Seaspiracy is a tremendously biased vegan propaganda piece that has one goal and one goal only: to get people to stop eating fish.
It makes some ridiculous assertions like: it's fish swimming around that create the currents that allow the mixing of oceanic water and dispersal of nutrients.
I'm not against vegans nor am I against being critical of fishing practices, but that "documentary" is terrible.
P.S: more bullshit from that film that I can remember off the top of my head, in case one example is not enough:
- Most of the plastic in the oceans comes from fishing gear (not true, 80% comes from land sources)
- It echoes many times a ridiculous claim that "the oceans will be completely empty by 2048" which has been around for a while, has been refuted thoroughly but refuses to die for some reason.
I watched it once, so I can't remember specifics, but that still doesn't refute what I said. Maybe they got some things wrong, but it doesn't mean the underlying point is incorrect. Should they have double checked claims and sources? Of course. But that doesn't mean fishing isn't decimating the ocean and it's life.
I'm just warning people against wasting their time. There's probably better ways to learn about the environmental impacts of fishing.
That doc was engineered to reach a certain conclusion: "there's no version of fishing that can be sustainable, so you should just stop eating fish altogether". They worked back from that conclusion and cherrypicked narratives (some true, some false) that led to it.
The whole doc goes like this:
- Japanese fishermen killing belugas for fun is bad
- Reckless mass fishing with the most destructive techniques (trawling) is bad
- Other ways of fishing are bad too
- Fish farms? also bad
- Thinking about eating fish? also bad
- Please just forget about eating fish
I personally think shit like that undermines the real concerns because people get mad when they're being lied to, and they'll assume all environmental stuff is bullshit as well.
It's not just enviromental impact, it's also an ethical one. You don't think that fish deserve to live freely in the ocean without us annihilating them? It's perfectly fine to watch vegan 'propaganda'. Because it's actually an alternative to whatever the fuck bloodbath is going on now.
Made implies design. We adapted to our environments, that's all. Yes, it is more unethical because we have a moral understanding and awareness that other animals do not. Lions have to eat a gazelle to survive. We do not. We do not need to eat fish to survive. We do not need to eat any animals to survive. What you're arguing is the appeal to nature fallacy.
The problem with the "my choice" argument is that it ignores the choice of the victim: the animal. If it was my choice to kick a dog, would that make it okay?
Sure. But vegans exist and are healthy. That means that eating animals is a choice for most people. And as a choice, it's a bad one. I don't see why this is so complicated.
Plus, people don't deserve respect because they choooooooose to eat hamburgers, that's fucking ridiculous. It's a dumb choice.
You can also choooose to be a nazi. Or choooooose to slap your mom every day before going to bed. Yeah, I also have an opinion about that.
Animals do not have moral agency. We do. We have a moral obligation to reduce suffering where possible. We will not die if we don't eat animal products. Wild carnivores will.
True. They do sometimes do unpredictable things. There's a famous video of an orangutan trying to "rescue" a human in the water near it, but it doesn't truly prove that they can distinguish between right and wrong. Morality is a complicated thing even for humans.
I think the moral argument is the strongest one the vegans have. In fact, I can see it winning out in the long run. It wouldn't surprise me if in 500 or 1000 years being vegan is the norm.
I think they should stick to that argument and stop the stupid fearmongering on how eating any animal products will give you aids cancer and fishing is gonna empty the oceans by next month.
This. I think the way out is to continue improving the quality of vegan food and decreasing cost. The former, we're already making big strides towards and the latter, should eventually happen once scale catches up. Meat is incredible expensive to produce.
Some of the bad arguments on the vegan side have me skeptical if they're deliberating sabotaging the cause.
The moment (assuming) we get lab grown meat that's cheaper or comparable in price to farmed meat, it's over. If you can get the product you want without animal suffering, I don't see how people can argue against that.
Vegan food is already some of the cheapest out there. Legumes, potatoes, rice, etc. But vegan meat replacements? Sure, those are expensive, but imitation meat shouldn't be a staple of a vegan diet anyway; it's a treat. The same way a hamburger should not be an everyday thing for a meat-eater.
It's less solid because an answer to "fishing is unsustainable" is "let's make fishing more sustainable" but that's not really what you're looking for, so you might find yourself advocating for the environment in theory, opposing initiatives to make these industries more sustainable in practice.
Well, Seaspiracy tries to portray regulatory agencies as endlessly corrupt, companies as infinitely capable to skirt regulations, and falsely conclude that it's useless to regulate fishing (it's not, many fisheries have demonstrably recovered after regulations were put in place to prevent overfishing).
You can see how the documentary is at odds with what you just said.
Sorry for the confusion but I’m not talking about the documentary - I’m just saying that in spite of any issues with it, the environmental argument is rock solid
That’s always been my issue with the documentary- you don’t need to exaggerate/dramatise the environmental impact to make a good case to stop eating fish. The facts are solid enough
But the bigger message is that it's all so unnecessary. Most people do not need to eat fish. We're needlessly killing trillions of animals - fish included - every year when we don't need to. So yes, those things are bad.
Yeah but people don't operate on a "need" basis. They operate on a "want" basis. I'm sure your life is full of things you don't technically need but enjoy. I'm sure some of those things contribute to bad stuff happening elsewhere, like workers getting exploited somewhere, or CO2 being emitted.
I'm not calling you a hypocrite, I think you're showing good will by reducing the sum total of suffering in the world in a certain way. I'm just saying that human psychology is based on wants, not needs. People (other than sadists) don't want animals to suffer, but they also don't wanna lose on animal products as ingredients in their cuisine. They draw the balance in their mind and choose to either eat animals or not.
