Alan's Blog

Haymitch: I'm a political mastermind that started working on this revolution over 25 years ago, already blew up the arena twice and I am the best chance you have to get the victors to work with you

Katniss: I'm deadly in combat, can shoot arrows with the precision of sniper bullets and I am literally the face of the revolution

Peeta: I can get Katniss and Haymitch to eat three meals a day, maintain a semblance of a sleep schedule, exercise, stay sober, shower and actually listen when I speak

Coin: that's not-

"But it's just milk from a cow? Why would that be unkosher?" they asked.

"Well, it's simple but really disgusting. You see, the reason that kosher milk standards explicitly state that there needs to be a Jew present for every step of the process--from milking the cow to drinking the milk, ideally--is because of contamination fears."

"What kind of contamination fears?"

"The kind where Medieval Christians would milk pigs and try to sneak the sow's milk into cow's milk, just out of Jew-hating spite."

"..."

"Yeah. People would go to the trouble of milking a pig and wait for their chance to try to pour that milk into a bucket of cow's milk, just because they hated Jews so much that they wanted us to accidentally break kosher rules. So the kosher rules evolved because of that sort of environment of active spite."

In the last year, pretty much everyone who was involved in that conversation and who hasn't hopped onto the Jew-hating bandwagon themselves has admitted to me that at the time, they didn't believe it, not fully, and now they do.

And I think, unfortunately, this will further antisemitism. "Why aren't the Jews sick? They must be contaminating our food!"

Medieval Christians did not need Jews to be actually dying at lower rates of the plague to claim we were, and kill us over it. This is important to understand. Bigotry does not need evidence.

in fact, the restaurant used the vegan identity and environmentalism as fuel for their marketing in quite cynical ways. at the same time they had a deal with Whole Foods (implicated in prison labor allegations btw) to source ingredients, meaning that there were transcontinentally shipped produce lol. for example we used frozen blueberries that were product of Chile. for a restaurant in the pacific northwest region in the united states of america. there are blueberry farms in oregon, washington, etc. But it’s cheaper to exploit south american farms than get local blueberries i guess. (which still by and large exploit the labor of migrant farmworkers from mexico and south and central america, but i digress)

Cashews that make vegan cheese are extremely dangerous to harvest due to the fact they mist be harvested by hand and the fruit has corrosive enzymes. Most workers end up with scars from chemical burns.

Almond farms were linked to the declining bee population due to the number of bees needed to pollinate the plants. Most bee keepers were lucky to get half their hives back after farms rented them.

We all know about how much of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed to make way for soy farms.

Agave is a main food source for many bats, but no, harvesting excess honey from bees that over produce it is the problem. If bees regularly have a large surplus of honey they swarm, the hive splits and some leave to start a new hive. Problem is that most bees don't survive this process because it makes them vulnerable to other environmental factors. So encouraging farming and over consumption of agave and stopping the consumption of honey, you're actually harming two different populations of pollinators.

"Vegan leather" is mostly plastic, which breaks down and sheds microplasics. Contributing to the ever growing landfill and contaminated water supply issues we have. Meanwhile cow hide is a natural byproduct from the meat industry, and real leather can last decades if taken care of. A single cow can feed 2 families of 4 for a year, and that leather can go towards making belts, boots, gloves and jackets that last decades.

It's like how a bunch of celebs were big on body positivity and fat liberation...until Ozempic dropped and it turns out no, none of them ever believed any of that! They just pretended to bcs up until now healthy, long term weight loss was impossible so they had no choice but to cope by learning to love themselves no matter how they looked...but now that it's here we can go back to the truth! Being fat is ugly and gross and unhealthy and you should starve yourself and take experimental meds right now so you can be skinny which is what ALL humans are clearly supposed to be!! Yeah that body positivity stuff was fun, but come on. We know you actually just wanna be skinny and think being fat is a fate worse than death.

That's what it feels like to me. Every single time. Honestly in a lot of other areas too, one of the big issues with the left is that they really do seem to think that Republicans are right about how things work and should work but we just pretend otherwise because it's the right thing to do and it reduces suffering. Which seems fine, but you cannot be an effective leftist like this. You do actually have to deconstruct your beliefs and biases and world systems, you can't go around like "well yeah we aren't gonna kill disabled people that's eugenics and it's wrong" when you clearly don't actually think it's wrong. You think eugenics would work but implementing it would be uncivilized, and it shows. You have to actually understand that racism and ableism and all other forms of bigotry are not just cruel, but entirely incorrect.

Good riddance.