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I get so scared to interact with the vegan users on here. And I am on their side.

But like why do I see people getting harrassed and banned for like admitting out loud they love cheese too much so that they haven’t been able to find a replacement yet but they are looking?

Why does veganism manifest in such a scary way here? Speaking as someone who participates in non-scary vegan commities 😭I wish the vegan movement so much success and I don’t want that to result in a schism on here but I feel like doing harrassment and name calling doesn’t work well. Just like, be kind.

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SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It’s just how internet activist groups work. Most people aren’t motivated to improve things for their cause, they’re motivated to prove to others in their group how zealous they are. The more outlandish and untrue the things they say are, the more they prove their loyalty to the cause and the more points they’ll get from others in the group.

It’s the same pattern of behavior for every internet activist group. Whether it’s a vegan group, a socialist group, a MAGA group, an antivax group, Qanon, whatever. Promoting the cause doesn’t really matter, it’s about promoting yourself to others within the cause. Which is why you see insane lies about every kind of contentious issue. They aren’t trying to convince you, they’re trying to convince the others in the group how dedicated they are to the cause. “I’m willing to lie to help the cause!” gets a lot of points from the people already supporting the cause.

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- Nevoic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  This is an interesting theory, but I think you’re just wrong on several counts. There are definitely permanently online people who don’t do anything in the real world, but out of the groups you listed, vegans and MAGA members almost universally have material impact on the world (socialists and antivaxers would like to, but their impact is usually hyper-localized, so you’ll find more “only-online” types).
  
  For vegans and MAGA, there is real direct action that they partake in as buy-in for the group. For the former, it’s abstaining from animal products, and for the latter it’s (at least) voting for Trump.
  
  Claiming most vegans or MAGA people aren’t motivated to improve things for their cause is incredibly foolish. Like I said, an interesting theory, but it’s just materially wrong.
  
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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I see what you are saying but I don’t think it’s every. Perhaps every kind.
  
  Once I see a group getting this toxic I just leave and make or join a new one that is being more constructive :)
  
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blackris@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Look at it like that: Many people become vegan because they realize that there is no magical difference between humans (or dogs, cats and so on) and the animals who are raised to be slaughtered. We all feel pain, fear and grief. So a society that kills sentient animals and eats or wears parts of their dead bodies is not too different then one which does that with their fellow humans. How angry would you be to live in such a horrible society?

The only reason to not being angry all the time is, that I needed more than 30 years to realize those things myself. How we are handling most animals, how we are torturing and killing them is normalized. It is really hard to get from “steak yummy” to a vegan world view. How can I expect that other people change their ways just like that?

It is still fucking sad and I totally get, why some vegans are so angry. Live and let live is the most cynical shit one could say in this situation.

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- MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I’m a mean vegan because I used to be a carnist, and mean vegans changed my mind. The people on vegancirclejerk are fucking hilarious. I stayed for the memes, and then I changed my diet because I felt guilty. The best possible thing you can do as a vegan is make carnists feel guilty. It works.
  
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  - blackris@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Interesting. I was a triggered vegetarian and didn’t like those guys calling me a cheese breather (I’m still ambivalent towards them). When I became a vegan it was because of the non-drastic stating a fact people, not because of the jerks.
    
    So maybe we need both – and many more forms of activism?
    
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    MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I can absolutely defend and relate to being angry :) I can absolutely defend being a “mean vegan.” I can absolutely defend being disruptive and proselytizing and refusing to live and let live.
  
  I cannot defend verbal harrassment. That’s not “being mean,” that’s using your position as a vegan as a token to do emotional abuse.
  
  :::spoiler Disclaimer This comment may not be about you. If you are the person in the first paragraph we have a lot in common! My criticism is of those represented by the second paragraph and if that’s not you my apologies and much love 💕 :::
  
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Nevoic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
MLK said it best, so I’ll just quote him directly:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

When moderates advocate for “kindness” or “civility”, they’re advocating for negative peace; the absence of tension. Vegans advocate for positive peace; the presence of justice. When activists advocate for positive peace, in the face of those who deny said justice, tensions rise and moderates fall back to this common trope.

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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Holy shit you did not just quote MLK at me saying people who eat cheese should not be harrassed!
  
