I mean isn’t it something like 300 million animals going through factory farming per year? A lot of that is essentially actual torture, so I would say pretty much nothing is on that level. That’s the entire population of the US every year going through factory farming.
Idk what would be performative about it? Many vegans are crazy, that doesn’t mean supporting factory farming is “just a diet choice” any more than supporting trump is “just politics.”
Animal agriculture is objectively an absolute horror show on any level. Boycott and abstention are legitimate political tactics.
The problem, is that many vegans divide society up into two camps, people who eat meat, and people who don’t. The people who do eat meat are willfully destroying the environment and causing great suffering; the people who don’t eat meat are not contributing to the suffering, simple as. Q.E.D. veganism is not just a healthier and more sustainable way to live, which it undeniably is, but people have a moral imperative to abstain from consuming animal products.
But, that imperative to act is based on many contradicting assumptions. For one, it implodes the entire issue of the ethics of production, down to a individual personal choice. The choice to follow an ethical vegan diet is one of many factors that might decide what people eat and why. Ignoring differences in social culture and perspective, also ignores economic causes and effects. These vegan centrists don’t care about more ethical kinds of farming practices or actually campaigning for change politically and economically.
I think there are chill vegans who feel good knowing they don’t contribute to animal cruelty, who believes that injustice to animals doesn’t excuse injustice toward humans, those people arent just comrades, they’re disciplined through and through. I admire the commitment and discipline and the organized left needs more of it!
But condemning an individual when the system is largely to blame, is absolutely devoid of a coherent theory of change. This approach creates an abstraction of animal agriculture based in righteous outrage against immense suffering; and another abstraction of the individual and their “choice”, but never bothers with any actual specifics. To me, this amounts to telling people to go vote with their dollars. It’s accepting a literal market solution. And market solutions don’t fix problems, they exploit problems for profit.
You know who most often calls for market solutions to structural problems? Political centrists.
Furthermore, there’s no theory of how ideas spread, which stems from no theory of power. People act like they can just debate people into changing their behavior. Actually, change only comes from organization, because power is made of individuals all working together. Without real power, centrist vegans can’t berate a mass of people into agreeing with them. All they can do is make other people feel judged, and more likely to reject even the many beneficial aspects of veganism. So the approach fails, and being totally impractical, actually hurts the goals of veganism. Textbook campism and sectarianism.
I know that there are very committed, busy activists who are also militant vegans. If that person wants to yell at me, I’d accept the abuse, I’ll take that L. And if you’re a vegan who is like “that’s gross, I’d prefer if you didn’t eat meat around me,” I would consider whether altering my behavior is even worth it. Because if we are friends I’ll def abstain. If not, fuck off. Funny how that works, being friendly.
Monopoly capitalist corpos, and animal agriculture are brutally bound up in one another, unevenness of access to nutritious food, and oppressive living conditions driven by capitalist class war economics, have well documented effects on people’s culture (how regular people determine what is true and ethical) but also their decision making. Vegan views are based in reality, but not in many peoples reality because in our society, we are alienated from the natural world, where our food comes from. Vegan centrists aren’t bad people, they subscribe to thinking the way that many people do. It just happens to be a way that hides real causes of suffering while professing to be an enemy of real suffering.
It isn’t that vegan centrists are objectively wrong, but like all centrists, they are too abstract in thinking, because they’re too far away from the particulars, and so they can’t name the actual problems.
I mean I don’t think this is really wrong but it’s sort of obscuring the situation. Yes you can’t really blame the individual for societal problems, but you should still “expect” of them to not do so. For example I wouldn’t call someone evil if they had slaves in the 30s, but it’s still absolutely inexcusable to own another person. We can “expect” individual change while still recognizing the society at large is the main problem.
Any vegan who believes they don’t do massive harm just by existing is hugely misinformed, but this still feels like it’s obfuscating the situation. If I have the choice to not torture someone, it’s morally wrong for me to continue regardless of if I’m committing other harms. I should try to reduce the largest harms I can within my abilities. For most people this would be significantly reducing how much meat they eat, for vegans this would be canvassing and building community to try to reduce things like climate change. If someone isn’t vegan but helps their community and votes to reduce climate change etc, most (not insane) vegans would say this person is doing as much or more moral good as if they were vegan.
Pretty much fully agree with the rest of it, I’m not asking people to change their minds from some vegan berating them, but it is pretty exhausting having to use “kid gloves” on something most people would consider the greatest moral emergencies of our time, if they would diegn to look into it. A “haha gottem” like OP’s post from time to time helps me not freak out at people when they say “it’s just a diet choice” or “they were bred to be eaten, its just nature.”
Well I’m not going to nitpick each view of a single person, i’d love to continue our discussion, and I hope you’ll consider my points. I’ll consider yours.
