No seriously. Why did veganism and animal rights activism seemingly die out entirely from the left?
I’m old enough (38) to remember when veganism was practically a litmus test for determining if you were a principled leftist or not, especially in anarchist and Maoist spaces. Nowadays it seems like no one under 28 is vegan anymore, or gives a shit about animal rights.
Having become an anarchist as a teenager in the early 2000s, I fully remember how interwoven the radical left was with the animal rights and vegan movements. Gen X and xennial comrades in particular were very dogmatic about this issue, arguably more than they were most issues concerning US imperialism. But the younger generation doesn’t seem to care at all. Why?
For the record, I was never vegan and I eat an omnivore diet now, but still.
145 posts and 14 image replies omitted.>>2806306>Vegan ran out of argumentsThe intellectual capacity of a vegan is always limited because their limited palate results in brain shrinkage from lack of essential nutrients.
>>2806313have you considered that the fact that only people in nations that have been subjected to endemic poverty whilst being sanctioned or strip mined to hell don't eat much meat means that it's not a luxury there's people that need to be fed?
>>2806315don't he'll get a stiffy
>>2806275Plenty of migrant workers work in agriculture and are paid pennies to harvest tomatoes, peaches, strawberries, etc. Honestly this is why I find veganism silly, at least if it's posturing as a political movement rather than a personal choice. Obviously it would be more ethical to refrain from meat and animal products, or replace them with some kind of substitute (lab grown meat, genetically engineered unconscious meat slabs like
>>2806315 etc), plus the environmentalist arguments. But with the amount of evil and suffering our society currently inflicts on human beings, it seems like an absurd waste of time and resources to focus energy on solving the problem of animal cruelty. Get your priorities straight. If you believe that human life is more important than animal life, then creating a mainstream vegan food system can and should wait until we've created a society that at the very least treats humans ethically.
>>2806325I've worked for an org that provides legal representation to migrant workers in labour/immigration cases against their bosses. They are paid shit and sometimes not at all, if they complain, try to organize, or do anything to irritate their bosses they can be fired, deported, and blacklisted. This often puts their families back home in dire economic straights since they depend on the income from migrant work. I once worked on a case where two Jamaican migrants worked for six months without being paid.
I like meat, and I am unconvinced on ethical arguments regarding animal sentience. it's a load of nonsense to me. however, you can persuade me with arguments that address environmental sustainability; if those problems could be solved without sacrificing meat, then I am fine with that. animals are not people. in terms of health, meat is good for you, which is something that vegans want to staunchly deny, but it is scientifically proven fact. yes, eating meat is pleasurable, but that's not the only or even the primary reason that people consume it.
if you're vegan I bear you no ill will but you should respect my perspective, I will not abstain from meat for your moral crusade, and until you can produce a machine that lab grows meat or can outright clone living organisms so we can have a cheat code for infinite meat, the industry surrounding it will continue to churn despite human rights violations and environmental concerns. the world is not fair, it is what it is.
>>2806349there's no ecological insensitive to be vegan
>>2806349Reminder: this is the person calling you treatler in other threads.
>>2806349Based. After The Revolution™ you will be placed in charge of a re-education camp to fix all these retarded vegans and to force them to start eating meat again. They will complain and whine and try to rebel but because they're vegan they will be weak and physically unable to overpower anyone so you won't have any issues.
If the USSR under Stalin enforced veganism, Hitler would have won. Kill all vegans. Vegans are counter-revolutionary bourgeois scum who want to make proles weak and unable to fight. Revolution requires strength.
>>2806369Hitler was vegan, thoughbeit. Maybe that was a contributing factor to why the Soviets won. Germans were soyboys.
>>2806313yeah the highly meat eating countries of Kazakhstan, Bolivia, and Cuba are super rich
>>2806330oh cool so you make a living working for NGOs (no mystery who funds them) to get scabs to come in and do work and expect that the bosses who hire these scabs are going to treat them fairly? Like they would with native organized labor? The whole reason they hire scabs is because they don't have any rights or recourse.
Imagine if it wasn't ag-workers, but H1B software engineers. You think we give a fuck about those scabs either? Same deal, these people get ripped off and fucked around with, but because they aren't the chosen browns picking my salad, the NGOs don't want to take their cases lol.
