Any talk by carnists about how "Well, if only you weren't so rude" is a smokescreen. Merely describing our views is met with thought-terminating cliches and accusations of wrecking, both of which get much more highly upvoted than our own comments.
Even if (as a lot of users have been claiming) the recent vegan posts were the result of wreckers, the response by the majority of the userbase has been so much more alienating than those original posts could be. The events of a year and a half ago are a lot less important to me than what I'm seeing today.
And what I'm seeing today is that Hexbear is about as vegan-friendly of a site as Reddit is: the movement is siloed within its own comm, has to regularly community ban people who wander in to snipe at it, and is met with extreme hostility anytime it ventures out into the main site.
As a carnist I try to make sure I avoid vegan threads where I don't belong. Pretty sure most carnists on this site think vegans are objectively correct anyway. We are just to lazy figure out how to live properly. I think all this recent stuff has got to be on just a handfull of users.
this is directed more generally (from the "We are just to lazy figure out how to live properly") rather than at you personally, cos i know individual circumstances can make things harder. i know that when i was an omni, i had all sorts of excuses but like you say, they really all boiled down to "going vegan is hard and scary". for me as a mayo, vegetables were mostly those sad sides that went along your big lump of meat and you had to kinda force yourself to eat them to pretend to be healthy. veganism seemed like a life of impossible monastic-level self-denial, of living just on bits of lettuce and raw carrot or whatever or overpriced shitty fake-meat sausages. something only the most committed people with superhuman willpower could do, not just some regular depressed lazy idiot like me.
and then when i switched, it was way easier than i ever thought it could be. the first month was absolutely hard, not gonna lie, and i was kinda the new vegan meme. but once i figured out a few easy staple recipes that worked for me (mostly of the "shove a bunch of shit in a pot and leave it for half an hour and eat with rice" type that make a few days' worth in one go), and worked out which regular groceries were vegan or not, it was really remarkably smooth sailing and also way cheaper and healthier and really tasty. it inspired me to actually learn to cook basic easy shit, and i was able to feel proud of even my most basic creations. others will find different staple foods that work for them, maybe more basic, maybe fancier (i also eat very lazy shit when i cant be bothered at all). eating out is probably the trickiest bit, but happycow really helps with that. and i went from one of those "i could never live without bacon and cheese" people to literally never missing either of them (or anything else for that matter). and it also did wonders for my mental health to be taking some concrete positive action to live more consistently with my values. on top of everything else, its absolutely the best thing ive ever done for myself
not to imply at all that people should go vegan cos of personal benefits, thats not what its about. you should go vegan cos of animal liberation (which i agree that most people here already know is correct), but you can go vegan because its much easier than you think and its not a life of grim self-denial like youve been led to believe but actually cool and good
Absolutely agree with all of this, and I guess the only other thing I'll say is that vegan faux-meats/dairy product substitutes have never been better than they are now, and they are very widely available now, Soap_Owl. And a lot of stuff that you are probably already familiar with is already accidentally vegan.
I disagree with MF Broom. You should stop hurting others as soon as possible. It's not that hard. Check out the resources in the sidebar.
:shrug-outta-hecks: I guess we'll see which approach works out in the marketplace of ideas!
But for real, I suspect more aggressive/confrontational approaches work for some non-vegans, while less confrontational approaches works better for other non-vegans. That's fine, I think there is merit in both, and I don't necessarily always stick to one or the other anyways. At the end of the day, people have to want to change for themselves, no one else can do it for them. But there can be value in planting a seed, too.
Edit: I also never said they shouldn't stop eating animals ASAP, I even said that there's nothing stopping them from cutting it out cold turkey like others have. But it would be naive to think that approach works for everybody. It still sounds like this person isn't yet fully in tune with all the ethics and morality around veganism anyways if they're saying they're effectively too lazy to go full vegan right now (that's how you know someone isn't serious about it...yet) so if they were to immediately quit animal products without that moral framework, there's a very good chance they would fail and be back to their old ways.
I have not internalized how to have a constuructive relationship with normal food. At some point walmart brand frozen snack products will switch to fully vegan and I won't even notice the corn dogs are made out of tvp.
I am pretty sure most regular hot dog products got as much tvp in there is as legally possible. I am not emotionally attached to the content at all. It is just the energy output
I appreciate you recognizing the moral issues with eating animal products, that's usually the first step toward making more conscious choices. Is there anything specifically holding you back from going vegan?
