Ethical Veganism Debates [truncated]

Some (shortened for clarity) debates with white nationalists over animal protection issues.

A segment of my October 25th, 2024 'letter to the editor'

"...Then there’s Patriotic Alternative (PA) advertising their latest conference, a key detail being their complimentary “delicious evening meal of various meats, including minted lamb, chicken and pork”.

I shudder having to share a planet with these people. They’re scum. Literal Hobbit-minds. I suppose I just can’t cope with morons. The worst is that they don’t/can’t/will never realise that they are morons. The entire international ‘movement’ sphere annoys me, far too much. I don’t care if they call themselves white advocates or the wombles (British children’s television puppet animal) in their wretched little normie socialite club. The labels and monikers and self-aggrandizements are transparent. They don’t speak for me in any fashion. I wish these PA/white nationalist would come round to my door for their activist vote campaigning so I could tell them as much face to face. I think I actually wish the net would fail and be shut down at times also, driving people into the real-world (and them silenced and in disarray, stripped of publicity opportunities).

I was thinking of what we discussed last night on animals. The worst thing for me is knowing it goes on live-time and 24/7, and as I’m sat up here typing, many millions are being slaughtered painfully. And then they brag about it, as if they were discussing Bitcoin, or lead, or a piece of coal; “meat”.

It’s odd, but I think I dislike the Right more than the left. I find neochristians/liberals/modern statists intolerable if they have any form of official authority, but the everyday people’s idealistic left just seem like people I can walk up to in a coffee shop—I miss going out to chat—and not immediately hear something retardatory, smug and Neanderthal out of, considering I have no interest in talking on politics with people (that docile quality doesn’t so much apply to the American ones)..."

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Cue an extended multi-session debate featuring myself (Benjamin), the editor, 'Ben/Bannon', Dale Jensen, and 'Autisticus Spasticus'.

Round 1

Ben: We are “designed” to eat meat. We have sharp canines and eyes on the front of our faces, like every other predator in nature.

Benjamin: Yes, and “designed” surely with the brains that manifest our minds’ distinct phenomenology, and we have achieved a lot with those brains. We’re omnivores. As I stated somewhere recently, we haven’t evolved biologically in quite a while, if at all for about 30,000 years, if I recall William Pierce’s segment in Who We Are correctly.

Unlike those other predators, the carnivores and omnivores, with a differently manifesting consciousness, we can realise what we’re doing and choose. It seems rather fatalistic otherwise in a deterministic sense, or biological essentialism (or whatever they call it). I’m born with a loaded gun in my hand; do I automatically shoot the little girl of my own race? I hope that analogy works okay.

I’m not denying a complex biological teleology, as that seems prudent to me too, but it feels like a fallacy of relevance to invoke an illegitimate lack of choice. Are we really obligated to do it consciously? If so, by who or what? And who claims authority to work as their interpreter? A more thorough appeal to Nature would perhaps allow for a weighted symbiosis more than mere mimicry – we are aligned with them as life, but not identical. I’d have to think more on this. That’s my initial thoughts.

On a side note, I wish we’d stop using the word ‘meat’ personally for the pieces of dead animal corpse, and just be blunt without commodifying it into abstraction. It’s a devastatingly effective means of blind-siding the mind to pity. This is what I don’t understand about so-called online National Socialists. It’s all fine and good on the JQ and history speculation and ‘hard talk’ and all the rest and one feels their momentum returning, but bring up this facet of Hitler’s worldview and the agreement rate plummets 100% to a backdrop of rolling tumbleweed.

Editor: If we take into account the category of ‘psychoclasses’ in psychohistory, it is more than clear that those who refuse to eat meat out of solidarity with our cousins ​​belong to a higher psychogenic state than those who eat it.

Benjamin: Infanticide’s my argument against knee-jerk acceptance of Tradition. The proponents of these pastoralist/hunter-gatherer type arguments seem unable or afraid to criticise the actions of vast swathes of distant ancestors rather in the same way that they don’t review their parents (or seem to want to let anybody else). It’s certainly not an all-or-nothing total binary, but they were in a very different psychoclass. Eating the dead in Finland… my personal belief is that animal husbandry at all rendered us lazy for millennia.

I think of the main Julian Jaynes book also. I think one can respect forebears and primogenitors without the necessity – given new raised state understandings – to put them on pedestals without evaluation.

If we stopped 100% eating their flesh and drew back from them, would they evolve in time not to devour each other also: that sort of geological/evolutionary time-frame wonder crops up in my mind now and again. We’ve certainly put our dominion in their evolutionary way. We’ve pushed them beyond any survival of the fittest adaptation they’ve been able to come up with, hence huge extinctions; a regular die off (and breeding them in captivity doesn’t always work too well much as food-stocks breeding isn’t a soulful solution). I can’t remember the exact date, but I’m sure I read somewhere that we’ll have, at current rate, emptied the ocean of fish by about the 2040s.

Or, as another thought: could teeth at all (of this current physical nature) be an unrefined stage to something, pan-spectrum. I’ve got an Amazon book lined up in theoretical biology on speculative evolutionary trajectories. I’ll return to this point when it arrives.

It occurred to me, haven’t gorillas got massive canines too? Fair enough, they might occasionally scavenge, and one could count insects maybe (not that I always do), but I think they’re basically almost full herbivores for most of their lives. I know this strand doesn’t affect your argument, which I assume lumps humans into the ‘carnivore’-leaning omnivore category somehow by assumption (and is irrelevant to my previous argument) but it suggests to me that it’s not quite so clear cut. What did our primates develop colour vision for in those forward facing eyes?

Distinguishing ripe berries and fruits perhaps, and to weed out the poisonous ones. Is there any chance our ancestors evolved the forward vision to assist the picking dexterity process on top of chasing down prey? I know big canines in other species would help with defence, or for arena mating as a showpiece.

The naturalistic fallacy always strikes me as akin to cherry picking. I’m not even sure, at cosmic teleology level, i.e. on the very long scale for the future, if they’re an advantage attribute or not. I suppose they’re only useful now if you’re still doing it, which, as I say, you don’t exactly have to.

Ben: I wonder if sympathy for animals is really just another aspect of residual Christian morality. Surely the Romans had no qualms against it nor any of our other European ancestors. Most vegetarians I know are neo-christian, virtue-signalling, woke and usually anaemic.

