I notice this with people talking about capitalism, obviously, but honestly what drove me to make this post is the attempted arguments against veganism. They’re basically 95% unoriginal and fail under the most basic of scrutiny.
Take, for example, “not eating the meat won’t bring the cow back.” Under basically any logical scrutiny, this is a clear double standard to any other purchasing decision in capitalist society, and doesn’t really make any sense. But I’ve seen in so many times over the years, so much so that im planning on becoming a vegan over a period of time. Not because of any arguments vegans make, but because somehow pro-meat eaters are losing a debate to a brick wall, and the conclusions I’ve made myself have convinced myself that I should be vegan. And I’m really starting to ask, do people just…like…ctrl+c ctrl+v arguments in their head?
I…try to be nice. But…how little respect to your own ability do you have if you do that? Not only to justify something you really don’t have to, but something you obviously dont care about. I mean…sorry, it’s just baffling to me.
In the words of Kim Kitsuragi from disco elysium, “I dont understand officer…please, help me understand”
I have had so many arguments where I argued a common sense point and a trot or other revisionist argued i was wrong until I quoted Lenin. They care more about whoever is saying it rather than the argument itself.
Reason usually flows from emotion and not the other way around. By this I mean people without noticing themselves construct reasons for whatever they feel is true. It is why changing minds is so hard as you need to avoid invocking an emotional response. You’ll notice often when people do change on a subject it is due to some personal experience and not research. Veganism can be construede as a moral failure of the person who is not if it comes from a point of animal liberation or welfare.
Logic generally isn’t enough to convince people to become vegan because it’s contending with other mental forces much more powerful than logic. The force of habit. The unwillingness to accept you’ve been doing things wrong. The fear of potential conflicts, judgement, or awkwardness, of potentially becoming part of an outgroup. Just one of those is difficult to overcome, but with all of them all at once, it can become insurmountable for a lot of people.
This is what I realized like the week after going vegan - that every reason and justification that had previously held me back was just an incredibly flimsy excuse. Like, when I made the decision it felt tough with some reasonable points both ways, veganism being just a bit more compelling, enough to try it out - but once I took the plunge and the arguments no longer had those psychological forces behind them, it become abundantly clear how idiotic they were, and how foolish I had been to let them hold me back.
Meat eaters employ bad arguments because there are no good arguments, and their minds desperately want to find some argument that can hold enough water to push it aside and thing about something else as quickly as possible, to eliminate the threat the question poses to the psyche.
I think yourveganfallacyis.com has an exhaustive collection of antivegan arguments. I don’t think I have seen a different argument made.
The factory farming industry has an impact on the working class too. https://www.animalagricultureclimatechange.org/the-life-of-a-slaughterhouse-worker/
I wish more comrades were consistent and applied “No investigation, no right to speak” when it comes to veganism.
Too many people feel comfortable commenting on and criticising veganism and vegan movements when they don’t know what veganism even is (one tell-tale sign is if they compare veganism and vegetarianism, even though they’re not related concepts in the slightest).
For people reading this who have not experienced being on the receiving side of this, just imagine an endless barrage of “gommunism 100 trillion killed, no iphone, vuvuzela” and having to explain for the 1200th time that no, personal property and private property are not the same thing, no one is coming for your toothbrush.
I avoid the topic as much as I can online because, in my experience at least with this topic, conversations over text are rarely productive.
People collect arguments like they do Magic cards and deploy them whenever they want to pick a fight. The validity of the argument is in how it morally justifies the worldview of the debatelord, not in actual material reality.
Dude, comparing it to Magic is perfect. That’s exactly what it is.
Yep, it’s even funnier when you see the same quips, and think of them as being “common, uncommon, rare, legendary, etc.”
Most arguments are only designed to persuade oneself. And who wants to grapple with the cruelty of meat?
I used to be a vegetarian. I went years without eating any meat whatsoever, and did so on moral grounds. I caved, and the reasons were not any of the typical excuses offered by carnists. Simply put, not eating meat alienated me from others. I was made to conceive of them as villainous by my abstention from that same evil. I still don’t think it’s right to kill animals for meat, but I eat chicken just so I don’t have to deal with thinking of my coworkers and friends as bad people for also doing so.
Not sure if that gives any insight, but maybe it will.
It’s the illusory truth effect. A lie repeated over and over again becomes a truth to many.
Yes.
Before I start, I will just say I am not opposed to being vegetarian or vegan, but am speaking to larger arguments about capitalism and how things are laid out. I think it’s good to be vegetarian or vegan if you can.
