenwood at 7:23 AM on May 15, 2001

opposable, bipedal, dictionary...
posted by roboto at 7:36 AM on May 15, 2001

Don't be a poedant.
posted by rodii at 8:32 AM on May 15, 2001

riddley -- if we take this discussion any further, we're in philosophy of ethics territory. Yeesh.
posted by tweebiscuit at 8:54 AM on May 15, 2001

...just stokin the flames ya'll. Be nice.

Go here.
posted by cCranium at 10:16 AM on May 15, 2001

Everyone here who thinks we evolved to have huge brains, posable thumbs, bipoedal motion, and peripheral vision so that we could outwit and hunt down potatoes please raise your hand....

Hey, it works for gorillas (Gorillas are largely vegetarian and have the characteristics above in some form, except for bipedal locomotion.) Argument by affirming the consequent doesn't always work. (i.e. Just because carnivores have certain adaptations, doesn't mean that having those adaptations requires that you are a carnivore. (Of course, determining the appropriate diet of humans through by appealing to natural history has been (and continues to be) a long and ugly fight. I'm not trying to propose and answer to that debate; I'm only trying to get the logical fallacy that glenwood stuck in the fire out before toxic fallacious smoke chokes us all.))

*iceberg attempts to extinguish the fire, as he is almost entirely composed of water.*
posted by iceberg273 at 11:04 AM on May 15, 2001

My favorite mistyped URL is www.whitehouse.com (it is a porn site). As a network admin, when I am asked to look into internet abuse on the company WAN, I ask the person to give me the web site for the White House (governmental version). More often then not, the concerned individual will come back with .com as opposed to .gov.

Which just one reason why I refuse to waste my time scanning usage logs.

Another reason is "TMI".
posted by perogi at 1:21 PM on May 15, 2001

Wow. riddley's comment bears a very uncanny resemblance to certain passages of my last english paper.
It's rather unnerving.
posted by sonofsamiam at 3:51 PM on May 15, 2001

If you look at Meatfilter now, you'll see that they've started a thread to comment on how "out of hand" this thread has become.....oooh, it's like that episode of Star Trek where Mr. Spock was evil and had a cool goatee!
posted by briank at 5:52 PM on May 15, 2001

Well, this did get a little confusing -- and it's my fault. Sorry, everyone.
posted by tweebiscuit at 6:05 PM on May 15, 2001