vegan

I admire your discipline. I usually fuck around in meat eating communities until I get banned.

Meat-eaters: See block button. Choose to downvote/comment against it instead.

They hate when others speak the truth, which - naturally - makes them look bad. They can only feel good about themselves if the truth is supressed and never spoken out loud.

The only reason Im here is because i browse by everything and posts in this comm pop up frequently. Same as womenstuff so I get exposed to these posts without making any effort at all to encounter them as non vegetarian.

I don't vote on the vast majority of posts I encounter. I don't care for the voting system but I'll use it if a post strikes me as bad content for Lemmy in general.

I don't care what comm I'm in. Rarely check. I'll engage with content if I have something to say, usually pass without comment. As most people do.

I don't understand why restricted comms even show up for the whole Lemmy to see if they aren't welcome to have all of lemmys eyeballs on them.

People who post content in niche places that are actively hostile to the vast majority of a larger community are naturally going to get massacred in any popular vote. That's just math. And it's a problem because it's content for the wrong audience and just causes friction.

As far as I know unlike a comm that restricts who is allowed to post, non vegans are welcome to be here even if they aren't very much appreciated and many of the vegans would just prefer they avoided it entirely instead of messing with it. Look but don't touch kind of thing that's my approach, but I get it wrong or just have had days too like anyone else.

I don't think blocking out things you don't like, or make you a bit sqeemish about, is a good habit to form. It's absolutely a valuable tool but it's too easy to create echo chambers and I constantly see that lack of encountering things greater than your own opinion being bad for your health over the long run.

We need to challenge the things that make us uncomfortable to make any real change happen. I wish I had a better solution for the people who need tear down all the things they don't personally feel comfortable with it that challenge them in someway.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I look at this place and others like it as people sharing their opinions not communities acting as a group. It's convenient to have those communities because they are real things that exist, but the content is for everyone even when everyone shouldn't be responding to it. I hope I explained that properly.

Food and the consumption of it is a human universality. We all have it in common so I think whether you are vegan, vegetarian, or neither, it will draw interest far outside those it is intended to because food is just relatable one way or another.

I think it's very mature of the vegans communities I've encountered on here that they don't segregate themselves. I think that's the only way to stop hostilities between different worldviews and start helping each other be better.

Thanks for getting through my dumb thoughts. If you are ever in Quebec City, one of the best soups I've ever had was a Thai curry soup from Don Vegan the first vegan only restaurant in that historic city.

This post is in global feed.

I'm pretty sure the word you are looking for is capitalism. And it's not the only way people can live.

EDIT: I should clarify that there's not one vegan philosophy. There's many different philosophies that could lead to veganism. Animal personhood being the most extreme end of it, but vegans also include people who believe in harm minimization, people who just hate factory farms and live in cities, Buddhists, radical interpretations of halal, and more. I answered these questions from a harm minimization perspective.

General principle is minimization of harm. The classic example is "You're on an island alone, slowly starving to death. There's a pig. Would you kill and eat the pig?"

For quite a few vegans, the answer is yes. Luckily, that's not the situation we find ourselves in, we can live healthy and happy lives without harming many animals in the vast majority of situations.

To directly answer the question: it depends. Is there an alternative that hasn't been tested on animals? Is this medicine life-saving, or just very slight quality of life bump, like getting over a hangover slightly faster? Those questions would guide you to an answer.

To answer your chicken question, I don't think there's any moral issue with eating the body of a being that's died of old age. I don't think many vegans would do that anyway though, because after a long time without meat, it tastes "wrong" to eat meat (not sure exactly how to describe it). Same reason not many long-term vegans are that interested in lab-grown meat.

Veganism is not about animal suffering, but needless animal exploitation.

Is the medicine needed for you? Then it isn't needless animal exploitation.

Do you have other options besides exploiting animals to death for food? Then it is needless animal exploitation.

Especially since usually these animals suffered WAY more than livestock does, due to how medicine is tested.

You already got some good answers for the rest, but this part is also questionable. Lab animals tend to be kept in better conditions than most farmed animals. And while toxicity tests are terrible (esp the ones for cosmetics) they don't tend to last as long as intensive farming. Chickens in factory farms can barely move, some collapse under the weight of their own muscles, 70 to 80% of them have broken bones. It is trully hell and that's just one example.

Also when you look at the numbers, proportionally eating animals is a way bigger issue. Most meat eaters would be "responsible" for the killing of around ~100 animals a year just for food. For medicine, proportionally it would be way, way less, since the test happened only once.

To be honest for me veganism is not a set of rules, it's a way of looking at things. Taking into consideration that animals are sentient beings and being honest to myself about the implications. Also on how my actions impact the world. I can't justify not taking most medicines if I need them. However I also can't justify not making the effort to look for cruelty-free cosmetics.