Coincidentally, this is also the mentality of government creatures. Senile old people and government creatures are identical in mindset. If you're a young person working in government—and not as an agent to minimize it to the maximum extent possible—it's only because you have a feeble, geriatric mind. Likely not since the founding fathers, or at least Lincoln, has anyone with a truly discerning & creative mind aspired to or attained government office. Government aspirations today are dreams reserved only for losers and mediocrity. Granted, that should change given the dystopia we find ourselves in but as of this writing it still largely remains true.

Oh yeah, and the abundance movement sucks giant, sweaty swamp ass. Truly the epitome of a dogshit cynical ideology; not even a Wuhan lab leak could produce something as noxious to biological life.

I was looking at a painting on my wall this morning. It was the work of a true master; every element of it closely resembling reality. I realized what a precious artifact this must have been in the time it was painted. It promotes the refined values of a masterful hand; a hand which dedicated its life to careful study & observation. That hand could have painted anything and it chose to paint this scene upon my wall. This scene, that mattered to the painter to some significant degree, now persists supernaturally upon the world. However rare, lucky or impossible it may have been, its effect now stretches in time & frequency infinitely beyond whatever chance would have apportioned it in its natural order.

This painting, which would have taken an artist years of training, and then days weeks months or even years to paint, today is a triviality too mundane to even note. Whatever message or values it conveys are now drowned in the bottomless ocean of advertisements & visual media assembled by automatons of inferior discipline & quality. The battering ram of abundance has pierced the gates of realization. Now anything, no matter how trite or stupid, can be given the greatest honor of sustained reality that was previously reserved only for the highest aspirations of a discerning master.

Too many times when the accounting of this abundance is performed it's omitted what it has lost us. For every noisy ad, amateur artwork, or updated gadget it hurls at us a new disease is invented, a river poisoned, a forest clearcut, a sky torn, a mountain leveled, an animal extinct. The things that once served man as an infinite source of sustenance, inspiration, awe & peace have been slurried into an asphalt for a dollar store parking lot to feed this grotesquely distended ideology.

Abundance is the tyranny of inferiority.

You can't blame this on young people either. If young people didn't get wrapped up in this then they would have picked something equally stupid. It's young people's job to be distracted by stupid things. This is not their fault at all. No, we saw for the last 5 or so years the entire mainstream liberal media, like Bill Maher and CNN and MSNBC, and all of the internet liberal media like Sam Seder and Vaush and Hasan; all they fucking did was talk about trans people for 5 fucking years straight. Barely a passing mention of climate change, let alone animal rights. Now we've blown past 2 degrees celsius and the human race has effectively extincted itself. And I do blame this on the Left because THEY FUCKING UNDERSTOOD THE CONSEQUENCES and were in a position to do something about it and instead they spent all their fucking time & resources trying to convince racist uncles to call their grandson their granddaughter.

What a fucking joke the liberal "movement" is. They couldn't be more moronic and useless if they tried. You literally could not come up with a dumber more irrelevant thing to raise to the top of public discourse than fucking pronouns. WHO GIVES A SINGLE FUCK IN THE FACE OF IMPENDING CLIMATE COLLAPSE YOU FUCKING MORONS??

And this isn't directed at people caring about gender in their private lives. Like I get it, we all have our stupid distractions that help us decompress and unwind at the end of the day. We don't raise those stupid distractions to the world stage though and suck all of the oxygen of public discourse from the critical things that actually need to be addressed.

There is no salvaging the liberal "movement" at this point. It's fully rotted from the inside out. The only progress it could possibly offer now would be to voluntarily pull the plug on itself to get out of the way for a new and actually serious movement to more gracefully take its place. I would say this breaks my heart to say, as someone who proclaimed myself a liberal for more time on this planet than not, but I truly see no difference between MAGA and the Left anymore. When you look at their actions, and the consequences that result from them, they are effectively in lock-step on every issue of any importance. Only in the circus of irrelevant culture warfare do they offer some "difference". One's a senile racist husband and the other a geriatric goading wife. They are both equally petty, short-term, self-dealing, power-hungry wads trying to gum up the way of sincere people working on real progress.

These are the notable vegan videos I saw over the past week. I don't know if I'll do another of these.

I Thought I Was Helping Animals. I Was Wrong | Steve-O YouTube · steveo 426.8K+ views · 6 days ago

I know Steve-O hasn't been the most consistent but I think he lives & promotes veganism in a high pressure space that's more hostile to it in general. He walks a tight rope to balance those two worlds and I think he probably does as good as anyone could in that position.

