Vegans Suck

Devilishly Handsome 
Red-blooded American Omnivore

Skinny-fat Vegan Sissy-boy

Today I met a vegan, and I believe he may have been the most misinformed and stupid person I have ever met.  He observed me eating my lunch, which was a leftover flank steak that I grilled last week. I was eating it cold, out of a plastic sandwich bag, without the aid of utensils as I often do.  Caveman-style, if cavemen had had plastic sandwich bags, that is.  It was delicious, but apparently this guy thought it was pretty offensive, which actually accentuates the flavor to me.  He began talking to me about the dangers of red meat consumption, the horrors of the livestock industry, and the wonderful benefits of the vegan lifestyle.  He did this with complete sincerity, even though he looked to be suffering from some sort of rickets or scurvy or some other major illness.  I don't want to brag, but I'm a pretty healthy-looking guy.  I lift weights, and can generally hold my own in most physical endeavors.  I'm pretty sure that in an arm-wrestling contest with this particular vegan, I could rip his arm completely off his body and stick it up his sanctimonious ass.  Which is what I fantasized about the entire time this little vegan spoke to me.

You may wonder why my musings suddenly turned so violent.  Well, let me explain why I hate vegans so much.  First of all, vegans are almost always hippies, and you know I hate hippies.  Second, veganism is more than a choice they have made to not eat meat or use animal products.  It is a philosophy that they have adopted that is, frankly, retarded. They also almost always choose to then project that stupidity onto me.  That's when I get upset.  If you want to go off and eat a weird diet of bean-sprouts and kale, go ahead—knock yourself out.  But don’t try to ruin my lunch, you anemic little turd.

I like to examine both viewpoints...

I can respect vegetarians.  They are wrong, of course, but all they are doing is choosing not to eat meat, and I respect people's personal choices.  You can choose to live off a diet of nothing but Twizzlers and Cool-Ranch Doritos if you want.  Just keep it to yourself.  It’s like being gay—it’s fine with me, as long as you don’t try to make me be gay with you.

MMM...Fortified soy alternatives.
That sounds delicious.
Read this guy's blog...

How do I know the vegetarians are wrong?  Because you have teeth in your head that are called canines, and they wouldn't be there if you hadn't evolved to eat meat, dumbass. 

Canines are the pointy ones.
The ones that wolves and bears also have.
You know who doesn't have canines?  Cows.

The Circle of Life.
Simba knows what I'm talking about.

Just how exactly do you suppose that people got by in the days before farming?  Before we had corn to make into Doritos and Twizzlers?  If you think people wandered around in the Stone Age finding berries and melons under every bush, you are very mistaken.  Go out into a forest sometime and take a good look around.  Take a close inventory of everything you find that you can eat.  It isn't going to look like the produce section at Wegmans, I promise you.  If you are lucky, you might find a grape vine or a nut-producing tree, maybe a rotten log full of grubs (those are animals too, by the way) but that's about all.  There's lots of grass and leaves and acorns, stuff like that, but you can't digest it very well, even if you cook it.  But you know who CAN digest that other stuff?  The insects can.  The deer can.  And your digestive system is perfectly designed to digest the deer.  You can eat nearly every single part of that delicious little bugger.  And you know how to make weapons to kill the deer.  See my point?  It's the friggin' circle of life, for goodness sake.  Watch The Lion King sometime.  This is how people lived for eons until they learned how to farm about 10,000 years ago, which is just about a heartbeat in evolutionary terms.

Explain to me again how the banana is spiritual.

So, like I said, even though it is obvious that vegetarianism is fundamentally wrong, and our ancestors evolved to eat meat and animal products as the primary source of calories, I can respect the views of other people.  I will not force them to eat meat.  I may make fun of their skinny-fat appearance and general weakness, but I won't make them eat dead animals.
-----------Now, as if that's not dumb enough... Vegetarian Spiritualism...Follow this link for proof that I'm not just making this up.  Apparently they think you can taste the cruelty in your food.  If you can, I must think it is yummy.

Doesn't he look absolutely delicious?
Just imagine how tender the meat must be.

I have never really gotten the basic idea of vegans, or of vegetarianism.  I mean, if you are against the killing and exploitation of living things, why is it okay to kill plants?  Are they not living things, too?  If your argument is based on self-awareness, I would say that a shrimp or an oyster (or a chicken, for that matter) is not too much more intellectual than a cabbage.  Can we eat the stupid animals?  What is the maximum IQ for being considered edible?  Do you hear how stupid this sounds?  

Nice tattoo.  

The fact is, we as human beings are consumers in the food chain.  Do you remember that from your science class in middle school?  We have to get our energy from food, and that food is made from other living things that are either producers, or other lower-level consumers.  You must kill another living thing and eat it, or you will die.  This is the way the world works.  So unless you are going to learn to photosynthesize, you better get used to it.  I for one did not fight my way to the top of the food chain to eat lettuce.

