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For the love of god reblog this to be a decent member of society
Month: September 2017
a question for vegans
this isn’t a ‘gotcha’, i am genuinely curious: how do y’all feel about animal products – specifically fibers – that are harvested without cost to the animal?
for instance, fibers like bison and qiviut, which the animals shed annually, and which is obtained by combing. they enjoy being combed, since shedding is itchy. there are also a number of suppliers who don’t even interact with bison to get their wool, but harvest it off fences after the animals shed. i’m also thinking of ‘peace silk’, made from used cocoons after the moths leave them.
assuming these no-cruelty systems are working as expected and the animals suffer no discomfort, would you feel comfortable wearing that fiber?
Assuming that there is some kind of absolute certainty that the animals are treated perfectly well, and there is no system surrounding the whole issue that relies on harming them in any way (including e.g. painful dehorning, husbandry practices relying on fear, or the killing of calves deemed superfluous), I might be comfortable with that.
That’s a pretty big assumption, though. In theory, eggs, milk and wool can also be harvested without cost to the animal, and wool is almost exactly what you’re talking about (shearing might not be pleasant by itself, but reward-based training could easily make it so for the sheep, and facing summer heat without lots of wool is definitely in the sheep’s best interest), but a competitive industry based on wool just created sheep who need to have patches of their skin removed for health reasons (and which does that without anesthesia of any kind, for cost reasons).
you’ve pretty much hit on my reason for asking, i think – i’ve been wondering whether most vegans are focused on the practical fact of whether the specific animal is being harmed, or whether it’s more abstract and philosophical, like keeping kosher/halal.
do you think, then, that i could reasonably extrapolate you don’t object to semi-pet type livestock keeping? the family cow, or a pair of chickens in the backyard, or a pet angora goat. that kind of thing.
(again, i’m not sneaking up on some kind of ‘aha’ here. i know folks on this site like to mess with vegans but i’m genuinely trying to understand the parameters of your regular, everyday, non-fringey vegan. i think people focus too much on laughing at outliers and miss where reasonable people are coming from.)
the general gist of responses so far seems to be that yeah, if they know the animal isn’t being harmed, folks are okay with animal fibers.
Glad to hear I was helpful 🙂 I don’t know how representative of most vegans I am, but that’s what multiple data points are for.
I’m not sure where you draw the line between practical and philosophical – aren’t ethics always philosophical?
As for comparing it to kosher/halal, there is a certain purity aspect to how my brain approaches the topic: non-vegan food just gets put into the category Gross And Not Food. I’m not sure I could ever actually eat eggs, even from vegan-kept chickens, and I can’t make myself eat ethically neutral non-vegan food like dumpstered or gifted food. (This response is equally strong for wearing fur and leather, but very weak for wool, so maybe this is more about the nature of the animal product in question than about the distinction between animal and plant matter.)
This is not in line with my ethics, though, just an emotional response. It’s mostly pretty useful in my day-to-day life, since it means being vegan takes zero effort. (Not eating a Gross Non-Food doesn’t exactly take willpower.)
Regarding semi-pet animals traditionally considered livestock, it probably depends on what exactly you mean by objecting. I mean, given the usual current practices in factory farming, pretty much anything is an improvement, and glaring at a family keeping a few chickens would be pretty ridiculous and counterproductive.
I might have some ethical or philosophical issues with it, some of them rather practical, some philosophical, and some sort of both.
Cows and goats are social animals and should probably not be kept alone (I know chickens have a maximum number, but don’t know if there’s a minimum – that doesn’t usually come up), and if cows/goats are milked, they need to give birth every now and then and I strongly suspect I would not like what happens to their young. (The same goes for potential chicken offspring.)
Slightly less immediate: where did they get the animals in question (a breeder? other backyard/hobby farmers?), what do they intend to do with them once they get old, do they intend to get new ones and if so, where?
On a very abstract societal level, I don’t think animals should even be considered something that can be bought and kept rather than somebody who can be lived with and taken care of. And I think this is where I get pretty fringey compared to mainstream society and possibly also compared to vegans – I think most people don’t really agree with factory farms keeping animals in horrible conditions, but few really think of them as somebody.
