We have to do it. Some of us have to do it in different ways. Doing small things where you can is all well and good but literally none of us are making a single impact in capitalism by making different choices about how we're forced to participate in it. Focus on tearing it down together rather than picking apart individual choices because those individual choices still result in participating in capitalism.
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Meanwhile you're over here actively trying to exclude me and others from action that actually matters because I'm not doing action that doesn't matter. Leftists need to stick together and organize together because "just don't buy it then" does not and will not even remotely harm the interests of capital.
The problem is capitalism. It's not meat eaters or plastic users or tax payers. The sooner folks of ALL walks stop trying to exclude people from the movement the sooner we can actually have a movement. Meanwhile you're doing a tiny thing that makes 0 actual difference and claiming that we are horrible horrible people doing something else. It's counter productive. It does nothing. Why do it except because you don't actually care about tearing down capitalism?
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I won't say that I don't give a shit about animals. I was vegetarian for like a year but guess what? Fucking capitalism happened and now I'm not anymore. This is what I'm talking about. You are just flying in here and everywhere passing judgement on people you don't know for something that literally does not further the goal of "remove capitalism". It's frankly disgusting. You don't know me. You don't know anyone or any of the circumstances around the people you're shouting at. You have no idea what my circumstances are. You have no idea what you're saying other than "I'm better than you because I don't participate in one tiny piece of capitalism and I don't care about the rest." It's ridiculous. It's the same shit libs do when they say things like 'Voting for Biden is the lesser evil!' and then they do literally nothing else for 4 years. That's you. Right now.
Go organize instead of trying to tear a community apart
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I didn't make a big show of it. I didn't even reference animal products at all; you brought this up, presumably as an example of how I'm wrong, and then flew off the handle immediately when I went to defend my initial statement of "this kind of bullshit is counter productive".
And that's why it's counter productive. So I guess thank you for popping in and immediately proving my point?
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It's the circle of lib honestly. There's nothing more lib than saying "I'm doing one thing, therefore I'm better than you and don't have to do anything else". And as is customary of libs, when someone calls them out on "hey, that's just being a lib and isn't useful, let's try doing something useful instead", they get mad and say "no actually YOU'RE the lib!"
Seriously, go do something that matters. Annoying people online because they can't or won't or don't fall into your perfect ideal vision of what leftism is doesn't do anything.
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Not to butt in here but yesterday's dogposting triggered a couple animal ethics questions in my head. Like, assuming it's not against your religion (Jews, Muslims, and I THINK Christians but I'm not sure), is there a problem eating wild animals that died on their own? Also, it is my understanding that the issue with eating eggs is the circumstances in which the eggs are produced, so if I personally got some chickens that would have been used to produce eggs in a factory and kept them on my property to roam about freely and safely, would it be ok for me to eat their eggs? At that point the chickens are living with basically their maximum potential autonomy short of being able to wander around in the woods with no food, and they're gonna lay the eggs anyways, so why not eat the eggs? I get that the fact we have bred chickens to produce eggs in this manner is itself unethical, but now there are chickens that will be producing eggs whether we like it or not, so if the chickens are in a position where their egg laying is not exploited (i.e. they can do whatever they want, if they stop laying eggs it's fine but if they lay eggs that's cool) is there still an ethical dilemma? And if we wanted to stop egg production entirely, wouldn't that require us to kill off all chickens either directly or through forced defertilization? Additionally, if we were to let all chickens free and voluntarily stop eating them or their eggs, where would they go? That last one isn't an argument against veganism persay, I'm just curious about the practical aspects. Like what habitat can chickens live in? I know they came from forests in South East Asia but now I can't imagine where they'd survive. I'm sure they'd survive somewhere. Great Plains maybe? Majestic herds of chickens galloping across the plains with the sun shining over them?
Eating a wild animal that died on it's own would be vegan yes but I'll give you a heads up that questions like that don't tend to go down pretty well with vegans cuz it comes across as a gotcha and they get that a lot. Like is the practical implication there that there are people that would go vegan if only they could eat roadkill? I'm sure you don't intend it to come across that way but I thought I'd let you know.