Take, for example, “not eating the meat won’t bring the cow back.” Under basically any logical scrutiny, this is a clear double standard to any other purchasing decision in capitalist society, and doesn’t really make any sense.
I don’t understand what is wrong with this argument as compared to other purchasing decisions in capitalist society. You can choose the boycott route, yes, and if enough people do, it might make an impact, but you aren’t going to change the whole system by not consuming a particular product, or not buying from a particular retailer or the like. In particular, individualist choices that have no organization behind them mean little other than massaging one’s personal conscience (it’s like the “vote with your wallet” stuff that comes from rightist libertarian argumentation). Organized boycotts are more where you’ll see real impact, though obviously better is actual regulation and systemic change.
That said, I think it’s commendable to try to live ethically, even when it’s treading water in an unethical system, but I also think it’s understandable when some people struggle to do so in every way, against the inertia of the system and within the options they have available to them.
As an example of how annoying it can be (and this isn’t even ethics, it’s just health), I try to live gluten-free cause while I’m not celiac, I do have some digestive issues with gluten. But it limits what I can eat quite a lot, unless I can include stuff that is substitute. And if it’s a substitute, it’s almost certainly going to cost more because it’s normally a glutinous food. Now add onto this a prospect like trying to eat vegetarian or vegan. That can run into the same kind of issues. We could say like “get over it and figure out how to do it anyway” but that starts to get into idealistic striving, where it’s all about overcoming as an individual.
There are limits to this kind of perspective on things, but in general, I would say there’s a significant difference between someone who is directly performing/instigating an unethical act (ex: landlords) and someone who is distantly reaping the benefits of it, who never asked for it to happen, and who has no control over whether it happens in the first place. If we count the 2nd one as inexcusable, then probably most people in the world should be considered horrible people for what they consume that has, at one stage of production and distribution or another, some links to imperialist and/or capitalist exploitation.
The argument doesn’t make sense because it treats the situation like it’s in a vacuum: there’s a dead cow, might as well eat it.
This ignores reality. That cow was slaughtered to meet the demand for meat. By choosing to purchase meat you are responsible for that demand and so farmers will continue breeding cows for slaughter.
Less people buying meat = less cows being bred and slaughtered.
My problem with this thinking is enough people need to be vegan in a given community for the killing of animals to be reduced. Until enough people become vegan the killed animals would go in the trash. (For example) I believe coffee harvesting is unethical but I still consume coffee because I know my boycott efforts wont even be noticed by the bourgeois let alone lead to less slavery. What I know will make a difference is a socialist revolution which will hopefully eventually put an end to slavery. As long as there is capitalism the meat industry will live on and so will the supposed meat eater propaganda.
“I’m just one person so I won’t make difference” - 1 billion people who could be making a difference.
Also I already said that without an organised boycotting effort no change can be done. Veganism is not very organised. For example in my small (very conservative) city if I were to go vegan I’d be the only one. The suppliers would not notice me not eating a dozen eggs and a few kilos of chicken/meat every month.
Organising, creating strategic campaigns, and creating communities is a crucial part of the vegan movement. What makes you believe that veganism and the animal rights movement is not organised?
There are many international activism organisations doing coordinated work. This ranges from on-street activism, education about health, sustainability and cooking, lobbying, organising protests (including protests against fur-farming which successfully outlawed it in multiple countries), various forms of agitation, working to improve accessibility of affordable vegan products, providing funding for new groups, and working intersectionally with feminist, queer, environmentalist groups, etc.
Here are some examples of bigger organisations/groups:
Veganuary: International campaign based around a 1-month ‘challenge’. (25 million people took part in 2024, 27% of which stayed vegan afterwards, most others at least cut down by half).
We The Free: International activism organisation that has over 180 chapters in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
Vegan Hacktivists: Volunteer group of professional developers, designers, etc. working with and helping many animal rights and vegan organisations for free.
Animal Rights Map: Map that shows the location of animal rights groups around the world.
ProVeg International: Organisation mainly focused on industry, business, lobbying, vegan products, etc., but they also provide grants and funding for activist organisations and even small local groups.There are also many activists who give talks in schools and universities, and more recently there has been an explosive surge in university campaigns that aim (and many have already succeeded) in making university cafeteria’s plant-based, and other groups working on anti animal testing campaigns.
Plant-Based Universities: Extremely well-organised, very successful, focused on systemic change in the food system.
Allied Scholars for Animal Protection: More focused on education, agitation, research, and community. Mostly US-based, also supports campaigns in India.Of course, like any sort of progressive movement, it’s not likely that you’d find many existing groups in a “small very conservative” city. This does not mean that we should not try to organise and build up a community in these places. I was personally surprised to meet two people who have started successful activism groups and vegan communities in two quite rural, small, and very conservative towns.
