[Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism?
Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don't come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don't really get upset by it IRL
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There’s a ton of vegans who exist without trying to force their way of life on everyone, but the ones who do dominate the conversation and can be off putting.
Just like with everything else that people make into a lifestyle or part of their identity. Most are cool, but there's always a vocal minority of dillweeds that take it way too seriously or use it to judge others that aren't part of their pack.
I'm not trying to be combative with this but want you to consider something. If you see the cruelty of factory farms and decide that its unethical to be killing and torturing animals in that way, but nobody else around you seems to care, would that not be a little upsetting? What does it mean to be taking it 'too seriously'?
You are upset and allowed to be so, the problem starts when you start trying to make other people live like you and force it into conversations.
If we are sharing recipes, you can fuck right off.
Conversation about climate change and the causes of and solutions to? Jump on in running.
It’s all about the context.
In the mid-19th century there was a doctor in Vienna named Ignaz Semmelweis. He worked in a maternity ward and took extreme focus on the extremely high mortality rate in his ward, and Semmelweis eventually found that hand washing before providing care was extremely effective at reducing the mortality rate (consistent hand washing dropped it from 18% to 2% mortality rate) specifically doctors would do autopsies in the morning then (without any sanitization) move onto their duties in the maternity ward.
Semmelweis had the seniority to mandate hand washing (specifically he identified Lyme to be very effective, but of course it's very unpleasant to wash with Lyme) he had the data to back up it's effectiveness, but what he lacked was the social capital to successfully shift the local medical culture to include handwashing before caring for sensitive prenatal and postnatal care. Specifically he was a dick about it. Because he was extremely outspoken about doing this unpleasant Lyme wash before providing care for which he couldn't provide a good theory as to why it worked, he was replaced as the director, continued his advocacy with limited success and eventually was placed in an asylum following a nervous breakdown where he died of sepsis from a caretaker not washing their hands.
His work was never recognized until long after his death. He probably could have had more success if he wasn't so annoyingly loud and outspoken about this hand washing thing. It was clearly the right thing to do but it took time and effort, wasn't entirely pleasant, and it wasn't yet the norm. He saved hundreds of lives while he was in charge and hand washing was mandated, but because his successor ended the handwashing mandate countless more died at his hospital alone.
The first successful soaps, in part created by a handful of individuals Semmelweis had inspired, were only successful when marketed as a cosmetic product to make you smell better (and by convincing people that they real!)
The point is, in advocacy, no matter how right you are, if you're fighting against "the way we've always done things" you will always have a significant uphill battle and have to play the politics and not be too upsetting to the order of things until some momentum is built, because otherwise, no matter how right you are, you can simply be written off as a lunatic and too annoying to be worth listening to
This argument is the same one anti-abortionists use.
And the context is completely different. To get meat, you have to kill or harm an animal. There's no wiggle room there.
How is it?
Edit to address your edit: Still the same argument anti-abortionists use.
I edited my comment after I made it, but you have to kill an animal to get meat. There's no debate around fetal development or rights of the mother vs. the child. There's no religion involved. If you argue that torturing or killing animals doesn't hurt them, you're arguing in bad faith. Even people who eat meat won't deny it. They just don't care. You could just as easily frame vegans as the abortion activists surrounded by anti-abortion folks.
I’m saying that what you are saying is the same as anti-abortionists saying that abortion is murder.
It’s not going to convince anyone who doesn’t think the exact same as you on the subject because it relies on beliefs that not everyone has.
How would you frame the vegans as the pro-choice activists in your hypothetical situation?
We're arguing for the rights of animals over the rights of people who want to take them away. I just told you there's no debate that killing an animal is killing an animal. How do you disagree with that? I never said 'murder', that's trying to muddy the waters. The abortion debate is about whether or not abortion is killing a living being. Slaughtering animals is objectively so.
You didn’t address a single thing I brought up in my last comment.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. The same argument applied to different contexts is perfectly valid.
That is the problem, you aren’t understanding what I’m saying or even trying to.