She said in her talk, she supports the goals of the “Bernie Sanders campaign, the native lead movement at Standing Rock, the movement for immigrant rights and LGBTQ rights and the black lives matter movement”DarlBundren wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2017 4:35 pmI am well aware of how industrial production works and I am sure her followers know a lot about the harms of capitalism too. What I would like her to do, though, is going beyond criticism and provide a solution to the problems she's talking about. She doesn’t.
Fairer taxes and supporting the middle class. Indigenous autonomy for different first nations to grant oil permits and others to not by their choosing, especially when it effects drinking water sources in which a majority non-native town had successfully lobbied for the pipeline to not run through their backyard. Fairer immigration controls and refugee quotas to have on board those people fleeing ISIS who can attest to their brutality and prevent further radicalization. Improved sex education and protection against LGBTQ discrimination. Police demilitarization, transparency and better training.
When Bernie was cheated out of the race, she put up an interview with a Humane Party supporter, to help make people aware of this vegan party they could lend critical support to, despite their shortcomings because it would be good to raise the platform of a third party explicitly for the animals in gov, potentially through strategic voting in safe states.
At the end of her “What do I think about a Resource Based Economy and TZM?” video she rejects ‘one size fits all’ prescriptive politics and talks about autonomous movements she likes that are taking abolitionist opportunities when they present themselves:
https://youtu.be/NEWfdYyVBYI?t=11m41s
She also said “…all the talks were around a common theme and we were sort of given the challenge to give a talk that addressed how times are changing and how like what this means for the vegan movement.” If you want to learn about specific intersectional animal rights groups like the ‘food empowerment project’ I would recommend “Intersections of Justice: Building an Inclusive Animal Rights Movement” by Christopher Sebastian:
https://youtu.be/VrlVQiSNNSs??t=15m43s
That’s called slave morality, which is a pseudo-scientific universalist idea, which I know APV doesn’t believe in from their TZM video linked above, liberation theology has produced some positive results in Latin America though.It's good that these arguments helped you to become a better vegan, man. I mean it. However, I think those ideas can be pretty damn dangerous too. Do we really need other guys like Zizek? Guys that are telling their (huge) audience that helping people is bad?
Because that is what they are saying: https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-animate/2010/08/rsa-animate---first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce-
And it's not new. It's the age-old Marxist idea according to which improving the condition of the poor is helping the enemy, because, by being vegetarian and giving money to charities, we are delaying the revolution. To be honest, I'm surprised that A Privileged Vegan is vegan to begin with. I know some people who have used the same argument to justify their eating meat. I am glad she has taken a more moderate position.
I get how that ethos would bother you, I’m constantly disappointed by the apathy I see when the two most unfavourable candidates in US history faced off, and in my friends when it came to Brexit and the last general election. An article from an academic Buddhist site I like visiting wrote in support of “the ensuing economic catastrophe [that] would greatly speed the radicalization of the increasingly impoverished majority.”
But there is also much to be said for Zizek’s critique of people buying moral complacency through ethical consumerism just as UV said and doing more harm than good in specific situations. He is not deriding the “. . .idiosyncrasy of some good guys [giving charity] here and there. . . I'm just saying that if all the cherished values of liberalism - I love them but the only way to save them is to do something more. . .” You’re still a shitty person if you don’t give to charity without doing that ‘something more’, he is just saying we’ve got locked into a system of moral complacency.
When I was doing solidarity work with refugees at the border I would see local people putting old jumpers in collection bins destined for Africa while African refugees were getting hypothermia sleeping rough on their own streets. [1][2] That’s an example of them doing their charitable lifestyle deed of recycling, without even realizing there were real people in their town they could lend solidarity to through organizations on the ground and form a real human connection in the process. [3][4]
Glad we can agree on that.2) I agree that ethical consumerism is not the most effective option we have got. Veganism is pretty good though.
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References:
1. An experience with solidarity activism
- http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3019&p=29886
2. Hypothermia in the jungle & squat raid in town
- https://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/hypothermia-in-the-jungle-squat-raid-in-town/
3. Charity or Solidarity?
- http://davidcharles.info/2015/06/charity-or-solidarity/
4. From “refugee” to “migrant” in Calais solidarity activism: Re-staging undocumented migration for a future politics of asylum:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241104502_From_refugee_to_migrant_in_Calais_solidarity_activism_Re-staging_undocumented_migration_for_a_future_politics_of_asylum
No Borders’ testimony strives to expose the “miscounts” which allow the discriminatory functions of border controls to pass unnoticed. I call this emphasis on “framing” a politics of spectacle, to contrast it with the humanitarian politics of providing sanctuary for those afflicted (see Darling, 2010). The spectacle is effectively an intervention into collective forms of ethos it throws into question a particular partitioning of the social, or boundaries between those who are allotted ethical responsibility, and those expected to gratefully receive it. In practice, this stance could not but affect No Borders’ own conception of their activism. Through dialogue with migrants activists confronted gaps between their own assumptions about politics for example, that migrants understood themselves as political activists, and would rather claim a borderless citizen-ship than a particular nationality. I consider the collaborative forms of politics resulting from these encounters a recount or a call for a continuous recount, since they attend reiteratively to the partiality of particular counts. This distinguishes the solidarity ethos as a set of habits of attention, and of action based on attention, which precede the attachment to a particular count. It is an ethic of ethical disturbance, which allots political listening to new priority over political speech.
Across the months I observed No Borders’ activity the practice of this tactic visibly altered the kind of testimony produced by the network. For example, activists experimented with using their bodies to interrupt the perception of a scene making noise to make sure that the habitual arrest of migrants could not occur unnoticed; or standing by passively, constituting an audience to whom police must also be accountable. One instance was described by Nicole, an activist involved in producing alternative media about Calais: a raid on migrants was taking place outside an internet shop, just as a tourist “mini-train” stopped outside a nearby church. Whilst the riot police were “beating up” migrants, tourists continued taking pictures, apparently oblivious to the scene. Articulating her disbelief, Nicole reported that when she shouted people noticed, and began to protest themselves. She noted a growing conviction that the key element of solidarity activism is becoming “receptive”, and fostering a broader culture of receptivity. Rather than setting the political agenda, this ethos demands that individuals be moved by their experience, and allow this affectedness to address the norms inflecting shared ordinary reactions. Some described this tactic simply as “witnessing,” even suggesting that embodiments of witnessing might replace the humanitarian emphasis on testimony. A male interviewee, involved in planning initial visits to Calais used this term for the practice of following riot police to document, and where necessary intervene in, their interactions with the migrants. On one memorable occasion he states how:
Then some of us, with papers and light-coloured skin, were able to shout. This act of declaring one ’s presence at the scene – a “hey!” - is political according to Rancière, not in the sense of the content of the shout, for this would emphasis the No Borders activist as a political speaker. Rather it is political in that it addresses the framing of the scene, engaging the way that migrants’ speech is perceived only as noise by the police and wider public. The critical political point here is not, therefore, that the actions of No Borders’ activists “politicise” the actions and claims of migrants, but that such tactics address the conditions of speech and listening which constitute lines of separation between migrants, citizens and activists. This evidence forms of activism which not only challenge security practices for what they exclude, but which continually reconsider what is inside a collective ethos, or ethic of responsibility. It can be enacted by anyone; a No Borders activist, a migrant, a French citizen, but it speaks back above all to one’s own partisanship in relation to such categories. Further, such definition casts the solidarity ethos as an ethos of audiencing rather than of performing; a politics which calls the count of the situation itself into question, rather than re-presenting what has been counted out.