Most vegans are very aware of the importance of community because it could feel quite isolating being the only vegan in your family or friend group. This is why almost every organisation/local group/chapter regularly hosts social events and tries to build up a welcoming and safe community for its members.Also similar to other progressive movements, most of what you will come across will be in the global north, but that doesn’t mean that the movement doesn’t exist or is entirely irrelevant in the global south.
For example: there is an especially growing vegan movement in India, and recently China has started to have an organised movement as well. Many western organisations, such as some of the ones I linked above, also have active campaigns and independent local groups in the global south.
Middle East Vegan Society: Vegan advocacy, education, lobbying, certification in the Middle East and North Africa.
China Vegan Society: Vegan advocacy in China, yearly summit, community events, and provides two forms vegan labelling and certification to suit the conditions in China.You can criticise many aspects of these organisations, campaigns, etc. because most of them are of course led by libs and anarchists, but that’s not ground to dismiss the movement as a whole or veganism in and of itself. A lot of groups have marxist members and you’ll probably find some small local ones run by MLs. There aren’t many explicitly marxist vegan orgs, but I did find one in Germany and Switzerland. Here’s the English “about us” page: https://mutb.org/international/about-us
I’ll leave it at that for now because this comment is getting too long, but please feel free to ask about anything and I’ll be happy to elaborate.
Also I already said that without an organised boycotting effort no change can be done.
Going vegan is a boycott lmao
If I were to go vegan I’d be the only one.
Same argument as before “I’m one person I can’t make a difference” - 1 billion people not making a difference.
Yeah the fact that its a boycot is the problem. Its liberal individualist thinking.
Same argument as before “I’m one person I can’t make a difference” - 1 billion people not making a difference Oh god i thought this site was lib free but here we are. No i am not voting with my pocket. Yes i will not even be noticed it i were to boycot nor will the 60-70 muslim grammas ever change their mind even if the best vegan debatebro talked at them for hours
Also I already said that without an organised boycotting effort no change can be done.
Yeah the fact that its a boycot is the problem. Its liberal individualist thinking.
Yeah try getting 1 billion people to go vegan. The argument you are making is literally a libertarian “vote with your money” type of wrong.
Your argument is literally “1 billion people won’t go vegan overnight, so why should I?”
This is effectively the rightist libertarian “vote with your wallet” argument though. It is based on the belief that market forces are moved entirely by the magic of supply and demand, and so the idea is that issues in society will simply be fixed by people changing what it is they demand in the market.
The reality does not operate like this. In practice, one of the most common capitalist practices is to invent a problem and then try to sell people the solution. With that practice, it doesn’t matter whether you wanted the product because the point is they’re going to try to find a way to change reality so that you want and/or need the product they want to sell; either change your beliefs about the world so that you’ll buy, or change your actual material realities so that you are more dependent on it. An example of this in practice is cars in the US. Surely a lot of people would love high speed trains across the country, like China has. But they don’t get the option. The car industry and the fossil fuel industry ensures that they don’t have that choice. Robust public transit would easily outcompete the horrible experience that is gridlock traffic and preventable accidents. And as long as the alternative is not an option, people can’t just go, “Fuck cars, I’m going to take the train.” In some areas, there just isn’t an alternative. What little public transit there is, is not feasible without an obscenely long trip, if it’s feasible at all. Alternatives like bikes are not feasible if the distance is too geographically big. If everyone in the US stopped using cars tomorrow, the industry would not stop producing cars. What would happen is society would shut down because a huge amount of it is dependent on cars.
At a glance, this sort of thing can sound like moral excuses, but it is how capitalism works. It forces you to have culpability in one perspective and look like excuses in another. No one is getting out of it with a clean conscience if you want to moralize about it badly enough. But moralizing about it on an individual level has yet to fix the problems and there is no reason to think it will start doing it. I am not exactly an expert on dialectics, but I feel pretty confident in saying that while moral shaming can at times play a part in the component of dialectics where we influence the world, you won’t change the world on that alone. You have to take into account what people’s material realities are and address them.
I think a much more useful thing to do in the face of someone saying, “not eating the meat won’t bring the cow back” is to ask what it is about not eating meat that gives them pause. Do they just really like the taste? Is it hard to change their diet? Are there traditional foods they eat and a sense of culture tied up in it? Rather than focusing purely on the argument as sound or unsound. And perhaps more importantly, what is it going to accomplish getting them to go vegan? Just harm reduction for the time being? What is the broader strategy toward dismantling factory farming as a practice?
People do have that option though. It’s not cars vs non-existent rail transport. It’s meat vs beans.
