Sounds like an excuse.
What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.
I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.
Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.
Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.
And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.
I’ve heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it’s modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I’m not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle… it’s a little too on the nose.
So here’s the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift’s private jet.
And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.
And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it’s an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it’s an attack on you personally.
Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they’re trying to shake up and motivate.
Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don’t get off our asses and fight climate change we won’t have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.
We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.
When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.
Have you ever seen a sheep be sheared? It’s violent and bloody. If your barber held you down and cut and scraped scraped the hell out of your scalp while shaving your head, you’d fire them.
Also, sheep too old to produce good wool don’t get a peaceful retirement. They get slaughtered and turned into dog or chicken food. The same thing happens when there’s a disease epidemic - common because of the crowded and filthy conditions in factory farming - or crop failures or drought. As soon as it’s not profitable to keep the sheep alive we kill them.
But neither of those points are actually the point of the conversation at all. The point is it’s immoral to use an animal as an object to benefit humans. If you wouldn’t keep humans in pens and shave them to make clothing, you shouldn’t do the same thing to sheep. Simple as.
How about spaying or neutering them and letting them live out their natural lives?
Yawn.
“Genocide” only applies to humans. The correct term for animals is “extinction”.
And I remind you: we humans control when and if our domestic livestock breed. And we let specific breeds of domestic livestock go extinct all the time. There are dozens of breeds of cows and chickens and sheep that are now extinct because they were replaced by other, more useful breeds - or the cultures that bred them were wiped out. Consider the Tautersheep, for example.
Let me be blunt. If scientists developed synthetic wool that was chemically identical to sheep wool but ten times cheaper, domestic sheep would be extinct within a decade. And nobody but sheep farmers would complain. So when carnists argue we have a moral duty to the species of domestic sheep to continue breeding them for human use I just roll my eyes.
Stupid children. Don’t they understand personal consumption is irrelevant and “carbon footprints” are industry propaganda? If they actually wanted to make a difference, they should have spent more time shitposting about the 100 corporations that produce 70% of fossil fuel emissions.
in no small part because it’s much more difficult to get the nutrition you need from a vegan diet without money.
Lol. Compare the price of a pound of beans and a pound of beef and get back to me, would you?
I can’t get more specific about costs unless you get specific about what you mean by “nutrition”, but studies have consistently found plant based diets are both cheaper and healthier than omnivorous diets. Especially the average American diet.
Nothing makes the average person angrier than telling them their consumption matters.
Blame governments! Blame Taylor Swift! Blame the 100 fossil fuel companies that produce 70% of the world’s fossil fuels, and the factory farms covering entire states in corn monoculture to fatten billions of tortured animals, and the multinational corporations filling the oceans with garbage and our veins with microplastics!
But don’t ask who is buying that plastic garbage, or eating those animals, or whose cars and homes are burning those fuels.
Don’t you dare expect me to change what I eat and wear and drive.
Is this really a surprise? Both candidates are 80-year-old rich white men. They don’t give a shit about the environment personally, because they’re going to be dead before things get really bad. They don’t give a shit about the environment for the sake of their families, because their families have enough generational wealth to guarantee them a seat in the metaphorical ark. And when politicians have no personal investment in a cause they don’t talk about it. Shocker.