The main  reason I hate vegans is because they are almost all very militant about their weird dietary choices.  As if they are saving the world.  They think this is the Holocaust and they are Schindler.  I guess the cows are the Jews.

This is a real cartoon I found on a vegan website.
I think it is pretty offensive to equate farming with murder and rape.
Not to mention how incredibly naive it is...

Bacon makes the strongest argument.
Mmmmm....Bacon.

Too Safe

That was the first thing I noticed, too.

America is absolutely bonkers about safety these days.  I am not an old man, but I can clearly remember a time when absolutely nobody wore seatbelts but race car drivers, and I had never even heard of a bicycle helmet.  These days, if you let your kid ride his tricycle without wearing a full set of pads, Child Protective Services will show up and take him away.  Everything has rounded edges, padding, and guard rails.  The outlets are plugged with little plastic safeties, there are electronic baby monitors with digital cameras accessible from the internet, the playground is lined with soft rubber, and even the shopping cart has a seatbelt.  There is little opportunity for Darwin to insert himself into the equation at all during the early years, the period of time he was once most effective—prior to sexual maturity. 

Evolutionarily speaking, it's probably already too late at this point.

Now any hope for natural selection has to wait until the teenage years, when the little boogers invent weird stunts to hurt themselves, like Parkour or skateboarding or whatever.  Watch the show Jackass a few times, and you will understand the backlash of too much safety for kids.  I think it is an example of nature trying to correct an imbalance, to weed out the unworthy before they pass those defective genes on to the next generation.  The Jackass guys are doing their best to help nature get rid of them.  Unfortunately it seldom works, as the little morons need to either die or get their testicles ripped off prior to getting anybody pregnant to have the appropriate effect on evolution.

It looks promising, but his girlfriend may already be knocked up.

In our weird little modern world, it’s the least favorable genes that seem to get passed down the most.  Watch the movie Idiocracy some time.  The premise is that the idiots are breeding like rabbits, while the intellectuals are hem-hawing around being proper and not reproducing.  This is then extrapolated over a thousand years until the intellectuals go extinct and everyone is stupid.  It’s kind of a slapstick comedy, but that’s a pretty powerful message.  Watch a few episodes of Jerry Springer and Jersey Shore and tell me it’s just my imagination.  I think this is a legitimate concern. 

On second thought, maybe you should just enjoy it.

I know what you are thinking.  You’re thinking, “Why don’t we just restrict reproduction by people who have inferior genetics?  We do it with horses and dogs, why not people?”  Another guy had some plans like that.  His first name was Adolf.

We could make a "super race."
I don't see any way that could possibly go wrong. 

Oh yeah, now I remember.

I am probably about to shoot a lot of holes in my own credibility with the following admission, but my journalistic integrity will not allow it to be omitted (and neither would my mama).  As a youngster, I managed to pull off a dizzying array of antics that still spark some lively conversations on the back porch at my parent’s house.  For instance, I set myself on fire with gasoline, completely filled my younger brother’s eye with mud, ran a three-wheeler into a car at 30mph, blew a hole in the living room ceiling with a shotgun, and stuck a wooden spear into my own forehead.  All of those are actual childhood events.  I have taken no poetic license here—and if you’d like all the details, my mother would be happy to tell you all about them.

I honestly wish I was making them up.

I did these, and many, many more amazingly fun activities which will remain unmentioned, since I have no desire to admit to any misdemeanors (or felonies) or to give Mama even more ammunition.  I did even more still as an adolescent and even as a young adult.  Were they stupid things?  Yes, they were.  Completely retarded.  But they taught me very valuable and realistic lessons that I carried with me into the future, sort of an attitude towards life and an actual appreciation for the consequences if you act like a retard around dangerous things.  The school of hard knocks, I’ve heard it called. 

He will remember this far longer than you yelling,
"Stop throwing darts at each other!"

I guess my point is that I have earned the right to reproduce because I navigated my way through a lifetime filled with opportunities to die or go to prison.  Because I was either smart or lucky enough to make it through, there’s a good chance my genes didn’t come from the shallow end of the pool. 

The ancient Spartans used to grossly underfeed their boys as they conducted their warrior training, forcing them to steal food to survive.  They were expected to steal the food, and it was left around for them to be able to steal it.  But if they were caught, they were beaten severely.  This made them resourceful, stealthy, and clever.

Do you think his mother ever left him
in the car while she was in the store?

Safety is a good thing, taken in moderation.  You don’t want to let your toddler play on high-rise scaffolding with a rusty razor blade and a book of matches.  But you do need to let him get into some trouble.  Life is risky, and living it is all about managing risk.  Let him earn his stripes.  He’ll be better in the long run.  Look how awesome I turned out.

Awesome safety sign.

