Until I joined Lemmy I had no idea how militant vegans could be. I sorta just assumed they were a different brand of vegetarian.
I’m not opposed to their ideaology in any way, but after reading the comments on a few posts that found their way into my feed… I had to block their communities. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be reading any productive discourse there.
I was vegan for 8 years and during that time I didn’t talk to anyone about it other than to say, “I don’t eat that.”
I say that to say this - vegans are insufferable and a large reason why I quit the community and went back to omnivore. Even after 8 years, other vegans were still ‘more vegan’ and would nitpick the dumbest stuff.
“Bro, did you eat a date? That killed a bee or something. Not cool.”
Shut up with that. Let me eat my damn fruit.
I was healthier though. But, to be fair, I was younger.
You know what, it’s so much easier to say you’re an omnivore and end up eating meat once a year than to say you are a vegan who makes an exception about once a year. The first label would earn you a “wait so you’re basically vegan?!” vs “you’re not vegan then and you’re a dirty cheater”.
As you might have experienced, it’s pretty hard to be vegan in a carnist world. People talk about animal abuse all the time, they confront you all the time, make fun of you. Most don’t want to talk about it, they want to shut you up. The hate and ignorance is strong and different people react diffrently to that situation. Some stay quiet, like yourself, some get vocal. Some debate, some get angry. Calling vegans insufferable is like calling gays insufferable, or feminists. Some might be. We have recognized a major injustice and we want to change it.
“Bro, did you eat a date? That killed a bee or something. Not cool.”
That’s rage bait and you made it up. Why would anyone say that?
Hey bud you really need to get off the cross. You just compared your eating preferences which are 100% a choice to someone being born homosexual and not wanting to be killed for it or being born/transitioning to a woman and wanting the same basic human rights as the other half of our species. Honestly you need to just shut up and think about that for a hot second.
I oppose racism, sexism, trans- and homophobia. And I oppose speciesism as well. It’s the same system: One group considers another group as less valuable and exploits, abuses or fights them.
You just draw the line at you own species.
Animals are innocent, vulnerable and easy to abuse because they don’t have a voice and don’t understand the situation we put them in. If they were human children or mentally disabled humans, we would protect them from harm because of who they are. Instead, we do the most horrible things to them, we take their freedom, their babies, their lifes. In factories, on an industrial scale. Because a pig is just a pig, right?
EDIT: Please reply, don’t just silently downvote. What’s your refutation?
What are you talking about? Don’t you also draw a line when you choose to eat plants? I don’t think they would agree to that. Untill humans develop the ability to photosynthesize, we are going to have to eat other species, there’s no way around it.
Don’t you also draw a line when you choose to eat plants?
I think there’s a reasonable distinction here. You would presumably also draw a line between a conscious human and a brain dead human that won’t ever be conscious again. As far as we can reasonably tell, consciousness requires a brain. Dogs and pigs have brains, so maybe we shouldn’t torture and kill them on factory farms. We can also see them suffering and measure their physical reaction to it.
Of course there’s a possibility that plants have some kind of consciousness too, but 1. that’s speculation and 2. there’s no way around farming them, as you have said yourself:
Untill humans develop the ability to photosynthesize, we are going to have to eat other species, there’s no way around it.
Farming animals will always require far more plant deaths than growing plants for human consumption. These animals have to grow for months before being slaughtered and literally eat tons of animal feed in that time.
Therefore, plant-based food minimizes both animal suffering and deaths as well as plant deaths.
I’m not convinced that plant deaths are an ethical issue in of themselves, but farming has environmental implications so it makes sense to minimize the food that needs to be grown and make the farming as environmentally friendly as reasonably possible.
I tried to find historical articles about it, but couldn’t find any. But I swear I used it and saw it all the way back in the AIMs chatroom dialup days
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as vegan, is in fact, GNU/vegan, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus vegan.
Exactly my experience. I often heard stories of vegans being like that, but I never ever saw it so I thought it was just made up to belittle vegans.
