If you go around yelling at people to put down the hamburger, people are gonna tell you to mind your own business. That's why people think vegans are insufferable. The ones who don't do this, you never know they're vegans because they mind their own business. Really fucks with the numbers, so I'll clarify and say that someone who makes it a point to steer a conversation to how they're vegan is a yellow flag. Veganism itself is not at all a problem

I welcome a world in which factory farms are gone. The amount of actual cruelty needed to sustain our population and capitalist demand is insane and depressing, but we are nowhere near winning that fight with boycotting animal products, and we never will. It won't make a difference. The improvement of substitute meat with systemic and legislative change will do that, and that's what we need to push for

So yeah, I'm not offended because a vegan told me not to eat a hamburger. I'm annoyed because a vegan went out of their way to steer the conversation towards their own moral superiority

So I'll apologize for having reacted so defensively, but I don't think that eating meat and having empathy for animals is mutually exclusive. It sure just seemed to me like you were telling me that veganism should be a green flag for me, and it just really isn't. It's whatever. If I find out a person is a vegan, I'm not gonna be more attracted to them; I'll just now know not to offer them a chicken nugget