Well, that’s unfortunate. I definitely don’t want to be counted among that group.

I still stand by everything I said. Some people taking an idea too far doesn’t stop the idea itself having merit in moderation. You and everyone like you are placing yourself on the same pedestal above all other beings that the Abrahamic god placed his creations on. The pedestal is certainly decorated a bit better than when Descartes climbed it centuries ago, but it’s still the same pedestal. Y’all will never achieve the egalitarianism you preach until you realize that; you’re just fooling yourselves that the pedestal of “moral veganism” is somehow different (reducing animal products is very good for other reasons, yeah, but that’s not one of them) – unless you are explicitly fine with structures of hierarchy.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml

Yep, the “meaningful consent” bit is what I’m talking about as being pat-yourself-on-the-back overkill. It’s intellectualism trying to future-proof feelings, because people can’t get their heads around the fact that feelings changing in the future doesn’t affect the validity of their form in the past. And, again, it has nothing to do with goats.

And I do think I’ll be done with this thread soon. You’re a human supremicist, and don’t seem to be willing to challenge that. You can look at a dog bouncing and excited to go for a walk but whimpering and lagging behind to go to the vet and say they can’t communicate, they can’t have input into decisions. You think that any reaction a non-human expresses is just training and mental automation rules, because they certainly can’t come up with emotions and opinions themself. (Except when their reactions support your thesis of the moment, when you’ll temporarily forget all that to point gleefully at the same communication you dismiss otherwise to crow “See? They are so much happier in the forest glade than the cage!”)

This was the country; for fun we’d set up hay bales and plank bridges in the side yard, and see if we could communicate with the goats well enough to let them figure out how we were imagining the obstacle course going. Sometimes they were feeling playful or were just in the mood to climb on things, and they’d run the course beside us – sometimes with the human scrabbling to keep up. Sometimes they rejected the idea entirely, dug their hooves in, and told us in no uncertain terms to go see if anyone else was more willing to put up with our tomfoolery. Sometimes they were disinterested and just wandered off to graze aimlessly.

If any goat actually didn’t want to be milked on a given day, there’d be no way we’d get her onto the stand without an outright wrestling match, and no way she’d stay up there through the whole rigamarole. (We wouldn’t have bothered trying, just let her go back to the herd.) First-time mothers did have to learn the process, since it involves a number of non-obvious steps and an unfamiliar metalic ringing when the milk hits the bottom of an empty bucket. But you know what they almost universally weren’t, even the first few times? Distressed. They didn’t have to be “trained to accept milking”, they just had to familiarize themselves with the setup surrounding getting milked.

It’s your comparison to wild goats which seals the whole thing, though. Wild goats are prey, with limited interaction with humans because their instincts read humans as “predator”. These were goats who grew up from birth around humans, who were able to ignore the vague undercurrent of their instincts because they knew better that we were harmless – and in fact were often beneficial (and gave good shoulder scritches). Of course beings with entirely different life experiences will act differently! But, no, that shared understanding of another species is entirely the evil farmers exploiting the poor innocent goats, corrupting their poor natural instincts, which alone determine the entirety of non-human animals’ behavior, and which must be held sacred since those instincts are blessed by evolution and apply equally well to every domestic situation every non-human ever finds itself in. Except when they’re human instincts since we are the only species with the capacity for abstract thought and for rising above the mandate of our baser nature.

I’m tired of y’all. You position yourselves as abolitionists, and maybe you are – but only an abolition of the worst atrocities while enthusiastically perpetuating the idea of “inherent superiority” that underlies it, seeing the ideal goal being one of segregation, patronization, and autocracy.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml

So you’re one of those people who think it’s impossible to have sex when you don’t share a language, then? Consent is a very good model to live by. Blind devotion to the form of consent while ignoring the actual purpose behind it (i.e. to simply make sure nobody regrets what’s happening, in the moment or later) twists it into something it was never meant to be.

And I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about two species learning to read each other’s body language, and to communicate despite the barrier. A goat freely jumping onto the platform where she knows she’ll be milked, without any fear of punishment if she doesn’t, is her agreeing to be milked. It might not meet some mythologized standard of “consent” where all parties involved practically have to sign a contract saying they know every minute detail of what might happen, and the exact likelihood of all potential future consequences years down the line, but that’s not what consent was designed to solve.

