I Don't Believe in "Open Rescue" (vegan / vegans / veganism)
10 November 2017 [link youtube]
Two vegans talking about the politics and the future of the movement. This is part of the "Brass Tacks" playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/user/HeiJinZhengZhi/playlists
Youtube Automatic Transcription
sometimes I start recording a video and
then I realize it's got to be like five or six different videos we started talking about a bunch of related issues last night and in this video let's try to make it one to one-and-a-half topics open rescue if I were to ask you what's your position of hoping to rescue how do you feel about open rescue we hadn't even talked about this for last night obviously we have a lot in common but weird theoretically you're having some kind of conversation you're getting organized through some kind of activism with with other vegans where do you stand on open rescue it's not because I'm just with you and I'm trying to agree with you I really feel that I'm against open rescue last night I told you that when I first was looking at your channel I saw your video against violence basically about Gary Yourofsky and I got into it with my ex-boyfriend because he was Pro violence and Pro Open rescue Pro going into you know breaking and entering into slaughterhouses or mink farms or whatever yeah and freeing all the animals right right I was like you can't do that you can't do that it's wrong it's wrong so at the time you felt that way but you didn't have like an articulated explanation for why you opposed I've assumed you were struggling to try to find the words or find the reasons for why there was this big gap between you and your boyfriend right yeah but basically it was just because I was against violence you know I didn't want there to be I didn't want begins to engage in violence in order to spread their beliefs it's just not its interests me how much the word belief comes up in this partly because identifies no no no no no it's its ears no nope I mean I think that is the way the way to say it I mean what I'm tempted to say is look I don't just oppose open rescue I would have convenience or out of some kind of cynical political ploy that I really do believe this is wrong it's the easiest way as a matter of belief it's not like in my heart of hearts I want to support Gary Yourofsky or I want to support DXE but I feel I can't because the constraint of the law or that I feel I have to compromise know in terms of my real feelings my real I really do oppose this and so one of the challenges I've received from a patreon commenter a patreon supporter basically amounted to saying to me well would you be on the wrong side of history with something like the civil rights struggle if this is a hypothetical if if Martin Luther King jr. or Malcolm X or the Black Panthers we're proposing illegal methods damage to property some kind of low-key semi revolutionary methods in the pursuit of the civil rights struggle wouldn't you i pathetic ly be on the wrong side of history if you if you believe what you believe if you're against this kind of violence direct action everyone put it and I know the challenges specifically stated in terms of if you believe these laws are unjust therefore you must feel it's just to violate these laws and of course I do feel that the laws against heard the laws involved with animal agriculture are wrong or and I think they need to change however I'm not against laws protecting people people's private property I'm against laws that enforce the law sorry look I mean you know I think I think there are two approaches to this walk either a thousand approaches but two of two out of a thousand um it's one thing to say I want to win and it's another thing to say I want to win by any means necessary at all cost no matter how much violence no matter what that's used I think the vast majority of African American people precisely the struggle they had to deal with around the dinner table with their own family members was well yes they want civil rights that want advancement for African American people that want to prove assess African people but everyone wants it their way you know it means some people want it peacefully democratically some people wanted to be part of a communist revolution remember communism was a popular mainstream ideologies act then that had nuclear bombs behind it and they could list off their victories around the world at that time you know there was a time when communism was expanding and triumphant not collapsing and pathetic and shameful and they had all kinds of propaganda to make it seem right so there were people who wanted to be left-wing they're people to be violent that people wanted to be an uprising of the factory workers and there were people at the opposite extreme people who are extreme moderates or whatever we said no they wanted to accomplish this through you know Civic and civil action that was very much than the balance the law so it's one thing to say you want to win and it's another thing to say I want to win my way or I want to win in a manner that has the lowest body count possible or with absolutely zero deaths if possible what have you and you know I've actually had several different videos criticizing the idea of justice and injustice and this is this is 0.2 0.2 out of a thousand year I think that the concept of justice gets at the the Batman part of our brain you know I think it's actually quite dangerous when vegans are talking about this as injustice and of then justifying their own actions legal or illegal to to redress that just it's really easy to look at so these these examples your boyfriend had in mind okay there are minks in cages in a mink farm they think that is an injustice therefore justifies any or all what it justifies whatever means that are necessary justifies any or all actions to liberate those minks from the mink farm there are pigs living in a crate maybe a wooden crate maybe a steel cage inside a farm we perceive that as injustice and then in our minds again whether its cultural programming or maybe human nature we think oh just like Batman were now justified in climbing on a rooftop kicking in a window breaking down a door rescuing someone I mean that the ethic of rescue as a redress for injustice it's really kind of it's evading all the all the important issues here you know so III completely I mean again I've said many many times lately I think sympathy is most important as an analytical tool I sympathize with the way the other side thinks through this issue so that I can understand it better so that I can relate to it better I understand how appealing that is and I think for people in our position like even you so again whether it's around the dinner table with your relatives or with your your boyfriend or what have you I think it's actually quite difficult to make a principled argument for the modern position it puts the onus on us as to why we don't justify law-breaking again whether that's because we want to win but we want to win our way I don't want veganism to become a terrorist organization or if it's because we actually do believe the laws are just again there's a lot of lazy thinking within vegan philosophy vegan politics one of the most popular arguments popularized by Kerry Franchione a etc setter is that the fundamental injustice here is property that owning animals as property is evil and we oppose that therefore therefore therefore therefore right then we get a bunch of a bunch of imputed assumptions following after this idea that that property ownership is a problem now that puts me in a difficult position if I want to say no I actually do believe in property laws I actually believe they're just and not unjust and I don't want