Editor: I disagree because the Romans were simply inferior in the sense that these Germans belonged to a higher psychoclass. For example, no vegan or non-vegan Nazi would have behaved like what they did to the innocent daughter of Sejanus in the time of Caligula.

Those who use the Roman paradigm haven’t considered what I’ve written about psychohistory, or my criticism of Eduardo Velasco on the Spartans.

You have posted as ‘Bannon’ in the past, right? In order not to be confused with the trolls I would suggest that you don’t use sockpuppets.

Benjamin: Just out of interest, what is it that directly encourages you not to have sympathy for them? I mean these arguments are all basic validations for terrible cruelty, by self-imposed metrics of importance. That’s what I don’t understand. The tenacious, rather quick to decide ‘me, me, me’ that can happily see this stuff go on and participate (the working of slaughterhouses; every form of hunting, blood sports, animal testing, all the rest…) and simply doesn’t give a shit (or not much at least).

We’ve already made the infanticide and destructive parenting point from Lloyd DeMause’s History of Childhood, and a lot more on that topic. They had no qualms with that either. If they all filed off a cliff like Disney lemmings would you follow?

I made the comment before about feeling like I’m talking to armoured rocks with sneers painted on them. It seems there’s a divide here. What level of cruelty would it reach before you, just for example, would consider drawing the line, or would you never? It’s impossible to linguistically argue it away as not being cruel. I found the deadened abstraction involved curious, as if everyone on here is somehow autistic.

It’s a shame most vegetarians so far are progressives. I think it’s simply a bonus point in their otherwise misguided philosophies, which do after all, usually contain a grain of truth. I see no reason though for the issue to become politicised into the left-right paradigm in the first place. I should hope one doesn’t have to be a leftist to be caring.

As with the 'emergence' art point recently, do you look at all the unnecessary death and suffering (and it is extensive, gratuitous and very brutal, really, one has to see that), and just go ‘meh’? I don’t think it’s Christian morality, no. I think it’s certainly what I would express as soulfulness though, in a non-Christian sense, a racial cohesion in line with an emerged psychoclass.

Look, I’m quitting commenting here for a while. there’s no point. You don’t get it, and I don’t think you’re going to get it, and it bores me typing these. I repeat again for the last time, which is better: the perception that thinks, ‘hey, tasty broth’ etc., or the perception that acknowledges 500 million – at least – daily tortured animals that are forced into this non-human gulag? The means do not justify the ends.

The Romans at least had a perception of what was distasteful. I’m sure they evaluated Carthage as unacceptable for Carthaginian cruelty. That might be a start in understanding.

In general, it’s not to be understood, and is felt or is not. I’m wasting my words. It’s not that its unsuccessful for humans alone (although there may be more successful survival strategies, and that does need detailed exploring) it’s that it’s appallingly cruel, and is not, in the deepest sense, necessary for survival.

Ben or Bannon: Sometimes, it seems like vegetarianism is a luxury. Also, in order to eliminate as much suffering as possible, wouldn’t the logical endpoint be anti-natalism? Also the Jews want us to stop eating meat. So in the current context, it might some to be seen as an act of rebellion.

In theory, lab grown meat, or at least something synthesized for optimum nutrition a la the replicator in star trek would be ideal. Until then, nothing comes close in terms of nutrient density as meat. The only time I condone hunting is when it is to put food on the table. And yeah slaughterhouse are for the most part disgusting and barbaric.

  Also, ironically, most of the money for wildlife conservation efforts comes from the hunting community.

Note: I had long dispersed at this point, and ‘Ben/Brannon’, evidently wanting to type to the room at large to somehow ‘embarrass me publicly’ as opposed to any one particular commenter, as everyone else involved had lost patience with him, was left to close off the discussion in pedantic fashion until the comments closed automatically shortly afterwards, earning himself a petty ‘victory’ despite having solidly lost the argument some lines back. I wondered quietly before I left if he was an autist. It was like talking to a unfeeling stone.

I regret that I didn't get to respond to his final point. It's already covered adequately in a book by Ian Pedler titled Save Our Stags about British blood sports and stag hunting. It's a cynical move on the hunt community's part (perhaps because they come from a background with more money, supporters, and funding in general) and a sad one. I would have argued: look, if all of a sudden the Minor-Attracted Persons community came out and supported wildlife conservation, would that suddenly make paedophilia ok morally and legally? Would that render them legitimate? Of course not. The same argument applies here. It just shows they have more money and power to dabble in other peoples' affair with, surely as a way to leverage their own position into legitimacy – they’re having their cake and eating it, very much by self-serving design. You're only 'fundraising' and 'conserving' them so you get you get your own damn way to kill them for pleasure/convenience. Taking advantage of the gloomy fact that, for all their platitudes, much of the public really do not care about these issues, in any meaningful sense, (and that speaks volumes about them).

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Round 2

Autisticus Spasticus: No decent person would want animals to suffer, but it has to be said that vegans anthropomorphise animals to an absurd degree, very similar to the way children view them. Humans are divided from the rest of the animal kingdom by our capacity for metacognition. Because animals lack metacognition, they do not possess a highly articulate conception of the world. They are not animated by thought. As such, they have merely an instinctual aversion to danger. If this instinct is not activated, they do not experience any distress. Because they cannot think, animals have no concept of time and cannot ruminate on mortality. They have no foreknowledge of death, so if they are well cared for and their death (when it comes) is painless, there has not been a breach of moral code. It should be noted that the vegan doctrine can trace its origin to certain Christian sects, which may account for its utopian flavour and disregard for basic Darwinian facts.

Vegans desperately try to harmonise human nutritional requirements with animal welfare, but the two are incompatible. Humans have been omnivores since our days on the African savannah, and there is not a single hunter-gatherer tribe that doesn’t consume meat. It is the reason we developed such large brains. In an attempt to shame us for eating in accordance with our evolved diet, vegans habitually equate the consumption of meat with hedonism, determined to separate the pleasurable taste of meat from its nutritional value. I would wager that grass tastes good to a cow, precisely because it is supposed to eat grass. With regard to what humans are capable of subsisting on, we have seen the “battle of the research papers” take place time and time again. No conclusion is ever reached, and the same goes for the anecdotal back-and-forths. At the end of the day, you cannot force people to eat food they do not like. Vegans consistently ignore this inconvenient fact, because it is devastating for their cause. I don’t place any blame on our naturally omnivorous diet. I place it on the industries that supply animal-derived produce. The main cause of animal suffering is human overpopulation, which is an entirely Third World phenomenon. The pressures on all industries are only going to get worse, and they are already strained beyond belief. If the global population were reduced by six billion, the relief on these industries would be indescribable.

