Snippets from some writing I’ve been doing on the Philosophical Vegan Wiki recently.
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Freeganism
Activism – In Summary
Actions you can take as an individual or group:
• Buy vegan food from relatively cheap, efficient and ecological local food schemes.
• Buy vegan food staples with long shelf longevity and rare plant foods for your own impact and also to make it more efficient to produce, therefore cheaper for others.
• Buy vegan food reaching peak ripeness that has been over-stocked and you’re sure you can plan to use it in a meal that day or the next.
• Buy/sell second hand, recycled or ecological supporting items. Plus give away/collect items for free to friends and on sites like freecycle, freeshops or really free markets.
• Forage and glean food on public paths or where there will be no perceptible difference to farmers (keep in mind safety advice in the section on foraging).
• Compost or feed to animals the organic waste you can’t avoid and build a compost toilet.
• For the adventurous, go dumpster diving, table surf or prepare roadkill (keep in mind the safety advice in each section).
Ways to get organized:
• Advocate to family, friends and acquaintances in your day to day and online. Watch street advocacy and epistemology videos for tips and tricks.
• Help organize a Food Not Bombs stall for serving free delicious freegan food in public squares, gives a strong statement while inoffensively feeding food to the hungry, also making for a perfect opportunity to advocate to the public.
• Take direct action in collaboration with communities to agitate against harmful aspects of our culture and industry.
• Help organize a housing or workers co-op like a social centre, hotel, shop or gym with ecological commitments and incentives for people to be vegan or freegan.
• Petition/run for your local school board, council or party representative to fund and legislate to help remedy all these environmental issues.
• Help organize a veg box or field to street local food distribution network.
• Help organize/donate/fundraise to restore shrub land for use again e.g. overgrown apple orchards and hazel coppices. As well as manage land to encourage wild edible plants, reintroduce animal species and maintain diverse forests that would encourage tourism and local artisan industry.
• Talk to food sellers to put aside food they would otherwise throw away for yourself and others to collect on bin day.
• Map foraging and gleaning locations, plus organize events to go out and for example help each other shake apple trees and catch in nets.
• Guerrilla garden public spaces and abandon plots of land.
• Petition shops to use better stocking and shelving practices.
• Petition farmers to sow seeds once a year, but not to till or spray pesticide at the edge of their fields, to allow wildlife corridors in hedgerows. Build a relationship by organizing with the farmer to glean fields that could not be sold that year or paying for the right to pick grown or wild food at the edges of the field by hand.
• Petition/donate/fundraise for land to be opened up for allotment clubs.
• Document your experiences and create video, podcasts, articles, artwork, zines & books. Reach out to larger media outlets and/or have a way you can be contacted that’s searchable online.
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Companion Animal Care
Indoor vs. Outdoor Cats
The biggest issue with letting domestic cats outdoors is they are highly skilled predators that are glutenous for enjoying the hunt more than the food, which means often torturing their prey and giving you half-dead animals as presents. Unlike the common ancestor they share with wild cats which are quick killers, consume all their food and have a working niche that is threatened by domestic cats.
Secondly cat fights from living so unnaturally close together and road accidents from living near a busy road, so you have to consider the long healthy life you could be depriving the cat of or long drawn out painful death or injury.
Some potential solutions
You can build an outdoor enclosed cat run and some inside the house to effectively increase your cats play area.
You can test to see if they’ll walk with you on a leash.
And if you still want to let your cat out, the RSPB recommends one step you can take towards limiting the carnage:
Keep your cat indoors when birds are most vulnerable — at least an hour before sunset and an hour after sunrise — especially between March and July when baby birds may be out of the nest waiting to be fed. Also, keep your cat indoors after bad weather to allow birds to come out and feed.
Virtue Activism
Existentialists see mountains of food waste, a disorganized network of rescue efforts and an untapped reservoir of compassion that simply needs to be directed towards simple tools for ending the suffering of these domesticated animals. By making the choice to be good industrious owners, we affirm that it is a valuable thing to do for our pets and those around us.
If you have the capacity and heart to, adopting the most vicious, scarred, mangey looking old pets from low demand, over-populated, no kill shelters is the most ethical choice you can make, but so long as you’re not increasing demand any will do for getting used to having pets and extending that carrier capacity of caring homes.
Enticing feral cats with freegan/vegan food will significantly improve their well-being to know they can have a food source they can rely on. Feeding may also result in increased fertility, so should only really do this with a mind to being able to trap, neuter and release, but you can call groups up in your area to know what percentage of the feral cat population they’ve been able to neuter in your area.
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Racism in Veganism
Jack Green
I was introduced to the ideas on nationalism, I already could tell that a lot of it, if not most of the media was full of shit, and their anti-white propaganda just sickened me, but I learned to question more and more of history, developed an interest in my own lineage and ancestory. . .
Why have the desire to perpetuate your own race when it could result in you getting screwed over and leading a life of slavery and misery. . .