Then I joined lemmy and found out that I’m apparently in favour of massacres, slavery and rape because I consume meat/milk/eggs from time to time.
I imagine the vast majority of vegans just go about their lives and resprectfully discuss the ethics of animal consumption when the topic comes up, but these loud militant members really make vegans look bad and they sure as hell make it so that even less people consider going vegan
Yes, them calling me a rapist totally made we want to be like them and adopt their ideology.
Their strain of it appears to be poison religion like fundamentalist Christianity or Islam. A fanatic is a fanatic, whatever paint they’re dipped in. Guess they’re just trying to fill a hole in themselves.
I’m not in favor of it, but I’m not going to stop eating meat. The second lab grown meat is available to people in my economic tier I’ll switch exclusively to that.
I’m really hoping that lab grown meat will be available soon. I have a weird genetic issue where my body doesn’t like to absorb certain vitamins from food so I get basically nothing from raw veggies, negligible amounts from cooked veggies, and a tiny bit more from meat, eggs and dairy.
I take prescription vitamins, but according to my Dr I need to eat meat/animal products with them or risk going into a deficiency again… the last time I was deficient I had seizures and serious neurological issues.
I hate the meat industry and factory farming, but also want my brain to function and to not have seizures.
I also have severe malabsorption and can’t process most veg at all. I have been told hundreds of times that I am lying, and that I don’t need to eat meat. To some of these people it is better for us to suffer than to eat meat, while they claim to subscribe to a philosophy of reducing suffering.
If I went vegan I’d probably suffer a very slow, agonizing death from my brain going haywire and seize until I go into psychosis and die. If my body could take it I’d probably be a vegetarian and eat only local eggs and cheese, but it’s a bad idea according to my doctor. It sucks.
100% yes. I am fully aware that being vegan is, in my opinion, the more ethical option but I can and will continue to eat meat because 1 it’s cheap, it’s plentiful, I know how to and can cook with it well and because yes it tastes so fucking good. I don’t mean this as a 3edgy5me thing but fuck me I love a nice ribeye stake with butter and garlic cloves and a baked potato.
Okay, but you have to know about plant-based steaks and vegan butter. And of course you know about vegan garlic and vegan potato, because all garlic and potato is vegan. What’s the extra cost of a vegan steak compared to an animal steak in your area? In mine it’s around 3 dollars.
I have never seen a plant based stake at my local grocery stores. The next time I am there to pick out a stake, I will also look and ask specifically for a plant based one, and I will try it. But I have had other stuff like plant based burgers, and while they are ok, they just can’t hold up to the taste of a meat burger.
Never fails in a discussion about how fundamentally shitty vegans are that there will be a ton of vegans invading the thread to prove the point definitively.
I stick with Margaret Cho’s advice on vegans from her Assassin tour back in 2005:
And especially, especially, don’t fuck with vegans. Do not look vegans in the eye. If you get into an argument with a vegan, say “I’m wrong” and run away as fast as you can. Do not fuck with vegans because they will fuck you up…BECAUSE THEY’RE HUNGRY.
I’m sorry to hear that. The thing is, you mainly hear from those who are the most vocal, and those tend to be the most angry and therefore unreasonable. And those probably had their fair share of verbal (and/or physical) abuse from meat eaters, as vegans are hated on by a much, much larger part of society than the other way around. (That doesn’t justify their hate, of course)
It’s all a self reinforcing dynamic of groups riling each other up, unfortunately.
Vegans being annoying was a thing awhile ago, but they really chilled out. This is a smaller band of die-hards.
“Chilling out” is of course a terrible metric when animal abuse is on the line but being good to animals would make you vegetarian, not vegan, and yet that was never where the righteousness was coming from.
For the most part, the “unreasonable vegan” stereotype comes from two places.
Confirmation bias. Veganism makes people uncomfortable with their own decisions, so people spread around the most outrageous stories about vegans as a defense mechanism. This is the same thing that happens in various circles with anyone whose mere existence makes other people insecure; e.g., teetotalers, or polyamorous people.