  That is a disturbing twisting of both veganism and MLK. :(
  
  Once again I participate with so many vegan individuals in ways that do not involve harrassment campaigns. Here is a list of direct action that I consider constructive:
  
  animal rescue
  
  investigations of animal abuse
  
  leafleting
  
  inline education campaigns
  
  protests and marches
  
  restaurant sit-ins
  
  graffiti
  
  civil disobedience
  
  many more
  
  Again I cannot believe I am saying this, but there is no credible evidence that MLK participated in harrassment against individuals admitting minor disagreement. Attacking a person who admits to eating cheese, like maybe 60% of the world population, accusing them of being a rapist constantly and repeatedly, and calling that “advocacy for positive peace,” is really really fucking sad. It is absolutely terrifyingly in bad faith to quote MLK in defense of such behavior.
  
  disclaimer
  Maybe this isn’t you, I haven’t checked your account history so keep that in mind. You have my apologies if you aren’t doing verbal abuse. :) My criticisms of others in the Lemmy community who do verbal attacks do hold, though. I am just glad they are the minority in real life and only seem to exist online.
  
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  - Longpork3@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Why should people committing unjust acts be allowed to commit them in peace? Where is the peace for their victims if we do not speak up? The MLK quote seems entirely fitting.
    
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  - Nevoic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    While the civil rights movement was largely “peaceful” (loaded word with little meaning), it was also incredibly disruptive. People in the movement were very rude to moderates who advocated in favor of negative peace while reaffirming their appreciation of the status-quo.
    
    MLK’s position here was not that the people within the civil rights movement needed to be more respectful to white moderates. His position was that the moderates were the issue. The people who consistently advocated for negative peace were the issue.
    
    The leaders of vegan movements also don’t generally go around attacking the moderates of our time who appreciate the status-quo and advocate for negative peace. There are individuals that do attack moderates, just like there were individuals in the civil rights movement who literally physically assaulted white moderates (much worse than calling someone a cheese-breather and having their feelings get a bit hurt). Again, MLK did not draw attention to these fringe cases because the actual issue were the moderates themselves.
    
    Veganism is the same. The issue is not the people who are a bit rude online to bloodmouths/carnists. The issue is the moderates themselves, their constant advocacy for negative peace in place of positive peace needs to be shut down constantly.
    
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    spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    There are individuals that do attack moderates, just like there were individuals in the civil rights movement who literally physically assaulted white moderates
    
    Yeah, precisely. Put simply my goal is to call out the fact that these individuals are having an outsized influence on Lemmy. I have no criticism of vegan leadership as a whole. I just hope we can continue to call out the toxicity that is present on Lemmy until a more constructive and representative-of-the-whole community exists on here. 💙
    
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- Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  That’s fair but there’s also a practical question of efficacy. Malcolm X did not convince white people to change.
  
  MLK brilliantly straddled the line between speaking up and alienating people.
  
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  - Nevoic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    MLK actually alienated white moderates to about the same degree that vegans alienate carnists. It was only retroactively, after the civil rights movement, that white moderates pretended like they were aligned with him all along. In 1966 MLK was polling in the low 30s among white Americans.
    
    I’m sure future moderates/apoliticals will do the same with veganism. Lab grown meat will become a thing, we’ll outlaw our barbaric practices of animal torture and slaughter, and those future generations will look back with horror at how savage we were, and all the moderates will proclaim proudly that “I would’ve been a vegan if I was born in the late 20th/early 21st century”, and they would be almost always wrong.
    
    It’s similar to everyone’s modern position on slavery. If you polled the majority of the population “would you be an abolitionist if you were born in the early/mid 19th century?”, you’ll get the vast majority of people saying they would’ve been, but the vast majority of people were not, and its not like we had some evil gene in us that got naturally selected out of us. People were just normalized in that environment. People today are just generally incorrect about what the impact of normalization would’ve been on them in the past (or even what the impact of it is on them today).
    
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  - MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    The people in Washington listened to MLK because he was radicalising hundreds of thousands of people, and if his demands were not met, the politicians worried that those people would start listening to Malcolm X. The radical and moderate sides of any movement exist in symbiosis. They are the carrot and the stick, working together. The owning class likes the carrot much better than the stick, so they give credit to the carrot. But you need radicals so that you can say “look who’s coming for you if you don’t listen to me”. It’s good cop bad cop.
    
