I don't agree with the gatekeeping of the take from a literal point of view, but rather I think that the sentiment of "It is reactionary to support exploitation and oppression, and it is hypocritical to claim that you oppose it while still continuing to support it" that leaks from it is spot on

Also, I gotta love how someone posted two separate comments within a minute of each other just to articulate a very short point of this take being "ableist." That's 100% indicative of seething.

I also love (this time using this word unironically) that she's a fellow black vegan communist who is sick of non-vegan leftist bullshit.

I got in a discussion with one who said I shouldn't support PETA because they believe that all domesticated animals, including pets, should be released into the wild. When I asked where PETA had stated such a thing, he said "they never did, but people claiming to be acting on behalf of PETA have kidnapped and released pets." I asked him, given why this was illegal, 1) why those responsible would so readily rat out their organization, and 2) why PETA, which has many enemies among capital who would benefit greatly from crushing it, has never been hit with RICO charges over this.

His response? "Well, PETA's never denied it!"

Because they never shut up about it! Especially if they find out you're a vegan!

Thanks for coming to my joke

Conservation of mass?

Do they understand that producing energy and fertilizer using the bodies of animals is less efficient than producing the same number of calories or mass of nitrates from plants+less-energy-than-is-required-to-raise-the-animal-in-question?

For example:

Carnist: "Hey, you want a slice of this pepperoni, triple cheese pizza?"

Vegan: "Sorry, no thank you, I'm vegan."

Carnist: "Oh, wow! Nice! I respect that! Yeah, I would go vegan, but I just would struggle with protein, B12, and iron if I did! Like, I tried being vegan for a week and got so sick! I still eat plant-based alternatives every now and then, though! And I totally get where you're coming from with your ethics! Yeah, the way they treat animals on those factory farms is crazy, bro! I hope those cruel practices can be abolished one day. Complete solidarity with you and the animals, dude! ✊ In the meantime, I absolutely try my best to get my meat, dairy, and eggs from local, free-range, humane, and organic farms!"

Vegan: "Okay?"

Like, seriously, just saying "Oh, okay." and moving on with your life would be preferable over this shit.

It's why I don't use the term myself.

Are there instances where vegenaises* do use their chuddiness to give God awful takes on things like Israel's veganwashing? Yes.

Are there instances where it seems like some vegans need to be educated on the fact that other forms of oppression beyond the kind of oppression that the movement is fighting against can exist within that movement? Yes.

Are there vegans who just do some all-around cracKKKer shit that makes it seem like they're completely forgetting the anti-oppression nature of the animal liberation movement? Yes.

But let's be real here: most of the times that people have gripes with "white veganism" are just instances where they're trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of harboring a reactionary sentiment (anti-veganism) and leftism simultaneously.

Let's not forget that many of these fuckers who do this are white themselves and have also proven themselves to be totally inconsiderate of the voices of BIPOC vegans.

*vegenaise = vegan mayo = white vegan

I have the following symptoms:

• Hair thinning on the top of my head
• Feeling more tired than usual
• Going to the toilet more often
• Feeling colder compared to my gf despite being fatter
• Dry skin

Could these be related to the change in my diet? If so I will go for a blood test, which vitamins would you recommend me to check? (I will obviously take them as supplements if needed)

Other changes in my life in the last year were finding a job and starting Zoloft.

Considering how many of them say this, it's statistically implausible due to how rare these kinds of farms actually are.

Big-ass, industrialized factory farms need to exist in order to accommodate the demand that there is for so many people to consume flesh and secretions.

Ultimately, in addition, even if it were true, engaging in "humane animal slavery" still does not justify it.

I already bitched about this in the vegan theory club cooking discord bub I'm still bent the fuck out of shape over it.

Ok, so my kid's birthday party was yesterday and the last 2 times I wasn't able to eat the cake because it was made with extra helping of animals. I just sat their on my phone and took a few pictures or whatever. I helped with set up and tear down.

We are also going broke because I'm too fucking stupid to hold down a job and after over a year and a half of trying to find a job, we are at the point where I am considering getting rid of the rest of our streaming services and pull our youngest out of daycare. We are barely surviving on a teacher's salary right now.

In the past, my partner has gone all out on our kids' parties but I was working so it was fine. This time, I wanted to try to save money where we could. In the past, my partner would get a cake from a local bakery that costs like $80 and only 1/4 would get eaten and I'd throw the rest away 2 months later because it got forgotten in the back of our garage fridge.

So this year I wanted to kill 2 vegan birds with one stone and make my kid's birthday cake. I could make it for way cheaper and also sub in vegan ingredients.

