Can anyone familiar with veganism answer me a curiosity?
Would someone who’s vegan be fine with owning their own chickens and using them for eggs? If you’re not engaging in the marketplace for them, you can absolve yourself of the suffering egg laying hens in factory farms could be experiencing, but I’m not sure how the ‘suffer free because I raised them’ plays into the belief/practice.
Vote left and feel complicit, to a degree, for that candidates’ policies related to Palestine. Vote right (or not at all) and feel complicit in further violence AND reduction in LGBT+ protections in my home country.
Yep, I made my choice in ‘wasting’ my vote. Crazy to me when people think not voting will get politicians to suddenly seek out their policies, when instead they’ll just shift further to the right to capture politically active voters across the aisle.
Do you (presumed non-voter) feel responsible for any of what was just shot through executive orders today?
Endorsing a candidate or a party places an additional seal of approval on the actions and beliefs of that candidate/party. There’s a difference between saying “between ham or fish, I pick fish” and “I believe fish is the right choice for everyone, fish has qualities that I myself would like to emulate and believe in”.
Ita not about cool, I think the intent was more ‘Spotify Premium to get on the go access to all of my music’ being akin to the additional equipment used by the shooter on the left, versus the ‘youtube to mp3 converter because free’ being bereft of all bells and whistles and equipment on the right.
Also…you could have gotten the joke and I’m overexpla8ning, one of the two.
So it’s implied that the entwives (if I remember correctly) live near the shire. They say the trees in the deeper parts move, and some even speak.
Of course, in the books, the shire is decimated and attacked, and similar to the other commenter I believe this is another example of the magic leaving the world of middle earth.
There must be people with great ideals, someone who will choose the high road as often as possible. Just as there must be people who know that the system cannot change from within, that it must be torn apart and began anew.
I like the concept, minus the real life examples of Magneto-minded dictators and violent revolutionaries. I think having that balance gives the average person, the reader, the opportunity to see the places where an idealist fails and where an extremist goes too far and how to walk a path closer to the middle.
I don’t refute that there’s far too much callous cruelty in the production of meat products. I hope there’s a greater push to, at the very least, reduce the suffering to as minimal as possible for the duration of the animals’ lives. I worked on farms growing up, but never factory farms or anything larger than 20-30 cows and flecks of sheep or a barn of egg-laying hens, but the cruelty of factory farms and the shit stained floors and the breeding cages and the systemic abuse, it’s all on another level far above what I’d consider humane.
Unfortunately, I grew up and had to work on farms, both parents worked separate shifts to have no babysitters best they can, and whatever was cheapest or easiest to shove in our guts is what we were fed. I will attest to the ‘brain washing’ element through the everyday normalcy of buying the cheapest frozen bag of gigantic chicken breasts, but that’s also all my mother and father could afford to feed us, and we didn’t live in a location that had many options for grocery stores (a ‘local owned’ kroger/owens, and a Walmart if you drove another 15-20 minutes the other way). I definitely think, if they had had the training or information or the time and cash, they’d have fed us better meals (I don’t think either of my parents know a single vegan friendly dish).
All of that to say, myself and many other people were living in conditions incongruous with the forethought and planning necessary to even attempt veganism. The few vegan locations I was able to find when I went to college were terrible, the food wasn’t good, or at least I didn’t like any of it. I’ve had good vegan dishes, but I have to make them, every single one, or I stomach food I don’t enjoy. I can live on apples for lunches, I’ve gone many a day eating throw-together salads, I meal prep grains and veggies each week so that a majority of my meals are already set. But I want meat dishes sometimes. And until there’s a more affordable way to get lab grown meat, the only way I can dive deep into a MASSIVE section of the culinary arts, is through engaging in capitalism that supports a horrific industry.
In fact, I can’t eat my bananas without inadvertently funding the violent private militias enlisted to put down dissent among the local farmers. My wife has to buy all of her beans through a local seller who supposedly employs previously indentured coffee bean pickers and gives them a fair rate, but surely she can’t only drink coffee she’s made from home, so we’ll try local places (boycotting Starbucks still, options very limited) and not all of those places buy from that bean seller so it’s not all confirmed ethical. The list is exhaustive, and so my minor attribution to the slaughter or those animals is, to me, the same contribution I make to the military juntas who ensured I could buy a banana, and the same as the polluting of the rivers for any manufacturing process or project. Although not worthless, I do value human life above animal life, and so dealing with those internal struggles and questions and navigating where best to purchase fabrics because of the indigo staining children’s hands who wash jeans, to me, are all above the suffering of animals, the sheer number of those animals (the 90 billion figure) does not hold any weight, to me, when comparing the two. So I am just as culpable, to myself, for engaging in those other acts of violence through capitalism, as I am for engaging in eating meat.
So, I try to buy less bananas and less fruits out of season that aren’t grown locally wherever possible, but I will eat at dairy queen and order a banana split. I reduce the total red meat in my diet because I want to impact the problem where I can, but I do like the taste and I don’t believe that consumption of another animal is wrong, so a dozen cows over my lifetime will bother me morally as much as driving my gas car (I’d do electric, but I couldn’t afford it the 8 or so years ago I bought the car), which is to say, I don’t love it, but I won’t lose sleep over it.
That analogy goes so far above what’s happening, at least for the average person.
Do you buy jeans or any clothing produced outside of the US? BAM, you’re as bad as the people in the factories abusing local communities and child labor.
Should one attempt to find clothing that is ethical where possible? Then absolutely, and buying a pair of Levi’s doesn’t make you complicit in enabling child endangerment.
Same with most things, I try my best to already only buy from brands that don’t: support genocide through funding or messaging, discriminate based on sex/race/gender, engage in union busting or union restrictive activities, employ under the table for children or for tax/benefit reductions. So many people try to argue from a place of Absolute Moral Supremacy, and the world is just too grey for that.
Reduce the meat you eat, yes, that’s a good plan and it’s good for the budget and it’s good for the planet. But humans HAVE been eating animals for longer than we’ve walked upright, so going entirely non-consumption just isn’t going to happen.
You can make stances as to why it’s a good thing, why it might assist you in the long run, but to conflate it with enabling violence towards spouses? That’s the kind of rhetoric that gets vegans shouted down and laughed at anytime the name is brought up. If you want to make long lasting change, changing hearts and minds will do that, and your tone/style won’t win hearts and minds.
Looks sick! But … why are the z and the y switched?