i don't know about vegetarianism, but i just read about a study in baltimore where a genderless language seems to be developing. a genderless pronoun, at least. it's pretty interesting, check it out:
http://www.randomhouse.com/livinglanguage/2008/01/yo_a_genderneutral_pronoun.html

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awesome! i hope it catches on.

"Linguists and teachers have found that their students are using yo in place of he or she, along with its common usage as a substitute for 'you' or 'your'."
since when is that common usage? isn't yo just an interjection?

sidenote - on the wikipedia article about yo, one of their example sentences is "This hot dog bun is kickin', yo!"

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if you become a vegetarian, our friendship is seriously over.

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I'm not sure if this comment was meant as a joke or something, because tone is not conveyed well over the internet, but I am curious. Why would someone's dietary choices be a reason to end a friendship with them?

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it's always bothered me that there's a subset of pro-lifers who are totally fine with slaughtering entire species just because they are tasty and meat is convenient. but forcing a human being to wrap her life around carrying a creature which starts out stupider than a cow to term, sometimes regardless of the damage to her health/life/sanity, is totally okay.

vegetarian/vegan pro-lifers, while i still disagree with them, at least make some fucking sense.

/me has been watching too much political coverage.

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i'd imagine their answer is something about how people are inherently superior and more worthwhile than animals

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um. being pro-choice is a lot more than killing babies. hopefully you know this. depends on your perspective. i expanded my post, if you want a better idea what i meant

other than using singular they, i have never seen gender neutral pronouns that weren't alienating to people who hadn't already thoroughly learned them. when people start throwing zir and hir around, i have no idea what it means. i can get a lot from context obviously, but it's an extra effort to keep up. if you tried to use them people who didn't understand the purpose or didn't believe it, i imagine they'd get frustrated and stop listening pretty quickly.

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as a vegetarian who is madly in love with a transsexual, I think you can probably guess how I feel about all of this. :)

I am, however, a pro-choice vegetarian, and to me these beliefs do not conflict.

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here's how i see it -- being vegetariam rests (or would for me, if i became one) on the idea that animals have some level of consciousness/feeling/awareness/emotion/whatever. if they didn't, eating them would be like eating carrots. and since we have no access to their experience, and don't even understand our own brains enough to really gleam much from theirs, it's all conjecture.
i don't see a lot of that argument that couldn't also apply to fetuses. obviously the little blob of cells you get initially isn't doing much heavy thinking, but when does that change? and is there a line of awareness that has to be crossed before it goes from blobhood to personhood?
on the third hand, i hate to argue the "but someday it WILL be a person" card, but if being currently mindless means they don't have a right to exist, what's to stop me from going to the hospital and killing everyone in a coma? or everybody in deep dreamless sleep?

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i have been informed recently that i am too cold and logical, morally speaking.

i assume you're quoting someone else here but since the world revolves around me, i want to clarify that when i tell you you are "too logical" i'm not really speaking about your morality.

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so you're speaking about how i am always right and wise and correct and it makes you feel like the inferior wastrel that you truly are?

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hi dan its andrea. i'm joining the foray!
i'm prolife. i'm mostly vegetarian. some religions say don't kill animals, but ALL RELIGIONS AGREE that killing PEOPLE is evil and wrong and a sin.
I find it much much more difficult to understand when people are pro-life and also IN THE ARMED FORCES and PRO-WAR. fuck, that's just some bad theology. Christians, please: study your religion, folks. Christ is not down with that. Just think about killing a person, even a hypothetical person, and you might as well be a murderer.
Don't kill people, yo. Where my wombies at? Pray for peace, and for a world in which women will want to choose life for their unborn children.
i can't tell what gender very elderly people are sometimes unless they're wearing obviously gendered clothes. for that reason alone i would be in favor of some polite gender neutral term to replace "sir" and "ma'am". something along the lines of "your highness", only less formal.

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ALL RELIGIONS AGREE that killing PEOPLE is evil and wrong and a sin um well that is just plain wrong. you say study your religion, but the christian god was allll about killing. setting aside the times he killed individuals for various petty reasons, how many genocides did he commit or order the israelites to commit? as for christ, he said he came to bring the sword, not peace. and as i remember, he didn't say thinking about killing someone is like murder, he said being angry wtih someone is like murder. then he went to the temple and got angry at the moneychangers and knocked their stuff over. not to mention his entire existance was so he could be killed because god demanded blood sacrifice for sin, which is about as pro-death as you can get

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i like that you made the comment about vegetarianism and pro-life and i'm honestly surprised that some people may not have seen the connection. people say that the, "personal is political", but more and more i don't believe it. at least for me, personally, i don't think i could ever have an abortion, but i also acknowledge that it might be the right thing for someone else, so personally i'm pro-life, but politically i'm pro-choice. same thing with vegan/vegetarianism-it works for me, it doesn't for other people and i don't think they're the scourge of the earth because they eat meat.

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I'm pro-choice. Maybe that's a selfish thing, as if I were to get pregnant right now I would go insane and would rather abort than carry to term. However, I think late term abortions are murderous. BUT I am also a person that believes there are exceptions to every rule and the only absolute is that there is no absolute. You know, never say never.

I was strictly vegan for 6 years. I have been freegan, but mostly vegan, for the past two. I don't like the term "animal rights" as it doesn't describe how I feel. I have dated meat eaters in the past and won't any more. It is not about what people eat, it's about why they eat it. It's about thinking about one's actions. Most american meat eaters I know don't have solid reasons for why they eat meat other than habit and "it tastes good." I morally cannot eat meat. I have hung out with chickens and cows and seen what factory farming can do to animals raised as food. It is atrocious. I could happily have a garden and grow all my own food. I could not have a cow and slaughter it myself, so why would I eat one?

Drinking cow milk makes no sense to me either. The only animal sourced food I could justify is free-range eggs, as chickens lay them no matter what, and fish because I could catch that and prepare it myself were it necessary. I still don't eat either of those because my brain doesn't let me, but I know I could if I needed to.

I don't expect other people to follow my ethics. I am friends with a huge variety of people. In fact, I really only have one other friend that's vegan. But, as mentioned, I won't date someone who isn't at least vegetarian or (preferably) vegan. It just causes too much conflict. It's the same reason I don't date christians. There is just too huge a gap in ideology. I won't date people who self-medicate either. I think all of these things require a certain amount of self-deception and that is definitely something I'm not interested in.

And now you know.

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i suppose i don't have solid reasons for eating meat, but i don't have solid reasons for much of anything. i am too much a philosopher for my own good, and any justification i have for basically everything i do i instantly poke full of holes. i'm not sure why (if?) i believe people have an inherent right to exist, so it's hard to extend that to anything else. admittedly, if i'm unsure about my reasons, it might be morally 'safer' to be veg, but the same could apply to almost anything i don't have firm beliefs on, and that's really not workable. i'm sure i have as much self-deception as anyone, but i do try to be as aware of myself as i can.
regardless, i am more omnivore than carnivore. when i buy groceries it's almost entirely veg, except maybe bacon and chicken soup. my work makes it harder, as my clients all love fast food (if i never see the inside of a burgerking again i will not complain), and 90% of my meat eating happens at restaurants. but it's really not a large sacrifice for me.

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