⛧ First Church of Hypocrisy, Blasphemy, and Self-Righteousness ⛧

A description, if you've never seen Himalayan Blackberry brambles before. Imagine barbed wire but nastier, which grows everywhere it can reach and becomes these ugly nasty tangles of evil like the thorny vines from around Maleficent's castle in Disney's animated classic "Sleeping Beauty." They wear down shears, grow so fast if you leave any left in the ground they'll be back in a week, and about the only thing that does any good against them, remarkably, is goats.

They choke out the undergrowth of forests, them and English Ivy both competing to see which can outperform kudzu. English Ivy kills trees by strangling them and covering their leaves. Meanwhile Himalayan blackberry covers almost all of the forest floors and grows everywhere it can. You can't go more than about 20 feet in Oregon without finding massive thorny tangles of that stuff. If it wasn't for Oregon's attempts to keep it under control, the whole state would soon be nothing but Himalayan Blackberry and English Ivy. All the trees would be dead and all land animals would get caught in the blackberry tangles and die. The whole state would look like it was Maleficent's domain.

I really cannot stress how noxious of a weed these invasive blackberry vines are. It's like the Huns of the plant world. Kudzu is tame compared to this stuff. Pretty sure the only reason the government doesn't use a flame thrower on them is they don't want to risk hurting the few native plants that manage to grow in the few tiny spaces those two invasive weeds haven't yet conquered. About the only way to really get rid of it is to dig up the entire area with heavy machinery and incinerate the plant and the soil together. Even the goats only manage to keep us from getting drowned in thorny vines of iron-hard wood.

So I ran across this post on Tumblr, of some idiot vegans making the whole "meat is bad for the environment" argument. Which includes such dubious stats as "methane is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2" and that manure also releases "nitrous oxide" (whatever the fuck THAT is), which is supposedly 300 times more potent than CO2.

Here was my response:

So collect the fucking methane and burn it for fuel. Problem fucking SOLVED.

It always pisses me off when jackass vegans make the “environment” argument. First, we’re past the point of no return already; even if everyone magically converted instantly to green energy RIGHT THIS INSTANT, we’re already fucked. The planet will live on, but we humans are already fucked and it is too late to change that.

Secondly, you have better odds of forcibly evolving the ability to fly by flapping your arms and jumping off a building than you do of ever getting humans to give up meat. We fucking EVOLVED to eat meat, we need the fucking protein to fuel our brains. But of course, vegans don’t eat meat and so their brains shrivel up and start to die.

It is not possible with current human physiology to have all the protein needed in your diet without eating a fuckton of nuts and soy and so on. And gee, somehow we never ever see the stats on the environmental impact of humans all going vegan. It’s just always assumed to be better than raising meat. But, hey, what do our meat animals eat: PLANTS! And guess what? THEY ARE MORE EFFICIENT AT DIGESTING IT THAN WE ARE. Seriously! When is the last time you digested grass? Food animals can digest more kinds of plants than we can, and get more out of the food they do eat than we do. Plus, food animals MAKE THEIR OWN PROTEIN, which is something humans cannot do. So odds are, humans all going vegan would be WORSE for the environment, not better.

Third, let’s say everyone gives up meat. Congratulations, now cows and chickens and turkeys are probably going to go extinct because humans don’t care about anything that doesn’t profit them. Furthermore, cows and chickens have been symbiotic with humans for far too long for them to survive in the wild; cattle would go extinct if we didn’t eat them. We would end up having to feed them and water them to keep them alive anyway, and if we’re going to do that, we may as well eat them.

So basically: FUCK YOUR STUPID WORTHLESS, ILLOGICAL “LOGIC.”

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Just wanted to add something else here: gee, somehow the vegans always forget stats like the one that says things like arugula (and who knows what else) use far more water and other resources to produce than is worth it. So yeah, they keep going on about how bad meat is for the environment but they always conveniently forget that a lot of vegetables humans eat are wasteful to grow. Shit, how much water does watermelon need? Oh, and lettuce: human in the first world love the shit out of lettuce, but human bodies aren't even capable of digesting it! And celery isn't much better.

The point is, they keep thinking everyone is going to fucking magically give up meat, and that when they do, the world will be saved by the power of rainbows and puppies because MURICA! Typical fucking first-world hipster thinking, if you can call it "thinking." There are no fucking easy answers, people!