Vegan apostasy

[das_nut]

Here's the website Vegan Sellout List from a bunch of vegan extremists that offers a user-submitted online directory of people who are ex-vegans. It is a refined mix of unchecked self-righteousness and threats of actual physical violence. The website includes both average people and celebrities, as well as chefs and food industry people.

It includes: Andrea Beaman (of Top Chef season one), forager Frank Giglio, Boston area chef Jamie Bissonnette, NYC butcher Berlin Reed, and LA chef Jon Shook's girlfriend and actress Shiri Appleby.

Also on the website is Ben Runkle, owner of Salt & Time, a butcher shop/restaurant in Austin. On his entry, the Vegan Sellout List actually advocates violence against him and his business: "I hope someone breaks out every window at this sick man's shop."

- Eater.com

The website seems to have been taken down. Here's an archived version, and here's an older archive version that seems to have more working links.

 

[SummerRain]

Proof that being vegan doesn't mean you're a nice person.

 

[Forster]

Don't these people realize they're doing more harm than good?

 

[Danielle]

Proof that being vegan doesn't mean you're a nice person.

How shocking

 

[Mischief]

Proof that being vegan doesn't mean you're a nice person.

Or a smart person.

 

[Werewolf Girl]

It was a hoax to get people to watch the Meet Your Meat video: http://www.animalliberationfrontlin...slaughterhouse-footage-to-over-200000-people/

 

[thefadedone]

It was a hoax to get people to watch the Meet Your Meat video: http://www.animalliberationfrontlin...slaughterhouse-footage-to-over-200000-people/

^This. The whole thing is suspiciously odd and pathetic.

 

[das_nut]

It was a hoax to get people to watch the Meet Your Meat video: http://www.animalliberationfrontlin...slaughterhouse-footage-to-over-200000-people/

Did he say that everything on that site was fake?

I'm skimming the link you posted and it doesn't sound like it:

What could have been done better

[...]Maintaining full oversight over the content. While I had an editorial role, I wasn’t behind updating the site. Some of the entries submitted were a little too offensive and really shouldn’t have been posted. Same for the “Mission Statement” (the most highly-trafficked page on the site), which should have been better worded to resonate with a mainstream audience. (It could also be argued the over-the-top language was responsible for the media coverage, so this may have been for the best.)

Stricter fact-checking. Some of the ex-vegan submissions had errors, either through a deliberate effort at misinformation by the (anonymous) submitters, or honest mistakes. Either way, allowing inaccurate information on the site was inexcusable.

That sounds like the entries are real.

If this was originally set out to be a joke, they should have used fake information. (Of course, there's always the possibility that once the controversy started brewing, they took it down, redirected the site to the video, and claimed it was a stunt.)

 

[SummerRain]

How shocking

I didn't mean that it was shocking... it was just a round about way of saying the posters were idiots.

Yeah, from that link it looks like the site was set up to attract people to watch the video, but the posts themselves were genuine.

If this was originally set out to be a joke, they should have used fake information.

Yeah I agree with that. I still don't really buy the concept that more "good" was done by people watching the video, than "bad" was done by people associating the site with vegans. I guess you'll never know how many people were more persuaded than put-off by the stunt. But if you put that to one side, real people still had their information put up on that site. The guy talks about erroneous information... but seems to assume there was nothing wrong with the correct information being on there. He says the concept wasn't good, but he doesn't say it was a wrong thing to do.

 

[LuvOurMother]

The content about actual ex-vegan was user submitted. Peter explains that here :
"What could have been done better
First, being prepared for the traffic before it happened. Getting “Meet Your Meat” onto the front page of the site would have generated more views (and less confusion) than redirecting to a third-party site. In the end, the traffic brought down the server and a URL-redirect was the only option.
Maintaining full oversight over the content. While I had an editorial role, I wasn’t behind updating the site. Some of the entries submitted were a little too offensive and really shouldn’t have been posted. Same for the “Mission Statement” (the most highly-trafficked page on the site), which should have been better worded to resonate with a mainstream audience. (It could also be argued the over-the-top language was responsible for the media coverage, so this may have been for the best.)
Stricter fact-checking. Some of the ex-vegan submissions had errors, either through a deliberate effort at misinformation by the (anonymous) submitters, or honest mistakes. Either way, allowing inaccurate information on the site was inexcusable."

 

[FortyTwo]

So you make a site that probably only the preachiest of vegans will be interested in, and you use it to market one of the preachiest vegan videos.

And this is logical how?

 

[Amy SF]

How 200,000 People Were Fooled into Watching Slaughterhouse Footage

• by Abigail Geer
• July 17, 2013
• 4:00 pm

It all started with ExVegans.com, a website that publicly named and shamed former vegans in such a ruthless and malicious way that it was bound to turn heads.

As anticipated, it didn’t take long before the site was receiving hundreds of thousands of unique hits a day and the mainstream media were jumping on the ‘vegan extremist’ bandwagon and letting the whole world know that they were right all along, and that vegans really were the fanatical crazies that they had always said they were.

To give you an idea of just how much the mainstream media loved this story, here are some of the headlines that popped up once the site starting gaining tract:
“Fanatic vegans launch website to name and shame former followers who are now meat lovers” – Mail Online
“Vegan extremists launch Website to name and shame ex-vegans” – New York Post
“Extremist site shames ex-vegan ‘traitors’ for carnivorous cravings” – The Observer

http://www.care2.com/causes/how-200000-people-were-fooled-into-watching-slaughterhouse-footage.html​

 

[thefadedone]

http://forum.veggieviews.com/threads/vegan-apostasy.2710/#post-125228

 

[Clueless Git]

Simple problem here.

One way around or another these people (was the article saying Peter Singer was behind it?) have acted in a way that is far from irreproachable.

All the vast majority of people behind those "200,000 unique hits" will ever remember from this is that vegans/ism is/are far from beyond reproach.

 

[Amy SF]

http://forum.veggieviews.com/threads/vegan-apostasy.2710/#post-125228

Oops. I didn't realize that was about the same thing. Would someone please close this thread or merge it with the other one, thanks?

 

[Calliegirl]

So yes, ExVegans.com might have made vegans look bad, and yes it probably turned a lot of people off, but as Peter Young himself said, “Before last week, you believed the temperature in Hell would have to hit 32 degrees before FoxNews.com would ever link to this: Meet Your Meat.”

 

[SummerRain]

Mod post: Threads merged as they are on the same topic