>>2806344Fuck you bitch, you think I like having some amigo not be able to use a bathroom so he has to shit in the field, wipe his ass with his hand and keep on working. There are outbreaks of disease every day because of this shit. Maybe you're the jewish nigger for defending the status quo.
>>2806643You are Kaczynskist, ending the meat industry to end the exploitation of the workers is a stupid position
>>2806651Even if you genuinely dont give a shit about suffering of animals, you do see connection between massive wastefulness and environmental destruction of animal agriculture and economic conditions of less privileged people, right?
PETA was a successful psyop that painted vegans as incredibly insufferable.
>>2806673And we should care about whether you find us insufferable because…?
>>2802186trve, veganism is associated with rich white yuppies and gentrifiers. white people who smell bad and have dreadlocks.
Other thoughts:
Veganism feels like an all or nothing sort of thing, probably due to the majority of vegans being moralists. It's not really about sustainability. I think it's probably easier to get people to only eat meat 4 times a week instead of everyday, but this messaging would be against the moralistic believes of the majority of vegans. This is why the concept of pescetarian or vegetarian went away. A vegetarian meal might still have dairy, a pescetarian might still eat mussels, oysters or tinned fish. Both of these are obviously significantly better than eating beef every meal twice a day, but neither are compatible with veganism.
Veganism itself isn't compatible with food deserts. If your meals are cheap hotdogs and whatever you can get at fast food and corner stores? You can't reasonably be a vegan. Veganism has also become a luxury product, sorry but moralism doesn't work when Beyond Meat is $7.99 per pound and ground Turkey is 2.99 per pound.
>>2806682PETA is controlled by the meat industry to paint vegans in a specific way to make them less appealing. You're defending people using the thing you support to psyop others into eating more meat.
>>2806699source uyghur
>think it's probably easier to get people to only eat meat 4 times a weekWhy? If there is no ethical principle here, why the fuck would you bother? Vegan dont want reduce factory farm population from a trillion to 800 billion, but to stop it.
Also vegan diet is cheaper both per calorie and per protein, pick any measure you want.
>>2806643>oh cool so you make a living working for NGOsI was a volunteer.
>no mystery who funds themThe group I was with was funded by donations, mostly from migrant workers themselves.
>to get scabs to come in and do work No, the workers are brought in as part of a government program. What the org does is help them protect their rights which are frequently attacked by their bosses. Are you saying protecting the rights of migrant workers is a bad thing? That they shouldn't be able to sue their bosses for wage theft, harassment, unsafe conditions, etc? They're also not scabs because they aren't crossing a picket line. Learn what words mean.
>The whole reason they hire scabs is because they don't have any rights or recourse. Again, they arent scabs. Scabs are people who are hired to replace workers that go on strike. In fact the right to strike and organize is one of the issues that the org I worked with helped defend. Technically they have all the same rights as native workers, the problem is their immigration status is tied to their employment, which their bosses can terminate for any reason. Legally they have to pay them severance or give reasonable notice, however once they've been fired they can be quickly deported. Once that happens their only option is to try and sue their bosses from their home country, which means spending huge amounts of money they don't have to navigate an unfamiliar legal system in a foreign country hundreds of kilometers away, often in a language they dont even speak. It's basically impossible. The whole point of the org was to get them legal representation to defend their existing rights under the law before they can be deported. Alternatively they also act to represent them even after they've been sent home to get them lost wages or other damages. This is all done for free. Idk what kind of brainworms it takes for you to think that helping migrant workers stand up to their bosses is a bad thing. I guess you're okay with people being forced to work for free for months at a time.
>>2806703It's easier to go
"Meatless Fridays" -> "Meat only eaten four times a week" -> "Meat is a special meal" -> maybe we don't need meat. by making it a black and white "do or don't" "with or against" narrative, you're creating ideological conflict, it's piss poor propaganda. literally just read any book on ruling over a population of people or how propaganda operates.