I don’t have issues with the concept of captivity itself, and I think anybody who believes chickens would prefer to ditch a warm, safe coop with plenty of food year-round for a cold scary forest and hunger has distorted ideas of freedom, but I think the framing of animals as a category of things (pets or livestock) doesn’t value their happiness and autonomy enough. Even with cats and dogs, there’s a million pictures of smiling people hugging dogs whose body language shows distress, and videos of people intentionally scaring cats with cucumbers, and plenty of other examples of animals in distress that people find super cute and funny. Most of those people probably feel love towards the animals in question and would claim to take good care of and value them, but somehow they still don’t bother to learn and respect basic body language, or fully believe that being scared or distressed is a bad thing.
Cows might actually have it better in some of those respects, if only because they’re bigger and typically less trained not to harm people, but even comparatively good keepers often don’t really consider that e.g. tying a cow up overnight severely restricts its range of movement, or that the cow being able to choose rather freely where to go (think open stable) is an inherently good thing. So I might have a bunch of nitpicks regarding family-kept cows based on those abstract philosophical values.
(Oh whoops, this got long. Hopefully it’s equally as interesting.)
a question for vegans
this isn’t a ‘gotcha’, i am genuinely curious: how do y’all feel about animal products – specifically fibers – that are harvested without cost to the animal?
for instance, fibers like bison and qiviut, which the animals shed annually, and which is obtained by combing. they enjoy being combed, since shedding is itchy. there are also a number of suppliers who don’t even interact with bison to get their wool, but harvest it off fences after the animals shed. i’m also thinking of ‘peace silk’, made from used cocoons after the moths leave them.
assuming these no-cruelty systems are working as expected and the animals suffer no discomfort, would you feel comfortable wearing that fiber?
Assuming that there is some kind of absolute certainty that the animals are treated perfectly well, and there is no system surrounding the whole issue that relies on harming them in any way (including e.g. painful dehorning, husbandry practices relying on fear, or the killing of calves deemed superfluous), I might be comfortable with that.
That’s a pretty big assumption, though. In theory, eggs, milk and wool can also be harvested without cost to the animal, and wool is almost exactly what you’re talking about (shearing might not be pleasant by itself, but reward-based training could easily make it so for the sheep, and facing summer heat without lots of wool is definitely in the sheep’s best interest), but a competitive industry based on wool just created sheep who need to have patches of their skin removed for health reasons (and which does that without anesthesia of any kind, for cost reasons).
all right guys here it is THE BIG GAY ANIMAL SEX POST
or in other words, “Why Nonhuman Homosexual and Asexual Behavior has both Survival and Reproductive Benefits” aka that lit review i’d like to write if i could ever be arsed to get around to it
yes reproductive benefits you heard correctly we’re gonna get there but first we better do a basic rundown of what I mean by homosexual/asexual behaviors
IRREVERENT DISCUSSION OF ANIMAL SEX BEHIND CUT YOU’VE BEEN WARNED
This is not going to be fully coherent.
I consider myself a leftist, a democratic socialist. Nevertheless, sometimes other leftists express opinions that make me afraid, and then tell me that being afraid proves that I’m the enemy.
I’m not a radical pacifist. I do think that sometimes, violence is a useful tool. But when people post violent rhetoric, I often find it disquieting, because I don’t know how to read it, where to place it. Is it literal or is it a metaphor? Is it venting or is it policy? Is it a joke or is it deadly serious? Am I dumb for not getting it, or do they deliberately bank on plausible deniability? I mean I’m well used to the fact that for some people, revolution means ‘working hard for incremental but all-encompassing social change’, for others it means ‘violently toppling the state’ and yet for others it means ‘sitting on our asses talking big.’ But I still cannot tell, when someone makes a violent statement, whether they mean ‘I’ve thought about it and I’m ready and willing to do this violence for my cause, I’m willing to live with the collateral damage, I’m going to make this sacrifice’ or ‘I haven’t thought about it.’
