There’s something odd about a lapsed vegan getting death threats from vegans. Apparently, this has been happening for several years, and it’s a very ugly picture. So ugly, in fact, that it is highly suspicious. Some of the circumstances are also highly suspect.
The Guardian has an article covering a couple of cases like this. A vegan stops being a vegan, and the hate comes crawling out of the internet woodwork. … Or maybe not.
The first case cited by the Guardian is of someone called Freya Robinson, and is very interesting. Robinson cited a range of “symptoms”, including lack of energy, brain fog, menstrual problems, and being generally rundown. She then had a steak and felt much better.
(The Guardian, for some reason, didn’t provide links to the original articles, and these events date back several years, one of them to 2015. Why?)
No news here at all, you’d think, except for what apparently followed. The second case, somebody called Tommy Kelly, was exactly the same. Kelly also achieved a miracle cure by eating meat; except this is where the cited abuse started. What Kelly received was also formula abuse, using 1970s vegetarian rhetoric. Death threats?
Hmmm, perhaps; although that it is a massive overreaction to this anything -but remarkable bit of non-news. What’s wrong with this scenario is that Robinson and Kelly both launched into online lyrical exercises on the subject of eating meat.
I’m a copywriter. I know how to write this stuff too, and both stories are 100% formula copywriting. It’s almost chapter and verse meat industry commercials. It touches all bases. It exploits the various dietary shortcomings of vegan diets, which are very well-known to vegans and usually manage with supplements or dietary equivalents.
Triple think
It’s fair to say that not much in the way of irrational behavior is unexpected online. Thanks to the deranged, eternally polarising rubbish infesting all forms of media, it’s considered quite normal.
… Except in this case, it isn’t. There is something decidedly unlikely about an online vegan community suddenly going psychotic. This convenient, on-tap abuse could also be used for discrediting vegans, specifically, after Robinson’s and Kelly’s rhapsodically meat-eating revelations.
I’m also a carnivore. I can find vegans irritating and unnecessarily emotive for various reasons, but not at all prone to irrational behavior or downright blatant insanity. It’s like a herd of deer suddenly becoming axe murderers. Not at all likely, and highly questionable at best.
An old McCarthyist tactic was to write on behalf of the opposition, discrediting them as much as possible. This psycho response looks very much like that. This is where triple-think comes into play.
Two alleged ex-vegans have made entirely unsupported statements. Every single common commercial cliché is pressed into service in support of these statements. The statements are virtual macros. A large number of anonymous trolls have suddenly and mysteriously appeared out of thin air.
How much of an issue is this, really? Not that much. Is it any possible justification for even mild abuse? Barely, if at all. How many people are likely to get that offended? Certainly not many vegans.
Vegans are very used to being on the other side of the argument. They could easily see these statements or anything like them and completely ignore them. They could ignore it even more readily because there is absolutely nothing new in the statement.
(Before I go any further, to be fair to the Guardian, and despite some gaping holes in the narrative, they do try to balance out the various health issues properly. The simple fact is that some diets simply do not suit some people. The reason may include metabolic issue for individuals, et cetera.)
Meanwhile back on the increasingly-obscure topic – This is where triple-think comes in – Issue creation. It is quite possible to create a totally non-existent issue, based entirely on polarisation. It doesn’t really matter what people know about the issue. The mere fact that there is a polarised situation is quite enough to get people gravitating to both sides.
Publicity basics, in fact, and at a remarkably pedestrian level. The rest of the Guardian article is padded out with what might be described as eco-platitudes. It would be better for everyone if we all ate plants, et cetera.
(Maybe so, but if you consider the sheer amount of land use involved in feeding 7.8 billion human beings nothing but vegetables, you might think otherwise. Both cropland and grazing land take up enormous amounts of space. You would have to retool the entire global food supply, to start with, and drastically improve the food supply chain.)
The question is what exactly is this article about the alleged vegan death threats prove? Not a lot, if anything at all. Nothing is substantiated. The look is to put it mildly erratic, with a chronic lack of evidence.
May I point out to those who care that this is also definitively not the way to manage a very serious global issue? Just a thought. There is also quite enough hate online without any further help from undocumented sources.