Just plain disagreeing with them. There are lots of vegan arguments that are logically valid, but they sound outrageous if you don’t already agree with them. People have trouble looking past their initial emotional reactions, so they respond to logically valid arguments with mere incredulity.
Having personally known several perfectly normal and sane vegans, maybe your “reasonable conversation” is a bit more combative than you believe. Vegans are just normal people. Some will be crazy. Some will be normal. If your experience with your hundreds of vegans you’ve met is 100% unreasonable, then you’re definitely the problem. Someone choosing to avoid animal products for personal health or environmental reasons, or any other personal reason, is inherently not unreasonable. They might be unreasonable if they try to force their ideas on others, but defending their own choices isn’t unreasonable. Tone down your confirmation bias and aggression, and you might find that just like every large enough group, people are still people and they vary.
I have to admit, diet restriction vegans (and not the ones that just think meat is icky and can get a doctor to sign off on it) do not fall into the general stereotype but then only one of them ever had a chance to speak to me and she would sneak chicken occasionally so I don’t really consider her vegan as such. Also she was a work associate and I normally never bring up the subject in the office.
There may be reasonable vegans out there, and I have actively sought them on forums and IRL through school clubs and protests. I have never IRL raised my voice, never used a derogatory label harsher than ‘leafeater’ and that only once. Yet I am so ridiculously burned out by the arguments and harsh words I’ve endured that I’m done holding any hope out any longer.
You sound like what I like to call a “debatist.” No one wants to be challenged on their personal choices. You don’t seem to be approaching this concept with an open mind. Can you define what makes anything they say unreasonable? I am not vegan, but I can recognize, definitively, that veganism is better for the environment (by far), healthy (if you make sure you’re getting all the nutrients you need, just like any diet), and less cruel to animals. You can choose to disagree that those conclusions mean you need to cut out animal products, but those aren’t opinions up for debate. Farming meat is far worse for the environment, vegan diets are perfectly healthy, and obviously, killing animals isn’t something the animal wants.
Again, you can disagree with their conclusion that those reasons mean you shouldn’t eat animal products, but denying that they’re true is like denying climate change. I’m not vegan, so clearly I didn’t come to the same conclusion, but I’m not trying to purport that anyone that does is somehow unreasonable.
Until I joined Lemmy I had no idea how militant vegans could be. I sorta just assumed they were a different brand of vegetarian.
I’m not opposed to their ideaology in any way, but after reading the comments on a few posts that found their way into my feed… I had to block their communities. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be reading any productive discourse there.
I was vegan for 8 years and during that time I didn’t talk to anyone about it other than to say, “I don’t eat that.”
I say that to say this - vegans are insufferable and a large reason why I quit the community and went back to omnivore. Even after 8 years, other vegans were still ‘more vegan’ and would nitpick the dumbest stuff.
“Bro, did you eat a date? That killed a bee or something. Not cool.”
Shut up with that. Let me eat my damn fruit.
I was healthier though. But, to be fair, I was younger.
I’m a level 5 vegan. I won’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
Now it reminded me of Vladimir Sorokin’s “Horse soup”. Time to read it again.
You know what, it’s so much easier to say you’re an omnivore and end up eating meat once a year than to say you are a vegan who makes an exception about once a year. The first label would earn you a “wait so you’re basically vegan?!” vs “you’re not vegan then and you’re a dirty cheater”.
exactly. you choose your labels to best express your positions.
As you might have experienced, it’s pretty hard to be vegan in a carnist world. People talk about animal abuse all the time, they confront you all the time, make fun of you. Most don’t want to talk about it, they want to shut you up. The hate and ignorance is strong and different people react diffrently to that situation. Some stay quiet, like yourself, some get vocal. Some debate, some get angry. Calling vegans insufferable is like calling gays insufferable, or feminists. Some might be. We have recognized a major injustice and we want to change it.
That’s rage bait and you made it up. Why would anyone say that?
