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.
And despite that, I remember indigenous vegan was banned for calling bullshit on the "veganism is racist" line. This site is so bad at coping with their inability to self-crit on this.
I can't say much to the higher levels of the struggle because I'm generally a lurker and never had a knack for following those things, but for what it's worth it did cause me to finally confront my privilege and hypocrisy and I've been vegan since March of last year.
I'm glad. It goes to show that talking about animal liberation is always better than silence, even if it's divisive
same here. went ovo-lacto vegetarian around april and then vegan in ~november of last year.
Agreed with everything in this post. I was on a different account back then and switched for fear of it getting banned. It was a shitshow and handled terribly
Reminder to any carnists reading: your reports will be ignored
I remember getting banned for malthusianism because I said that the world cannot support modern agriculture practices and people will have to be forced into veganism. This site would rather unconditionally support jim jones before it supports vegans.
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.
This is why I roll my eyes whenever someone says veganism is colonialist. Pretty sure it wasn't vegans systemically wiping out the buffalo.
Pretty sure it wasn’t vegans systemically wiping out the buffalo.
or currently waging genocide on indigenous people in Brazil and ecocide against the Amazon and native vegetation.
Christopher Colombus: vegan
King Leopold II: vegan
Queen Elizabeth II: vegan
I hope the cowards who laugh at the defense of our exploited animal comrades are destroyed
Reactionaries are explicitly not allowed per the rules of hexbear. They continue to be protected, but it's not too late to ban them
Thanks for this. The fact that pictures of corpses are still allowed in c/food has never ceased to rankle. Yeah, Hexbear is one of the better places to be openly vegan, but I still find myself mincing words around carnists here because I "don't want to cause trouble". It's a problem.
Also, :vegan-seitan:
Safe to be openly vegan? We were literally being persecuted for existing lol
Yeah, for a period of time we absolutely were. Now, however, I can tell people I'm vegan, share vegan recipes, all that kind of fun stuff, and carnists don't dogpile my comments to insult me for being vegan. Which they do most other places. I can get recipes off c/food, and if the recipe isn't vegan (it usually is), someone (often the person who posted the recipe) will talk about what to substitute to make it vegan. That would never happen in the subreddit r/food, ever.
Is this absolutely the bare fucking minimum and this website should be much, much better because we're leftists who claim to care about the oppressed? Yes, absolutely. But am I grateful I can post a vegan recipe and not be swamped with angry carnists telling me how much better it would be with meat? Also yes.
You will get your post locked and your comments deleted the next time a salty carnist mod sees them though.
I mean, you're absolutely right. The one yesterday was ridiculous. There's clearly some tension on this here website surrounding veganism. And it would be easy to fix, just enforce banning of asshole carnists sitewide. Easy.
But I guess what I want to point out is that the fact that there's any tension at all and the whole site isn't constantly shitting on vegans is kind of rare for communities on the internet that aren't vegan communities first and foremost.
Again, hexbear should be better. There's no excuse for the anti-vegan shit that happens here. But it's still better than any other online community I can think of, except the ones that exist for the sole purpose of vegans talking to vegans.
Some of the admins previously (I dunno about now) are reactionary cowards that don't give a shit about what this community should be.
You're of course correct. If you weren't, we wouldn't need to be having this conversation. I'm still hopeful that this place can improve though. We'll see, I suppose, I'm not really holding my breath, but it would be nice to at the very least make c/food totally vegan. There's literally no excuse for allowing corpses in there.
are you saying regarding the last vegan struggle session or is there something i missed?
Check out my last post in this very com and the interaction that prompted it. Admins haven't stopped their carnist crusade
huh. i saw the original thread but i figured they'd explain why they locked it eventually. that's pretty weird, even reddit mods are more transparent.
There's also my last post in this very com and the interaction that prompted it
I distinctly remember being polite and respectful for an entire week and getting the most vile responses. Very scarring and it destroyed any solidarity I could have with
unreasonableleftists.And they didn't even get banned, when I did!
