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Calling someone a bloodmouth for literally eating things with blood might hurt their feelings, but vegans have feelings too, and sometimes we’re upset at the idea that moderates can’t be bothered to give enough of a shit to stop literally shoveling blood into their mouths.

This is something I seriously hate from people like you, you expect vegans to be these bastions of angelic perfection. We already go through the effort of being vegans in a non-vegan world, but that’s not enough, we have to make sure we do it in a way that don’t effect the delicate sensibilities of people who pay to consume tortured animal carcasses.

The goal shouldn’t be to try to de-radicalize vegans for expressing their discomfort around literal abuse that’s normalized in our society. The goal should be to get rid of the abuse.

While the civil rights movement was largely “peaceful” (loaded word with little meaning), it was also incredibly disruptive. People in the movement were very rude to moderates who advocated in favor of negative peace while reaffirming their appreciation of the status-quo.

MLK’s position here was not that the people within the civil rights movement needed to be more respectful to white moderates. His position was that the moderates were the issue. The people who consistently advocated for negative peace were the issue.

The leaders of vegan movements also don’t generally go around attacking the moderates of our time who appreciate the status-quo and advocate for negative peace. There are individuals that do attack moderates, just like there were individuals in the civil rights movement who literally physically assaulted white moderates (much worse than calling someone a cheese-breather and having their feelings get a bit hurt). Again, MLK did not draw attention to these fringe cases because the actual issue were the moderates themselves. Some might even say the racists deserved to be beaten, and that’s not even something I would necessarily argue against.

Veganism is the same. The issue is not the people who are a bit rude online to bloodmouths/carnists. The issue is the moderates themselves, their constant advocacy for negative peace in place of positive peace needs to be shut down unequivocally.

It goes to show how much we purposefully disregard the ways of nature, actually.

Moral decisions are not made on the grounds of “is this natural”? A lot of things are moral and unnatural, and a lot of things are immoral and natural. It should be incredibly easy for you to think of examples, but if you’re really struggling I can give some.

They’re orthogonal discussions.

MLK actually alienated white moderates to about the same degree that vegans alienate carnists. It was only retroactively, after the civil rights movement, that white moderates pretended like they were aligned with him all along. In 1966 MLK was polling in the low 30s among white Americans.

I’m sure future moderates/apoliticals will do the same with veganism. Lab grown meat will become a thing, we’ll outlaw our barbaric practices of animal torture and slaughter, and those future generations will look back with horror at how savage we were, and all the moderates will proclaim proudly that “I would’ve been a vegan if I was born in the late 20th/early 21st century”, and they would be almost always wrong.

It’s similar to everyone’s modern position on slavery. If you polled the majority of the population “would you be an abolitionist if you were born in the early/mid 19th century?”, you’ll get the vast majority of people saying they would’ve been, but the vast majority of people were not, and its not like we had some evil gene in us that got naturally selected out of us. People were just normalized in that environment. People today are just generally incorrect about what the impact of normalization would’ve been on them in the past (or even what the impact of it is on them today).

MLK said it best, so I’ll just quote him directly:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

When moderates advocate for “kindness” or “civility”, they’re advocating for negative peace; the absence of tension. Vegans advocate for positive peace; the presence of justice. When activists advocate for positive peace, in the face of those who deny said justice, tensions rise and moderates fall back to this common trope.

Your mistake here was saying “puppies” too early. You have to lead with a couple paragraphs of how you’re a flexitarian who has a farm and humanely raised animals like pets and then slaughters and feed them to your family.

Then list off the animals you exploit, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, cats and ducks. Then their brain gets hit with the dissonance of “wait why did I support this and then stop the second they said ‘dog’?” That jarring experience can work for the intellectually honest type.

Saying it too early means they can categorize your post as satire easily and not engage with it at all mentally.

This is an interesting theory, but I think you’re just wrong on several counts. There are definitely permanently online people who don’t do anything in the real world, but out of the groups you listed, vegans and MAGA members almost universally have material impact on the world (socialists and antivaxers would like to, but their impact is usually hyper-localized, so you’ll find more “only-online” types).

For vegans and MAGA, there is real direct action that they partake in as buy-in for the group. For the former, it’s abstaining from animal products, and for the latter it’s voting for Trump.

Claiming most vegans or MAGA people aren’t motivated to improve things for their cause is demonstrably false. An interesting theory nonetheless.

I’ll mention just so my biases are clear, I’m a vegan socialist, but I don’t think i was unfair here in favor of those positions.

They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.

The end goal is near-total eradication of the natives. Similar to native americans in the U.S. Israel is a settler state, much like the U.S was, and actively drove the natives out of their homes. They’re almost done though, we’re seeing some of the final acts of the ethnic cleansing/genocide.

Once there are barely any left, they’ll feign sympathy to garner support, and that’ll be that. Another win for imperialist settler states. Nothing unique or special about it.