to challenge it that way I don't want to I don't want to push you that way at all now I've had relatively sophisticated lengthy videos talking about that but in direct contradiction to Gary fancy on his position I've pointed out that what he says about the nature of property in modern Western society is just not true there are special classes of property such as owning an historical building historically significant architecture owning a work of art the way museums and handle works of art they do own them they are property they are bought and sold they can be exchanged and loan between museums but there are all kinds of legal restrictions on this if you talk to anyone who's lived in Europe even some parts the United States they may own a building as their property but they don't have the right to repaint it without going to the government's get permission they have to get a permit saying it's okay to make this window larger or while making the window enlarging the window is that gonna harm the historic here they're building we actually have all kinds of classes of property that are very very well protected and I don't I just do not agree that abolishing the category of property or saying that animals are not property is the way out of this puzzle I don't think that's the way to abolish factory farms or greatly diminish the significance of factory farming he really wants it either because a lot many of them probably have pets and would they want people to be able to go onto their property and take their pride there you know they're not really anybody's property then you know anybody can take your dog or cat somebody's backyard well they're there they're phony solution is to just talk about legal personhood that once animals have equal rights which I don't believe it I'm a vegan I don't believe in equal rights for animals I don't i actually again it's not like a compromise of enforced into when I read direct action ever was 40 year plan their manifesto their set of principles for the future I say oh no I actually oppose almost every single point in that plant I oppose the use of direct action I oppose open rescue I oppose the law breaking methods of old cetera et cetera uh but I also oppose this idea that every animal has a soul and that link to that soul are legal rights and that they have the right to live their plan is for when they shut down a you know a factory farm that taxpayers dollars should pay for each and every one of those cows to be put in the Farm Sanctuary and live out it stays in in some kind of imaginary happiness now again among I follow that to you imagine cows are happy unfactored burden before a Farm Sanctuary either way I mean I I really think that's that's a very problematic set of set of assumptions too and I've had videos addressed to that also so there are many many different delusions of misconceptions here and all right but I mean in principle what's wrong with open rescue and the the open rescue mentality the set of assumptions about justice and political intervention and activism and action that get attached to to open rescue I grew up reading Batman I grew up yeah and mostly the comic book of Batman but it's it's true of many comic books and many movies and many TV shows there's a whole cultural thing about this and you know one of the bedrock assumptions about Batman is that he solves problems with his fists he solves problems by breaking through people's windows kicking down the doors punching people in the face and normally when Batman bursts through the broken window or bursts through the door he knows who's good news evil he knows who he's rescuing he's what I mean and uh I because of the life I lived politically in terms of humanitarian war I have really had to think through the implications of this even when I was in Canada it's kind of another story I've had to see the think think through the implications of this mentality again and again one of the most striking and extreme examples being Cambodia Thailand and Laos and the various do-gooders the various charities often Christian charities that try to rescue prostitutes and a lot of these people really had the the Batman mentality they assumed they would show up and there's an evil pimp holding a prostitute as the as his captive and all they had to do was rescue these prostitutes in this situation and that they would be totally justified you know and of course the police are assumed to be evil which also built into the Batman comic books is that you know the the corruption and inefficiency of the police which justifies Batman's violence as vigilantism and so on that's somehow you know there is no legal way to address these problems and you know in the real world in Cambodia and Laos you may show up you may kick down the door and the pimp and the prostitute have a child together very very common scenario where the prostitute has a kid with her pimp they're boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife and the kid is growing up on the farm and the pimp of the prostitute living in the city that would be with an older prostitute obviously when you talk about young prostitutes who just were a lot of the kind of salacious attention of foreigners is directed you know very often they're young women who made who exactly made the decision to run away from to reject the farm they grew up on and when you try to rescue them by forcing them to go back to the to the family farm but they'll tell you to your face you know they'll try to escape again as soon as possible that's not the life they want they've made this decision and so on and even I mean this is a really dark but I've done formal research on this this is part of my own humanitarian work and formal research I did including and I was working as an editor for a non fiction academic publisher I did read real studies of this and I talked to people in the humanitarian history doing this work hands-on you can have situations where the humanitarian agency rescues a young person who was sold into prostitution generally talking with a teenager delivers them back to the family that sold them into prostitution and then after they leave the family sells them into prostitution again it repeats the cycle so that is a case where you can classify it as human trafficking although again sometimes it's just barely you don't know to what extent there's the exclusion you know the human reality of prostitution is really murky really complex Minea comic books don't address it it's not suitable for a patrol Drance entertainments bad treatment somehow just barely children's entertainment despite the you know the the nature of servant matter matter dealt with here um you know the idea that there is injustice out in this world and just in just in identifying as injustice just in saying this is an injustice you therefore know what your role is it therefore justifies your violence your transgressing legal and political norms and the you know the the solution is self-evident this is an injustice therefore the opposite is justice therefore by any means necessary you know I think this is really bad in terms of the process and the product in terms of the outcomes in terms of what it means for veganism and look I say this now even if it's a non sequitur if I were an employee of the FBI I would be proud to enforce the law in this case I don't want veganism to become a kind of semi terrorist movement I don't think this is legitimate activism it's not because of some compromise have been forced into if I were an employee the FBI like the real me I was vegan I'm a vegan activist with a vegan YouTube channel but I had a job working with the FBI I would look at this situation with direct action everywhere and say yeah damn right and for throw the book at them enforce the law this is not what vegan activism is supposed to be this is not the future of the movement this is not the way forward and I don't I don't believe in or sympathize with or support this whatsoever so I mean that that really is my position on this now again I mean like if someone asks you what is the solution to prostitution the mentality in looking at you know it's going to be a multitude of policy changes and and and difficult complex questions but there's no simple sense in which you can say well prostitution is an injustice or you know the pimps exploiting the prostitutes is justice therefore let's just send out you know the the stormtroopers let's just send out men in uniforms with guns to kick down a bunch of doors and break in a bunch of windows and violently you know you know separate pin from prostitute and try to shut this down and that's been tried all over the world that's been done all over the world of course in cases where the majority of people opposed prostitution we're in a situation where the vast majority people support the pork industry ninety eight percent of people we're in a situation where the vast majority people do not share their fundamental ethical assumptions they don't perceive this as an injustice they perceive what the vegans are doing as an injustice which changes things perception matters and I mean it's interesting with your discussion with your boyfriend you were talking about the Gary Yourofsky example Gary Yourofsky has stole his criminal record he still is on paper or a terrorist he said chaos is an international terrorist I believe in terms of his criminal record because he went to Canada and he tried to liberate all of the mink within a mink farm at least that's more morally coherent than doing what direct action everywhere does because you know what direct action just did they went into a farm and they only chose to piglets then right right word particularly particularly cute and I think the point was they were they felt they were arresting them from particularly bad circumstances at the farm to make propaganda out of it right but I mean if you believe in this why didn't they burn down the farm yeah why didn't they open all the cages that's a common slogan why didn't they liberate all the pigs why did you just try to get you know why these two pigs what's what special about them pretty obvious that it's for money you know it's trying to get money for their organization that's using these two piglets you know they're cute you can watch their progress from of course when they first rescued them they were good on the verge of death I think you know like updating people on their progress right right it's gonna get sympathy it's gonna get attention and yeah yeah in a way that's kind of also taking advantage of their lives sure their own benefit you know like of course in a totally different way it's not like DX is going to slaughter the animals and make you you know make money off of their their flesh but they're making money off of them in a different way yeah and I don't think they think about it in that way at all I think they think about it as justice great yeah and they show up with a film crew you know they are vigilantes with a film crew you know and that is very different they could have shown up with the the guys holding the camera and all the film crew stuff they could have instead that bull cutters and then freeing as many pigs as possible or burning down the farm they could have been I don't support I hear that either but there's this very strange hypocritical you know fence they're sitting on or fineline they're walking and you know I mean that's even built into this the term open rescue why does it say open their point is that it's over it's not covert they're not wearing the mask they're not doing this in a clandestine manner that they're trying and in their forty year plan they claim that in the future they want to see presidential candidates being asked at Q&A sessions by the media what's your position on rescue I think you know they kind of drank the kool-aid they don't realize that - 99.9 percent of humanity including me this is just laughable I'm you know if there's a way forward for veganism I don't think it can possibly be breaking into people's you know private property breaking into these estates and stealing their hens and pigs and you know stealing their their cows it doesn't it does not make sense to me I don't think that's a that's a question that any presidential candidate is ever gonna have trouble answering you know now look you know there are a lot of differences between the black civil rights movement and the the vegan movement I could we could talk for hours about this and the similarities are few the differences are humans versus I mean right that's the fundamental difference there but there are many look you know did you ever hear so they we're talking with civil rights struggle here not the abolition of slavery but the later struggle to get black people civil rights do you think you could get civil rights for black people through a consumer boycott do you think that's an effective method to promote black rights in America or in South Africa by only purchasing products that are made it's completely surreal its comfort there's no way you can compare these right now do you think you can promote veganism through consumer boycott through refusing to buy meat dairy and eggs do you think you can promote black civil rights through opening a new restaurant there's really no comparison it's so radically wildly different how about through health advocacy how about the role of PCRM and vegan gains health diet heart attacks you know atherosclerosis diabetes there is really no comparison now you know and again it's completely false it's really a false intentionally misleading the interpretation history to suggest that the civil rights struggle had two sides and either you are on the right side of history or you want the wrong side of history people who were alive during that era had a lot of really difficult discussions around the dinner table if you had a black family maybe one of the sons supports the Black Panthers and one supports some kind of Democratic moderate position and you know the other huge factor here is Christianity how can you ignore the fact that dr. Martin Luther King jr. was a Christian Reverend the role of explicitly Christian gospel musicians and folk musicians going from church to church from town to town appointed so before there was a huge crucial role for the black colleges segregation in the United States it deprived black people of educational opportunities but also created a completely parallel set of institutions where young black people were getting educated black high schools black ologists says an incredibly dynamic situation for political organization you could have a folk band or gospel crew Singh going from black high school to black high school from black college to black college from black church to black church do vegans have anything like that is there any in comparison to how we can organize and stimulate activism I can't go from vegan high school to vegan high school in the United States there's one there's one high school in the whole world maybe there are two or three I've never heard of any others heard of the one in the United States it only has 269 students it's a tiny Hook school 200 students all the way from kindergarten to the end of high school it's it's you know K to 12 school so it's couple dozen students per grade or something you know there is no such thing as a vegan kosher vegan University and there are a million other reasons why this is not comparable now if you asked me in a very broad sense look