Editor: But even without the recent overpopulation, animals in human captivity suffered horribly (the first Nazi measure when Hitler came to power was precisely to protect animals from human cruelty).

Autisticus Spasticus: Yes, but that was at a time when we were not technologically advanced and when the concept of animal rights did not exist. It would be different today. Still, you know very well what I would say. An asteroid annihilating this planet is the only solution. Ideally, life would never have evolved in the first place.

Benjamin: So Autisticus Spasticus, is an asteroid hitting the planet easier that putting a gun to a person’s face and saying, here, your fruit and vegetables for the day?

If anything, it seems an all or nothing excuse again, from one not willing to quit a very easily quittable rote behaviour. I know humans (us for the argument) lack will, but minimising suffering seems better in the long run than removing that positive, simply for an all encompassing voided negative, where the toddlers in their high chairs can continue to bang their fists and demand ‘sweeties’, right down to the last second of their self-serving lives.

You have abstracted suffering. I’m trying to keep it to its limit. Better than nothing is just that, both ways.

I think I second the editor on this, as I imagine you expected I would. They are not well cared for, not even on the whole, no (or in any way, really), and their deaths are far from painless to observe.

I have come to the conclusion that it is simply a matter of human compassion, and cannot be argued for or against. The, as I would feel, compassionate arguments fall on deaf ears to the cruel, selfish, and indifferent, and in return their logical protestations seem futile in the face of such overt brutality, sadism, and suffering. I’d be quite happy to force people to eat what they didn’t like (and imagine they would come to like it genuinely, if only they used those much lauded superior abilities to try).

It seems a matter of laziness/convenience at times, and cultural consensus, looking at the man next to them, and seeing no problem. But the deaths remain far from painless, and their lives futile for their own sakes, and this really can be assimilated, can be spotted. I realise you’re quite depressed as a person, and also an autist, so I think I am going to have the same problem I do with you as with our acquaintance.

The main cause of animal suffering? Yes, the third worlders are crueller than Europeans to them, but factory farming, and fur farming and the like (and indeed all animal farming) throughout the West really is no better, and the cruelties are effectively alike at that level. Cruel is cruel. Just more ways for Westerners to feel good about themselves, passing the buck to the Neanderthal other in the mirror in front of them.

I would argue (as someone not so sentimental on this topic as some – I agree, liberal/leftist vegans do whites no favour) that they do indeed appear the more one studies them to manifest deeper emotional lives than at first suspected; more meaningful lives, perhaps more than could be said for many humans (and all subhumans) of this wretched dead age. They may not think (though it’s a scale and a great many do possess internal meaning/the qualia of intelligence), but intelligence isn’t thinking – it’s sense, sensation, feeling. Non-computational.

Latter day research increasingly comes to that conclusion from some quarters, and has not been refuted to my knowledge. At a basic level I consider the ethologist Marc Bekoff on the topic of animal soul, if Jeffrey Masson seems too soft for you. I don’t care the number of self-justifying research papers either, as at the end of the day this eating of this meat has not bred superior humans of us by any stretch… look around you at the deadened automaton masses. I don’t think losing that would devolve them any further, if such could be done.

Yes, we have our large brains now, but I don’t on the whole see them being used for anything vital to our survival. we could not have known then is the point. We can indeed know now. Outside of this blasted Christianized anthropocentrism, how much can we see them as lives and not as a food source or economic unit for ourselves? See them for them, and as best as can be done, respectful of their terms.

Yeah I blame the industries, but I blame the people that facilitate them more, by their very lack of better humanity, that lack of soul. I don’t blame non-vegans (perhaps vegetarians to be more generous to the weak public). I do hate them though, and I will continue to hate them. There are no decent people, it seems, there are just people, and I do not care for their emotionless, thoughtless paradigm of personal excuses. You are hurting something innocent, that knows hurt well by now, and you see no real intrinsic problem with this. Hence why I don’t really make much effort arguing these days. I cannot talk adequately to Neanderthals whilst still expecting men, and it’s foolish of me to try.

Dale Jensen: “Humans have been omnivores since our days on the African savannah, and there is not a single hunter-gatherer tribe that doesn’t consume meat.”

This was a quality comment. This subject is relevant to me. I suffered from a number of chronic ailments but especially atrial fibrilation. Out of desperation I tried the Carnivore diet (only animal products; mostly meat, pork, fish and eggs) and every health problem disappeared in just under a year. I have lost 30 pounds and am off all medications. Now, you could say this might have happened with either a vegan or vegetarian diet. I tried both and was miserable on them. Eating only meat, fish and eggs was transformative for my health.

I totally agree about outlawing animal cruelty. And Hitler was right; respecting animals is evidence of a superior soul (which Nordics are more capable of than any other race). But we are meat eating omnivores. If you study the history of nutrition you learn that the Germans were on the forefront of medical science (they were on the forefront of every science) and they were moving in the direction of what today is referred to as the ancestoral health movement (holistic health). They may have found cures for cancer by the end of the 20th century. But WW2 happened and the Anglo-American homicidal war against Germany. This elevated Anglo-American corporatism and its industrial food complex with all its processed foods; the real reason for the obesity epidemic and the health decline (that and vaccines).

There needs to be rights afforded to animals. But there also needs to be a recognition of the nutritional needs of humanity. Metabolic health depends in large part on animal products. Veganism is the food philosophy of the Neo-Christian left. But it derives from certain Christian sects like the Seventh Day Adventists. Its interesting that circumcision also derives from Christian sects implementing their Old Testament Christianity (and circumcision is rampant in America where it is not in Europe).

So, while I consider the modern plant based movement to be leftist malevolence, I don’t hold it against the Nazis (and Hitler) for being pro-plant based. They didn’t know what we know now (and they didn’t have the experience of the modern vegan movement which has produced a group of undernourished, sickly, mentally weak humans; certainly not strong proud Aryans). I think If the Germans had won WW2, they would have cracked the code of ideal human nutrition and implemented a diet that provided maxim nutrient quality from animal based foods derived from a benevolent food system.

