Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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Culturally people who are vegetarians in practice just ask for a salad or whatever and are good with it. The public self identifier of vegetarian has been stolen by folks who engage in intense proselytizing. So culturally people don't know how to react to people who self identify as vegetarians... are they "cool" in which case they can play it cool and friendly in response, or is the slogan shouting and poster waving about to start in which case they might have to contact security ... so it creates that awkwardness you mention. Some folks tolerate or support the proselytizing, maybe because they like watching the world burn, who knows.

By analogy, imagine if it was "normal" culturally if when a non-member is at a church for a friends wedding or whatever for that non-member to break out into a string of religious slurs about the members and attempt aggressive recruitment into the non-members religion. You can totally imagine in a society like that, if you're in a catholic church and tell people you're an evang, they'll recoil in horror and start worrying if security will need to evict you. Because most people act a little more civilized in church, most of the time no one freaks out when they discover a non-member attends.

This sounds like the South Park strawman of vegetarianism and its advocates.

Oh no! Exactly the point I was not trying to make! The problem being everyone has had a runoff with the small proportion of non-civilized advocates, leading to fear / awkwardness / uncomfortable feeling with the majority of civilized participants. And the culture doesn't self police strongly enough to keep the non-civilized fraction under control.

No one wants to sit thru a lecture of "my self denial makes me superior" "I'm morally superior" "meat is murder" "hey wanna see some slaughterhouse pixs" "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" "I'm saving the planet, all by myself".

OPs question of why vegetarians are looked at like space aliens is because its impossible to predict if the next couple minutes are going to be agony or fun. Probably gonna be all right, but...

(edited to add, come on guys, cut it out with the world doesn't exist stuff, my very own sister pulled the "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" for a couple months when she was about 14... now stand by for a round of "well I'm not sure sisters exist in the real world, after all I only have brothers and my buddy is an only child so citation needed...")

(And slayed0 is a better writer than I am...)

Are you trolling man? Trolling's not cool, you know.

Have they really? In my experience prying into people retelling this story, the whole vegetarian zealot thing is one of those moral panic things that everyone claims to have had run-ins with but really most people are just citing the one main caricature.

I've certainly seen way, way more people say "I'll eat two steaks for every sanctimonious vegetarian I engage with" than actual vegetarians, particularly after becoming an engineer.

> The problem being everyone has had a runoff with the small proportion of non-civilized advocates

Everyone, apparently, except for me. Yet despite the dearth of obnoxious advocates, I have run into dozens or more who complain about their existence.

I think the obnoxious advocate trope is just a trope, and I'm convinced the the vast majority of complainers are complaining about the idea of a reification of the trope or something they've seen on television, rather than any actual live instances of the trope they've had run-ins with.

Interestingly, I was listening to a vegan friend complaining about exactly that this week - that he finds the vegan community itself nearly insufferable due to smugness and proselytizing. He's vegan for religious reasons, but doesn't want to impose his faith on anyone else and doesn't feel it makes him superior. Sadly, not true of many vegans.

My daughter, a budding chef and foodie with many vegan friends, gets a lot of grief over it too. For her part, she's trying to get the vegans to eat decent food, as most of the ones she knows eat what she calls "vegan junk food" - factory products rather than actual cooking of fresh ingredients.

so vegans are smug and proselytizing, and your non-vegan daughter goes around calling what they eat junk food, trying to get them to switch diets.

interesting.

I don't think you understand. She tries to teach them to cook good vegan food. She totally respects their choice to be vegan. She worries that they're eating factory food from a box rather than something more natural and healthier. She would never, ever try to make a vegan break their veganism. She will make them food that is tastier and more nutritious than what they normally eat, but is still vegan.

I don't think you understand. She is trying to get them to eat something different (proselytizing), for reasons that she believes are important and true, even though they don't currently agree with her themselves (smug).

Sounds a lot like ethical vegans to me.

It's one thing to try to make people better at their own diet, and another thing to try to make them choose another diet. Not all help is proselytizing. There's a TREMENDOUS difference between "I understand you're a vegan, here's some homemade lentil stew that's better for you than the potato chips you're eating", and "You are a filthy murderer for eating that burger!", or "You're a stupid pansy who needs to eat a burger!"

If you can't understand that distinction...

That's not the difference between proselytizing and not proselytizing, that's a difference in how you go about it.

If you want to make the case that your daughter is a really nice proselytizer for healthy eating, and that vegetarians are really awful, we can just compare anecdata.

You went out of your way to quote second-hand sources for "filthy murderer" vegans, suggesting it hasn't been your experience. How many people who've called vegetarians pansies do you personally know?

Actually, I just made those quotes up.

As for "proselytizing"... rather than bickering over the word, bicker the intent. Do you think it's a bad thing for a non-vegan to cook vegan food for a vegan? To teach them about cooking and nutrition? To encourage them to make their own food rather than eating something put in a bag in a factory?

I don't see how what she's doing can be reasonably considered negative. So if it's proselytizing, then proselytizing is itself not a negative. If you think it's negative, I'd love to understand why.

Do you think it's bad for someone to persuade someone else to stop eating factory-farmed meat?

I don't see how that can be considered negative either. Can you?

The problem is when it stops being persuading, and starts being haranguing and elitism... using veganism as a way to feel and act superior to others. Which surely happens. As I said earlier, a vegan friend was complaining to me this week about exactly that, and he's not the first, nor will he be the last.

If my daughter was just getting on the vegans she knows for eating junk food, not good food like she does, it would be one thing. Instead, she leads by example, teaching them to be better and healthier vegans.

Something analogous would be a vegan making a beautiful, delicious vegan meal for a meat eater who thinks a vegetarian diet is dull and poor in nutrition. That's not proselytizing, imho.

I'm not sure you have an unbiased perspective on what constitutes elitist or haranguing. Progressives were called sanctimonious niggerlovers, butch (women) and effeminate (men) when they rallied for the progressive issues of their day, and all of this talk about them "acting superior" seems like a lazy coat of paint on top of not liking what they're preaching. Additionally, it seems to be all second-hand, as is usually the case. I've never ran into militant vegetarians, they honestly seem like a figment of the american imagination.

And at the very end you're trying to go back on admitting your daughter is proselytizing, by complimenting her cooking skills. I think you're quite confused about your principles.

His/her point is that the strawman is self inflicted. There is a silent majority that inherits the stigma of the crazed minority. Of course not all vegetarians are like this, but the few who are give a bad name to the rest.

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