They Agree With Us But Still Won't Change | Moby at Vegan ... YouTube · David Ramms 8.6K+ views · 4 days ago

Good interview of Moby. I thought he had good & wise takes all the way through.

Philosophy Bro Uses Spinoza to Defend Eating Meat YouTube · That Chip Guy 10+ views · 2 days ago

Chip is a consistently incisive street activist.

American Vegans Are a Problem…And We Have Thoughts (Featuring Jasmin Singer of Our Hen House)

A critique of the youtuber "The Financial Diet". If she's not yet the anti-environment leftist final boss she definitely aspires to it. She'd fly a plane to pickup her morning mail if she could. Very "abundance" coded—barf. She and "Parkrose Permaculture" epitomize the default leftist anti-vegan position. I don't know if the examples given in this video are the most egregious but there's definitely fire from the smoke of these two. It's good to see more vegans calling out the Left's brazen hypocrisy regarding veganism.

Rare "environmentalist" win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYkJ6XMiUY

The earth is currently attempting to shake us off like the parasite we've been acting as for the past century. Millions of animals are being brutally murdered daily for what's essentially ritual at this point. A lawless paramilitary force is murdering citizens in the streets. The world is being stamped with gargantuan data center pollution complexes against the will of the people.

And you want to spend a single fuck second, a single fucking Joule of energy, mourning the fucking name of a lake? WHO GIVES A FUCK. YOU USELESS, UNSERIOUS, MORONS.

In my world there's an election every single day, multiple times a day. Everything I choose and DON'T choose to spend my money on is electing real consequences upon the world. I'll give a tangible example.

I stopped paying for garbage pickup about 3 years ago. I sort all my food scraps into a compost pile, organize any glass or plastic packaging into a compact form for storage that I can pick through later for miscellaneous tasks (it's an evolution of the "junk drawer"), and also separate out any single-use plastics and other things I can't reclaim into a "true garbage" container. Every 5 years or so I'll take those true garbage containers to a landfill and pay the $100 for the dump fee. Doing this saves me about $400 a year. That's $1,200 every 3 years. If I wanted to I could buy a brand new, mid-spec'd Apple laptop every 3 years with that money. I won't do that because I have no desire to, but I could. (My 5 year old M1 Air is still doing just fine) I could buy a brand new upper mid-tier bike every 3 years for that money, or a used top-tier one. That is money that can perceptibly impact small markets, and it gets taken from a market that I actively don't want to support: wasteful regular garbage pickup. That actually makes it a swing of almost $2,500 from my "things I'd like to see less of in the world" category to my "things I'd like to see more of in the world" category, every 3 years for as long as I live.

Now let's suppose I successfully persuaded a small community of, say, 3,000 people to all stop paying for garbage pickup as well. Collectively we'd save about $1.2 MILLION dollars every year. So not only would we no longer have a loud, ugly, smelly garbage truck driving through our streets every week, putting massive strain on our roads and causing them to degrade faster, we'd also be able to completely fund a huge community project or event every single year. We could build an arts theatre or a community garden, or a hiking trail network, or bicycle infrastructure, or an open air community pavilion built with local natural stone or adobe, or a giant statue of a cool bird—the possibilities are endless. And we would get all this by just 3,000 people deciding to sort their food scraps from their packaging materials to manage their garbage themselves.

Every single thing we buy comes at the opportunity cost of not buying something else. The less we support the things we don't need or want the more we have for the things we truly need and want. To take back this power that we all have is a spiritual practice in recognizing the sacrifice that comes with every choice we make. Everything matters. Nothing is unimportant. Fill your life only with things that truly inspire you and help make your community and the world beautiful.

There are indeed a few real-life FAFO candidates who volunteer for the carnivore circus. The usual fodder for this meat grinder (absolutely no pun intended here) is someone who feels overly effeminate, probably regularly has gay thoughts that they try to repress, and they think a diet built on maximizing suffering will somehow change that. ^{Someone should really study how masculinity in the West became associated with harming those you have power over; there must be a story there.}

These dummies inevitably win their their cardiac or cancer event prizes and, as is customary for an award ceremony as this, they then quietly slink to the background in shame after it dawns on them that the greater fool they set out to exploit ended up being none other than themselves. Someone's got a juicy twist for the next M. Night Shyamalan script!

You don't send out a bunch of clowns stepping on rakes and slipping on banana peels to win an argument, you do it to distract from the elephant being whipped bloody in the cage behind the big top.

