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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.
I do not care about animal welfare, pictures of overstuffed chickens in pens or male chicks being sent to the meat grinder do not matter in the least to me. That makes all the arguments downstream of their moral salience irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Sure, with a fastidious adherence to a broad diet and medical supplements, you can barely get an adequate caloric and nutritional intake that makes you not outright unhealthy or anemic, but what of it?
I prefer cars, I find it daft that after centuries of industrial and technological progress, there are people who would try and make them cost-prohibitive to use for the average person. I am intimately familiar with "walkable cities", every city in India is walkable, as they must be when the majority of the population is too poor to afford cars. I've had the "pleasure" of using public transport in London, often paraded as the city with the best infrastructure for the same, and I would far prefer an alternative with more cars. I see nothing absurd about relying on a two-ton vehicle and fuel to get about, any more than I am concerned about the other hundreds or thousands of tons of infrastructure required for a comfortable middle class existence in the West.
Am I aware that the anti-car movement has a point regarding the drawbacks on density, the inconvenience to pedestrians or the relative inefficiency of everyone driving? Absolutely. I don't even deny it, I simply consider it an acceptable tradeoff for my preferences.
On a more meta note, I see nothing particularly wrong with arguing one's point to an opponent and using arguments within their framework of beliefs that I do not consider salient to my own. When I point out the manifest absurdities of aligning Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnibenevolence in the context of an argument for atheism, or when I point out that the world as it exists looks nothing like a world made by an Omnibenevolent Creator, I do not for a millisecond happen to have believed in any of those properties, I'm only trying to demonstrate their utter incoherence to someone who holds all of them. Showing inconsistencies is a necessary step to start swaying people, and eventually, one hopes, when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear, they'll stop trying to patch things up and then tear it all down to build a new edifice that aligns closer to mine.
So I don't particularly begrudge the vegans or anti-car people from trying to advance tangential arguments, but believe it or not, those are still niche positions to hold, and I don't see it as particularly surprising that they don't have all that many vocal adherents here. There's nothing in the rules of the Motte that states that any particular brand of advocacy must find positive feedback here, and many of us who remain, including the more extreme of the Wignats, do so because they're willing to accept downvotes and negative feedback, and to the extent they persist, by following the rules in their statements.
I think there's a bit of a "grass is always greener" problem on both sides of the equation. I understand where you're arguing from, and I don't disagree with you. But you didn't grow up in the midst of American car culture the way most of the anti-car people did. You never had the pleasure of sitting in a long line at a stoplight that stays red for ten minutes, turns green long enough to let three cars go, then turns red again. You've never been 500 feet from where you want to go, but the only way to get there is to get in your car, make a harrowing left turn onto a 4 lane highway, and follow that with another left turn across traffic into the parking lot. Conversely, you've never had the same problem but you can't make a left turn due to the highway divider so you have to make a right turn with the intention of making a u-turn at the end of the block (followed by another u-turn at the end of the next block), only to find that u-turns are prohibited and you have to take a long detour in heavy traffic to get to the store that was directly next door to the one you were just at. You've never been in a hurry to get somewhere and had a Cadillac abruptly pull out in front of you and not top 20 mph for the next 5 miles, with the invariably 87-year-old driver hitting his brakes frequently and arbitrarily. You've never sat in a 10 mile traffic backup caused by people's inability to not slow down and look at crashed cars and ambulances on the other side of the highway. You've never changed brake pads on the street. You've never paid significantly more for an apartment that had a garage. You've never paid $250/month for a parking lease at work. You've never spent 45 minutes at a dead standstill between the bend at Bates and the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, not once, but every. Fucking. Day. As part of your commute.
I'm not literally saying that you have never personally experienced any of these things, nor am I saying that everyone who lives in a car-centric country deals with them every day. I'm saying that if you grow up in places where the infrastructure revolves around cars, shit like this happens often enough that you wonder if everyone paying thousands of dollars per year to maintain his own car is really an optimal use of resources. Yes, I understand there are tradeoffs to being transit-based, and I think that most of these transit hounds don't understand that these massive lifestyle tradeoffs aren't worth it for most Americans. But I try to understand where they're coming from, especially when they're probably urban people who look at the way things are in Europe and wonder why they can't be similar here.
I've never driven, or owned, a car.
I hate "car culture" as it developed in the years after 1945 because of how ugly and unlivable it made nearly every American community. Six- or eight-lane arterial roads, lined with strip malls, fast-food places, Walmarts etc. (interspersed with car-related businesses such as gas stations, auto dealerships, tire stores, muffler shops, etc. which take up huge amounts of space), every one with an enormous parking lot that one has to walk through (I can't even count how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through parking lots) while keeping an eye out that some distracted moron might run me down.
The sidewalks are invariably empty except for the homeless, the poorest of the immigrants, or once in a great while a dog-walker.
All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.
Bus stops, most without a shelter, for buses that run every half hour or even every hour (less than that if it's snowing or raining).
Neighborhoods with nothing but houses, on winding streets (many without sidewalks). For mile after mile after mile. No corner grocery stores, no corner pubs, nothing to walk to unless you're buddies with all your neighbors.
In the US, there is no such thing anymore as an affordable, safe, walkable urban neighborhood. There are smaller cities and towns with affordable housing - but with no jobs, very little shopping or cultural institutions, with a huge fraction of their population bombed out on opiates or meth.
If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.
Thanks a fucking heap, Henry Ford and postwar urban planners.
For what reason would we want to tile the land with housing?
There's actually plenty of buses which go to such places. They're slow and inflexible, but such is the nature of public transit.
Yes. What good is paradise if there's no place to park? People want to go places, and not only do they want to go to different places, they're coming from different places and they want to go at different times. This makes the problem of mass transit difficult, and the usual solution of a 3-seat ride (low-speed collection, high-speed trunk, low-speed distribution) for more popular destinations (and worse for less popular ones) is terrible.
Because there's a severe shortage of affordable housing in every city in the US and Canada which is worth living in.
Somebody needs to build the walkable equivalent of a thousand Levittowns, starter housing which can be easily paid for on the salary of a single working-class adult - and not a highly-paid one, either.
There's plenty of housing available in the existing "levittowns". The problem is that there are a small number of cities in US and Canada that you and many others consider "worth living in", and a relatively small amount of housing within those cities, hence high prices. Eliminating commercial development in the suburbs and building housing there only makes nearby suburbs less desirable (because people need places to buy things); it does nothing about the cost of housing in the places you consider "worth living in".
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