shop: this product is ✨ vegan ✨
shop: ✨ no animals were harmed in the making of this product ✨
me: okay great
me: so what is it made of
shop: ✨ plastic ✨

remind me again how many animals are harmed in the production of cotton or linen

veganism is when you get a bunch of crude oil form the ground, transform it into PVC or whatever in chemical plants, and then have it shed microplastics onto the entire planet for decades. And the more you do those things, the more vegan it is

@schratze atp idk what is even vegan or not it feels like no matter what i do i will harm animals 😭

@mynameistillian yeah. It's unavoidable. I would say cotton and other plant fibers are the best option, but even then, those are using up tons of space and water and pesticides are a factor

@schratze are u shitting on vegans or perfomative feel good capitalism?

@schratze most vegans i know avoid plastics and avoid buying new shit altogether

granted, i used to know alot of the performative ones too but i cut them out

@xyhhx I'm more or less vegan. I'm complaining about companies promoting shitty plastic clothes, shoes and pillows as vegan

@xyhhx thanks but I thought we were past using that word

@schratze or hemp

@schratze flaxheads unite

@schratze @xyhhx but i see vegans saying "plant based" all the time…

@mcc @xyhhx come oooon

@schratze cotton: pretty water intensive and if it's not eco cotton the production often releases a ton of waste chemicals into the watter

linen: barely needs any water and the wrinkling is part of the charme, no "non-iron" chemicals needed, 10/10 no notes

@schratze you can choose to keep infighting if you'd like, but i havent seen a reason to stop other than "this person i don't like also uses it"

unlike pepes etc, i dont see a correlation between it and hateful rhetoric specifically

that said, i can try to be mindful when engaging with you and try to avoid it

@schratze likewise, i chose not to harp on being "more or less vegan", which is a binary state: you either are or arent; but the sentiment is what matters to me

@xyhhx different people use "vegan" to mean different things. I've heard people say you can't grab onto a leather handle on the tram if you're vegan. I don't subscribe to that. And I still would rather wear leather shoes than ones entirely made of plastic

@schratze whoever realised plastic shoes could be sold as "vegan leather" should be condemned.

@schratze And then they try to say its breathable and antibacterial so it's the same or better, as if natural fibres aren't.

Literally both times I've had folliculitis, it was directly traceable to polyester, nylon, or blends containing polyester or nylon being on my legs. (Once to leggings, once to looser pants.) Both times required antibiotics to treat, one time resulted in scarring that's only just started to fade years later.

And I don't care how lightweight the mesh is, I am going to sweat exponentially more in synthetics than I will in natural fibres and that just adds up to sensory hell. (I have no idea why and I frankly can't be bothered finding out.)

The only thing plastic has going for it so far in containers is that it's significantly cheaper than silicon (glass and ceramic can shatter too easily for my clumsy self). Or possibly the few sellers around me offering silicone food containers are charging exorbitant prices (I'm convinced this also happens and probably more than people think). I could definitely try my hand at it, but I don't have a 3D printer so I doubt I'll get very far making anything that can seal well enough for food storage.

@dartigen yeah that's fucked up.

Most synthetic fibers just don't allow any liquid or air to pass. They insulate you hermetically. The sweat does not pass through and evaporate, it just builds up.

I will go to bat for semisynthetic fibers such as rayon or lyocell though. Those are usually fine to wear. And clothes with 2% elastane or whatever are fine in my book. That usually just means the waistband is made of that stuff.

@schratze no animals were harmed ✨ yet ✨

@virtulis @schratze I'm enjoying this particular ✨ corporate shitglitter ✨ markup, or whatever it's called

@achadwick @virtulis well it's called shitglitter now

@schratze

new rule: if you can't eat the shoes, they're not vegan.

@celesteh @schratze @mynameistillian I have two leather jackets so old that they were already old when I bought them and had been wearing them since a while too. I think I will be able to pass it down to any potential future niblings or something, they're just so durable

@leguinian_utopia @celesteh @mynameistillian there's this shitty old German poem I keep thinking about. It's about a pair of buckskin breeches that last for at least four generations. And they can stand on their own
https://www.mumag.de/gedichte/mue_b05.html

@schratze @celesteh @mynameistillian ✨️Lederhosen-saga✨️ lmao

@leguinian_utopia @schratze @celesteh @mynameistillian nábrók defeated

@owl @leguinian_utopia @celesteh @mynameistillian "Nábrók or nábuxur are a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead human"

what

"which are believed in Icelandic witchcraft to be capable of producing an endless supply of money"

WHAT

@owl @leguinian_utopia @celesteh @mynameistillian reading up on this and I'm learning that creating the necropants and performing the rituals necessary to use them is the most ethical way to make money under capitalism

@schratze veganism is when you don't give a single fuck about the underpaid, overworked workers who harvest your veg. it's only about feeling good about what's on your plate, not the system of exploitation that harms everyone regardless of diet choice.

@burnitdown @schratze
yeah it does feel pretty good not to eat the literal flesh of someone who was actually alive before being brutally killed for consumption, actually

not a diet. never been a diet. always been about redefining our relationship to other animals, respecting their personhood and rejecting their status as commodities AKA anti-speciesism (I'm sure this is funny to some people, liberation always is to the opppresor at first)

good luck forming any kind of coherently decent relationship to other animals while still making these weak excuses

@burnitdown @schratze
If you think a black person is racist for telling you any of this btw you're the issue.

@Opticacia are you addressing me or @burnitdown?
Because the point I was trying to make at the top of the thread was not to bash veganism. It was criticizing companies that try to market their plastic crap by greenwashing it as vegan.

The major reason why I don't wanna wear plastic clothes is that they're gonna dissolve into microplastics which is going to poison the environment, the animals in it, and us humans.

And the alternative I'm proposing is not wearing wool and leather clothes, but cotton, linen and hemp.

@schratze leather moment

@schratze i guess synthetic fibers fit the bill better here since the alternative to plastic leather is animal leather

although IMO at least cow leather is a much better idea than cow meat under current animal slaughter conditions (cow skin is often tossed); i imagine other lifestock is similar in that

@schratze @burnitdown
no not you at all.

veganwashing and greenwashing is a problem and its getting worse. I'm almost in two minds because its pragmatically useful for things to be labelled 'vegan' but also its increasingly being absorbed into capitalism and therefore increasingly absurd. The rise of the term 'plant-based' I suppose is good in this case actually. I definitely think veganism is losing some of the power it had as an anti-consumerist movement with all these new products, as much as it is I guess an ethical improvement in most(?) cases. I find it hard to care about 'improvement' personally, it's all varying degrees of hellish.

@schratze @burnitdown
I suppose this is why I'm protective of veganism as specifically an anti-speciesist practice.

Otherwise it's wide open to this kind of capitalist recouperation as some kind of vague 'good' when in reality there's still problems, or it's actively expanding exploitation in different trajectory.