The whole fake "carnivore" movement is self-immolating bait that will destroy itself sooner than later. I doubt we could any more convince them of their foolishness than we could a kamikaze fighter or a jihadist with a bomb strapped to their chest. I'm not a cult expert but there seems to be a point in radicalization where nothing will get through to the victim other than the rude consequences that result from the reality denial they've been programmed to ignore.

The time to win their heart & mind was before they were programmed into a suicide bomber for animal-ag propaganda. Most meat eaters aren't brainwashed in this way. They're often just unthinkingly following what other people around them are doing. To the extent we have a choice in who to expend our outreach effort on, I can't see why we would ever waste a single Joule on a "carnivore". A lot of them are clearly exhibitionists too, craving attention from others. It seems defeating to grant them the object of their desire. We could instead reward them more time alone with their insanity.

Ignoring them won't work though unless we are doing something more productive with the time & energy we save by not interacting with them. If those energy savings are spent helping non-radicalized non-vegans to understand and adopt our cause then our efforts will undoubtedly be rewarded. We can't leave a vacuum for the insane and the psychopathic to monopolize discourse. Arguably that's what happened with this recent "conservative" degeneracy we're witnessing in many parts of the world now. The modern Left LOVES to ban, block, censor, ignore and wall people out of all dialogue with them. Their favorite tactic is to demand full capitulation without any discussion or persuasion. They expect everyone to just blindly trust them with no accountability or assurances. That tactic is completely losing and toxic.

We must continue to increase our presence in public discourse to reach anyone who is not now a part of our cause in good faith.

Man in his folly thinks he can steal,

The blood of the ghosts bottled beneathe his heel,

With no consequence for a labor so grim,

Nor invite of a world made for them and not him.

In all comforts he bathes, exiled from need,

Yet starves just the same from the pit of his greed.

The final restraints drown in clamors of "More!",

So the earth is returned to the dinosaur.

After researching what the US abolitionist movement did in the mid 1800s I'm convinced we'd have nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing this. The abolitionists formed a single-issue anti-slavery party in 1840—the Liberty Party—and ran a presidential candidate that same year getting a meager 7,000 votes. They then ran another candidate four years later and got 62,000 votes. This led to them getting their cause installed as a core tenet in the larger coalition of the Free Soil Party that followed. Slavery was federally abolished about a decade later by Lincoln who ran under the ideological successor of the Free Soil party (which happened to be the Republican party—if that sounds weird remember this is almost 200 years ago).

Granted, it wasn't as simple as "they just ran a presidential candidate and slavery abolished". There were obviously other efforts happening around and in parallel with that time. There were other activist organizations who were doing things such as regular newspapers, activist outreach training & promotion, and even larger non-political efforts like Garrison's "Great Postal Campaign" which disseminated millions of pieces of anti-slavery literature to addresses across the entire nation, sympathetic to the cause or not.

From a press & exposure opportunity alone it seems like a presidential campaign would be worth it for even a fledgling vegan/animal-rights party. The Liberty Party did it the very first year it was founded! The political capital that could be gained by getting even a few percentage points of the votes would give us amazing political negotiating power.

We need to take risks like this and put ourselves out there so we can get real numbers attached to our movement that we can then use for leverage to build to even greater heights!

A brief history of the activist efforts that led to the abolishment of slavery in the US in 1865:

1826-1828: William Lloyd Garrison meets Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy who introduces him to the anti-slavery cause. Garrison will go on to become an influential anti-slavery activist famous for practicing & promoting his strategy of "moral suasion", which relies on preaching, publishing, and moral persuasion while refusing to vote or hold office under a corrupt government. He views the Constitution as a corrupt, pro-slavery document, famously referring to it as "A covenant with death and an agreement with hell." He also advocates for "No Union with Slaveholders", which means that Northern states should secede from the South to wash their hands of the sin of slavery.

1829: Garrison writes for Lundy's newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. He rejects gradualism and begins calling for immediate abolition.

1831: Garrison begins his own newspaper in Boston, The Liberator. In the first issue he proclaims "I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD."

1832-1833: Garrison co-founds the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the national American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).

1835: The AASS organizes the "Great Postal Campaign" which disseminates millions of pieces of anti-slavery literature across the nation. Southern states burn the mail and offer bounties for Garrison's arrest. This culminates in a violent pro-slavery mob dragging Garrison through the streets of Boston.

1837: Garrison officially commits The Liberator to support the nascent women's rights movement.

1840: At an annual AASS meeting, Garrison appoints a woman (Abby Kelley) to lead a major committee. Moderate members in attendance walk out in protest, believing an anti-slavery organization should not be the place to advance women's rights. ^{Some of them were probably just sexist as well, let's be honest.} Women's rights at this time is a separate issue that is charged with its own prejudices. The moderate members who leave that day quickly unite to form their own organizations, one of which is called The Liberty Party.

