Adjectives imply something unusual, something different from the standard object the noun refers to. If we say “cheese” for the animal product and “vegan cheese” for the plant product, we implicitly send the message the animal product is normal and the plant product is abnormal.
Strike that. Reverse it.
Say “milk” for plant-based emulsions and “cow milk” for stolen baby cow food. SAy “burger” for veggie protein patties and “cow/pig/turkey burger” for dead rotting animal flesh.
The meat industry doesn’t get to control your language.
Words are activism.
I’m not a vegan, but I upvoted this because it seems logical to me that removing the stigma caused by an adjective addendum to the “normal” word would be beneficial in normalizing vegan choices as comparable to animal products.
As another poster pointed out, adding the name of the animal to the name of the product (ex: cow burger) un-does some of the deception and erasure of animal life done by changing the name.
However, I can see this post is getting downvoted. Is it the vegan community that disagrees with this, or is it the general population stumbling upon a vegan post and downvoting it?
It’s always the anti-vegans. It was the same shit on r/vegan, its German equivalent, and meme derivates. Downvote culture in general is toxic af, but it’s really ridiculous when it comes to anything related to veganism
I definitely agree about downvote culture. This isn’t a space for vegan haters to hate on vegan ideas, but you can’t really moderate downvotes the way you can with comments. It’s a way for people to voice their disagreement of an idea without providing any context or conversation, which is ultimately useless and makes “non-majority” posts feel unwelcome, even if the post was never meant for the majority. There are instances that have turned downvotes off for this reason.
I think more communities and instances should turn them off. Don’t like it, don’t read it; if the post violates any rules, report it. It’s that simple. If you actually feel like arguing about something, go ahead and do so, but don’t just downvote and move on. It’s just such a knee-jerk reaction that, as you said, does not contribute anything worthwhile to the conversation. Really riles me up.
I think it was instance-wide where lemmynsfw.com removed downvotes altogether as to encourage OC posting singles, couples, whatever, and to encourage people posting at all as a test. Then people felt like complaining, so they have been reimplemented.
Thinking back to reddit, posting something that the collective hive-mind has decided to not be appropriate for the subreddit - be it a legitimate concern or not - would just be buried in downvotes and die in “new” immediately. It discourages people from participating and getting involved with the community outside of “DAE [super popular take]?” which again does not contribute anything.
Sorry for the wall of text, but downvotes really have been annoying me ever since I started using reddit 10ish years ago. The fact that Lemmy even shows the negative scores for actual posts and not just comments is just kinda baffling.
Most likely the latter. I find anti-vegan stigma is worse here on Lemmy than it was on reddit, which is saying something. On reddit, we at least had strength in numbers. I think one factor is that there are a lot less posts period, so a higher percent of eyes from c/all come across vegan posts. Another factor might be the age demographic, Lemmy skewing a bit older, and the younger generations being a bit more willing to question the horrors of mass animal agriculture.
That is what I figured. As I say, I’m not a vegan and I came across this from /all, but I generally don’t downvote posts unless the content is harmful (racist, disinformation, discriminatory, etc).
Spot-on, couldn’t have put it better. Back on reddit, there were a lot of carnies “infiltrating” the sub and spewing their ignorance but at least the sub was big enough to foster a good sense of community and discourse