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Support freedom of choice for Australian women.
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Just in case you missed it, here it is again! Woo.
selahwrites: Celebrate all mothers this May 8th. Go vegan.
Must watch! Worth every second. “Best Speech You Will Ever Hear” - Gary Yourofsky
Ass bread! So many gross LOLs.
One of my favorite excerpts from any speech ever given. Sorry for all the text, but it’s worth it:
“How come, when I talk about mock meat, you always catch a handful of people in every crowd…that wrinkle up their noses, make big wide eyes, and start glancing at the people next to them or across the aisle like “Soy chicken, is this guy crazy? Soy bacon, he must be out of his mind.” How come this stuff that is made of soy, wheat, vegetables, grains and spices, no chemicals…how come this stuff is considered gross to most people, but meat, meat’s got five components, let me break it down for you. Blood, flesh, veins, muscles and tendons. The cut up corpse of a dismembered body, how does meat not qualify as gross and disgusting to everybody?
How in the world is a beverage, a liquid that oozes out of the utters of cows, a secretion that drips from the mammary glands of another being, that’s loaded with pus by the way. Oh yeah let me tell you about the pus in your cow milk, it’d be my pleasure. When you hook machines up to the udders of cows three times a day to suck them dry, those machines cause massive amounts of infections on the inside and outside of the udder. Now let’s add all the bovine growth hormone they put in cows to make sure they provide huge quantities of milk, which always leads to another infection, the machine doesn’t know what not to suck out! Pus, mucus and infections right in with your milk, and yeah milk is pasteurized. But when did pasteurization become a removal process? It’s a sanitation process. You’re only sanitizing pus….and by the way, our government, the USDA, they allow the dairy industry to have a maximum amount of one eye dropper full of pus in every glass of milk. Drink up…
Does anybody know what an egg actually is from a hen? And don’t say embryo or aborted fetus, not even close, it’s unfertilized so it can’t be either. Hen is a female though, unfertilized egg through a female system? It’s part of her menstruation cycle, it’s a hen’s period. People scramble up hen periods in the morning and all the sudden I’m weird because I don’t make omelets anymore?
And what about vomit? Oh we’re going to take those blinders off today. C’mon you guys love vomit, you adore it all over your food. Better give this one a pretty name though. Nobody’s going to buy and eat vomit. Unless we call it honey instead. Honey comes directly from a bee’s stomach, it’s regurgitated right through the bee’s mouth. Look it up with any wildlife biologist. But nobody wants to eat Bee Vomit Nut Cheerios, we want Honey Nut Cheerios, to lie to ourselves and play euphemism games.
The standard diet of a meat eater is blood, flesh, veins, muscles, tendons, cow secretions, hen periods and bee vomit.
Now we’re not done yet. I am not going to let you off that easy, not while I’ve got you here today. You know where we top this all off in my opinion? Every November, during the certain holiday people love so much, people take a dead turkey, open up the dead turkey’s ass, or carve out a really big hole in their ass, take some stuffing and shove it inside their dead empty ass, and use the little dead ass as an oven to bake some bread. Somebody else’s dead empty bacteria-laden ass to make bread? Ass bread?! And people think vegans are weird? Because we eat tofu? And rice, and beans, and lentils? I tell people one of my favorite meals nowadays: yams. Boy dish me up a plate of yams for dinner and I’m a happy guy. Most people, I tell them that and they’re like “Wait you just eat yams for dinner? I don’t know man, that’s kinda weird.” Okay, but somebody else’s ribcage sitting on your plate isn’t weird? Doesn’t make you think twice? Severed legs, sliced up thighs, and mutilated breasts on your plate doesn’t make you think twice. And you know why? Those blinders are on nice and tightly aren’t they?”
- Gary Yourofsky
Watch the rest of the speech here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6U00LMmC4
Veganism, Privilege, and Liberation:
In practice, veganism means renouncing the benefits that come from the exploitation that speciesism is constructed to naturalize. Theory and practice are one; you can’t “renounce absolutely … the right to use” without, at the same time, renouncing the actual use and the benefits of that use. In other words, renouncing speciesism means renouncing privilege – human privilege. This is why vegans don’t consume anything derived wholly or in part from animals or support other practices that contribute to the exploitation of other animals.
