We don’t shy away from the fact that Rule 5 enforces a double-standard, namely that carnism is free to be argued against in basically any tone and capacity not amounting to mis/disinformation (or harassment of someone who’s talked here about how they feel as an omnivore politely and in good faith), while comments from omnivores should be polite, in good faith, and made with some underlying acknowledgement that this isn’t a DebateVeganism community. At the end of the day, this is a community for people who are activists against carnism, either just through their own lifestyle or also through outreach, protest, etc.

To give an example that might seem extreme to you but measures up to the same way vegans feel about carnism: imagine we had a community called PreventPetAbuse. It’s a community about people who want to support laws banning pet abuse, foster pets who’ve been abused, raise awareness about puppy mills, etc. I think you could imagine that even discussion of why someone thinks abusing pets isn’t that bad in that community would be strictly banned, while anyone would be almost unconstrained in arguing against pet abuse. Maybe people could debate the particular practicalities of specific laws, how to most effectively create change, or the edge cases of that ideology, but there would be no such thing as people coming in and saying: “I don’t think buying dogs to flay them alive is that bad. Let’s debate.”

If anything, Rule 5 is made pretty excessively generous because carnism is such a prevailing societal ideology that it’s treated as a trade-off to the benefit of outreach. Vegans have their lifestyle debated literally everywhere else on Lemmy, the Internet as a whole, and in the real world; giving them one place where they can round a corner and hopefully not see a debate on the merits of their decision not to unnecessarily abuse animals for food etc. is what we try to do here.