A Heartfelt Seasons Greetings from a Long Gone Comrade Who Sincerely Wishes You All Well

Hey UV! Hope you've been well!

Stick around awhile?

Wow! A liberal that talks more sense than most anarchists. Still, that ain't saying much where this topic is concerned.

http://youtu.be/amI20uj3dE0

http://youtu.be/ykTH_b-cXyE

That last one just fucking ripped me to pieces Webb, I had to force myself not to walk away from the screen. Where were the 'higher' animals? I feel lost.

UV! Happy holidays to you!

And here's the thing, the meat eating, pus guzzling majority on here can beat us over the head with 'science' every bit as dubious as the woo woo horse manure peddled by vegan snake oil sellers, they can puff their chests out as a revolting display of their superiority complex, they can even come out with simpering platitudes about how eating animal products isn't wrong it's just that we need more humane methods of producing them(laugh my fucking arse off!), the truth is that if you still think it's ok to consume this shit after viewing this video you deserve to have the fucking shit kicked out of you.

Welcome back UV and a happy yuletide!
p.s. I'm almost a veggie now.

I think more than any other sign, when I see them actually adopting this physical posture it makes me feel how lost people are deep within the social prison.

Hey UV. I believe I first encountered your good self back on this free will thread and I think I forgot you to tell you that free will is only possible through determinism, that you can't causally effect any decision without it. Welcome back..

Good work

Wait a sec... that video is supposed to make us feel bad about eating animals? How the hell did I miss that??

Personally I took it at face value to be about factory farmed animals as commodities. Would you eat meat 'products' from these sources? I'm not being funny but since you've been saturated by capitalist culture since you were born, is it completely out of the question that your capitalist conditioning has short-circuited the connection between your intellect and your heart (not the edible organ, I mean your feelings) that's required for a person to reason correctly and reach beyond a certain ruthless egotism that is the reflection of a narrow economic outlook on life together with an attitude of entitlement and dominance? If I've got this wrong I'm sorry, but is it really compulsory for a person to have a deficiency of affect in order to be a revolutionary? Surely the opposite is closer to the truth?

I've noticed this in a lot in people who claim scientistically to have a scientific basis for their viewpoints, as if a narrow calculating intelligence could ever be enough to synthesise parts into new wholes rather than seeing them as just sums of separate, divided components, in science or anywhere else.

Primitive hunters respected the wild animals they killed through a consciousness of depleting resources, to the point on many occasions of apologising for having to take their lives. Does the sadism and destructiveness on display in the video seem in any way similar to that, any more than our modern consumption of market commodity creatures in general? How did anatomically identical people end up behaving in such contradictory ways, apart from the complete separation and alienation engendered by the minute application of division of labour, Taylorisation and the thousands of years of authoritarian conditioning required to separate us from ourselves so thoroughly? I'm no primitivist and I'm not Bookchin's number one fan but I'm with him on the link between our treatment of nature and our treatment of each other and ourselves.

A lot of this primitive 'honouring' is noble savage romanticism based either on superstitions or made up. I'm not sure we have that much to learn from our primitive ancestors and it requires being very selective so I think on the whole the fact that they did something is far from a ringing endorsement of it.
On the other hand the food industry in general is terrible for our environment and ourselves. The meat industry is horrific and to be honest those, like myslef, who continue to eat meat do it largely on the basis of ignoring the suffering caused.
Obviously someone is exploited to make everything in society but it is possible, although extremely difficult (and often prohibitively expensive) to cut out some of the cruelty.

I've heard this claim/opinion more times than I can remember. What gives it validity in your case? What selection(s) in particular are you referring to?

watched the first part of that video about chickens --- looked to me like prisons in Brazil. let's save the humans before the damn chickens, eh?

I'm interested in people's motivations for holding the positions they hold, not subtexts as such just,things like this example of dualistic thinking which actually sets the treatment of humans by humans in opposition to the treatment of other animals by humans, as if they didn't come from the same syndrome of destructiveness and necrophilia which are the products of not just the past few hundred years but of our attempts to solve the problems of the human condition using only our negative, life destroying rather than life enhancing passions, which has itself been encouraged by the authoritarian societies which have been enslaving us for thousands, not hundreds of years.

it would really be you that would need to back up your claim that they did

Are the two things so separate that we can only look at one at a time? Can we not realise the connection between the suffering of all sentient creatures? We are de-sensitised to the suffering of animals. Does that not de-sensitise us to the suffering of humans?
Anyhow, saving the humans or the chickens is not the point. I've said this before: as me not abusing women or being racist will not end misogyny and racism should I beat my wife and put a burning cross on my neighbours lawn?
Not consuming animal products is easy, cheap and can be extremely healthy. There is no reason at all to be complicit in the suffering of animals used for the production of food.