As for eggs, while keeping your own chickens is better than battery farming it's still problematic. Hens don't naturally produce the insane number of eggs that we're used to. A wild chicken will generally produce 12-20 eggs a year similar to how a woman has a period but when a hen's eggs are taken away from them they instinctively produce more leading to the hundreds per year that battery hens lay. Laying eggs uses a lot of calcium for the shell so forcing them to lay way more than they're naturally used to is very bad for them. Normally a chicken will eat it's own eggs to replenish the nutrients lost during laying so by taking the eggs of your backyard chicken you're forcing it lay more eggs than it should and denying it the nutrients to sustain itself.
Your point about stopping egg production entirely is on the assumption that we're able to stop it overnight which no vegan is naive enough to think. The veganisation of society is something that will happen gradually over many years so there is no worry of some overnight chicken re-wilding that must happen.
As for the last point there are wild chickens in the world atm and it's very unlikely to be the case that battery chickens will all be released into the wild they will just be bred less and less for exploitation.
It is unfortunately true that domestication and selective breeding has made it so many of these species are reliant on human intervention for continued survival
you: a sectarian
"i am correct and cannot empathize with your position and refuse to try"
Slaughterhouses, factory farms and whatnot are still going to run even if you turn Vegan. You're not freeing animals from cruelty by not eating meat, just like how you're not freeing kids from sweatshops by not wearing sneakers. Unless you're that confidence in your buying power as a consoomer like a :LIB:
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With this in mind I will stop ordering packages from amazon to exercise my power as a consoomer.
Have you just learnt the definition of a boycott lol?
I'm making fun of you people who thinks that boycotts works.
There's no one organising technique that "works" what does this even mean? Boycotts are absolutely effective at raising consciousness as part of a wider movement
Actually, it doesn't change anything because the markets aren't responsive enough to adjust how many animals are slaughtered based on a single person's day-to-day consumption habits.
The comparison to child labor is apt.
Sorry if that makes you feel less morally superior.
"You see, it's bad, actually to give money to homeless people because it's a temporary fix and won't long term solve homelessness"
That immediately alleviates the suffering of another
humanbeing, however insignificantly, making it categorically different than simply being vegan:thinkin-lenin:
Didnt realize the immigrant slaughterhouse workers who get PTSD from their jobs weren't humans who were suffering.
Please tell me more about your empathy for fellow humans tho :)
https://www.texasobserver.org/ptsd-in-the-slaughterhouse/
Your not eating animal products does jack shit for those people, sorry
A comparable action to giving a homeless person money would be fostering animals or donating to orgs that help animals
But you definitely can just stop eating meat and live more or less the same life. Buy some beans, it turns out they're cheaper too.
Vegans say this sort of thing a lot. But they also say that going vegan causes you to lose weight. I would be dangerously underweight if I lost even 15 pounds. So maybe don't assume it's genuinely viable for everyone?
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Must be nice to know everything about everyone else's life circumstances.
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If you must know, I haven't been to a grocery store in over a year, and I don't prepare food for myself, which is, you know, kind of a key activity vegans need to perform for themselves.
Anyway, I don't really want to continue this argument. I just wanted to point out that going vegan is not simply something everyone can do (despite being in full agreement on the morality of veganism), and I got a ton of shit from multiple people for it. As many others have said during this ongoing struggle session (which I have been studiously avoiding up until now), condescension is not a winning conversion strategy.
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I have asked to disengage, and you have not done so. Further comments will be reported.
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That literally happened to me(vegetarian) and my nutritional levels dropped too. My doctor forced me back into eating at least some kind of red meat and fish, at least one of them each week. I tried my best to have a balanced diet while vegetarian, but it didn't help apparently.
Edit: By the way i'm perfectly aware that mine is a rare situation and don't apply to everyone. Try going vegan/vegetarian if you can. I'm eating the minimum amount of meat just to keep myself healthy. If you don't feel like it, try reducing the amount of meat consumption. Every little bit helps. If you don't want to go vegan, don't go vegan, you're not forced to, and people who are trying to guilt-trip you have online poisoning.
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I have never heard a vegan say this. If you want to lose weight on a vegan diet, you can. If you don't want to lose weight, you don't have to. If you're eating a metric fuckton of cheese and fatty meats I mean yeah, maybe.
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You're presupposing that I can "bulk up" without being vegan, but I have never found this to be true. So I don't think imposing additional dietary challenges is going to help.
