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
Vegans simply existing make people feel uncomfortable, so defense mechanisms in the brain trigger.
Since it’s an ethical stance, and people at least deep down know that killing innocent animals for 5 minutes of taste pleasure is wrong, but they don’t want to change themselves.
So the brain tries to rationalize how it’s definitely not wrong and really the vegan is wrong, and/or demonize the position to shield itself from the discomfort of knowing.
Basically psychological defenses kick in to defend unethical behavior that someone highlights by simply existing.
this kind of comment is exactly what make people hates vegan. lmao.
What would make you love vegans?
Many non-vegan psychologists do agree with it though.
I don’t hate that people choose to be vegan. I hate the self-righteous bullshit humans get about veganism, science, religion, politics, and anything else they start considering a moral high ground.
You don’t have a moral high ground. You have a biological and/or social niche. That’s enough to be proud of, without dissing other people’s shit, or pretending yours doesn’t stink.
Being proud of yourself for not eating meat doesn’t stop the mass amounts of suffering in the farms though.
I became vegan once someone showed me what it meant to eat meat, had they not done that I’d still be eating animals grown in pens.
I eat animals I grow, except in a few exceptional circumstances - minimal enough that, if everybody ate meat the way I do, the industry would fall.
It’s good you’re living up to what you believe in. It’s a bad idea to live off of suffering you can’t yourself bear.
Yeah I don’t have any issues with you growing your own meat, I bet you take care of them. My issue is with industrial farming, not you.
I used to gut and skin animals my self to eat but I just don’t have to desire to do so anymore, I’m happy with plants.
I do what I can to give my animals a good life. Mostly, that means keeping them protected and giving them a lot of space.
I definitely hate factory farming. It’s a cancer, and allows people to eat meat without processing death. …and so, in soft ways that have hard consequences, they look away from death, and look away from any conflict -or only enough to decry it, and complain that someone should do something about it. But that mentality pervades everything they do.
Thanks for contributing to the ultimate destruction of factory farming. You have my respect.
Also if the vegan is being preachy and judgemental that this somehow totally undermines their point, which can now be ignored because some vegans somewhere were hypothetically rude.
We can have a conversation about effective and respectful rhetoric, but the material and ethical facts of the argument are not going to change.