Maybe a potential solution for people who are or are starting to become MGTOW’s and nationalists at the same time, it may be time to start thinking about adopting a kid of your own race, or having a surragete child, that way you don’t have to deal with marriage and women, and you’ll be able to instill your ideas in your kids and continue your own race.
Shares national action propaganda on his twitter, (see thumbnail to the right). 2 The white supremacist organisation was outlawed in December 2016 after endorsing the murder of Labour MP, Jo Cox 3. One member of the group committed attempted murder with a machete 4, while another bought a machete and conspired to carry out the murder of Labour MP Rosie Cooper 5
Promotion of anything as bad or worse than genociding non-white people as moral retribution for people having children with partners outside their own skin color.
Sangeet Som
A relatively unknown legislator of the BJP from western UP shot into fame during the Muzaffarnagar violence. He was credited with posting and circulating a video on the social media, taken out from an incident in Pakistan, and using it to whip up hate against the Muslims in the area. By the time the video was exposed as false by an apathetic state apparatus, Muzaffarnagar had erupted in violence. This violence placed Som centrestage, he was garlanded and felicitated at meetings even as an arrest warrant was out against him. He was arrested finally and released on bail in record time.
With this record Som has become a well known face of the BJP. He travels to ‘trouble spots’ to whip up sentiment against the minorities. He was in Dadri recently whipping up passions and demanding that the family of Mohammad Akhlaq who was beaten to death by a mob on the issue of beef, now be charged with a case of cow slaughter. This was after an unverified report suddenly emerged after eight months claiming that the meat consumed by Akhlaq was beef. Som has announced that he will personally ensure the release of the 17 persons arrested for lynching Akhlaq.
The beef ban celebrated by some vegans hasn’t gone anyway to reducing the consumption of cows in the country and was only instituted to flatter Hindu nationalists in a what is supposed to be secular country and has inevitably resulted in the murder of many Muslims and Dalits who had already been suffering at the hands of so-called “cow vigilantes”.
Animal rights and veganism advocate PETA has in fact gone further and berated vegetarians who consume milk in India for “supporting the beef industry”, thus playing into the communal politics of food in India.
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Starting a YouTube Channel
Letting viewers know the ways they can help you
Give an example list of ways people can help improve the service you deliver and your public reach through transcribing, reviewing, academia, and publicizing, that you might like to hear about if it happens and possible rewards you can offer.
- Write a Review. If you’re a skilled writer who likes to talk about veganism, consider reviewing our site or a favourite episode for your website. We will give you press access to our site for one month in exchange for an honest and thoughtful review.
- Transcribe. Transcribe our videos to text. Each one is approximately 10 minutes long and take 20 minutes to an hour to transcribe. In exchange, you’ll get a free month membership to work on the transcription and then enjoy the rest of the time to watch what you like!
- Translate. Do you speak a language besides English? Transcribe our text content into other languages — especially valuable for vegan vocabulary that accurately reflects our nationalities.
- Educate. Use our videos / photos / essays to illustrate your educational articles on your website or lectures. Go to colleges across the country? Share our ideas with your students.
- Peer reviewed. Get studious about effective activism, writing your own research paper or graduate thesis? Interview our content producers or quote us and bring grassroots advocacy examples into the academic arena.
Start a pay per month subscription?
If you spend a significant amount of time making weekly videos it’s likely a good idea, to allow your fans to give you workplace solidarity when the boss is docking pay unfairly with no possibility of refund. You don’t want to be relying on that income alone, you should be able to expect some economic stability, and it’s great that viewers that get something out of the show can step up and help out where the boss fails. The paywall also restricts to genuinely interested participants in discussion, which can be a bonus or a curse (in the case of echo-chambers).
Patreon takes a 5% tax on donations and you’re on a seperate platform which some like posting to and using, others leave barren and link to a private facebook group that more people are already using. They can also kick you off or age gate you, sometimes based on an algorithm that is wholy undeserved.
Paypal takes a 2.9% tax on monthly donations and you have to go to the work of setting up user groups if you want to create pay to view posts on your website. You can set up a wordpress site, pay £3 per month to get your own domain and install the Groups plugin feature that will do this on SiteGround. Paypal banned the Anti-Fascist Network along with that of the Proud Boys in a PR move, but it’s unclear whether they deploy the same alorithmic censoring reach as companies like Patreon & YouTube.
Liberapay is entirely donation run itself, but with it being a small startup, it’s dependent on other third party licenses. Third party tax on transfers between euro countries is as low as 0.6%, but they haven’t been able to aquire rights to transfer with debit cards in US dollars and transfers between currencies can incur a flat $3.50 tax which just doesn’t make sense outside of large donations, not building a subscription service based on small donations. And there’s always the concern of licenses closing on them as has happened before, but next time them reaching a brick wall.
If you do set up user groups that can see restricted content, this also means you’ll able to offer memberships for other reasons like for collaborators who do so many transcripts per month, coupon codes for affiliates who invite more than 5 people or give aways at a charity event, etc.
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Activist Journeys 