Events / Omnitarians Unite!
When:March 30th, 2008 @ 9:35am TO April 5th, 2008 @ 9:35am
Where:
Wherever you are
Everywhere
Activity:
Get Your War On
Enrollment
2/unlimited
Organizer:
Tricia Tanaka
Description:
We are the peacekeepers in this time of war.
The middlemen who choose neither meatdom nor vegitotalitarianism.
We are the Omnitarians!
We eat what we like and like what we eat!
JOIN US
http://sf0.org/teams/Omnitarians-United/
IN THE WAR AGAINST THE WAR!
Responses
2 Attending
Terms
(none yet)Comments
Join the team! We need all the people we can get to stop this blood- and vegetable oil- bath!
Hm torn. I like to eat both...but not sure....
Yes! I'd die without ham, and heaven help me if I don't get my banana milkshakes. People of middle ground unite!
Us meat eaters are all for eating everything, that's our whole mission!
We don't hate vegetables (well, maybe broccoli) but that doesn't mean we can't eat meat!
i'm beginning to suspect this is just a meatitarian front organization.
lo-tec, since when are you a vegetarian??
I would rather eat grass raised American beef than almost anything else.
But explain to me: why are we going through this now, really, sfzero?
In this country the Fucking industrial food model has ruined everything: chickens that don't taste like anything so people wind up saying they taste like everything; overfished endangered species topping the price lists, or mercury-laden fishes dragged out of horror-farms to retard our kids, lagoons-of-shit-producing hogs, organic soy and other crops grown on fake 'organic' factory farms and sold back to us at a premium, homogenized dairy from inoculated cows shot up with hormones (why the fuck do the cows need our hormones? why do we feed them back to our kids and then wonder why it feels like they're growing up so fast? I'm just askin) corn. in. everything.
Why do you think I'm so bloated and out of shape?
The madness of arguing about the ethical virtues of our diets. Let's keep rearranging these deck chairs, the ice will melt soon enough!
Hormones are not ours or theirs, which is actually pretty cool.
The meat people seem to emphasize meat and the vegitable people are there to oppose meant. This promotes both and allows people to not have to pick a side on either side of the spectrum. Did that make sense?
We emphasise meat because that's the thing they wish to prohibit.
Were they prohibiting another food, we would support that too.
Omnitarians prohibit no food.
It's all good.
Perhaps by emphasizing what they leave out you forget what they allow. Omnitarians promote food equality.
The Color Wars
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted March 25, 2008.
Imagine that you had a group of friends and acquaintances you saw every day at school or at work, and one morning instead of saying "How are you?" they suddenly started saying, "Have you joined one of our teams yet?" At first, you would dismiss it as some dumb joke you missed on The Colbert Report the night before. But it keeps going: "I'm on white team. But Bob's on blue team," your pal says to you later. "Are you on the puce team?"
At this point, you truthfully believe that everybody has gone fucking crazy and that the people you thought were your friends are actually a bunch of kids living on that island from the movie Battle Royale (2000) where everybody has to kill one another for arbitrary reasons determined by a capricious authority figure who thinks he's a comedian.
This actually happened to me last week on a social network called Twitter, an online service that lets you send short messages to people on your list of friends. As you look at your Twitter "stream," you'll see your friends' names and short "tweets" about what they're doing or how they're feeling. When you work at home and don't have office pals to say hello to in the morning, Twitter is your surrogate office chit-chat zone. In the morning, I see my friends saying things like, "Yawn, I'm drinking coffee" or "Gotta finish this awesome project." In the evening, people will say, "Going to Sugarlump Café -- anyone want to come hang out?" Though I'm home on my computer, Twitter keeps me in touch with the social world.
But last week, for the first time, I felt like my friendly chat zone had become a freaky arena of prototribal warfare. Everybody had started joining colored teams. I kept getting messages like the ones I described earlier, where people were saying, "I'm on blueteam! I'm on greenteam! What is your team?"
Finally, after hours of this, I typed a quick message to everybody: "I do not want to join a team." One of my friends replied, "OK, I've set up a team for you -- noteam! You can join that!"
No. I do not join colored teams. I don't join nonteams just to feel like I'm part of the team-joiners. I do not like when social spaces degenerate into meaningless competitions. It seems too much like Facebook.
I had to get to the bottom what the hell was going on. After a few quick searches, I discovered that the color wars were started by a popular Web personality named Ze Frank, who is most famous for doing funny shit online and creatively promoting the hell out of it. He decided it would be fun to say he was on "blue team" and then see how many people would join it or join other teams in response. On his blog, he wrote that it would be just like summer camp, where everybody joined a colored team and played tug-of-war or egg toss.
Except there are no potato sack races on Twitter. It's a communications medium, not a freaking summer camp.
The whole thing depressed me more than it should have because it confirmed my worst suspicions about humanity: one, that people will blindly do what a charismatic figure asks them to do even if it's stupid; and two, that in the absence of conflict, people will still race to form teams for no reason. This team thing took over a huge portion of the Twitter social network within a day. It spread that fast -- as fast, perhaps, as our desire to form alliances.
