That’s fair but there’s also a practical question of efficacy. Malcolm X did not convince white people to change.
MLK brilliantly straddled the line between speaking up and alienating people.
Comment on non vegan pizza time
Nevoic@lemm.ee 5 months agoMLK said it best, so I’ll just quote him directly:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
When moderates advocate for “kindness” or “civility”, they’re advocating for negative peace; the absence of tension. Vegans advocate for positive peace; the presence of justice. When activists advocate for positive peace, in the face of those who deny said justice, tensions rise and moderates fall back to this common trope.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Nevoic@lemm.ee 5 months ago
MLK actually alienated white moderates to about the same degree that vegans alienate carnists. It was only retroactively, after the civil rights movement, that white moderates pretended like they were aligned with him all along. In 1966 MLK was polling in the low 30s among white Americans.
I’m sure future moderates/apoliticals will do the same with veganism. Lab grown meat will become a thing, we’ll outlaw our barbaric practices of animal torture and slaughter, and those future generations will look back with horror at how savage we were, and all the moderates will proclaim proudly that “I would’ve been a vegan if I was born in the late 20th/early 21st century”, and they would be almost always wrong.
It’s similar to everyone’s modern position on slavery. If you polled the majority of the population “would you be an abolitionist if you were born in the early/mid 19th century?”, you’ll get the vast majority of people saying they would’ve been, but the vast majority of people were not, and its not like we had some evil gene in us that got naturally selected out of us. People were just normalized in that environment. People today are just generally incorrect about what the impact of normalization would’ve been on them in the past (or even what the impact of it is on them today).
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
The people in Washington listened to MLK because he was radicalising hundreds of thousands of people, and if his demands were not met, the politicians worried that those people would start listening to Malcolm X. The radical and moderate sides of any movement exist in symbiosis. They are the carrot and the stick, working together. The owning class likes the carrot much better than the stick, so they give credit to the carrot. But you need radicals so that you can say “look who’s coming for you if you don’t listen to me”. It’s good cop bad cop.
spujb@lemmy.cafe 5 months ago
Holy shit you did not just quote MLK at me saying people who eat cheese should not be harrassed!
That is a disturbing twisting of both veganism and MLK. :(
Once again I participate with so many vegan individuals in ways that do not involve harrassment campaigns. Here is a list of direct action that I consider constructive:
Again I cannot believe I am saying this, but there is no credible evidence that MLK participated in harrassment against individuals admitting minor disagreement. Attacking a person who admits to eating cheese, like maybe 60% of the world population, accusing them of being a rapist constantly and repeatedly, and calling that “advocacy for positive peace,” is really really fucking sad. It is absolutely terrifyingly in bad faith to quote MLK in defense of such behavior.
disclaimer
Maybe this isn’t you, I haven’t checked your account history so keep that in mind. You have my apologies if you aren’t doing verbal abuse. :) My criticisms of others in the Lemmy community who do verbal attacks do hold, though. I am just glad they are the minority in real life and only seem to exist online.
Longpork3@lemmy.nz 5 months ago
Why should people committing unjust acts be allowed to commit them in peace? Where is the peace for their victims if we do not speak up? The MLK quote seems entirely fitting.
Nevoic@lemm.ee 5 months ago
While the civil rights movement was largely “peaceful” (loaded word with little meaning), it was also incredibly disruptive. People in the movement were very rude to moderates who advocated in favor of negative peace while reaffirming their appreciation of the status-quo.
MLK’s position here was not that the people within the civil rights movement needed to be more respectful to white moderates. His position was that the moderates were the issue. The people who consistently advocated for negative peace were the issue.
The leaders of vegan movements also don’t generally go around attacking the moderates of our time who appreciate the status-quo and advocate for negative peace. There are individuals that do attack moderates, just like there were individuals in the civil rights movement who literally physically assaulted white moderates (much worse than calling someone a cheese-breather and having their feelings get a bit hurt). Again, MLK did not draw attention to these fringe cases because the actual issue were the moderates themselves.
Veganism is the same. The issue is not the people who are a bit rude online to bloodmouths/carnists. The issue is the moderates themselves, their constant advocacy for negative peace in place of positive peace needs to be shut down constantly.
spujb@lemmy.cafe 5 months ago
Yeah, precisely. Put simply my goal is to call out the fact that these individuals are having an outsized influence on Lemmy. I have no criticism of vegan leadership as a whole. I just hope we can continue to call out the toxicity that is present on Lemmy until a more constructive and representative-of-the-whole community exists on here. 💙
Nevoic@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Calling someone a bloodmouth for literally eating things with blood might hurt their feelings, but vegans have feelings too, and sometimes we’re upset at the idea that moderates can’t be bothered to give enough of a shit to stop literally shoveling blood into their mouths.
This is something I seriously hate from people like you, you expect vegans to be these bastions of angelic perfection. We already go through the effort of being vegans in a non-vegan world, but that’s not enough, we have to make sure we do it in a way that don’t effect the delicate sensibilities of people who pay to consume tortured animal carcasses.
The goal shouldn’t be to try to de-radicalize vegans for expressing their discomfort around literal abuse that’s normalized in our society. The goal should be to get rid of the abuse.