And I know I don’t have a right to other people’s past, to other people’s stories – but without that, I’ve got no context. Does this person talk like they’ve got nothing to lose because they’ve got nothing to lose, or because they’re so privileged that it never occurred to them that they could lose the things they have? Is this person so blasé about violence because they’ve suffered violence, and now they walk into a violent situation with their eyes open, or because they’ve never suffered violence, and have no clue how much a single puny punch can fuck you up? (Note: in all the online debates I’ve seen on the topic, people were called cowards for being unwilling to punch, but nobody was called a coward for being afraid of being brutalized by the police. The topic of avoiding protests, or avoiding escalation out of fear for one’s safety was never brought up – is it taboo?)
I’m thinking about this because I’m upset. I’m upset because I’ve seen a post mocking liberals: a supposed liberal cry-types an incoherent complaint – ‘what if a thrown brick hits me when I’m drinking my latte in a Starbucks?’ And to an extent, I get the point: if a big protest for a good cause ends up resulting in some minor property damage, (especially the property of a wealthy corporation that can easily fix it), that doesn’t discredit the protest, and attempts to discredit the cause with such details are despicable. But: the idea of a brick being thrown through a window scares me. And sure – maybe I’m the enemy and I deserve that fear. The thing that bothers me is the uncertainty: does OP know fear and make a deliberate statement that it is my turn to be afraid, or does OP not know fear and assume when people show fear they are manipulative and acting in bad faith? (Has OP ever been on the wrong side of a mob yelling slurs.)
The funny thing is, the moment I read that stupid one-line post, I thought something, but I didn’t know what it was. A brick being thrown through a windowpane, shards of broken glass everywhere, the crash and that long drawn-out moment of silence, and we are bad and we deserve to be afraid, but at the same time, our fear is obviously a deceptive, self-serving lie. I walked home, and twenty minutes later, in front of the Aldi, I remembered that the word I was looking for is ‘pogrom.’
Yeah.
MHO, the problem is not “the wrong people are afraid”, it’s “fear”. I don’t think torture and suffering magically become good if we just point them at the people who are Bad and Deserve That, because I’ve spent so much of my time surrounded by people who are on someone’s list of people who are Bad and Deserve That.
i made a resolution to stay away from punching discourse because it’s so very emotional for everyone involved, but i’m breaking it for just this one post, because the brick-through-the-window image did exactly that same thing to me, even secondhand.
like, it was clearly phrased to bring to mind the image of someone who ‘deserves’ to get hit by a brick. and i could try to get around that by saying, well, imagine it’s a nice little old lady. imagine it’s a nice little old muslim lady drinking coffee while her tiny granddaughter eats a cookie. you think nice little old ladies don’t sit in starbucks by the window? but that’s missing the point. the point is that ‘more blood’ is a really shitty problem solving method.
so instead let’s go ahead with the image the brick-flinger wants us to visualize. a blond soccer mom named becky. so privileged in every other way that being female doesn’t count and prog bloggers can use female-coded insults without getting called on it. she’s wearing pastels. she’s surrounded by shopping bags. she voted for trump. she was mean to the barista. she didn’t even tip. she’s everything you’re sick to death of and she has everything you’ve been denied.
the brick sails through the window. broken glass, shock, screams. becky is confused, disoriented. there’s broken glass in her latte and she’s trying to figure out what to do about that but her brain doesn’t seem to be working right and she’s pretty sure she didn’t order raspberry syrup? she tries to stand up and falls over instead. something’s wrong.
the barista she was mean to is squatting by her side talking in reassuring tones. she can’t make out the words. she tries to talk and it comes out all wrong. eventually she understands that someone called 911 and she is to lie still. there’s blood on her brand new sweater. she’s crying about that, it’s just about the sweater, it’s definitely not because when she tries to tell the barista that someone has to call her son and tell him why mommy is late picking him up for school, all that comes out is heavy burtation. it’s not that, because if she thinks about that she’ll panic, and the barista is telling her to stay calm.
paramedics come. they’re shining lights in her eyes and asking questions, and then she’s in an ambulance, and time is all wrong, and she’s scared. she’s so scared. she thinks about when she last called her mother. did she say something nice? was the last thing she said to her mother nice? she can’t remember.
