- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- climate@slrpnk.net
This fucking sucks, the Great Satan needs to be forced to embrace the Great Seitan 
(so does the rest of the first world but Great Satan/Seitan was funnier)
Before someone comes in calling this liberal idealism, here are your material reasons:
In a society that takes climate change and ecological destruction seriously, the land/food/water requirements for raising animals for food are totally untenable. This is literally just a constraint problem. Read Half Earth Socialism.
Capitalism requires the ability to dehumanize people in order to manufacture consent for their exploitation or destruction. This relies on creating a hierarchy where the lives of (white-male-cis-het) humans are important but anyone deemed sub-human or an animal can be maximally exploited or destroyed. This in turn requires a widespread acceptance that it is okay to do as we wish to nonhuman animals. Eating meat contributes to the maintenance of a line where, if you manage to push someone over it, you can do whatever you want to them. See israeli defense minister calling Palestinians animals. It’s an objective fact that humans are animals. So why is it bad to state an objective fact? Because what this really means is they’ve pushed Palestinians over the line you uphold every time you stuff your face with meat, and they can do to them what you did to that animal you’re eating.
By freeing nonhuman animals we free ourselves.
The part I’ve just never understood is why that is a necessary position to hold for a ‘leftist’ political project to be not derided as incoherent/inconsistent, given by the fact that many/a majority of leftist political projects both contain non-vegan comrades that contribute/have contributed greatly to building left politics and of which those projects have not/ are not making veganism a large priority in their political project.
Do vegans here and in other leftist places claim that the lack of their sufficient account for these two components is a factor contributing to why they have failed? Furthermore, do they believe that if current AES projects were to make veganism a priority, that this would weaken the influence of bourgeois thought and strengthen the revolutions occurring there? If so, that’s fine by me for vegans to hold that position, I just don’t really see then what distinguishes that from the same kinds of arguments that Ultra’s and Maoist’s make about past/current socialist projects and why it’s just veganism that can’t be derided for doing it.
There will have to be a lot of changing hearts & minds before this would strengthen the revolution instead of alienating people. Remember the party must not run too far ahead of the masses. However, the arguments are simply too strong for anybody seriously engaged in shaping the ideology of the party to ignore. There have been plenty of successful-ish leftist revolutions that had (from our modern perspective) glaring gaps in their attitude toward certain oppressed classes of people, whether from failure of party leadership or desire not to alienate the masses. I believe animal liberation is another of these instances.
Anyway, most leftist spaces I’ve inhabited are very tolerant of at least vegetarianism, and all potluck-style events will be heavily skewed toward vegetarian-friendly dishes (this also serves halal & kosher people by default). Vegetarians & vegans are very well represented in these spaces, often reaching 25-50% by informal count (groups of anarchist bent are often much higher). So things are heading in the right direction.
previous revolutions also held that queer people were acceptable targets.
And yet when I call for mass euthanasia of the domesticated livestock herd somehow I’m the monster.
yea this is one case where you/we (vegans) are obligated to do a bit. maybe not so far as to kill individual animals but definitely work to reduce their reproduction and therefore future population
Didn’t the mass euthanasia of muscrats in Finland due to covid basically kill the industry overnight?
Unless we’re going to somehow re-home millions of chattel animals, or release them to the wild where they’ll terrorize the local ecosystem I don’t really know that the solution is.
Maybe maintain the farm until they die? But if it’s a battery farm then that’s not a way to live.
Sterilizing them & keeping them on repurposed farms with basically decent standards of living until they die of natural causes is probably the most humane route. However, in this hypothetical scenario we would have to contend with the constraint problem of necessary land/food/water supporting these animals with their (often quite long) lifespans. In reality it will probably be a patchwork of euthanasia with isolated efforts to save as many as possible. The unfortunate aspect of creating enormous death machines is that even when you shut them off they take time to grind to a halt. At least we will not continue to bring billions of animal lives into existence for the purpose of suffering & slaughter.
Yeah, which was kinda why I mentioned the effect that mass euthanasia had on the fur industry. The death machines have a lot of momentum, and that works both ways. They’re really hard to start back up if they are stopped.
Theres 1.5 billion chickens in the United States. It’s hard to imagine.
E: now that I can type a little more, Just going by the free range guidelines from the usda (generally focused on production instead of quality of life), they would need 345 thousand acres of forage land and half that much in coop space.