I don't want to exclude leftists aren't unreasonable reactionaries - so, with the strikethrough, I meant to imply that I couldn't have a reasonable conversation (a dialogue) with the majority Hexbear userbase, and I couldn't have any solidarity and couldn't act in unison with the majority Hexbear leftists anymore.
As an aside, the incident was also so vile that I won't consider to do any more outreach on leftist forums - instead focusing to do stuff entirely in the offline domain. The vitriol was so bad - and I wasn't toxic at all, and I didn't even antagonise it! I never felt this way about any forum, even fascist forums I have argued in when I was younger. (I have about a person; that's another incident with a toxic idpol 'leftist'. Common theme...) The sheer amount of abuse I received when I was being actually polite, because I wanted the merging of a big vegan forum and a leftist forum to go well, makes me really especially hate the experience and Hexbear for a while after.
If anyone goes to check, I can't say I've been non-toxic since! Since initial week of drama, my very and increasingly rare post has been "toxic" as heck; I'm not mincing my words and I'm being very blunt. Because carnists and libsneed to take responsibility, and I'm not going to waste my time coddling carnist worldviews (carnist paradigms), and I won't court lib respectability politics and their vacuousness in principles, which would make me another lib. Carnists are also reactionaries, so i don't respect that as well.
I consider them quite synonymous terms! I just think it's easier to explain toxic idpol to people than it is to explain radlib (reactionary and vacuous in good principles and courting right-wingers/fascists?) I have a better understanding of the term, I suppose. If you are happy sharing, how do you define term radlib?
The way you see left wing agitation - I respect that. All of this:
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Either a relatively one-way broadcast.
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Or being extremely pick-and-choose about where to engage in order to radicalize people who can actually be radicalized and correct people who are actually open to correction.
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I’m just here because I’m lonely, but I won’t mistake a second I spend here as involving any kind of leftist praxis. The moderation policies and user culture make it clear that such things are not viable here.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer! Excellent considerations.
Your informal definition ties immediately into the vacuousness of liberals with their lack of principles, and their individualism ("do whatever I want regardless of consequence, producing colonial interest": libs are never radical; they are not principled.
liberals in the state (in bourgeois oligarchic) class court fascists in exploitive interests, with both individualist (self) interest and collectivist interest, by increasing nationalism, for example, in the state apparatus liberals are based. (People can choose to be neither individualist or collectivist: but they fundamentally don't see both as exploitive and utilitarian ("greater good rhetoric"). Liberals also only have short term interests, and no long term understanding of the ideology and its processes - parallel to the corporate daily bottom line. The corporate daily bottom line applies to their personal lives.
then you get fascists in population, and liberals still court them, in self-interest or bourgeois oligarchic state interest, eventually the liberals court fascists in positions of power, pulling themselves further rightward (~because of vacuousness of good principles!) and positions court fascists in positions of power to stay in power/in a bourgeois class.
Tbh, with modern usages, I consider liberal and neoliberal synonymously: neoliberal refers to capitalist and individualist + collectivist interests (the capitalists and politicians) and liberals refer to both neoliberals and liberals in the (working class) general population.
and liberals also have a terrible thing of respectability politics, which they cannot justify when they have no known anti-exploitive principles (with best interests at heart) as the rules of play to work with (to manage expectations with other people) in the liberal sphere/domain.
The opposition to feudal orders of titles and castes deciding one’s status in the eyes of the government in favor of nominal egalitarianism
Lol, you've reminded me of people who say it's bad to speak ill of the dead when I spoke casually about queen liz. - a lot of serious social ire i got! - when I have pointed out she enabled prince andrew to continue sexual assault of people, by paying off her own son's settlement claim! and that she was the sole reason he could get that done. a symptom of how insidious and perverse respectability politics is. These people, anecdotally, many non-monarchists. WHERE'S THE PRINCIPLE! aha
yep, they never see private property as a crucial problem, literally religiously.
and they never respect reappropriating private property by force to create parity of power (political participation, life quality etc.); to emancipate disenfranchised people.
Most people are radlibs. The people that want to make the world better (ego reasons or some compassionate beliefs? I don't know) but it's mostly performative and without substence. They lack any basic principles and they often do savior shit or tokenise who they choose to save. They are lost in bourgeous individualist self-interest, and have no concept of lived experience and of hierarchy/class, or they are pro-hierarchy/class fundamentally.