If everyone stopped eating meat, cows wouldn’t be farmed for meat.
The fact that now supermarkets have entire vegan sections or vegan variants of non-vegan products is proof of a deman for vegan products. People that could be spending money of meat, are spending on vegan alternatives instead.
So you’re just going to ignore the part about the importance of political power and organizing, huh. Fascinating.
No lol
So my takeaway is you don’t care about ending factory farming, you just want to argue about abstractions.
No lol
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I’m trying really hard not to say something rude right now. Maybe I need to just step away. Because it is infuriating to see someone try to compare genocide and settler colonialism to factory farming of animals. Like can you just not trivialize an ongoing genocide by comparing it to factory farming. It does the opposite of what you seem to be intending. It makes vegans look ridiculous.
They’re just pointing out the underlying logic behind the argument, and how applying that logic to other situations produces absurd conclusions. At no point did he claim the two were equivalent. In fact the whole point of the comparison is that the settler-colonialism is indisputably bad.
Let me make a similar argument to demonstrate. When I was in school, sometimes certain teachers employed or threatened collective punishment, if one person did something wrong, and no one confessed, then the whole class would be punished. Collective punishment is pretty awful and unjustifiable as a concept, like, the exact same logic behind it has been used to justify a lot of terrible war crimes, it was even used during the Holocaust, and it is explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
Now obviously, whatever punishment my class had to deal with in school is in no way comparable to the Holocaust. I don’t think it would be fair of you to get angry at me for “comparing” the two, because my point wasn’t that the scope of harm was the same, only that if we can clearly recognize that collective punishment is a horrible war crime when the stakes are high, then we’re left wondering why, in this other situation with lower stakes, would it suddenly become valid?
Likewise, we can see in the high-stakes context of settler-colonialism that if someone says, “Yes, it was bad to kick the Palestinians out of their homes, but now that it’s done I might as well move in” that logic is obviously not valid. Why then, does the logic suddenly become valid when it’s applied to the lower-stakes situation of someone saying, “Yes, it was bad to kill this animal, but since it’s already dead, I might as well eat it?”
What part of that reasoning do you take issue with? What part of that “makes vegans look ridiculous” or makes you want to say something rude?
With all due respect, you only feel that comparisons between factory farming and genocide of humans are disrespectful because you do not have respect for the other living, thinking, feeling creatures we share this Earth with. You might benefit from listening to vegan survivors of genocide, such as Alex Hershaft, a survivor of the Holocaust. He directly compares factory farms to the horrific genocide he narrowly escaped.
With all due respect,
proceeds to say something extremely disrespectful
But correct. How much more respectfully can someone point out your speciesism which is necessary for you to continue your role in the animal holocaust?
What exactly do you hope to accomplish with nonsense like this.
That you realise that booty is disagreeing as respectfully as possible, but that your material interests have you interpreting it as a personal attack.
It seems you believe it is disrespectful to have a different opinion at all.
because you do not have respect for the other living, thinking, feeling creatures we share this Earth with
This is what you said about me almost immediately after saying “with all due respect”. Based on absolutely nothing. Make up your mind. If you want to be disrespectful, just do it, don’t pretend you’re being “nice.”
Based on absolutely nothing.
Well, no, this is based on your outrage at vegans pointing out the horrific crimes we commit against our fellow inhabitants of the world. If you had respect for cows, or pigs, or chickens, of which we murder such incredible numbers that it is difficult even to wrap our heads around the scale of the horror in question, you would fully understand why it is appropriate and reasonable to compare their plight to other genocides that we all recognize.
If you want to be disrespectful, just do it, don’t pretend you’re being “nice.”
I’m not being disrespectful, I’m just disagreeing with you. If you can’t handle disagreement, reconsider posting on a public forum.
it’s insane how you’re getting hit with downvotes.
I am somewhat lost yeah. If you replace factory farming with all kinds of forms of capitalist exploitation that happen to human beings, people are in my experience usually fine with the kind of position I put forth, but when it’s factory farming, it’s being compared to genocide.
The ultimate conclusion of the implication that factory farming is anywhere near equivalent to genocide would be that veganism is at best the liberal position and we should be doing everything we can to stop factory farming in its tracks with organization. Maybe I’m just not tuned into vegan ideologues, but that is not something I can recall seeing said much. Mostly what I see in passing is people encouraging veganism and arguing for why, and that is something I made a point of agreeing with because I figured what I was saying might come across as opposing veganism otherwise. But that seems like a very mild stance and way to live as a response to the situation, if the belief is that factory farming is on the level of the worst mass crime human beings can do to one another.
