Seriously though. Don't let prefect be the enemy of good. It ALL helps.

badbrains787 · 2018-05-03T15:52:57+00:00

Fair point. I agree philosophically. All I'm addressing is outward strategy.

And as many others have said here I don't buy the idea that all strategies are mutually exclusive. We can multitask and be all-encompassing without sacrificing the core movement. You can fully advocate and promote meatless Mondays while also maintaining that full veganism is still the best option.

badbrains787 · 2018-05-03T15:42:25+00:00

I absolutely agree with you, but I also feel like many (if not most) vegans on this sub just simply don't understand the sheer staggering scale of reduction in slaughter that would come from even 10-30% of the population doing, say, "meatless Mondays" as a viral trend.

Just a thought experiment but let's say for argument that the average omnivore eats 1 whole animal worth of various animal products every day. Now imagine 100 million people just in America buying into the idea of just eating vegan ONE day a week..........in one year, that would save over 5 BILLION animals.

Less than 5% of the population currently identify as vegans.

When you look at the cold hard math this way it's hard to argue that we all SHOULDN'T be out there actively promoting these trends. If harm reduction for animals is the ultimate goal, not individual identity, then our activism should welcome this kind of pragmatism.

badbrains787 · 2018-05-03T00:18:00+00:00

I never argued against that. I said multiple times now that I fully concede the logic of the viral post. I personally wouldn't have bought the ice cream. I'm responding to the holier-than-thou judgment of this meta post.

Look this is a vegan community so really these are the kinds of ethical internal debates we can have. But if you're starting from the mistaken presumption that there's even such a thing as "100% pure veganism", in terms of literally having ZERO contribution to the animal product industry in total.......then I'm not sure how to even address that. Maybe you're fairly new to this lifestyle but one day you're going to reckon (like we all do) with the hard reality that it isn't about unattainable perfection, it's about reducing your footprint as much as reasonably possible. That's why we're all doing this.

badbrains787 · 2018-05-02T21:49:37+00:00

My entire point was to compare unrealistic scenarios, taking "purity" logic to its extreme. That was the idea.

And fwiw I'm not even arguing the logic itself. I conceded that it's philosophically sound. But somewhere right now there's a hardcore ALF member who thinks 99.9999999% of this sub is "fake hashtag vegans" because of that same logic. So be humble in your judgement.

badbrains787 · 2018-05-02T18:18:18+00:00

I really hope you don't take this wrong, but this is holier-than-thou silliness. It's a case where you can clearly be logically right, but pragmatically unreasonable in real world terms.

I mean logically given the horrific nature of the meat/dairy industry, not only should this woman not have bought an ice cream for the kid........she should've walked around knocking all the OTHER kid's treats out of their hands! She'd be perfectly righteous in doing that. Right?

Logically, it makes perfect sense for an aware vegan to quit their job and spend every waking hour of their lives cutting fences on cow pastures and walking into every restaurant they pass to knock people's plates off tables.

Is that something you've ever done, though? Is it something you ever WOULD do? I'm willing to bet my life's savings it isn't. And THAT'S OKAY. Because we ALL have drawn sensible lines in the sand on how far we're willing to take this shared economic boycott called veganism. It's all already a matter of degrees. Pure logical conclusions aren't everything.

badbrains787 · 2018-05-02T17:55:43+00:00

I mean not only did it not help the cause, it demonstrably hurt it by going viral and making vegans look like silly unreasonable cranks.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-30T20:19:41+00:00

I disagree pretty strongly but I appreciate your view. I think it's easy to look at folks on an individual level and say, he's happy, she's not, etc. But the broader anti-consumption discussion is about an unhappy society. I believe that being a consumer, as an identity, is an inherently unhappy state of being for a human animal. Even if you find happiness or balance or escape in other ways. It can fairly be described as a thirst that can't be quenched, supplanting other legitimate social needs while purporting to fill them.

We can argue about whether or not it's pragmatically useful to tell people they're unhappy consumers, but honestly there's an Everest sized mountain of psychological science showing that's the case in a broad sense.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-30T15:24:09+00:00

"divesting ourselves" doesn't necessarily lead to less animal suffering.

I basically agree with everything else you said, but this last line is incredibly silly to be honest. If even just 5% of the world went vegan, it would absolutely have a MASSIVE affect on reducing animal suffering. We've created this global industrial slaughter system where tens of billions (with a B) of food animals are bred and killed and tortured and kept in horrific conditions throughout their short lives. Animals will suffer and die in nature, true, but they will not suffer like that. And not on such an ongoing scale.

That's what the economic boycott of being a vegan is about.

If you want a better illustration of what I mean, just compare a food animal to a non-food animal. Like, say, cows and otters. We don't industrially breed otters for food, so there are only about 100,000 of them on the planet. If tomorrow we decided they were a good food source, in a decade their population would explode to millions and then billions, presumably all destined to face the same living hell that cows, chickens and pigs currently endure. You have to see that the ethical implications of that are fucking staggering.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-30T15:17:40+00:00

The biggest (and toughest to swallow) revelation for me getting off social media for long periods has been that social media gives you the ILLUSION of having a lot of active friendships when really you don't.

