No, because they actually agree with them*. Everyone doing activism for a cause I believe in could never be wrong! Any call for optics is just tone policing! Oh, the vegans? Obviously they are too aggressive, what about the optics? I'm very smart!
Do you genuinely believe this? If I hear "X is bad", I don't need someone to tell me "oh, but less X is still good step". I can understand that with even my two braincells.
Where's the proof that people don't understand that? Do we need to start preaching harm reduction and "perfect is the enemy of good" in other areas of activism? Feminism, anti-racism?
Veganism is by it's very definition harm reduction. There's a large difference between "cannot eat less meat" and "don't want to eat less meat". The first is technically even vegan, the second will never be.
well, akschually, assuming all that is true, at least your wife and kids are vegan, or could be. In the end, veganism is about doing what is "possible and practicable".
That being said, have you checked out TVP or seitan? They can roughly match protein content of most meat.
Finally, if you generally believe in the idea behind veganism, every little bit helps. Strangers on the internet can't really see though what exactly you could do. If you do what you can, that's already enough.
A "rabid" vegan turned me vegan. There was some thread on reddit about dogs or animals. It's Reddit, so obviously crazy claims and discussions happened. One was a typical 30 comment deep discussion with a vegan. I thought he was a dickhead, like all vegans, injecting his preaching anywhere he could, like all vegans.
That's why I started researching veganism. I wanted to prove to him that he was obviously wrong. Jokes on me though, because he was right. Roughly 4 months later, I was vegan.
I think non-vegans MASSIVELY underestimate the bubble they live in. What kind of vegan will ever reach the average persons feed or frontpage? It's not the calm, nicely argued one. Just like with the "angry, yelling, colored hair feminazi", the only vegans reaching most people are the most aggressive, most divisive vegans. That says absolutely nothing about vegans in generally, but everything about how filter bubbles work.
I can't see into what your experience has been, but I can give my own 2 cents: 99% of the time people say vegans are aggressive or uncompromising, the non-vegans are just wrong. Secondly, I've had many a horrible experience with feminists (and anti-racists etc.) online. Yet, none of that kept me from doing genuine research and becoming "woke", and I most definitely didn't use the terminally online versions of a movement as a indictment of the validity of the movement.
It's not all or nothing, it's definitional! Why even have words describing concepts if everyone makes up their own version just to get mad at it.
Veganism is based on anti-speciesism, the philosophical belief that discrimination based solely (SOLELY) on species is immoral. It makes perfect sense, then, to find a word that describes the opposite stance. Carnism is that word.
This is, quite frankly, just as ridiculous as TERFs getting pissed at being called "cis". Or "TERF", for that matter. It's entirely reasonable that someone might not like people holding opposing philosophical views (TERFs, carnists), but that does NOT make those words insults in and of themselves.
All this is ENTIRELY divorced from whether reducing meat consumption is good (it is!).
At best, a boycott is part of veganism. Vegans obviously also don't personally kill animals to eat, or kick puppies, or have cock fights. Not supporting those things financially is a consequence of that stance, not it's sole purpose.
The reason it seems like a boycott is simply because for the average city dweller, buying animal products is simply the main way they interact with this form of oppression.
To try an analogy: Imagine most/all men actually not assaulting or raping women. But, 99% of them pay for others to do that on their behalf, three times a day. Feminism would look a lot like "just a boycott" to these people simply because consumption is their main point of exposure/support of anti-feminism.
It's absolutely fine to do this, but it's just as reasonable to not call that veganism. Reducitarian or Flexitarier are right there.
Maybe I'm reaching, but this stuff feels like stolen valor. They want the label, without doing all the work.