So there was a recent post of some right wingers standing next to a ballot box to intimidate voters. This is clearly bad. They also made questionable aesthetic choices, like wearing dad cargo-shorts and growing goatees. This is also clearly bad.
So, what did Chapeau.Chat focus on? The weight of these men of course!
Let's start with the basics:
--Everyone has a range of weights their body is comfortable at. If you try to go too low or too high in this range, your body will start sending your hunger and satiety signals to keep you within that range. While you can go higher or lower in that range by manipulating Calories-in-calories-out, this range is fairly fixed without medical intervention. In other words, some people are just fat.
--There are other uncontrollable factors that effect weight. In Texas, for example, there are fewer walk-able neighborhoods and more access to fast food than here in Portland where there are more new-seasons than mcDonalds or Manhattan where it's easier to take the train than to drive.
--Socially, weight is co-constructed with fitness and self-control. In the protestant value system (the dominant one in the U.S. even among atheists), self control is one of the most important virtues. Fat implies unfit implies poor self control. Thin implies fit implies good self control.
Protestant morality is, here, at odds with reality. Weight here is co-produced by environment, hormones, eating habits and movement habits. All of those things are only partially under our control, and a Portlander is always going to have an easier time being thin than an Austintonian. Moralizing weight the way this community did celebrates protestant morality over basic reality.
As communists, we are better than that.
Call them fascists, make fun of their ugly beards, offer to shoplift them better shorts, but don't fat-shame them.
I'm not saying eating chicken is fine. I don't eat chicken.
I said, more or less, thinking eating chicken is fine is fine. Which of course it clearly is, I know tons of good people who think it's fine and thus eat it.
"Eating chicken is fine if you think eating chicken is fine" is just a needlessly convoluted way of saying "eating chicken is fine." "Good person" is a nonsense label, we should talk about specific behaviors as right and wrong, not people as good or bad. Racism is wrong, carnism is wrong. Plenty of people throughout history have been bigots, we don't have to judge them as "good people" and "bad people," to spend our time arguing about whether Stalin was a "good person" or a "bad person" based on e.g. the criminalization of homosexuality. We do need to be clear that racism, homophobia, and carnism are wrong, not fine, and things we should advocate against.
But I don't interact with behaviors, I interact with people. I can engage in behaviors myself, but as soon as it's someone else's behavior in question it's outside of my zone of direct control, so any modulations of the behavior have to be done through the person and my relationship with them.
So do you tolerate transphobia in your friends and dismiss it as "fine"?
Nah transphobia makes someone a bad person in my book.
Ok, literally killing and eating animals is "just a choice" but discriminating against humans makes you a bad person.
You are a speciesist. If hatred and bigotry makes someone a bad person, you are one. Fuck off.
I actually think I'm rather swell, if a bit dense. And speciesm doesn't actually mean anything everyone's a speciest, or at the very least a phylumist or kingdomist, in as much as species and phylums and kingdoms are anything beyond abstractions (which they aren't).
You are correct, species are abstractions. That's why using species to draw lines of when violence is "fine" and when violence makes you a "bad person" is bullshit.
Yeah and if I broke out a cladogram everytime I bought my friends dinner this would be a problem for me.
You don't have to because the violence is built into society. You can just go sit in the whites-only section of the restaurant and feel smug about the fact that you personally don't care what color your friends' skin is, because the mechanisms of privilege are all ready made for you to take advantage of, and then get mad at all those black protesters because they care so much, and enlightened people don't care about things.
Why would I be in a whites only section of a restaurant, obviously I would leave if I saw that sort of thing.
Cool, because the racism isn't something you can put in your mouth you can recognize it as a bad thing.
I mean everyone here agrees that it's bad that's sort of why we're all grouped here as leftists no?
I have no doubt there are plenty of racists on this website, and plenty more who come in from time to time. Taking action against racism is how we deal with them. Taking action against carnism is how we deal with the reactionary human supremacists. Spending your time sniping at vegans as you do is the opposite of that.
I mean I think we can all agree leftism, is at the current juncture explicitly anti-racist in it's construction and I think we can all agree in theory (if not in practice in specific instances) that a leftist doing a racism is either not doing leftism at that point or doing leftism poorly.
All I'm hearing is "There are no good and bad things, only group consensus. Racism became bad when we all agreed it was bad."
Edit: Look, all I really want is for you to stop hurting animals and stop punching left at vegans. If you feel the need to play enlightened centrist, punch right and go annoy the anti-vegans who keep stirring up shit, especially on this comm.