becoming vegan because factory farming is unethical is like deciding that since walmart and amazon mistreat their employees you are now going to get everything you need out of dumpsters
in a nutshell, instead of reforming the bad parts of your society, you
try to opt out of it in a way that has really no effect, and wouldn’t
work at all if the majority of people weren’t still part of the industry
you dislike.
there was, for a while, a real movement of people who tried to get everything out of dumpsters, as a way of opting out of capitalism. but the problem was that you couldn’t get what you need when you need it, leading to you being kind of a drain on your community, and someone had to buy that stuff in the first place for it to end up in that dumpster anyway. it was Fundamentally Silly.
going vegan to opt out of farming practices has similar problems. for instance: you (hypothetical vegan you) won’t buy honey, but the bees are being used to fertilize the vegetables and fruit you eat, they’re making the honey anyway, all you’ve done is – well, nothing, because you’re not a big enough demographic to make an impact, but even if you were, honey sales are a much smaller part of beekeepers’ income than crop pollination. and beekeeping is not a big faceless corporate interest. it’s not monsanto. it’s a bunch of single-family or partnership business with a truck or two and a couple hundred hives. the bees make honey after a pollinating run, and the beekeepers sell it for a little extra income. if you made a dent in that, you’d be achieving nothing but making joe beekeeper buy his kids’ t-shirts at k-mart instead of target.
animal farming and plant farming are deeply interconnected. plant farmers grow animal feed; animal farmers sell manure for fertilizer. most non-corporate farmers raise both plants and animals. it’s more economic and gives them more resilience.
if you were a big enough demographic to hit ‘the farming industry’ in its wallet. you would be making things MUCH harder for small farmers than for factory farms. you would be making it easier and easier for factory farms to crowd family farmers out of business. so that’s pretty much achieving the opposite of what you want, right there.
and then there’s the fact that plant farming is just as rife with gruesome factory farm conditions as animal farming, but it’s humans who are exploited in those. i’m not going to level accusations of racism here, but it really is unfortunate how little the vocal internet vegan contingent seems to know or care about the exploitation of the mostly nonwhite workers in the industry. it makes y’all look racist, whether you are or not.
look, i keep saying this, even though folks never seem to hear me: i don’t hate vegans, i’m not trying to stop you being vegan, i do not care what you eat.
my problem is with defensive internet vegans trying to promote their dietary restriction lifestyle as a solution to problems in the real world. it is not. it may create more problems than it solves, or maybe it breaks even, i don’t know. it certainly doesn’t solve anything that can’t be solved just as well without it. it can only look reasonable from a perspective of deep ignorance about where food comes from and how the farm economy works. you basically have to be young, urban, and somewhat privileged to embrace it. and it is, fundamentally, very silly.
Furthermore I’d like you to look at a sheep farm. Actually look at it.
You CANNOT grow crops there. That’s WHY there are sheep on it.
You refuse to use wool, well aside from.the fact that it’s a fantastic fiber and how polluting polyester and other plastic fibers are, it doesn’t harm the animal to remove and in fact is done for their benefit.
Above – a sheep farm (note steep and craggy hills), an uncompressed bale of freshly shorn wool and some sheep being shorn.
It’s not stressful for the sheep. Sheep are dumb. Be confident, dont hurt them and they’re good. Wool is a good fiber – strong, warm – even when wet – renewable and biodegradable.
My issue with Veganism-As-A-Cult is the lack of critical thinking. By all means eat what you want, wear what you want to wear but a blanket ban on all animal products because they’re HARMFUL is in itself an extremely harmful philosophy.
Do you refuse to eat plants that were pollinated by bees or fertilized by manure since they’re a product of animal labour?
Honey doesn’t hurt bees. Wool doesn’t hurt sheep.
What about animals that are going to die anyway? We are currently in the process of exterminating possums in our country as they are a pest and destroyer of our native species. We kill them humanely but they’re still going to die because its them (introduced pest) or our endemic endangered species. We use the meat for pet food and the fur for a lot of things now – in making yarns or fur items – because the alternative is to let it rot. Which is just bloody wasteful tbh.
What would (generic) you prefer we do here? Let sheep die of over heating or the weight of wet wool? Force bees into swarming (90% casualty rate) so we can avoid taking their honey? Leave pest animals to rot and encourage the use of set-and-forget traps since there’s no incentive to check them?
