CW discussion of animal agriculture and all it entails
I never made a "why I'm leaving" post. At the time, I was too stressed and upset to bother, and the drama was so high, and so many others were making those types of posts, that I figured it wouldn't be worth it. I'm a very avoidant person, and so when other mods begged for any talk of veganism to just die down for a while, even though it was completely unjust, I did as asked. I had already quit anyway.
Well, it's been over a year and a half. The draconian measures against talk of veganism never went away. To the surprise of no one, silencing activists who fight for the liberation of the animal slave class only appeased the slave owners and those who lick their boots. Ironic considering how hexbear started in the first place.
Over a trillion sentient beings are murdered every single year, a number that is unimaginable. It's devastating enough all on its own, and yet the impacts of this never-ending worldwide genocide are horrifying too. Animal ag is the leading cause of climate change. It destroys ecosystems and massively pollutes, causing mass extinction of wild animals and harming the most marginalized humans. It has been and continues to be used as a tool for human genocide, intentionally destroying the lifeways of indigenous communities. Most people who work in animal ag are impoverished if not enslaved, forced to do the dangerous and traumatizing work of brutal subjugation and slaughter, all for the profit of the capitalist class. Animal products are more than completely unnecessary, they are destructive and corrosive.
Who qualifies as a "person" is extremely political. Carnists insist that sentient nonhumans are not people because it excuses their oppression. "It's just an animal." Well, I'm just a woman, just a jew. My personhood has always been at risk as well, to those who wish to see me oppressed. The division between human and animal is as arbitrary as the division between man and woman, between jew and aryan.
Human supremacists show their whole ass when they try and essentialize differences enough to justify the complete debasement and subjugation of nonhumans. They will argue that nonhumans cannot speak English, as if one needs spoken language to have an interest in not being raped, or forced into labor, or murdered. They will argue that nonhumans are not as intelligent, as if IQ is a real thing, as if ordering society based on who the white man deems "intelligent" isn't a terrible precedent. They will argue that nonhumans lack certain abilities that humans have, as if all humans have those abilities, as if nonhumans don't have abilities that humans don't, as if ableism is totally okay when applied to the ones we desire to oppress.
Nonhumans have interests. They do not want to die. They resist their oppression. They fight to escape. When their children are taken from them, they scream and they cry, tears drip down their faces. When they resist laboring for us, they are coerced with violence. They are beaten, whipped, yelled at, broken, because we know they feel pain. We know they feel fear. We know because they communicate these feelings to us every day, and we choose not to listen. It's a good cope to pretend nonhumans are automatons, that they live some idyllic life on Old Macdonald's farm. Oppressors always tell themselves stories about how the oppressed prefer their oppression. There is no nice way to rape someone, no nice way to enslave, no nice way to murder.
Anyone denying the sentience of nonhumans either doesn't know what sentience is or is a liar.
Carnists are always grasping and moving the goalposts when it comes to justifying their ideology of supremacy. We do not exploit animals because we deem them to be inferior, rather, we deem animals to be inferior because we exploit them. The ideology arises from the material circumstances. The point, however, is to change them.
Animal liberation and human liberation are rooted together. So long as we live in a world where oppression of others based on ability, intelligence, and other arbitrary differences occurs, there will arise ideologies of supremacy which will in turn harm humans as well. So long as we destroy this planet through continued animal agriculture, we will continue destroying ourselves, especially the most vulnerable humans.
Upon the revolution, we must immediately abolish animal agriculture. But we cannot wait until then because we do not have time. The planet is already on fire. More importantly, nonhumans do not deserve to have their justice delayed for the comfort of their oppressors. Over a trillion nonhumans are murdered every year.
Hexbear admins begged for our silence because they wanted negative peace. They don't care about justice. They don't care about liberation. They cared only about their image. They banned indigenous vegans and vegans of color because those vegans challenged their image. They banned Jewish vegan mods like hamid and lotf because they dared to challenge the reactionary idea that we shouldn't be allowed to call the animal holocaust exactly what it is. Billions of nonhumans are held in concentrations camps (CAFOs) and killed in literal gas chambers every year. Reactionaries always prefer to listen to right wing jews than left wing ones. It doesn't matter to them that many holocaust survivors and their families are vegan and are begging, begging people to make the connection so that "never again" ever once means something other than Zionism.
I'm sorry I didn't say anything for so long. It was a mistake. Silence for the sake of negative peace is always a mistake.
Thanks for filling in a bunch of gaps.
That whole thing felt very fishy. In 2 years on this site I've had 3 comments removed, and one of them was expressing disbelief when someone said that urging people to go vegan, including indigenous people, was "a neocolonial relationship of oppression".