Editor: In fact, studies indicate that the healthiest people are in remote villages on islands in Japan, towns in Italy and Costa Rica (the so-called ‘blue zones’). Some of them live up to 110 years old. Obviously, this is the parameter for determining what is healthiest for humans.

They mostly eat vegetables. And although they are not vegans, the amount of meat or fish they eat is very small in their diets. I remember a documentary about that island in Japan in which they ate red meat (pork), IIRC, once a month.

I rely more on these studies of the blue zones than on any others not based on millennia- or centuries-old evidence (since those people have had those diets ancestrally).

Benjamin: Dale, I didn’t think I’d respond again – I’m in a hurry tonight so apologies for any hasty thought; I’ll write in sequential streaming points – but I think I can fit one more response in.

How could one have a benevolent food system and outlaw animal cruelty, and still insist on caging them up, or at least containing them artificially and then killing these enslaved nutrition units? Raising them to kill them, a strange nihilism for them to undergo.

I mean, you could deliberately breed animals that feel less pain or as close to no pain as could be done (as they’re attempting currently) but you’re still basically enslaving them and stripping them of their own self-determination. Unless you’re suggesting to breed out their minds also. It all seems somewhat desperate.

Invariably cruel in the process also. There’s a simpler solution. I don’t think it was an error on the National Socialists’ parts that they didn’t know any better – it was an ethical novelty, a high ground we have since regressed from. For every healthy meat eater, I see a fat, slovenly mental invalid or simpleton, and I wonder if there are other reasons for leftist physical appearance, that trademark phenotype (as so many look like that and do consume meat).

I’m sorry it made you so miserable. It doesn’t make me miserable or depressive, and I’ve kept to a very strict non-animal products regime for about 4 years. So, to some degree we may both be outliers.

Though forced neuroleptics blight me now, before then I felt nothing but fully healthy (and indeed tested as such medically, with superior results, a surprise even to myself), a clarity (or purity, free of corpses) one senses in their lungs more than their stomach. It did nothing negative to affect my modest strength training and it did not muddy my mind or reduce my intellect.

Can we do anything but exploit them? Yes, we did then, and we do now, but if I can type here, as a product of evolution, and say I have a choice, and work on that choice daily in performing it, am I unnatural in that very human decision-making, or am I in fact merely innovative, if idealistic, qualities that did our ancestors well?

I’m not Nordic, no. I do the best a proud non-Nordic Aryan can do I think. Hitler wasn’t trying in that particular venture to crack the code of optimal human nutrition – as we have already pointed out encapsulated in Savitri Devi’s Impeachment of Man – but to alleviate their suffering, and bring an animal liberation.

Leftism and neochristianity are one thing, but I see no reason that a National Socialism for the 21st century in coincidental parallel to (and not inspired by) neochristian/Christian sect ideals cannot continue this aim. Separate veganism from straw-manning its adherents into the leftist bracket.

Animals have their lives regardless of the ‘rights’ we presumptively award them, as if again, it was somehow our place to do so on paper; this feral, entitled anthropocentrism. They had that ‘right’ regardless of the poor deal we rehash repeatedly and rote sell them while we tell ourselves it’s ‘for their best interests’.

The main difficulty I see is that I’m talking about something that has never been tried, never at the scale required. Part of me thinks the distress caused by it would be psychological, not nutritional, and that passing in time (or adjusted to easily, if there is real pain at all). Better that transient needy distress than the 27 million I mentioned before, the brutal, incomplete tally of deaths per day in your own country. This knee-jerk motherly drive to provide our folk with good nutrition comes with that feminine amorality, that casual glossing over of the tangible reality that there is no way to achieve this without more grotesque suffering, as opposed to a paradigm-shifting innovation that promises a lot of moaning and gnashing of teeth, but the saved lives of every domesticated animal on the planet, those with simpler, more natural needs, and a greater capacity for love, which inexplicably, we are still awarded by them.

I don’t buy the naturalistic fallacy used in this convenient pseudo-Darwinian sense. I’ve covered the other points I wanted to make. If I may add, perhaps the vegetables, fruits, grains and seeds you were consuming were not of a suitable quality, or selection, or variation.

We had this discussion before I remember when I retired from answering in weary acceptance that nothing I wanted to add after that would have – or ever could have – made a difference. As far as I remember, I had wanted to get into further discussion on changing the food supply at primary level, or encouraging the migrating from areas your country has already destroyed via agribusinesses – their own sightless fault (or sucking up and realising everything is shipped and handled by immigrants, food or otherwise).

But I’ll leave this for now. It’s cruelty at the heart of this. I’m still waiting for more to be broached on that, not just food facts, from an outlier to what may so far be an outlier. Feel free to respond. I’m too busy to type any more tonight though, and may, unavoidably, be gone for quite some time.

Note: As I wrote to my friend later...

"I wasn't sure if my final point was clear - it's a given that I blame and hate subhumans i.e. meat eaters. I was just considering vegetarianism as the only viable binary alternative to veganism, the only human non-vegans, so to speak, and ones I do not quite hold the same blame to, but certainly much hatred. I didn't phrase it too clearly, to the point of seeming to contradict myself. Hitler was a vegetarian after all. I imagine post-war that he would have come to the vegan realisation though, systematically reviewing eggs and dairy treatment after slaughterhouses. He seems the type of figure to, by his other conduct. I'm lucky in that I can learn from his example, whereas he cannot have known much better, so radical was the shift, as with the unavoidable error over the psychiatric patients of the Tiergartenstrasse 4 program.

I doubt 'AS' will really - as he as a flawed being cognitively cannot - address my point though, and there was only one. Humans might cry and mope for a while as they transitioned to vegetables, and grump, and feel their lives unsettled and hard done by, as they are wont to do at the drop of a hat, like with heroin withdrawal (or sugar, also addictive), but the life of every domesticated animal on the planet, those with simpler, more natural needs, would be saved.

Misguided? Yes (potentially). But 'Malevolent'? Say, more malevolent that the posterboy apologetics for a couple of hundred million cruel deaths a day? These people drip smug ignorance.

I'm re-reading The Emotional Lives of Animals (in a revised and updated edition) by Marc Bekoff. I wish more like AS would consider it - although it seems like he doesn't want to examine anything that doesn't match his thinking, as is clear from your repeat requests to him to read Impeachment of Man. 

