stabby_cicada

“That being said, I am happy to give up my right to vote as a trade for a significantly better quality of life. It’s cleaner, it’s safer. There’s more opportunity in mobility,” she said.

Plenty of people are happy to make that trade while staying in America. This is why Trump's going to win.

Full disclosure: I don't have the time or patience to watch a thirty minute video, and perhaps the OOP discusses this point somewhere in the video. I don't know.

But I believe vegan activism doesn't require anti-capitalist activism. Or even opposition to capitalism in general.

I agree that capitalism is inherently anti-vegan. The logic of capitalism sees both animal bodies and human bodies as objects to be owned and used for their masters' profit.

I think it's more ideologically consistent for vegan activists to also oppose capitalist systems as a whole.

But vegan activism doesn't require ideological consistency. We're not trying to change the entire world economic system. We don't need to change the entire world economic system. If abolitionists could oppose slavery without opposing capitalism - and win - vegans can oppose the slavery of animals without opposing capitalism. Vegans can win victories and have protections for animals written into law without opposing capitalism. We can and we have.

And if you can be a vegan activist and still be a capitalist, you can certainly just be an ordinary vegan and still be a capitalist.

Frankly, absolute ideological consistency is for heroes in an Ayn Rand novel. Vegans can work with with anybody who puts the animals first. And anybody who puts the animals first can be a vegan.

What is the source of your quote? I can think of quite a few places where I'd want to share it 😆

Added to post, thank you!

In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you're better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?

English commoners forgave their empire's industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.

American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.

The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America's wealth. But they don't consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don't burn 80% of the gas, they don't eat 80% of the food, they don't produce 80% of the pollution. What's killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.

But telling poor Americans "your standard of living is too high" when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it's a hard sell, you know?

In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.

Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.

And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.

Food Not Bombs has a cookbook with a similar style of "protest food" recipes.

To be fair, people are choosing capitalism because they have to make money, buy food, and pay rent.

Graphic designer, writer, commissioned artist, were jobs people could do entirely online. And a lot of highly online people did one or the other, or have friends who did one or the other, and they see AI as the existential threat to their livelihoods that it, in fact, is.

And I feel for them. I really do. If you bought food and paid rent by making art online - especially if you're neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn't hold a normal job - AI tools have destroyed your career. And it sucks. There's no getting around that.

But the core of the problem is not AI. The core of the problem is the lack of a safety net. Some of the enormous profits from the AI boom should be funneled back into society to support the people who are put out of business by the AI boom. But they won't. Because capitalism.

I deleted most of this comment because it wasn't as civil and understanding as I wanted it to be and it's probably better off lost to history 😆

But let me summarize my thoughts: your mother, and presumably you, eat a lot more meat than the average person. The 10% of human foods that aren't plant-based and can't easily be made plant-based are overrepresented in your meat heavy diet.

And meat heavy diets are bad for your personal health and for the health of the planet, for reasons we both know very well.

Which is to say: you are universalizing your personal experiences. It's not difficult to go vegan. It's difficult for you to go vegan, because your diet and lifestyle are so heavily focused on animal products. That's not an indictment of veganism; it's an indictment of the Western diet, and big agriculture, and capitalist food science that studied what flavors and textures trigger dopamine release so they could pack food with them and sell more product, and the whole vicious capitalist PR mechanism that convinced Westerners to eat a meat heavy, highly processed, unhealthy diet and convinced Western governments to subsidize it. And, to a much lesser extent, it is an indictment of your personal choices.

It's difficult for you to go vegan. But that's not on veganism. That's on you.

Frankly, I think your comment exemplifies how correct this article is.

"Cooking vegan is hard" - no, it isn't. 90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients. You don't need any different cooking methods to make pasta sauce without meat or fried rice without eggs. Dairy is slightly more complicated because milk does very particular things to the texture and chemistry of food but you can find guides to non-dairy replacements in literally 30 seconds on Google.

"I will be a social pariah/I can never eat out again" - that's catastrophizing. If you personally live in a food desert where no vegan food exists, or you personally have relatives who will emotionally abuse you for eating vegan food - I'm not saying this doesn't happen, in the age of Trump there are some conservatives who think eating tons of red meat (and smoking cigars and rolling coal) virtual signals their loyalty to conservatism, and I hope they enjoy the heart disease they're giving themselves - then eat non-vegan food in public. That's okay. Veganism is about avoiding animal products as far as is reasonable and practical.

But what I see a lot is people saying "I can't be vegan because there are no vegan restaurants in Kansas" when they live in California. I see people saying "I can't be vegan because people at church give vegans the stink eye" when they don't attend church. I see people saying "veganism is wrong because there's tons of land useless for agriculture that can only be used for grazing" when the meat they eat comes from soy fattened factory farm feed lots. I see people saying "veganism is wrong because hunting is a traditional lifeway of Native American people" when they are not Native American.

How does a lack of vegan restaurants keep you from cooking vegan at home? It doesn't.

Will you actually get criticized at family reunions if you bring a potluck dish without meat in it? As if there are food inspectors going through all the side dishes to make sure the required quantity of animal product is in it? Even for conservatives, that's ridiculous.

What I see over and over again is people bringing up reasons why other people can't go vegan in order to explain why they don't go vegan, even though the reasons that apply to those other people don't apply to them at all. And that is deflecting. And that's exactly what the article calls out.

If you came up to me and said, "You know CHEESE is ABUSE" I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn't have lab-grown cheese yet.

I'm going to pick this sentence specifically to respond to, because. With all due respect.

If you said "I torture animals for pleasure and I'm not going to stop" we would consider you a sociopath.

But you're saying "I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I'm not going to stop", and we're supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?

Look. Torturing animals is wrong. You know it's wrong. You are admitting it's wrong. It hurts your feelings to be reminded that you are doing wrong.

That's a fair and understandable feeling and I don't care. Because you are torturing animals, and if you feel bad when someone reminds you, it's because you should.

There is value in gentle persuasion. And there's also value in ranting about the sheer fucking hypocrisy of carnists. This article is the latter.

Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.

Without getting into the definition of "art", yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than "art". And that's not a gimmick. That's a valuable tool.

Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn't have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company's ads.

AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn't have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that's a good thing.