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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   29096 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.

I'd like to bring up the opposite problem, too;

Vegans claim to never meet pushy, irritating vegans, and like to assert that those people simply don't exist. But the reason they don't meet them is because the irritating vegans simply have no reason to be preachy and irritating to someone who is already a vegan, creating a massive blind spot where they refuse to believe that the type of vegan who annoys meat eaters at every opportunity is not just made up because those people, who might even be standing right next to them at the salad bar, just never display those behaviours towards them.

While I think this is true to an extent, I have also noticed the people just seem to be defensive when they meet someone who doesn't engage in the same "vices" as them. I don't drink alcohol, and I'm not pushy about it. But I've had several encounters where someone offers me a drink, I politely decline, and then the tone of the interaction completely changes. I think there's something about seeing someone who is "pure" that makes some people act a little crazy in the moment, though I've never understood it - especially since I try very hard not to be santimonious about my temperance.

It has happend to me often enough that I've always wondered if half of the "pushy vegan" stories aren't just ordinary vegans who get read as "pushy" because of the emotions a person goes through meeting such a person. (My theory for the other half is that I think highly scrupulous people are probably neurodivergant in some way, and are more likely to be vegan/etc. Neurodivergant people aren't always known for their social graces, so I think those people might be clumsily pushy vegans as a result.)

Wow, what a great point. And this applies to so many other groups, not just vegans. Thank you so much for this, I’m stealing this.

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