I knew this stupid hippie chic in college. Her name was, I shit you not, Sunshine.
She was a vegan, and was one of those opinionated idiots that makes you want to hit them in the face with a broken piece of wood.
You know the type. That person you know who it totally clueless, so much so that they have no idea how much of a fuckin’ moron they are that they actually think they are smart. Anyway, she was always extolling the benefits of being vegan, and picketing in front of Subway (of all places) and telling us all not to eat meat, or fish, or turkey, or wear leather. Yet she drove a car, wore make up, went to the doctor, used prescription medicines and lived in a house (the one next to the one my girlfriend at the time lived in) in a big city.
No amount of begging, pleading, demanding or verbal abuse would convince her of the benefits of personal hygene. She smelled like my ass after a nine day camping trip… with cheese dip.
She had nasty nappy dreadlocks and smoked about 50 pounds of weed a day. No there is nothing wrong with that, it just added to her aroma.
She insisted that she was clean but that deodorant were tested on animals (as if the black eye-liner and lipstick and nail polish she wore wasn’t).
This stupid person forever skewed my view of vegans, and now I have some bigoted tendancies towards them.
And I hate that. I should be open minded and level-headed, but no, that dumb ass hippie conditioned me to the point where if I hear someone start to preach about eating habits, however innocently, I cut them off with something like
“One more outburst from you and I’m going to strangle you with some beef tripe, do you understand me?”
I’m such an asshole to vegans now, and I shouldn’t be.
All because of that one stupid bitch.
Damn.
Yeah, I’ve gotten plenty of that. I think those type are far more common than the stupid woman Lexicon mentions.
I’d like to also point out - how many threads have been started on SDMB with some sort of premise that vegetarians/vegans either are hypocrites, subtley (or not so subtly) questioning their motives, or just basically expressing critical thoughts? I can think of several since I started posting here. I cannot think of one thread started by a vegetarian with the intent of preaching to meat-eaters.
Sure, all us veggies will come out of the woodwork to duke it out with the Danielinthewolvesden types, but we don’t start the whole thing. Just like we usually don’t start it in real life. Just the reality that we don’t eat meat is enough to set some people off, and they’ll start in with the whole spiel that pldennison so aptly describes. The obnoxious hippie chick types (like Lexicon encountered) exist, but they are not a dime a dozen. But the type pldennison describes are. At least in my experience.
I really don’t know if it’s cause or effect, but since I’ve stopped eating meat-dabbling on & off since age 11, and not eating it at all for 5 years, I’m just not very aggressive. I’m not trying to make a correlation between eating meat and aggression; this is a subjective observation. Perhaps my relatively non aggressive nature was what led to not eating meat in the first place.
In that light, if you’re looking for a flamefest, perhaps you’ve chosen the wrong camp. Not “happy shiny people”, that shit gripes my ass, really. For me, it’s a decision I’ve come to after years of examining what has meaning to me, down to what I need to take from others to survive. That’s my decision, and yours is yours.
What do you hope to accomplish by this veg-bashing? I don’t get these threads. There’s always some story of some hideous anti-meat "hippie"or whatever, usually fem, who gets everyone’s panties in a bunch. So what? I’ve never heard anyone resembling that profile answering in this forum, so where’s the debate? Or the fun of the flame? Yosemitebabe has answered in an intelligent manner to most of these debates, and I don’t think you’re trying to flame her.
Whenever I’m up against someone who harrasses me for my particular dietary choice, I look em right in the eye & say that I don’t eat meat unless I can’t tear out it’s jugular with my own canines. That usually works.