If we want to beat climate collapse our entire food network will need to be rethought, from the ground up, with a focus on agroforestry. Something that has already been shown to be incredibly effective by the DPRK.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pafo.12222If you don't believe that eating animals is inherently wrong (I don't) then the moral argument of veganism falls apart. But the moral argument really has nothing to do with sustainability, because ignores non-plant food sources, which are often key for agroforestry (ie sustainable crawfish farms, mussel farms as coastal restoration, hunting as necessary for environmental stewardship, etc). This is never where the discussion is though, it's usually about shaming individuals into making better consumer choices which is the epitome of neoliberal "everyone is navigating the market" mindset.
Showing something the brutality of a factory farm via one of the countless documentaries that have the leaked footage doesn't change the fact that you need a car to get to the whole foods, which is going to cost more than 'food mart' corner store, which is already overpriced, and since you can't access the whole foods anyway, you are stuck with what they sell at the 'food mart' and they sell hot dogs, processed frozen chicken patties, gallons of milk, lunch meat, and bread. There are millions of people who simply do not have access to things like fresh produce.
The solution is a total rework of our food networks focused on locally available foodstuffs. Local varieties. In season produce. Agroforestry instead of monocultures. Real systemic change like that would do infinitely more to actually prevent that which vegans oppose than shaming individuals ever could.
Veganism makes people leak because it basically makes people admit that morality is an idealist constructions and that there is no objective right or wrong. In any situation whatsoever.
People finally have to abandon all their retarded moral idealism just because they don't want to give up eating meat lol. And that's a good thing. Moral ideology is as damaging as religion to materialist thinking.
>>2806775 (me)
See :
>Genocide is bad<Why?>[answer]<Now why doesn't that answer also apply to beings that don't look human but still feel pain, fear, and are capable of love and happiness?>incoherent screeching and leaking >>2806781Nothing is ever good or bad, they just are
I am going to eat meat right now just to spite these autists.
>>2806781because animals are as stupid as they are nutritious. they can't conceive of their predicament or enact their liberation. they can lead a 90% happy life if you raise them outside in something akin to their regular habitat.
workers have been resisting their enslavement with varying levels of sophistication for as long as there has been civilization.
There’s one way to sustainably eat meat, it’s do it rarely and to hunt for it yourself, we have plenty of overpopulated and invasive species running around causing havoc. Why should I let the meat from 17 pigs rot in the sun when they destroy the land? Just snip the needles off the lionfish, who gives a fuck
>>2807051>we have plenty of overpopulated and invasive species running around causing havoc.that's only because we fucked up the ecosystem in the first place by killing off the predators, we need to reintroduce wolves etc
>>2807049if animals were actually raised for meat that way maybe I would feel a bit more postive about carnism but they aren't. it's like saying slavery isn't that bad because 'well slaves could live in humane conditions', okay but they didn't/don't so what kind of argument is that. plus slavery would still be wrong.
>workers have been resisting their enslavement with varying levels of sophistication for as long as there has been civilization.so might makes right? workers have failed to liberate themselves so I guess they deserve wage slavery then right?
>>2807293Also even if you say that "well workers haven't liberated themselves but at least they tried", ok, well in that case should we legalise putting seriously mentally disabled people in camps because they wouldn't be able to resist? How about children or oldsters with dementia?
bump
>>2807293you're strawmanning my argument: workers have not yet liberated themselves, history and economics show that over a long enough timeline they will. animals cannot even conceive being oppressed. comparing the two is an absurd joke.
you think you're making clever arguments that expose the absurdity of the status quo. it's actually sophistry: it only works in theory not practice.
you also can't address the core problem with veganism: humans eat meat because animals are tasty. people intuitively understand vegan arguments are wrong because they feel hungry when they smell a barbecue.
>>2797226>But the younger generation doesn’t seem to care at all. Why?trauma from mad cow diesease was the driving force behind millennial veganism
zoomies didn't experience it
>>2806349your general point is sound but you are not entitled to respect and demanding it belies a certain insecurity. if you didn't really believe vegans to have
something, you would not feel bad that they do not respect you.