But all of this is just sidestepping that, while liberal idpol is certainly a problem, I am always weary of people who proactively foreground the characterization of liberal ideological defects as principally connected to “idpol”. There have always been reactionaries within socialist movements who seek to ignore or actively perpetuate violence against marginalized groups that they are not a part of.
Hmm, if it helps, I should have defined what I meant:
- I criticise toxic identity politics when I see it.
- I don't criticise other kinds of identity politics.
I also said 'leftist' toxic idpol on the server. Not (neo)liberal, which mischaracterises what I'm referring to:
'leftist' (toxic self-IDed left) is distinctly less vacuous, but more principled - with bizarre principles! they call themselves 'leftist' but ill happily gatekeep the shit out of that term.
Yes, 'identity politics' originally a right wing accusation, but it has its uses. 1) I criticise ideology based on identity (toxic idpol). 2a) I don't criticise the good kinds of idpol at all: 2a) personal is political 2b) political is personal 2c) identifying as a bisexual queer: there is a political reason/material reasonfor my identity with politics
2d) also, crucially, i don't criticise expanding an in-group. in-groups should be expanded to include all sentient life, regardless of intergroup biases like racism, sexism, transphobia, speciesism etc... which produces ideologies that don't value difference but value sameness, producing ideologies of white and human supremacy. i criticise someone pretending to be anti-hierarchical but being pro-hierarchical (being anything but anti-hierarchical) (your paragraph beginning "We also know the limitations involved:" is an excellent example of this. I think my anecdotal example of ~~non-~~monarchists has a relevance in what it's reflective of, which is my accusation against the majority Hexbear users, calling them toxic idpollers.
And, radlib might be a more hard-hitting truthful insult, I'm happy to use it, but maybe what I mean by toxic idpollers has a distinguished definition from radlibs, which feel overlapping and not the same. maybe how i defined it changes your opinion of it. please let me know if it does! what ive described is what ive described here, and not necessarily what you mean, and i noticed when writing up how i define it that what i was calling out is specifically that, and not neoliberalism or neoliberal forces or predatory imperialist tendrils (which is what first comes to mind for neoliberalism).
as an aside, ive noticed some new feelings on the word: it feels like no non-leftist would understand what neoliberal means, and feels a bit circlejerky to say instead of toxic idpol in my original post. do you agree with this impression?
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Yeah, you put two tilde (~~) on either side of the
stuff you want crossed outyou can also click the strikethrough button on the bottom right near the other text settings, then replace the underscores
Especially after your post in !news@hexbear.net getting locked for no reason yesterday
I side with the vegans on this one, obviously, but am also wary of wreckers taking advantage of this to escalate something that should be a very simple issue. Veganism is good, and vegans are often unfairly bullied and therefore posts shitting on vegans should be removed under the hostility rule.
Keep in mind that Kiwi Farms just went under so there are a lot of bored wreckers out there. Mods might make mistakes, they might take time to address concerns, but IMO they have always at least tried to be fair.
They did not try to be fair during this time. They were extremely hostile and reactionary with us. We were nothing but cordial and to the point and we got banned like a bad joke.
It 100% was not in any way meant to be fair or accommodating.
Thank you so much for this post. It's a very important conversation we need to have sitewide.
Carnists are not my comrades.
I have nothing specific to add, I just also want to say thanks for this post and I guess raise my hand to be counted as another :im-vegan: .
Ok, I guess I will add that I love this community, I mean hexbear as a whole, and feel like it is truly a sanctuary of sanity in an otherwise insane world. But one of the few remaining things that still irks me on a regular basis here is the casual carnism. I get it, it's the normal reality of everyday life everywhere else too. But coming here and reading some comment from someone I respect and consider a comrade in every other facet casually talking about the steak they had (or whatever carnist bs) still makes me :stalin-stressed:
Over time I'd forgotten how bad this incident was. Fuck this site and fuck the anti-VCJ mods.
good, thoughtful post, comrade. thank you for sharing.