Hey bud you really need to get off the cross. You just compared your eating preferences which are 100% a choice to someone being born homosexual and not wanting to be killed for it or being born/transitioning to a woman and wanting the same basic human rights as the other half of our species. Honestly you need to just shut up and think about that for a hot second.
I oppose racism, sexism, trans- and homophobia. And I oppose speciesism as well. It’s the same system: One group considers another group as less valuable and exploits, abuses or fights them.
You just draw the line at you own species.
Animals are innocent, vulnerable and easy to abuse because they don’t have a voice and don’t understand the situation we put them in. If they were human children or mentally disabled humans, we would protect them from harm because of who they are. Instead, we do the most horrible things to them, we take their freedom, their babies, their lifes. In factories, on an industrial scale. Because a pig is just a pig, right?
EDIT: Please reply, don’t just silently downvote. What’s your refutation?
What are you talking about? Don’t you also draw a line when you choose to eat plants? I don’t think they would agree to that. Untill humans develop the ability to photosynthesize, we are going to have to eat other species, there’s no way around it.
I think there’s a reasonable distinction here. You would presumably also draw a line between a conscious human and a brain dead human that won’t ever be conscious again. As far as we can reasonably tell, consciousness requires a brain. Dogs and pigs have brains, so maybe we shouldn’t torture and kill them on factory farms. We can also see them suffering and measure their physical reaction to it.
Of course there’s a possibility that plants have some kind of consciousness too, but 1. that’s speculation and 2. there’s no way around farming them, as you have said yourself:
Farming animals will always require far more plant deaths than growing plants for human consumption. These animals have to grow for months before being slaughtered and literally eat tons of animal feed in that time.
Therefore, plant-based food minimizes both animal suffering and deaths as well as plant deaths.
I’m not convinced that plant deaths are an ethical issue in of themselves, but farming has environmental implications so it makes sense to minimize the food that needs to be grown and make the farming as environmentally friendly as reasonably possible.
All the animals on factory farms didn’t choose to be born there and don’t want to be killed either.
It’s not about the sensitivities of humans, but the insane suffering of animals in this system of oppression.
If all yall got off the crosses we could donate all the wood and nails to Habitat for Humanity.
Just goes to show how little you care about others suffering. Social justice for me but not for others (those who I consider interior).
Correct.
he is confused with figs. which are pollinated by wasps. and some vegans choose to eat them and some don’t. it’s really not that controversial.
Between them and Linux evangelicals, this place can be pretty annoying at times.
Spoken like a meat eating windows user
Windows eating meat user
Do you think that’s an insult?
meat eating windows user (derogatory)
No. If he wanted to insult you, he’d call you a MacOS User /s
Oh you must also be a reddit uaer… Here you go: /s
Lol pretty sure /s has been around LONG before Reddit
reddit is like 20 years old and rose to prominence in the web 2.0 boom. I’m pretty sure you’re wrong
I tried to find historical articles about it, but couldn’t find any. But I swear I used it and saw it all the way back in the AIMs chatroom dialup days
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as vegan, is in fact, GNU/vegan, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus vegan.
We just want to save your code from eternal damnation
I’ve just discovered a new game: start posting how you love windows, meat and Elon, place bets who will attack you first
My money would be on Elon. Windows users and carnivores are quite common here, but hatred of The Musk is near universal.
It was honestly more fun to irk the “grammer” police on reddit using misspellings and improper vocabulary.
Hmm…
*Squints*
You done messed up.
FTFY
I see, I still giggle when I do it, on Lemmy to!
Don’t forget to support capitalism as well!
I use arch btw
You know I really hate vegans, but I FUCKING REALLY HATE Linux evangelicals, and they are FUCKING EVERYWHERE HERE.
Anyway, fuck veganism and linux
Exactly my experience. I often heard stories of vegans being like that, but I never ever saw it so I thought it was just made up to belittle vegans.
Then I joined lemmy and found out that I’m apparently in favour of massacres, slavery and rape because I consume meat/milk/eggs from time to time.