eyes'll are there some circumstances you know we have this saying in English you don't need the bullet if you've got the ballot if you ask me look guys well are there some circumstances in which human beings can't use Democratic methods of Milad being which they have to take up the gun and run away to the the caves and the hills or whatever you know say the general well we talked about it so long ago world war ii you know the only you know it's it's very sad and moving me to think about what if I was in France during World War two what if I was in Poland during World War two yes there are services there is no way to democratically Lobby the Nazis the way to oppose the Nazis and the social in historical context of World War two it's very sad I think I would have had no choice but to get a gun and take to the hills and there I don't even think there would have been a resistance group for me to join you don't I mean I might have been more or less with a gang of bandits resisting the Nazis which there was plenty of plenty of unorganized resistance that way people who didn't want to join the Communists or didn't want to work for the British British intelligence but who couldn't compromise who are in a situation of resist or die there are historical circumstances like that we ain't enough we are not in them as vegans organizing vegan activism we are not in a situation like that and you even have contrast them in terms of open rescue if you want to do this type of research if you believe that film footage inside factory farms is worth getting there are ways to get it legally undercover journalists do it completely league there are drones you know these flying cameras there people who are completely legally using drones to get footage of what goes on on farms and they know exactly the legal lines involved and of course as you know the whole pig save movement cow save movement where you're filming the animals before they go into to the factory and even the exterior of the factory we already got plenty of footage like they'll be real I don't think we're really gonna discover anything new to get a new footage but there are so many examples of completely legal completely effective ways even to get inside our footage you know you can even go to the trade shows you know there are um there are trade shows for the meat industry where they show you and demonstrate the slaughterhouse machinery because they're selling it you can get the FC I've done this you can google and get the UM the manuals the owner's manuals from the machinery used to execute these animals these are products bought and sold and they have photographs and diagrams and it's a little bit psychologically disturbing everything the milking machines the the execution machines etcetera etcetera you know so I mean even with something that specific I don't see a justification for for open rescue I mean if you actually want to adopt these animals there are a million legal ways to do that we're not running out of animals to rescue legally to the point where we have to do this illegally so on its own and so forth now you know right now we live in the People's Republic of China a country that basically has zero freedom of speech zero right to public protests you're all right to it's organized politically okay in in my former statement we don't need violence of course I'm primarily talking about Canada the United States Western Europe countries that have enormous money but even here in China if I were talking to aspiring vegan activists in fields for which I do you think I'd recommend anything like this do you think I'd recommend that people spend the rest of their lives in prison there's so much you can do positively in veganism that doesn't break any laws that doesn't put anyone in prison that doesn't destroy anyone's property doesn't put anyone's lives in danger there's so much you can do and yes that partly is because it's an effective consumer boycott movement we can create new products we can encourage people to refuse the virus it partly is because we have this you know amazing array of basically cultural methods of advocating for veganism as a diet as a lifestyle as an ethical consideration ethics ecology you know human health there are so many headings under which we can effectively advocate for this cause even in communist China in 2017 that it seems inconceivable to me that someone would recommend resorting to direct action everywhere methods either in terms of disruption or in terms of open rescue so that that sincerely is you know my position and if you want to say to me that you believe that wasn't the case in the historical struggle to emancipate slaves or the historical struggle against the Nazis in World War two or some other extreme example you know you may have a point but it is there is just no easy dotted line to leap from that example to the situation we're in now as yet I think it ultimately has to do with the idea of personhood for animals I don't believe the idea of personhood for animals I don't believe they should be as it is right now like pigs or animals that are in factories we they rely on humans you know so just freeing them it's it's not a solution and you know uh maybe it's gonna creep you go from one hand one human hand to another human hand from if you go from a factory farm to an animal sanctuary it's it's not a solution and it's not the future of the vegan movement I don't I don't believe in it and well is bleak on the emotional level a lot of people want to believe in mythology and I think they're looking for a new a new myth and then veganism and new new heroes that like the heroism this is also part of the Batman mentality you know I think it's very disturbing for people to have that taken away from them to say no this isn't heroic this is kind of counterproductive and immature and stupid but again you know if you watch my channel you for these other examples you know what what's what's the future of mothers against drunk driving you know what's the future of the anti-smoking movement how what was the success of the seatbelt movement these are all examples of really successful civil society movements that didn't have to put people in prison and didn't have to use guns you know I mean yes you choose an example the favors your cause if you think the black civil rights struggle just vindicates breaking the law I'm okay you know black civil rights of it vindicates folk singers going from campus to campus if vindicates peaceful marches as a method of public protest that stuff were debating here we're not debating the use of folk music we're not debating the use of peaceful protests on a campus or at the lawn in front of City Hall all those things were part of the civil rights movement to amiyo and lobbying governments the you know n-double-a-cp you know they get to the acronym wrong and gnash sorry advancement of african-american okay sorry i thought it best to the epidemic okay anyway you know this this huge range of actions big and small that militated for that you know that kind of cultural and and ultimately legal change sure a meal you can you can choose to learn different lessons from that example and you can also choose different examples that either you know favor one case or favor another but there there are many things that are bad and wrong and misleading about this this open rescue paradigm and i mean maybe one of them is exactly that it locks people into you know a hero versus villain mentality for what's actually a very very murky situation and I can't even say it's not a situation I feel hopeless about at all there's so much hope for veganism there's such a clear and positive way forward it's just that this isn't it it's not going to be rescuing two pigs here in two ends there it's gonna be millions of people standing up and saying hey I'm gonna do that I'm gonna do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do right we are at
