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
Vegan: no animal products. No butter, no eggs, having to be well-informed (as others have stated) and know about the content of every bit of everything you buy, and making choices on that basis instead of on cost.
Even then, how many of the products you buy and use every day have depended on animal products for their manufacture? I’m willing to bet that a fair amount of human labor consumes and uses animal products to sustain themselves, even if there are no animal products in the thing you’re buying. I don’t think it’s fair to compartmentalize that away from purchasing decisions. The people who put your flat pack MDF furniture in a box, did they have a chicken sandwich on their lunch break? The people who are paving the roads and maintain the rails on which the products you ultimately buy, are they wearing leather boots?
Everyone depends, to some degree or another, on the use of animal products, either as food or for some other purpose. Even vegans.
Edit: Like I said above, reducing dependence on animal products is probably a good idea, but people who believe they have eliminated their dependence on animal products are patting themselves on the back for something they simply cannot accomplish.
Congratulations on synthesizing truly the dumbest argument I have ever seen in my entire life.
Can you explain what’s wrong with this argument? As a relatively disinterested observer it seems reasonable to me.
Being Vegan is a choice for yourself so it’s a fallacy to argue that others are not Vegan, and saying it doesn’t help to try to make a difference unless everybody does it is also a fallacy.
So the argument is based on no less than 2 obvious fallacies. This should be pretty obvious, so question is if you are just a troll?
I’ll say that this reaction does nothing to make me think you are approaching this with any objectivity.
The argument, to me, seems to be that it’s impossible in the modern world as things stand to actually totally avoid animal products. That would seem like an issue that Veganism should be concerned with.
I see your point, I think, about it being an individual choice. But though I have heard of things like vegan shoes, I can see how saying those are vegan when you may not control all the inputs seems problematic.
Regardless, your response was so unpleasant that I don’t think I’m much interested in continuing.
Yeah no reason to go to the moon if we can’t visit other planets yet. That’s the kind of logic you are arguing.
The vegan argument is to not contribute to animal suffering, you can’t control what other people do.
And avoiding suffering doesn’t help because there will still be suffering is about as stupid as it gets.
Veganism has never been about avoiding all animal products 100%. Only as far as possible.
To put it another way, would you feel responsible if the person who installed your solar panels drove an oversized truck in their personal life?
Because its not within any one vegans control whether a random factory worker has chicken for lunch. If there were businesses that only hired vegans and sold vegan products (there are, but very few), then vegans would obviously be buying things from there instead. If someone who isn’t vegan themselves uses this impossible purity test as an excuse not to make changes themselves, then they weren’t genuine about making any attempt in the first place.
If you’re okay with compartmentalizing that out of the production of goods and services you use, that’s a you thing.
Why is it reasonable to expect me to have any control over what a factory worker is eating? There are entirely vegan businesses, but its setting up a ridiculous goal post to claim vegans are somehow hypocritical by not having a 100% vegan production chain as a consumer, which is literally impossible in the current world. If we could, we absolutely would. But if you want to argue that vegans should handcraft and grow literally everything they use as an excuse not make any changes yourself, I don’t know what to say.
Veganism is not about completely eliminating every use of animal products no matter what. It’s about reducing animal suffering and their exploitation as long as it’s possible and practicable.
From https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism