#1
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..of the masses. our social relations being atomized and commodified has been leading more and more people to surrogate a child-like innocent behavior to their animal friends, regardless of the animals natural predatory instincts etc. im autistic enough to get upset about people disregarding social circles and building their schizoid dream world of a perfect loyal companion in animals because it literally subverts the needs to face the problems creating and maintaining social relations. its the same fucking thing with anime waifus and shit. a disstraction at most from trying to even analyze why us humans act as we do. idk my point even.. fuck pets I guess
#2
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whoa man.... have you ever thought that, like, breeding dogs for physical and behavioral traits is eugenics?!?? truly we were the nazis all along.. .
#3
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if pets are opium, call me that one character from The Good Earth that i don't remember from when i read it in highschool
#4
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my gf owns a acat and my parents a dog and they both act like telepaths towards their inbred wolftigers. its weirding me out cuz both my parents and mu gf have admitted to having problems associating with other hymenkind due to not ever knowing whats going on in their minds. they are literally projecting an illusion of consciousness to their furry friends and its argumentum ad absurdum way of differentiating between the fantasy of animal consciousness and the real of indecipherable hymon consciousness. JUST FUCKING DIAMAT THAT SHIT WHATS WRONG WIF/ YOUS
#5
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It is not technology that is decisive but the social relations that use it. I agree with what your said but what the United States fears most of all are cat videos from China becoming popular on the internet because it shows that the internet technology that is used under capitalism to create obedient workers with the attention span necessary for the rhythm of production and distract from alienation through immersion into "furbabies" can instead be used by socialism to create solidarity and empathy and real consciousness of the historical limits of the capitalist mode of production. Pets need not be incorporated into alienation and commodification and in fact resist it; the mere existence of pets under socialism has already opened pandoras box which no amount of buzzfeed articles about hamsters with twitter accounts can close. Look at the political struggles over Pandas and the reactionary role of the WWF and US govt to see the political role that animals can and should play as the superiority of socialism for the preservation of life on earth becomes more and more self-evident to even bourgeois liberals.
#6
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sub sam kriss analysis of random trivial facets of contemporary life as being insufficiently dialectical or whatever are my least favourite genre of posts in the world.
#7
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how excactly are pets resisting these? they are hella commodified.
#8
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troolari posted:

how excactly are pets resisting these? they are hella commodified.



Pets never actually look comfortable in clothes you buy for them or participating in pet therapy or whatever. They also lack the neuroses of capitalism and while pet anthropomorphizing is always "ironic," pets themselves lack irony or social atomization that is necessary for their owners to memeify them. There's always an irreducible gap between the meme version of animals online and in culture and the real existence of animals as living creatures. The obsession with animals isn't serious of course, if it were one would have to confront that to actually care about animals means advocating for socialism and the end of capitalism's consumption of the earth and daily animal Holocaust. Whether the real existence of China as a culture of animal memes without the horrors of capitalism or the fake commitment to animal welfare by liberals can be used politically I'm not sure.

#9
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i dont want to see the words animal and holocaust alongside each other even ironically
#10
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Petrol posted:

i dont want to see the words animal and holocaust alongside each other even ironically



Puppy mills and factory farms are pretty awful

#11
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pets, being in the animal kingdom are not even remotely opium, which is derived from a member of the plant kingdom, hth op
#12
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babyhueypnewton posted:

Petrol posted:

i dont want to see the words animal and holocaust alongside each other even ironically

Puppy mills and factory farms are pretty awful


no doubt but dogs aren't people so can we not with the holocaust

#13
Online
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I do think for example cat videos are so popular because cats are unconcerned with capitalism and so their simultaneous alien consciousness and mimicry of human emotions is the only way we can approach ideology as a whole: through irony. When you see a cat dressed up in a suit but not understanding what a suit is, capitalist ideology becomes visible for a moment in our clothes, even if it can only be approached from the unknowable and projected innocence of cat concerns. One can easily apply this to cockroaches (who are metaphorically used as nature's indifference to nuclear war and man's concern with his own place in evolution) or zoo animals who are incorporated into liberal politics and resist them.
#14
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That's a good post, wish I had made it
#15
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considering how much arable land we are going to lose due to climate change will it really make sense to allow people to give thousands of calories of food to pets under socialism? When I see how the bourgeois feed their dogs it disgusts me.
#16
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Petrol posted:

no doubt but dogs aren't people so can we not with the holocaust


We kill 115 million pigs each year in factory farms, but whine to me some more about how human suffering is objectively worse because Poetry

#17
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maybe if pigs want to stop getting eaten they should stop tasting good
#18
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Petrol posted:

maybe if pigs want to stop getting eaten they should stop tasting good



#19
mt.real
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i like cats and don't care about your dumb theory about how they're bad
#20
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the other day my wife got tested for the mind controlling brain parasite that makes you really like cats and I was stunned to find out that she didn't have it

i like cats too, though, and also dogs, they're all cool and good
#21
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Idea for a movie: Pigs, and then other animal and plant life, begin spontaneously evolving to taste bad, and while this ends the hunger problem and slows environmental catastrophe and so forth bc there is no incentive to farm cattle as opposed to cassava root, eating is no longer pleasant and children must be taught to do it. Soon the very memory of tasty morsels is no longer a memory, until the year 2855, when a young scavenger discovers a packet of bbq sauce that will change society...
#22
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drwhat, my ill-worded rants were really meant to imply having pets distracts from human social relations (excluding your agrarian societies where both cats and dogs served other roles. a bygone dead tradition weighing on our minds mayhaps?). social relations neccesary to build the neccesary class consciousness. pets serve a certain tabula rasa, in which people can fixate and project n their subjective ideology and find a solace to the harsh realities of late capitalisms commodification of our inherent being. opium as in it serves as a relief and gives hope and whatever values the person interjects into the perceived mind of the poor captive animal, yet distracts from the very feeling of alienation.