Honestly I’m rooting for vegans, like if y’all seized state power and were like, “all right mfs here’s how you make curry” and sent all the “but bacon though” chuds to reeducation camps that are basically just giant cooking schools, publicly tried and executed the ceos of Monsanto, Tyson – comrade, I promise you, I would be right there with you. If you all really bring the fight, and some do, I know you could actually change things, at least some basic reforms or smthn.
I just wish vegans would take their own ethical standards seriously enough to not be absolutist, and to understand the actual causes of mass animal suffering. I am telling you, it is capitalism. I’m not even saying you have to become a socialist or whatever, you just have to resist capitalism as a part of the larger mission. I need vegans to get serious and get organized and fight for power to change things. If I had somewhere to devote my feistiness to veganism, maybe I still would be one.
And I’m sorry, but comparing slavery to animal agriculture is exactly what I was referring to in my first post above. I don’t mean this as a dunk, and I understand where you’re coming from, but it demonstrates a deeply misguided view on both chattel slavery and animal agriculture.
However I very much appreciate this discussion, and exchanging views. I really value compassion and defense of life over petty philosophizing. I hear many people, men especially, saying that empathy is obsolete and it just makes me so fucking sad. Some of my absolute favorite people are vegans. When I move back to the city in 2 years, I’ll go back to eating vegan. See if I can fix the damage to my body of having to live in rural midwest :(
I think it’s sort of a “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” situation," like “vote with your wallet” is stupid because that’s not the solution, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. As an example sun chips tried recyclable paper packaging, but people complained it was too loud and they sold less, so they went back to plastic. Same thing with meat, if no one bought it no one would sell it. That is never happening, but that doesn’t mean one individual can’t still make a big difference with their choices.
It does feel pretty bad fighting for that though, because now I’m fighting my neighbor for eating his favorite breakfast instead of the machine that made it so immoral. I see veganism the same as leftism, you make changes in your life where you can to help, but the most important is get organized, get people talking, and get people voting and working for actual change.
I mean if like some vegans you believe animals have equal or at least similar worth to humans (I’m a bit of the latter), then as it stands we are subjugating and torturing them every day on a scale 100x that of slavery. It is literally slavery + worse living conditions than most slaves had + torture + death, which is why I don’t see it as a far fetched comparison.
Hey don’t knock philosophising till you try it, sometimes it leads nowhere but sometimes you learn a lot from it :P
I mean isn’t it something like 300 million animals going through factory farming per year? A lot of that is essentially actual torture, so I would say pretty much nothing is on that level. That’s the entire population of the US every year going through factory farming.
Idk what would be performative about it? Many vegans are crazy, that doesn’t mean supporting factory farming is “just a diet choice” any more than supporting trump is “just politics.”
Animal agriculture is objectively an absolute horror show on any level. Boycott and abstention are legitimate political tactics.
The problem, is that many vegans divide society up into two camps, people who eat meat, and people who don’t. The people who do eat meat are willfully destroying the environment and causing great suffering; the people who don’t eat meat are not contributing to the suffering, simple as. Q.E.D. veganism is not just a healthier and more sustainable way to live, which it undeniably is, but people have a moral imperative to abstain from consuming animal products.
But, that imperative to act is based on many contradicting assumptions. For one, it implodes the entire issue of the ethics of production, down to a individual personal choice. The choice to follow an ethical vegan diet is one of many factors that might decide what people eat and why. Ignoring differences in social culture and perspective, also ignores economic causes and effects. These vegan centrists don’t care about more ethical kinds of farming practices or actually campaigning for change politically and economically.
I think there are chill vegans who feel good knowing they don’t contribute to animal cruelty, who believes that injustice to animals doesn’t excuse injustice toward humans, those people arent just comrades, they’re disciplined through and through. I admire the commitment and discipline and the organized left needs more of it!
But condemning an individual when the system is largely to blame, is absolutely devoid of a coherent theory of change. This approach creates an abstraction of animal agriculture based in righteous outrage against immense suffering; and another abstraction of the individual and their “choice”, but never bothers with any actual specifics. To me, this amounts to telling people to go vote with their dollars. It’s accepting a literal market solution. And market solutions don’t fix problems, they exploit problems for profit.
You know who most often calls for market solutions to structural problems? Political centrists.
Furthermore, there’s no theory of how ideas spread, which stems from no theory of power. People act like they can just debate people into changing their behavior. Actually, change only comes from organization, because power is made of individuals all working together. Without real power, centrist vegans can’t berate a mass of people into agreeing with them. All they can do is make other people feel judged, and more likely to reject even the many beneficial aspects of veganism. So the approach fails, and being totally impractical, actually hurts the goals of veganism. Textbook campism and sectarianism.