I won't get into the neurobiology of it, but Marc suggests that not only do other animals on the whole experience more vivid emotions than we do, they most likely also experience some emotions that we don't/can't, and that consequently we have trouble putting a name on. 

Also, on a review of scientific evidence and on eight criteria (to do with neural pathways and nociceptors), Jonathan Birch and his colleagues have proved that cephalopod molluscs - squid and octopus - and decapod crustaceans - shrimp, lobster, crabs - are sentient. Dr. Victoria Braithwaite has already concluded that fish feel pain (as well as experience stress), and that there is more evidence for this (even) than for human neonates. 

Finally, I note that bees, beetles, butterflies, moths, and even flies and ants show substantial signs of experiencing pain, much as bees can become depressed, as well as being optimistic, or pessimistic. It's a shame the UK Animal Welfare Act 2006 is rather outdated over these truths. 

As Marc remarks early on, the 'animals are automatons' Cartesian position says more about those promoting it, and their philosophy than it does about the science of animals emotions and thus sentience.

As he writes:

"No, animals can't speak to us. They let their faces, eyes, ears, and tails do the talking; some communicate with odors, ranging from sweet to pungent. Animals also convey what they think and feel using a myriad of behavior patterns - postures, gestures, and gaits. In all these ways, animals express themselves, but are we listening?"

I would suggest AS has something psychologically riding on his wretched position being true, and also that he - just like all who espouse this position - is figuratively blind, and somehow dead to emotive empirical perception (as would make some sense for an autist).

I thought you might find this contemporary research interesting.

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Round 3

Autisticus Spasticus: I don’t drink alcohol either. It just tastes vile to me. On the other hand, there hasn’t been a single hunter-gatherer culture in history that didn’t eat meat. It’s why we evolved such large brains. Animal rights and human nutritional requirements are incompatible. Shaming people for abiding by their evolved diet seems rather Abrahamic. In all honesty, I think veganism derives from the same utopian, blank slate assumptions as wokeness.

Editor:  Benjamin has already responded to this sort of argument.

Autistucus Spasticus: Benjamin strikes me as the sort of person who would try to convert his dog to a vegan diet. As with the Leftists, it is the inability to accept that the world is fundamentally an unpleasant place. Attempts to fix our inherently malevolent reality are doomed to failure.

Benjamin: What sort of a person is that? You’re correct, actually, except there’s not so much a conversion as a detailed observation, acknowledgment and facilitation of his own independent tastes. Skyler chooses the vegetables and fruits of his own volition. We noticed early on he wasn’t much of a fan of his meat, and some high-quality cuts were tried in addition to the dire standards of commercial dog food.

I’m not sure what to say to you today – I addressed all your points before, and you blanked me, or at least didn’t engage again. If you feel this to be the case (the hopelessness), why do you comment here at all? Would you not like to at least try? I accept very well that the world is an unpleasant place, but an ‘is’ is not a ‘must’, as if it were set in immutable stone. Why wallow in it, washing your hands of the matter? Really, this backing away from the issues at stake strikes me more of cowardice – if one tells oneself than nothing can be changed then it saves the realisation that they damn well could be, and in practice can be – are, for that matter – if only one could pull their finger out, so to speak (although I’m sure from far prior experience that depression warps the faculties). Stop straw-manning my Veganism points with the Leftist comparison. I’ve already referenced this lazy, dismissive, disingenuous technique.

We were not raised to psychogenic awareness in historic hunter-gatherer culture either, just as we practised mass infanticide, child abuse and human sacrifice. We could not have known then. We can know now.

We adapt as a race. There is no need for ‘assumptions’; one observes the cruelty readily. As I said before, if there is an adaptation that can serve Nature as well as it serves that facet that is us, in limiting that rampant age-old cruelty, a truly novel development, why is this innovative idealism brushed under the rug? Why the weary contempt?

I too hold a couple of deep-seated beliefs on this topic 1. that all these dietary/evolution arguments are convenient hot air, a big heap of self-serving rationalizations to paper over the lack of a fully developed Aryan soul, and 2. that you’re simply addicted and a stickler for convenience, lacking the willpower and/or imagination to try a little harder on this front.

Nutritional  requirements?!  What fallacious bollocks. If you’re truly going to put this hypothesis to the test, why not try a while without, and make a proper effort of it? To the best of my own ability to ascertain, it does me no harm, after all, and there are a wealth of commonly available substitutes and alternatives to fulfil any of your nutrient needs.

If I were more suspicious I would hypothesise that the grim ‘common-sense’ pronouncements you are accustomed to utilizing in your defence only come so effortlessly to you because, fundamentally, through whatever early-environment stimulated neurological deficit, you lack the ability to feel human compassion for animals. A dispassionate person would argue like this; a string of carefully-crafted defensive techniques to prevent acknowledgment of a fundamental flaw, objectively. I’m not trying to shame you, just to call a spade a spade. I’m still waiting for someone to assimilate the scope of my previous cruelty points. It’s simply not good enough to claim idly that nothing can be done, as if it were an a priori truth.

Autisticus Spasticus: You are making it a moral issue when it is simply an evolutionary one. Yes, we evolved large brains because our hominid ancestors ate meat. Yes, every single hunter-gatherer culture has consumed meat. If it bothers you that much, the simple solution is to stop creating humans. This is far easier than converting natural omnivores to a vegetarian diet they did not evolve to eat. I don’t really buy into this psychoclass business. I hold it in the same regard as astrology and palm reading. But that is a good question, though. I’m not entirely sure why I comment here. It is certainly the case that I have given up on life, as anyone who has read my substack essay An Indictment of Life will know.

You actually named your dog Skyler? Oh god, it’s worse than I thought. Well, you know what they say. A vegan dog is like a transsexual toddler. You know it wasn’t the one who made the decision. Of course, there is also the possibility that you have an oddball dog.

Benjamin: Would you like to put to me conclusively why it is not a moral issue, one for higher faculties than the scope of your primitive id?

I didn’t name the dog, no. He’s my partner’s dog. I humour her. It’s not worse than you thought, don’t be so fucking dramatic. That’s a lot of assumptions there. You have no real clue. What matters is that he is a healthy, happy, energetic dog, with keen instincts, a deep, peaceable, playful temperament, and boundless energy. The call of the wild. And he certainly did make the decision – how else can I phrase it to you?