Republicans: Felons should NEVER regain the right to vote. Got a felony for pot possession when you were 21? Fuck off. If you can’t follow the law, you don’t get to vote on the law.
Also Republicans: I mean, even if Kavanaugh IS an attempted rapist who drank underage in high school, whatever. It’s not disqualifying even if its true. I still think he should serve a LIFETIME POSITION ON THE SUPREME COURT.
Not only that, but he perjured himself 3 separate times in front of the Senate, first during his confirmation when Bush nominated him to the DC court, again during his SCOTUS hearing, and then again this past week.
Perjury is, wait for it, a felony.
hold on a second, why does this say ‘REGAIN right to vote’? Are prisoners in USA not allowed to vote???
Yeah in a lot of places in the USA any felony charge loses you the right to vote. It’s called felony disenfranchisement
… Wouldn’t that allow government to strip opposition activists of political rights by arresting them on manufactured charges? That sounds EXTREMELY undemocratic and easily exploitable.
You are correct.
In Florida there’s a board of people who get to decide if people get back the right to vote. these people don’t have to follow any laws or offer any explanation, really. They can just say “I mean, yea you’re a reintegrated part of society but I don’t like the color of your shirt so no rights for you.”
Also in Florida, on the ballot in November: Amendment 4.
Amendment 4 allows automatic restoration of voting rights to felons after serving their sentence, completing parole or probation, and paying restitution. Convicted murderers and sex offenders are excluded from this automatic restoration.*
In other words, setting voting restoration back to pretty much what people MEANT by ‘felons shouldn’t be able to vote if they get out’ in the first place, because murderers & sex offenders.
So, if this violation of the 8th amendment pisses you off and you live in Florida, SHOW THE FUCK UP TO VOTE.
*Kam, Dara. 2018. “Amendment to Restore Felons’ Voting Rights on Florida November Ballot.” News Service of Florida, in The Palm Beach Post: January 24, 2018. Last loaded October 14, 2018 from https://pbpo.st/2Q942ER
I am looking forward to this vote, and when Amendment 4 passes, I hope the media gets a shot of our lovely governor’s face when he hears the news. I want to see that look of constipation in all its not-glory.
Today in chemistry we did a lab where we burned different chemical compounds to see what color flame would be produced and my group mixed all of the compounds together, and this was result
This week’s devastating IPCC report has brought the impending impacts of climate change, and just how far we are from meeting our goals to stop them, into crisp focus.
We earthlings have had to swallow some hard truths lately. The impending impacts of climate change, and just how far we are from meeting our goals to stop them, have been brought into crisp focus by not only major, intergovernmental reports but also the slew of dramatic weather events around the globe.
It can be easy to feel hopeless, like there’s nothing we can do to stop our species from obliterating the planet as we know it in less than a generation. But there’s one sect of people who think they have the answer and, if everyone would just get on board, could easily curb the effects of climate change. It’s called ecosocialism, and it’s exactly as radical as it sounds.
“Ecosocialism combines the ideas of ecology and socialism, meaning that you have a society without class divisions that lives in some kind of harmony or balance with nature,” Victor Wallis, author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism, told me in a phone interview . “You can’t make the decisions necessary for the health of the environment on the basis of profit calculations.”
Ecosocialism first began to spread in the 1980s alongside environmentalism, though some scholars argue that the roots of this movement trace back to Karl Marx’s theories. The concept is basically that environmental protection is incompatible with capitalism, and the best (or, some would argue, only) way to fight climate change is to move towards a socialist society. Capitalism is always going to be driven towards producing and consuming more and more, which is a big part of how we got in this pickle to begin with.
Though proponents of the movement have trouble detangling the two ideologies, the overlap may not be immediately apparent to everyone. After all, there are profits to be made from the fight against climate change: think of renewable energy or electric cars. These industries don’t exist out of some corporate altruism, they exist because they’re profitable. And they’re growing rapidly—in 2017, more than 500,000 new jobs in renewable energy were created around the world, bringing the total number of people employed in the sector to 10 million, and $335.5 billion of new investments were made in the industry.
But ecosocialists argue even if some parts of capitalism can advance an environmental agenda, the rest of the market will still be working against it, and we’ll never get where we need to be.
