Rachelleea is Right: "Why I Can't Stand Vegans"

I was fully vegan for about six months
instead of 2015 and I'm gonna give you the absolute honest harsh truth here because I feel like sometimes people don't give the the harsh treat when they like baby and it's so great bastard is it is hard this is I'm giving it to you so young woman named Rachel Lee so I'm gonna choose to pronounce her name has been complaining that vegans are on the whole moralizing self-righteous punitive abrasive overly intrusive and that they deeply hurt her feelings by um I don't know scrutinizing the hell out of her and trying to hold her to a higher moral standard what if she's right vegan people on my youtube channel were the nastiest ever and I was completely shocked when you go to the zoo do you go to the zoo to see the cage or do you see the animal it left a really bad taste in my mouth to do with vegans veganism I was so angry and I was so mad and I was so disgusted with the word vegan I couldn't say it and I couldn't write it and I couldn't have anything to do with vegan stuff and it just made me cringe like yes I was still eating like vegan so I wanted nothing to do with it anymore I didn't even want to acknowledge the word I just couldn't because it just had scarred me so much from the nasty awful things that people had said her experience is not unique and it's not isolated what most vegans do in response to this is to try to dismiss the significance of the experience to suggest that it's an exception to the rule that it's something that's not central to vegan not a student not central to veganism that it's something that's only coming up intermittently due to some unusual set of circumstances that reminds me a bit of the excuses people make for Catholicism I don't think it's say an extrinsic minor or incidental part of Catholicism that when you're really in a Catholic culture your neighbors and your grandparents are scrutinizing your conduct against a Catholic standard what if this really is an essential feature of veganism because veganism is defined in terms of ethics and morality it's it's a bit intrusive it's a bit oppressive you have people who think they're your friends and you think you trust them and like them and then they see you holding a leather purse and they're denouncing you it's a bit like the Catholic grandmother who's so friendly to you and so loving towards you and I don't know feeds you when you come to her house but she found she finds that you got a tattoo and now she's at you she's after you Catholics aren't aren't that hard on tattoos actually in general Jewish families and Muslim families are much more concerned about tattoos Japanese families are against tattoos but I'm sorry it's it's just a random example yeah you know top-down prescriptive morality and how that plays into authoritarian attitudes and even how people act towards their personal friends let alone their husbands wives sons and daughters it's not pretty it's an ugly potentially violent side of human nature and for me my response to it is not to pretend that this is something minor or trivial or incidental and veganism for me this is a reason to care even more about democracy and transparency and veganism even when you're talking about small political movements for me this is a reason to really have you know to really gather together the lessons learned from past centuries of political movements to not reproduce the errors made by communism and socialism and even anti-slavery movements would have you to not let veganism fracture into cult groups or political extremist groups but to really have transparency democracy and accountability and decision making process with checks and balances where to some extent we can expose and think about me responsible for this tendency that yeah leads to people denouncing one another leads to people making nasty attacks on one another look man if those of you who are real big fans of my youtube channel what if I accidentally have a leather suitcase in the background here on camera what you'd be after me I get emails asking hey you know that looks like a leather suitcase and from my perspective fair is fair because I'm cut out for it I don't get upset but a lot of people are not cut out for I would like to ask that to every person that writes something really nasty to me are they aware that the nasty words made my depression a lot what it was a day away the way they treated me actually tend me all wanting to be vegan and I'll just say I learned a lot hanging out in Taiwan when people were involved in veganism of different kinds one of the lessons learned there was that people said look there are many different reasons to become people including religious reasons health reasons what-have-you but the only one that lasts is the ethical reason when people do it for ethics for morality those the people who stay with it over time and that was a perception in Taiwan that was almost unique because they were in a culture were in some ways you know Taoism and Buddhism gave people a bit a great variety of reasons to stop eating meat possibly to stop eating eggs and so on but the ethical resolution was the one that lasted and the flip side of that is exactly what Rachel E is complaining about