Used to be, there were hardly any vegans at all, but it was popular for libs especially to be vegetarian. You can be healthy on a vegetarian diet that includes lots of eggs and dairy.
But this type of vegetarianism was an unstable schelling point: veganism has almost totally supplanted it, in part because it's easier for restaurants and food manufacturers to support both groups by catering to the more extreme diet, but more because the extremism itself is attractive.
From a signaling perspective, the vegans can stand to the left of the vegetarians and crow about how much holier they are. The moral positioning of the two groups causes most vegetarians to collapse into vegans.
There is a holiness gradient from Omnivory -> Pescatarian -> Vegetarian -> Vegan. Once you start falling down a holiness gradient, you tend to land at the bottom.
The friction that stops you from falling to the bottom is that signaling holiness becomes more expensive the deeper you get. Vegans and vegetarians get around this by cheating when no one is looking, just like everyone else.
A similar thing happens when people get into "extremist" online politics, extremist in quotes because we are talking about mostly normal, boring people who have fallen into a different sort of signaling pit.
One of the most common holiness gradients which tends to drive people insane is the jewish question. A person discovers the disproportionate representation of jews in elite positions in society, sees the classic "my fellow whites" type of obvious ethnic hatred that many jews level at gentiles, and then finds himself rolling down a holiness gradient where everyone is trying to be more antisemitic than everyone else.
The bottom is approximately the position that "the jews" are the ultimate, fundamental, metaphysical font of all evil and badness in the universe. This is an absurd thing to believe, of course, but there's not really a stable schelling point between vegetarian antisemitism vs. vegan antisemitism, because when you become fixated on purity, all calls for moderation are (rightly, in a way) felt as attacks.
People will respond to this post and tell me that I am somehow "running cover for zionists" — and they will do this because they are behaving according to the exact dynamic above.
A key point of failure is to over-abstract from obvious (but forbidden) truths such as "jews tend to practice ethnic nepotism" into imagining a monolithic, hive-like entity called "the jews" which is quasi-omnipotent, and which always acts in its own interest across centuries and so on.
People will say to me, "how is hating the jews different from hating the blacks?" That is, we can agree that both have racial tendencies which are on net deleterious to western civ. And we do agree about that. The difference is that no one thinks there is such a thing as the blacks — there are merely blacks, acting out their individual black lives, some of which, ostensibly, matter.
It's akshually good to treat both blacks and jews like individuals, to realize that tendencies are not certainties, and so on. But here we run into the objection from the other side, which is that treating people as individuals is supposed to entail not being racist.
This, too, is a holiness gradient. At the top of the hill is (People have idiosyncratic characteristics) and at the bottom of the hill is (there are no differences between groups of people with shared genetics.) You start at the top of the hill, and you roll on down and you end up in the world we are in, where differences in group outcomes are treated as indisputable evidence of human bias.
People who are susceptible to veganism, the jewish question, and anti-racism are all failing in exactly the same way, just in different directions. But the answer isn't centrism. That's just a fourth holiness gradient, as repulsive as the other three.
Really there is no answer, except that sometimes, out of the mass of people who are confused and stupid and small, a man will arise who is strong and clever and charismatic, who can thread the needle of all these traps of the mind, and such a man can briefly bring sanity to the insane world.
https://nitter.net/0x49fa98