Matters of principle: "Innocent until proven guilty".

hey what's up i'm making this video to
address the situation that is very serious today in reference to a particular controversy but I like to make my videos in a way that will still be meaningful and we're talking about five years from now 10 years from now someone watch this video who has no comprehension of the particular controversy that surrounded me at the time I recorded the video I also make my videos and awareness that my own daughter may see them one day maybe 10 years from now maybe more and all of my videos although they address a topic they also do tell you about me that's partly just because that's what I want to watch on youtube myself that's partly because I like to keep it real I think keeping it real is most of the valley of what you get out of youtube because otherwise you can be watching up you watching a world-class move you can watch your movie with a multi-million dollar budget this is something different I'm not trying to compete with that and also because ultimately this is my channel this is about me this is about my life it's not just about veganism it's not just about any one thing and I hope that also disarms people and helps to relax people because one of the questions that you get asked if you try to treat things in a more impersonal way if you try to ask more act more like a news broadcaster like you're someone objective who's not involved personally you get asked who do you think you are and I think in almost all my videos because I include myself in the story I make references to my own experience my own bias mount perspective you get a fair enough sense of who I think I am of what motivates me and why I'm saying these things matter at hand today and I mean today there are accusations against a guy within the vegan community which is not a community there are accusations that a guy is some kind of sexual predator some kind of alleged rapist and as is often the case with rumors that start in the internet a lot of anonymous and vague claims emails from uncertain sources and this is already resulted in threats of violence against the guy I don't know the guy I've I've never spoken him I've no contact with him I've never even seen a YouTube video for him to me he's a complete unknown but people are threatening to beat him up people are encouraging other people to confront him and beat him up so sort of had judge jury and executioner unfold very rapidly and now in the past on this channel in reference to a very different sex scandal very different set of allegations that included allegations of rape against a guy named Joe best a vegan in Chiang Mai in that context I talked a lot about tolerance and tolerance being an underrated virtue and you know saying things like look you may not like Joe best you may not like the way he lives his life but you know it's actually meaningful and important to tolerate him even if you're going to recognize and address what he's done wrong because he did do some things wrong I think at the end of that scandal nobody was seriously accusing him of rape anymore but he had behaved in a way that was dishonorable he had brought a lot of sort of hatred on himself and there was a lot simply put there was a lot to apologize for at the end of that scandal even though nobody was talking about going the police and making rape accusations and nobody was threatened to beat him up nobody was was threatening violence against the guy um so tolerance is one thing and the principle of innocent until proven guilty is another really what we're talking about here is the principle of skepticism the word skepticism is so misused in the 21st century in 2016 that I now don't use it at all uh I'll just pause to note really briefly that that's been saddening for me person I've read the ancient skeptic philosophy guys like sex does empiric us you know ancient Greek and Roman sources on what skepticism was I know the meaning and importance of skepticism in terms of the the history of the Western world I would love it if I lived in a place where I could use the word skepticism in a meaningful sense and I can't because it's just one of those words that's been kind of dragged through the mud and doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean anymore um but skepticism in a deep sense has to apply to these cases it has to be something you really live your life by somebody on the internet said that somebody else is a rapist what do you do with that information where do you go from there a lot of people grow up reading comic books like Batman and Superman and whatever none of those guys really spend a lot of time worrying about the burden of proof worrying about innocent till proven guilty you know most the time spider-man he already knows who the bad guy has because the bad guy is wearing a costume then identifies him as a bad guy spider-man is not concerned about whether or not dr. octopus is guilty or innocent you know and that type of fiction um you know it's not true of all but I would say it's even true of most kind of murder mysteries so much in our culture begins with the presumption of guilt and then the conflict unfolds and there may be questions of justice or righteousness violence and non-violence but they all take place after that presumption of guilt I remember I spoke to a lawyer a young lawyer a young female lawyer who was interested in being my girlfriend as it happens probably why she had that conversation um a lawyer who was involved in the human rights trials in Cambodia so some of the leaders people who had committed atrocities during the period of communism in Cambodia called the Khmer Rouge period were on trial that time and she was you know she was a minor part of those those legal proceedings and I remember with very honest conversation she was pointing out the differences between those trials and kind of European Standard and she pointed that every single one of them began with the