It's Time for Me to Write

My frustration has finally spurred action.

Wartorn buildings. Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

Why I’m Starting a Substack Publication

If you’ve spent the past six months watching a genocide unfold and felt anger and dismay as our own governments gaslight us into denying what our own eyes and ears are telling us, join the club. Personally, I’m tired of having no meaningful outlet for this frustration I feel at such injustice. There are so many avoidable cruelties that humans inflict on the other living things we share this world with. Wars for domination, industries reliant on death and cruelty, and persecution and discrimination based on immutable characteristics. There’s a common thread that ties these things together, it’s deception.

Video: September 12th 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu's testimony before US Congress in which he advocates for numerous regime change wars in the Middle East.

I’m in my mid-thirties, not that old, but old enough to remember at least five different wars our government has lied us into. The infamous lack of WMDs in Iraq woke a lot of us up. Once you lift the veil on one of their wars you start to realise it’s the same warmongers pushing all these interventions.

Then you have the animal farming industries that would barely survive an afternoon if consumers had to watch the last few moments of the animal’s life, each time they wanted to purchase a bit of their flesh. Large animal agriculture companies are so terrified of the public knowing the truth that they’ve successfully lobbied for the introduction of ‘ag gag’ laws in the United States, which threaten jail time to those brave activists who manage to film the horrors inside factory farms. And of course, the ever-present issue of discrimination and persecution based on ethnicity, sex, and sexuality. All of it is perpetuated by deception.

Pigs inside a factory farm living in appalling conditions.

While our governments still allow us to speak (and who knows how long that will be) I want to take my opportunity to speak up and speak out against what I see as wrong. Writers can still influence people and sow seeds of change, and that’s what I’d like to do with this new publication. It won’t be for everyone, and with my usual newsletters being about chocolate, I thank you for reading this far and allowing me to digress on this occasion.

About the publication. I’ve called it Ethical Future.

What topics will I cover? War, foreign policy, animal rights, human rights, civil rights, politics and occasionally history, wellness, and nature.

You won’t always agree with me. I’ve always been rather heterodox so don’t expect my writing to fall along popular left or right cultural divides. I approach topics from ‘first principles’, meaning I try to be logically consistent and suppress my biases.

I hope this, my first post, reminds me in the future as to why I started this publication and keeps me true to my principles. Thanks for reading.

Yours, Austin. 

It’s me.