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1. Embed this notice
   Alexander Sosedkin (monk@social.unboiled.info)'s status on Thursday, 27-Feb-2025 07:05:18 JST Alexander Sosedkin

   • Janneke
   @janneke in between
   
   other: Marketing this otherwise harmless practice as activism that's significantly useful at fixing the world is misleading. Get China to lower emissions and then shower for the rest of your life on a private jet if you want a meaningful impact, not just a headpat.
   
   and
   
   I don't care about animals: Demanding humane treatment of animals before humane treatment of humans is naturally insulting and alienating to humans. While it's a nice to fix later, putting it before, say, the rest 90% of the climate change reversal is attention diversion and sabotage. Not to mention direct instituonalized human-human harm. Ever seen those "all lives matters" cringe posters? To those of us with real problems veganism is this, but next level.
   
   I'm gonna check the manipulatively named "I don't care about animals, torture them" (for it avoids the largely irrelevant, but divisive issue that, at the current state of affairs, discredits the green more than it helps) as the best fit out of four.
   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Thursday, 27-Feb-2025 07:05:16 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     @monk thanks for playing and the options are pretty bad.

     However, most #vegan's consider not using animal products to be a minimal moral baseline. You're not really doing anything "good" for the world, you merely stopped contributing to one atrocity.

     There are two big differences with fighting human suffering, which many also consider to be very important: non-vegans are directly responsible/the cause of animal suffering three times a day. If they would just move their hand a proverbial meter to the left in the supermarket, or point to another menu item, no animal suffering is being paid for. So the responsibility is direct, stopping it is trivial, and (after the first two weeks) it takes no other effort. You still have just as much time as a non-vegan to work for other good causes. And it saves [lots of] money.

     Helping to end human suffering is much more difficult. The causality chain is often much muddier. Yeah, cheap clothes could be avoided...if you have the money! But what about an iPhone? And how often do you buy such things? Most human suffering is not directly caused by something as trivial as a(n unhealthy!) taste choice or clinging to an arbitrary cultural habit.

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Friday, 28-Feb-2025 06:09:30 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     @monk interesting. What exactly do you mean by defend it separately?

   • Embed this notice
     Alexander Sosedkin (monk@social.unboiled.info)'s status on Friday, 28-Feb-2025 06:09:32 JST Alexander Sosedkin

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     @janneke I'm not gonna argue that *going vegan* is somehow a bad thing for the supermarket-enabled. The responsibility is direct enough, the benefits to the environments are real, and less suffering is better than more suffering. That makes *going vegan* good in my book.
     
     Now, if a thing is good, why not promote the hell out of it then on socials? There are, surprisingly, quite a few reasons not to, and I'd like to stress two.
     
     One, X being good doesn't mean X is automatically the right thing to do when there's an even better Y. Hypothetically, if a country next to you decides to indulge in rape, pillage and plunder over another one, boosting your military spending and investing in defence in advance might be a good thing to do. Once they recover from the previous invasion and turn their attention to you, your preparations might save your sovereignty, soften the blow or even outright deter them from invading. Problem is, there could be much better/cheaper/efficient options. Say, if joining forces from the get go, counterinvading and nipping the agressor's perverse ambitions in the bud saves two countries, making your soldiers dig trenches instead while patiently waiting for your turn to get wrecked is a both a good thing in your local framing and criminal negligence in the grand scheme of things.
     
     Two, in case you're interested in comprehending what's my issue with *being overly noisy about going vegan*, note that it does not inherit the goodness of *going vegan*. Like, at all. Compare and contrast switching from cars to bikes with glueing yourself to asphalt. Starting a railway delivery company to compete with the government's inefficient monopoly versus cutting a top off a Christmas tree in an ecostunt. One is a direct action optimizing an objective goodness scalar grounded in reality, benefitting the common good no matter what opinions people hold about it. Another one is pretty much just pointlessly polasizing people and discrediting the public image of the first one. For an action that's supposedly done to get people to act, they're phenomenally countereffective, hurting the overall support of the underlying cause across all but the most loyal end of the fanbase spectrum. So, if you'll ever find yourself willing to defend *being overly noisy about going vegan*, defend it separately.
     
     And in the likely case you won't, just post your heart out. =) An Internet stranger's views and priorities slightly differ from yours. Big deal.
   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Saturday, 01-Mar-2025 22:13:47 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     @monk Ah, okay. Thanks, I see. Hmm.

   • Embed this notice
     Alexander Sosedkin (monk@social.unboiled.info)'s status on Saturday, 01-Mar-2025 22:13:48 JST Alexander Sosedkin

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     @janneke you've spend a post justifying *going vegan*. I heard you and I agree. Now, indulging in *highly active veganposting* (or whatever your preferred term might be, I'm open to suggestions) is not *going vegan* though, and, since it comes with completely different upsides and downsides attached, it thus warrants a different, largely separate justification.
   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Saturday, 01-Mar-2025 22:38:43 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     @monk
     So, am I right that you somehow (if so please explain!) do not read the message "How to live without cheese" (<https://kolektiva.social/@Herbivore/114063828391167980>) as a funny/absurdist, non-confrontational, non-explicit (no blood, dead bodies, macerator) way of saying please just: #goVegan; it's trivially easy, even handling silly questions from carnivores is probably going to be harder.

     Some people need bloody explicit images (Dominion), others need a philosophical argument (Animal Liberation), being told what's going on held responsible (The Best Speech You'll Ever Hear), or a role model (Natalie Portman), or a friend who goes vegan. Some may need humor and absurdity. The goal is the same, the message that's needed may differ?