Earlier today a vegan made a post with a white supremacist dog whistle by satirizing a person who's people "have been eating dog for thousands of years". Another Indigenous person and I did our best to call out the white supremacist nature of the discussion, so the poster later edited the title to specifically reference European people, which may have been well intentioned but only served to gaslight us by making it look like we were over-reacting and looking to be offended.
I came here for the leftism, and stayed for the Trans Rights. I'm a 2-spirit, native leftist. I have myriad reasons why I may or may not choose or even have the choice of veganism and any moralizing or condescension that comes from white vegans is an extension of over 500 years of an imposition of an alien value system which is profoundly disconnected from this land and the plants and animals which are our blood relations.
Am I still allowed to be upset that my tax dollars are used to fund the torture and slaughter of animals on an industrial scale?
Edit: Or the well-documented prevalence of PTSD among slaughterhouse employees? Even if we decide we don't give a shit about animals, I kind of get the impression that concern for the wellbeing of workers was meant to be core to the concerns of communism.
Yes, and you should be. Destroying life to satisfy the market is not the same as taking life to nourish and sustain other life. There is no connection, there is no respect. The mentality behind those slaughterhouses is one that views the rest of the world like it is behind some imaginary glass pane. Life (in the grand sense of the word) is something we are all immersed in, it is not a thing you can opt into or opt out of. If anything, the PTSD suffered by those slaughterhouse workers is a kind of proof that it is emotionally and spiritually harmful to engage in that behavior.
Fair enough. It is admittedly strange to me to see this talk of vegan colonizers. It seems to me that the white western societies that tend to do the colonizing are very much anti-vegan, given the massive scale of animal ag industries in most western countries, along with the aggressive police response to animal rights activists and anti-vegan signaling common in popular media.
Oh absolutely, the discourse around veganism is a goddamned minefield. I spent a number of years writing off veganism (despite a bunch of parallels where we could agree on things) because the common discourse was poisoned through that anti-vegan sentiment you're talking about.