Help End the Use of Cows and Pigs at the California State Fair Nursery Exhibit
In 2010, a pregnant Holstein cow escaped her pen during the California State Fair. State Fair police chased the frightened animal down in a large SUV. They shot her multiple times, killing her. The cow was part of the Nursery Exhibit, in which heavily pregnant cows, pigs, sheep, and goats give birth in front of an audience … READ MORE ABOUT THIS CASE AND PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION.
Human societies impose a state of being “as if” parasitical onto nonhuman animals, simply by claiming nature to be a resource ”exclusively usable” by humans. Nature is seen as a resource existent to serve human needs and desires, to be exploited. Nature is not regarded as an animal habitat with its animal inhabitants, etc.
By living out this attitude and worldview of: “subject the earth to your will and exploit it to your needs”, nonhuman animals are automatically put either into the position of being degradable and exploitable, subjectable, or they are seen as parasitical, just barely allowed to enter the human garden eden, so one could say.
This is a long subject and it came to my mind quite clearly today … ,so, well I wanted to quickly note it down. I am gonna write more about this angle of homocentrism later, of course.
Homocentrism makes blind to perspectives that don’t serve the “human interest”.
The human continuum with its cultural values is not necessarily one, and can’t necessarily be unified with its diverseness.
Every individual has the right to hold her or his own views.
Thus I can be for Animal Rights INASMUCH as I can be for Human Rights, for example.
No philosophical school can propose me their argumentation as valid IF it asks me to see nonhuman animals other than I see them now as an Animal Rights person.
Philosophy should stay out of attributing different “life forms” with their labels of value or meaning.
Otherwise philosophy becomes as bad as how religions function – as doctrines based on belief. Homoncentrists believe that nonhuman animal life matters less than human life, and they believe that the world relevant to nonhuman animals and the systems meaningful to nonhuman animals life must not be regarded as a complete world in its own rights in their own terms.
What about the cult of flesh
It seems to be enough today to eat veggies for a day or adopt the vegan or vegetarian lifestyle for a period of time and then go round pose as a post-vegan informer of a real truth about “meat”-eating or hunting or any other speciesist and non-vegan-compatible action.
When we think about the ideally vegan world, with a vegan society, and I really mean a society with society here, then we don’t think about the ideology of speciesism and how that is installed in our societies, most likely anywhere today on the globe.
Veganism is a moral education to some extent, but morals don’t create legally binding rules.
If human rights were dependent on the moral understanding of people alone, we’d still have torture and killing all around pretty much I think. We as ethical vegans should not overlook the dangers of speciesism. When we ask people to go vegan, we should bear in mind that the “habit” of “meat”-eating didn’t start just because the humans of the past just happened to be speciesist. The human past evolved from being speciesist to still being speciesist exactly on the grounds of held views, beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, philosophies.
Changing the lifestyle only does not go deep enough. One or more thousand years of deeply embedded ways of thinking within a society have to be changed, both on the individual and on the societal level. And the tragic thing with speciesism is, that humans built their understanding of what humanity means mainly on the basis of considering nonhuman animal life as a “lower” life form in a comparative measure to their own life form of being > HOMO SAPIENS.
What we as ethically driven vegans are asking for is a revolution. This encompasses a change in behaviour most of all firstly, but inasmuch it needs a change in thinking – well of course! And that’s where the question about what that cult of flesh is sets in.
I recently had this short exchange on diaspora that I want to close this blog entry with. It’s about just some examples of vegans-turned-animalkiller.
this year is gonna be amazing. AR is strong and will get even stronger. Veganism is a must by now, yeah and even the moral “musts” take till they take over a world with 7 billion humans. This is no utopic talk, this is the evolution of revolution … .
A HAPPY AND CREATIVE 2012 TO ALL THE GOOD MINDED FRIENDS
Vegan convenience foods are a nice starter for anybody who wants to turn planty in their eating behaviour. But in the long run I assume that any vegan person will find out about the limitations of a dependency on ready-made foods.