our cat is a rescuee I do love them but theres a difference between caring for something cuz your not a fokken sociopath; and thinking you could understand their motivations to act as they happen to do (cuz u need to project your societally formed views on any action).

catch my dorifuto?

anyhow im not so sold on the whole idea as animals and animalvideos acting as somekind of break from ideology, excactly due to people anthroporhmizing whole animal consciousness as something inherently NOT alien to us. every animal action is put under anthropocentric signifiers and while it maybe funny and thoughtprovoking (asif) seeing a cat squirming in a tuxedo, it doesnt cut through ideology. only fractions of it as in wow wearing a necktie is excactly like a noose, we should do something about. casual friday. consequential thought train never diverts from the confines of hegemonic liberal ideology, especially as it has the fun feature of assimilating and reforming any set of ideas to conform to the idea of private property while accepting trinkets for boirgeoise peace. animaldom is inherently subjuguated to the same liberal ideology because after all it is the ruling classes who standardize the bourgeoise values which form the basis for false consciousness.

id say we are unable to see anything alien about in the most domesticated pets since the signifiers attached to them have developed in pre-capitalist modes which has inherently chained humankind and its development to a certain emphatetic relational tradition.

I wish I could see something positively marxist in foonny cat videos but I simply cant see them having any hand in disrupting the hegemon.


#23
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I love my dogs, and it's clear from their behavior that they "love" me or experience whatever kind of emotion dogs are capable of towards humans that resembles love. I often question my relationship with my pets though. I have infinite power over their lives, and they have never had any choice in that. They were literally bred over hundreds of years to reduce their capacity for autonomy and make them as loyal as possible. On the one hand, I am doing the same thing that "furbaby" type owners do in projecting human consciousness to animals, but on the other hand animals are more than just resources for humans to use, so maybe it's actually not ok to manipulate other beings capable of consciousness into this kind of dependence.
#24
[account deactivated]
#25
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i recently read a book on cats (last three books I've read were Mike Davis's Planet of Slums, a spaceship book with giant spiders, and a cat book, they were all fuckin great and i dare you to fight me about it) that looked at the data and found that cats have pretty much never been good for pest control, and moreover that the old saw about how we didn't domesticate them is actually probably right and the natural history is better described as "wild cats evolving an ability to spread into an available niche" (as partially evidenced by the fact that they are the only ~domesticated animal able to thrive in the wild, due in part to what basically amounts to different domestic vs. feral phenotypes that become expressed depending on human presence during infancy)

i don't know if that can be related to capitalism but i hope you enjoyed my book report about cats
#26
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This world is insane poison shit that we've put to the full crapper & everything good we've made runs on slavery and suffering so no I'm probably not interested in indulging anyones dennis miller bullcrap about how pets or saying how are you but not expecting a real answer or buffy the vampire slayer or whatever isnt communist.
#27
Online
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swampman posted:

Idea for a movie: Pigs, and then other animal and plant life, begin spontaneously evolving to taste bad, and while this ends the hunger problem and slows environmental catastrophe and so forth bc there is no incentive to farm cattle as opposed to cassava root, eating is no longer pleasant and children must be taught to do it. Soon the very memory of tasty morsels is no longer a memory, until the year 2855, when a young scavenger discovers a packet of bbq sauce that will change society...


What if the scavenger found a stash of fiery fatty jerky. and the year was 2017

#28
bb bourgeoisie
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People can't afford kids, so they get pets and treat them like kids.
#29
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from what i can see, the western animal rights milieu is a primitive & much worse microcosm of the left generally which is made up of utterly toothless liberal campaigners and some crazy direct action micro groups .... but nothing with the mix Just Right like communists.

what i would do if i were them is link up with environmentalists, and socialists, and lgbtq groups etc as part of a broad coalition for changing society.

#30
[account deactivated]
#31
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if dogs or cats can experience boredom then pet ownership is cruel and amounts to imprisonment. i dont think they can, though, so i dont mind leaving my dog alone in my house with no active stimuli for hours at a time
#32
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To me it's untenable to be a vegan who doesn't fight for bettering human lives at least as much as they do for other animals' lives. And real progress in animal liberation can only really come after the abolition of capitalism, so I think if animal rights people realized that it would be a lot less shitty. Not sure if that's the kind of primitivity you're referring to.

As for pets, I can certainly imagine a world where we don't eat meat or drink milk that is produced by animal slavery and exploitation, and that would be a gigantic achievement. But people are so attached to their damn pets, idk how that can be stopped.
#33
Poronto
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what a good thread
#34
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let me just weigh in here,
#35
[account deactivated]
#36
Dont Mess With Sucess
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troolari posted:

my gf owns a acat and my parents a dog and they both act like telepaths towards their inbred wolftigers.


Do you think that if cats and dogs were driven to extinction, your gf and 'rents would instead donate the money to Hezbollah

#37
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Idea for an ad campaign to be run next year after the thread goals achieve fruition "Oh my dogs dead in the Dog Holocaust... Time to take the $6500 a year i saved and invest in Northrop Grumman Corporation
#38
Dont Mess With Sucess
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toyotathon posted:

MATERIAL:
- 2.2mm x 30mm x 44mm film-grown cutlets


This should be referred to as "puppy grist" so that you can also run a food truck called The Puppy Mill

#39
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Petrol posted:

maybe if pigs want to stop getting eaten they should stop tasting good


whats with the downvotes. did i stumble into the humorless vegan subforum by accident

#40
Dont Mess With Sucess
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http://thebulletin.org/just-90-companies-are-accountable-more-60-percent-greenhouse-gases10080