rather than write another thousand words about her hospital adventure and the reaction of her family, i’ll just be nice and say it was only a concussion and a scalp wound, and she’ll be okay. let’s not be melodramatic here. a brick probably doesn’t have enough force to kill after breaking a thick store window. the point is that it isn’t trivial, it isn’t funny, and even a person who represents everything you hate is a flesh and blood human being.
hell, even if i’d written her as a genuinely hateful person with no little kid waiting for her at school, even if she ‘deserved’ to be hurt, whoever threw the brick didn’t know that. they could’ve hit a baby. they didn’t care.
so i guess what i want to say to the people who make posts like the brick post is: are you ok with being the kind of person who throws a brick, not knowing who it’ll hit?
my position is, and will always be: wrong actions are wrong no matter who you do them to. the executioner is a killer no matter how guilty the heads he chops off. i’ve renounced violence, not because i excuse others’ wrongs, but because i choose not to be a violent man.
If happiness is morally good does that mean I am doing evil by not being happy?
My morality is good for saying “this world is better than that world” and bad for saying “this action is evil”. This is by design – I am interested in how to make good worlds but I am not very interested in calling people or actions evil. A world where you are happy is better than a world where you are sad. If there is a straightforward action to take to get there, go ahead and take it. If instead, as I suspect, there is no straightforward path to ‘happy’ but there is a straightforward path to ‘hating yourself for not being happy’, do not take that one.
Also: If you find yourself thinking “There is a straightforward path to being happy but I keep not taking it for some reason, probably because I’m a terrible person,” you are almost certainly wrong on both counts.
I just saw a trans exclusionary radfem call getting hrt “biohacking” holy shit
hey I need to leave work early today I’m getting BIOHACKED. need my weekly UPDATE to the new SYSTEM.
me, getting my dose of testosterone right into my asscheek: IM IN
Your mind is software.
PROGRAM IT.
Your body is a shell.
CHANGE IT.
Death is a disease.
CURE IT.
Extinction is approaching.
FIGHT IT.
– Eclipse Phase
welp, I guess I’ll have to bleg soon
I’m in a moderately precarious life situation and currently out of a job after 10 months on a very modest wage, while simultaneously trying to
1. unfuck my welfare/bureaucracy situation so that I at long last get anything at all from the system, for instance a housing subsidy and 500/mo in benefits (not even going to approach gender marker change until all that shit is squared away),
2. help a family member who’s themselves going through precarious times + some inadvertent administrative & living complications due to my presence near them (something neither of us foresaw due to inexperience with life here and no-one to walk either of us through it),
3. get on with actually systemically learning programming and studying for some kind of developer work (currently doing a CS101 online course to refresh and systematize knowledge first, then I want to decide on a quality paid one).I have some paltry savings, am still waiting on collecting severance pay for my work, as an absolute last resort my parents would bail me out, but I want to beg them as little as possible because that will come at the cost of their increased contact with me and sticking their noses into a life that they don’t really understand or accept. Yes, I know I’m a rather pathetic stereotype of a millennial.
Whew, point is: once I stave off some immediate bureaucracy crap next week, I’ll verify and unlock my paypal account, and then beg y’all to maybe donate a little for my survival expenses such as housing while I’m trying to claw my way further up.
Making this post now to give y’all a bit of a heads up + to get this off my chest. It’s viscerally draining to pretend that I’m OK while I’m kind of suspended over this uncertain future and not knowing when I might next be on solid ground.
(I will reblog this with a link once I’m able to actually receive money + get a better evaluation of near-term financial outlook.)Bonus 1: in the unlikely event that someone reading this has reasonable experience with the Finnish welfare system and can advise on maneuvering within it.
Bonus 2: I am reasonably fluent in English and can write, idk, anything except fiction; the last time I was hired, it was in large part due to my good command of writing, even though I ended up doing mostly one-on-one communication rather than creating content. In the unlikely event that someone wanted to pay me for some shit like that in the near future – I don’t know, summarize and annotate a book, whatever – I’d be happy to consider it.