First: preparing foods is an important part of learning about foods and their nutritional values.
Secondly, vegan foods should be affordable; a lot of those nice and tasty convenience foods tend to cost more than we should or can spend on our daily eating habits.
If we want to inform others about our vegan lifestyle, we should keep in mind that many people can’t spend tons of money on foods and we should gain ourselves and pass on an informed healthy eating plan.
I myself just started a recipe site, mainly cos of the reason that I want to spread the idea of understanding vegan cooking as something basic and healthy in it’s very straight and pure form.
Learning how to use herbs and spices, using staple foods to get the right nutritional benefits that a vegan diet should ideally entail. Learning about how to prepare foods in a reasonable way, that’s what i think needs some focus.
My recipe site is in German (the link to it is on the right sidebar), but maybe some of you guys get the idea also and share it.
Finally:
some people think they should put as much money as possible into supporting vegan products and companies. Sure, but supporting sanctuaries still ought to have the highest priority before anything else.
Universities – ‘institutionalized’ thinking
Why criticize universities, they are the only real location where you can develop your free thinking together with others on an intelligent and sensible plane … ???
The reality of universities is more than an ambiguous one. Hanging between reasonable discourse and hierarchical oppression. Language, logics, proof, deduction, induction, theories, argumentation, discussions cloak so many truths unspoken of.
Without the noble and legitimate dress
a naked truth glimpses through, that seeks to escape another type of truth. One that you can only find in the nightlight, within the space inbetween being and notbeing.
compassion
is not something
that’s FELT from a higher position up
imagine your are in a prison
feeling compassion for your tortured co-inmate
you feel her/his pain, because you
understand
You KNOW their pain.
when I feel sorrow for somebody I can’t understand, then my understanding might stay on the level of only feeling pity for somebody who suffers an injustice or fate that I wouldn’t want to suffer. I stay distanced to him or her.
when I feel the PANGS of compassionate feelings, that only those kinds of feelings can produce, then an understanding must have preceded this emotional response in me.
Annoyances
Vegans that travel the world to live their veganism globally. Reminds me a bit of a mixture between CEO’s and missionaries.
Academic arrogance. Thinking within the borders of what previous scholars have researched. Academia doesn’t keep up with naming the modern phenomena in any field. I am mostly thinking about the environment homocentrism context here. Another thing is Academia assumes that humans outside of their brainy world, can not think or reason properly. Reminds me of the pharisees as how described in the new testament (always sticking to the written word).
Vegan sectarianism is also a current hot iron. Vegan stupidity. Meat eaters stupidity. Speciesism where it goes unnoticed or noticed.
Just all around.
One has to put things into their right contexts or, one has to set things straight for oneself.
the political ramifications of:
what I say, whereever I happen to be
what I do where I am
how i decide, and how I come to a decision
how I influence my environment posivitely
You say that only politcal parties are political?
I say:
whatever you do, and whatever I do
has political ramifications
on the grassroots level
no matter what
It depends on what you consider “political” to be.
The plane in life of deeds and words is a large and impactful one.
Knowledge that circles round
Some take separate terms, and build a logic simply on these terms as pillars. But in reality nothing is so separate that it should become a carrying pillar. The building risks to stand on the wrong pillars.
To avoid being a bad constructor I want to acknowledge how each phenomenon becomes explicable only in the entireness of its “environment”!
Highlighting a few terms out as central “pillars” of my argumentation – around which all other relevant aspects have to settle themselves – lets me build a roof upon this construct, that seems logical in itself. But again, the fullness of life does not work itself in any fully contrivable logics.
A logic that lies within “something” is not mirrored in a logic contrived by my singling out some of its aspects and sticking them together so that they fit … .
When I want to prove how knowledgeable I am however, I can’t really leave my argumentation a lot of space to breathe. Everything has to be waterproof, for no leaks to let fallacies to become instantaneously visible. My opponent can rebut me.