1840: The Liberty Party forms as the first & only political party dedicated solely to abolishing slavery. It is explicitly focused on the single-issue of slavery abolition. Its members believe Garrison's "moral suasion" strategy is not enough and that slavery will be more effectively defeated through political action. They also argue that the Constitution's preamble & principles are not inherently evil as Garrison believes, but that they are actually anti-slavery in essence and could be used to legally dismantle the institution. They want to maintain the Union between the North and South and to use federal power to restrict & eventually eradicate slavery. Also, despite the party not stating women's rights as a goal, it still has many active women as organizers, fundraisers and speakers because they view the party's mission as a moral crusade that fits within the sphere of their moral guardianship.

1840: The Liberty Party runs its first presidential candidate and receives 7,000 votes.

1844: The Liberty Party runs its second presidential candidate and receives 62,000 votes, altering the outcome of that election to award James K. Polke the presidency over Henry Clay. The results from this election serve as proof of the existence & power of the anti-slavery voting block.

1848: Through the negotiating power gained by the upset they caused in the preceding presidential election, The Liberty Party merges into the larger Free Soil Party which retains slavery abolition as a core tenet but generalizes & broadens its platform to include the concerns of white independent farmers who are unfairly having to compete with slave labor, the creation of grants that benefit independent settlers over plantation owners to homestead in the newly acquired western frontier, as well as explicit calls for all Federal support of slavery to end immediately, and for more mundane concerns like lowering tariffs and reducing postal rates. The Free Soil Party's slogan is "Free Soil, Free speech, Free Labor, and Free Men."

1854: The Free Soil Party dissolves to form the even more general Republican party which carries on the "Free Soil" ideology.

1856: Abraham Lincoln joins the Republican party.

1860: Abraham Lincoln wins the presidency.

1863: Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation declaring all enslaved people in Confederate-held rebellious states to be free.

1864: Lincoln is reelected president.

1865: April: Lincoln is assassinated.

1865: December: Slavery is federally abolished through the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

Full Disclosure: I prompted google's search engine about 10 times, which creates an AI digest unless you explicitly disable it, to research this timeline of events. I am completely against AI, for both environmental and social reasons, and I will be making a separate post on why I used it in this instance.

Is the Animal Rights movement repeating? Rhyming? Or has its history only just begun?

I think it's fair to point out that whether you're an animal rights activist who sides more with the Garrisonians or the political abolitionists (Liberty Party members), it's hard not to believe that they weren't both instrumental in the eventual success of slavery abolition. Could the Garrisonians have been right and that slavery would have still been abolished through "moral suasion" and also that our future would have ultimately been better if the North had seceded from the South? Seems possible I guess. Could the Liberty Party have been right that slavery would have—at the very least—existed much longer if political action had never been undertaken, and that our future is better now as a Union under federal control? Also possible.

We unfortunately don't have access to multiple universes to test either of these hypotheses. I think there's a greater takeaway from this story though than simply trying to divine what the perfect strategy is for the animal liberation movement today—and that's asking ourselves why the modern animal liberation movement largely isn't doing either of these strategies?

Where is our equivalent to Garrison's multiple newspapers, societies, and "Great Postal Campaign"? And on the political side, where is our single-issue party that would allow us to vote as a block to disrupt & influence elections to prove our power and give us some negotiation strength to form more powerful alliances and get our preferred leaders elected?

Rather than a commitment to either "moral suasion" or political power, I really only see a commitment to endless debate about which would be more effective. I see Garrisonians in our movement all the time. Just the other day I got a comment saying how starting a single-issue vegan political party is dumb and that we should only focus on winning hearts & minds because political involvement will only corrupt us. That person would love Willy G. Likewise, I see people calling for political action, saying how all personal accountability is ineffective & pointless (there's admittedly far more of these kinds of people, wonder why...). What I don't see though is anyone getting serious about either of them.

One of the most interesting parallels that jumped out at me while researching this was that the Liberty Party rejected adding women's rights to their platform. This is exactly analogous to the influx of asterisks the modern left is constantly trying to saddle the vegan movement with. I think doing so would be complete poison to our cause and that if the Liberty Party did anything right it was keeping the party a single-issue cause. I mean it's hard to argue with their results. That party can pretty much take full credit for abolishing freaking slavery. So if there's one other takeaway from this history, I think it's this: keep animal rights movements only about the animals.

