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If I ate half as much gluten as I had been eating, I probably would have died within the year. I was already seriously ill. If you have celiac disease you need to eliminate gluten entirely. Or your intestine or in my case entire digestive track erodes its lining with the symptoms I already described. That took just three swallows of a beverage that had wheat in it but wasnt so labeled. On the other hand, when I decided to cut back on sugar I didn't count the sugar in raw fruit. Or modest amounts in cooked food. Or anything eaten in restaurants since I eat out so rarely. I just stopped buying and bringing home anything with huge amounts of sugar like candy and cookies. That seems to work well enough to keep me gradually and effortlessly losing weight instead of the reverse. But I look both ways before crossing a busy street every time, not just half the time. There's not one single rule such as all or nothing or completely rejecting all or nothing that works for all situations.I've never cared for the "all or nothing" mindset, personally. I remember my sister telling me once how I really needed to change my diet to sugar-free, or gluten-free, I forget which. Anyhow, I told her I didn't see the point in a strict absolute diet; couldn't I cut out half the sugar (or gluten) and get some improvement, if it was a problem? No, absolutely not, it has to be all or nothing, she said. OK then, count me out.
Same sort of thing in politics, so much all or nothing:
"My vote doesn't matter, so I'm not going to bother", and just as bad - "The candidate on our side isn't pure enough on MY issue, so I can't compromise my principles to vote for them". Yeah, so the other guy gets elected instead, who's a hundred times worse. That makes a lot of sense - a lot of NONSENSE!I don't see a little pragmatism in politics as being such a terrible thing.
As to vegans and veganism, it's not a diet, per se, or even a lifestyle. It's a religion, and an extreme, fundamentalist religion at that.
One of the hypocrisies that I've thought was mildly humorous with vegans in general, is they say humans need to "evolve" past their animal nature, past the basic biological need for our bodies to consume animal protein as we always have, and ascend to a higher level or some such.
Then on the other hand, most of these same people believe that when it comes to other natural biological processes (sex), you need to let it all hang out, follow your basest drives, desires, and animal instincts with whoever, whatever, whenever the urge strikes, because after all, we're just animals, and that's the natural thing to do....
The vegans I've known did not have or promote the sort of sex life you are describing. But I also consider it a religion rather than just a diet or life style.
As for compromising when voting -- interesting issue. When both parties utterly abandon you on every issue you care about but one promises you more but never does anything or only does trivially better than the other party, the only voting strategy that will work is for vast parts of the electorate to refuse to vote at all. That of course accomplishes nothing in the immediate election. But it can encourage the out-of-power party to reconsider its positions and serious third party candidates to run next time. If we always vote however unappealing the candidates, the parties continue their behavior of just trying to get a few more votes next time so as to barely win the election while continuing to use their positions to make personal fortunes themselves and continuing to destroy the country.
I think the closest one right now is Keizer. I've never been there.