I'll just say that there isn't necessarily an inherently right way to go vegan, some people go cold turkey and cut out all animal products, but that doesn't necessarily work for everyone. For me personally, I cut out all dairy and egg products when I went vegan right away, but that's because I was already vegetarian for 12 years, so the transition wasn't as drastic for me. There are more gradual approaches too, like taking your least favorite dairy or animal products, and cutting that out/finding a plant-based substitute, seeing how that goes, and if it goes well, then continuing cutting out additional things until you work your way to full-on veganism. And, this is just my personal experience, but the idea of initially going vegan for me was very daunting, and I feel shitty to say that I did put it off for several months, even when I knew I could be better, until I couldn't contain my cognitive dissonance any longer and decided to make the change, and, well, it ended up being a lot easier than I expected, tbh.
Of course I would prefer everyone to be fully vegan right away, but I also recognize that, like any major lifestyle change, it can be difficult to change/unlearn years or decades of habits and traditions, and different approaches for weaning off of animal products will probably work for different people, so I am sympathetic to that--I ate animal products for the first 22 years of my life, after all. But just like that old proverb, "The best time to
plant a treego vegan was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."And, of course, watching vegan documentaries, videos, reading articles, etc. is a good way to expand one's knowledge for why people choose to become vegan in the first place and can be a good motivating tool for making more ethical lifestyle changes. Like for me personally, once I made the change finally and after I'd learned about the many atrocities that occur every day in meat and dairy industries, the idea of ever supporting these industries in any capacity was so revolting to me that that helped make my transition easier and reiterated why I made the change to begin with.
I am not managing my life well now. Like most Americans if the store brand snack products were vegan I wouldn't know the difference or care. Like ramen? Appart from some animal gells I am pretty sure that is vegan now
I'm sympathetic to life challenges, having gone through them myself and continuing to do so, as some of my recent posts/comments in other communities would convey, but I guess I also feel like it doesn't necessarily preclude someone from making more ethical changes to their life in the meantime, even minor ones, because while I would vastly prefer everyone just dump every animal product they consume immediately, as much as it pains me to say it, that isn't going to work for everyone, but I do think that even minor changes (to start) count as something because every bit of animal product reduction is better than doing absolutely nothing at all. And hey, if you make minor changes and it turns out being quite simple, that can be a good source of motivation to cut out additional animal products as the next step, or maybe jumping to cutting them out altogether. And as always, continuing to educate yourself on the reasons to go vegan is absolutely critical if you want something like that to stick, because veganism is a lifestyle change embedded in ethics, and it's much more than just a diet (someone who only seeks to change their diet would be referred to as plant-based, but if they don't care about the ethics, it would be inaccurate to call them "vegan").
If you have interest in going vegan, this is a pretty good page that talks about the different processes one can take for transitioning: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go-vegan
One way Hexbear is better than Reddit: you can post in /c/food without dumbasses saying your meal sucks because there's no flesh in it. I don't really do vegan discourse online. It sucks to argue with extremely defensive carnists to an audience of mostly carnists. The status quo of the last year, where we don't have unprompted "annoying vegan" jokes like everywhere else on the internet, was good enough for me. I'm glad you brave souls are wading into it on my (and the animals') behalf though.
Carnists are reactionaries and like any other reactionaries they will lose their shit when they feel challenged. Hexbear's now a site that is pro-animal liberation. It's unacceptable to be anti-vegan per the new code of conduct. We will still deal with reactionaries, but their gaslighting and actual wrecking should be what's removed now. I'm sure that will take a while to settle in, but I hope this moves things forward in a better way over time
This is pretty much how it went a year and a half ago, except the carnists were able to spiral into tens of threads with hundreds of comments across the whole site, while vegans were getting banned even in the vegan comm. Things happening now are just a sliver of what happened before, and to be honest with you, it makes me hopeful that things will keep improving
Imagine saying something not even remotely inflammatory like
My opposition to living creatures being commodified and made to suffer industrialized torture for profit does not end at human victims
And then the response is
Y’all really have perfected the art of the moralist bludgeon
What did BeamBrain do besides state an objective fact? Animals are commodofied and suffering in masses in huge part because of the pursuit of profit. Why the fuck do you think factory farms exist in the first place that put these animals in deplorable cramped conditions? And that's without even mentioning that any animal wants to live and shouldn't be killed for human consumption in the first place when it's easily avoidable, factory farm or small farm or otherwise, but I digress. What an utterly gratuitous, dismissive, crybaby reply to his comment that doesn't even attempt to have an honest discussion about the substance of the comment, there's just no intellectual curiosity at all.
