Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I'm looking forward to having some visitors (???*) later today. Other than that I'm continuing to build the massive pile of backups and then will begin work on an image update for Monday or more likely Tuesday. I'm still being pummelled by worms as well.

I wanted to mention a thought I had about hypocrisy; now, I should preface this by saying that I've spent plenty of my life being a hypocrite and probably still am on many levels — we all are to one extent or another. I'd also like to preface this by saying it's an observation, not a judgement! Emphasis on that!

Anyway, corporations (and governments) “eat” just like we do. While we need calories and nutrients and such, they need money to sustain themselves. In order to get it, they can act ethically and in a fashion that helps people, or they can ignore all that and make money without concerning themselves with how it affects people — as we see now, by warmongering. Throughout the world right now we're seeing wars being waged for one reason alone — to put money into the hands of corporations.

Sure, other reasons get listed and argued about, but ultimately those are (a) distractions, and more frighteningly (b) creations of the corporations and governments — most obviously so in the very public “evidence” debacles the US corporation is going through, although they are far from unique in this action. Even these silly religious wars are purely a corporate and governmental manipulation — there are periods of history (Spain is one very obvious example) where we've seen vibrant Muslim and Christian communities living and working together…

But after all, why should a corporation care about people?

Let's break that back to people… People don't need to eat meat or animal products to survive and be healthy. Some of the world's top athletes are vegans, and there are a number of cultures with very long life expectancies that are vegan. That's not really up for debate. What's also not up for debate is that eating meat and meat products involves the killing, suffering, and enslavement of animals. So basically, whether you support it or not, meat product consumption is recreational killing.

Now, if you want to support that, that's cool, but you really have to also support war and carnage and abuse of others in general… I guess the question is, how can a person have an anti-corporate or anti-war stance, but not be a vegan without falling prey to hypocrisy? They're basically metaphors for one another… Anyway, just an observation. Most of my friends eat meat.

Update: I just had to share one hilarious message someone sent me… They said “but Shannon, you aren't minimizing the killing of animals by not eating meat — if you don't eat that steak, someone else will”, which gave me visions of meat eaters having to eat more and more and more as less people eat meat.

Anyway, obviously that argument holds about as much water as serial date rapers saying, “hey, if I don't rape this chick, the next dude will, so what the hell, I'm gettin' laid tonight….” Change begins with a single person.