Is veganism another white privilege? - Happycow
Vegans of Color - an impressive collaborative blog written by Vegans of Color. From that blog, a discussion (see comments): Explaining Racism to White Veg*Ns and Speciesism to Non-Veg*N POCs + see their awesome blogroll/collection of links.
Veganism and (white) Privilege - Vegan Soapbox
Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations - part 4 in a series at eco-health
& an old/interesting blip: Stuff White People Like: #32 Vegan/Vegetarianism with a photo of well-known vegan, Bob Torres of Vegan Freak fame. Who isn’t white.
(I didn’t find the stats showing more non-white vegans than white vegans in the USA, either. Where’d they get to? May have been on the Vegan Freak forum many moons ago… Anyone?)
Making choices, or taking choices?
Make choices more connected with your values, more connected with others, more connected with the planet, and more connected to protecting your health.
“Live your values. Change the world. It’s that simple.”
This video profoundly affected my soul. Within 60 seconds I was sobbing on the floor of my hotel room, and it’s not even that sad of a video (nothing graphic happens, and it’s been confirmed that the two dogs were rescued and at least taken to vets/shelters). Maybe it’s the fact that I’m alone (by choice) in a foreign country and have too much freedom to focus inward and dwell in thought, thus enabling me to overanalyze and become absorbed by things I would normally scroll past. For me, the message of this video is so powerful and so clear- suffering is suffering, and animals are just as capable of love, loyalty, fear, and grief as humans are. I cannot comprehend how so many humans refuse to believe this. I cannot comprehend how so many humans are happy to ignore that their daily choices in diet & fashion are forcing this pain and loneliness upon billions of other beings. I cannot comprehend how so many humans find it easier to dismiss those who make compassionate choices as extremists or irrational hippies rather than considering making a meaningful change in their own lives.
I assume this video will tug at your heart strings, as you’ve most likely been conditioned to feel more sympathy/empathy for dogs than for most of the world’s other species. Please, I beg you to take a step back and consider that maybe, just maybe, the meat you’re eating, the milk you’re drinking, and the leather you’re wearing came from living beings who care for one another just as these two dogs do. And that maybe, just maybe, it’s not worth it.
The correct response is always love.
To me, the parallel was simple and plain: oppression is oppression. We can rationalize all we want about how animals and humans are different, but at the heart of the quandary are certain undeniable truths: that animals really do suffer; that they have rich emotional and physical lives not so different from our own. If you’ve lived with a dog or cat, you already know this.
So it saddens me to see so many social progressives — gays included — who scoff at the idea of animal rights and veganism. In the fall of 2008, my husband and I volunteered feverishly for the NO on 8 campaign here in California. During a phone bank shift, one of the higher-ups, a gay man, approached me. He wanted to know why I wore an animal rights t-shirt every time I showed up to volunteer. “We get it,” he said. “You’re vegan.” “You don’t get it at all,” I replied. “Because if you did, you’d be vegan yourself.”
An oddity I’ve encountered a few times is being accused of an unreasonable amount of compassionate or sympathetic feelings being afforded to animals instead of to humans in need. Why are they mutually exclusive? I’ve found quite the opposite: more compassion leads to more compassion leads to more again. And even so, vegan ethics are generally grounded by the concept of necessity rather than feelings: why cause harm when it’s easy not to, and just not necessary? But I digress.
Inevitably, accusations of feeling end up with the phrase “I need to eat meat to feel healthy.” So the initial accusation of me feeling too much is to offset the accusers own feelings, not grounded in ethics or research or reason. Every. Time. I have had this discussion it follows the same pattern. At least that means I can have a response ready to go… or, if I’m in a Mood, unkindly shout “BINGO!” ;)
And this also brings me back to another post I made here recently: don’t blame veganism for your alleged lack of vitality. Blame your poor food choices, or even a placebo effect from your negative feelings towards habit changes… And, for goodness sake, ask for help! That’s what the interweb and its extensive network of various vegan activists, health nuts, and eco-terrorists is here for! :)