Any talk by carnists about how "Well, if only you weren't so rude" is a smokescreen. Merely describing our views is met with thought-terminating cliches and accusations of wrecking, both of which get much more highly upvoted than our own comments.
Even if (as a lot of users have been claiming) the recent vegan posts were the result of wreckers, the response by the majority of the userbase has been so much more alienating than those original posts could be. The events of a year and a half ago are a lot less important to me than what I'm seeing today.
And what I'm seeing today is that Hexbear is about as vegan-friendly of a site as Reddit is: the movement is siloed within its own comm, has to regularly community ban people who wander in to snipe at it, and is met with extreme hostility anytime it ventures out into the main site.
The "respect my choices" rhetoric is so funny to me, because carnists sure as hell don't respect the choices of vegans. I wasn't ever consulted on whether I wanted my tax money to go to $38B of subsidies a year so they can have their cheap meat.
And for all the talk that veganism is expensive or a privileged "diet", if anything, the opposite is true. A big reason why meat and dairy is so hugely subsidized to begin with is because it would be completely out of the price range of "consumers" if it wasn't. Which makes sense because think about all of the land, water, grain, etc. that goes into feeding and raising cows for dairy and meat, for instance. That is expensive as fuck and a hugely inefficient use of resources. It makes way more sense to cut out the middleman (i.e. livestock) and just give that food and water directly to people instead.
Hell, meat products still don't particularly strike me as cheap, especially in the face of rising inflation right now. Omnis don't realize that the US government subsidizes meat and dairy to the tune of $38 billion annually. In comparison, fruits and vegetables receive a $17 million in subsidies, or only 0.04% of what meat and dairy gets. That plays a huge role in the perception that veganism is more expensive than an omni diet. The same study says "a pound of hamburger will cost $30 without any government subsidies". Tell me, what is the real luxury here?
And besides, I'm pretty sure that "developing" countries eat far less meat and dairy products than western countries because plant-based foods are much more likely to be in their price range.
It would cost only $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US
But have you considered what would happen if we eliminated meat/dairy subsidies, freed all the cows, and repurposed all the money toward ending human homelessness instead? Congrats, now you just made millions of cows homeless. Checkmate, vegoons!
It's true, that's definitely how it would shake out, transient cows
Liberals and conservatives (:same-picture: ) would be like "we gotta moo-ve the homeless cow encampments from our city to keep us safe, we can't have our children stepping in the cow dung all over the streets!"
Picturing a bunch of spikes in the middle of a big open field as anti-bovine architecture