Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
In the mid-19th century there was a doctor in Vienna named Ignaz Semmelweis. He worked in a maternity ward and took extreme focus on the extremely high mortality rate in his ward, and Semmelweis eventually found that hand washing before providing care was extremely effective at reducing the mortality rate (consistent hand washing dropped it from 18% to 2% mortality rate) specifically doctors would do autopsies in the morning then (without any sanitization) move onto their duties in the maternity ward.
Semmelweis had the seniority to mandate hand washing (specifically he identified Lyme to be very effective, but of course it’s very unpleasant to wash with Lyme) he had the data to back up it’s effectiveness, but what he lacked was the social capital to successfully shift the local medical culture to include handwashing before caring for sensitive prenatal and postnatal care. Specifically he was a dick about it. Because he was extremely outspoken about doing this unpleasant Lyme wash before providing care for which he couldn’t provide a good theory as to why it worked, he was replaced as the director, continued his advocacy with limited success and eventually was placed in an asylum following a nervous breakdown where he died of sepsis from a caretaker not washing their hands.
His work was never recognized until long after his death. He probably could have had more success if he wasn’t so annoyingly loud and outspoken about this hand washing thing. It was clearly the right thing to do but it took time and effort, wasn’t entirely pleasant, and it wasn’t yet the norm. He saved hundreds of lives while he was in charge and hand washing was mandated, but because his successor ended the handwashing mandate countless more died at his hospital alone.
The first successful soaps, in part created by a handful of individuals Semmelweis had inspired, were only successful when marketed as a cosmetic product to make you smell better (and by convincing people that they real!)
The point is, in advocacy, no matter how right you are, if you’re fighting against “the way we’ve always done things” you will always have a significant uphill battle and have to play the politics and not be too upsetting to the order of things until some momentum is built, because otherwise, no matter how right you are, you can simply be written off as a lunatic and too annoying to be worth listening to