r/Vystopia

Came across https://www.reddit.com/r/HouseOfTheDragon/s/OZUHaQvTU7 this post today, and it annoyed me so much that the OP and the comments completely ignore what we do to animals while expressing empathy for fictional dragons. Cognitive dissonance strikes again.

My friend and I hung around our city’s central recently with signs that said ‘stop the r*pe and exploitation of animals - live vegan’.
(The word had an asterisks in it)

We had a few tame reactions and even some positive discussions but on the train back home I had a group say ‘there’s kids here, that’s disgusting to use that word’
The rest of the train carriage were nodding their heads and agreeing. Then they started blaming us for crop deaths and yadi yadi ya.

I said something like ‘yeah, this crime is absolutely horrible! That’s why kids shouldn’t be taught that it’s okay to support it.’
Then I was like ‘and what about non-human kids? They deserve to live lives free of this crime.’

We ended up talking over the top of each other before a fellow commuter told us to stfu. I remained calm and peaceful, dw.

I probably didn’t go about it the best way so what would you guys say? I know it’s a horrible word but I am referring to the use of artificial insemination which is standard practice in most meat farms.

Should I specify that’s what I’m talking about the next time? I feel like this part of meat farming is not talked about enough. It’s 100% a violation of the animals body to forcibly impregnate them.

I see the occasional smattering of “go vegan”’s in random places, but these phrases don’t do much to disrupt the rigid beliefs held by the target audience. Same issue with peta marketing- it tends to be shallow and leaves itself open to the meat-eaters’ entire arsenal of fallacies that they use to defend their habits. Is there an effective, short slogan that can actually bypass the defenses meat-eaters dredge up? One that isn’t just preaching to the choir?

It usually takes entire essays or documentaries to lay out the moral and environmental issues with animal agriculture, but I’m also looking for a convenient, mediary way of short length to them.
Need something I can write in the sand of a beach before I leave.

accidentally ate 3/4 of a pint of coffee flavored "non dairy sorbetto" before i flipped it over and read the ingredients and saw it contains egg. i didn't even consider that a possibility. i feel so stupid. its my fault, i should have checked, and i guess maybe its not purposely misleading, but im upset regardless. i thought sorbet was already inherently dairy free and so that specifying it was "dairy free" was signaling that is was also plant based. i forgot some people genuinely only avoid dairy due to allergies and do not avoid other animal products. silver lining is i learned a lesson but fuck i just feel awful. it was completely avoidable.

hi folks, i'm sure i'm not the only one here in a similar predicament, but as a vegan leftist antinatalist i feel pretty lonely a lot of the time, because like-minded friends are very rare. so many people who identify as "vegan" on dating apps like veggly don't even understand what veganism means and still exploit animals in some ways. since people here get it, i thought i'd seek here.

let me know if this is not a proper subreddit to make a seeking post like this in, i can delete it if so.

otherwise: i'm 30, agender (they/them), unfortunately from so-called "israel" (i'm very anti-zionist), but moving soon, likely to sweden. intersectional leftist/anarchist, vegan for 14+ years, childfree and antinatalist, atheist, autistic, introvert, relationship anarchist, smoke/drug/alcohol-free. i like video games, board games, tabletop rpgs (like d&d), jigsaw puzzles, dissociating from the horrors of reality, billiards, philosophy, learning japanese (n3), and collecting, rating and exchanging music.

feel free to reach out in dms if you're vegan, leftist, antinatalist, and at least 25+. and also feel free to use the comment section of this post to share about yourself to seek connections with others too :)

Made in blender.

Going back towards home from work, dead bodies of murdered victims showed on the screen of the bus. At work, an investor was talking about mountain sickness and my boss told I got it because I didn’t eat “meat” (dismembered murdered animal), despite recovering soon afterwards and working perfectly fine in high altitudes after my body became accustomed.

