Hey all,
I'm spending this week in Bangkok. Today will be hot and rainy, and I've got nothing better to do than to hang out at my local vegan restaurant, use their wifi, and dash off a quick newsletter.
Your pal,
-Erik Marcus
Just before the pandemic, I spent several weeks writing a lengthy guide to vegan activism. Over the past week, I've gone through it and cut out several hundred words of fat, and added in about a thousand more words. This is a very long piece, at almost 11,000 words—figure around 30 book pages. It covers all the basics of beginning and intermediate vegan/animal rights/animal welfare activism.
I dunno, perhaps 200 people a year will read it if I'm lucky. Was it worth a month of my life to create? That depends on you. If only a few people feel inspired to step up their commitment to animals by reading this, then it was emphatically worth my time. Learning the basics of vegan advocacy can put you on the road to becoming an animal millionaire.
Thanks to my buddy Josh Balk of The Accountability Board for going through this and making a couple helpful comments.
PETA's media relations person emailed me about my "Oh PETA, please STFU for once," comment in my last newsletter. I think it's douchey to quote letters without permission, so I won't do it here. The thrust of her email was that targeting the cow's nose ring in Mario Kart would raise public awareness about this serious animal welfare issue. Here's how I responded (I didn't get a reply):
Dear ***,Thanks for writing. Two things:
- Prior to doing this media release, did PETA bother to approach Nintendo to request they remove the cow's nose ring? If so, what was Nintendo's response? I'm concerned that unless PETA exhausted all possibilities for polite dialog before going public with its protest letter, they've likely alienated the leadership at Nintendo and made them less likely to act favorably in the future.
- Given PETA's enormous financial resources and large staff, I think this protest letter is just lazy. Do you want to go after a ring on a video game cartoon character, or do you want to go after the barbaric nose rings that are used on actual cows? Do you have any reason to think that convincing Nintendo to remove this ring from current and future games would take us the tiniest step closer to persuading the dairy industry to follow suit? To me this is just another cheap and lazy attempt by PETA to get headlines rather than drive actual change. Now admittedly, this cow ring letter isn't as blatantly stupid and needlessly antagonizing as, say, PETA's attempt to get the town of Fishkill to change its name to Fishkind, nor is it as outrageously offensive as their "holocaust on your plate" campaign from decades ago. But it's all cut from the same cloth—cheaply generating headlines to get your base to applaud. I don't think these things do the hard work of winning actual farm welfare improvements. And if these stunts annoy long-term activists like me, imagine how they make many omnivores feel.
Maybe PETA's actually doing meaningful behind-the-scenes corporate and legislative outreach to build consensus to ban cow nose rings. If that's the case, I'll certainly enthusiastically write about this campaign and the progress it generates, just as I've repeatedly praised PETA in the past for the difficult and expensive things they've accomplished (such as the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse investigation) that yielded important change.
Thanks for being in touch.
All the best,
Erik
I should add here that I wrote the above email quickly and wasn't half as gracious as I normally am. Part of that is because PETA has frustrated me for decades, and part of that was a much higher-than-average ratio of pods to normals that I've encountered this past month.
I'm continuing to download free public domain eBooks from Standard eBooks. I don't read a helluva lot, but this summer I did finish Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, and I finally reread F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which should never be assigned in high school. I'm happy I read both, but neither enthralled me.
The appeal of The Innocents Abroad is Twain was one of the sharpest writers of the 1800s, and as a thirty-something he embarked on a steamer voyage from New York to Europe and the Middle East. Traveling then was outrageously difficult and exhausting and took vastly more commitment than it does in the era of cheap coach fares on jets. Witnessing somebody so keenly observant visiting cathedrals, the pyramids, and other sights can't help but shift your view of the world. I didn't find it a riveting read, but it's frequently funny and left a lasting impression. Interestingly, in Twain's lifetime, this was his bestselling book—not Tom Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
As for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes beautifully, and tells a moving story of hedonistic virtue-free characters trying to find their way in the world, and getting back what they give. Nothing I've read so captures the feeling of longing.
These newsletters take me a couple hours to write. I need your help spreading the word. Please post this to whatever social media accounts you use, or forward this via email to any friends who might be interested. Pretty much nobody ever does these things no matter how much I beg and plead, so this is your opportunity to be a shining star.