My video on The Amazing Atheist's rebuttal

[Kanade]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3qknwpHosQ

It's my first video and just started this channel so it doesn't have any subscribers yet but i figured now would be the best time to start doing one.

I hope you don't mind me posting my video on here. Also don't mind the accent.

[Twizelby]

great video! Exactly the things I thought about! The video needs more going on though if you get serious about it. there are free programs that allow you to pull video and audio from youtube. Also if you want to stay out of the video you should use images like VA.
subscribed I look forward to hearing more from you!

[bobo0100]

there are free programs that allow you to pull video and audio from youtube. Also if you want to stay out of the video you should use images like VA.
subscribed I look forward to hearing more from you!

He used the audio from the amazing atheists video, I also would not have used the video as it's a very spontaneous, and not highly structured video. I was thinking it would be hard to cut it in a way that would retain structure, this video proved me wrong.

He did use images, as for quality and quantity I think it was enough to keep the viewers eye, but not too much to distract from the point of the video.
-----------------------------------------------
As for my views on the video. I congratulate you on making a well produced, highly structured video, in witch you remain objective, and admit your bias.

Content:

Around the 40 second mark you stated that "the amazing atheist is a youtubers well known for his videos criticise ink veganism and veggateranism" although this is relevant to your video it paints a false picture of his channel. Maybe something along the lines of "the amazing atheist is a youtuber whom vlogs his criticisms of world issues, this video in in regards to his criticisms of vegan and vegaterianism."

Looks

This may be what Twizelby was hinting at. Your video is very plain. The background is a flat black. Altho this is a colour I like it's not the best thing in regards to keeping an audience. I am an inspiring graphic artist, and would happily make some graphics for you. However I never said it would be of say the vegan atheist quality. PM me if you are interested.

The dimensions of your video are off, you can see where the cow ends on the video and where the youtube video borders are, it may be worth changeling the dimensions of your video to match.

My final point is one of little immediate importance, the background noise is noticeable in the video there are two ways to over come this problem.

1] play some quiet music over the audio. Louder than the background noise but quiet enough to not distract from the audio.

2] buy a higher quality mic, and reduce the sources of background noise, such as fans, friends, electronic devices, and air conditioners.

Improving the quality of your video is one of the most crucial things in regards to gaining viewers and subscribers. Getting clicks is only 1/2 the battle. Enjoy your video making.

[TheVeganAtheist]

great job. you got a new subscriber.

[kamitis]

Subscribed

Nice video, i agree with bobo0100 on all points.

[Red]

I totally disagree with TAA's vid, but I couldn't help but laugh at some moments..

[Collaide]

3:33

"We don't kill people because it hurts, mentally and physically"

I feel like this is a false statement, let me explain how I think.
Death does not have to be involved with suffering. The death itself is not suffering, it's the pain before we die that hurts.
Death ≠ Suffering

We do consider them bad, but it's not merely because it causes suffering. Killing people from your own group made your groups chances of survival smaller, this goes for all animals. If everyone went around and killed people all the flippin' time, there wouldn't be people, it's as simple as that. We also don't kill because morally, this is unjustified to a humans right to his life. We consider humans to have rights to live because we also want to live. Animals do not have the cognitive ability to understand this and are purely driven by instinct.

5:26

Of course chickens are able to make choices.
If you put two buckets of seeds next to each other, and there is a hungry chicken in between them he's gonna go and eat in one of them, but which one? How do they make their choices? To what scale do our choice to eat them effect their choices, excluding big factories full of chickens? On what scale do their choices actually affect their lives? How much of an animals choices are not driven by their instincts?

6:10

Of course it will try to escape the farm, it's an instinct.

7:31

"Confined against consent" & "Used as property" are essentially the same thing?
It can't give consent.
"Animals has no say"
Of course they don't, because they lack the cognitive ability to think that way.
And if you say that they want to escape and that is good enough, no it's not. All animals don't want to escape. A lot of these animals would die anyway if they went into the wilds. Everyone will die.
"Needs to blindly trust in the leader"
Wouldn't they blindly trust their instincts anyway? Do they even have the cognitive ability to make a decision that is against their instinct?




