Well I’m sorry I made you sad, but if that was the most important part of his statement, perhaps he could have been bothered expanding on it, and supporting it with the rest of his paragraph.
No, I chose to focus on the way he spoke because I largely agree with him, and he makes his point so terribly, and so insufferably, I think he does more harm than good. He’s not going to convince anyone that it’s wrong to harm animals, especially because he barely bothers to even tell people why it’s wrong. Instead, he just makes it look like vegans are mysticism motivated egomaniacs, which is what people tend to think anyway, so it’s not all that helpful.
If anything looks like a defense mechanism, it’s defense of someone you agree with, just because you agree with them, in spite of anything else. Nothing says insecurity about a position more than the inability to criticize people you agree with. Now, if you don’t think this man deserves criticism, that’s just fine. If you want to defend him, that’s fine. But defending him on the grounds that his central position is right, no matter if he’s wrong about everything else, no matter if he argues so badly it makes his position look worse than if he went back to saying nothing at all, that’s a problem.