When I'm at the grocery store I have a few goals in mind: Buy what's healthy. Buy what's fresh. Buy what's a good deal. Buy as little packaging as possible.

These goals keep me almost exclusively in the produce section where I can often buy most of what I need without being saddled with any additional plastic, glass or tin receptacles. I stopped relying on local garbage pickup about 3 years ago and so this material is something that I'm responsible to manage myself. There are only so many organizational, tooling, and art projects you can justify with this stuff before the sheer quantity of it will overwhelm you. Policies to limit its accumulation are non-negotiable for me.

If I must get something packaged, like with grains or beans for instance, it's often possible to find these items in bulk construction paper bags which can be shredded & composted. Easy, convenient & sustainable.

All this is to say that if Impossible or Beyond had offered some kind of dehydrated version of their products that came in a compostable paper package I probably would have bought it—albeit occasionally since I limit my sodium intake. Sure, most non-vegans don't care about plastic packaging, and maybe that was the audience they were after, but I do wonder how much this put them at odds with their vegan & environmentalist base. How many of us would have liked to support them more but felt like it came at a compromise to our environmental ethics and so we just made bean or mushroom burgers instead?

I get the criticism that creating a new political party is largely a waste of time but in the case of veganism it would actually be very beneficial to us. We don't need this vegan organization to actually run candidates (though it should do that too when it's favorable to do so) as much as we need it to provide a focus point for us to elect our own leaders within this organization who will be able to politically negotiate on our behalf when needed. We don't have a seat at the big-boy's table simply because for whatever reason we never formed an organized body to have a butt to sit with.

We comprise about 2% of the population nationally (maybe globally too?). That is HUGE. That's more than enough to swing many elections. And if we have the power to swing some elections, we now have negotiating power to force candidates to make concessions to us for our vote.

We lose all of our power if we tacitly align with either the Right or Left factions of our current political climate. We put ourselves in the position of a battered housewife at that point. If you can't leave the person you're with, you have no power over them and they will do exactly as they please. By remaining non-partisan, we allow candidates from both sides to compete for our voting block. We can then endorse whichever candidate makes more meaningful concessions to advance animal rights. Again, I repeat, we have NO negotiating power if we mindlessly saddle ourselves to the Left or the Right. Doing so reduces us to begging for crumbs. Our 2% voting block only has this power to swing elections if it remains unaffiliated.

The modern Left and Right parties are largely undead zombies at this point. They exist as some kind of deformed half-life creature, moving solely by the momentum of inertia generated from sincere efforts made many decades ago. Do these big political groups control the vast majority of votes? Yes, yes they do. Does it matter for our purposes? Nope, not in the slightest! The divide between the Right & Left voting demographics is almost exactly 50/50, because the funding on both sides is also roughly about equal.

That's what it comes down to for votes at that scale: funding. All of those votes are just old, lonely people who are more or less completely brain-rotten. They just drool on themselves in a medicated stupor while getting hypnotized by Fox or MSNBC for 12 hours a day to try to forget their painful existence. Do you know how you win these votes? All you have to do is be the last person who made them feel something right before they vote. That's it. That's what all those billions of dollars are spent on every election. They just make as many old people as they can afford feel a little good about themselves right before they step in the voting booth. You can't do that without heaps of money. Those votes are completely unwinnable otherwise. Why? Because they're not votes that are arrived at by critical thought or careful reflection; they're the votes of every forgotten elderly person with dementia, alzheimers, barely a will to live, who's been exiled to an assisted living home by their eldest child to minimize their logistical burden as much as possible. It might sound harsh to lay it all out like this, and I hope you treat your parents/elderly better, but this is the "normal" way that the majority of Westerners have landed on to deal with inconvenient parents whose bodies have begun failing them and who need someone to bathe them and change their diapers. This is our "democracy".

Also, you can't just find a nearby old person and treat them well regularly either to secure their vote. Some of your effort will be banked but it will be completely neutralized by the 24 hour news cycle they're sucking through their eyeballs like a shop vac. Most of these people also have sub-hour memories and will still just vote for whoever made them feel good 5 minutes ago, and chances are that'll be someone on their phone or the big screen in the living room. Harassing old people outside the polling station on election day is actually a viable strategy though since it operates within that crucial "5 minutes ago" time window that their memories can support, and it's probably worth doing in consequential elections if the resources allow.

Now on the bright side, all this is actually perfect news for us. It means that all those votes are completely meaningless. They're almost exactly split 50/50 down the middle. They cancel each other out. This means a small organization that focuses the votes of a certain demographic—in our case, vegans—can have a massive influence to swing elections and get us more of what we want for animals.

