bulbasaur

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/194038

Tone cops always come out of the woodwork to disparage vegans who ask carnists not to hurt animals, no matter how nicely they ask. But they'd never speak up on behalf of animals, bc they benefit from being the "good vegan" and are beloved by human supremacists for enforcing the status quo. Fighting for animal liberation is incredibly stigmatized, and pick-me's try to escape that stigma by throwing activists under the bus. This is common in all spheres of social justice.

Respectability politics have been criticized for being "used to rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence." For example, Bill Cosby "never gave voice to issues of racism, sexism, the failed public school system, health and economic disparities, mass incarceration or police brutality. Instead, he spent over a decade disparaging Black folk to the delight of white conservatives." which made him controversial in the Black community.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respectability_politics

Any challenge to the status quo will be deemed "mean" by those who benefit from it. Misogynists paint those who challenge patriarchy as mean man haters, femin*zis, uppity, unreasonable. Same thing for activists who fight against racism. Human supremacists will always paint vegans as mean bullies for asking them to stop supporting the rape and murder of nonhumans. That doesn't make their framing fair or true. They're just protecting their status quo, which causes the torture and death of over a trillion sentient beings every year. Carnists love when pick-me's favor their feelings (about being told to give up their victims' literal corpses) over the feelings of their victims (terror, grief, pain, horror) and the lives of their victims.

But change doesn't happen when you flatter power and enforce the status quo. Animals will not be liberated by throwing the people who speak out for them under the bus while protecting the people that harm them. Leftists know this already, but they like to forget when it comes to animal liberation

Tone cops always come out of the woodwork to disparage vegans who ask carnists not to hurt animals, no matter how nicely they ask. But they'd never speak up on behalf of animals, bc they benefit from being the "good vegan" and are beloved by human supremacists for enforcing the status quo. Fighting for animal liberation is incredibly stigmatized, and pick-me's try to escape that stigma by throwing activists under the bus. This is common in all spheres of social justice.

Respectability politics have been criticized for being "used to rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence." For example, Bill Cosby "never gave voice to issues of racism, sexism, the failed public school system, health and economic disparities, mass incarceration or police brutality. Instead, he spent over a decade disparaging Black folk to the delight of white conservatives." which made him controversial in the Black community.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respectability_politics

Any challenge to the status quo will be deemed "mean" by those who benefit from it. Misogynists paint those who challenge patriarchy as mean man haters, femin*zis, uppity, unreasonable. Same thing for activists who fight against racism. Human supremacists will always paint vegans as mean bullies for asking them to stop supporting the rape and murder of nonhumans. That doesn't make their framing fair or true. They're just protecting their status quo, which causes the torture and death of over a trillion sentient beings every year. Carnists love when pick-me's favor their feelings (about being told to give up their victims' literal corpses) over the feelings of their victims (terror, grief, pain, horror) and the lives of their victims.

But change doesn't happen when you flatter power and enforce the status quo. Animals will not be liberated by throwing the people who speak out for them under the bus while protecting the people that harm them. Leftists know this already, but they like to forget when it comes to animal liberation

Has anyone ever told you that it's ethical to shoot someone because otherwise, that person might suffer? Hunters are always telling us that they're actually helping deer by murdering them, because there's just so many deer, some of them might starve. It's not very convincing logic. It certainly wouldn't fly if we proposed solving human "overpopulation" through murder. But let's set aside the blatant speciesism for a moment and see whether it's even true that deer are overpopulated and if murder is the best solution if they are.

Hunters materially profit off the bodies of deer. Whether or not it's in the deers' best interest to get murdered, it's definitely in the hunter's best interest to be able to exploit and murder deer year after year.

To that end, deer populations are artificially inflated by deer breeding programs which are paid for by hunting licenses. They breed the deer and "manage" the land (like clearcutting forests, planting deer-preferred plants and requiring tenant farmers to leave a certain amount of their crops unharvested in order to feed the deer, creating the edge habitat that is preferred by deer and also outright feeding the deer) so that the populations increase so that there's always enough stock to hunt.

The reality is that there are thousands of “state game farms” across the country artificially breeding animals like deer and pheasants, quail and partridges in the hundreds of thousands and releasing them into hunting ranges. In Wisconsin alone, the state currently registers 372 “deer farms,” according to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. And when a disease outbreak occurs on these farms, entire herds are “depopulated.”

