In short
I got a reply from a prolific anti-vegan troll and referred them back to an earlier conversation we had. Got banned for "harassment" and "following someone around" when in fact they replied to me and keep following vegans around when they post against anti-vegan propaganda.
The 14-day ban and comment removals by @aeronmelon@lemmy.world: https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/modlog/45638?page=1&actionType=All&modId=6106918&userId=18352111
And the posts in question:
The comments when I posted them rendered as
Oh hey its you
The link is to a discussion which expanded is this here (The link goes to the comment with the highlighted star):
With background
The person in question is a very dedicated anti-vegan troll who is known to make non-sequitur claims as replies to vegans, in the hopes of roping then into a defensive position under the guise of "debate".
To exemplify this I engaged with them a couple months ago and got a perfect showcase of their behaviour. I had never used this and have never replied to them since then (at least I don't remember that I have and searching didn't turn anything up). But then when they replied to me yesterday I did. And got promptly banned for "harassment" and "following someone around". I messaged the mod who banned me to no reply.
Their behaviour is being enabled by lemmy.world mods like @aeronmelon@lemmy.world who will readily delete comments made by vegans should they dare step a foot outside of the norms of "civilized debate", like e.g. in the same thread (1) and (2). The petulant and incessant trolling by them is of course never subject to such moderation actions.
To any vegan comrades, do not engage this troll, you risk getting banned and your comments deleted.
Apparently I used wrong account to post this. Will have to switch accounts to my blahaj account on occasion to reply to comments, apologies.
In the pictured comment chain, the quote text asked OP to prove the absence of something (sentience in plants). Then Commie later admitted that it was impossible to do so. And from the start, the claim that plants are sentient is likely one that no one involved actually believes. I cannot think why you would make such an objection other than to exhaust someone and waste their time.
And even if plants were somehow sentient, it would still be less harmful to eat them directly than raising animals to eat due to the massive calorie loss from going up the food chain. Having animals be a middle man for humanity's consumption would result in more plants being killed, not fewer. OP touched on this briefly in their replies. Meaning that even if it was intended to object to veganism, the argument only adds an additional reason to adopt it.
OP did imply an objection to the plant sentience claim disproved it, which is the wrong response, but only because they should have rejected it out of hand as something unfalsifiable. Commie chose to be pedantic that it could still be true.
There's not enough here to judge Commie as a troll, but they did support a spurious argument much more than OP.
I think you are a bit confused about proof and logic, it is possible to prove absence of a property X if the presence of X has a necessary condition Y. Should Y fail, X cannot be present. This is one of the basic tools for proving theorems in math, for example if I can prove that the derivative of a function f is never zero, I can indeed prove that f has no localized minimum or maximum. More formally, given sets A and B we want to prove that their intersection is empty by proving that the complement of A is a superset of B.
Or in more laymans terms (I don't mean to be condescending I have no clue how well you know this stuff and want to cover my bases) If the streets are wet after it has rained, the fact that they are dry is proof of the absence of rain.
So there absolutely is a sufficient condition to prove the absence of sentience, the "ability to experience feelings and sensations". Or rather, there is a necessary condition to having sentience, since at the bare minimum it requires an organism to be capable of collecting sensory inputs, processing them and reacting to them. That is, it needs a nervous system. A lack of such facilities therefore means a lack of sentience.
A tree has no capacity to "feel" what's happening to it's branches. Lopping one of will have the rest of the tree completely unaffected, only the cut will "experience" the change and heal. An animal on the other hand can anticipate (even if erroneously) damage and react to it, by processing input with it's nervous system. A clam will close, a cat might jump, a human might scream etc.
This argument is presented in the link that sparked that comment chain just to be clear.
Now this isn't a formal proof of course. Such a proof would require the careful dissection and experimentation of plants to show that indeed no nervous system or similarly functioning facility is present. I think this is an inappropriate amount of work to ask of someone when arguing on the internet, which is why I would consider the above argument proof enough. Most people I would think can see clearly that salad is not sentient but a pig is. To pin this on the nervous system should also make sense to most and if someone is intrigued by such a topic usually they ask follow-up questions and don't combatively dismiss everything that's said (this argument is wrong therefore the claim is wrong is also some-type of fallacy).
The reason I didn't spell all of this out is because I had enough of these "that's not a proper proof/argument" counterpoints, lazily shifting the burden for even the most trivial arguments on to vegans, which is why I made the point that it is a proof, just not a formal one. That there are different layers of formalization and depending on context being lax can be more appropriate than a formalized argument.
What then followed was a continued stream of claims with 0 arguments provided and a prompt dismissal of the conversation when pushed for even one.
my whole point was that it is unfalsifiable. I did what you are saying they should have done.