Freegan Hilarious!

Drop everything you are doing right now, go straight over to the New York Press, and read this freegan article! You can thank me later.

Apparently, dumpster diving has become (or more likely, become known as being) a leftist lifestyle, and its practicioners call themselves "freegans".

Almost every week, [Adam] Weissman organizes an event commonly referred to as "dumpster diving," where he leads an open tour among the various trash heaps and dumpsters of Manhattan to gather discarded food. The activity is part of a larger social movement known as freeganism, which views capitalism as the primary force in destroying the environment and avoids the capitalist structure through such practices as eating discarded food, squatting in abandoned buildings instead of paying rent and refusing to hold a job. Just as vegans are vegetarians who avoid animal products, freegans subsist only on free food found in the garbage as consumer waste. In Manhattan, there is plenty to go around. [bold added]

Normally, I'd make a snarky comment right about now, but not only can you not tell these idiots to eat s--- (being how they're already practically doing that already), you can't do a better job of pointing out the sheer absurdity of their position than they already do!

Weissman assembled those who were still present for a final stop back to Daniel's Bagels. As expected, an enormous bag filled with bagels was waiting on the curb. Weissman grabbed a bagel from the bag and a mushy avocado from his backpack. He began dipping the bagel into the soupy avocado and looked around at the surrounding neighborhood.

When asked whether he viewed living so close to a beacon of unfettered capitalism such as New York as contradictory to his ideals, he quickly denied it.

"This is exactly where we need to be," he said. "If there's any one place on the planet where there's a vital need for people to be suggesting that capitalism is not a sustainable system, where people need to be demonstrating that we can create alternative ways of living to capitalism, then I think New York is that place."

Pausing to dab at the gobs of avocado stuck in his beard he said, "I couldn't think of another place in the world that would be more appropriate to what we're doing." [bold added]

"This is exactly where we need to be?" Well, you've got that right, bud! Might that, perchance, be due to the fact that the whole lot of you would freegan starve unless you hung around the very system you're trying to destroy?

What really blows my mind about the story, though, is that this isn't even the greatest irony. That honor goes to Weissman's hatred of school because "They promote obedience, they promote conformity, they promote the idea of unquestioning acceptance of authority and they promote the idea that we should accept daily boredom and misery and enforced banality as simply the way that life is."

As if picking through garbage and droning on about "resources" on a daily basis isn't banal. As if his political ideals aren't the logical extreme of what he was indoctrinated with while he was in school. As if the only way to be an individual is to act like a hippie, spout socialist nonsense, and sponge off everyone else -- just like all the other "non-conformists". This is one kid who was very unfortunate not to have dropped out at an early age!

Freegan idiots!

And what's worse, they're turning the rest of us into freegans by providing us all with ... free entertainment!

God help us all!

-- CAV

Updates

6-17-06: Corrected remark on Weissman's educational attainment. He did graduate from high school, the poor devil!