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
Because the only way most people interact with vegans is through activists using it as a bludgeon to project hate towards them.
No, that’s the only way most people KNOW that they are.
The most common is probably passing them in the halls at work, knowing nothing about their dietary choices.
Edit: Autocorrect
That’s only true in select places. Most people in one place can have different experiences from most people in a different place, due to the places being different environments with different populations.
The majority of the internet is definitely among the places you’ve described, though.
Source: I’ve lived in both types.
How do you know someone’s a vegan?
Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
Same with any evangelical.
That’s just incorrect. It’s pretty common not to find out until you’re talking about what to eat. I would imagine you’ve met vegans that you simply don’t know are vegan yet.
There are enough vegans who absolutely discuss their diet immediately to keep the joke alive. Given how difficult and isolating it can be in many places, I get how it can become really core to one’s identity.
Very fair. My core point remains that it’s all about that
though. If you live in a region with more than a handful of vegans, you find very differently. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine when people try to paint their own experiences as “most people”, and all of any group as being just like those members they have met and are thinking about. It completely ignores several distinct internal mental biases, that are themselves making our world shittier because they lead to inaccurate conclusions, and are fairly natural unless you’ve received training to be made aware of them.
Statistical selection bias, confirmation bias, etc.
Because of this, it’s less a joke to me, and more just a pain in the ass. And I’m a happy carnivore that also does not like being preached to.