Finally, of all the trite, glib piles of horse manure I've read on Libcom, the well used 'chickens are not my comrades' argument is the highest heaped and steaming.
The sense of entitlement on display with people's position regarding animals demonstrates that capital's cultural poison can be deep within even the most revolutionary heart.

That seems a little lopsided don't you think? You show me yours and I'll show you mine.

Anyhow, we could learn a thing or two from animals about revolution. See for yourself;

http://youtu.be/FQMbXvn2RNI

In the case of animal foodstuffs this simply doesn't apply. As I've said, being vegan is cheap and easy. Of course workers are exploited producing plant based foods but I'll bet it's a damned site worse working on a factory farm or in a slaughterhouse.

Seriously, the mental gymnastics people go through to justify there fear of missing out on something or their lack of willingness to make a change is pretty staggering.

Btw Jeff, the above is not directed at you, I realise your point and I was responding to the common fallacy of 'I can't afford to be vegan'.

What about societies where eating meat/and using animal products has developed as a successful strategy to support a population, due to them living within an area not suitable for agriculture either due to climate, poor soils or lack of available flat land, think of pastoralist societies for example or Japan historically where because the land is narrow and mountainous there is not much room for agriculture and so fish made up a large part of peoples diet.

Maybe that isn't as much a problem nowadays, although in an anarchist society I'd think that food production would be locally based, and so if societies to some extent use animals as a successful and sustainable way to support themselves then I can't see anything wrong with that, especially if they have developed cultures and ways of life where they have historically sustained themselves in that way.

My point is that in principle at least I can't see anything wrong with eating meat, although that we have a society where we consume huge amounts of meat unnecessarily, which is both harmful to the environment and mistreats animals is another matter, and there I can see good reason to be a vegan.

no, the emphasis is on the one making the positive claim to back it up, not the people disbelieving them

bullshit, you found it easy because of your likes and dislikes around food and your not short of money. how the fuck do you think your in a position to lecture people one there lack of empath for animals when you cant even consider the position of people different form you?

this is a terrible idea, its possible food production could be more local in some cases than now, but the idea that producing things locally is inherently better is a liberal disease

A vegan diet can be extremely cheap. Mine is based around grains mostly plus root veg and mainly cheap fruit. At the moment it's apples and satsumas most days. My very tasty, filling and healthy dinner tonight will cost less than a pound for a large portion. Anyhow, make accusations if you like, make assumptions about what I eat too, go on, fill your boots but don't justify torture fear and suffering by talking about personal preferences unless you're hellbent on making a complete fucking twat of yourself.

Why is it liberal?

Producing local food means that it can be done sustainably where the people who produce the food, use it and recycle nutrients to the soil, instead of it being produced somewhere else probably intensively only for most of it not to reach local people but be transported half way across the world and accumulate waste.

I've heard a rumour that liberals breath in and out every few seconds. We'd better stop doing that ourselves now comrades. Let's make the revolution disease free!

Why don't you try dialling it back, Webby. For someone who rattles on about humility and hating people who always have to be right, you're not exactly full of this magnanimity when it come to other people disagreeing with you. And certainly not when it comes to threatening people with physical violence for taking a different position. I realize you have the evangelical zeal of a new convert but arguing for people to have the shit kicked out of them for not being vegan is just gobby posturing.

It may have been easy for you to transition to your diet but I'd wager that most people would find a diet of grains roots and fruit to be as dismally boring as fuck.

As for eating locally, that only works in a place where there is good agricultural land all year round (like the UK or California.) Where i live the ground is frozen 6 months of the year, there are 8 million people to feed in this province and currently a cauliflower costs $8 each.

Fleur, I'm not getting into it with you - look what happened last time we squared up to each other but the perfectly blithering justification that is now predictably making it's appearance that goes along the lines of 'I wouldn't be a vegan coz I like the taste of chocolate milk' whilst ignoring the actual suffering being pointed out leaves people wide open for getting torn a new asshole.

How many hours did the happy new year last?
Wishing everyone a new start.