Vegetarianism and Veganism- The Best Indicators of Severe Mental Illness Since the Tinfoil Hat

When I lived in Tucson, I was entertained on my daily walk to and from class everyday by a woman who seems to have been the perverse conjuring of HG Wells and Charles Dickens, and then basted in a delicious Alex Jones-esque broth of irrationality.  The woman, whose name I never obtained, spent her days not panhandling, and not even badgering passersby, but actually screaming at them until they threw money at her and fled in terror.  She had filed her teeth to points, had a tan deeper than any of the douchetards on Jersey Shore, and wore a curious amalgamation of actual clothing and random street detritus that would not have seemed out of place in one the Road Warrior.  The best part, however, was her hair, which was thickly matted dreadlocks that had been spraypainted a rainbow of colors, and then braided with tinfoil.  I realize that at this point, the woman sounds impossibly absurd, but there she was, every day on University Ave., screaming at stop signs, or anyone standing in front of her.  When she was coherent, which was remarkably infrequent, I'd ask her questions.  One day, I gave her a dollar, and made her promise me that she'd spend it on crack.  She cackled wildly, which actually frightened me (a person with teeth filed to points, laughing, seems like they're preparing to gnaw your fucking leg off), replied that one couldn't buy much crack with a dollar (an astute observation), and stated that she intended to buy green beans.  I mentioned that she could get a burger from Carl's Jr. up the street if she had some change, but she replied that  she "don't eat that shit."  Intrigued, I pressed her a bit, and came to find that in spite of the teeth, she was a vegetarian.


You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I would think that a person used to eating refuse would lack such discerning tastes, but she pontificated at some length about the dangers of meat eating thereafter, which disabused me of my previously held notions about the homeless.   I mentioned that meat could hardly be worse for her than the shit she was absorbing from all of the paint on her scalp, but she simply cackled again and stomped off.  She was, I assure you, the most formidable vegetarian of all time- fuck Mac Danzig.  I would posit, however, that after meeting a variety of vegetarians and vegans, she's likely not the least sane of the lot, and probably closer to the mean than the outliers of this ridiculous and thoroughly insane sect of deluded dieters.  Luckily, after screaming at a group of tourists while quite literally foaming at the mouth, she threw a metal trashcan through a storefront and promptly got the shit kicked out of her by Tucson PD, and I never saw her again.  If only that was a microcosm of the vegetarian community, and they were all locked in camps now, as that woman is definitely chained up in a nuthatch somewhere for life.  Alas.

A History of Vegetarianism in the Western World

Obviously, vegetarianism's been around awhile in the East, since the Right-Hand Path fuckers in Buddhism and Hinduism have been studiously avoiding meat for millenia.  They didn't blather on at extraordinary length about the efficacy and superiority of their diet, however, and pretty much just stayed up in the mountains meditating, too weak to annoy anyone.  Thus, I shall focus on those who've badgered, cajoled, and berated us Westerners through the years, somehow managing to convince people that their diet is both healthy and ethical, the absurdity of which I shall address later in this post.


The root of this particular mental illness arose, oddly, in Christianity, though its roots go back to ancient Greece.  Prior to its adoption by Christian zealots, it was the diet popularized by the infamous nutbag Pythagoras, who while awesome with triangles, drowned students for making discoveries he couldn't while at the same time yammering on about the sacredness of animals' lives.  Yes, even in ancient Greece, vegetarianism was the purview of the completely unhinged.  Thereafter, people who were so super pissed for Jesus that they wanted to starve half to death got in on the game, discontented with the idea of someone suffering more for another god.  For those of you about to be fulled with righteous indignation, I'm not laying this at the feet of your Jewish messiah- it's his followers who are the fucking idiots.  Various Christian sects in the Middle Ages practiced asceticism and vegetarianism, but they were by and large wiped out in short order by Torquemada's merry band of slaughter-happy lunatics for the Lord, so their influence is at best negligible.(Flesh Inferno)  Freed from the steel-fisted chokehold of knights so angry for Jesus that it made them rape bitches and set babies on fire, people in the Renaissance picked up the torch of semi-starvation again and decided that it must've been cool, because pre-Christians did it, and they had central heating, unlike people in the Renaissance (actually, they didn't know it, but the Romans really did have central heating, about which Western civilization apparently forgot until the 18th and 19th centuries, as they were too busy slaughtering heretics and getting the plague).  

Vegetarianism wasn't really all that big a deal in the Renaissance, however, and was pretty much relegated to a couple of notable figures who apparently loved animals.  One guy who's held aloft by vegetarians as a pioneer of this era is Leonardo Da Vinci, which is pretty fucking amusing, because it's based on little more than hope.  People will try to tell you he was an avowed vegetarian, which is awesome, given that their staunch belief in this "fact" is based on one sentence written about him-  "Certain infidels called Guzzaratida Vinci."  The sentence was lifted from a letter written by Andrea Corsali, to one of Da Vinci's patrons, and was not echoed in any other writing by or about Da Vinci.  Though the evidence there is about as thin as a monomolecular blade out of a Warhammer book, vegetarians will yell all day long about how the smartest man ever was a vegetarian, but given that Da Vinci was a prolific writer and never addressed the subject, I would suggest taking that shit with a grain of salt.  And a steak.