And that's one of the tamer "confrontational" comments you'll see on this site! For fuck's sake. I'm not even typically a confrontational vegan but that fucking pissed me off.
Edit: Oh wait, you're BeamBrain lmao, my b
Don't forget the highly upvoted comment equivocating veganism with Zionism
Yeah, that one's a real doozy, absolute brainworms.
Also, the OP of that thread urging vegans to respect omnis choosing to eat animal products
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WIiHrfQq-bo/maxresdefault.jpg
The "respect my choices" rhetoric is so funny to me, because carnists sure as hell don't respect the choices of vegans. I wasn't ever consulted on whether I wanted my tax money to go to $38B of subsidies a year so they can have their cheap meat.
And for all the talk that veganism is expensive or a privileged "diet", if anything, the opposite is true. A big reason why meat and dairy is so hugely subsidized to begin with is because it would be completely out of the price range of "consumers" if it wasn't. Which makes sense because think about all of the land, water, grain, etc. that goes into feeding and raising cows for dairy and meat, for instance. That is expensive as fuck and a hugely inefficient use of resources. It makes way more sense to cut out the middleman (i.e. livestock) and just give that food and water directly to people instead.
Hell, meat products still don't particularly strike me as cheap, especially in the face of rising inflation right now. Omnis don't realize that the US government subsidizes meat and dairy to the tune of $38 billion annually. In comparison, fruits and vegetables receive a $17 million in subsidies, or only 0.04% of what meat and dairy gets. That plays a huge role in the perception that veganism is more expensive than an omni diet. The same study says "a pound of hamburger will cost $30 without any government subsidies". Tell me, what is the real luxury here?
And besides, I'm pretty sure that "developing" countries eat far less meat and dairy products than western countries because plant-based foods are much more likely to be in their price range.
Omnis don’t realize that the US government subsidizes meat and dairy to the tune of $38 billion annually.
It would cost only $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US
But have you considered what would happen if we eliminated meat/dairy subsidies, freed all the cows, and repurposed all the money toward ending human homelessness instead? Congrats, now you just made millions of cows homeless. Checkmate, vegoons!
It's true, that's definitely how it would shake out, transient cows
They're just going mask off that all they will ever see animals as is food. No matter what they say, they don't care about animals
Wreckers lol. You mean the previous mods of c/vegan? And mods from the now banned CTH sub?
Hey leave me out of this pal I spend all my time on chapotraphouse3 .
And mods from the now banned CTH sub?
What mods from the old sub were wreckers? The ones that were on here from CTH weren’t anti-vegan.
I think you misinterpreted. I'm saying that the actors at play are not wreckers and have been in the community
I don’t get how thats misinterpreted when you said:
You mean the previous mods of c/vegan? And mods from the now banned CTH sub?
Could you clarify what you meant about the previous mods of c/vegan and the old CTH sub? Trying to get if there were specific problems with them since I know a couple of them still
The ones that were on here from CTH weren’t anti-vegan.
:I-was-saying:
Do you all realize what site you’re on? Like, you understand you’re pretty much vegans attacking other vegans? You can pretend everyone criticizing some of the stuff that comes out of this comm is some deranged stormfront chud but people are upset by of the borderline racist and offensive shit said on this comm.
Okay, I'll bite. What was so offensive about this that it warranted such hostility?
I won't make such comparisons because I'm not a Holocaust survivor, nor am I a descendant of chattel slaves. But I'm afraid I have a hard time believing this because the hostility I encounter here on Hexbear is the exact sort of hostility to veganism I encounter everywhere outside of dedicated vegan spaces. No matter where it's done, no matter how it's done, arguing in favor of veganism in any way is met with anger, offense, or dismissal. I have seen this time and time again in countless different places. Phrasing, word choice, the arguments used, none of that matters. The only common factor is vegan advocacy.
If you’ve seen posts here comparing chattel slavery and holocaust to modern industrial meat production
- Decoding “Never Again” by Sherry F. Colb, whose family were holocaust survivors.
What people mean, then, when they say that a comparison between animal agriculture and the Holocaust must be trivializing to the latter, since they cannot be referencing the magnitude or scale of the injury, must be instead the relative insignificance of the victims of animal agriculture. People who say that the analogy necessarily trivializes the Holocaust plainly regard the nonhuman victims of the injury as trivial individuals. The complaint is “how can you compare grave injuries to beings who matter—human beings—to grave injuries to beings—non-humans—whose lives do not matter and are trivial?” I see this second type of complaint in the notion that comparing animal slaughter with the Holocaust necessarily trivializes the Holocaust, and insofar as that is the complaint, I reject it. It betrays the very lessons that one needs to learn from the Holocaust’s construction of Jews.