I buy all the ingredients and plan on making it Saturday. My mother-in-law decides to offer to make a cake for my kid after finding out we aren't spending $80 on a cake. I already bought the ingredients so I politely say no thanks. Because I am saving money, not wasting it. And because I wanted to enjoy cake at my kid's birthday party.

I got up early yesterday, put my earbuds in and threw on some baking metal. To be fair it was a box cake mix and the frosting was also pre-made. I was gonna do this as a test run before autistic hyper-focus takes over and I proceed to deep dive into making the perfect vegan cake. So I mix it up and bake it and do the toothpick test and it comes out clean. I wait for it to cool and frost it and it's good. Life is good. We good.

Well, It was on the softer side of done. My mother-in-law goes to cut the cake and it crumbles. She then proceeds, in front of like 15 people, to tell me that my cake sucks and I should have just let her make it because it wouldn't suck. In front of me, my partner, our kids, our friends, etc. So that's great.

I spiral, because I do that. and I'm still processing it. She seemed like she wanted to go out of her way to make a deal about it because she knows I'm vegan and likes to call it weird or whatever when she can.

I know this is all over a stupid cake but she really could have just laughed it off when it was falling apart instead of slopping it on to everyone's plate like she was a lunchlady in the 6th circle of hell or something.

That's it. That's my rant. I'm mostly just hoping that I could get it off my chest and move on.

I am always looking for recipes so if anyone has a good cake recipe that can adapt to flavors like vanilla or chocolate and such, I'm definitely interested. A tiny caveat is that the cake mix and frosting used palm oil and I'm really trying to avoid that because of how palm farming wrecked the environment.

Its like once or twice a day and they're decently sized. It feels like my body produces twice as much poop. Lowkey feels like wasting nutrients 😭.

Both are seen as iconic, important figures to their respective tendencies, but in actuality, they both have promoted harmful ideas that contradict and undermine their movements.

For example, Peter Singer thinks animal exploitation can be justified and that it can be morally acceptable to consume animal flesh if you "treat the animal humanely," y'know, typical welfarist bullshit.

Angela Davis considers Obama a part of the "black radical tradition," endorsed a cop for president and claimed that this cop would ease the horrid situation in Gaza, and preferred the CPUSA over the BPP because the BPP was far too radical for her.

Anti-intersectionals are also neglecting the fact that, even if we are to argue that veganism is exclusively about non-human animals in some sense, unlike many other justice movements, veganism is the only justice movement in which the oppressor class solely comprises the movement's voice. To give a comparison, many feminists are women, many racial justice activists are BIPOC, and many LGBTQ+ rights activists are queer, but not a single vegan activist is a cow, a pig, or any kind of non-human.

This means that the "vehicle" for the vegan movement will always be made up of humans, so there, by default, must be some baseline of accepting certain human rights stances in the movement. If there is not unequivocally condemnation of transphobia, for instance, there could be discomfort for trans vegans doing activism, which would actually harm the movement and weaken the cause for animal liberation.

To give another very topical and relevant example of how this could manifest, I can't say that I'd expect the Palestinian diaspora who are vegan to be happy with the ethnic cleansing of their people being given a pass in the name of "rejecting intersectional veganism and keeping the focus on the animals." Despite this, we've seen this exact kind of rhetoric supported and favored to a disgustingly eerie degree within the vegan community.

Walked by a lot of pastures and some of them had horses. Even saw three horses being led by someone right by us. Kid was excited, I'm sad. That's the post. Wish my wife could commit to being vegan... We both don't know how to approach it with our kid though.

I don't wanna bother making same if it sucks lol

Follow-up to my post from last night regarding this...

He even posted an Instagram story asking his drones, in poll format, "Do you think that a similar post about Chinese vegans would get the same backlash regarding the Uyghur genocide?" or some shit like that.

Very definition of

Edit: And no, this isn't all of them... I could've added more and more screenshots, but I think 12 will convey the point well enough.

Individual Screenshots

Second and Final Slide

George Martin (@carnism_debunked on Instagram) has a hateboner for what he terms "intersectional veganism."

He is a chuddy, British vegan who identifies as a centrist, and to be honest, giving credit where credit is due, some of his vegan content is pretty good from a more generalized "Pretty much any vegan would agree with this" kind of standpoint. However, I'm so tired of him being absurdly reactionary.

He complains that his issue with "intersectional vegans," i.e., vegans who want to incorporate human liberation messages in addition to animal liberation messages into their activism, is that they are taking away from the focus on the animals.