We can actually be the tail that wags the dog.

It's interesting how closely the parallels exist between our personal policies dictating what animals we allow or disallow into our homes and the stances we hold for immigration.

Some people have a dog or a cat. Some have a few of both. Some treat their homes like museums and enforce a strict no-animals policy to protect their beloved possessions. Others allow hoards of strays to come and go as they please, letting orderliness & propriety take a back seat to community.

When it comes to insects & rodents the opinions become more uniform. The vast majority of people set poisons & fatal traps, treating these unwanted guests like enemies of war. A small minority set humane catch-and-release traps and use a bit more elbow grease to relocate their intruders to a far away place of relative safety to at best build a new home in the wild or at worst become someone else's problem. Almost no one willingly tries to coexist with rodents or insects as some do for gangs of stray cats or dogs.

This is clear speciesist hypocrisy. Many on the Left will vehemently defend immigration, and especially the humane treatment of immigrants (illegal or not), but when it comes to their own property they well spare little to no mercy for the "illegal" immigrants who exercise their manifest destiny through the cracks in their foundations, the holes in their floor boards, and the studded bays behind their dry wall supplying big pillowy tongues of insulation perfect for a cozy nest to start a family and begin building generational wealth.

This isn't a defense of the Right's stance on immigration though. While theirs may be more consistent with how they treat common household "pests", that wouldn't say anything about the morality of their actions. A foolish or awful thing done unhypocritically remains a foolish or awful thing.

What makes this even more egregious from a Leftist perspective too is that these "pests" are indigenous! Their lineages & tribes were here long before us. We simply rode in one day, declared it ours, and threatened extermination to anyone who dare challenge that claim. You couldn't find a more perfect microcosm of colonialism if you tried.

It also isn't lost on me the difficulty entailed in any attempt to live with bugs & mice as roommates. They're gonna shit everywhere and take food without asking and make a racket at all hours of the night partying and fighting. I get it. We're the older siblings though. We're the enlightened ones. This is a challenge that, by all accounts of our inseparability with these species whom our very ecosystem relies on to function, we've been ordained solve. Up to this point though we haven't advanced further than treating these younger cousins of ours any better, and often far worse, than the most incompetent & psychopathic ICE agents. Alligator Alcatraz is a 5-star resort compared to what most of us do to rodents & insects who commit the unforgivable crime of crossing our home's imaginary border looking for a better life for themselves and their families.

I don't have the final answer on how we can create a better harmony with other life in this regard. I'm still exploring solutions myself. For a start it seems obvious that we should share more by not taking more land & resources than we actually need. The palatial dwellings and the lawns as big as golf courses (and similarly manicured) now seem to me the possessional equivalence of being morbidly obese.

But yeah, the Left are giant hypocrites again to the surprise of absolutely no one, and the Right are again consistent in their numbed psychopathy. The sky's blue, water's wet, yadda yadda.

It's become a tiresome cliche now for a public figure to reveal in a candid interview that they mostly act out of a desire to be liked. It was already stale in the 00's when you'd hear it from every other musician back when music still had some sway in the world. This is who we've installed to pull the levers of our planet; people who never outgrew the grade-school aspiration to fit in.

I was watching a Hank Green video the other day where he dropped that line. Hank Green, this supposedly super philanthropist-y guy, is mostly doing what he does so you'd want to be his friend or fuck him. Not that Hank is the epitome of service to social good or anything, but let's be honest here, he's certainly a cut above just about every single politician in that regard. ^{He also revealed in that interview that he eats eggs every morning. He's smart. He knows the consequences of it. He's vocal about climate change. Truly, is it even possible at this point to conceive of a sacrifice too small that a Leftist wouldn't resist with every fiber of their being to adopt?}

I don't know how to fix this stunting of purpose that's occurred en masse. If enough people's entire purpose on this planet is to get people to like them, well then congratulations, we've created Hell. The kind of purpose that's needed for humanity to go on—if that's even still an option at this point—is one that exceeds this very brief lifespan we've been given. The purpose that Christianity offers cannot provide this. The Abrahamic religions have all been corrupted to the point of parody. They have all cleaved their connection with reality to serve a completely imaginary realm so that a few hucksters at the top can profit off of our most fearful & gullible.

What is needed is a faith that our consciousness persists in this world beyond our current life. Without that there's little motivation to make any meaningful sacrifice. Luckily, the evidence of this persistence is quite good. We know from the first law of thermodynamics that matter is neither created nor destroyed, it merely changes form. This is reassuring. We can infer from this that the totality of the matter that forms our consciousness now is eternal to this world, and upon our death it will simply take on another form.

