Hello!

Great question. I think i have advice, based on personal experience. basically it depends on the quality of the political discussions you can have. I would date them and try to understand this person and their beliefs.

People have sometimes interesting reasons for not being vegans. For instance, you can argue that reducing the overall amount of meat consumption is more important than being radical vegan as soon as possible. Food/eating depends on habits, so radical changes are more likely to fail.

Also, one can argue that abolishing colonialism and capitalism is more important than individiual decisions.

These are just examples to explain why they might have legitimate reasons for doing what they do.

Also, as the left ideology is very broard and complicated, they might not define themselfs as leftist but still share common beliefs. People are probably not neutral, as many people have an opinion on fairness and justice. Also they might not have historical or contextual knowledge, for instance how their society achieved prosperity, they might not know which people suffered for that. They might not have the resources to learn about that or the time or the mental relaxation.

For instance, my parents are not leftists and they don’t read books, etc. because they have a different view of a good life. They work a lot, are very stressed but have much money and from that money, they go on holidays to reduce their stress. But they don’t know that a life with much less money but also much less stress is interesting in a different way, because you don’t need holidays. And they don’t think they can change the world and are basically too lazy/stressed to try.

Also they might have a different class-background, for instance they might be forced to work a lot compared to other higher privileged people, because they don’t earn that much money.

So it makes a lot of sense to talk about that. It makes a lot of sense to understand how people were raised and talking about that is also quite interesting, imho. But my personal experience tells me that the atmosphere of the conversation is very important. Depending on how open you are to the experiences of this person (how they were raised and how that shaped their current political belief and stuff) they might tell you personal things or just silently create a mental wall towards you. They might be shy or feel pressured, etc.

Also, you might want to be careful with chatting as it sometimes is easier to misunderstand people and create the impression of an aggressive atmosphere. Some people don’t want to chat that much where others create huge wall of texts. And political complicated discussions are more imho more interesting in person at least until you know the personality of this person very, very good.

You have asked in another thread if you should be agressively vegan. As a person that once was agressively lefist: i can tell you being friendly and non-agressive is much better.