Why does Matt Ball keep picking on me? Promoting stereotypes about activists is unjustifiably mean

I'm not sure why Matt Ball is picking on me. He has written that �animal rights and veganism attracts some people who are very angry and unable to get past their anger." Maybe a small minority, but most vegans? Certainly not proper animal rights advocates. "The movement also attracts many with an extremist / fanatical personality � people who obsess over purity, personal aggrandizement, intellectual and moral superiority, and / or the latest extreme health fads / scams [�] who spend their time attacking others who don�t believe exactly the way they do.� I couldn't agree more, although, thank heavens, these people are a very small if overly vocal minority.

But then he writes that �We serve the animals better if we realize this and get past it � focus on the work, not the disagreements.� and the agenda becomes too transparent: it's not just about antisocial behaviour, which is a legitimate thing to criticize, it's really about silencing legitimate criticism and disagreement and it turns what could be a thoughtful critique of the behaviour of others into an encouragement to silence disagreement generally.

After all, he's not talking about animal regulationist groups that engage in the euthanasia of healthy adoptable companion animals or promote controlled atmosphere killing for chickens the way PeTA does, or the moral acceptability of animal use and veganism as a "personal choice", not as a moral imperative, the way �Vegan� Outreach does.

Both strike me as deeply odd and the criticism rings even more hollow in light of it. Ball's actually talking about people like me, who take veganism and animal rights seriously enough to encourage other advocates to focus on work that really stands to achieve something for nonhuman animals, who openly criticize both welfare reform and violence and aren't willing to shove certain disagreements to the side.

But in all seriousness, I know he's not personally picking on me. I know he's trying to advance his organization and a civil discussion about animal welfare. I strongly disagree with his and "Vegan" Outreach's views, but on the substance of his arguments, not on his characteristics as a person. Still, these kind of comments that seek to portray other advocates unrealistically and to tar everyone with the same brush are not only unhelpful, they're just untrue (at least of me), and I can prove it.

Exhibit A: a recent photo of from a kayaking trip with my partner. That's actually her and not me, but the kayak was VEGAN!!!11 So was the water. And the air. How's that for personal purity?

Exhibit B: my very handsome roommate, Julius. He's the kind of nonhuman animal who some regulationist groups would euthanize in order to �reduce suffering�. If I'm fiery and unequivocal in his defense, and in the interests of full disclosure, there are times when I am, it's only because I love him. Shame on me, eh?

Exhibit C: I made this wonderfully plant-based ice cream as part of a project of self-aggrandizement and proselytizing. I even shared it with other people -- nonvegan people. Thankfully, it wasn't at a town hall meeting. How sinister and elitist of me!!

Exhibit D: I also made this poster. Witness the self-righteous fury and my need to make others feel inferior! There are others at AnimalEmancipation.com.

But in all seriousness again, I don't consider reasoning well to be fanatical. I don't see how advocates who are simply standing up for rationally-driven tactics and the rights of nonhuman animals are being divisive,. And I'm also baffled by the argument that it's somehow a matter of personal purity to avoid contributing to the exploitation and suffering of nonhuman animals when it's trivial to do so.

I think of it as just 'being vegan'. I guess what some people really have a problem with is veganism.

More important, I think it's problematic to propose that veganism is a way to reduce suffering the way many regulationist groups do. The logical implication of the argument that "we're just trying to reduce suffering" is not necessarily that anyone should go vegan at all, but that they should do whatever involves reducing animal suffering. Following this reasoning, it's fine to eat meat, drink dairy, etc., if an animal doesn't suffer during its production, and in fact, that we should eat animal products that involve less suffering. That's not vegan in the slightest.

In fact, one other logical implication of that view is that we should produce pain-free animals with no emotional life, or as Gary Francione critically commented recently, it implies that we should create nonhuman animals that enjoy pain. It doesn't matter how we use them or how much they suffer, nonhuman animal use is wrong. Taking their rights not to be used as property, and veganism as the baseline for taking that right seriously, is right. But what does this kind of name-calling, call to self-censorship and undermining of veganism really suggest and how does it function?

It's easy to get worn out when people actively misrepresent abolition, veganism, our work and our ideas. But nonhuman animals need us to be firm in their defense. That's the way industry want us to feel: ambivalent, second-guessing, worn out, afraid of our own shadows, depressed and pessimistic � in short, to be ashamed of our values, to be ashamed of taking nonhuman animals seriously, and to be too ashamed to insist on their collective freedom as quickly as possible, not a gentler form of slavery. It's strange that there seems to be an overlap here between industry rhetoric and the rhetoric of regulationist groups, but I'm not going to speculate on that too much (but I will say it's unholy).