then I realize it's got to be like five or six different videos we started talking about a bunch of related issues last night and in this video let's try to make it one to one-and-a-half topics open rescue if I were to ask you what's your position of hoping to rescue how do you feel about open rescue we hadn't even talked about this for last night obviously we have a lot in common but weird theoretically you're having some kind of conversation you're getting organized through some kind of activism with with other vegans where do you stand on open rescue it's not because I'm just with you and I'm trying to agree with you I really feel that I'm against open rescue last night I told you that when I first was looking at your channel I saw your video against violence basically about Gary Yourofsky and I got into it with my ex-boyfriend because he was Pro violence and Pro Open rescue Pro going into you know breaking and entering into slaughterhouses or mink farms or whatever yeah and freeing all the animals right right I was like you can't do that you can't do that it's wrong it's wrong so at the time you felt that way but you didn't have like an articulated explanation for why you opposed I've assumed you were struggling to try to find the words or find the reasons for why there was this big gap between you and your boyfriend right yeah but basically it was just because I was against violence you know I didn't want there to be I didn't want begins to engage in violence in order to spread their beliefs it's just not its interests me how much the word belief comes up in this partly because identifies no no no no no it's its ears no nope I mean I think that is the way the way to say it I mean what I'm tempted to say is look I don't just oppose open rescue I would have convenience or out of some kind of cynical political ploy that I really do believe this is wrong it's the easiest way as a matter of belief it's not like in my heart of hearts I want to support Gary Yourofsky or I want to support DXE but I feel I can't because the constraint of the law or that I feel I have to compromise know in terms of my real feelings my real I really do oppose this and so one of the challenges I've received from a patreon commenter a patreon supporter basically amounted to saying to me well would you be on the wrong side of history with something like the civil rights struggle if this is a hypothetical if if Martin Luther King jr. or Malcolm X or the Black Panthers we're proposing illegal methods damage to property some kind of low-key semi revolutionary methods in the pursuit of the civil rights struggle wouldn't you i pathetic ly be on the wrong side of history if you if you believe what you believe if you're against this kind of violence direct action everyone put it and I know the challenges specifically stated in terms of if you believe these laws are unjust therefore you must feel it's just to violate these laws and of course I do feel that the laws against heard the laws involved with animal agriculture are wrong or and I think they need to change however I'm not against laws protecting people people's private property I'm against laws that enforce the law sorry look I mean you know I think I think there are two approaches to this walk either a thousand approaches but two of two out of a thousand um it's one thing to say I want to win and it's another thing to say I want to win by any means necessary at all cost no matter how much violence no matter what that's used I think the vast majority of African American people precisely the struggle they had to deal with around the dinner table with their own family members was well yes they want civil rights that want advancement for African American people that want to prove assess African people but everyone wants it their way you know it means some people want it peacefully democratically some people wanted to be part of a communist revolution remember communism was a popular mainstream ideologies act then that had nuclear bombs behind it and they could list off their victories around the world at that time you know there was a time when communism was expanding and triumphant not collapsing and pathetic and shameful and they had all kinds of propaganda to make it seem right so there were people who wanted to be left-wing they're people to be violent that people wanted to be an uprising of the factory workers and there were people at the opposite extreme people who are extreme moderates or whatever we said no they wanted to accomplish this through you know Civic and civil action that was very much than the balance the law so it's one thing to say you want to win and it's another thing to say I want to win my way or I want to win in a manner that has the lowest body count possible or with absolutely zero deaths if possible what have you and you know I've actually had several different videos criticizing the idea of justice and injustice and this is this is 0.2 0.2 out of a thousand year I think that the concept of justice gets at the the Batman part of our brain you know I think it's actually quite dangerous when vegans are talking about this as injustice and of then justifying their own actions legal or illegal to to redress that just it's really easy to look at so these these examples your boyfriend had in mind okay there are minks in cages in a mink farm they think that is an injustice therefore justifies any or all what it justifies whatever means that are necessary justifies any or all actions to liberate those minks from the mink farm there are pigs living in a crate maybe a wooden crate maybe a steel cage inside a farm we perceive that as injustice and then in our minds again whether its cultural programming or maybe human nature we think oh just like Batman were now justified in climbing on a rooftop kicking in a window breaking down a door rescuing someone I mean that the ethic of rescue as a redress for injustice it's really kind of it's evading all the all the important issues here you know so III completely I mean again I've said many many times lately I think sympathy is most important as an analytical tool I sympathize with the way the other side thinks through this issue so that I can understand it better so that I can relate to it better I understand how appealing that is and I think for people in our position like even you so again whether it's around the dinner table with your relatives or with your your boyfriend or what have you I think it's actually quite difficult to make a principled argument for the modern position it puts the onus on us as to why we don't justify law-breaking again whether that's because we want to win but we want to win our way I don't want veganism to become a terrorist organization or if it's because we actually do believe the laws are just again there's a lot of lazy thinking within vegan philosophy vegan politics one of the most popular arguments popularized by Kerry Franchione a etc setter is that the fundamental injustice here is property that owning animals as property is evil and we oppose that therefore therefore therefore therefore right then we get a bunch of a bunch of imputed assumptions following after this idea that that property ownership is a problem now that puts me in a difficult position if I want to say no I actually do believe in property laws I actually believe they're just and not unjust and I don't want to challenge it that way I don't want to I don't want to push you that way at all now I've had relatively sophisticated lengthy videos talking about that but in direct contradiction