Some even claim that a substantial chunk of their funding comes directly from hunting licenses:

https://www.wildlife.state.nh.us/funding/charts.html

http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/aboutdnr/budget/bottom_line/budget.pdf

And the amount of federal funding they get is based off of license sales, too:

The Secretary determines how much to give to each state based on a formula that takes into account both the area of the state and its number of licensed hunters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Federal_Aid_in_Wildlife_Restoration_Act

Matt Hogan, executive vice president of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, pointed out, “Public support for hunting and fishing is crucial for conservation efforts. State fish and wildlife agencies have been and continue to be funded in large part by the contributions of sportsmen and women through license sales and excise tax payments on hunting and fishing equipment. To put it simply, without hunters and anglers, state fish and wildlife agencies would not be able to do their job conserving and managing wildlife for all Americans to enjoy.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20070615231714/http://www.responsivemanagement.com/download/news/newsrls_09_06.pdf

The whole point of our agencies is to conserve enough deer to hunt. They don't hide that they maintain a high population on purpose so that there can always be hunting seasons in perpetuity. They're conserving hunting stock. They're "managing" non-human populations so we don't run out of stock. We're certainly not doing this for the benefit of the deer as sentient individuals who deserve not to suffer; we're doing this because they are completely objectified as resources for our consumption.

An optimum population of deer balances positive demands (e.g., recreational hunting and viewing) with negative demands (e.g., agricultural and ornamental plant damage, vehicle collisions, ecosystem impacts). Despite damage caused by deer, Virginia’s white-tailed deer represent a beneficial economic and social resource.

https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/deer/deer-management-program

In fact, "conservation" in North American is centered entirely on exploitation of resources, not consideration for sentient individuals nor even preservation of species, which is why game animals are bred and bolstered yet predators and other non-useful animals are murdered and driven out.

https://www.fws.gov/hunting/north-american-model-of-wildlife-conservation.html

"Professor Thomas Serfass, Frostburg State University, Maryland, chairman of their department of natural resources and biology, told Thuermer: “I would describe the North American Model as incomplete.”

Hunter control depends on it being incomplete. One of the huge elements missing is contributions of federal land management agencies. “Setting land aside in the public domain in perpetuity is probably the most substantive thing we do for wildlife conservation," says the professor.

Thuermer quotes study co-author Molde as saying, “What about this public lands argument. Holy Toledo, that’s a huge subsidy to hunters.”

We, the 94 percent non-hunter public, pay for the lands and services, but are told that hunters have all the rights to destroy our wildlife. We pay — they have the only say. Seems fair to them.

The study's authors begin: “With increased awareness and interest of the general (non-consumptive) public in controversial wildlife management issues such as fur trapping, predator control, trophy hunting, coyote killing contests and wolf reintroduction, a debate is before us as to whether the general public is or should be afforded a proper voice in wildlife management decisions.

“Sportsmen favor the current system, which places a heavy emphasis on their interests through favorable composition of wildlife commissions and a continued emphasis on ungulate management. Non-human predators (wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, ravens and others) are disfavored by wildlife managers at all levels as competition for sportsmen and are treated as second-class citizens of the animal kingdom. Sportsmen suggest this bias is justified because ‘sportsmen pay for wildlife,’ a refrain heard repeatedly when these matters are discussed. Agency personnel and policy foster this belief as well.”

https://madison.com/ct/columnist/patricia-randolph-s-madravenspeak-non-hunters-should-claim-rights-to/article_1eeaf0bf-8c11-5c5f-835b-30e73edc8890.html

1. Decoding “Never Again” by Sherry F. Colb, whose family were holocaust survivors.

What people mean, then, when they say that a comparison between animal agriculture and the Holocaust must be trivializing to the latter, since they cannot be referencing the magnitude or scale of the injury, must be instead the relative insignificance of the victims of animal agriculture. People who say that the analogy necessarily trivializes the Holocaust plainly regard the nonhuman victims of the injury as trivial individuals. The complaint is “how can you compare grave injuries to beings who matter—human beings—to grave injuries to beings—non-humans—whose lives do not matter and are trivial?” I see this second type of complaint in the notion that comparing animal slaughter with the Holocaust necessarily trivializes the Holocaust, and insofar as that is the complaint, I reject it. It betrays the very lessons that one needs to learn from the Holocaust’s construction of Jews.

2. "Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?" by David Sztybel, the son of Holocaust survivors. Dr. David Sztybel: http://davidsztybel.info

The comparison in general, to the extent that it can be illuminated, cannot successfully be impugned and by alleging that it glosses over particular differences, is insulting, trivializing, or put forward by those who are "Nazi-like." Certainly, it would be viciously circular to assume that animal liberation is mistaken from the start, which makes a comparison offensive, and which in turn is supposed to prove that animal liberation is wrong. I conclude that if all other objections against animal liberation fail, objecting to the Holocaust comparison by itself will not indicate the case for anti-animal liberation. I submit the possibility that some people are deeply offended by the comparison because they are profoundly prejudiced against animals and in favor of human beings, and intolerant of those who hold opinions that are reflective of animal liberationist tendencies. If there were no such thing as discriminatory oppression, there never would have been a Holocaust, but neither could there be what animal liberationists refer to as speciesism. Far from the comparison being intrinsically objectionable, it is potentially useful and Illuminating, and may help to underline the gravity of our oppression of nonhuman animals.