I imagine the vast majority of vegans just go about their lives and resprectfully discuss the ethics of animal consumption when the topic comes up, but these loud militant members really make vegans look bad and they sure as hell make it so that even less people consider going vegan
Yes, them calling me a rapist totally made we want to be like them and adopt their ideology.
Their strain of it appears to be poison religion like fundamentalist Christianity or Islam. A fanatic is a fanatic, whatever paint they’re dipped in. Guess they’re just trying to fill a hole in themselves.
any movement will have more or less militant members. that’s life.
I’m curious. You eat meat, but you’re not in favour of massacres. Alright, explain it to me.
I’m not in favor of it, but I’m not going to stop eating meat. The second lab grown meat is available to people in my economic tier I’ll switch exclusively to that.
I’m really hoping that lab grown meat will be available soon. I have a weird genetic issue where my body doesn’t like to absorb certain vitamins from food so I get basically nothing from raw veggies, negligible amounts from cooked veggies, and a tiny bit more from meat, eggs and dairy.
I take prescription vitamins, but according to my Dr I need to eat meat/animal products with them or risk going into a deficiency again… the last time I was deficient I had seizures and serious neurological issues.
I hate the meat industry and factory farming, but also want my brain to function and to not have seizures.
Lab grown meat will solve this dilemma for me.
I also have severe malabsorption and can’t process most veg at all. I have been told hundreds of times that I am lying, and that I don’t need to eat meat. To some of these people it is better for us to suffer than to eat meat, while they claim to subscribe to a philosophy of reducing suffering.
Yeah, it’s frustrating to say the least.
If I went vegan I’d probably suffer a very slow, agonizing death from my brain going haywire and seize until I go into psychosis and die. If my body could take it I’d probably be a vegetarian and eat only local eggs and cheese, but it’s a bad idea according to my doctor. It sucks.
Dam, man, that sucks. Hey, quick question, if they made lab grown human meat, would you try it?
Grown from my own cells? Fuck yes.
What about someone else’s? My body sucks I don’t want to eat any part of it
With consent, and with cells from someone I know/love - Sure!
This is how you get prions…
Absolutely! I’m hoping it’s available soon since it’s more ethical than my current options.
Edit - missed the human part lmao. I would probably try it if it hurt no one and was offered to me
Ah, so you’re saying you don’t like it, but you find it an acceptable sacrifice to make in exchange for yummy food?
100% yes. I am fully aware that being vegan is, in my opinion, the more ethical option but I can and will continue to eat meat because 1 it’s cheap, it’s plentiful, I know how to and can cook with it well and because yes it tastes so fucking good. I don’t mean this as a 3edgy5me thing but fuck me I love a nice ribeye stake with butter and garlic cloves and a baked potato.
Okay, but you have to know about plant-based steaks and vegan butter. And of course you know about vegan garlic and vegan potato, because all garlic and potato is vegan. What’s the extra cost of a vegan steak compared to an animal steak in your area? In mine it’s around 3 dollars.
I have never seen a plant based stake at my local grocery stores. The next time I am there to pick out a stake, I will also look and ask specifically for a plant based one, and I will try it. But I have had other stuff like plant based burgers, and while they are ok, they just can’t hold up to the taste of a meat burger.
Never fails in a discussion about how fundamentally shitty vegans are that there will be a ton of vegans invading the thread to prove the point definitively.
I stick with Margaret Cho’s advice on vegans from her Assassin tour back in 2005:
And especially, especially, don’t fuck with vegans. Do not look vegans in the eye. If you get into an argument with a vegan, say “I’m wrong” and run away as fast as you can. Do not fuck with vegans because they will fuck you up…BECAUSE THEY’RE HUNGRY.
Every vegan I have met is one form of little bitch or another, without exception
Inflammatory prejudices are only bad when others have them. They’re definitely the hateful ones, so lets spread some hate about them.
I haven’t given out a quarter of the verbal abuse that has been heaped on me by people who feel morally superior over their diet.
