Dan Piraro is Full of Shit

That's a comic from Bizarro, written by Dan Piraro and which is basically being plastered all over my Facebook feed by every vegan and person who wishes they were vegan.

The comments were even funnier than the comic, although I already made a vow I wouldn't plaster this blog with Facebook comments.  I'll just say there was a lot of references to the China Study.

Whatever the case, it's full of shit.

Seriously, though.  What kind of mentality does it take to look at the way we eat and say, "Hmmm... well, we are clearly suffering from a large number of diet-related illnesses.  Let's look at our diet... hmmm... we're eating loads of processed foods, loads of sugar, bloating ourselves on wheat, corn, and soy, and have largely switched animal fat out for plant fats... IT MUST BE THE ANIMAL FAT THAT'S KILLING US."

The answer is a vegan mentality.  When you're a vegan, it doesn't matter how idiotic what you're stating is when you actually think about it... if it promotes veganism, it's The Truth^TM.

Silly Bumper Sticker Slogans

I hate bumper sticker slogans.  They're not all made for bumper stickers... it includes any attempt to summarize an entire political, spiritual, or social belief into a succinct word or phrase.  In addition to being unreasonably minimalist, they're often wrong or don't really describe what the person is really trying to get at.

For example, whenever I go to work I wind up parking next to a person living next door who has this hilarious bumper sticker:

Well, depending on where you are, I'd say the seal.  Wait, did you think seal hunting like, stopped?  Why do you think there's a yearly campaign to end the seal hunt?  Because people still hunt seals.  I mean, the very young ones are protected, but those are the little cuddly white ones.  This is clearly not that kind of seal.

The child on the left is a fully born, conscious, cognizant human baby... not a zygote, embryo, or fetus.  Those are not protected because they are not conscious, cognizant human babies.

Oh, believe me, I'm not just going to pick on nutjob right-wingers:

This is a pro-LGBT bumper sticker that is not actually pro-LGBT.  There are plenty of children doing fine with no fathers... in addition to the fact that there are successful single mothers out there, there are also, you know, lesbian mothers.

But back to the pro-lifers, shall we?

This plays on peoples' fear of, I guess, never having existed.  If I'd never existed, I wouldn't know that I had never existed, which for me would be no problem.

I'd like a bumper sticker that says "If you can read this, half of you wasn't left on a Kleenex in a hotel room after your father was given a handjob by a sex worker."  There have been billions upon billions upon billions of potential human lives that have been tossed away on Kleenex.  Or have died in the race-to-conception.  Or tossed away on a maxi pad.

I may as well call my parents and thank them for having drunk sex in the tavern one night 28 years ago.  My existence now may have depended on it, but so what?  If I hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here to worry about it.

Next, we need to remember that everybody who has ever loved anybody is bisexual:

It actually really annoys me when exclusive gays and lesbians use this.  Gays and lesbians have a very clear gender preference... for them, love does know a gender, it's just not the one society tells them it should be.

Which is OK, but don't use hokey slogans that don't apply to you to get that across.  If love really knew no gender for you, you could be happy pretending to be straight like NARTH thinks you should.

Childfree Leisure Time is Still Valuable

So I am childfree.  That means I do not currently have kids, nor do I ever want to have kids, which includes marrying somebody who already has kids as well as adopting kids.

When I have leisure time, it's often like my friends and relatives who have kids try setting it up as the perfect opportunity for me to babysit for them so that they can go have some leisure time themselves.  Now, being requested to babysit doesn't bother me (I generally like kids), but the assumption that my time is not valuable enough to me because I don't have kids... well, it abounds.  It's as if my lack of kids means any time I spend not at work is automatically idle time that must be filled with kids. Meanwhile, any leisure time spent by a parent is automatically well-deserved free time*.


My free time is perfectly valuable to me.  My lack of kids does not make it petty idle time any more than your free time is petty idle time.

But there's more to it than just "free time = free time."  You have to also recognize that, tiresome or not, having kids in this society is a choice, with very few exceptions.  If you didn't want kids, you could have used birth control, had an abortion, or given the baby away.  The only reasonable excuse for having and keeping kids is because you either wanted them or have some religious motivation--also a choice in our culture--for having them.

Likewise, not having kids was my choice, and there was a reason I made that choice, and that's that I want to occupy my time with other things:  Intellectual pursuits, my career, relationships, activism, animal care, and hobbies all occupy my time.  The time I spend outside of work is not "idle."  It is filled with things that are very important to me.

"Well, I had a lot of things I loved doing, too, but now that I have kids..."

Yeah, I know that, we all know that, and you knew that before you had kids.  There are even jokes about it.  Jokes that are actually kind of sad.

Having kids doesn't inherently mean you won't or even shouldn't have time for anything else, but expecting your childfree friends and relatives to pick up the slack on your choice just because we chose not to have kids is missing the point of us being childfree.

But OK, like I already said, I don't mind babysitting... or housesitting, or dogsitting, or anything else... provided my own needs and preferences fall into the situation.  Like, expecting that it's OK for me to be paid in "food and board" without recognizing that your pantry is full of Cheetos and other things I can't eat, and also that I already have a house that I rather enjoy sleeping in.  If you're not the kind of person who will readily help me move if I ask, in which case there is the agreement that we are just going to help when we need each other, that just doesn't fly.

It also doesn't fly when you whine to your other friends and relatives that I decided to, say, go on a birding trip I had planned in advance rather than babysit your kids at the last minute because I "had nothing to do."

I do have things to do.  They just don't involve kids.


*I know that due to stereotypes about certain kinds of parents this isn't always the case, such as low-income single mothers who are derided as "lazy," but in the context of my friends and relatives and their perceptions of themselves it is.