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.
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The post does explicitly say White Vegans, and generalizations are necessary because culture is a generalization. It's the overlap in identities, beliefs, and lifestyles of large numbers of unique individuals and therefore inherently nebulous.
I really think you're trying to hard here. You're trying to find loopholes, not grasp the central tenants.
Different people have different morals, standards, traditions, and lifestyles. These are often alien to us, and we need to be careful not to be exclusionary. That means recognising and accepting differences of opinion. Don't try to make your personal soft spot the criteria for who's a leftist.
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The title is not the post. You need to comprehend the title, the body, the argument, and the motivation behind the post, not the semantics of the tagline.
I use Us and We to mean leftists. That paragraph is not specific to veganism or indigenous issues. It's a real problem with the culture of the site.
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Most veganism is coming from the experiences of those living in a modern, industrial society, completely removed from where food comes from. It comes from people trying to close that distance and being shocked by what they find. And it is awful. The way we treat livestock needs to change, and that's something I think everyone here agrees on, vegan or not.
But there's another side to things. Humans are animals. We are naturally part of an ecosystem, fulfill our needs by taking fron that ecosystem, and we change that ecosystem to suit out needs. In this context, humans hunting and eating meat is no different than a wolf or bear doing so.
I'm a vegetarian. In my life, I don't think eating meat can be justified. However, not everyone has my life. I can't expect other people to come to the same conclusions I do when their relationship to food and to the natural world are completely alien to me.
Somewhere between those two points, early human ancestors and industrialised farming and slaughter, I think there's a line to be drawn where our relationship to other animals becomes unnatural, exploitative, and downright evil. I don't know where it is. Is the invention of horticulture when we lost the right to kill? The industrial revolution? Was domestication a mistake? Can we include animals in our economy at all? Should we separate ourselves from nature entirely? What's exploitation and what's symbiosis? Does the act of pondering these questions leave us with obligations other animal species lack?
It's hard to answer these questions even for yourself, but then trying to impose your answers onto others becomes problematic because you came up with your answers in a completely different context.
Why must it be true for all? If it exclude his culture that is enough. A counterexample do not disprove it.
The bottom line is still caring more about human comfort than animal lives. If a (hypothetical) Indigenous group has a culture that holds mass human sacrifice then should that just be accepted?
:yes-chad:
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are you indigenous?
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Nah I’d rather talk about my specific experiences in regards to my race than be some anonymous shadow figure. It’s a huge part of who I am, how I interact with the world, how I believe in leftism. Not like someone can identify every gypsy in the world out there to find which one I am.
edit: also mostly just asked cause if a nonRoma tried to tell me to not ‘generalize for all Roma’ or something i’d surely be upset. saying such a thing can be taken in kind of a shitty way if youre not of the same ethnicity/culture.
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Don’t worry I learned my lesson the other week and will never talk about my family crest on social media.
So where do you draw the line? Because there are quite a few morals, standards, traditions and lifestyles that opposing is inherent to leftism, we exclude capitalists, slaveowners, racists, homophobes, transphobes etc. what is the difference other than that you personally see it as a lesser issue and then why do you see it as lesser? Is it because you don't see animal life as life maybe?
The difference is animals are not part of the leftist movement (save for a handful of based riot dogs). If you're homophobic, racist, transphobic, etc. inviting you into the leftist movement weakens it by excluding others. Someone who eats burgers isn't excluding anyone from the leftist movement and therefore not an impediment to Leftism.