Badass blog alert!

Stephanie of Change.org is now Stephanie Formerly of Change.org. This saddened me for about half a minute, because her Change.org posts really galvanized me to explore my veganism in a broader sense and eventually launch this here blog. Then I realized that she has started her own superblog with some of my other favorite bloggers! It’s a happy day for mouthy vegans everywhere!

Animal Rights & AntiOppression (which Microsoft Word ironically wants to change to “Ant Oppression”) promises to be a large creative space where crazy lefty thinking can bubble over and infuriate those who still believe that animals are ours to use however we like. I’m especially thrilled by the broader focus on other oppressions as well—everything is interconnected! I think that animal rights advocates sometimes feels constrained because there’s not always room for them in other activist clubhouses, even though they may share overlapping goals. For example, I’d feel uncomfortable going to a feminist meeting where meat and cheese were served, because female animals are brutalized and exploited for their bodies and secretions. Try and unpack that, though, and you get chastised for even daring to compare women and animals, or suggesting that advocating for the rights of one does not require trampling the dignity of the other. (There is an interesting post about this on, I think, Feministing, and it led to quite the lengthy comment string, but damn if I haven’t just spent the last half-hour trying to find it.) The same goes for suggesting to environmentalists that eating fewer animal products (or none at all) would go a long way towards solving our energy and climate crises. Al Gore, sack up and go vegan already!

Ahem. So, yes, I am very excited about Animal Rights & AntiOppression. Blog long and prosper, Stephanie and Co.!

Mr. Spock is excited, too.