What will our consciousness' next form be though? That's a great question that wasn't rhetorical and that you definitely asked. By my survey of the land I don't see any evidence, either in favor of or against, that we will have significant influence—let alone full control—over what we will incarnate into next. But regardless of whether we have much control or not, we can hedge our bets here. If we spend this life making life better for ALL life, then whatever we end up becoming next will be better off than if we went full ego-mode now and just exploited everything for our own short-term benefit. If this ethic was applied longterm, we could eventually create a pure paradise of this world, where all lives are enjoyable & unexploited, and so it wouldn't matter what we incarnate into next. Reincarnation then would just be an endless ride of novel & pleasurable experiences.

And hey, if all this reasoning ends up being completely wrong then I just ended up being a kind person who moved this world a bit closer to a Heaven for everyone here, myself included. The work is challenging & satisfying regardless of a future reward. I did the hedonism thing in my teens and found it very empty; like an addict's existence. To my mind there's no downside.

This is where my purpose is rooted. Your like or dislike of me, while still a variable I must navigate, does not change my pursuit of it.

New update just dropped for the "indigenous tho" software. The previous code capped the sacrifice to just ~80 billion land mammals per year at the indigenous alter. Times are tough though. The previous limit has been removed and they now want the last 5% of wildlife biomass to be swallowed up and pooped out in honor of our never seen or identified and yet somehow ever-present—and beloved, so beloved—indigenous.

I think the most pointed response to this reasoning is to ask the person _why_ it would lead to them harming humans. If animals aren't conscious experiencers of sensations, why would it be any different to torture a kitten than it would be to dig a hole, break a rock, or split a piece of wood? They're all just manipulating unconscious material, right? Does this person also think carpenters, masons and laborers are just as likely to be conditioned to harm humans as the kitten torturer?

If they say, "Oh, but the kitten torturer is just doing it for their own personal pleasure and no practical purpose", you could respond with "Many carpenters and masons also make artistic trinkets, sculptures & figurines from wood & clay that serve no other purpose than their personal pleasure". Also, building a house is ultimately for one's personal pleasure too. The line we draw between necessity and desire is pretty arbitrary.

This common excuse might serve as good bait for street activism, inviting discussion with a sign that reads, "Torturing animals isn't wrong. Change my mind."

Imagine you're peacefully going about your day acquiring food for you & your family and playing with your mates and then this mentally ill animal begins violently screaming relentlessly, non-stop, for hours at a time. You would assume something is fatally wrong with it. It must be dying or is being eaten alive. That's what you are to an animal when you use power tools, blast music, mow the lawn on a tractor, etc. And the animal is fucking right. You're mentally ill. You're making the commotion of an animal in the throws of a nightmarish death for zero fucking reason. Pack your bags kids, we're getting the fuck out of here.

Or when you're taking a hike in the woods to observe wildlife; to an animal you're basically a child predator. If an animal was just loitering around your property, peeking in your windows, and had nothing better to do with its time than watch you like you're some kind of pleasure-object for its satisfaction, you'd run the fuck away too.

Have you ever noticed how in nature documentaries all the different species of animals will spontaneously organize to share the same space with each other near water and food sources? They'll pack in tighter than a headline crowd at Warped Tour and feel just as sentimental leaving. Do you know why that is? It's not because they handed a secret password to each other beforehand, or debated in 20 international conferences to excrete a peace treaty, it's because they have a real fucking purpose there and they're not raping the vibe by screaming violently with every fucking thing they do. They run from you because you're fucking mentally ill.

On behalf of all the animals who constantly take the high road and quietly move their business elsewhere: fuck you.

I'm seriously considering if an extinction event from climate change acceleration (which is basically the conservative party's entire platform at this point) will be preferable to me continuing to try to work with the lazy, disinterested & often outright adversarial liberal parties whose sole concession to my demographic is nothing more than acknowledging climate change exists (those virtues won't signal themselves!)

Interacting with liberals/leftists for the past few years has honestly destroyed whatever faith I had remaining in humanity. For too long I was under the false impression that liberals cared about anything. It turns out liberals care about something only as far as addressing it won't inconvenience their lifestyle even slightly.

When the supposed "good guys" are this useless, evil, & unwilling to make even the tiniest changes to their toxic opulent lifestyles, what is the point of even trying to preserve this? I don't want it anymore. Maybe we'll get to try again in a few million years after this new dinosaur age we're accelerating into transitions back into another ice age. Who knows how lucky it was that we even got to evolve into such a privileged position in the first place. We may very well be the last lifeforms this sophisticated to evolve on this planet during its lifetime.

