No Stupid Questions

I think some meat lovers get aggressively opposed to vegan ideas because they know that vegans are morally correct. I say this as a meat lover

I don't hate veganism.

I just don't like the militant and pompous attitude that some vegans seem to possess, that they feel that they have to flaunt their vegan lifestyles on others over.

Yes, go eat as many vegetables as you like, go eat meat alternatives and whatever. You do you, eat what you want. But I don't want to ever have someone like that coming up to my face and tell me what I'm allowed to eat in their eyes.

I love vegans. A few of my friends are vegan. There are two things some vegans will say which boil my piss, however. First is that they have a moral high ground because they don't eat animals. This isn't a given, it's a complex and nuanced argument I'd happily partake in if the other party weren't approaching it with a top-down belief that they're already in the right. Second is the notion that we should all be vegan to save the planet from climate apocalypse. I don't want this comment to get too long, but I have multiple problems with this faulty line of reasoning, and it muddies the waters. The only likely effect of it is that less progress is made on stopping global heating. So the upshot is that these people are literally sacrificing the ecosystem they purport to care about in order to bang their drum. Fuck that.

The same reason people hate leftists, feminists, trans athletes, "gamer girls", people on welfare, blacks, etc. An image the right cultivated of the group, out of convenient easily-hateable annoying people in it that they could use to create a generalization/stereotype out of. It's something that's able to happen to any group, I could portray any hobbyist or activist in this way the same exact way as these "annoying" groups are portrayed, but the right is particularly willing to just flat out lie, slander, and cheat their way into making countercultural/anti-status-quo groups look as absurd as possible, to the point that the majority of the population falls for it (even those that don't consider themselves to be conservative).

I'll make a comparison. Conservative/"anti-sjw" thumbnails often have a picture of some angry-looking rainbow haired woman, usually the same few, in order to be like "look how irrational and crazy these feminazis are, she must hate men so much" and like 4 out of 5 of those times it's a picture of a woman that was protesting a literal neo-nazi gathering or something, not some sort of radical crazy man-hating feminist. But the internet has conditioned the average person to look at someone like that and immediately think they're an irrational "feminazi", and conservatives showing these pictures everywhere and making 100 videos on the same person makes people subconsciously believe they're rampant and have a massive (and bad) grip on society.

Same kind of thing happens with vegans, you have the same 10 or so internet vegans people use to portray veganism that conditions people to think poorly of the concept "vegan", and when these influencers are confronted about it they say "I don't hate veganism, I just hate the annoying vegans" then they go onto Twitter to complain about the vegans and how they're irrational for not eating meat and their brains must be de-evolving or something. They know what they're doing, but they can hide behind plausible deniability, and the majority of viewers fall for it.

reddit

I don't think many people truly hate veganism, they are just frustrated by a few of the louder vegans out there.

For example, some vegans are very judgy - they will unabashedly tell non-vegans that eating meat is morally reprehensible. They also often want you to watch brutal videos of animal abuse and slaughter, with the overt overtone being an accusation of "you are doing this. It's your fault if you eat meat."

I'm not sure how any person who isn't vegan could possibly see that as anything but unwelcome. Life is hard enough without this sort of thing.

This said, I know plenty of vegans that never do this. I think it's awesome that they can avoid meat, and I applaud and support alternatives like impossible and beyond.

It's not veganism we hate, it's the stereotypical preachy vegans, acting like farming is the equivalent of the holocaust.

You don't tell me what to eat, I won't tell you what to eat, everyone's a winner.