He still consumes a small packet of dog meat, if he is encouraged to by us, he simply prefers (and one sees it if they know and like dogs) vegetables. Unlike what I would do with humans, in his case there is choice involved. We try to accommodate him, not the other way around.

Is ceasing all life on the planet really easier for you than making one choice? I don’t think so. I think you’re simply being petulant. They would be unhappy yes, disgruntled, certainly… equally petulant. So what? Scale this petty human grievance, transient as immaterial, against the suffering. We evolved as omnivores. See it as a baseline to improve from. We evolved brains, and cognition, and consciousness. Consciousness can make choices. I see you cannot. You have one option before you, filling your mind, and that is all there is to it. No wonder you don’t believe in psychoclasses – it makes your job easier, and allows you to maintain self-esteem. I am talking to a Neanderthal.

Autisticus Spasticus: It would be absurd to call predatory animals evil, because animals are essentially automata. You would be projecting your human values onto a creature that does not possess a mind. They simply do what they do in order to satisfy their nutritional requirements. Humans have minds, but their nutritional requirements are just as much a product of evolutionary history just as much as a lion’s is. You cannot negotiate diet, much as you cannot negotiate your sexual orientation. It is what it is. Your determination to push against this is no different than the Left’s attempt to mould reality into what they find more agreeable. It is the same utopianism, the same desire for emancipation from nature.

As I have said before, you cannot force people to eat things that they find vile. Your response to this is to brute force it, to hold a gun to our heads and demand that we change. This is also what the Left does. I may be an anti-natalist, but I don’t proselytise it. Vegans do. Much like Muslims, they cannot help themselves. They are compelled to convert and conquer.

Benjamin: I don’t know where you get your rigid, dogmatic opinions from, but animals certainly do possess a mind. You’re incorrect, and your worldview is barren. I take it you are not well read or up to date on this topic, as would suit your underlying brute ignorance.

This is how you seem to be using ‘evolution’ also, an immutable excuse. You seem to be denying human conscious choice also. You have fixed in stone what is in reality fluid. As I say, it’s convenient to you to do that. I’m growing tired of this conversation -we could be at this all day. Stop glossing over what you seem to find psychologically difficult to accept.

As the highest evolved life on the planet, and perhaps much further afield, Aryan man has a unique opportunity to alleviate suffering, utilizing that big brain, for once in a century. A problem solved. If you truly cannot see a problem, I would suggest, as I said before in other words, that you are blind (or just being stubborn), and I mean that in terms of simple empirical observation as much as soulful perception. On a side note, Muslims’ drive to convert, compel, and conquer is one of their strong points, not a flaw. Ultimately, we would do best to pursue the same.

Autisticus Spasticus: Since I was very young, I found fruit and most vegetables intolerable. I would gag and regurgitate a slice of apple or banana if I tried to eat it. This is the nature of autism. We are fussy eaters, which makes us a nightmare for vegans.

You may have noticed that the editor evaded my question about all the beautiful young nymphs he covets. They are almost certainly meat eaters. Would he therefore have them exterminated? I think he avoided the question because it caused him considerable cognitive dissonance.

I know he doesn’t like bare links, but I don’t know how to create a hyperlink, so he can either create it for me or just tolerate it.

https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2022/12/28/nonhuman-animals-are-not-agents-language-sets-humans-apart-from-the-rest-of-the-animal-kingdom/

Benjamin: Lest I too am considered evasive (I would imagine he has simply had enough of you and your incessant silly replies), I thought I’d add my own thoughts. Yes, I’d imagine they most likely eat meat. Most of the population, healthy or not, does after all. I don’t think they would necessarily have to be exterminated. The goal is more to educate people and encourage them away from meat-eating, albeit by force, not immediate summary firing squad or whatever. I’d imagine pure, healthy Aryans would be most likely to have the ability to rise above this; to understand the issue, and the patience and willpower to run with it.

The point is not that they are carnivores, an unsurprising observation after all but that, with encouragement they may not always be. Currently they simply don’t know any better. They are divinely beautiful, and inspirational, but not infallible, being after all women.

The article reads like it was written by another one of you. I imagined as much from the website’s title. ‘Here we go’, I thought, ‘more cheap’n’popular alt-right Newtonian universe genetic determinism’. I’m surprised you didn’t toss Dutton at me. Or Daniel Dennett.

Coincidentally, I read Donald Davidson (Actions & Events is a good one, or Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective) but don’t agree on his Cartesian automata mistake. A mind as a discrete realm of conscious intention is the capacity to feel/perceive and sense – to possess emotion – not the capacity to logically compute; to reason; to exhibit higher intelligence, for which, accepted, some would then say language is a necessity.

We’ve established a thousand times that thought is non-computational. Ultimately, we could take it back to the classic analogy in Thomas Nagel’s What is it Like to Be a Bat? but I think it can be inferred by their expressiveness, if one only spends enough time observing them – I think these cold dissident rightists are asking the wrong questions.

Tangentially though, I refer you to the recent short book Beyond Evolutionary Psychology: How and Why Neuropsychological Modules Arise, by George Ellis, which, as far as I remember, also delves into language ability, albeit acknowledging that there are no innate cognitive modules in the neocortex.

I think Brendan Wallace’s modest contribution in Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won’t Work could be useful to flick through just for an overview.

I seem to remember enjoying the pocket edition of Why The Mind is not a Computer: A pocket lexicon of neuromythology by Raymond Tallis, but you have enough to work with.

Personally, I recommended Marc Bekoff before.

Roger Penrose also suggests (I think it’s somewhere in the anthology Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence edited by Fabio Scardigli), as do a number of the more open minded panpsychists and Russellian monists such as Galen Strawson and Philip Goff, that our consciousness evolved out of a naturally-existing rudimentary ‘proto-consciousness’ that has in effect always been here, taking existence back to the Planck epoch.

It’s the same for the rest of Nature, including the remainder of the animal kingdom, to one degree or another, muted as some phenomena are, granted. We’re marked out by our intelligence, clearly the pinnacle, but we’re not markedly ‘more conscious’ that say, a fieldmouse, or a dairy cow, at least not to the degree that they are unconscious.

Finally, Peter Godfrey-Smith seems to disagree with you also, if you consider Other Minds, or Metazoa (which I was recommended copies of recently by my father).

No, as I say, I think it’s a matter instead of a lack of scientific curiosity, the naturalist’s vital passion, that seals off these dissident right fools from examining this issue clearly or with any particular rigour.