I don’t think the person you’re responding to is a Trump supporter. I think they’re critiquing the vast amounts of political energy people put into supporting and justifying a genocidal state and its leaders.

Your entire comment exemplifies this perfectly. There’s obviously a lot of time and effort you’ve put into forming your electoral views, and you obviously spend a good deal of time going around, at the very least online, trying to inform people how to make better decisions inside the electoral sphere.

This is exactly what electoralism tries to drive in people. The expenditure of political capital within acceptable bounds. Before electoralism/liberal democracies, political capital accumulated and was then spent on strikes, riots, or revolutions. Things that are much more effective at driving change per political capital spent.

There are literally millions of people like you in America that could all immediately stop all your expenditure of political capital and it would make actually no material difference. That’s a beautiful thing about electoralism (for those in power), the thing that matters is the differential, not the total expenditure. This is why “swing states” exist.

I’ll put it into concrete terms, imagine the amount of electorally active individuals in America was immediately cut in half. The population remains the same, but exactly half of the current voting population stops voting. Assume all ratios remain the same. There’d be fundamentally no difference in material outcomes.

Now imagine if all current political capital was spent towards strikes, unions, revolution, or really any form of politics outside electoralism. Doubling or halfing this engagement would be massive. Real material outcomes would be different if there were thousands more strikes. What doesn’t matter is if the voting population is 150 million, 90 million, or 10 million. Only the differential matters, and only for determining a fixed binary outcome.

Until the tankies seize power and start killing the anarchists for being anti-state xd

Not all tankies would do this, but it’s happened before and it’s good to be cautious around those who want supreme authority, even if they claim it’s just “temporary”. If we see the Chinese state wither away and give rise to a truly communist society, I’ll be genuinely surprised.

Presidents are above the law while they’re in office. This case is unique because it happened before he was in office. The message that will really be sent is “wait until you’re actually president to do would-be illegal shit”.

Still worth handing him a harsh sentence, just to put the orange fascist fuck behind bars, but there shouldn’t be any misconceptions about some true notion of justice here. Trump is just a moron, and didn’t know how to play the game correctly.

Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.

I like your comment, but there’s an important note that needs to be made, I’m not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of “politics; not to be discussed at work” was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.

Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same “kind” of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he’s never stepped foot into).

The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It’s not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won’t intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. “right to work” ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it’d be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it’s better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.

I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it’s normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don’t believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.

Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I’ve talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn’t cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I’d be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).

Yup, just like it’s employment 101 to not discuss salaries.

Lack of communication and organization is a fantastic way to keep workers in line. Genuinely all it takes are a handful of socialists in an environment of heavily exploited workers to get a union going. They can all feel the material harm capitalism is causing, but lack the language and means to express and resist that harm.

When socialists provide it (via politics in the workplace), that harms companies. When communication takes place (salary sharing, organization tactics, etc.) you place a strain on the bourgeoise to behave more inline with worker expectations. This isn’t what capitalists want.

I don’t think revolutions are any more likely to be fascist than socialist, historically though genuine socialist revolutions tend to lose, mostly because international capitalism can play very nicely with fascism, but not socialism.

However if the U.S underwent genuine socialist revolutions, it’s an entirely different ballgame. The U.S has been the capitalist hand on the global stage for the better part of a century, constantly involved in overthrowing democratically elected governments in favor of fascist dictatorships.

With that constant capitalistic/fascistic pressure gone, and better-yet replaced with genuine socialism, you’d get a very interesting situation. You’d have genuine socialism in the U.S (probably followed by at least some socialist revolution or socialist-inspired reforms in Europe), and then rhetorical socialism in the east, marred by material capitalism. The contradictions of the global stage would intensify, and I don’t think there’s any Chinese theory for development in an internationally socialist stage.

It’s more counterproductive to be a non-vegan and try to convince nobody. I’ve had a good deal of success convincing people to go vegan. There are definitely vegans that are more successful than me, but you want to know who is always less successful? Non-vegans who rage online about vegans.

They should be the focus of our criticism, both in their own actions, and even as a broader strategy for enacting change.

Also I’d go as far to claim malapropisms don’t exist. There is no “incorrect” use of a word. I’m not a prescriptivist. Language is about communicating ideas, and I know everything I’ve said would make sense to a great deal of people I know.

Maybe something doesn’t make sense to you, maybe because we learned different definitions or usages of some word or phrase. Neither of us are wrong, we’ve just hit a language barrier. This is uncommon in English, but actually happens quite regularly in Europe even with two people speaking “the same language”.

Our best example of this is going from American -> British English, but it can happen within the same “dialect” too.

Now there are obviously times where you try to adopt some language someone else has, and misunderstood it, so your usage aligns with essentially nobody else’s (so the word has lost all function). I know that’s not the case with what I’m saying because I’ve had these types of conversations with enough people who have understood me, but I’m fine humoring you, and still interested where the clash/miscommunication happened.