to Gary fancy on his position I've pointed out that what he says about the nature of property in modern Western society is just not true there are special classes of property such as owning an historical building historically significant architecture owning a work of art the way museums and handle works of art they do own them they are property they are bought and sold they can be exchanged and loan between museums but there are all kinds of legal restrictions on this if you talk to anyone who's lived in Europe even some parts the United States they may own a building as their property but they don't have the right to repaint it without going to the government's get permission they have to get a permit saying it's okay to make this window larger or while making the window enlarging the window is that gonna harm the historic here they're building we actually have all kinds of classes of property that are very very well protected and I don't I just do not agree that abolishing the category of property or saying that animals are not property is the way out of this puzzle I don't think that's the way to abolish factory farms or greatly diminish the significance of factory farming he really wants it either because a lot many of them probably have pets and would they want people to be able to go onto their property and take their pride there you know they're not really anybody's property then you know anybody can take your dog or cat somebody's backyard well they're there they're phony solution is to just talk about legal personhood that once animals have equal rights which I don't believe it I'm a vegan I don't believe in equal rights for animals I don't i actually again it's not like a compromise of enforced into when I read direct action ever was 40 year plan their manifesto their set of principles for the future I say oh no I actually oppose almost every single point in that plant I oppose the use of direct action I oppose open rescue I oppose the law breaking methods of old cetera et cetera uh but I also oppose this idea that every animal has a soul and that link to that soul are legal rights and that they have the right to live their plan is for when they shut down a you know a factory farm that taxpayers dollars should pay for each and every one of those cows to be put in the Farm Sanctuary and live out it stays in in some kind of imaginary happiness now again among I follow that to you imagine cows are happy unfactored burden before a Farm Sanctuary either way I mean I I really think that's that's a very problematic set of set of assumptions too and I've had videos addressed to that also so there are many many different delusions of misconceptions here and all right but I mean in principle what's wrong with open rescue and the the open rescue mentality the set of assumptions about justice and political intervention and activism and action that get attached to to open rescue I grew up reading Batman I grew up yeah and mostly the comic book of Batman but it's it's true of many comic books and many movies and many TV shows there's a whole cultural thing about this and you know one of the bedrock assumptions about Batman is that he solves problems with his fists he solves problems by breaking through people's windows kicking down the doors punching people in the face and normally when Batman bursts through the broken window or bursts through the door he knows who's good news evil he knows who he's rescuing he's what I mean and uh I because of the life I lived politically in terms of humanitarian war I have really had to think through the implications of this even when I was in Canada it's kind of another story I've had to see the think think through the implications of this mentality again and again one of the most striking and extreme examples being Cambodia Thailand and Laos and the various do-gooders the various charities often Christian charities that try to rescue prostitutes and a lot of these people really had the the Batman mentality they assumed they would show up and there's an evil pimp holding a prostitute as the as his captive and all they had to do was rescue these prostitutes in this situation and that they would be totally justified you know and of course the police are assumed to be evil which also built into the Batman comic books is that you know the the corruption and inefficiency of the police which justifies Batman's violence as vigilantism and so on that's somehow you know there is no legal way to address these problems and you know in the real world in Cambodia and Laos you may show up you may kick down the door and the pimp and the prostitute have a child together very very common scenario where the prostitute has a kid with her pimp they're boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife and the kid is growing up on the farm and the pimp of the prostitute living in the city that would be with an older prostitute obviously when you talk about young prostitutes who just were a lot of the kind of salacious attention of foreigners is directed you know very often they're young women who made who exactly made the decision to run away from to reject the farm they grew up on and when you try to rescue them by forcing them to go back to the to the family farm but they'll tell you to your face you know they'll try to escape again as soon as possible that's not the life they want they've made this decision and so on and even I mean this is a really dark but I've done formal research on this this is part of my own humanitarian work and formal research I did including and I was working as an editor for a non fiction academic publisher I did read real studies of this and I talked to people in the humanitarian history doing this work hands-on you can have situations where the humanitarian agency rescues a young person who was sold into prostitution generally talking with a teenager delivers them back to the family that sold them into prostitution and then after they leave the family sells them into prostitution again it repeats the cycle so that is a case where you can classify it as human trafficking although again sometimes it's just barely you don't know to what extent there's the exclusion you know the human reality of prostitution is really murky really complex Minea comic books don't address it it's not suitable for a patrol Drance entertainments bad treatment somehow just barely children's entertainment despite the you know the the nature of servant matter matter dealt with here um you know the idea that there is injustice out in this world and just in just in identifying as injustice just in saying this is an injustice you therefore know what your role is it therefore justifies your violence your transgressing legal and political norms and the you know the the solution is self-evident this is an injustice therefore the opposite is justice therefore by any means necessary you know I think this is really bad in terms of the process and the product in terms of the outcomes in terms of what it means for veganism and look I say this now even if it's a non sequitur if I were an employee of the FBI I would be proud to enforce the law in this case I don't want veganism to become a kind of semi terrorist movement I don't think this is legitimate activism it's not because of some compromise have been forced into if I were an employee the FBI like the real me I was vegan I'm a vegan activist with a vegan YouTube channel but I had a job working with the FBI I would look at this situation with direct action everywhere and say yeah damn right and for throw the book at them enforce the law this is not what vegan activism is supposed to be this is not the future of the movement this is not the way forward and I don't I don't believe