About the mentally disabled children, if you think about it, it's just a waste of money. If mental disabilities could be tracked in genes or in the womb, we could just abort them and give birth to actual healthy kids.

I don't know if this argument/question is any good, but if everything has a right to live, what are your opinions on abortion? Doesn't the kid have a right to live, and a right to make his own decisions? Wouldn't he appreciate not getting aborted afterwards? (Assuming someone who considered an abortion did not go through with it)


Correct me if I'm wrong, but in your opinion all sentient beings have rights to live and to make their own decisions.
Why would they? Animals are not humans, so why treat them as such?

My reasons for not being vegan/vegetarian:
*I don't think animals have human rights. There is a reason cannibalism is tabu and eating animals isn't. It's not wrong to own them either. I am sorry for not feeling human compassion to animals. (This doesn't mean I want to torture them.)
*I think other industries have a larger impact on the environment (I have the global warming in mind when I talk about this)

If you disagree with me, or think I have made some stupid arguments/statements/questions, you can answer them. I am open minded to most things, but when it comes to veganism it feels like it's just a matter of opinion. (If you think animals should have human rights or not).

Note: English is not my native language.

[brimstoneSalad]

Note: English is not my native language.

You could have fooled me, your English is excellent. Where are you from?

Please feel free to post an intro thread.


TheVeganAtheist makes a lot of small mistakes that inherit from some deontological views that were inspired in a large part by Francione. I like to think his views on the subject are evolving over time.

A more accurate way to approach morality is consequentialism. Bad things are bad because of their bad consequences, not because it's "just so", or we arbitrarily appeal to "rights" which are merely asserted and can not be violated for some unknown reason.

Are you familiar with Utilitarianism? That would be more useful towards your understanding the issue.

when it comes to veganism it feels like it's just a matter of opinion. (If you think animals should have human rights or not).

Not at all, "rights" have nothing to do with it.

Rights are a socio-political construct, and have little to nothing to do with morality.

Rights ≠ Morality.

You correctly identify that here, but you don't understand the full implications:

We consider humans to have rights to live because we also want to live.

This is called a social contract.

You are capable of bashing my head in with a rock while I sleep, and I don't want my head bashed in with a rock while I sleep.
Likewise, you don't want your head bashed in with a rock while you sleep, and I'm capable of doing that.

We both have something the other wants; the ability to offer protection from our respective selves.

Because we have the POWER to harm each other, we can offer the right not to be harmed in trade.

A being that is powerless than not offer not to harm the other in exchange for immunity from harm itself.

Do you understand?

Traditionally, women have been denied rights because they did not have the power to threaten men enough to negotiate those rights.

In a system of pure social contract, children also should not have any rights, because they have no power to demand them. Non-human animals should not have rights over humans because they are likewise powerless (and also because, lacking our language skills, most of them can't understand and thus can't abstain from harming in that trade; however, some of them can implicitly).

In a system of pure social contract, disenfranchised humans also lack rights when they lack power. E.g. slaves. And this is perfectly acceptable to social contract.
If you have no power to threaten the other person, then you have no rights.

Is this the kind of world you want to live in?

Progressivism has changed that, and has inserted a little moral consideration into rights. We have abolished slavery for moral reasons, although slaves had no power, we gifted them rights despite that and freed them, and now we are all equal human beings. We've given women rights, who are now equals too, and now children- who are not equals, but who are given the right to care and protection.

Morality has influenced our concepts of rights somewhat, and distanced them from that cold and rational "ideal".

Do you believe that we should be granting rights based on the moral implications of doing so? If so, obviously non-human animals shouldn't be granted equal rights in every regard (just as children shouldn't be driving or voting), but you have to realize that once you drift from that hard rational line of social negotiation and you grant rights on moral grounds, you lose your justification for not granting non-human animals some particular rights (similar to how we grant rights to young children).

Anyway, the more important question here is "what is morality?", and for that, you will need to understand consequentialism, not "rights". Rights are a side effect at best, not something you appeal to in order to justify morality (TheVeganAtheist sometimes makes a mistake in that regard).

Animals do not have the cognitive ability to understand this and are purely driven by instinct.
How much of an animals choices are not driven by their instincts?
Of course it will try to escape the farm, it's an instinct.
Wouldn't they blindly trust their instincts anyway? Do they even have the cognitive ability to make a decision that is against their instinct?