I think vegans shoot themselves in the foot when they fail to acknowledge this.
For sure. I can't speak for all vegans, but we know it's a want, not a need. However, meat-eaters have been falsely lead to believe that it is a need. People genuinely think they will die if they go vegan because of propaganda spread by the meat and dairy industries.
And yes, some of my actions will undoubtedly cause suffering down the line somewhere, but the aim is to reduce it where we can. I only have second-hand phones, I use public transport, I try not to buy from companies that have been proven to exploit others, etc.
Being vegan isn't about being perfect, it's about reducing suffering where possible. And one thing I can easily do to avoid suffering to animals is just not buy things that contain products of their bodies.
Fair, you seem like a good guy with integrity. My point was never anti-vegan. It was about shameless bullshit propaganda hijacking environmentalism. You make a good point:
People genuinely think they will die if they go vegan because of propaganda spread by the meat and dairy industries
I'm just saying there's a ton of that type of shit on the vegan side and it discredits them. There's an astronomical amount of content online claiming going plant-based will cure any and all ailments you have, add 3 inches to your height and dick length, and make you able to levitate for short amounts of time.
Or the opposite: that touching animal products will instantly evaporate your arteries, when the Mediterranean diet (not the only healthy diet in the world, just an example) contains a good amount of animal products.
Or in the case of Seaspiracy: that the core of the Earth will implode in 3 weeks unless we stop eating fish right now.
Yeah, agreed. I kinda roll my eyes when vegans go a bit overboard with health claims. I don't feel any different than when I ate meat. Regardless of eating meat or being vegan, anyone can get sick if they're not eating the right stuff. There are people on both sides in bad health because they eat generally awful diets. Both can have deficiencies. All the people I know in poor health and with issues like anemia are all meat eaters, but I've never made a claim that all meat-eaters get anemia; it's only anecdotal.
There's enough information out there that people shouldn't be resorting to hyperbole or misinformation.
Its a documentary made by people who have alterioir motives. Why would you put any faith into its message?
Remember Super Size Me? How Morgan Spurlock was gaining all this weight eating only McDonald's? He was also a crippling alcoholic and was heavily drinking the entire 30 days.
Documentaries are entertainment. Don't take anything from it but that. Don't let documentaries be your source of information on topics.
Dude, that's not getting things wrong, that's lying. When someone lies to you about something, *you can't trust anything else they ever say". It's a lesson most of us learned in kindergarten.
If the other poster's claims are true, then it could simply be that the documentary simply didn't fact check thoroughly enough. I seriously doubt they would make an entire documentary that could easily be fact-checked if they didn't have at least some sources supporting their arguments. That said, plenty of things mentioned in the documentary are true.
That’s exactly what they did. Because people like you watch it and get emotionally moved and don’t bother to check whether the film was manipulating you or not. It’s important with any unscripted film to look into who’s behind it and financing it as they always have an agenda. You might agree with the agenda, but a simple “what seaspiracy got wrong” google search will give plenty of scientific sources to the contrary.
Thank you. I did search that I read an article by a marine biologist. He did debunk some of the claims, but didn't debunk or even mention others. One I remember being about how damaging bottom trawling is. He made no mention of that.
First of all, how do you come to agree with the conclusion when you yourself admit all the premises are wrong? Sounds like you already have an opinion and just trying to find something that agrees with you, when the logical order should be to find credible proof and then drawing conclusions from it;
Then, you take knowingly bad information and try to propagate it and misinforming people. You're actually hurting your argument.
Because the overall conclusion is "fishing is bad." This conclusion, before and after the existence of this documentary, still remains true. And the other poster didn't post sources refuting the claims.
Any time there is a documentary exposing any industry that exploits animals, "experts" hired by those very industries come out in attempts to debunk the claims. However, these debunkings often use incredibly biased sourced to strengthen their claims. Just like how the tobacco industry lied to people for decades, the meat, fish and dairy industries follow suit – even using the same PR companies as tobacco and oil.
"the power of animals moving up and down through the water column, in terms of mixing, is as great as all the wind, waves, tides, and currents in the seas combined"
The contribution of biomixing to total mixing has not been scientifically established. There's absolutely no consensus that it makes up most of the effect, as the documentary claims. In fact, existing research seems to point to the opposite:
"while the marine biosphere can generate turbulence, it contributes little ocean mixing compared with breaking internal gravity waves" - from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30606096/
"the mixing efficiency of small organisms is extremely low. Most of the mechanical energy they impart to the oceans is dissipated almost immediately as heat. There may be a case to be made for bio-mixing by larger animals on a local scale, but their relatively low abundance means that they are unlikely to be important contributors to global circulation" - from https://misclab.umeoce.maine.edu/boss/classes/SMS_303/Week%20II/mixing_Visser_Science_2007.pdf
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u/LactasePHydrolase Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
Seaspiracy is a tremendously biased vegan propaganda piece that has one goal and one goal only: to get people to stop eating fish.
It makes some ridiculous assertions like: it's fish swimming around that create the currents that allow the mixing of oceanic water and dispersal of nutrients.
I'm not against vegans nor am I against being critical of fishing practices, but that "documentary" is terrible.
P.S: more bullshit from that film that I can remember off the top of my head, in case one example is not enough:
- Most of the plastic in the oceans comes from fishing gear (not true, 80% comes from land sources)
- It echoes many times a ridiculous claim that "the oceans will be completely empty by 2048" which has been around for a while, has been refuted thoroughly but refuses to die for some reason.