(if you don’t know me; I’m a transgender refugee from Russia, moderately screwed in the head. I have this blog, full of shitposts and low effort. A year ago I took a step into the unknown so that I could safely come out irl + transition, and since have been living in a foreign country where I don’t even speak the language. Luck, desperation and the charity of friends & strangers have somehow carried me this far. Really really trying to stand on my own two feet for a change here.)
UPDATE:
– housing and groceries situation mostly stabilized, me and my life partner will be able to finally pick a long-term rental very soon.
– that’s literally it; can barely survive (assuming nothing goes wrong with housing subsidies and unemployment allowance for now) but as things stand I’m unemployed and in poverty, facing a language barrier and a huge welfare cliff to Just Getting A Job. I’d be exceptionally grateful for donations to help with basic living needs. Every cent helps.
– if you enjoy my blogging, well… having things to eat other than rice and beans, and a can of beer, and not fretting about unpredictable costly incidents really help me make effortposts and/or shitposts, you know?
– mine and my partner’s long-term plans seem to point towards running a business of some kind together. They can draw and craft and speak the language, I can do writing and coding… and potentially modelling, which I’d love to look into. Stay tuned! (Speaking of coding, my immediate plans are to go ahead studying programming and web dev specifically; that’ll be helpful either way.)
– here’s my PayPal, any assistance is thoroughly appreciated and will be put to sensible use: https://www.paypal.me/EstherFiddler
Update 2:
Everything, everything, literally everything has been going wrong with welfare. All because I’ve been trying to fend for myself by working remotely! The system is apparently unaware that it’s even a thing, so they were counting it the same as physically being in another EU country, and thus not eligible for literally anything in Finland. I updated their office re: my employment being over as of early September – registering as a job seeker and all – but the bureaucracy here will need to update my info all over again, it seems. And that’ll take an UNKNOWN FUCKING LENGTH OF TIME to process yet.
My social worker has advised me and my partner to apply for (urgent) basic assistance money – to at least cover rent – which *might* work, but there’s zero certainty.
I’m exhausted, dispirited, on my last legs, and my partner has been unintentionally dragged into this whole fucking mess too, being registered as cohabiting with me – which they’re kind and understanding about, but also near breaking point just generally. I have about enough money to survive October, and that’s it. At this rate I’m uncertain if even my November housing subsidy will happen, I need some more breathing room to unfuck this mess.
Right now I’m filing for basic social assistance, as it’s ostensibly done more swiftly – and separately from the general unemployment/subsidy mess, and foreigners are eligible if they’re a citizen’s family. Then again, the welfare office might decline it on a whim – seeing that I had paid for some obscene luxury… like plane tickets to visit my parents, a room to temporarily stay over in (my partner is disabled, they’ve been stuck in a tiny apartment, they needed more space of their own but couldn’t get any for months), etc. Who the hell knows. I’ll take a shot at this, but I’m still afraid.
If that’s doable for you, please help me get some breathing room. I really don’t want to go back to Russia and stay closeted and have my transphobic parents pretend that everything is perfectly OK; I can only get any assistance from them if I’m ~independent~, and that’s difficult.
Y’all had already helped me; I paid some of it forward when things were looking up for me. Now I need to stabilize this whole mess – moving houses, getting something out of the fucking welfare system, having enough peace to study and then get more skilled work. I can make it happen – but assistance would be really, really good. Thank you! ❤
The Shape of Water (2017) dir. Guillermo del Toro
The literally silent women protagonist leaves a super bad taste in my mouth.
She’s deaf and speaks with sign language, she’s not a silent woman. Like, can we agree that deaf representation in media is important? Can we agree that ASL representation in media is important? This is an adult-oriented romance/sci-fi movie where the female lead is a deaf woman. How can you act like this isn’t significant? The last gif has a deaf woman in the 60s standing up to an aggressive man and telling him to go fuck himself.
This movie is doing something that has probably never been done before. But hey, she can’t talk “normally” like a hearing woman and that’s bad, so go off I guess.
She’s NOT deaf, she’s mute. They say so in one of the trailers.
Omphaloskeptomai 