It was getting depressing.

Post-Renaissance, the mantle of vegetarianism was taken up by those parties I mentioned before, the religious zealots.  Unconvinced that life sucks enough without suffering deprivation that would make modern-day Rwanda seem like a fucking Hedonism cruise ship, these fuckers got busy making life really suck, and decided to deprive themselves of sex, sleep, meat, and leisure time.  Oh, I'm not exaggerating, fuckers.  The Ephrata Cloister, founded in 1732 by one of the biggest assholes in the entire span of human history, Conrad Beissel, believed just that.  Beissel, fuckhead that he was, decided that people were living just a little bit too cushy in an era where smallpox was running rampant and we were still fighting Indians on a daily basis to prevent them from eating our children, and established the Cloister in Lancaster, Pa.  People living there were sworn to celibacy and vegetarianism, had to sleep on wooden benches with wooden blocks as pillows, and were allowed two 3 hour blocks of sleep a night, interrupted by a two hour period in which they had to go outside and wait for Jesus.  Seriously.  The rest of their day was spent in hard labor, because they figured that a homeless, jobless guy from ancient Mesopotamia who hung out with a whore and got people hammered on wine and gave them fish to eat would want them to live in a manner completely opposite of the way he lived, apparently.  Way to think it through, guys.  

Cheery guy, eh?

This type of idiocy was not uncommon, however, and was not confined to the US, as Reverend William Cowherd (1763–1816)  founded the Vegetarian Society in England in 1809.  This is considered to be the first modern vegetarian society, and also practiced total abstention from sex. (Vegetarian Society and IVU)  Though you and I would assume that the abstention was simply resultant to the precipitous drop in testosterone suffered by anyone who adopts a vegetarian diet, I guess these morons wanted to hedge their bets.  Thereafter, the Seventh-Day Adventists were founded, and they spawned a massive shitshow of vegetarianism that led to the modern vegetarian movement.  Foremost among their progeny was Sylvester Graham (July 5, 1794 – September 11, 1851), who advocated a nearly vegan diet consisting of whole grains, fruits, and veggies, and preached abstinence from both sex and masturbation throughout his life. While he did invent Graham crackers, this was the only positive thing the Presbyterian minister did in his short, shitty, sexless life. According to Wikipedia, "Grahamism was influential in thevegan movement. Sylvester Graham focused on meat and milk, which he believed to be the cause of sexual urges. In fact, he claimed animal byproducts produced lust; Grahamism thus rejected meat, animal byproducts, and alcohol in order to develop a purer mind and body", in addition to "white bread, feather beds, pork, tobacco, salt, condiments, tight corsets, nocturnal emissions, heavy clothing, and hot mince pie." So, the only thing that could help you in a life bereft of meat, masturbation, seasoned food, and sex would be to be so fucking hammered, at all times, that you thought you were dead, but that was out for him as well.  Wow.  

He needs a stabbing on general principle.

Graham was followed shortly by another Adventist, John Harvey Kellogg (February 26, 1852 – December 14, 1943).  Graham's foundation paid Kellogg's way through medical school, presumable to foment further interest in removing any and all pleasure from one's life in an effort to attain a mythical purity of soul.  As expected, Kellogg followed in Graham's footsteps, echoing the same diet and anti-sex, anti-masturbation nonsense. When not prescribing daily yogurt enemas, Kellogg was busy NEVER FUCKING HIS WIFE OF 40 YEARS, giving circumcisions sans anesthetic to teenage boys to curb "unnatural urges" or sewing their foreskins closed, and for the love of fuck, applying pure carbolic acid to the clitoris as a means of allaying "abnormal excitement" in broads.



Yes, these are the people who have brought the world vegetarianism.  Note, by the way, that they were not vegetarians because they thought it was natural, or because they thought it was necessarily the healthiest way to eat.  They ate it because they either loved animals too much to eat them, or because (ignoring the New Testament altogether... but Christians never cherry-pick verses, do they?) the Jewish God says in Genesis "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed...to you it shall be meat."  Yes, that shit is flimsier than the reasoning behind calling Da Vinci a vegetarian, but a lack of tangible evidence isn't stopping the likes of David Icke, Alex Jones, Barbara Boxer, or vegetarians!

Next time: the best way to kill a vegetarian is to just sit back and watch him(or her in the case of the chick above) slowly starve, but alternatively, you could rip the arms off of his fallacious arguments and beat them to death with them.

Sources:
Whitechapel, Simon.  Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition.
"Ephrata Cloister" http://www.ephratacloister.org/history.htm
Vegetarian Society.  "History of Vegetarianism."  http://www.vegsoc.org/info/developm.html
Twigg, Julia.  "THE VEGETARIAN MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND, 1847-1981 : A STUDY IN THE STRUCTURE OF ITS IDEOLOGY"  http://www.ivu.org/history/thesis/bible-christian.html