in or sympathize with or support this whatsoever so I mean that that really is my position on this now again I mean like if someone asks you what is the solution to prostitution the mentality in looking at you know it's going to be a multitude of policy changes and and and difficult complex questions but there's no simple sense in which you can say well prostitution is an injustice or you know the pimps exploiting the prostitutes is justice therefore let's just send out you know the the stormtroopers let's just send out men in uniforms with guns to kick down a bunch of doors and break in a bunch of windows and violently you know you know separate pin from prostitute and try to shut this down and that's been tried all over the world that's been done all over the world of course in cases where the majority of people opposed prostitution we're in a situation where the vast majority people support the pork industry ninety eight percent of people we're in a situation where the vast majority people do not share their fundamental ethical assumptions they don't perceive this as an injustice they perceive what the vegans are doing as an injustice which changes things perception matters and I mean it's interesting with your discussion with your boyfriend you were talking about the Gary Yourofsky example Gary Yourofsky has stole his criminal record he still is on paper or a terrorist he said chaos is an international terrorist I believe in terms of his criminal record because he went to Canada and he tried to liberate all of the mink within a mink farm at least that's more morally coherent than doing what direct action everywhere does because you know what direct action just did they went into a farm and they only chose to piglets then right right word particularly particularly cute and I think the point was they were they felt they were arresting them from particularly bad circumstances at the farm to make propaganda out of it right but I mean if you believe in this why didn't they burn down the farm yeah why didn't they open all the cages that's a common slogan why didn't they liberate all the pigs why did you just try to get you know why these two pigs what's what special about them pretty obvious that it's for money you know it's trying to get money for their organization that's using these two piglets you know they're cute you can watch their progress from of course when they first rescued them they were good on the verge of death I think you know like updating people on their progress right right it's gonna get sympathy it's gonna get attention and yeah yeah in a way that's kind of also taking advantage of their lives sure their own benefit you know like of course in a totally different way it's not like DX is going to slaughter the animals and make you you know make money off of their their flesh but they're making money off of them in a different way yeah and I don't think they think about it in that way at all I think they think about it as justice great yeah and they show up with a film crew you know they are vigilantes with a film crew you know and that is very different they could have shown up with the the guys holding the camera and all the film crew stuff they could have instead that bull cutters and then freeing as many pigs as possible or burning down the farm they could have been I don't support I hear that either but there's this very strange hypocritical you know fence they're sitting on or fineline they're walking and you know I mean that's even built into this the term open rescue why does it say open their point is that it's over it's not covert they're not wearing the mask they're not doing this in a clandestine manner that they're trying and in their forty year plan they claim that in the future they want to see presidential candidates being asked at Q&A sessions by the media what's your position on rescue I think you know they kind of drank the kool-aid they don't realize that - 99.9 percent of humanity including me this is just laughable I'm you know if there's a way forward for veganism I don't think it can possibly be breaking into people's you know private property breaking into these estates and stealing their hens and pigs and you know stealing their their cows it doesn't it does not make sense to me I don't think that's a that's a question that any presidential candidate is ever gonna have trouble answering you know now look you know there are a lot of differences between the black civil rights movement and the the vegan movement I could we could talk for hours about this and the similarities are few the differences are humans versus I mean right that's the fundamental difference there but there are many look you know did you ever hear so they we're talking with civil rights struggle here not the abolition of slavery but the later struggle to get black people civil rights do you think you could get civil rights for black people through a consumer boycott do you think that's an effective method to promote black rights in America or in South Africa by only purchasing products that are made it's completely surreal its comfort there's no way you can compare these right now do you think you can promote veganism through consumer boycott through refusing to buy meat dairy and eggs do you think you can promote black civil rights through opening a new restaurant there's really no comparison it's so radically wildly different how about through health advocacy how about the role of PCRM and vegan gains health diet heart attacks you know atherosclerosis diabetes there is really no comparison now you know and again it's completely false it's really a false intentionally misleading the interpretation history to suggest that the civil rights struggle had two sides and either you are on the right side of history or you want the wrong side of history people who were alive during that era had a lot of really difficult discussions around the dinner table if you had a black family maybe one of the sons supports the Black Panthers and one supports some kind of Democratic moderate position and you know the other huge factor here is Christianity how can you ignore the fact that dr. Martin Luther King jr. was a Christian Reverend the role of explicitly Christian gospel musicians and folk musicians going from church to church from town to town appointed so before there was a huge crucial role for the black colleges segregation in the United States it deprived black people of educational opportunities but also created a completely parallel set of institutions where young black people were getting educated black high schools black ologists says an incredibly dynamic situation for political organization you could have a folk band or gospel crew Singh going from black high school to black high school from black college to black college from black church to black church do vegans have anything like that is there any in comparison to how we can organize and stimulate activism I can't go from vegan high school to vegan high school in the United States there's one there's one high school in the whole world maybe there are two or three I've never heard of any others heard of the one in the United States it only has 269 students it's a tiny Hook school 200 students all the way from kindergarten to the end of high school it's it's you know K to 12 school so it's couple dozen students per grade or something you know there is no such thing as a vegan kosher vegan University and there are a million other reasons why this is not comparable now if you asked me in a very broad sense look eyes'll are there some circumstances you know we have this saying in English you don't need the bullet if you've got the ballot if you ask me look guys well are there some circumstances