No this circle of yay and nay just wastes a lot of time. And it is possible to differentiate within more or less fully integral settings.
Why AR people in particular should not use Facebook and start using Diaspora
A person doesn’t even have to have a “typical” blemish on his track record in regards to human rights or environmental issues to be proven on the wrong side of morality.
Being a pronounced speciesist is a problem that should make us AR people take a decision on such a morally vain person, especially if the person even acts up upon his or her speciesist attitudes and actually engages in harming and/or killing nonhuman animals.
Facebook makes politics with the individual image of it’s founder Suckerberg. And exactly that’s why you should take his “personal activities” serious enough to leave the services of his company FB alone, if you were ever on there or freeze your usage of it down to a minimum.
Suckerberg stands for the individual that explicitly socially lives out our commonday societal collective egotism. And he is hiped exactly for this. Socially shared egotism is the “social” phenomenon that FB triggered most predominantly. (Someone rightly noted that FB tuned the term “to LIKE something” into a useless word, an interesting observation about the warped psychology of Facebook and its users.)
UPC’s Karen Davis has written about Suckerbergs speciesism and she sheds a light on the gruesomeness of his stance towards nonhuman animals life:
http://www.upc-online.org/thinking/110613only_connect.html
Both, our views on the world based on an abstract scientifically led philosophy of life-as-a-whole and otherwise also our religiously influenced views, they both fail to allow a non-homoncentric approach towards our co-species. If a person is set within either a biologically driven view or stands in a religious tradition of one of the abrahamic religions at least, we can probably not expect him or her to understand more of the world than that it should be subjugated to what we suppose to be the human concern. This is a gigantic problem.
(Also, a person being rich and enormously skilful in these our societies, does not prove for this person not to be a whackjob at the most important moral concerns.)
Well, and for the sake of it, let’s take a look at Suckerbergs human rights track anyway. In which way is FB involved in human rights violations “indirectly” …
This video by http://craig-antweiler.com gives you an overall idea
Diaspora* Next Online Revolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mMSxWEnjU
To close this, see the Diaspora creators and join a pod or set a branch up yourself
the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqxQgfQD24M
Envy? in a world that’s being wrecked to hell, where rights … are disregarded … Envy what exactly?
This is an ink drawing I made with a super tiny fine liner, the drawing has an original size of A3. This scan has been taken from a postcard that I had printed of the drawing. I will set up an online shop asap, where I will offer thing like these.
Dowload dieses Textes als PDF : keim_veganer_denkanstoss
Vegan? Anregung zu Denken
Vegan zu leben, schlägt sich nicht nur nieder auf die Art wie ich mich ernähre, auf das was ich konsumiere. Die praktischen Implikationen der Lebensweise bieten allerdings den Schlüssel, mit dem ich mir die ethischen Hintergründe erschließe. Dem sei auch beigefügt, dass wenn es überhaupt keinen eigenen Begriff für die vegane Lebensweise gäbe, diese Art der Lebensweise aber nichtsdestotrotz sowohl einen ethisch-praktischen Aspekt abdeckt, als auch einen ethischen Gedanken. Das Denken stellt schließlich den Ausgangspunk eines ethisch motivierten Handelns dar.
Wir erfahren nun immer mehr über die Seite des Veganismus in Hinsicht auf das, was ich tun kann, das was mich als Handelnden involviert. Die Frage die ich hier aber stellen möchte, ist die danach welche gedanklichen Bausteine sich eigentlich hinter der Praxis verbergen, denn diese bilden das Fundament auf dem auch Andere den ethischen Veganismus verstehen lernen können.
