Ok buddy.
Labor exploitation isn’t vegan. Vegans are doing the best they can, better than me.
Bacon vegans are the most nonsensical
We do the best we can to reduce harm and suffering.
Modern life is not vegan by nature, human infrastructure destroys animal habitats, human pollution is destroying the planet. Our species is responsible for the deaths of trillions of animals. Our existence is complicity.
Doing what I can to avoid consuming products of animal suffering is never going to be enough to counteract the majority of humans who revel in it. Especially as it’s them who’ve built/control/condone the broken systems this world is running on and will be ending due to.
Oil is vegan, though.
It’s made from the remains of dead plants.
Also, I’m not sure how vegans view corpses of animals.
Oil is from plankton and algae, and coal is from terrestrial plants. It’s all vegan
Plankton does contain animals.
Phytoplankton is composed of plants. Zooplankton and Ichthyoplankton are composed of animals.
Good point
Also, I’m not sure how vegans view corpses of animals.
Like a dead cow, chicken, or pig? Probably not favorably.
I’d argue the extraction, refinement and typical uses of petroleum oil are somewhat not-vegan.
Non-vegans have a really hard time understanding veganism, huh?
They willfully refuse to try and understand, then we get posts like this every two weeks.
It’s like explaining free software to someone who only uses apple products.
Vegan has always been about doing the best you can in reducing the harm you do onto others and the environment as much your able to. Some vegans absolutely will refuse the use of petrol but most will see it as a current necessary evil they have to deal with and just reduce when able to in their current modern lives.
looool
how do you know if someone hates vegans?
don’t worry they’ll tell you
OMG I’m totally using this from now on. 😆
people fucking love to do these gotchas against anyone for even fucking trying, don’t they
well congrats, you did it, you convinced all of us to compromise on our principles
I love vegans because they’re usually pretty normal people that have see front-and-center how collectively stupid most people are.
The majority of people are proud of their ignorance because it makes them fit in with others.
The irony of this comment.
How so?
You’re saying vegans are normal people while also saying that normal people are stupid and ignorant.
Interesting thought, but humans didn’t harm the life that became fossil fuels, most of which came from plant matter anyway. I’m not in a position to unilaterally declare something vegan, but I’m pretty sure fossil fuels are vegan by default.
Sure, its use can harm animals. Still, I could kill a mouse with a cucumber, but it wouldn’t change the fact that cucumbers are vegan.
Hmmm… but taking your argument to the opposite end; the normal consumption of a cucumber may not typically harm animals but I think there is an argument to be had that the normal consumption, and production, of fossil fuels typically does.
It’s a common viewpoint among vegans that systems that depend on animal exploitation should be abolished. On the other hand, systems that contain animal exploitation should be improved.
I’ll give two examples with human animals so it can be clear: Slavery? Should be abolished. People getting ran over and killed by cars? We should improve that.
The ones I always come back to are pollinator-dependent crops such as fruits and tree nuts. Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops. Presumably, if more people were to become vegan then we would demand them even more.
From what I know, vegans oppose the transportation of pollinators for pollinating these crops. Yet it seems most vegans eat plenty of them (apples, peaches, plums, almonds, avocados, etc).
Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops
and why might that bee??? 🔪🪿
You definitely could bring the wild pollinators back. I do that with my own garden in my backyard. But that means you’d have to remove parts of the orchard to provide a habitat for the pollinators, lowering the density of the trees. Lower density => lower production => smaller crop => more expensive almonds (or peaches etc).
If we want everyone to be vegan that’s gonna mean mostly giving up the luxury products that many vegans currently enjoy and switching to staples (beans, squash, corn, root veggies).
Lower density only means lower production of the usable land remains the same. Which would not be the case if the world became vegan: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
that relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which is problematic. you might be right but your link isn’t good evidence.
If we eliminate animal ag we will have more than enough space for lower density production, here Seppoland as an (albeit extreme) example:
And since we won’t be eliminating animal ag under capitalism the profit motive is gonna be moot point anyway.
Oh honey, I have no idea
Do those crops depend on transportation of pollinators? To me it seems like they don’t.
By your own admission, there are natural pollinators. We can also manually pollinate them, which reinforces my point that
systems that *contain* exploitation should be improved.Manually pollinating thousands of almond trees is definitely possible. But then you should expect almonds to be in the same price range as vanilla pods, another manually pollinated crop.
Thanks for conceding. Now to your new point: once the majority of people are vegan, we can focus on those systems that can be improved. Currently the majority does not even care about animal exploitation, so there’s very little value in trying to change systems that don’t depend on animal exploitation.
Those two counter examples that I provided aren’t all possibilities to replace open pollination. Surely experts in the field can come up with better solutions once this problem actually becomes a worry in the minds of the majority.
The question is: can you turn it into a product? Would people be willing to pay $100/lb for hand-pollinated almonds? It’s potentially something to explore on a small scale.
I would love to know how many vegans would pay that much for an ethical product.
Can you give some real world examples of systems that contain animal exploitation that vegans would want to see improved? I’m not sure I completely follow that point.
Animal manure as fertilizer in farming. We can use fertilizers that don’t depend on animals to be made.
Is any of what you are saying material though?
It’s kind of revelatory that vegan is a shifting term, that means whatever it wants to mean for the believer.
I tell vegans all the time that in order to have their potato chips brought to them, first they have to have millions of hectares of fields destroyed, planted with a monoculture potato crop, sprayed with pesticides, harvested by diesel equipment, made in a factory with pollutants, placed on trucks which ship all over the country.