in which human beings can't use Democratic methods of Milad being which they have to take up the gun and run away to the the caves and the hills or whatever you know say the general well we talked about it so long ago world war ii you know the only you know it's it's very sad and moving me to think about what if I was in France during World War two what if I was in Poland during World War two yes there are services there is no way to democratically Lobby the Nazis the way to oppose the Nazis and the social in historical context of World War two it's very sad I think I would have had no choice but to get a gun and take to the hills and there I don't even think there would have been a resistance group for me to join you don't I mean I might have been more or less with a gang of bandits resisting the Nazis which there was plenty of plenty of unorganized resistance that way people who didn't want to join the Communists or didn't want to work for the British British intelligence but who couldn't compromise who are in a situation of resist or die there are historical circumstances like that we ain't enough we are not in them as vegans organizing vegan activism we are not in a situation like that and you even have contrast them in terms of open rescue if you want to do this type of research if you believe that film footage inside factory farms is worth getting there are ways to get it legally undercover journalists do it completely league there are drones you know these flying cameras there people who are completely legally using drones to get footage of what goes on on farms and they know exactly the legal lines involved and of course as you know the whole pig save movement cow save movement where you're filming the animals before they go into to the factory and even the exterior of the factory we already got plenty of footage like they'll be real I don't think we're really gonna discover anything new to get a new footage but there are so many examples of completely legal completely effective ways even to get inside our footage you know you can even go to the trade shows you know there are um there are trade shows for the meat industry where they show you and demonstrate the slaughterhouse machinery because they're selling it you can get the FC I've done this you can google and get the UM the manuals the owner's manuals from the machinery used to execute these animals these are products bought and sold and they have photographs and diagrams and it's a little bit psychologically disturbing everything the milking machines the the execution machines etcetera etcetera you know so I mean even with something that specific I don't see a justification for for open rescue I mean if you actually want to adopt these animals there are a million legal ways to do that we're not running out of animals to rescue legally to the point where we have to do this illegally so on its own and so forth now you know right now we live in the People's Republic of China a country that basically has zero freedom of speech zero right to public protests you're all right to it's organized politically okay in in my former statement we don't need violence of course I'm primarily talking about Canada the United States Western Europe countries that have enormous money but even here in China if I were talking to aspiring vegan activists in fields for which I do you think I'd recommend anything like this do you think I'd recommend that people spend the rest of their lives in prison there's so much you can do positively in veganism that doesn't break any laws that doesn't put anyone in prison that doesn't destroy anyone's property doesn't put anyone's lives in danger there's so much you can do and yes that partly is because it's an effective consumer boycott movement we can create new products we can encourage people to refuse the virus it partly is because we have this you know amazing array of basically cultural methods of advocating for veganism as a diet as a lifestyle as an ethical consideration ethics ecology you know human health there are so many headings under which we can effectively advocate for this cause even in communist China in 2017 that it seems inconceivable to me that someone would recommend resorting to direct action everywhere methods either in terms of disruption or in terms of open rescue so that that sincerely is you know my position and if you want to say to me that you believe that wasn't the case in the historical struggle to emancipate slaves or the historical struggle against the Nazis in World War two or some other extreme example you know you may have a point but it is there is just no easy dotted line to leap from that example to the situation we're in now as yet I think it ultimately has to do with the idea of personhood for animals I don't believe the idea of personhood for animals I don't believe they should be as it is right now like pigs or animals that are in factories we they rely on humans you know so just freeing them it's it's not a solution and you know uh maybe it's gonna creep you go from one hand one human hand to another human hand from if you go from a factory farm to an animal sanctuary it's it's not a solution and it's not the future of the vegan movement I don't I don't believe in it and well is bleak on the emotional level a lot of people want to believe in mythology and I think they're looking for a new a new myth and then veganism and new new heroes that like the heroism this is also part of the Batman mentality you know I think it's very disturbing for people to have that taken away from them to say no this isn't heroic this is kind of counterproductive and immature and stupid but again you know if you watch my channel you for these other examples you know what what's what's the future of mothers against drunk driving you know what's the future of the anti-smoking movement how what was the success of the seatbelt movement these are all examples of really successful civil society movements that didn't have to put people in prison and didn't have to use guns you know I mean yes you choose an example the favors your cause if you think the black civil rights struggle just vindicates breaking the law I'm okay you know black civil rights of it vindicates folk singers going from campus to campus if vindicates peaceful marches as a method of public protest that stuff were debating here we're not debating the use of folk music we're not debating the use of peaceful protests on a campus or at the lawn in front of City Hall all those things were part of the civil rights movement to amiyo and lobbying governments the you know n-double-a-cp you know they get to the acronym wrong and gnash sorry advancement of african-american okay sorry i thought it best to the epidemic okay anyway you know this this huge range of actions big and small that militated for that you know that kind of cultural and and ultimately legal change sure a meal you can you can choose to learn different lessons from that example and you can also choose different examples that either you know favor one case or favor another but there there are many things that are bad and wrong and misleading about this this open rescue paradigm and i mean maybe one of them is exactly that it locks people into you know a hero versus villain mentality for what's actually a very very murky situation and I can't even say it's not a situation I feel hopeless about at all there's so much hope for veganism there's such a clear and positive way forward it's just that this isn't it it's not going to be rescuing two pigs here in two ends there it's gonna be millions of people standing up and saying hey I'm gonna do that I'm gonna do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do right we are at