Agribusinesses want us to pursue reforms, which don't cost them much, if anything, that do nothing meaningful to help nonhuman animals, and that's even if those reforms are passed into law, which they rarely are. They want us to be so bent-over backwards to do anything that we'll donate to groups that conduct studies around controlled atmosphere killing in order to kill chickens more cost-effectively and �more humanely.� They want us to be so desperate that we'll engage in antics in order to get the slightest bit of attention (I wonder if that has anything to do with donations for regulationist groups who are so often their partners?). And they want us to be so pessimistic about change that we'll promote violence and confrontation in order to rile the public enough to pass even more restrictive legislation.

The best response is not to do our best to make matters worse and crank up the propaganda machine for everyone to see just how crazy some segments of the animal advocacy movement are willing to be in order to provoke a conflict or to promote meaningless reforms. Neither will achieve anything for nonhuman animals. Instead, what is to be done is the same, day-in, day-out hard work that at least some advocates have focused on to promote the rights of all animals not to be used as property, veganism as the moral baseline of taking that right seriously, and the unequivocal abolition of the property status of nonhuman animals.

Confrontational comments on blog posts, tweets and other media from regulationist advocates, name calling, mud slinging, and other forms of personalizing disagreements are intended to intimidate other advocates. Innocuous seeming enough out of context. But when it reflects a pattern of repetitive behaviour, it equally often reflects a subtle and not so subtle harassment of other advocates. Add to that pattern the fact that a number of advocates are doing the same thing. Multiply it over several years of propagandizing, and so on. I'm really not sure how that has anything to do with helping nonhuman animals.

Instead, it seems meant to distract and intimidate us as well as to confuse the public about what abolition and veganism are. But the truth of the matter is that it seems more likely that other advocates engage in this kind of behaviour because those who do wrong are always looking over their shoulders in the hopes that the truth doesn't come out. It's a shame (and a scandal) that abolitionists are persecuted by other members of the advocacy community, but the answer is not to shrink, but to be firm.

Attempts to portray us all as angry, fanatical, obsessed with personal purity, or as weak, ineffectual, and ivory tower theorists, and so on, reflect a tremendous amount of bluster mounted to silence people who are just interested in proposing and making change for nonhuman animals. But it's also an attempt to appropriate abolition's critique of welfare in an attempt to neuter the radical proposal that all nonhuman animals should be freed immediately and that nonviolence is a moral imperative in a nonviolent movement. It's an attempt to turn abolition into anything but abolition: a little welfare reform, some gum chewing, some cheerleading, some sloganeering, but not veganism, not the promotion of veganism, and not the promotion of abolition.

In the end, though, it's all propaganda. It seems meant to wear abolitionists down before we even get started and to forestall our mass movement building. It seems like a game that's intended to intimidate us, to provoke us, to alienate us from the public, and so on, but most of all to turn abolition into a personal difference between supposed �figureheads� rather than a political difference between ideologies. It's not; the difference between abolition and "everything else" is the difference between ideologies: one that seeks to end the system of animal slavery out-right with a nonviolent, anti-capitalist mass movement (abolition), and others that seek to �lay the ground work for change� someday in a far off fabled future while advocates sell their books, further their careers, high-five one another and collect donations today. The difference seems pretty clear.

It's unfortunate, but when you boil it down, this kind of petty harassment of abolitionist advocates also reflects an uncertainty about what nonhuman animals face on the part of these other advocates. There's a lack of urgency and real firmness in favor of an iron-clad and repetitive commitment to the status quo and tiny reimaginings of it that involve a broken window here and an extra 1/4" of cage space there and a whole lot of furtive posting to the Internet, as well as an attempt to debase anyone who thinks and acts differently. In large part, this kind of directionless carnival of whateverism can only reflect a serious distance from the struggle.

While that is what it is, these kinds of games do nothing to help nonhuman animals. I'm not blaming anyone: a habit of understanding nonhuman animals as persons, as well as what that means and how to act best on it takes a long time to cultivate. But animal advocacy is not playtime on the Internet running down other advocates. Rational critique is vitally important, but that's meaningfully different from the personal attacks so often waged against the abolitionist community.

As a stoic, I believe that everything ends in fire one way or another. But so long as there is only one abolitionist who is not afraid to push for an end to the system, all these talkers are scared. They want silence, but nonhuman animals need us to say no on their behalf, to go vegan, to stay vegan and to say vegan on their behalf. All socially transformative work starts with us believing in our own values: that veganism is right, unequivocally; that ending animal slavery is right, unequivocally. I don't believe change is necessarily on our doorstep, but I do believe it's down the street and just around the corner. But until we believe in our own capability to change the world, we'll be forever standing still standing on the porch killing time and talking.

If you're not vegan already, today is the best day in history for anyone who wants change to take the rights of animals seriously and go vegan. If you're not an abolitionist today, and you want to learn more about it, today's a great day to change your mind and your work.