Vegan

Anybody know any good vegan themed gym shirts? I'm thinking something similar to dom mazzetis bro science shirts (yeah he's a shitty person but his shirts can be pretty creative), but obviously centered around lifting as a vegan. And sustainably and ethically sourced. Bonus if they have tall sizes

Crazy how people will refuse to drink from plastic water bottles from fear of BPAs and microplastics but will happily eat the dead flesh of an animal that gorged on plastics for years. Our risk analysis is as broken as our morality.

Adjectives imply something unusual, something different from the standard object the noun refers to. If we say "cheese" for the animal product and "vegan cheese" for the plant product, we implicitly send the message the animal product is normal and the plant product is abnormal.

Strike that. Reverse it.

Say "milk" for plant-based emulsions and "cow milk" for stolen baby cow food. SAy "burger" for veggie protein patties and "cow/pig/turkey burger" for dead rotting animal flesh.

The meat industry doesn't get to control your language.

Words are activism.

And even worse: 99% of farmed animals in the US are factory farmed.

If you think your animal products were ethically raised - and by ethically I mean "not in a torture factory" which is an extremely low bar - there's a 99% chance you're wrong.

We see that:

• global land allocated to livestock - either in the form of grazing land or cropland used for animal feed is equivalent to the area of the Americas (North, Central and South America combined);
• cropland (minus land used for the production of animal feed) is equivalent to the area of East Asia-Pacific, extending as far south as Thailand;
• forested area is equal to Africa (minus Libya), the Middle East and South Asia;
• global freshwater (inland water bodies) approximates to the area of Mongolia
• total build-up land (villages, towns, cities & infrastructure) would fit into an area the size of Libya;
• shrub land is equivalent to an area the size of East Asia-Pacific, from Malaysia southwards;
• barren land is equivalent to the size of Europe;
• glaciers (permanent ice & snow) approximates to an area of Antarctica & Greenland combined.

Source: Our World in Data - Land Use

If you struggle to go fully vegan, you might want to try some of these

Image text:

1000 YEAR OLD VEGAN POEM BY ONE OF THE GREATEST CLASSICAL ARABIC POETS

Al-Ma'arri

973-1057 A.D.

VEGAN | PHILOSOPHER | POET | WRITER

Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up,

And do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,

Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught

for their young, not noble ladies.

And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;

for injustice is the worst of crimes.

And spare the honey which the bees get industriously

from the flowers of fragrant plants;

For they did not store it that it might belong to others,

Nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts.

I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I

Perceived my way before my hair went gray!

If you’re a vegan in the US but you pay tax, part of your tax contribution goes toward livestock farming subsidies. So in effect you are forced to support unethical treatment of animals.

So I have to wonder-- have vegans attempted to fight for the right to be fully vegan and thus requested to opt-out of those subsidies? In principle, it seems a vegan should be able to tick on a box on their tax forms saying “I was vegan this whole tax year” and the result should be a tax credit that reimburses their share of the livestock subsidies the gov pays every year using public money.

Canonical YouTube link

~~(the audio associated to the link will air on BBC World Service again in a couple hours from now [20:00 GMT today], if anyone is on a strained internet uplink)~~ (that’s in the past now)

A panel of climate experts answered questions related to #COP28. Someone asked about the viability of an agenda to get people off animal products. IIRC, the answers basically boiled down to:

• An elected politician telling people not to eat meat would be political suicide
• Nutrition would be a problem

IMO both answers are accurate. But isn’t there an oversight in terms of subsidies? The US gives huge subsidies to farmers and that includes livestock subsidies (not sure about other countries). A politician would not get away with intervening in people’s diets but canceling livestock subsidies would not be an intervention - it would actually be non-intervention. Would that still necessarily be political suicide?

W.r.t nutrition, someone who works 2 jobs and struggles for a survivable income would not have time/resources to study avoiding malnutrition on a strictly plant-based diet. So if animal products were priced out of the market for poor people, it would cause real problems, no?

Would it make sense to cut the subsidies, let animal product prices skyrocket, but then put the subsidies on the consumer side so overworked underpaid workers could maintain their diets? Apart from that, it seems a bit shitty that vegan taxpayers still finance animal exploitation by simply paying their tax.

Are there any states/countries known to not subsidize animal exploitation, where vegans can be vegan in the most absolute sense?

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), 18 U.S.C. § 43, is a federal law designed by corporations for the purpose of protecting the profits they make from animal abuse and exploitation. Former President George W. Bush signed AETA into law on November 27, 2006 at the urging of a corporate lobbying group — the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a group that is largely funded by corporations that profit from animal exploitation. See http://www.alecwatch.org. AETA attempts to eradicate the First Amendment rights of animal rights activists so that cruel, socially unacceptable practices of exploitative animal industries will be insulated from public scrutiny and democratic discourse.