Das Wort „Vegan“ ist nicht alles wovon wirklich alles abhängen muss. Wir begegenen vergleichbaren Lebensweise in anderen Kulturen und anderen Zeitabschnitten der Geschichte. Der ethische Kern gleicht einer Bewegung die jahrtausende fast wortlos überlebt hat. Nur teilweise finden wir die wesentlichen Beweggründe expliziert durchfomuliert. Das Verhältnis Mensch-Tier birgt ein gigantisches Spannungsfeld in sich. Nichtmenschliche Tiere haben anders „evolutioniert“ als Menschen. Seit jeher betrachtete sich der Mensch wahrscheinlich als Krone der Schöpfung, und Tiere wurden und werden am eigenen Maßstab gemessen. Das Denksystem erweitere sich, was die ethische Einbeziehung der Tiere anbetrifft, wenn dann zumeist aus altruitsischen Gründen. Die Tierwelt bleibt dem Menschen in ihrer eigenen Intergrität aber ein Mysterium.
Wir alle haben eine mehr oder weniger unausgeprochene Beziehung zu Tieren, die sich in unserer praktisch gelebten Einstellung gegenüber Tieren ausdrückt. Der Begriff Speziesismus weist auf die Negativ-Form der Mensch-Tier Beziehung hin. Dieser Begriff gibt aber auch Aufschluss über die Gegensätzlichkeit im Denken über Tiere.
Die Tierwelt an sich und das, wie wir sie im ganzen Welt- und Naturgeschehen am besten lokalisieren sollten (insbesondere in ihren großen Zusammnehängen mit der natürlichen Umwelt) ist sprachlich von uns noch nicht in einen Rahmen gesetzt worden. Diese Materie kann auch nur schwerlich besprochen werden, wenn die Gesellschaft sich über den eigenen Anthropozentrismus (Biologismus) nicht hinausbwegen will.
Eine vegane Ethik sollte sich idealerweise mit der Thematisierung der Probleme in der Mensch-Tier Beziehung auseinandersetzen. Die eigenen Gedanken zu äußern, spielt hier den entscheidenden Faktor.
Vegane Politik, die grassroots Ebene
Handeln ist politisch, jede Handlung steht in einer Beziehung zur Umwelt. Meine privaten Entscheidungen sind Hebel, die im öffentlichen Raum irgendwetwas betätigen. Auch das, wie ich mich äußere gegenüber Freunden, meiner Familie, unter Kollegen, auf einem Blog, egal wo, greift in das allgemeine Geschehen mit ein. Oft schließen sich Menschen mit ihrer Meinung zu einer größeren Gruppe zusammen, weil sie dadurch meinen „might makes right“ – was Alle denken, ist auch richtig. Was natürlich falsch ist! Die größte Macht hat ein Denken, das sich auf Wahrheitssuche begibt. Denn solch ein Denken richtet sich an dem aus, was ist in der Welt, und nicht an dem, was heute gerade angesagt ist.
Thesen zum Mensch-Tier geflecht sollten ihren Ausdruck finden in allen Themenbereichen, die sich in diesem Bezug äußern können. Aber auch ausserwissenschatlich sollte jeder, der sich mit Ethik, Menschen und deren Beziehung zu Tieren befasst, sich äußern, eigene Gedanken formulieren und damit zum Teil der täglichen Diskussion machen. Das geht natürlich in allen expressiven Bereichen: Kunst, Musik, Dichtung, Design … . All das, wo der Mensch eine Rolle spielt, kann genau auch der Raum sein, in dem Tiere und die Natur anerkannt und respektiert werden.
Eine zenrale Frage, die allerdings eher die Zukunft der Tierrechtspolitik bestimmen wird, ist die Frage: Wie verhalten sich unsere Einstellung zur natürlichen Umwelt und die Lebensformen nichtmenschlicher Tiere und derer Verhalten im natürlichen Raum zueinander?
Was für uns jetzt als vegan lebende Menschen wichtig ist, ist es eine innere Spaltung unserer pionierhaften Bewegung durch die Abhängigkeit vom Begriff „Vegan-ismus“ zu vermeiden. Denn die Gefahr, dass der Begriff kommerziell funktionalisiert wird und damit als ein Tool zur kommunikativen Gestaltung unserer Gesellschaft wegschrumpt, ist groß. Genauso sollte man sich nicht irritieren lassen durch die Risiken von Gruppendynamiken, die in jeder Bewegung auftreten. In jeder Gruppe geht der Einzelne unter; außer denen, die den Ton angeben wollen.