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Ganbat@lemmyonline.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Thinking about it, it is strange that such extremist behavior seems so prevalent around here. In the real world, I haven’t heard much like this since the Australian couple that malnourished their puppies years ago. They displayed the same level of smugness the whole time.

On the fediverse, however, it seems like I see someone yelling “carnist rapist murderer” every couple of days. I’m honestly starting to think that there actually might be some kind of corpo-backed false-flag going on here, it’s so extreme and constant. There are people in this thread alone who are so extreme it reaches the point of parody.

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- papertowels@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Let’s be honest, Lemmy is not a good sample of the general population. We’re all atypical in one way or another, it makes sense that niche extremism concentrates here.
  
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- MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Ah yes, Big Tomato is funding an anti-meat lobby on Lemmy.
  
  The actual logical explanation you’re missing is that you’ve been propagandized so you think murder is normal, and being against murder is extremist.
  
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  - Ganbat@lemmyonline.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Aaaaand you’ve willfully ignored what I’ve said so you can do more grandstanding. This is precisely what I’m referring to. Your first sentence shows that you didn’t even grasp what I said in the slightest.
    
    For context, I was saying that meat corporations were paying trolls to make vegans look like loons and idiots, the exact opposite of what you’ve claimed.
    
    I can think of two possible reasons for your complete failure at a response.
    First, because you felt the slightest opposition to your position, even if the opposition is only to your methods, was a personal attack, or second, because I nailed it, called you out, and you felt you needed to cover your ass. And based on the complete disconnect between my comment actually said and the ignorant content of your own, I’d say the latter is entirely possible.
    
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    MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Damn, you caught me. Yep, I’m a paid shill for the meat industry. I’m trying to trick you into eating lots of meat. Please don’t go vegan, it would be so bad for our shareholder value.
    
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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I agree with your first paragraph 🧡
  
  Second paragraph is a reach. I think it’s just a symptom of online toxicity, as in people feel enabled to do verbal abuse when they can’t see the person on the other side of the screen. You don’t need to stoop to the false flag accusations to see the cause, it’s literally just the same setting that brings about all uniquely online abuse.
  
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- tomi000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Ive been thinking about that and I have a theory that most of those “extremist vegans” are people trying to make others hate vegans. Im not positive this is true but it makes more and more sense to me.
  
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AVincentInSpace@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
To a leftist there are two kinds of people in the world: people who are with me 110%, believe everything I believe to the last letter, and are willing to take action to that effect, and enemies who must be crushed

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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  ew no not at all what i am saying
  
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- tomi000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  You are talking about conservatives, why would you call them leftists?
  
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  - ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Horseshoes.
    
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Forester@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Well you seem cool. Just don’t let the authoritarians rub off on you

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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I am cool thank you muchly
  
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  - Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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tomi000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The people you are describing arent the ones being harrassed. Its the ones who make eating meat their religion and dismissing any other way of life as wrong

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- lastweakness@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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  - tomi000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Why would you make that assumption? I havent even made a statement on the matter and am already being harrassed.
    
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    lastweakness@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    The people you described aren’t the ones being harassed
    
    I think it’s very hypocritical of you to assume that and then call me out for assuming something similar. And then you call this harassment? I made an assumption based on an assumption you felt free to make. But when I make a similar assumption, that’s harassment?
    
    If you are so confident in vegans harrassing almost-vegans who try to live without animal products, please name a single instance.
    
    I’ve personally experienced it, both in real life and on social platforms, including lemmy. I just make it a point to try and avoid interactions like that these days. I don’t go into vegan communities despite being really enthusiastic about stuff like meat substitutes because around 50% of my interactions have been terrible. And 50% is a terrible number btw. The false equivalences, the assumptions and other issues even in this post’s comments section is kind of alarming. But yeah… Play a victim if that’s what suits you i guess.
    
    I like the concept of veganism, but your community isn’t the best to outsiders. One day that too will change hopefully.
    
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growingentropy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Oh no. This whole thing quickly turned into yet another opinionated divisive fedposting shithole.

I don’t think real conversations of the type you would respectfully have in person exist on the Internet anymore.

I thought maybe this place would be a little smarter than that, but it kind of sucks now.

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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  yeah, this is why i need a fediverse version of tiktok/reels.
  
  i think we can be quite kinder versions of ourselves when we have the constant reminder there is a living breathing person on the other side of the username :)
  
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