I don’t know why so many nonvegans tell the joke of “how do you know someone is a vegan” when always people around me find it out for the words of others, not mine. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shy away from my veganism and I speak for the victims a lot through the internet and social media, but I know how freaking irrational the average person is and I just put a wall between activism and my immediate social surroundings in order to not become insane trying to reason with fucking walls.

Still, such a wall becomes paper thin more often than not. My mother called me once “sick in the head” for becoming vegan even if at the time was quiet about it… but how could it be? Why is not wanting to hurt animals the insane position? Why is being violent towards them normal? Every time I get some sort of health issue she says to me “see? you are eating unhealthy, you should be “more balanced”, despite a lot of times those problems being solved themselves or just a change in supplementation.

Being constantly the target of jokes, relatives treating your choices as a problem… why is not willful ignorance the actual issue? Why those who inform themselves and change for the better the issue? I swear I wonder how our species could go to the fucking moon and not get it that cutting heads off to eat body parts is fucking wrong!! There are days in which I want just to scream to everybody “the hell is wrong with you?! Abusing animals for products we don’t need is grossly immoral, you are the wrong one, not me!!! And yet, our societies gaslight us into thinking we are in the wrong.

And having no one in real life to talk about this... because everybody around you are human supremacists, literally everybody… no matter how much you try to reason with them, they turn their brains off, gaslight you and scapegoat you as soon as you start to make sense.

I am so tired of people’s bullshit. So tired of being lonely and ridiculed. Very, very hard of not becoming disgusted with our species.

I've been thinking a lot about animal leather lately, and how abysmal it is that the default non-vegan position on it is that it's "actually environmentally sustainable" and "way better than vegan leather" (by that they typically only mean one specific type of plastic based synthetic leather).

It's really hard to challenge this opinion because non-vegans - and even some vegans! - tend to believe it wholeheartedly, never looking into the industry itself (cow leather has been identified multiple times as one of the highest-impact apparel materials from an environmental perspective, ranking twice as destructive on a complete cradle-to-gate assessment vs. synthetic leather; many of these studies aren't new either - we've known about how destructive leather livestock runoff and tanning is in terms of eutrophication for decades).

It's even harder when people won't consider that when you say you wear vegan leather, it's not simply PVC coated plastic; there's cork, and mushroom, and cactus, natural rubber, waste materials from winemaking, pineapple skin, processed corn and banana fibers, the list goes on... (many much more durable than people assume!)

How do you talk to people about these easily misunderstood topics, like vegan leather? And, are there aspects that you feel similarly really lack understanding in the overall cultural consciousness, even among "smart" or liberal minded people?

I'm recently vegan (8 days, feeling AMAZING); transitioned out of an omnivore diet for about 2 months due to health issues, joined the vegan sub, saw Dominion advertised, watched it, now I'm vegan for all the reasons.

I was only there for five minutes but the weight of what I can't unsee started to feel suffocating. I'm good at focusing on how glad I am that I'm on the right path now. I can't afford to beat myself up for my past lifestyle. I don't spend my alone time dwelling on the guilt, even though I am guilty (deep down I knew better for many years, but always yielded to cultural momentum... Dominion just cracked me open). But being there... all I could see was packaged misery. Brought to you by big oil, who couldn't function without this, and has spent 100 years convincing us that we need it.

I'm desperately networking, trying to find like-minded people, but I've already been trying to make friends in general since I moved across the US last year and it's HARD in your late 30's. I emailed a rescue farm near me about volunteering. I want to go be with the cows and just sit and watch them and be gentle around them, and be with people who feel the same way. The nearest meet-ups would take too much travel for me given certain life circumstances, though I should be able to do that sometime within a few months. I need to find a vegan who's willing to let me cry into their arms for a few hours.

There are no words in any language to describe how fucked up this is. Even if the lies and jokes about how vegans have to eat "rabbit food" were true, I'd rather eat nothing but iceberg lettuce for the rest of my life, to the detriment of my health, than participate willingly in this hell.