The tea model is consent. The tea model can be fulfilled without relying on any specific wording, or even words at all. Anything more complex than the tea model is either meant for risky kink (note: milking a goat is not risky kink) or is over-ritualizing the process for purity points.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml

Ah, good to know you have a argument ready to allow you to move the goalposts, and that you won’t accept any solutions for achieving utopia that don’t come out of the gate already perfect.

To be equally blunt, my response wasn’t “all eight billion people should drink small-farm milk”, it was “you’re being anthropocentric in a very similar vein to saying all other animals are automata.” If you really do think humans are the only species which can have and express desires and dislikes, then enjoy your biological essentialism.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml

My family took care of a small herd of dairy goats when I was growing up. They could definitely make their displeasure known if you tried to make them do something they didn’t want to (especially when they were very nearly your own weight). Milking time? Most days they were perfectly happy to jump up on the stand for us to relieve their udders for them, sometimes even before we’d gotten everything set up.

I am careful where I get my milk from because the big dairy institutions are rather problematic. And I agree that the broad disempowerment and incarceration inherent in farming is an issue on its own. But saying that milk is always, unequivocally, unwanted theft (and respectively that farms provide an unqualified worse life) is just the other side of the same human-exceptionalism coin – you’re removing their agency to say “yes”.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
cc: @Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip

The no-censorship crowd is funny. “I wanted to block everyone whose admins block someone, in order to find the people whose admins don’t block anyone, so I could talk to the few people I hadn’t blocked because they don’t block people.”

(And that’s ignoring the traditional entitlement in that people somewhere else deciding not to listen to you somehow means you’re censored locally.)

Hypocracy – and conspiracy-level rambling – aside, there’s actually an interesting kernel of commentary here on how we talk about joining and administering Fedi. On the one hand, we say that newcomers shouldn’t worry about which instance to start out on, because every one connects to every other, but on the other we celebrate how the instanced architecture allows admins control over which other instances to connect to. And then you have the deeper issue of the vast majority of the software assuming DNS, so even if admins do want to connect to Tor instances, they can’t feasably do so without a fair bit of host-system tweaking. Yeah, those mixed messages are just the emergent result of which layer of abstraction we’re talking about in any given conversation, but it would be nice if we could find language that doesn’t take literally the opposite tack on each successive layer.

I’d say there’s a bit of a difference in that a shopkeeper’s goods don’t depend on any particular storefront (or even any storefront at all with the internet – or a traveller’s cart/van), while a farmer’s land is a crucial part of the means of the crops’ production. I’m also not saying that simply renting is sufficient to be working class, just that it removes one measure by which someone could be pushed out of it.

I also wonder if we’re talking past each other due to misaligned definitions. On one end of the spectrum you have large-scale agricultural business owners who spend their days in the office managing the people who do the actual labour; they’re definitely bourgeois. On the other you have the farmhands themselves who do largely fall into the proletariat. The people I’m talking about are the small farmers in between, who don’t have a boss per se but also don’t employ anyone in turn (at most they enlist a grown child or a long-time friend for a day or two’s parnership to rush the harvest in when weather begins building on the horizon); who only have the one or two fields stretching out behind their own house and who aren’t in any position to consider expanding.

And given the widespread political illiteracy driven by teamerism I don’t think we can rely on what any person or group of people supports to reflect their actual class interests. How much of the reactionary, anti-worker support is because of identifying with the party, as opposed to identifying with the party because of those beliefs? (Also, anti-tax and anti-regulation positions aren’t uniquely bourgeoise ones, they can also be libertarian/anarchist and intended, even if wrongly, as part of a larger system that is just as focused on empowering the working class.)

Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll definitely check it out. It does indeed sound like something paralleling my position here. The feudal->capitalist economic distinction has always been a weak point in my understanding, and it’ll be interesting to see how Varoufakis characterizes them both.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml

Yeah, there’s certainly a fair petite bourgeois population among farmers, but I think you overestimate its size. Many farmers might own the land… if it weren’t still under morgage to the bank. The tractor is almost certainly also still on loan from the dealership since the same “trade in for new, better equipment” scam is as prevalent there as it is for personal vehicles. The corn and especially soybeans aren’t something that can be sold directly at scale (farmers’ markets can only support so much) unlike dairy which you can theoretically turn to regional groceries for – you’re selling to one of a small number of processors and aggregators, and if they decide they don’t need as much as you sold them last year you’re left scrabbling for something to do with a lot of worthless product. At the end of the year, most of the profit has gone right back to the financiers rather than to the farmer themself.

The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it’s advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
via @politics@lemmy.world