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.
As a carnist I try to make sure I avoid vegan threads where I don't belong. Pretty sure most carnists on this site think vegans are objectively correct anyway. We are just to lazy figure out how to live properly. I think all this recent stuff has got to be on just a handfull of users.
this is directed more generally (from the "We are just to lazy figure out how to live properly") rather than at you personally, cos i know individual circumstances can make things harder. i know that when i was an omni, i had all sorts of excuses but like you say, they really all boiled down to "going vegan is hard and scary". for me as a mayo, vegetables were mostly those sad sides that went along your big lump of meat and you had to kinda force yourself to eat them to pretend to be healthy. veganism seemed like a life of impossible monastic-level self-denial, of living just on bits of lettuce and raw carrot or whatever or overpriced shitty fake-meat sausages. something only the most committed people with superhuman willpower could do, not just some regular depressed lazy idiot like me.
and then when i switched, it was way easier than i ever thought it could be. the first month was absolutely hard, not gonna lie, and i was kinda the new vegan meme. but once i figured out a few easy staple recipes that worked for me (mostly of the "shove a bunch of shit in a pot and leave it for half an hour and eat with rice" type that make a few days' worth in one go), and worked out which regular groceries were vegan or not, it was really remarkably smooth sailing and also way cheaper and healthier and really tasty. it inspired me to actually learn to cook basic easy shit, and i was able to feel proud of even my most basic creations. others will find different staple foods that work for them, maybe more basic, maybe fancier (i also eat very lazy shit when i cant be bothered at all). eating out is probably the trickiest bit, but happycow really helps with that. and i went from one of those "i could never live without bacon and cheese" people to literally never missing either of them (or anything else for that matter). and it also did wonders for my mental health to be taking some concrete positive action to live more consistently with my values. on top of everything else, its absolutely the best thing ive ever done for myself
not to imply at all that people should go vegan cos of personal benefits, thats not what its about. you should go vegan cos of animal liberation (which i agree that most people here already know is correct), but you can go vegan because its much easier than you think and its not a life of grim self-denial like youve been led to believe but actually cool and good
Absolutely agree with all of this, and I guess the only other thing I'll say is that vegan faux-meats/dairy product substitutes have never been better than they are now, and they are very widely available now, Soap_Owl. And a lot of stuff that you are probably already familiar with is already accidentally vegan.
I disagree with MF Broom. You should stop hurting others as soon as possible. It's not that hard. Check out the resources in the sidebar.
:shrug-outta-hecks: I guess we'll see which approach works out in the marketplace of ideas!
But for real, I suspect more aggressive/confrontational approaches work for some non-vegans, while less confrontational approaches works better for other non-vegans. That's fine, I think there is merit in both, and I don't necessarily always stick to one or the other anyways. At the end of the day, people have to want to change for themselves, no one else can do it for them. But there can be value in planting a seed, too.
Edit: I also never said they shouldn't stop eating animals ASAP, I even said that there's nothing stopping them from cutting it out cold turkey like others have. But it would be naive to think that approach works for everybody. It still sounds like this person isn't yet fully in tune with all the ethics and morality around veganism anyways if they're saying they're effectively too lazy to go full vegan right now (that's how you know someone isn't serious about it...yet) so if they were to immediately quit animal products without that moral framework, there's a very good chance they would fail and be back to their old ways.
We have the subliminal, the liminal and the superliminal.
NAGEV OG :penguin-dance:
I have not internalized how to have a constuructive relationship with normal food. At some point walmart brand frozen snack products will switch to fully vegan and I won't even notice the corn dogs are made out of tvp.
Vegan hot dogs already exist
I am pretty sure most regular hot dog products got as much tvp in there is as legally possible. I am not emotionally attached to the content at all. It is just the energy output
Please stop hurting animals
I appreciate you recognizing the moral issues with eating animal products, that's usually the first step toward making more conscious choices. Is there anything specifically holding you back from going vegan?
I'll just say that there isn't necessarily an inherently right way to go vegan, some people go cold turkey and cut out all animal products, but that doesn't necessarily work for everyone. For me personally, I cut out all dairy and egg products when I went vegan right away, but that's because I was already vegetarian for 12 years, so the transition wasn't as drastic for me. There are more gradual approaches too, like taking your least favorite dairy or animal products, and cutting that out/finding a plant-based substitute, seeing how that goes, and if it goes well, then continuing cutting out additional things until you work your way to full-on veganism. And, this is just my personal experience, but the idea of initially going vegan for me was very daunting, and I feel shitty to say that I did put it off for several months, even when I knew I could be better, until I couldn't contain my cognitive dissonance any longer and decided to make the change, and, well, it ended up being a lot easier than I expected, tbh.
Of course I would prefer everyone to be fully vegan right away, but I also recognize that, like any major lifestyle change, it can be difficult to change/unlearn years or decades of habits and traditions, and different approaches for weaning off of animal products will probably work for different people, so I am sympathetic to that--I ate animal products for the first 22 years of my life, after all. But just like that old proverb, "The best time to
plant a treego vegan was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."And, of course, watching vegan documentaries, videos, reading articles, etc. is a good way to expand one's knowledge for why people choose to become vegan in the first place and can be a good motivating tool for making more ethical lifestyle changes. Like for me personally, once I made the change finally and after I'd learned about the many atrocities that occur every day in meat and dairy industries, the idea of ever supporting these industries in any capacity was so revolting to me that that helped make my transition easier and reiterated why I made the change to begin with.
I am not managing my life well now. Like most Americans if the store brand snack products were vegan I wouldn't know the difference or care. Like ramen? Appart from some animal gells I am pretty sure that is vegan now
I'm sympathetic to life challenges, having gone through them myself and continuing to do so, as some of my recent posts/comments in other communities would convey, but I guess I also feel like it doesn't necessarily preclude someone from making more ethical changes to their life in the meantime, even minor ones, because while I would vastly prefer everyone just dump every animal product they consume immediately, as much as it pains me to say it, that isn't going to work for everyone, but I do think that even minor changes (to start) count as something because every bit of animal product reduction is better than doing absolutely nothing at all. And hey, if you make minor changes and it turns out being quite simple, that can be a good source of motivation to cut out additional animal products as the next step, or maybe jumping to cutting them out altogether. And as always, continuing to educate yourself on the reasons to go vegan is absolutely critical if you want something like that to stick, because veganism is a lifestyle change embedded in ethics, and it's much more than just a diet (someone who only seeks to change their diet would be referred to as plant-based, but if they don't care about the ethics, it would be inaccurate to call them "vegan").
If you have interest in going vegan, this is a pretty good page that talks about the different processes one can take for transitioning: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go-vegan