>>2806703utilitarianism. killing two cows is worse than killing one cow.
this is where some (including myself) would previously conclude that vegans are an ineffective religion more interested in personal moral purity (killing one cow is still very sinful!) than in utilitarian outcomes in real life, but i've since revised that. their moral pressure does reduce the social status of meat eating even if their personal abstention doesn't really.
the best way to reduce meat eating would simply be to increase the price of meat. then people will knowingly or unknowingly cut back their consumption and substitute non-meat products. that would take big legislative action, but you can shift the total calculation around a bit by reducing the social value of the good. (this is also a major reason that boycotting israel works - even if you don't actually legislate, drawing attention to it can shift a structurally relevant number of people's
tastes.)
>>2812007>one guy is personally abusive to animalsWow that really proves that slaughterhouse workers are not oppressed and actually deserve it
>>2806705And nobody besides deep green anprim schizos is proposing eliminating industrial farming, just reforming it
>>2812007I support this happening all over the world if it means I get to keep eating delicious delicious bacon.
>>2812018>killing two cows is worse than killing one cow.Since you believe torturing and killing animals is bad, are you vegan? If not, why? If killing two cows is worse than killing one, then killing none is the best, is it not?
>>2812023>one guyAbusing animals is in their job description.
>>2812031partially because i am a lazy, flawed person who is good at compartmentalizing (this is of course 99% of the practical reason), partially because i am a pedant who judges that buying discounted meat (i am also a cheapskate) kills no cows (the killing comes before the selling) and that a structural resolution is necessary (and i can contribute to a structural resolution by defending vegans online while quietly continuing to eat meat and by preaching the gospel of "just increase the price of meat" - obviously i undermine the first part by being honest with you, but here we are.), and partially because i have a calvinist streak and so have always been at ease with the idea that i'm mired in sin (and suspicious of meat-eaters instinctive desire to defend themselves or rationalize why obvious wrongdoing is actually fine, rather than to accept their fractional involvement in immorality and with it, the generally evil state of the world.)
>>2812018>utilitarianismwow cool ethical framework, where'd you find it? philosophy 101? you dumbass. you basic bitch.
utilitarianism is the mark of the pseud. morons use it when they're out of their depth shortly before losing. tim pool does it constantly. one cow feeds a lot of people. if killing one cow feeds many people it must be good. killing two must be even better!
it gets proved over and over that vegans don't care about animals enough to do proper scholarship, and prefer to post torture porn which is fast, cheap, and cathartic. you guys have consistently failed to prove that veganism isn't ascetic moralism, and that ending meat consumption is even a worthy goal.
hell, I've been begging for proof of the environmental benefits that isn't: vegan resource use = resource use - livestock resource use. or economic proof that isn't based on imperial core net importers like europe or north america.
stupid fucking moralist fucking reductive arguments that don't quantify anything and abuse outliers are worthless. you are worthless. go eat more processed vegan slop from israel you mindless bovine.
>>2797233This is objectively the correct answer.
I remember reading about some old school vegan society from way back, like the early 20th century or something. They originally promoted veganism along the lines of health. When they started promoting veganism along the lines of "the animals" they lost more than half their membership.
I think the same is generally true today. The vegans who stick with it the longest are always the ones who do it on the basis that a vegan diet is healthier and will give you superpowers if you do it long enough (a lot of raw vegans are like this whereby they think the degeneration of the human race came when humans started eating grains, meats, and dairy products). Whereas, the people who are vegan "for the animals" usually quit after 2-5 years because they realize it's not worth it.
It makes me wonder how a future socialist society would promote veganism, if they would do so at all. "Vegan for 'the proles'" maybe. But how long would that last before people throw in the towel and revert to omnivore?
>veganism was practically a litmus test for determining if you were a principled leftist or not, especially in anarchist and Maoist spacesNever happened. At no point in time and in no country ever has this been the majority position among Tankies, among progressives, among Trots, among etc.
>Nowadays it seems like no one under 28 is vegan anymoreProportionally speaking, meaning relative to the size of what it used to be, the group of vegans has massively increased over the past 30 years pretty much everywhere. An example: 1. Over the past five years, the percentage of Swiss vegans more than doubled. 2. It is still less than one percent. These two statements are not in contradiction.
So, post
>>2797236 is right. The premise of this thread is a hallucination.
>>2805710If demand goes down, production goes down.
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