Der Begriff „Vegan“ ist ein Tool um einen Gedanken zu verbreiten.
Resume
Veganismus ist eine bewegliche Sache, eine Praxis ist damit bezeichtet. Das Denken aber dazu, das sich dahiner verbirgt, ist reich und frei. Wir alle füllen die Denkwelt, die uns in andere Verbindungen zur Tierwelt und unsere gemeinsamen Welt setzt. Und unsere Kreativität kann zeigen, was wir alles schon schaffen zu formulieren.
Ein Keimling, 30 November 2011
The Connyland dolphinarium in Lipperswil is the only remaining dolphinarium in Switzerland. Please ask for the closure of this dolphinarium!
Two dolphins were found dead following a rave at Connyland. The Swiss marine park had initially been accused of killing Shadow and Chelmers by allowing a deafening two-day rave to be held just a few yards from the dolphins’ pool. Campaigners had warned that the dolphins could be affected by holding the event so close to the pool, yet the authorities went ahead with the rave. Animal activists from ProWal and The Whale and Dolphin Protection Society recorded noise levels of over 100 decibels outside the park, well within earshot of the dolphins. According to Andreas Morlok from Prowal, this is comparable with that of a pneumatic drill on top volume. It has now been suggested that the dolphins may have been drugged and poisoned by ravers.
Please sign this petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/dolphins-die-after-rave-at-connyland
Three snippets from my essay “What is an animal and what is a human?”
“We can ask if the interpretations of the characteristics, that are considered to make up the marking dividers within a human-animal hierarchy, are in reality a negation of the autonomous value of otherness in nonhuman animals.”
“We know that the single criterion [against which we measure anything nonhuman animals do] that serves as our standard, is the human parameter, i.e. the human model counts as the ideal, as the standard, for creating norms. So what happens if we put this standard of measurement into doubt?”
“Biology has already determined what the identity of nonhuman animals is, and even the Animal Rights movement has satisfied itself with placing the moral question somewhere out of reach by accepting the explanation of the identity of animals as something strictly biological.”
The image on the left is severely speciesist. I still can not really fathom why some feminists make that comparison between the “treatment” or I guess rather objectification of women in advertisement etc. with “meat”. Meat is a solely speciesist problem, I expanded a bit on this critique / controversial aspect at this location: http://simorgh.de/niceswine/feminism-and-animal-rights
It’s a PDF, check it ! http://www.veganswines.com/superfiles/horizon_of_homocentrism.pdf
Speciesism isn’t like something that has to be assumed like a “status quo” that we are just condemned to be living with for ever. Speciesism is always an almost inexplicable disaster for which we lack any real terms to fathom that what is happening.
It’s not an issue that’s less pressing than violations of human rights.
Even if Animal Rights are not legally pronounced anywhere in our homocentrist human societies now, the world consists of an autonomous natural world too (in a parallell form) of which nonhuman animals are the inhabitants and nonhuman animals are rights bearers in the vital positions they hold in the environment /nature.
Our manipulative and destructive mingling in their matters does not change anything about the animal-nature connection – which is far more fundamental than our conceptions of might and force are, which we have set against them.
My friend Comet adds rightly: the entire existence of humanity is not something that goes “way back” as far as the universe, at it’s age, is concerned, so all of humanity from the start until now, although “ages and ages” to humanity, is still a catastrophic event in the eyes of the universe, as much as Nazi Germany was a catastrophic event to humans. So one can look at the whole of humanity and say ” that event went totally wrong, time to start over ”
Hello friend: if you read this post or look at it, make sure you have a look and this tumblr entry too. Please talk with your friends about the atrocities of animal sacrifices,be they for religious craziness or for whatever … http://niceswine.tumblr.com/post/12614331791/i-heard-about-the-killing-of-camels
Animal Rights: why there is a similar concern for establishing them alongside human rights
What do you feel are your rights dependent upon? The first instance when you learn about how important it is that you have rights is as a child. If you don’t have rights, anybody might marginalize you because you are weaker than them. Other humans can be in that negative sense the “stronger” ones, that they can potentially just violate the integrity of your individuality completely.