This stuff about instinct is popular pseudoscience. I assume you know what pseudoscience is. You're making a lot of ignorant claims here, and it comes from pop-science; the same source of bad common-knowledge that makes people think water spins in one direction in the Northern hemisphere and another in the South when it's draining in the sink or toilet because of the Coriolis effect.

Humans and non-human animals have nearly identical cognition, there are just a couple important differences:

1. Most humans eventually get smarter (but children are not smarter than many common animal species); this is just more of the same. More RAM, bigger Hard Drive, faster processor, same OS.

2. Humans have more advanced language. You'll need to read Daniel Dennett on this. It's less genetic and more a matter of memetic infrastructure that gives us the reasoning ability that we have. It's a system of concepts that have been passed down for generations and make up mental tools that we have access to and make it possible for us to think in the way we do.


Neither of these differences exist in young children and babies. Only the second exists in retarded humans, but it also exists in other species of primates who have been taught language, and seems to exist to a degree in other intelligent social animals (possibly cetaceans).

Animals are not humans, so why treat them as such?

Correction: Non-human animals are not human animals.
Humans are animals.

This is just a tautology. Non-humans are not humans. So what?
Black people are also apparently not white people. And?

Why is this morally relevant?

Your arguments about instinct are extremely false.

Your arguments about rights, as per social contract which I have explained earlier, are partially true but also misguided; in order to argue that, you would also have to argue in favor of children having no rights, in favor of slavery, and in favor of restricting or eliminating the rights of women; that anybody who can not physically force you to give them rights is not deserving of them.
I don't think you're prepared to make that argument.

In any case, rights are irrelevant, and a poor explanation of morality. The relevant factor is consequence.

Animal agriculture is wrong because of the effects of the system upon the world in general.

*I don't think animals have human rights. There is a reason cannibalism is tabu and eating animals isn't. It's not wrong to own them either. I am sorry for not feeling human compassion to animals. (This doesn't mean I want to torture them.)

This is irrelevant. However, you should be aware that you are torturing animals by supporting animal agriculture; it's not the nice happy scene painted on a milk carton or in advertisements (you must be clever enough to realize that).

*I think other industries have a larger impact on the environment (I have the global warming in mind when I talk about this)

All other industries combined have a larger impact. So, let's consider which would be better for the world:

Case 1: Shutting down all trade, abolishing cars, eliminating air transport.
World economy crashes. We return to a near-medieval level of local infrastructure and technology. Mass starvation.

Case 2: Ending animal agriculture.
Economy shifts into processing plant protein into mock meats, creating better jobs (slaughter house and processing jobs are considered among the worst in the world). Humans become healthier, heart disease and certain kinds of cancer are reduced. More food is now available (animal agriculture is wasteful; the animals are fed more plant protein than is needed to feed humans). Fewer diseases (no more new swine flues).

Which do you think makes more sense?

Animal agriculture is the only massive polluter that we actually can end in the short term (without any advanced in technology) and without disastrous effects on the world economy and human well being. In fact, it would improve matters, because some of the greatest threats to human health and well being come from meat and dairy consumption, and the existence of this many disease vectors in contact with the population.

It doesn't matter if you give a shit about animal suffering or not. If you care about humans, you should not support animal agriculture.

I'm not saying don't own animals. I'm not saying don't kill animals. When it's actually useful to humans and relieves human suffering to do so, you can make a good argument to do it. E.g. for medical reasons.

Don't breed and kill animals for food, though, it's the most inefficient food source there is, causes massive amounts of pollution, and only harms human health and well being (much like smoking- people do bad and irrational things due to addiction). It also happens to cause animal suffering, but whether you care at all about that or not, the former reasons are incontrovertible.

[Collaide]

Note: English is not my native language.

You could have fooled me, your English is excellent. Where are you from?

Sweden. I'm only 17 years old
Anyway, I don't have time to make a proper answer atm. I'll read this through and post a response during my christmas holiday or something.

[Jebus]

TheVeganAtheist makes a lot of small mistakes that inherit from some deontological views that were inspired in a large part by Francione.

Kindly elaborate as I am a big fan of Francione