Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
The same reason people hate leftists, feminists, trans athletes, “gamer girls”, people on welfare, blacks, etc. An image the right cultivated of the group, out of convenient easily-hateable annoying people in it that they could use to create a generalization/stereotype out of. It’s something that’s able to happen to any group, I could portray any hobbyist or activist in this way the same exact way as these “annoying” groups are portrayed, but the right is particularly willing to just flat out lie, slander, and cheat their way into making countercultural/anti-status-quo groups look as absurd as possible, to the point that the majority of the population falls for it (even those that don’t consider themselves to be conservative).
I’ll make a comparison. Conservative/“anti-sjw” thumbnails often have a picture of some angry-looking rainbow haired woman, usually the same few, in order to be like “look how irrational and crazy these feminazis are, she must hate men so much” and like 4 out of 5 of those times it’s a picture of a woman that was protesting a literal neo-nazi gathering or something, not some sort of radical crazy man-hating feminist. But the internet has conditioned the average person to look at someone like that and immediately think they’re an irrational “feminazi”, and conservatives showing these pictures everywhere and making 100 videos on the same person makes people subconsciously believe they’re rampant and have a massive (and bad) grip on society.
Same kind of thing happens with vegans, you have the same 10 or so internet vegans people use to portray veganism that conditions people to think poorly of the concept “vegan”, and when these influencers are confronted about it they say “I don’t hate veganism, I just hate the annoying vegans” then they go onto Twitter to complain about the vegans and how they’re irrational for not eating meat and their brains must be de-evolving or something. They know what they’re doing, but they can hide behind plausible deniability, and the majority of viewers fall for it.
Lot of words to describe cherry-picking, but… yeah. All of that is true.
Not even a vegan. I love meat. But the classic image of the vegan that constantly reminds you of the fact is not at all consistent with my experience with the several in my life…
I don’t like explicitly stating “cherry-picking”/“strawman”/“ad hominem”/other fallacies because people seem to have a visceral reaction to seeing those words, probably are confused as to what they actually are and are assuming you’re just throwing out random fallacies to conveniently discredit any arguments with no basis, and will refuse to consider the rest of the stuff they read. I think it’s more consumable for the people who really are open to seeing new angles if they have more specific/relatable views to work with, rather than me repeating the same thing they’ve already heard a hundred times without much elaboration. I can’t confirm that though
You’re describing the Fallacy Fallacy, being that the implication that the argument is necessarily wrong because a fallacy has been committed. That a fallacy has been committed by the other party should not alone be used as an argument against the point itself.
I.e. you committed a strawman fallacy by stating that all strawmen are made of straw, therefore no strawmen are made of straw