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
On this note, I’d like to point to the Loud Minority problem; You have XYZ group, and within XYZ group there exists a minority that comes across as very “loud”. You can barely miss them, and because they state they’re a part of XYZ group, you start associating that group with the loud minority.
Happens with Vegans a lot, and usually people which have already associated a group with a minority within said group which annoys them do not want to learn that they are wrong, or will just refuse to accept they are wrong.
Precisely.
Personal anecdotes, there was a particular vegan at work. The smell of cooked meat made her feel sick.
Instead of doing the rational thing and taking lunch at her desk; she proceeded to insist that the break room be meat-free. It escalated into all manner of preaching, “shame on you,”- including signage, nasty emails. Shaming with “don’t you care about me?!” All sorts of victimization.
The reality was any attempt at accommodating her was met with “not enough”. The entire office in the end, according to her, needed to be a complete vegan zone.
She didn’t last long for other reasons, but none of those shenanigans really helped. (let’s just say the attitude didn’t stop at being a vegan.)
Yeah that was a wrong decision on the vegan’s part. Perhaps this sort of behavior might be acceptable in the public commons, but work is a private space where people join a company for specific purposes. Work and philosophy/politics should not intertwine.
And who knows: if she excluded herself from the breakroom during lunch without notifying others, maybe coworkers would notice and be more willing to hear her out out of a desire to socialize. It probably could have helped her effort to do this actually.
Vegans live and learn. We are part of a minority group, and with being a minority comes all of its benefits and detriments. We just need to learn that in situations like these, we often are the only vegan around people and so we need to carry our entire movement on our shoulders, whether we want to or not. Else, you get general, anecdotal sentiments the likes of which you see in this post.