Did you watch the new jubilee video about 1 vegan vs 20 meat eaters? Usually I wouldn’t give jubilee the time of the day but I was curious and it ended up exactly how I thought it would. The meat eaters had no solid argument, no sources and went in very emotional and defensive. They made themselves look ridiculous. Surprisingly the comments are majority positive. The vegan guy Dr Jack Symes was absolutely brilliant
I still don’t understand the flag system. It seems like they swap out whenever their side is losing the argument which is telling about how they’re not actually there to engage in good faith.
I just watched it - I thought that Dr Symes did pretty well in terms of his debating skills. He was good at forcing his opponents to address the point or concede the argument before he let them move on, which too few debaters do, so it ends up with two people just having two entirely seperate arguments at one another. The conversation with the physician was probably the most constructive for me, because they were both actually listening to each other and established some common ground.
I did think he was really strong when the discussion was on ethics itself, which was supposed to be the primary topic of the debate. Instead we had a lot of distraction with people trolling on "plant lives matter" stuff, and a lot of in the weeds discussion of health. He dealt with that well, he didn't rise to it and seemed bored which takes the joy out of it for the trolls - that is the right way to handle those people.
The emotional side was very interesting. You had these really overtly angry and emotional people (I'm thinking of the boxer especially) accusing this very calm, deadpan face vegan of being "emotional." It genuinely made me laugh out loud to see that guy say that, while in the middle of a clearly visible emotional reaction.
Where he was weakest for me were some of the quite biased statistics he used, some of the health claims were particualrly dodgy, I recognised most of them as sort of cherry-picked or lacking a bit of context, or cases of a single study being chosen that had the most favourable outcome, as opposed to an accurate representation of what the scientific consensus is and how little research has actually been done on some of the claims made.
On specific claims, he kept repeating a claim about 99% of wildlife extinction being due to animal agriculture which is a bit of a dodgy statistic, because it isn't actually what the WWF report he cites said - it is what one of the authors said seperately. He also quoted that 50% of climate change is due to animal agriculture line, which is pretty widely contested. I think we need to be careful about things ike that, because one misrepresented statistic can collapse trust in the entire argument. Most of all, I objected to his holding up the existence of "a lot of fat people" in America as a criticism of animal agriculture. The religious arguments about Christianity advocating veganism were also quite weak for me.
However, he was under a lot of pressure, his opponents were generally so bad faith that it feels a bit harsh to hold him to so much of a higher standard, when the people he were arguing with were quite often just not serious people. I suspect had we heard him on conversation with people who were more progressive and interested in ethics itself, we'd have seen him take a lot more care about his responses than he did in parts of that debate.
The worst part of the whole thing was how even the host felt then need to get involved because he was obviously so defensive about his meat eating, which was absolutely farsical and I've never seen that happen in any other debate. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw him sit down to take part in the debate that he is supposed to be arbitrating with neutrality. I mean, this vegan is against 20 meat eaters, already vastly outnumbered, and still the host felt the need to pile on. It was such a good example of how there is no such thing as a fair debate when it comes to veganism, when even the host is against the vegan.
Despite that being just incredibly biased of Jubilee to do, I think that these debates are generally more of a sport than anything else, and are unlikely to change anyone's minds even if they were conducted fairly. These 1 X vs 20 Y debates are formated in a way that seems almost designed to avoid constructive conversation, with the red flag system that you alluded to preventing anyone from following an argument to it's conclusion and proving it wrong. The person is just voted out as soon as they start to lose ground.
Given the shitty format and biased host, he did a great deal better than I would have in that seat, and I think he should be applauded for being so well informed and articulate under pressure.