I know that there are very committed, busy activists who are also militant vegans. If that person wants to yell at me, I’d accept the abuse, I’ll take that L. And if you’re a vegan who is like “that’s gross, I’d prefer if you didn’t eat meat around me,” I would consider whether altering my behavior is even worth it. Because if we are friends I’ll def abstain. If not, fuck off. Funny how that works, being friendly.
Monopoly capitalist corpos, and animal agriculture are brutally bound up in one another, unevenness of access to nutritious food, and oppressive living conditions driven by capitalist class war economics, have well documented effects on people’s culture (how regular people determine what is true and ethical) but also their decision making. Vegan views are based in reality, but not in many peoples reality because in our society, we are alienated from the natural world, where our food comes from. Vegan centrists aren’t bad people, they subscribe to thinking the way that many people do. It just happens to be a way that hides real causes of suffering while professing to be an enemy of real suffering.
It isn’t that vegan centrists are objectively wrong, but like all centrists, they are too abstract in thinking, because they’re too far away from the particulars, and so they can’t name the actual problems.
I mean I don’t think this is really wrong but it’s sort of obscuring the situation. Yes you can’t really blame the individual for societal problems, but you should still “expect” of them to not do so. For example I wouldn’t call someone evil if they had slaves in the 30s, but it’s still absolutely inexcusable to own another person. We can “expect” individual change while still recognizing the society at large is the main problem.
Any vegan who believes they don’t do massive harm just by existing is hugely misinformed, but this still feels like it’s obfuscating the situation. If I have the choice to not torture someone, it’s morally wrong for me to continue regardless of if I’m committing other harms. I should try to reduce the largest harms I can within my abilities. For most people this would be significantly reducing how much meat they eat, for vegans this would be canvassing and building community to try to reduce things like climate change. If someone isn’t vegan but helps their community and votes to reduce climate change etc, most (not insane) vegans would say this person is doing as much or more moral good as if they were vegan.
Pretty much fully agree with the rest of it, I’m not asking people to change their minds from some vegan berating them, but it is pretty exhausting having to use “kid gloves” on something most people would consider the greatest moral emergencies of our time, if they would diegn to look into it. A “haha gottem” like OP’s post from time to time helps me not freak out at people when they say “it’s just a diet choice” or “they were bred to be eaten, its just nature.”
Well I’m not going to nitpick each view of a single person, i’d love to continue our discussion, and I hope you’ll consider my points. I’ll consider yours.
Honestly I’m rooting for vegans, like if y’all seized state power and were like, “all right mfs here’s how you make curry” and sent all the “but bacon though” chuds to reeducation camps that are basically just giant cooking schools, publicly tried and executed the ceos of Monsanto, Tyson – comrade, I promise you, I would be right there with you. If you all really bring the fight, and some do, I know you could actually change things, at least some basic reforms or smthn.
I just wish vegans would take their own ethical standards seriously enough to not be absolutist, and to understand the actual causes of mass animal suffering. I am telling you, it is capitalism. I’m not even saying you have to become a socialist or whatever, you just have to resist capitalism as a part of the larger mission. I need vegans to get serious and get organized and fight for power to change things. If I had somewhere to devote my feistiness to veganism, maybe I still would be one.
And I’m sorry, but comparing slavery to animal agriculture is exactly what I was referring to in my first post above. I don’t mean this as a dunk, and I understand where you’re coming from, but it demonstrates a deeply misguided view on both chattel slavery and animal agriculture.
However I very much appreciate this discussion, and exchanging views. I really value compassion and defense of life over petty philosophizing. I hear many people, men especially, saying that empathy is obsolete and it just makes me so fucking sad. Some of my absolute favorite people are vegans. When I move back to the city in 2 years, I’ll go back to eating vegan. See if I can fix the damage to my body of having to live in rural midwest :(
I think it’s sort of a “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” situation," like “vote with your wallet” is stupid because that’s not the solution, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. As an example sun chips tried recyclable paper packaging, but people complained it was too loud and they sold less, so they went back to plastic. Same thing with meat, if no one bought it no one would sell it. That is never happening, but that doesn’t mean one individual can’t still make a big difference with their choices.
It does feel pretty bad fighting for that though, because now I’m fighting my neighbor for eating his favorite breakfast instead of the machine that made it so immoral. I see veganism the same as leftism, you make changes in your life where you can to help, but the most important is get organized, get people talking, and get people voting and working for actual change.
I mean if like some vegans you believe animals have equal or at least similar worth to humans (I’m a bit of the latter), then as it stands we are subjugating and torturing them every day on a scale 100x that of slavery. It is literally slavery + worse living conditions than most slaves had + torture + death, which is why I don’t see it as a far fetched comparison.
Hey don’t knock philosophising till you try it, sometimes it leads nowhere but sometimes you learn a lot from it :P
That was a good read. Thanks for sharing :)
Thanks :)