Kindergarten Environmentalism

I hate hippies.  I’m using the word hate here, about hippies.  A very strong word, hate.  The main reason I hate them is their association with, and perversion of, the environmental movement—which is what this installment is really about, not hippies.  I also hate their generally disheveled appearance, lack of personal hygiene, and condescending hipster attitudes, but their screwing up of the environmental movement is what I hate most.

They never seem to look like this...

This is a more accurate representation.

Living this close to D.C. means that I regularly bump into these kinds of people, these hippies.  Growing up in Tifton, Georgia, I never ran into one.  Here, they are as common in the coffee shops and yoga classes and Whole Foods stores as flies at a dumpster.  Thankfully, both my profession and testicles keep me out of such establishments most of the time, but I still run into them occasionally, and when I do, they usually piss me off.

A little history on Yours Truly:  I dropped out of college in 1989, got married, and enlisted in the Marines—all in the space of a couple of months.  When I resumed college in 2003, as a grown-ass man (and a Marine Corps captain to boot), I decided to major in environmental science.  That struck a lot of people who knew me as strange, because of my libertarian views and general disdain for bullshit.  I will admit that the main reason I chose this field was that I could accomplish it quickly (the Marine Corps would only allow 18 months, and I was still two full years short of my degree), but I also had at least some interest in the good of the planet.  I had been around the world a few times by then, had seen some really messed up things, and had to comply with a few environmental regulations on construction sites.  Just enough to pique my interest.  So anyway, that’s how I came to begin my education into environmental issues, and when I first really began to dislike the pot-smoking little shits in my environmental classes with me.  

Exhibit A

Now back to the point-- The Earth is not a stable place.  It changes all the time.  The weather changes, of course.  Climate changes (we can argue all day about whose fault it is, but it changes nonetheless, and has done so for eons), species die out and are replaced by others, and mountains erode and wash into the sea.  Modern-day environmentalism doesn’t seem to take this into account, and freaks out about any evidence of change it uncovers.   Let me tell you a little tale to illustrate what I mean:

Andy, the Desert Tortoise
(they seem cuter if you give them a name)

In the Mohave Desert, there is a turtle.  More accurately, it is a tortoise—called the desert tortoise, interestingly enough.  Anyway, this particular animal is endangered.  The Marine Corps has an enormous training base in this particular desert, near Twenty-nine Palms, CA, and as such the Marines have to pay particular attention to the desert tortoise and his terrible little life.  I have received countless briefs by environmental “experts” about this specific animal, and have been threatened with all sorts of draconian punishments if I or my Marines so much as frighten one of these things.  The reason for this is that the turtle stores extra water in its bladder, and if frightened, it pees.  If that happens, it may die from dehydration.  You heard that right.  The turtle pees itself when startled, and then expires from dehydration as a result.  This animal, which lives in the desert, dumps its water supply as a startle response.  That is not smart, evolutionarily speaking.  Why do we care if this weak and stupid animal goes extinct?  I’m sorry, but I think this critter was on his way out anyway.    You can make all the rules you want, but Darwin’s had his eye on this little guy for a while now.

Here's your villain 

Not this guy

I think some thanks are in order, Andy.

Now, the environmental expert's argument was that the animal is endangered because of human encroachment on his habitat (meaning me and my fellow Marines, I suppose).  He seemed unable to understand that the reason the little guy has a habitat at all is because the government fenced off a plot of land the size of Rhode Island for us to train in.  If it weren't for that, then some mining operation or other such activity would have long since ground these pesky little turtles under the treads of their bulldozers.  If one of them finds his way under the tracks of a Marine Corps tank now, c'est la vie.  Vaya con Dios, little dude.  But he would likely have never had the chance in the first place otherwise.

I’m not arguing for the eradication of the desert tortoise.  I’m just saying that the coyotes and snakes and whatnot are under the same pressures in that training area, but they seem to be doing okay.  Failure of the weaker species is a key factor in evolution, and was happening for ages before mankind ever made his first spear.  I’m saying that unless this animal can be shown to hold some sort of value (other than the biodiversity bullshit argument), then why should we go out of our way to keep it around?  The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is chock full of the fossilized bones of failures.  It’s the way it goes.

Beatrice, the prehistoric frog-type thing.
Doesn't the name help you to relate more?
(photo credit to Tina Carr)

The reason this makes me say I hate hippies is that hippies try to make me feel guilty for the fate of the desert tortoise.  Everything that changes is seen as bad, everything that is bad is seen as the fault of the intervention of man, and every action of man is seen as “unnatural,” as if mankind was from some other world.  Human beings are as much a part of the natural order of things as any other organism.  That attitude bothers me because mankind can and should consider the environment as we go about our business, and the perversion of environmentalism to the role of a Jewish mother will only politicize the idea.  And when things become political, you can throw science right out the window.

Screw you, hippie.  It’s not my fault.