Swallow a fly, oh my God the world is ending. Kill a couple thousand things on the way to get your vegan chips, let’s not talk about that.
Well that’s… needlessly hostile?
Vegans are aware of the damage the supply chain does, hence “buy local” being such a common phrase and the push to support small local farms. I’m not sure what you’re accomplishing besides hilighting that capitalism is an awful economic structure that incentivises profit over environment, which sure good message, but most people choosing to adopt such a culturally despised practice are going to be aware of the externalities already.
It’s kind of revelatory that vegan is a shifting term, that means whatever it wants to mean for the believer.
Really? It’s not new, at least. Vegans love to disagree about what specific things are vegan- some are cool with honey, some are cool with nestle products made without animal products, and some are cool with anything they don’t pay for. Many aren’t cool with any of that, but don’t think twice about killing a mosquito in their home.
It’s an individual choice and you’ve got to decide what you care about and prioritize that.
This, 100%. For some reason people imagine vegans as an ideologically aligned group rather than a bunch of people making their own varied decisions for their own varied reasons. Then when inconsistencies come up between vegans they’ll decry it all as performative. Meanwhile, vegans themselves tend to just be happy to see others making their own best effort and the hair-splitting over what is vegan matters a lot less than generally resisting animal product consumption in any capacity.
Setting a unifying standard for a broad group of people that they’ll never meet and then reacting to the shock of them failing to meet that standard is a common rhetorical tactic in other contexts, no surprises it turns up here too.
This is like banning H₂O, NaCl and C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ from your life because “you don’t like chemicals”.
(Water, Salt and Sugar)
My sister had a freak out and told me she would never allow chemicals on her lawn. I said what about nitrogen?
NO FUCKING WAY
I followed up by asking her what she thinks our breathable atmosphere is made of, and what is captured by the rain and falls on her grass?
YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN
I told her no, I don’t, because when you just make up imaginary definitions for words, no one can ever know what you mean.
This is a pretty dumb hill to die on. If someone says “chemicals on their lawn” it’s pretty clear they mean lawn treatment services.
You sound fun
Oil is actually primarily formed from algae, not dinosaurs, so it should qualify.
Coal is plant matter, so it also qualifies.
Even if it was dinosaurs, the dinosaurs weren’t harvested, much less exploited, in any way. They died of natural causes. Hell, even if the aliens decided to farm them and we used what remained it still wouldn’t be exploiting them since it’s more akin to scavenging.
This is shifting blame. Fossil fuels are vegan in the sense of origin, however the harm done to the biosphere in using them is not vegan. Therefore a vegan using fossil fuels in a dependent society is to blame.
Sure. It’s not the much higher percentage of people participating in this, it’s the vegans. At least they’re making attempts to change, unlike the rest of us.
Plankton have animals in it though.
So they only use algae-only oil. Still doesn’t change the point.
Where do you buy algae only oil?
Depends on whether you’re talking about oil/gas or coal. The former is dead marine fauna (edit: and flora), the latter is dead terrestrial flora.
Coal is from woody (containing lignin) plants. I think oil/gas is from algal mats.
Oh yes good point. I guess flora and fauna are confusing terms in this context. Wiki talks of zooplankton and algae.
(The “zooplankton part” might still be relevant to the original post.)
I drive an EV and my electricity’s 100% renewable.
Your move. :)
Any plastic in that EV?
Probably? I dunno.
The plastic (including polyester fabrics) in your car was most likely derived from petroleum. The car parts were most likely shipped around during manufacturing using combustion engine vehicles. The energy to cast those car parts, probably some of it comes from non renewables. The labour to build the car almost surely comes from other people who consume gas (for example to drive to the EV factory)
That “100%” renewable energy? The installation and maintenance of it was/is almost certainly done with large industrial equipment and vehicles burning fossil fuels. (Similar issue with production of parts).
Look, I’m not saying you aren’t making positive choices by choosing renewable options. What I am saying is, while they are more renewable, they aren’t truly 100% renewable when you factor everything involved in it. Fossil fuels are so pervasive in society, it’s virtually impossible to both function in a modern society and not contribute to the consumption of fossil fuels.
Ugh.
Well, at least I can say I didn’t buy new.
Is the food you eat farmed with tractors and transported in semis?
Are people not allowed to better themselves in your world without 100% total perfection? It’s about doing our best in the world we live in, man. It seems like you’re committed to misunderstanding that, sadly.
Context: am not a vegan, but I strongly believe that perfection is the enemy of progress. Moreover, attitudes like this conveniently excuse folks from doing anything to better themselves or the world around them because “it’s hopeless” or “nothing I do will change anything”.
I’m a believer in harm reduction and the lesser of two evils that’s why I vote democrat.
I didn’t know this post was made by satan.
You seem like a generally reasonable dude, hopefully you will be able to learn how your misconceptions about veganism and eating meat are just that: misconceptions.
Vegan? Probably. But it is 100% Organic.
Actually 🤓, the refining process for many fossil fuel products requires the use of inorganic chemicals AND are proven to be hazardous to human health meaning they can’t even fit the US “Organic” certification. (Though I suppose the oil industry has enough money to
bribelobby the regulators)Now if you meant “organic” strictly as in “the final product is a purely hydrocarbon compound” then you’re correct, assuming you’ve entirely distilled out any metals or other inorganic compounds of course.
