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 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.
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.
Hmm, if it helps, I should have defined what I meant:
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?