I remember when I was a teenager, hearing about the Jewish holocaust and how evil it was to mass murder the innocent just for being from a different race, and that something like that should never happen ever again.

You hear it over and over again. Nazis are bad. Hitler was the devil himself. Every comparison with evil you heard your whole life involved the holocaust the nazis did to the jews… so you grow up thinking everybody is against violence towards the innocent, than torture and murder is wrong….

And suddenly, by a pathway all of us took by different means, you have a consciousness shift. Being a nazi is not frowned upon, but normal. Being violent towards the innocent is the norm. The only difference is with the victim. And if you try to wake people up to this fact, you either get mocked or become a target of insults.

But that is not even the hardest part of it. It is not the whole indoctrination of human supremacy you got since the day you were born and animals being mass murdered, that are bad enough things, but the fact that once you wake up, no one else wants to listen, they become numb and stop listening to you, like if you spoke a different language....

And one day you realize: People have no problems with being violent and causing injustices to others, as long as they have a benefit from it, and if they can get away from it.

It is beyond dystopic. It is so hard to not gaslight oneself and wanting to go back to that blissful state of ignorance, being among so much violence, so much cruelty, everyday, everywhere. But you can’t go back, you would become a holocaust supporter…

Seriously, most of days I can’t wake up without this awful feeling of something horribly wrong, and feeling completely hopeless, like if someone in order to stop a forest fire would borrow you a hose and say “go on, end the forest fire”.

Opened my instagram and this girl I followed had a post of her with animals. First slide: smiling holding baby goat. Second slide: holding a calf on the ground that was tied up. Third slide: video of her pushing over and holding the calf while they brand them. Fourth slide: bunch of cows in the grass.

Me now: CRYING.

Like the video is so cruel. i can’t believe people are just okay hurting baby animals like this and then posting it thinking it’s aesthetic or cute. The fact she posted her holding the baby goat in the first slide and then holds a baby calf still for branding??? Her other posts are all of her huge fluffy dogs. It’s just so insane that people are so loving towards their fucking dogs and other animals while actively abusing cows??? I’m so angry and upset and I just really hate that I was born in this timeline that is so cruel to animals. I’m genuinely so upset and crying rn, I haven’t been triggered like that in a while.

Obviously unfollowed her, but took a lot in me not to message her and say that’s fucked up. How do yall ground yourselves.

Edit: also called my sister to try to chill out but she was like oh I don’t want to hear about that, that’s sad. (She eats meat) added salt to the wound cause how are you sooo upset to hear that but still eat animals??

It really is insane how apathetic and morally disengaged people are to the point you just can't have a serious conversation without people terminating their thinking or reflexively becoming defensive because they are unaware of their emotional state. It is beyond me that people can live in a world with so much apparent suffering and injustice and not care to change or address these things at all even when a lot of it would only require a small amount of effort to create a significant difference (researching products/not buying them, being more considerate, small acts of volunteering).

So much would change drastically if people could find it within themselves to just care a little bit, but it seems pretty clear to me that most people don't even care to think about their own life beyond what is immediately in front of them and how they personally feel about it. So many people want to complain and deflect/displace their own contributions to avoid taking accountability for what actions they are capable of. So fast to blame the world and system and yet somehow never reaching the conclusion of reflecting on the consequences they bring about and actually have immediate authority over. Yes things are undesirable and one person cannot change the surrounding circumstances of existence, but they can still do something that makes a difference to someone and if enough do you get a systemic difference. Although it is obvious that it never really was the point if the individual wasn't willing to do what 'they thought was right' in the first place. It's pathetic levels of stupidity and an unwillingness to learn that makes sure things stay extra shit and it's never fair on the victims.

I was at the pride parade today and saw people ordering hot dogs from a stand. I started to think how they were actively supporting the rights for one group while actively oppressing another. I tried to talk to them about this but they didn’t want to hear it.

I used to think people who were oppressed themselves would be more open to hearing about animal oppression but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Just needed to rant.