3. “Animals, My Brethren", by Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, who wrote this while in the concentration camp at Daschau

The following pages were written in the Concentration Camp Dachau, in the midst of all kinds of cruelties. They were furtively scrawled in a hospital barrack where I stayed during my illness, in a time when Death grasped day by day after us, when we lost twelve thousand within four and a half months. [...] I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.

4. Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

When I see cages crammed with chickens from battery farms thrown on trucks lile bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz. When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a Holocaust on their plate.

5. Isaacs Bashevis Singer, “Enemies, A Love Story” and “The Letter Writer”

What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.

6. Alexandra M., full name withheld, a Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered. "The Lesson Has Not Been Learned”

Almost seventy years since that War – and the lesson has simply not been learned. There is not a single memorial in which there’s no mention of those innocent led “like lambs to the slaughter”. Woe is to him, though, who has the audacity to even hint that there’s anything wrong with the lambs themselves being led to slaughter. Woe is to him who compares those past persecutors and today’s; past freedom fighters with today’s. As if those led to slaughter back then were pronounced inferior “by mistake”, whereas those pronounced so today are “truly” inferior. As if one extermination isn’t the same as another, as if rescuers aren’t rescuers wherever they are. As if the calf doesn’t treasure his or her life, as if the hen doesn’t prize her freedom, as if the sow does not enjoy the company of her friends.

7. "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust” by Charles Patterson

In the forward to the book, animal rights activist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Lucy Rosen Kaplan states:

I came to understand that the oppression of nonhumans on this Earth eclipses even the ordeal survived by my parents.

8. Eternal Treblinka: Reactions - more survivor and family member accounts

Eternal Treblinka should be on every list of essential reading for an informed citizenry...for the compelling comprehensiveness of the life-and-death story it tells.

--National Jewish Post & Opinion

Whether the comparison between the extermination of the Jews and our daily slaughter of millions of 'food' animals evokes agreement or outrage, you will want to read this meticulously researched and compelling treatment of a painful and controversial subject.

--Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Exceptionally well done. I'll recommend it to many others. A cold shower for relativists cozy in their SUV's, I hope many read it and I hope many Jews, like myself, make room for the lessons within. I don't see it as a diminution of the Holocaust. Quite the opposite.

--Paul Allen

9. Mark Berkowitz (a Mengele Twin)

I dedicated my mother’s grave to the geese. My mother does not have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.

10. Speech from Alex Hershaft, and you can find several more on YouTube. Page on Jewish Veg website

11. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

12. Holocaust Survivors Speak: Lessons From The Death Camps

The idea that almond milk is the most wasteful milk ever is literally dairy industry propaganda (and here's the receipts)

Your brain on carnist realism.

emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

sci-hub.st/10.1215/10642684-4157487

From a linked paper, published in a queer studies journal.

the animal victims of bestiality in early america were usually killed in front of their abuser. The crime was more about it being taboo or worries of creating demon children and obviously not out of concern for the animal.

As for modern laws...

Rather than describe animal husbandry as absent sexual gratification, this reading of South Dakota’s law actually has the opposite effect: the presence of “sexual gratification” is not an adequate means to distinguish animal husbandry from bestiality

Sexual abuse is not defined by the act alone, since the same act can be criminal in one context and merely agricultural in the other. Nor is it defined by the absence of consent, since meat animals are as incapable of legal consent as family pets. Nor is it defined by the presence of perverse intent on the part of perpetrator, since some laws recognize that such intents may be congruent with an act of husbandry. Nor, indeed, is it defined by the animal’s subjective experience of pain and violation, since injury, pain, and even death are commonplace in animal breeding, and swine and cattle are as cognitively capable of pain and trauma as cats and dogs. Instead, sexual abuse is defined exclusively by the nonrelationship of the sexual act to the reproduction of biocapital.

As bestiality laws make clear, meat animals are life opened to sex, but life that cannot be raped—flesh that can be touched but that cannot be violated.

lots of over good stuff in there, like how kids 10 and up can legally work at forms and be directed to perform "animal husbandry" tasks that would be illegal if they were directed to do so by a parent at home to a pet. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320208999_How_Meat_Changed_Sex_The_Law_of_Interspecies_Intimacy_after_Industrial_Reproduction

Plant based foods systems and degrowth are necessary to combat climate change. Failure to recognize this is soft climate denialism based in profit or self interest.

Related: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-121-climate-chaos-part-i-how-the-gap-between-liberal-rhetoric-policy-promotes-denialism

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-122-climate-chaos-part-ii-the-militarization-of-liberals-climate-change-response