Your rights depend on the basis that the social context amongst which you live shows respect towards you, and accepts that you are weaker in some sense. Additionally the social context around you must leave you the space to “fulfil yourself” to a meaningful (for yourself) and reasonable extent.
Rights have basic social patterns which they require, in order to function “organically” almost. And even more, rights require in their social context and embedding a broader frame of fundamentals. Within this “frame of fundamentals” you will find the entire environmental contexts – nonhuman animals included at the forefront.
The environment is not something passive that is born out of causalities that started off with a big bang universe theory … and nonhuman animals are not the biological instinct bearers as the natural scientists might want to explain them in an oversimplified yet extraordinarily body-centred way. When we make assumptions about what is important in the assumed “instinctual life of an animal”, we just put our assumptions about the animal’s priorities right over them like a cloak under which the real animal will not become to be seen. When I understand that some bird species does some specific singing because he/she wants to mate, then I assume that is what is happening, but I should not claim my assumption to be mirroring the truth of the nonhuman animal. That what is not understood, what remains a world not fully understood by me, can still be a measuring standard in it’s own terms, even if outside my cognitive grasps reach.
Overall, the habitat in which we live is way too complex to be described in solely logical terms, even. On the irrational side yet again, that what we can see in nature is what religions have “sterilized” by setting against natures own (incomprehensive) complexity their single mighty god/divine concepts, as some all inclusive surrogates – with hidden features like a human miracle- producing brain that creates the world and universe and so on. In real life we all have a direct connection to the grandiosity of nature though, that basically totally independent of any prescribed views on it. After all we are part of this universe too. In our singularity. As lonesome single beings.
To come back to where I initially started, animal- and humans rights need each other to go hand in hand, because if we separate our desired rights as superior to what we might only see as the “needs” of animals, then we should ask ourselves: on which planet do we live and with whom are we dealing here? If we will stay and head into a prolonged thinking of us as the centre of the universe, then we will isolate our capacities of thinking and feeling to a perversely narrow circle of ourselves reflecting just what we want to see.
Where do you draw the line, when asking others to act up – ethically?!
chatty <3
I often wonder myself about what i can ask of others and what i can ask of myself, as when it comes to: what’s ethically ok, what can we do, and what is asked too much for most people (and even understandably asked too much?).
I don’t want to imply in any way with what I am saying here, that the “do whatever you want to” approach would be a recommendable path to seek in our daily practiced ethics.
What I mainly find worth highlighting in the context is this:
How about letting others down who really need my help and I could help them? Ok many of us would think I am talking about things relating to friends and family. but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is – extend your circle: helping “strangers”.
It shouldn’t be provocative to ask, my question is: is having ones “own” kids a form of letting “others” down by denying the “others” the support I could give them if I instead would chose to feel responsible just as much for them as I would for my own kids?
The other day I heard a fellow vegan talk about vegans who don’t care if exploitative “cheap” labor or any oppressive means were involved in the production process of vegan produce bought, that a vegan person’s care should ideally reach out to the questions of human rights inasmuch. This of course is an undeniably important critical point to bring up. Also this vegan person highlighted the need of a stronger awareness in the fields of veganism and environmentalism and how these two go together, and finally she briefly discussed the importance of making your kids aware of speciesism.
Thinking about vegan parenting made me think of the dilemma everybody of us faces when confronted with the decision: my life as how i would (possibly) want it for myself (having kids) or what about the kids that are born but who really don’t have much of a chance in the world for how we all are setting this world up anew every day.
I’ve taken the decision now. I don’t feel extravagant for having decided to put all my support into helping other’s kids, nonhuman and human alike, primarily.