The article read like it was written by discount AI. I’d be more inclined to posit that, rather than the rest of Nature, whoever penned it lacked that intrinsic soulfulness that raises one above the level of another passionless golem, of which there are increasingly rather too many, among our own species at least.

Sorry if my answer isn’t precise enough for you – I’m tired tonight, hence why I only came to your article recently. I was informed you felt ignored. Perhaps you’ll do me the courtesy of answering (just for yourself) the many questions I’ve asked you, scattered over quite some replies on this topic over multiple sessions, and seemingly glossed over, akin to maintaining your position by a sort of blinkered lie by omission. I’m not in the habit of making rhetorical remarks. Anyway, bye for now.

Note: In another reflection letter I wrote to my friend afterwards, I gave the sentiment...

"Given the Overview lines to Tom Holland's Dominion, which I don't contest:

  “In Holland’s view, pre-Christian societies and deities, such as in the Greco-Roman world, tended to focus on and glorify strength, might and power; this was inverted with the spread of Christianity, which proclaimed the primacy of the weak and suffering. ...  The concept of human rights and equality, as well as solidarity with the weak against the strong, Holland argues, ultimately derive from the theology built on the teachings of Jesus and Paul the Apostle.” 

And also to that, given the unyielding perspective in Ragnar Redbeard's Might is Right, how do National Socialists and upholders of the Greco-Roman (and Cro-Magnon) tradition reconcile this with the mandate to eliminate all unnecessary suffering, including that of animals?

My initial response, if I was answering my own question would be to say that might and strength, much as it demands adaptation to perfection - to pierce the summit of existence - as with the rest of Nature, and mastery over enemies, does not automatically consider all non-Aryan (or non-Nordic to be strict about it) i.e. non-human life to be an enemy, much as I associate outright cruelty against what I would call those undeserving of cruelty as being a historically Oriental (as opposed to Occidental), or broadly speaking, non-white trait. I suppose I'm thinking of animal cruelty more than cruelty to Aryan children, as the latter is slightly easier to argue against at times on account of the children being our own race i.e. fellow Aryans. To me it's intrinsic that I love animals and thus that cruelty against them (apart from a few exceptions - and even then it's only death, not cruel actions per se) is unnecessary; is wrong.

I know my usual core position instinctively is obvious, I'm just wondering how you would go about answering, if faced with the usual crowd who insist that, on account of strength and power values, we should be able to brutalise and subjugate animals, and that anyone who says different is, fundamentally, working on Christian values, with our emphasis after all on suffering too, and on one permutation of the weak, and with them able logically (just about), to warp Nature's grand hierarchical interconnectivity (we are animals – life – as much as they are) to a form of pseudo-equality, at least for the set, much as the objects in it can never be equal. With this latter concern I'm thinking of the horrible neologism 'speciesism' which, though accurate to me, I try not to use, for the very reason that it feels postmodern, and egalitarian, much as I prefer not to think in animal 'rights' as much as animal liberation. I wouldn't want to be criticised by them suggesting my call to life-affirming harmony with the rest of the natural world was egalitarian.

I'm wondering if, to my doubters, I should instead make beauty/aesthetics arguments and state that animals are beautiful in form, and generally more so than the mass that is 'we' are if in rough comparison, and better suited and adapted to their contemporary environment too, and so us, as the ugly species, is the weak link, acting out of the Gods' divine order of the universe by hurting them unduly - because, of all of them, we alone could choose not to, and yet we do (and, as they seem empathetic already, and do not like pain, I would even argue that were they complex enough to cognitively be able to choose not to, they would in some cases more readily do so, speculating on how other pathways would evolve in the consciousness present among other species) - were it not for that fact that we have long enslaved them, with our more complex modern needs, as opposed to their natural simplicity.

I suppose I would also reflect on the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers who adopted, in their own different forms, variations of vegetarianism and pure veganism, such as Pythagoras, Epicurus, Plotinus, or Plato's Socrates (the vegetarian city ideal in The Republic), or in particular my better choice favourites, Theophrastus and Empedocles (the latter of whom I think is closest to my own perspective), then Ovid, Seneca, and Plutarch for that matter, when I read On The Eating of Flesh recently, plus of course Porphyry whom I mentioned before (though I'm not sure if he counts as a Greek).

I'm struggling to phrase my worry adequately, but I hope you get the gist. I suppose if one is going to be dogmatic about 'might is right' Master morality points - as you aren't, but some are - to use your expression from Abraham Maslow: and to the point one becomes a hammer and so everything looks like a nail... then to me they somehow misinterpret the intent of what it is to be strong, or beautiful, or noble, (or furious against foes), and simply become brute evil instead, where one did have power and yet benevolence, tempered by wisdom, and now only has power.

---

My final musings on the matter (for the moment), presented to a friend initially:

"...I was mulling over my diaries tonight, all my past correspondence, etc., and came across those animal rights/veganism discussions from earlier in the year. That’s what I was trying to articulate at the time but couldn’t put across as clearly as I wanted before invariably tempers flared (I anticipate those distant, gathering torches and raised pitchforks every time I bring up this topic).

Yeah, we eat meat on the whole. So fucking what though? Has continued consumption of it bred better humans of us, in a latter-day world – or humans at all in most cases? Better in psychoclass? Better in nature? No. Outside of all the blatant, perennially disregarded animal cruelty points already raised, what are we in general:

Narcissistic down to a tee, soft, smug, cowardly, bourgeois, backstabbing, conformist, hedonistic, cynical, small-minded & unambitious, apathetic, insensate & anti-aesthetic, degenerate, feminized, individualistic, standoffish, dispassionate, disloyal… the list goes on, and one can add to it what they like.

I wasn’t arguing that vegans cannot be those qualities so much as meat eaters also can surely possess them, and in practice do (although personally I find the indignant excuse-making, ostrich effects, and cognitive dissonance over the cruelty involved in the animal products industries to tick more of those boxes, and have put so before enough times).

I twigged immediately when I read the comment you made recently on slaughterhouses, talking about one of the key reasons for your paradigm. Yes, very much as I said before… these lazy, slovenly mental invalids and simpletons and arguers-in-bad-faith – these unyielding rocks sinking to the bottom of the Rubicon – certainly have their meat still (as much as all the ‘trademark leftist phenotype’ meat-eaters do), but they remain the worst generation… the ugliest, most abject generation of exterminable useless eaters and traitors yet to taint and shame our race, for all their reverent dedication to their hallowed, addictive dietary convenience fad.