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Switching to not eating meat will not cause you to drop a lot of weight.
Meat isn't what causes people to gain weight, carbs do. And carbs are vegan.
I have absolutely zero desire to talk to you, as you clearly already know. Go away.
Going vegan can help you lose weight if you want to because you have to reevaluate all the food you eat so you can make healthier choices. But if you don't wanna lose weight, you're not going to.
I've lost plenty of weight without wanting to in the past.
Then how is this complaint about veganism? You've manufactured an unrelated excuse to continue doing animal cruelty.
i'm the direct opposite lol - going vegan hasn't made me lose weight at all.
I've never seen studies or anything about it, but I'm fairly sure that people who lose weight going vegan were overweight to begin with. Rice and beans don't have less calories than a steak.
There’s also A lot of people who lose weight when going vegan because they were going vegan for such a purpose or subconsciously have orthorexia. So it is an issue but their circumstances aren’t applicable to everyone if you pay attention to eating enough calories.
You're right - we cannot escape capitalism. The various electronic devices we use, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the power we use in our homes etc. At the same time, as leftists, we must try to reduce the harm we cause at a personal level, while recognizing that this wouldn't end capitalism. Use your phone/laptop etc for longer rather than getting a new one every couple of years. Wear clothes for longer, or get them from non-exploitative labor. For food, don't eat meat. These are all steps you can take that won't end capitalism - but they're all steps that you take if you have a compassionate view of the world.
These are all things we should be doing, that in fact, we can do if we act collectively, but right now we don't have that level of solidarity. So we do what we can as individuals while building towards that solidarity.
Vegans please shut up about being vegans for just one day challenge
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:doubt:
Learning to eat a more plant-based diet is good. People have an unhealthy relationship to food, especially meat.
But veganism is far from a healthy relationship to food.
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Because wherever you live, there are meats that are significantly more ecological sound than any agricultural output.
Where I live, it's white-tailed deer & invasion carp.
Also, if your vegan diet involves shit like almonds, bananas, avocados, or really anything that isn't grown near you... lol
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Where are you getting this clean power?
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None. The farms are already in place, all the produce is just fed to animals so you can get a tiny fraction of meat from it.
Or it's burnt as fuel. Or it's just...left to rot on the field because farmers often can make more money doing that. We waste so much food because that's what's convenient for capital
Do you people really think that people feed tomatoes and cucumbers and shit to farm animals? Most industrialized farms mainly produces shit like wheat, with the remaining stalks harvested for animal feed. Getting rid of animal husbandry is quite literally increase the carbon footprints of farms as each produce will be less efficiently used. Not to mention if everyone were to eat vegetables exclusively, you'll have to increase the farm capacity to make up for all the food that's no longer coming from unfarmable pastures.
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Indeed, I feel like I'm wasting my effort here. These people's sole purpose is to get off of acting contrarian.
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Pests refer to species that are destructive to a given agricultural or husbandry practice. I'm not talking about the deer population as a pest. I'm talking about the explosion in deer population and it's effect on North American ecosystems.
Long-term solution involves the centralized planning of agriculture, husbandry, hunting, and foraging to produce food for the local human population in concert with nature.
Neither hunting & eating more plant-based diets are long-term solutions by themselves.
ehhhh carbon footprints going up from not having giant fart-machines attached to them? stalks going to animal feed is a compelling point but it doesn't feel like a coup de grace. and to my knowledge 'regular' crops of corn get fed to animals, so its not an argument that applies to all farms
What do you suppose we do with agricultural remains then? Let it rot on the ground and produce more gasses? Burn them and produce gasses?
It's true, some crops like Sorghum are grown specifically for animals. But my point that let's not pretend that agriculture has no environmental issues in of itself.
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"Please, we humble southerners only wish to continue doing cruelty in peace. Why must the north intervene."
So is there some subset of vegans that are contractually obligated to equate not being a vegan with owning Black people as property or something.
Equating human cruelty with animal cruelty is good because they're similar in many ways, including the reluctance of liberals to speak up or take any inconvenience in their lives to end it.
I think vegans should stay in their lane and stop trying to equate simply not being vegan with slavery and ethnic cleansing.
But it's also a false equivalence because slave owners own the means of production under slavery, whereas non-vegans do not own the means of producing meat.
Sorry for participating in animal husbandry