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

  • @[email protected]
    7•8 months ago

    I think people do construct identities around consumer behavior, and they feel rejected when someone doesn’t share those same consumptive habits which they take for granted.

    But I think theres a problem with public discourse that encourages this kind of ingroup/outgroup good/bad acceptance/rejection, so much that it is implied in all discourse whether a vegan or not.

    people can’t see the world for what it really is, we can only see it from behind the fences of our specific camp.

    Very well put, and agreed on all points, especially the bit about how this sort of in-group/out-group behavior is not limited to food. Veganism/food opinions in general are particularly clear examples of it in action though.

    I forget where I first heard this, so unfortunately I can’t give proper credit, but I once heard that we’d all get along better if people learned to say “that’s not for me” instead of “that’s disgusting”, and it’s really stuck with me. Like who cares if someone doesn’t like cheese on their pizza? Picking it off is hurting no one. It’s a food preference, it’s not that serious. Let people enjoy things the way they want to enjoy things. If it isn’t immoral or harmful, let people be. People doing things differently from you is not grounds for you to question or ridicule. Have some empathy, have some respect, have some semblance of open-mindedness, and let people live their lives, man

      • @[email protected]
        2•8 months ago

        by the end of your thought process you are like out grouping some imagined person who is doing this thing, creating an in group between you and I, and others who still behave this way.

        Yeah, I’m definitely cognizant of that, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing. For me it fits into the “don’t tolerate intolerance” principle. It seems paradoxical, but the way I’ve come to understand it is that sometimes the in-group/out-group divides are unavoidable, but as long as the in-group is tolerant of everything other than intolerance, they’re more “in the right” from a moral sense. If the in-group ends up getting all the people in the out-group to join the in-group, the only group left will ideally be tolerant.

    • @[email protected]
      3•8 months ago

      I get what you are saying and I agree with “thats not for me”. The difference to other personal preferences is that as a carnist, you are paying for literaly billions of our fellow earthlings being killed on an industrial scale. So many that it’s destroying our livelihood. This is not a personal choice anymore, there are victims you choose to not notice, human and non-human. A lot of victims, 1.9 million chickens killed in Germany every day.
      Once you realise this and you have the courage to really look beyond the word slaughter with your own eyes, see the inconceivable suffering, this became something I could not push out of my sight anymore. And then you realise it’s everywhere, and everyone is calling themselves animal lovers. So what do you do?