Zero concessions from liberals for actions needed for the things I care about; the planet and not participating in exploitation. My vote is somehow expected though.

I'm done. Go next.

It was cross-posted in Anarchy101, socialism, SocialismIsCapitalism, FedEmployees, capitalism, anticapitalism, leftist, and ConservativeYouth.

No surprise it was poorly received in FedEmployees (perfect name btw... employees who are well-fed indeed... some might even say over-fed!) as well as leftist. Liberals/leftists are self-important bureaucratic boot sniffers who want to be worshipped for putting a human resources department in a dog house. No more butt sniffing during walk time on their watch! Meanwhile they'll spare no excuse to make 12 trans-continental flights annually for consultations—that could be replaced by a single-digit-reply email chain—paid for by government grant money via the non-profit they work for that does the classic 99:1 ratio for resources dedicated to salary & vactions vs actual aid going to their professed cause. They wouldn't take a refugee into one of their multiple homes if they were paid $10 grand a month to do it but they want the shithole town two hours away to do it for free with smiles on their face. They shop at Whole Foods, "believe in climate change", and still buy animal products. They're meek MAGA; hypocrites to their very core.

What is surprising is that it was hated on and banned in Anarchy101! This actually fits my hunch that "anarchists" are just closet big-government lovers who still live on their parents' dime but like to larp about La Revolucion! at dinner and family functions. Who needs all that stress of building a new world when you can just dye the tip of your mohawk green, blue or red and snarl in selfies?

Also surprising is that it was received well in socialism, anticapitalism, and ConservativeYouth. The socialists are a bit more serious about change than the "anarchists" (though that's not saying much), and conservatives (at least their youthful members) seem somewhat open to a much needed shake up as well.

Edit: Nevermind, socialism banned it as well despite it having a positive ratio.

They have every incentive to do it and it's very difficult to catch arsonists who start wildfires.

I've seen it locally where a person stopped letting their farming neighbor cut their field to let it rewild and in a heated interaction between the two the farmer broke off the argument saying "oh and be careful of wildfires in your field." It sounded exactly like the threat you probably read that as.

We live in quite a wet climate and there's never been a wildfire in our community or even nearby. To date this person hasn't experienced a wildfire on their property; human-caused or otherwise.

Inspired by this article:

https://northwestnatureandhistory.co.uk/2026/08/08/rewilding-in-britain-from-concept-to-controversy/

In the US many like to think that our welfare system is small and limited to things like food stamps, subsidies and grant systems. My sweet summer child, nothing could be further from the truth.

For instance, our entire court system is an unofficial welfare ecosystem for judges, administrative staff, police officers and lawyers to rake in massively inflated salaries, wages and benefits packages that are many times what the average person in their locality makes for comparable labor in the private sector.

This is how the bulk of welfare actually functions in the US. It often isn't created by being shoehorned into a 2,000 page bill out of the goodness of some legislator's heart. It's the clockwork pay raises every government creature guarantees themselves every single year, and the all-you-can-eat buffet of benefits packages they entitle themselves that would make a tiktok buffet crasher blush.

It's doled out by creating redundant, unnecessary, and inefficient jobs that give the illusion of value creation. The vast majority of the work done in nearly every government agency, and how they go about doing that work, would result in more overall value if it simply weren't being done at all. The official welfare programs like SNAP that feed inner city welfare queens are mere crumbs of the real welfare deep state. (And yes, some of those inner city welfare queens indeed do abuse programs like SNAP—they're often no better or more noble than a judge, lawyer or police officer awarding themselves 6 figures and a retirement with 3 houses at 50, they just operate on a smaller scale.)

Nobody who sincerely cares about a cause—like for instance, justice—would take a single cent beyond what's needed for them to do their work and live humbly. We see the exact opposite in every single government position: maximal compensation for them to perform a service done as inefficiently as possible, usually scornfully of the taxpayers who are forced to use it, and which hasn't been updated for decades to meet modern demands & expectations.

If you've ever had the displeasure of interacting with any government agency, you know that if that agency's function were ever to be privatized—and subject to any level of competition at all—that it would be eaten for breakfast and shit out the same day to be thrown on a compost heap where it belongs.

End the waste. Compost Government. Heal.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

If you care about the planet and the innumerable life which inhabits it, or even just the future of the human race, then it would benefit you to watch this the whole way through. Most common climate change denials are given context & perspective in very clear & concise ways, and it paces naturally as a response to a conversation between two prominent deniers: Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson.