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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this guy gets it. Clearly, he has drawn the line at "proprietary software is fine, as long as it's useful to me". To RMS, though, that's not where the line is: he simply refuses to use software he can't tweak or audit. That's not like calling Obama Hitler or saying global warming is a scientific fraud. It's just an ideology, like not driving a car or only eating foods that don't come from animals. Nothing wrong with that, so why all the hate?

This article is sillier than calling the kindle "swindle".

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If the spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society was trying to persuade others to become vegetarian by branding all farmers "murderers" and engaging in ridiculous rhetoric, I think other vegetarians might be concerned that their message wasn't being conveyed appropriately and was alienating them from the mainstream, thereby resulting in fewer vegetarians.

I can't tell if you are being facetious, but the main argument for vegetarianism is that "meat is murder."

I guess I meant PETA-levels of extremism. Like this: http://blog.peta.org.uk/2011/01/peta-takes-meat-warning-to-c...

For many of the vegetarians I've known, that's a secondary argument, the primary being a healthier lifestyle.

I know people like that, too. However, if I had to bet money on the primary motivation of the majority of the world's vegetarians, I would bet they hold ethical arguments against eating meat.

The analogy works fine. We have the politically motivated FSF on the "meat is murder" side, and on the other hand the Open Source movements belief that open source is simply a more practical way to develop software on the "healthier lifestyle" side.

I wouldn't expect PETA to stop with their off-putting campaigns ("Your Mommy Kill Animals"), it is what they genuinely believe, and for them keeping silent and advocating "a healthier lifestyle" would be so far from their viewpoint that it would practically be a lie, even if it might win them more friends and influence.

Same with RMS. His views are radical, and toning his messages to make them more palatable down would be dishonest to who he is. Let someone else play the moderate and practical.

Of course, moderate and practical people don't dedicate their life to a message, be it "a healthier lifestyle" or "a better way to develop software". The Open Source spokespeople like Michael Tiemann or Tim O'Reilly) tend to get distracted by having a life to live.

And let's not forget that RMS' views create the space that moderates inhabit. In other words, if there were no RMS, the moderates would be the extremists and we'd all be poorer for it.

The difference though, is that usually the moderates have the pulpit and the radicals are ever marginalized. That hasn't happened to a great degree here. Stallman is still the front man for the movement.

That's strange, all of the vegetarians I know are very clear that being vegetarian adds an extra difficulty in living a healthy lifestyle because getting enough protean is difficult. Vegetarianism, for them, is entirely a moral issue, and is in fact a detriment to a healthy lifestyle.

And that's why moral vegetarians like me, don't worry about offending "healthy" vegetarians. They don't have any skin in the game.

I have been told that the primary reason is that killing animals is morally wrong, not that it is in any way comparable to murder. I have never met an vegetarian so extreme to tell me that animals (we eat) are people.

Whether killing animals is comparable to murder is a different question than whether animals are people.

Peter Singer argues against the species-ist argument that they're incomparable. Or that killing any human is worse than killing any (or even all) animals, i.e. he argues that for some human,animal pairs killing the human is less-worse than killing the animal.

http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html :

> Q. I’ve read that you think humans and animals are equal. Do you really believe that a human being is no more valuable than an animal?

> A. I argued in the opening chapter of Animal Liberation that humans and animals are equal in the sense that the fact that a being is human does not mean that we should give the interests of that being preference over the similar interests of other beings. That would be speciesism, and wrong for the same reasons that racism and sexism are wrong. Pain is equally bad, if it is felt by a human being or a mouse. We should treat beings as individuals, rather than as members of a species. But that doesn’t mean that all individuals are equally valuable – see my answer to the next question for more details.

When someone says murder most people think 'subset of killing humans' — that's how people come into play. I don't ink you are really referring to a mainstream vegetarian argument there.

There is even vast common ground between meat eaters and vegetarians. Most people agree that killing primates it morally clearly wrong.

Singer's is a utilitarian framework for arguments about vegetarianism and other animal-rights issues; not an argument for vegetarianism, per se. Animal Liberation is a great, mind-opening read.

> Most people agree that killing primates it morally clearly wrong.

Roughly, you're probably right: killing primates is generally wrong. But it's not always, clearly wrong: killing a primate that's about to kill you, killing primates that are consistently killing other primates, killing one primate to save a hundred other primates, etc., etc. Singer's framework gives us a way to reason-through cases where there isn't consensus.

Quite a few quote the circumstances under which meat is 'produced' as another primary reason, i.e. not the killing of animals for food per se, but the conditions created by the industrialized process optimized for efficiency in killing.

"... tasty, tasty murder" is how the t-shirt ends, I believe. That is basically the point. "meat is murder" is so far over the line it's laughable to most people who aren't vegetarians.

Dubious claim. There is no single argument against eating meat. I know vegetarians who abstain from eating meat on grounds ranging from waste of biomass resources to "I don't like the taste." It's a multifaceted belief system.

Within the group, you'll likely find a small subset that actually thinks meat is akin to human murder, but that takes a leap of logic that many vegetarians aren't willing to take when there are so many other perfectly reasonable reasons to choose the vegetarian lifestyle.

His personal refusal isn't even part of the letter or in any way criticized.

Nothing wrong with that and the letter makes that pretty clear. It's about persuasion and spot on when it comes to that.

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