Until Aryans can recognise themselves in all their shabby disgrace and all the smug anthropocentrism of lingering Christian malware, and start to come to terms with their myriad faults and defects, and stupid self-serving errors, as much as any, so far ill-placed, pride, I don’t have much hope for us. I gave up on spotting everyday humility quite some time back.

I certainly can’t boil it all down to the Jewish Question either. I hate it so much when that buck is passed by default. Just another convenient excuse to paper over honest self-reflection, all acting as our own indefatigable defence lawyers for impeccable moral hygiene and infallibility of character. It drives me mad.

So yes, I share your infuriation. Beyond my private idealism for what we should be, I remember you sharing quite some while back that practically all whites too are your enemies these days. I can understand what you mean by that, surely. The aftermath of the war really has left its nigh-on indelible mark."

Penultimate Edit: (31/10/2025): I didn't put this at time, but it struck me as rather darkly amusing (if I can call it that), in a pathetic sense, when my stubborn interlocutor typed:

"I was very young, I found fruit and most vegetables intolerable. I would gag and regurgitate a slice of apple or banana if I tried to eat it. This is the nature of autism. We are fussy eaters, which makes us a nightmare for vegans."

Um, no. That's all fair and good to try and put a stoic veneer of scientific essentialism over the top (and if anyone's "desperate", it really is you lot - argument after argument on your parts rebutted [even the ones I have trimmed from this account] and you're still trying to pump out your feeble retorts, moving on to each new thrust without acknowledging that you've openly been defeated on the previous ones!); a very effective rationalisation on your part, and surely long upheld, but it is simply the case (not glamorous; not mentally appealing to you) that you are, in fact, merely the adult remnant of what was once a very spoilt child, raised by a single mother who seems to have facilitated your every need and more with some degree of gross irresponsibility, thus creating what is effectively a man with the mind and psychological motivations, albeit verbose lexicon and quite intelligent nonetheless - high-moderately so at least, enough to be dogmatic - of an perennial adult baby, back in their high chair for their entire lives, dictating the show in the matter of an unrepentant Little Lord Fauntleroy. Nice try. If it's the 'nature' of autism, then it's an imposed nature (and an imposed 'condition'), massaged carelessly into your early development by a subtle, irresponsible campaign of flippant emotional neglect, and far too late to do anything about now it seems. It's not just overt cruelty than can ruin a child.

It's that simple, though it burst your bubble. It's not that you're 'fussy eaters' because you exist as such a category as a valid, respectable and arbitrary evolutionary development, as fundamental to you biologically as your hair colour or the rest of your racial phenotype, it's that you're all fucking spoilt rotten, having been pampered to death by over-generous, and yet paradoxically deeply neglectful lone female parents, lacking in infancy all familiar role models for masculine discipline, women who failed 100% at instilling in you the most basic interpersonal plasticity and regard, in a situation you did not make any steps yourselves to perform self-reflection on at any point prior, and which - unless you consider it privately with a shudder - you now, by years of this insidious conditioning, lack the ability (and indeed will and mature desire) to reflect on still. I'm afraid that's the case. Out the window with your unconvincing, ego-massaging rationalisations, you brats. Think of this... your whole lifelong patter on this tenacious issue, every last drop of it, an internal monologue of truth-avoidant bullshit, to facilitate gross over-indulgence. Stop pulling my leg, would you? You're not cerebrally qualified to discuss this issue, much as you inevitably will, the only predictable 'determinism' in all of this.

Final Edit (15/11/2025):

I reject hard determinism just as I reject biological essentialism. The former leads indeed to moral nihilism - which for me is the antithesis of Master morality (though almost in the same ballpark). For us, there's an intrinsic good (it's just that we know what it is, and aren't obliged to have to justify it to ourselves/anyone else as we just seem to pick it automatically)... for them, I can only assume they have that harsh, sort of 'Evil' tone for that reason - there is no objective good or bad to them i.e. it's firm atheism, where we are debased also. A misunderstanding of Nietzsche on top of this.

I feel if hard determinism was true you wouldn't have people arguing on the same side over conflicting moral decisions. The variation would have to be explained (and I notice hard determinists are less inclined to read the body of evidence of their opponents than the other way around). For me Nature shapes, in overview, but isn't miraculous - that takes us actively doing something. If Vegans won the planetary war, surely that would disprove them utterly, for example. I suppose you’d literally have to win against them to put it to them, given the position’s inherent self-justifying stubbornness.

Much as hate is natural, love is a choice on top of that (and a choice I feel must be kindled also). That sort of fatalism... about being pulled along by the tides of life... it allows them to justify their poor choices a priori.

Besides that argument, I'd just quote the non-determinism science perspectives, from Karl Popper or Ilya Prigogine and the like. I take it when they (some) go on about technology as the root cause of our continuing dysfunction they sees us as 'machines' also (despite Penrose et al., and all those great scientists and computer researchers who discredit AI or human cognition being in any way akin to AI). My main page is stuffed full of academics who appear to disprove scientific determinism.

I can cope with either soft determinism or - potentially; as a backup in case I am wrong -totally free will (although tend to greatly favour soft determinism for contemporaneous cognitive science/biological reasons). I despise the 'emotions are made up' neuroscience crowd, and indeed the Daniel Dennett types, as much as I have no fondness for the 'flat mind' of Nick Chater - surely a very easy way to let abusers off the hook. I'm not particularly fond of the Australian David Chalmers either.

You'd be a terrible pessimist about the universe itself if you took this position to its logical conclusion. Might is right/'all is justified because our bodies are doing it' can't be right by itself as suffering exists. You'd have to say suffering wasn't a bad thing (in which case why does physical pain - the evolved nociceptor response - hurt?), or make the obnoxious denial that it didn't exist at all to have any philosophical consistency in this wacky theory, lackadaisically spitting in the face of all human ontological empiricism (or simple observation). I can only think it would appeal solely to the very, very depressed, and those who harboured an unprocessed grudge.

I'll argue this properly at some point, if I can be bothered, but it's increasing difficult (impossible) if your opponent comes pre-loaded, and simply wants it to be true no matter what fresh insight is added, and no matter how much they are consistently proved wrong.