A mature oak can produce twenty-nine thousand acorns a year. Each has the chance to sustain our people, heal the world some, and spread where it can.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

"With Friends Like These..."

Yesterday author Lierre Keith (of "The Vegetarian Myth", which I'm currently reading) was attacked by three masked cowards, with a cream pie laced with cayenne pepper, who then shouted "GO VEGAN". By her account she's still in pain today. This is an ideologically driven hate crime, and I suspect misogynistic motivations as well (myself and others have spelled out why the fanatic vegan movement has huge racist and sexist undertones). It was an exercise in dominating-male violence over a woman.

Lierre is a middle aged woman with a degenerative disease. The attackers were reportedly young men. In no way was it a "fair fight". To add insult to injury (literally), the pepper in the pie is an honest-to-goodness chemical weapon. Pepper spray, even the strength used by police for crowd control, is the same active compound as that put in the pie. This causes injury that can't be taken lightly. Pie-ing is usually a political statement made against CEOs and politicians; they don't receive capsicum pies, but a fellow environmentalist gets a legitimate attack on her safety!? It's the bullshit of chauvinistic males attacking someone they deemed lower than them on the violence hierarchy; she was perceived as an easy target, in part because she's a woman.

Of course, dogmatic vegans aren't actually interested in the environment, or justice, just their identity politics. Even at the expense of potentially driving further rifts into the already tenuous radical environmental movement, apparently.

Call out cowardly zealots committing ideologically-driven assaults as the criminals they are! Ostracize them, if not more! Say no to "Horizontal hostility"! Especially you vegan allies!

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Twenty-Nine Thousand Acorns by Daniel Q is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Photoshop Tree Brushes created by Obsidian Dawn. Photoshop custom dandelion shape created by MyMimi. "Broken Acorns" photograph in banner taken by modcam. Layout by Kris.