I believe that a sort of weaponized fragility was brought to bear in this case and several others -- a tactic that we are particularly vulnerable to as leftists, and that I have encountered all too often in the course of in-person organizing. But that on its own is another entire meta-struggle session.
An anti-fracking activist I once went to hear said something that really stuck with me. "The way they treat the earth is the way they'll treat their employees, and the way they'll treat you too." Indigenous issues and animal liberation should go hand-in-hand. No one has taken better care of the nonhuman sentient beings on this planet than indigenous peoples.
I think one thing that could have been useful is a party line. It would clear up a lot to have something that said "we are not against the ability of indigenous people to hunt in the manner they always have; veganism is a correct ethical position/conclusion; CAFOs are extremely bad and esse delendam; people choosing a vegan lifestyle should be lauded, and we should try to build the viability of collective ways of life that are not built on animal misery" that I think the overwhelming majority of the userbase would agree on.
By this do you mean "it's not immoral" or "state violence shouldn't be used to stop them"?
By that I mean "not touching this issue avoids the ethical quagmire of trying to ensure that no vertebrate (or animal in general?) kills any other vertebrate, and also many of the implications of where you draw the line on sentience".
Now I'm even more confused.
Taking a firm stance is the opposite of not touching an issue. And since when are vegans deeply concerned with animals killing other animals? Being opposed to speceisism doesn't mean giving all living things the same moral responsibility. We don't hold toddlers to the same standards as most adults, why would we hold wolves to the same standards as most adult humans?
If you want an uncontroversial party line you can't just take the least offensive stance on these issues. I personally wouldn't sign onto anything that says it's fine to unnecessarily kill animals for purely cultural reasons.
:based-department:
seriously though culture shouldn't be used as a justification for anything, if it's right or wrong it's right or wrong for anyone
We are talking about killing, wanton killing, are we not? I hope you would expect a toddler not to murder someone.
If you've ever had a dog you know they have the capacity to feel guilt. Wolves are more intelligent than dogs and their psycho-social faculties are better developed.
Taking a bullet or arrow or spear to the head or heart is arguably less suffering than being chased for a long distance, bled out with teeth or claws, and in many cases eaten alive.
"Chasing something down and killing it is okay when a wolf does it, but not okay when a human does it" is a very flimsy, unprincipled argument.
It is not going to convince anyone, and the premise of "but we have a moral faculty that they don't" plays right into speciesism and human supremacy, by saying we are categorically separate from other living things by our ability to morally reason, and have a different set of rules. (see also: humans having "cultural reasons" to hunt, but not other animals)
The logical conclusion of banning hunting is to extend our human morality and value for life to all creatures- see cat owners who give their pets a vegan diet, but extend it to wildlife, because all animals deserve a full life that terminates by old age.
If it makes sense to reduce the number of feral or outdoor cats, then it makes sense to extend quality of life to all animals.
You are making two opposite sides of an argument. "I care about animal welfare, except..."
The simple fact is that wolves are wild animals and if they didn't hunt other wild animals they would starve to death. The same way I would not judge you for murdering a human and eating them while stranded on a boat lost far at sea with no food available, I will not judge a wolf for doing what is required to survive.
It is different from modern humans hunting or farming animals not because humans are different from animals, but because we do not have to do it. A wolf hunts because it must, a human hunts because it likes the result brought about by the suffering of other living beings, or sometimes just the suffering itself.
If the central point is animal suffering, I don't think there's a meaningful difference whether it's brought on by a human or any other kind of animal. The victim doesn't care who the offender is.
Trophy hunting is wrong and I think most leftists are already on board with that. But I think there's a massive categorical difference between industrial animal agriculture and subsistence hunting.
Humans today "do not have to hunt", especially with the support of modern civilization and the ecocide that it rests on- we can buy a Beyond Burger or a bunch of TVP made from fields of soybean monocrops. I am aware of a minority of pre-modern cultures that practiced vegetarianism of some sort, but I am not aware of any that practiced veganism prior to the modern age of economic overproduction. Could people survive on their own without eating animal products? I think so, but instead of saying they should go hungry when their crop fails, I would rather say "at least do [carnivory/eggs/dairy] in a way that minimizes the suffering of the animal".
I don't know why you're telling me this, because I already said it. It gives off the impression that you're not carefully reading what I'm saying. Why, then, should I spend my time writing these comments?
Same thing here. Who are you talking to? Because it clearly isn't me. I already explicitly said that it's okay to kill if that's what you have to do to survive. My comment isn't complicated or long or anything. It's extremely straightforward and concise.
Then I'm in agreement with you.
As an extension of the previous post I'd made, I had just thought it made sense to clarify that I don't think it's politically useful or even sensible to set a certain point of hunger where the range of permissibility suddenly jumps.