- "Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?" by David Sztybel, the son of Holocaust survivors. Dr. David Sztybel: http://davidsztybel.info
The comparison in general, to the extent that it can be illuminated, cannot successfully be impugned and by alleging that it glosses over particular differences, is insulting, trivializing, or put forward by those who are "Nazi-like." Certainly, it would be viciously circular to assume that animal liberation is mistaken from the start, which makes a comparison offensive, and which in turn is supposed to prove that animal liberation is wrong. I conclude that if all other objections against animal liberation fail, objecting to the Holocaust comparison by itself will not indicate the case for anti-animal liberation. I submit the possibility that some people are deeply offended by the comparison because they are profoundly prejudiced against animals and in favor of human beings, and intolerant of those who hold opinions that are reflective of animal liberationist tendencies. If there were no such thing as discriminatory oppression, there never would have been a Holocaust, but neither could there be what animal liberationists refer to as speciesism. Far from the comparison being intrinsically objectionable, it is potentially useful and Illuminating, and may help to underline the gravity of our oppression of nonhuman animals.
- “Animals, My Brethren", by Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, who wrote this while in the concentration camp at Daschau
The following pages were written in the Concentration Camp Dachau, in the midst of all kinds of cruelties. They were furtively scrawled in a hospital barrack where I stayed during my illness, in a time when Death grasped day by day after us, when we lost twelve thousand within four and a half months. [...] I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.
When I see cages crammed with chickens from battery farms thrown on trucks lile bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz. When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a Holocaust on their plate.
- Isaacs Bashevis Singer, “Enemies, A Love Story” and “The Letter Writer”
What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.
- Alexandra M., full name withheld, a Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered. "The Lesson Has Not Been Learned”
Almost seventy years since that War – and the lesson has simply not been learned. There is not a single memorial in which there’s no mention of those innocent led “like lambs to the slaughter”. Woe is to him, though, who has the audacity to even hint that there’s anything wrong with the lambs themselves being led to slaughter. Woe is to him who compares those past persecutors and today’s; past freedom fighters with today’s. As if those led to slaughter back then were pronounced inferior “by mistake”, whereas those pronounced so today are “truly” inferior. As if one extermination isn’t the same as another, as if rescuers aren’t rescuers wherever they are. As if the calf doesn’t treasure his or her life, as if the hen doesn’t prize her freedom, as if the sow does not enjoy the company of her friends.
In the forward to the book, animal rights activist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Lucy Rosen Kaplan states:
I came to understand that the oppression of nonhumans on this Earth eclipses even the ordeal survived by my parents.
Eternal Treblinka should be on every list of essential reading for an informed citizenry...for the compelling comprehensiveness of the life-and-death story it tells.
--National Jewish Post & Opinion
Whether the comparison between the extermination of the Jews and our daily slaughter of millions of 'food' animals evokes agreement or outrage, you will want to read this meticulously researched and compelling treatment of a painful and controversial subject.
--Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
Exceptionally well done. I'll recommend it to many others. A cold shower for relativists cozy in their SUV's, I hope many read it and I hope many Jews, like myself, make room for the lessons within. I don't see it as a diminution of the Holocaust. Quite the opposite.
--Paul Allen
I dedicated my mother’s grave to the geese. My mother does not have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.
-
Speech from Alex Hershaft, and you can find several more on YouTube. Page on Jewish Veg website
None of us are saying anything racist or offensive, this is just more gaslighting from users who do not care about animal liberation
Stop abusing animals. If you've done that, stop tone policing people calling for their liberation
(looks at link) Oh look, it's the friendly neighborhood end-justifies-the-means poster.
Beam, I think it may be the case that decommodification is a path to veganism, or at least something close to it. How many people would eat meat if they had to do the slaughtering themselves, or dairy if they had to do all that it entails, instead of simply buying it from a store?
Pedantic voice: decommodification doesn't mean everyone will make their own food
I'm vegan just pedantic
That's true but even a "local rancher" (or anyone who made animal products directly for human consumption) would be hard-pressed to proportionally come anywhere near to matching the level of cruelty of CAFOs. When an animal isn't seen as just a representation of money, there becomes more of an emphasis on "quality".