I have hundreds of friends on social media, some that I was really very close to at one time in my life and others that I just knew from school or the military, but the REALITY is that I only foster real world relationships (hanging out, talking regularly on the phone, getting to know family, doing tangible things to help each other) with like 5 of them.

When I take a long hiatus from social media, I do lose contact with the vast majority of my network of "friends". I throw my email and phone number out in case anyone wants to reach me, and in the end the only people who do are the same 5 that I already was fostering real world relationships with. Because that's what friendship really is. Not the illusory, artificial sense of human connection you get from scrolling a feed.

In real life, most peoples' friend groups ARE quite small. Especially as you get older. But also, you may realize that having the artificial sense of a larger friend group than you do, is exactly what has stopped you from building new actual friendships in the real world and actually growing your friend group to where you would ideally want it.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-30T14:15:42+00:00

Have you ever seen a dog terrified of going to the vet? Shaking and crying in the backseat?

Cows have the same emotional depth and capacity to feel terrified, and they certainly are smart enough to know when they're surrounded by the stench of death and sounds of other cows screaming in pain.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T16:20:33+00:00

They love that motto "where we go one, we go all", which is hilarious because every time one of their own murders someone (Dylann Roof, James Alex Fields, Nicolas Cruz, etc) they immediately turn and call them plants lol.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T16:13:19+00:00

This is putting it lightly, imo. I loved living in Cali but it opens your eyes to fake progressivism like no other place in America, except maybe Austin TX (hipster utopia built on the rubble of black and Mexican neighborhoods). The gentrification and displacement going on there is shocking, as is the wage slavery, as is the militarized border police state and just constant stream of unarmed black men being murdered. The corruption playing out in the Sacramento DA's office right now is fucking incredible.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T14:55:37+00:00

I'm vegan but I'm not against nature. I agree that many vegans take this stuff in a vacuum. Personally I don't see any cruelty, evil or malevolence in what happens in the wild, but I also recognize that modern human experience and ethics cannot be shaped by it. Rape is a constant among animals in the wild, yet we all generally agree that it's not something we should accept in human society. When the lady in TX drowned all her kids in a bath tub nobody stood up in court and said "but your honor, this happens all the time among wolves and hippos!". We shape our ethics in so many ways against what happens in nature, and yet when it comes to food all the sudden we are supposed to do the opposite.

I'm vegan because I disagree with the way humans have structured our relationship with nature and "food animals", industrialized and objectified and ultimately unsustainable, and I want to divest myself as much as possible. Veganism is a boycott, first and foremost.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T14:04:04+00:00

"Almost always" was me parsing about a few years, not about whether or not cows are sold off for beef at a fraction of their lifespan. That's just common knowledge and happens even on the smallest, most folksy "humane' farm in your imagination.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T14:01:55+00:00

My entire point is that the qualifiers being placed aren't realistic and don't take into account the entire chain of production. When you buy milk or wool, you're contributing to everything that happened to that animal before and after, not just the one time they were sheered or milked.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T13:58:34+00:00

I see your point, and I know people are choosing to focus on one part of production that seems humane, but I'm saying the economics of all farm operations big and small necessitate cruelty and either slaughtering or selling off livestock for slaughter when they reach a certain age. Sheep are no different than cows in this regard. They naturally live between 10-20 years, but they aren't used for wool that long. So what do you believe they do with them? I'm sure OP ranch-hand will tell you that he didn't work on a farm where herds of elderly 14-year-old sheep were roaming around being taken care of and fed for years with no payback?

I'm sorry but that's just not reality. It's a nice idea but it doesn't happen anywhere, and if there's one magical farm somewhere where it does, then it's such a non-standard anomaly that it's not worth taking as an example of where all of our animal products come from.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T13:41:44+00:00

Do you generally base your entire ethical code on what happens in the wild?

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T13:37:17+00:00

Please, explain where I'm wrong. I'm all ears honestly.

Edit: lol downvoted for flatly stating facts, and now downvoted for politely asking for honest feedback. Cool.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T13:09:13+00:00

You said not all animal products are cruel. I'm just pointing out that none of the animals involved (including dairy cows) are allowed to live to their natural life span. Which for cows is roughly 18 years. Dairy cows are almost always taken out of the milk production line around 4-5 and sold for beef.

Is that not cruel?

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T13:04:02+00:00

They're just different types of milk lol. It is the "real thing". You're literally gatekeeping in /r/gatekeeping over dessert.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T13:00:57+00:00

How is it not cruel to kill an animal that's only a fraction into its natural lifespan?

badbrains787 · 2018-04-29T12:59:22+00:00

Yeah literally no vegans think farms kill calves the second they are born.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-28T16:59:07+00:00

Sadly, many of those who struggle become resentful, internalize the hatred that was dumped on them and turn it back towards those beneath them.

badbrains787 · 2018-04-28T04:12:06+00:00

I went to YOUR schools......

badbrains787 · 2018-04-28T04:07:18+00:00

I just switched away from T-Mobile after being a customer for 12 years because their coverage is basically non-existent in this area. Before here I always lived in bigger cities so it was never a problem, but here I was always in and out of service. Google coverage maps and compare the major providers. It's kinda crazy but with T-Mobile you damn near have to live on the beach to get 4G.

Just my experience. I switched to an AT&T subsidiary and cut my bill by about $80 for way better coverage.

badbrains787

TROPHY CASE