However, this is entirely disingenuous. Quite plainly, George is just a chud and is upset that these vegans express leftist viewpoints that he does not like. He also "both sides" a lot of the intersectional vegans. What I mean by this is that he'll say things like, "Intersectionals say vegans should be pro-choice to be anti-oppression, but don't right-wingers consider being pro-life anti-oppression? How are leftists the authorities on what counts as being opposed to oppression? This is why veganism should remain apolitical! 😤😤😤😤"

As you can see here, he is a major hypocrite. He's made tons of posts where he's attempted to not-so-subtly shove in his own Zionist commentary in his complaints about "intersectional veganism," diverting back to "I just want veganism to be politically neutral and only focus on the animals!" when called out for it.

Hell, even some vegans who would normally think at least somewhat decently of the guy are having enough of his shit. This vegan is probably someone George would describe as an "anti-intersectional," but here is her killer response:

He strawmans intersectional vegans all the time, as he's stuck in a "2016 SJWs Rekt Compilation" kind of mentality. Of course, he loves to abuse the word "woke." He actually ended up debating Catherine Klein, a self-identified intersectional vegan, and his strawman arguments were so inaccurate that basically none of the things he complained about in the debate even really applied to Catherine. (2:46:46, hardly worth the entire watch TBH.)

Catherine Klein even commented on this post herself, of course, disapproving of the hypocrisy.

The last thing I'd like to state is that George abuses the shit out of tu quoque fallacies (AKA whataboutism ) against intersectional vegans. He'll say things like, "How come intersectional vegans always urge vegans to talk about Palestine, but they never urge pro-Palestine protesters to talk about animal rights?" This is his best argument, which isn't as much of a "gotcha" as he thinks, especially because many vegan leftists do swing both ways, but it's especially ironic for a man who's so self-evidently hypocritical to tire the shit out of the tu quoque fallacy this hard.

Yeah so I've been trying to go vegan all year and I'm pretty proud that I'm for all intents and purposes fully vegan at this point. Except I've been dealing with some stomach issues this past week or so, and unfortunately many of my go to stomachache recipes use chicken: plain chicken and rice, chicken soup, chicken broth, etc.

I'm wondering what, as vegans, you all eat when you're dealing with stomach issues. I can generally stomach oatmeal, although not too much of it, and plain white bread, again not too much. Bananas are always a go to for me also. But I'm unsure of what else to eat - beans are out, I feel like most nuts are out? What do you all eat when dealing with stomach issues?

It's been rough. But at my weakest moment, a voice in my head reminded me, "You can't give in or internet communists will call you a cheesebreather." I would like to specifically thank @Angel@hexbear.net as well as anyone else who I might have seen throwing it around for keeping me honest.

My friends did pick up breadsticks for me which helped because it's basically the same kind of slop but without the cruelty.

I'm usually eating on my own where I never struggle with controlling my diet, but those social situations when it's free and I'm the only vegan in the room can be super challenging. But I know if I'd made an exception I'd feel guilty later and it would make it harder to assert in the future. Now I really need to reward myself and splurge on like the best vegan pizza I can find.

Pic of cow as a rememinder of what it's all about

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.vg/post/763508

Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period

There is great uncertainty over the timing and magnitude of the termination of the African Humid Period (AHP). Spanning from the early to middle Holocene, the AHP was a period of enhanced moisture over most of northern and eastern Africa. However, beginning 8000 years ago the moisture balance shifted due to changing orbital precession and vegetation feedbacks. Some proxy records indicate a rapid transition from wet to dry conditions, while others indicate a more gradual changeover. Heretofore, humans have been viewed as passive agents in the termination of the AHP, responding to changing climatic conditions by adopting animal husbandry and spreading an agricultural lifestyle across the African continent. This paper explores scenarios whereby humans could be viewed as active agents in landscape denudation. During the period when agriculture was adopted in northern Africa, the regions where it was occurring were at the precipice of ecological regime shifts. Pastoralism, in particular, is argued to enhance devegetation and regime shifts in unbalanced ecosystems. Threshold crossing events were documented in the historical records of New Zealand and western North America due to the introduction of livestock. In looking at temporally correlated archeological and paleoenvironmental records of northern Africa, similar landscape dynamics from the historical precedents are observed: reduction in net primary productivity, homogenization of the flora, transformation of the landscape into a shrub-dominated biozone, and increasing xerophylic vegetation overall. Although human agents are not seen as the only forces inducing regime change during the termination of the AHP, their potential role in inducing large-scale landscape change must be properly contextualized against other global occurrences of neolithization.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2017.00004/full