I’m sorry to hear that. The thing is, you mainly hear from those who are the most vocal, and those tend to be the most angry and therefore unreasonable. And those probably had their fair share of verbal (and/or physical) abuse from meat eaters, as vegans are hated on by a much, much larger part of society than the other way around. (That doesn’t justify their hate, of course)
It’s all a self reinforcing dynamic of groups riling each other up, unfortunately.
the vast majority of vegans are not represented by a tiny segment that has found lemmy.
If Lemmy had its version of r/atheist users, they’re either vegan, Linux obsessed, or politics obsessed.
Hey. Do you have time to talk about our lord and saviour, Linus Torvalds?
Oh yeah, I love Linus Tech Tips, it’s one of my favorite YouTubes.
Savior? Do you mean Terry Davis, AKA King Terry the Terrible?
It would have to be the Linux crowd, just by force of numbers.
oh there’s a shitton of r/atheists here too, and some are supermods.
Quite a bit of their content is antagonizing and alienating. What a shame.
Vegans being annoying was a thing awhile ago, but they really chilled out. This is a smaller band of die-hards.
“Chilling out” is of course a terrible metric when animal abuse is on the line but being good to animals would make you vegetarian, not vegan, and yet that was never where the righteousness was coming from.
I like how they expect everyone to share there ethical views. Fun fact: most people don’t.
In 5+ decades of living I have never once met a sane vegan, not once.
And I’ve met hundreds…
For the most part, the “unreasonable vegan” stereotype comes from two places.
There’s a 3rd source: Trying for 3 decades to have a reasonable conversation with one, with hundreds of attempts made.
Having personally known several perfectly normal and sane vegans, maybe your “reasonable conversation” is a bit more combative than you believe. Vegans are just normal people. Some will be crazy. Some will be normal. If your experience with your hundreds of vegans you’ve met is 100% unreasonable, then you’re definitely the problem. Someone choosing to avoid animal products for personal health or environmental reasons, or any other personal reason, is inherently not unreasonable. They might be unreasonable if they try to force their ideas on others, but defending their own choices isn’t unreasonable. Tone down your confirmation bias and aggression, and you might find that just like every large enough group, people are still people and they vary.
Edit: for the record, I’m not vegan.
Calling a group of people insane is so cool and good 👍🏻
I’m not vegan. But I find it very shady to talk shit about people like this.
Some seeming innocent ideals breed significantly more fanaticism across all class and culture lines, we should all have learned that by now.
I have met 1 and married her. But yo be fair she is just vegetarian whi developed a dairy allergy knocking out the non veg part of her diet
Makes a dumb good steak too
I have to admit, diet restriction vegans (and not the ones that just think meat is icky and can get a doctor to sign off on it) do not fall into the general stereotype but then only one of them ever had a chance to speak to me and she would sneak chicken occasionally so I don’t really consider her vegan as such. Also she was a work associate and I normally never bring up the subject in the office.
There may be reasonable vegans out there, and I have actively sought them on forums and IRL through school clubs and protests. I have never IRL raised my voice, never used a derogatory label harsher than ‘leafeater’ and that only once. Yet I am so ridiculously burned out by the arguments and harsh words I’ve endured that I’m done holding any hope out any longer.
I call those ideolgical vegans and yes they drive me nuts too
You sound like what I like to call a “debatist.” No one wants to be challenged on their personal choices. You don’t seem to be approaching this concept with an open mind. Can you define what makes anything they say unreasonable? I am not vegan, but I can recognize, definitively, that veganism is better for the environment (by far), healthy (if you make sure you’re getting all the nutrients you need, just like any diet), and less cruel to animals. You can choose to disagree that those conclusions mean you need to cut out animal products, but those aren’t opinions up for debate. Farming meat is far worse for the environment, vegan diets are perfectly healthy, and obviously, killing animals isn’t something the animal wants.
Again, you can disagree with their conclusion that those reasons mean you shouldn’t eat animal products, but denying that they’re true is like denying climate change. I’m not vegan, so clearly I didn’t come to the same conclusion, but I’m not trying to purport that anyone that does is somehow unreasonable.