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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion
A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"
The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.
Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.
Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.
I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.
I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.
Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.
Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.
I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.
I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
One question for vegans is that pretty much any industrial sized farming (needed to support our population) will involve killing a lot of animals in collecting farm products. That is, killing a cow and eating it may involve less animal death compared to eating bread.
This can be solved via two ways: (1) is that animals killed during farm are less advanced and therefore their death is less morally wrong or (2) intent matters.
The problem with (1) is it undermines the entire vegan argument. The problem with (2) is that at a certain level of recklessness the moral consequences are similar.
Therefore, to live means other animals will die. I am on board with not torturing other animals (eg I wont eat veal, I buy pasture raised eggs) as that seems just unnecessary. But at the same time I don’t have qualms with eating meat.
Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.
A life lived only doing the optimal bare minimum to survive is not a life I want to live at all.
It might be more efficient for humanity to subsist on a bland grey nutrient paste, but that's not in any way an argument to say that we SHOULD do that.
Is somebody asking you to consider doing that?
If you're using efficiency as an argument for doing something with no other considerations bounding it (such as enjoyment) then, yes, you are asking exactly that.
Veganism is one point on the spectrum, with people both before it and after it. You cannot dismiss it by appealing to the limit (you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste).
Unless you’re arguing that anyone advocating for efficiency in consumption has to eat flavorless paste, otherwise they’re a hypocrite.
The key is not that they're advocating efficiency, it's that they're excluding other things. If they exclude enjoyment, yet they don't eat flavorless paste, indicating that enjoyment actually matters to them, yes, they're a hypocrite.
Responding to "one benefit of X is Y" with "I think you're forgetting about Z" is completely fine.
When somebody (zeke5123) incorrectly says "actually Y isn't a benefit of X" and somebody (sodiummuffin) responds with "actually, you're wrong because etc.", it is completely inappropriate to accuse them of forgetting about Z (assuming that was what astranagant was actually doing).
sodiummuffin never claimed to be doing a fully-fledged accounting of all the pros and cons of veganism.
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I've seen vegan bacon. It looks like a plastic dog toy.
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