So forgive me if I can't think of Ze Frank's little game as something "fun," like summer camp. It was about as fun as the Stanford Prison Experiment, and just as revealing.
Comment vote. I am rebuked. Like the movie "The Wave".
But sometimes fun things are fun because they are pointless. Feeling part of something greater than yourself, with people who want the same goals you do. It's a nice feeling. Being part of a movement, whatever it is, whatever it's for, as long as you believe in it it makes it okay. Is comic relief a bad thing, is any relief at all? When you are a student or where ever you work, isn't it nice to just do something random and silly?
Again, I agree with scienceguru (this is happening more and more with a striking frequency). This war about what we eat is a bit... strange. I was there on the Skype when it started and I didn't understand it then. Because I found I could join any one of the "Teams" and support each as equally as any other, I choose not to join any. I didn't know why I was opposed to joining a team until I read that article there. Now I know. It's because it's arbitrary. If it were something I really believed in and supported like freedom or adventure or pacifism or atheism I'd take a stand, and not just for the point of taking a stand, but to express my views in the hopes that I could change somebody's mind or better yet, have my mind changed.
That being said I wish you all well on your war against other types of food. And I'm in favor of fruit.
Umm.... I'm honestly a little shocked by the extent to which you missed the joke here Lincoln.
Look more into Ze Frank guys, he's funking wonderful.
Watch The Show. So. God. Damn. Awesome.
He frequently finds a way to be both entertaining and fascinatingly poignant.
A lot of what he does is about letting people explore and realize exactly how much power they have as individuals and masses on the internets. And also about how playful silliness (and all the failure that goes with) is exactly what it takes to get the kind of creativity to do something truly astounding.
I don't care about eating identity, personally. But it doesn't hurt me (or anyone else as far as i can see) if its someone else's whim to do so. So I don't feel need to stifle their play (or their discussions of industrial agriculture that this play seems naturally to have lead to, for that matter either).
Bex: Ze Frank is, and always has been, my God.
Yes, no, I, this is.
DUCKIES!
and
Hi, I'm Ze! What's something I like that's gay?
(proof that I am an AVID fan). The man is a genius. I love you the most!
Are the new viewers gone yet?
Yay, a fellow sportsracer!!!
I thought the way you said WORST EVER, sounded suspicious!
The entire last month of The Show made me cry. So. Good. Guh...
P.S. Please don't go on hiatus. Why must you leave us?
JJason, I think I get the joke as much as can be expected.
I just don't really find this joke to be very funny. I loved being Rubin. I love zombie flash mobs, I love Ze Frank and I love Banksy and I love pranks, and was hoping the meat-veg war was an April Fool's joke, but now that I realize it's not, I just don't get it.
I'm not trying to bring anybody else down, I'm just explaining why I'm not participating I suppose. I feel like I'm expected to join a side or something, and I'm just not feeling it. I love the free and easy games being played and the fun being had and I look forward to a fun war that I can join.
Fruit FTW.
Fruit is pretty awesome...
We decided at the start that the war was going to be "a more light-hearted, pun-filled, slightly surreal war on it", nothing's really too serious.
All this did start as a bit of a joke - messing about on skype that escalting into an awesome idea for a task completion, but it seems that a lot of people have started taking us way too seriously. We're honestly not trying to cause any hostility, and by all means we aren't forcing people to pick a side, we were just having a bit of fun. Please stop waging wars on our behalf! :P
I personally couldn't give a pig's ear if you ate meat or not, I'm just unlucky enough to have no choice in the matter.
It's all a bit of a laugh!
Now where's that turkey I'm supposed to duct tape to Adam's door...
MMMMmmmm… I am eating spicy salami rapped in peppered turkey wrapped in roast beef right now and thinking about just how much I love meat. Meat smothered in meat. Meat stuffed in other meat.
Mmmmmmmm…
But I also love broccoli!
Hey, who else loves broccoli?
It's like little trees y'know!
You know, I don't actually mind broccoli, don't kill me Lowteck...
It's like little trees y'know!
For the win.
Ugh. I feel a bit nauseated and a lot conflicted by all of this. At first I didn't get what was going on- why does everyone have "meat" or "veg" in their name all of a sudden? Why are people's eating habits being thrust in one anothers' faces?
This all feels really superficial and uninformed. I mean, it'd be one thing if this were a serious conversation, but it looks like this is mostly sophomoric insults being thrown at earnest, personal decisions. Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I'm waiting for y'all to be done with this phase. It's April 6- are we done?
i appreciate the arguments of the vegetarians, and I love tofu. i try not to eat red meat when I can.
but i love fish. and chicken.
and if someone serves food to me, I'm probably going to eat it. survival instinct, ya know.
and damnit, there are a few things in this world that just taste wrong without some beef.