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Comment by samcday | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think they made many friends.

I don't think they're interested in making friends. They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.

> It's really hard getting someone to change their mind or their thinking about an issue.

I agree.

> But I firmly believe actively making enemies is probably not the way to go about things.

I disagree. Pretty sure there was lots of enemies made when women demanded the right to vote. Or when African Americans demanded to stop being segregated. We take a lot of things for granted as "obvious" now, but they're only obvious because enough people stood up and said they don't really care for your feelings.

> If I worked in Melbourne on that day, I would have eaten a revenge steak.

I think that says more about you than it does about the vegan activists.

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> I don't think they're interested in making friends. They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.

And first making those people your enemies is a good way to persuade them to do it?

First of all, you need to make sure that the cause is known. Every demonstration, every strike, has the primary goal of raising attention. Yet, every strike, every demonstration inconveniences people and as such may make enemies.

I wasn't trying to make the case that it's the best way of doing it. Nor was I even implying that it's a particularly good way of doing it. But I do think that sometimes, it's the only way of doing it.

Also as an aside, I think there's deeper societal problems that we need to face if a few people lying on a road and stopping others from getting to work on time results in those people being considered "enemies".

> I think that says more about you than it does about the vegan activists.

It means that I had a bad day because some one made me late for work and I vented my frustration out on a meal.

I watched the Netflix flat earther documentary and even the physicists interviewed preferred not to ridicule the flat earthers because they wanted to make sure they kept an open dialogue. I think there's a similar threshold for annoying people. Once you cross it, a lot of people are just going to stop listening to you.

> They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.

In a strict sense, you’re right, our diets don’t require meat. But most people wouldn’t consider it practical to take the 5-10 different supplements needed to replace all of the benefits of eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy. And that approach is almost certainly suboptimal to whole food sources anyway.

> But most people wouldn’t consider it practical to take the 5-10 different supplements needed to replace all of the benefits of eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy.

You need B12, that's all. Pretty much everyone in the first world supplements iodine, I don't know why some people have such reservations with B12.

Then they are going about it the wrong way. It is know at this point that the way to change people is to befriend them, listen to them and make sure that they see you as human, despite the differences.

It worked on the Klan, it worked on the babist church. Of course it is not satisfying and you get no virtue points.

Reminds me of the proverb "Honey attracts more flies than vinegar"

I wholeheartedly agree with you that taking the time to really connect with an individual so that you can then grapple with their beliefs from a place of deep, shared understanding is more ideal.

The problem is most of the scientific community is telling us that we're heading towards dire circumstances in the next few decades. I don't think we really have the time to hold everyone's hand and bring them gently to the realization that we're all part of a massive problem that could very well threaten the continued survival of our species :(

But I guess nothing I say here matters because I clearly don't actually believe any of it and I'm just virtue signalling.

> I wholeheartedly agree with you that taking the time to really connect with an individual so that you can then grapple with their beliefs from a place of deep, shared understanding is more ideal.

Ideally, yes, but in the debate about climate change, as with other issues like vaccines and whether the earth is round, there are bad actors who aren’t interested in having a rational debate no matter how many indisputable facts are put in their way.

There’s no point trying to engage with them; it’s just a waste of everyone’s time and energy. At least flat earthers can largely be ignored and we’re finally seeing community-preserving action against anti-vaxxers [1]. I don’t know what an equivalent action would be for bad-faith climate “debaters” because it’s not like we can leave them on this planet and go somewhere else.

1: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/anti-vaxxers-defeate...

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