I think this is a really weak-ass an unnecessary rebuttal. Nobody in capitalist power gives a shit about the difference between a communist dictatorship and worker’s control of production, they’re just scared of labor and want to propagandize against it in any way possible. And DSA members who do want communism at the state level sans dictator and do care about the distinction will just be potentially alienated by this. And nobody who this guys message is trying to reach read Jacobin.

ITT: Honey-eating vegans getting ethically roasted by non-vegans.

There are at least a dozen inter-related reasons to be vegan and no hard line of what diets are and aren’t vegan. All vegans check at least one of those boxes, many of us check multiple. Some vegans only care about avoiding the suffering of animals who experience life through a nervous system, therefore will eat shellfish which have no nervous system. When honey is exempted it’s usually utilitarian vegans doing logical gymnastics to claim that the way in which it’s farmed does no harm to the bees, or that while it harms the bees it doesn’t hurt their nervous systems and cause them direct pain. Veganism is no monolith.

That’s cause we don’t, the only time I’ve ever heard this mushroom fud come up is from non-vegans. “Did you know that grass screams when you cut it?”-tier territory.

There is far more debate about veganism within veganism than there is outside of veganism. Honestly it makes debates with non-vegans look fucking boring.

Yeah all of those things sound pretty likely in most honey farming settings.

And my cat always keeps an excess of food in her bowl. If I fed her only the amount she actually ate, she would just eat less to still have excess. These are evolved survival behaviors.

Which is why when someone asks me “Well what about indigenous tribes? Almost all of them hunt, are you doing to tell them they’re morally wrong?”. No, no I am not, because they are not morally wrong. They’re hunting for survival, in relative harmony and reciprocity with the ecology that completely enveloped every aspect of their social development.

Dumpster diving still relies on industrial agriculture happening and doesn’t scale to more than a small portion of the population, some of whom have no other choice but to do so.

It’s also responsible for a not-insignificant portion of the meat industry’s carbon footprint.

Yeah veganism isn’t a single set of beliefs, it’s a range of practices and the people who do those practices do so for a rather wide variety of sometimes-overlapping reasons. I’ve never had a more heated debate about veganism than one with a fellow vegan.

The problem with the carveouts that utilitarian vegans make for honey is that they’re largely falsifiable feel-good apologia. The claim that harvesting honey doesn’t harm bees is complete bollocks, really it’s in the same realm of the claim that milking a cow doesn’t harm the cow because she can always make more and just saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so. The hive does need to downsize and drones do have to die to accommodate the loss of surplus, workers do forage further and compete more with other insects for nectar, while honey harvesting rarely harvests at the low extraction levels claimed to be harmless and domesticated bee colonies crowd out native pollinators. If it were harmless the bees would never bother to make it, it takes a shitload of energy for them to produce it. It’s turn-brain-off dissonance territory in the same league as dairy farm propaganda but because vegan utilitarian thought leader Peter Singer said it’s OK they’re all willing to make the huge leap in logic to eat something that could just as easily have been maple syrup or agave nectar.

I’d respect the utilitarians a lot more if they just said they don’t care about bees and shellfish because they’re not fuzzy mammals, instead of performing these unimpressive acts of logical acrobatics.

Also to add another reason for veganism to your list, the more important one for me personally: The reflection on oneself. We are symbolic thinkers, we transpose ideas from one context to the next. eg Slaughterhouse workers exhibit the same elevated levels of domestic violence as cops. When we harm someone else, in another manner we also harm ourselves. If we can understand another entity on some level and we then hurt it, we do ourselves a psychic injury that isn’t just philosophical but has real profound effects on our thought processes, our outlook on the world, our behaviors toward other things. Maybe utilitarian vegans just don’t see any commonality between their bodies and the beehive, but I think the core failure of utilitarianism is it’s inability to respect this very simple but unfortunately intangible concept, in all contexts.

You’re taking a hit!

I left NYC about a year before Adams became mayor, but my bike commute used to go down Lafayette right past Hanson Place, and I remember back then I referred to it as the “chaos zone” because even the old bike lanes there ended for several blocks for no apparent reason. I once got cut off very deliberately by an SUV with a Police Benevolent Association sticker on it’s window right there, like the driver was clearly waiting for my lane to end and for me to take the lane so he could bully me over it. The fact that there was a random carveout both back then and in the new design speaks to the fact that private interests, often just single private individuals with connections and too much time on their hands, are often to blame for huge dangerous gaps in our mobility infrastructure.

I think it’s assumed that we are to imagine we’re looking at a small part of a whole.

And our average house price is only $550,000!

It’s the land of the free for the specific class, race, and ideology that phrase was implicitly intended to cover.

There are municipalities and counties that have classist lawn laws, too. In some places you either have to fight them and win or leave.

Especially funny because while there are other things vegetarians will eat that vegans won’t (Other dairy, eggs), cheese is actually physically addictive because the same protein that makes it curdle breaks down through digestion into a substance that acts like dopamine. It really is the “one ring” of veganism and often the last / hardest thing to give up when one goes vegan.

I lived down the street from the WTC pit for a few years in college, I remember that high-up surfaces like ledges above subway stairs and awnings above storefronts that were protected from rains often still had a thick layer of white-ish dust on them and it was always so eerie to realize that probably a majority of it was from 9/11, probably a certain amount of pulverized human bone in there…