Personally, people with backyard chickens getting offended at vegan speech isn’t something I’d concern myself with as a mod.

The above statement that I made was specifically in response to someone asking why some vegans use language like Holocaust and slavery and motivations for doing so.

This isn’t the place to argue about whether its ok to have a backyard chicken, though, because the thread topic is what speech should be regulated. We can go over to debate a vegan on that if you want.

You suggest that people offending other people should be regulated and thats a different philosophy than I have about moderation. You suggest only large scale agro can be criticized. I think its overly censorious and that you will create a blindspot for this community by preventing ideas you agree with from getting challenged. But the joy of a federated platform is that people can choose where they associate and escape such echochambers whenever they want. You’ve at least been transparent with us. These shall be my concluding thoughts on the matter.

This thread is just becoming people arguing about what type of vegan speech is effective and failing to understand the concept of the seriousness with which vegans promote and believe in animal rights. To vegans, animals are individuals and their sentience is respected and taken very seriously.

I can’t speak to “off topic” or “bundled insults” but if something is “off topic” or “bundled with insults” then it can be moderated accordingly.

A lot of vegans who have had enslaved ancestors are still ok with the analogy and a lot of vegans who ancestors in the holocaust are still ok with the holocaust analogy. Since there is a wide spread of people with this very common opinion, if you censor it, you’re ok censoring vegan speech which is hostile to vegans.

I’ve already said - people compare animal agriculture to slavery because we captivate, force impregnate, mutilate, steal their children, and economically exploit animals. We violate their rights for mere taste pleasure because today, in most parts of the world, it isn’t required to do this to them.

People compare it to the holocaust because every year billions are killed, in gas chambers and in abattoirs. They’re led to their deaths packed on top of each other in trucks, breaking their legs on floors of shit, dehydrated, and terrified.

When people say this, it’s not TRYING to get an emotional response, this is just WHAT happens and WHAT you contribute to if you consume animal products. And some people really wish you’d stop and sometimes emotions get in the way and ok, if someone crosses a line, moderate that shit.

It looks like what’s really going to happen here is that because vegans are a minority, even here, the sensibilities of people who get offended by the animal rights point of view is going to blind them to the fact that they’re being incredibly censorious. Enjoy your echo chamber if you want, I guess. Disappointing.

Context matters here when we’re talking about what speech you’re going to outlaw on this platform. You can have whatever opinion you want on whether its ok to exploit a backyard chicken but if you ban someone for this, that’s quite censorious. Why don’t you just say to them what you said here and let the people suss it out.

Forbidding the comparison of animal captivity, forced reproduction and child stealing, and economic exploitation to slavery would be a clear example of indulging a censorious impulse.

I rarely use this comparison personally because it’s subject to this kind of confusion (thinking comparison to human slavery is equating to human slavery). Nevertheless it’s my personal opinion that when you account for the massive scale of the suffering, billions of animals yearly, a comparison of severity can still be drawn, even with any inspecies prejudices about the richness of human lives and experience potential compared to animals.

So it seems you’re automatically defensive about wanting to moderate vegan speech (preempting with "don’t feel personally attacked) and deep down I think you know why.

I understand you’re just trying to make a space where everyone feels welcome. But harrassment policy and other conduct policy should cover people getting out of bounds and requires no vegan specific clause. Making a vegan specific clause is a little hostile.

Unless you are truly aiming to ban people for having the opinion that it’s not ok to not be vegan. That would be tone policey and censorious, in my opinion. If a vegan is actually harassing someone that calls for moderation, but its already a rule to refrain from harassing. If you want to make a rule on harassment and include several examples, and one of them is a vegan example, that would be fine.

It just reminds me of other contentious issues like racial justice or gender issues. Sometimes people didn’t like getting called racist, but do you censor a racial minority because their message is intense and makes someone a little uncomfortable? People have the right to decline interactions that arent going well but they shouldnt expect to always be perfectly comfortable when writing in the public square.

Even though I’m on Facebook, I use it rarely, and I wasn’t even in this particular subgroup where he posted it until he shared the update with me directly 😂. So I totally get ya.

Totally understandable.

Btw in reaponse to your other question about current OSE activities, the team has been heads down building the Seed Eco Home 4. Heres an image from their recent FB post.

The Seed Eco Home project is the one I wanted to post about next

If it isn’t too much trouble, can you tell me the pages with the broken links?

I’m just here from the frontpage, and even though I didn’t know what vetiver grass was, I still lol’d and you have my upvote.

I do know that vetiver essential oil is often touted as having an energizing scent, because I make smelly things, but I didn’t even know it was a grass, so TIL.

Exactly!

Hello! Great to have you here, sorry for the delay in responding :D

We can talk about:

• Open Hardware Projects (particularly if related to ecological mindset ;))
• Open Software Projects (also particularly if related to ecological mindset)
• How to encourage people to participate in Open Hardware and Open Software Development
• Discussions on starting Open Enterprises and Mass Collaboration Efforts
• Discussions on what it’s like volunteering or working with OSE
• Attempts to replicate or contribute to Global Village Construction Set or Eco Homes and related projects
• Topics related to OSE Guiding Philosophies (Integrated Human, Abundance Economy): https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Category:Guiding_philosophies

Personally, I’m going to try to start posting helpful resources starting with the more developed projects and proceeding to the less developed projects. I know that the way the wiki is, that it can be overwhelming for new people, even though it’s really an amazing resource. I hope to make it less intimidating by helping people understand how to navigate the project.

But certainly by no means must all posts be absolutely directly/officially related to OSE.

Exciting that it passed! Hope to see one that broadens to farm equipment, cars, consoles, and medical devices…

TIL Colorado’s right to repair farm equipment bill (hb23-1011) passed in April.

True, I guess for my closing remarks and bringing it back to the OP, my ethical backing for veganism is partially consequentialist in both my direct actions (supporting exploitation) and indirect actions (not actually exploiting, but causing conditions that could be condusive to exploiting).

I come from the perspective of someone who felt tricked into years of animal exploitation by the welfarist position. I wasted hundreds if not thousands of dollars buying grassfed, free range, yada yada bullshit.

And in my view I should have just either kept that money or just went vegan. I don’t think jt did anything good, I don’t think it moved the world further at all. All it did was make me poorer and make me delay doing the right thing, the thing that does make a difference, which is going vegan.

Its not to say I wouldn’t engage in dirty pragmatism when I’m arguing with others. I emulate my best friend who made the biggest impact on me. I’m ok using any means necessary to make carnists reduce their consumption of animal products, including praising “small steps” like Veganuary or meatless monday or something. But my friend never coddled my delusion of animal welfarism and I also draw the line there.

Would I vote on a bill that made battery cages illegal? Sure. Would I try to convince carnists to also do that? Sure. That’s the extent of it. I’m not going to tell someone cage free is ok or better. Id just focus on how bad battery cages are.

I talk about my cycle so much that any men I’m with are going to learn eventually. I even make my guy friends hear about it.

I’m sure this varies with age, and some younger men may be more immature or resistant at first and I wouldn’t consider it a huge red flag unless they were stubborn about it. But I would keep an eye out for other symptoms of toxic masculinity/misogyny at play and start a conversation.

But I’m in my 30s now and if a man is in their 30s and can’t follow conversations about menstruation, that’s a no-go for me. It would reveal a willful ignorance that I wouldn’t be able to abide.

I’m just curious- how much footage / information have you seen about what actually goes down in the “cage free” egg industry? Why exactly do you see that as “better”?

To me, all that does is convince someone to buy more expensive eggs, when they could just not and save themselves the surcharge.

Ah very cool :) Yeah I’ve heard of the rainbow gathering, as there’s a lot of crossover between our communities. It’d certainly be neat to check out some time.

Are you offering me fruit, itchy?

I think you picked up what I mean about democracy playing a factor.

I would have to ask around I think to find out the answers to your questions. It seemed to me that there were about 10 or so people in the “community kitchen” at any given time, which in this case was a specific permanent structure on the land that had cooking facilities. One of the main things they did that I know about was make a huge batch of burritos that they would distribute to people volunteering for other functions (such as fire safety, leave-no-trace patrol, parking, rangering). But in addition to this, there were also numerous theme camps that had kitchens. But I don’t really have even a rough estimate of what percentage of people were volunteering to make food for others. The event was around 2000 participants though.

I think that the combination of established kitchen and decentralized kitchen worked together to cause the sense of an abundance of food.

The experience of sharing was basically that while I was walking around, occasionally someone would say “Are you hungry?” and if I was they usually knew where I could get some food. And it was basically like, if you were in the area when a camp was making food, they shared the food with you.

I choose not to refer to myself or other people with philosophical terms. I prefer to use the words to describe specific arguments. Basically a person can make a deontological argument without referring to themselves as a deontologist. I think the scenarios of life are diverse enough that a person may find one way of reasoning more applicable in a certain realm and another in another. Or you could even want to justify an action with multiple arguments. Sometimes, I make deontological arguments for my social relationships but I don’t commonly use them outside. I often find utilitarian arguments useful, but they also have their limitations.

I didn’t enjoy giving up wool when I became a vegan because I was a needlefelter. I also don’t think anyone can deny that wool is a material with great properties.

But in the reality of the world we live in, and specifically for me, my use of wool is potentially tied up with a system of live transport. Typically when animals used for wool reach the end of their lives, they’re packed up on ships in a brutal manner and sent to be processed for meat. I’d hate to make a mistake and accidentally support that, either by making an errant purchase or stochastically inducing someone else to buy wool who would likely buy it from that system instead of mutualistic scenarios.

I don’t really have a enough of a problem with someone buying secondhand wool to protest it. There are products that I purchased before becoming vegan that I’m using until the end of their lifespan.

Personally, I don’t necessarily have a problem with mutualistic relationships between animals and humans, such as we see in certain sanctuaries. I’d be willing to evaluate moral decisions in such situations on a case by case basis. But I do think that in today’s climate, animal welfare is just a smokescreen for animal exploitation. So many people justify eating meat from CAFOs with the idea that they buy from family farms some percentage of the time. The urgency for me is to stop the massive exploitation than to entertain edge cases, and the way to do that is to advocate veganism.

As to whether it would be morally neutral for me to eat an egg from a backyard hen in specific scenarios, perhaps it is. I just don’t really see why I would, when I don’t have any real reason to. I think that feeding eggs from rescued hens to other rescued animals is potentially justifiable, although I would want to learn more and rule out alternatives before I would confidently vote yes that its ok to do it.