- There is a certain schadenfreude in watching a self-proclaimed moral authority fall—especially one who looks like these YouTubers: young and lithe, with perfect skin and seemingly endless vacation time. It is akin to watching the Varsity Blues scandal unfold, but if those rich and beautiful people also posted chiding Instagram captions about “enslaving animals for the sake of our taste buds.”
Long, long before George RR Martin wrote Game of Thrones - long before he was a staff writer on Beauty and the Beast - he wrote a story called Sandkings. Sandkings was about a rich man who collected exotic pets who ended up buying an alien ant farm (no relation). The ants had the advantage of worshipping their provider as a god with sculptures and everything. Unfortunately the rich man was twisted and proved that creatures living in a warped universe create a warped culture.
I've had a suspicion that Martin wrote an analogy for the Internet twenty years before the Internet for a while now.
It’s crazy to think all of these hundreds of thousands of sanctimonious vegans that pounced on their icons are all real, living, breathing people, clogging up LA traffic. Less lazily: I think the author can get away with a lot of the snark because vegans portray themselves as moral paragons. When they turn out to be lying, transparently commercial and self-centered, it’s hard not to point out the hypocrisy—the moral argument for vegetarianism notwithstanding.
Context is key here- if you're profiting off a Vegan image, selling Vegan products and encouraging a Vegan diet all while secretly eating fish then you're guilty of hypocrisy at a minimum.