“Unless you do away with capitalism, you’ll still have the other companies that are much more influential and bigger in scale, like oil companies,” Wallis said. “There is ultimately a clash in the wider scheme of things, even if you have one sector of a capitalist market that responds to people’s concerns about the environment.”
The other aspect of socialism that Wallis says meshes well with environmentalism is leveling the playing field. You may not like that your job at a coal mine contributes to climate change, but you still need to feed your family and pay your bills. If we could flatten out class structures so that was no longer a concern, more people would be able to participate in the changes we need to make.
But what does an eco socialist society even look like? Do we all live in vertical farms together, sharing crops and riding bicycles to power our light bulbs? Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist, reporter, and ecosocialist, told me it doesn’t have to be that dramatic of a shift.
“It’s not going to require everyone giving up all their possessions and living on a farm for the rest of their lives,” Holthaus said in a phone interview.
Holthaus argues that we have the technology to rapidly switch to a world that runs on carbon-free energy, but that won’t happen in the current structure because it doesn’t benefit those already at the top. He pointed to the fact that studies have shown just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If we created a government willing to strictly regulate these companies, it would make a drastic impact and open the door to a clean energy future.
This all sounds peachy, but it also sounds impossible, especially under the current climate-change-denying administration in the US. It doesn’t seem likely that we could make such a massive global shift in enough time to slow down this runaway train of destruction. While Wallis largely agreed, quipping that even though it’s highly unlikely, it’s “our only option,” Holthaus was a little more optimistic.
“Think of 30 years ago: 1988 was a very different world,” he said. “The example I always go back to is gay marriage. At one point, it felt impossible. It felt like an issue we would never change. But with a lot of people working behind the scenes and very publicly for decades, the political world switched within just a few years.”
Holthaus thinks we can see similar switches with climate change, as more people become aware of the dire straits we’re all in and decide, y’know, we’d like to stay on this planet for awhile.
And it’s not just a fringe movement. The US Green Party has embraced ecosocialismas a core tenant of its platform since 2016. Democratic socialism has seen a surge in popularity this year, including the election of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ousted a 10-term incumbent for a congressional seat in New York this summer. The Democratic Socialists of America organization has also adopted the ecosocialism philosophy and has an ecosocialism working group.
Trump Keeps Lying About Medicare for All…Not only is Trump lying about Medicare for All. This president, who fought to throw 32 million Americans off of health insurance, is acting like he cares about health care for seniors or anyone else.
I guess Trump doesn’t understand that Medicare is already a socialistic program, and so is SS, the military, EPA, our current democratic government, politics even when it’s failing, or any common sound approach to help all people! Socialism is about the common good of all people when decisions are made for the society! That’s why Trump doesn’t like democracy! He is GOD, so he feels he knows all! We usually call that mental illness!
Children cry a lot. Over a lot of different things, and in a lot of different ways.
In my years of working with children, I have never seen a child cry like this. I have never seen tears so resigned, so fearful, so fucking… Scared.
This little boy is Mikey. When he was 2.5 years old he was found in a meth lab, with rope burns, human bite marks, a black eye, burned fingers, misplaced hips and signs of sexual trauma.
Now he’s being given back to the woman who allowed this to happen to him. He is being put back with the woman who did this to him.
He’s being taken away from loving family, from a school and therapist that have his best interests because of a judge who has decided that she needs to teach his father a lesson for some reason.
So, out goes all his progress and he goes back with her. The fear in his eyes when he sees her, the resignation on the faces of people around him… They can’t do anything to protect this poor angel.
We’ve seen this again and again. We’ve seen what happens when these horrible people get their children back. We saw Zachary Turner, 1 drown. We saw Merah, 8, Elias, 7, Nahtahn, 6, Gabriel, 2 be strangled to death and then Abigail, 1 be beaten by their father. We saw Alexa-Marie, 4 get her teeth knocked out for two weeks before she was finally beaten to death by the man who fought tooth and nail to get her back.
We have given countless children back to people who have hurt them before. Who have shown no remorse, no need to get better, no want to better. We look them in the eyes and give them our most vulnerable.
I don’t want this to happen to Mikey. I don’t want to wake up one day and see the headline that would ruin his father.
Please, if you are able to… Donate. Read his story. Share. Contact your local news stations. Do whatever you can. Just, help him.
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