presumption of guilt Co procedurally what they were doing started with so you know you were guilty of massacres and torture and killing people uh now what do we do about it haha and now you know that may that may seem very reasonable in some ways especially in Cambodia especially with you know mass murder crimes against humanity but even in that extreme situation it's worth thinking about how to skepticism apply how does the presumption of innocence apply procedurally what do we do in these situations and what is the meaning of moral responsibility if you take away the presumption of innocence again I've studied a lot of political history things to generate into a witch hunt fast things to generate into murder and mass murder a lot more quickly than you want to think they do generally I mean in the history of communism you often start off with small groups of people who started out as you know labor organizers trying to get higher wages talking about helping the poor talking about human equality and various sort of pious and positive aspects of communist ideology and overnight they're they're kicking down the doors of their neighbors hunting people down and murdering them for being bourgeois for being class enemies um I wish that was an exaggeration I've studied some some really dark chapters of the world's history that really reflect on aspects of human nature that you do not see in the movies that Batman did not teach you about and you know on the other hand as I say our Western culture today tends to take for granted some of these virtues like tolerance skepticism presuming in a sense until guilty I was just thinking about this you don't want my way home from class at university today and I by the way I'm really busy right now I've got three stacks of books you don't see one of the stacks of book here i'm going to write three essays in three days basically then i've got final exams and I've got some other real challenges on the under near horizon but on my way home from universe today I was thinking about this and I was thinking about different anecdotes my own life I could tell in relation to this thing of this guy being accused of some kind of sexual transgression and now people threatening to beat him up you know based on basically internet rumors and you know that the realest story I can tell and this is a story I would want my daughter to hear one day I don't know I don't know when she would be old enough to hear it because this is this is definitely you know rated R but I can remember I was in a situation where a young woman told me her story of how she was a victim of rape repeated rape uh she was a victim of rape and beating and in her case she had gone to the police she had gone to the authorities so again this is often with these rumors on the internet one of the questions as well if your story is true we assume it's true why didn't you pursue some kind of legal action so in this young woman's case she had but the man who had committed these crimes against her allegedly um you know the rapist he was in a position of real power politically and he was able to suffocate the legal proceedings against him and over years not right at that time but I learned a fair bit about that and again in a real sense one of the reasons i'm using this in a real sense till this day i don't know to what extent he was guilty or innocent it's possible that he was innocent and he still used these politically corrupt measures to defend himself it doesn't prove he's guilty you know you can be innocent and still be a corrupt political figure you know you're guilty of other things but the the rape charges could be false or could be exaggerated could be a mix of the false the true but hey I was in a situation that really affected me in a big way where this young woman talked to me for several hours about what had happened to her and I don't know if I learned right away but I learned piece by piece about her legal troubles and whole context surrounding the sort of question of crime and punishment and when I heard it all and I put the pieces together I I really wondered to myself if I should kill this guy um not out of any kind of rage I'm not a violent character or whatever but I mean this was so terrible and so you know morally upsetting and she had gone to the courts seeking you know redress and that had been completely denied to her and I knew that I was a person in a position she had told me but I wasn't connected the case in any way so it wasn't likely to be a suspect and again I I grew up reading Batman and that kind of thing everyone else and I was really thinking through you know you don't mention it to anybody you don't tell her you definitely you know don't tell the victim but maybe this is a situation where i should step in and quietly end this so again some people might do that lightly or think about that lately but that was a real moral burden for me that was a real question of what is the right thing to do in these exact circumstances and at that time I did not take it seriously no one had ever talked to me about it I did not think about the concept of innocent until proven guilty in the way I've just been describing it's just it's just not something I really took seriously and in this case you know either this guy had subverted the normal course of the law the normal procedures of innocent till proven guilty so sort of the last thing on my mind but as I talked to that young woman more and especially when I talked to her in a casual circumstance like bumped into her at a social event it became clear to me and this is not blaming the victim at all and again I'm presuming she is a victim presuming her story to be true it became clear to me just how unreliable she was as a witness it became clear to me that even though I wanted to trust her in many ways she was not trustworthy and I could not trust her she would contradict things she said she would have very strange gaps in her memory like something she told me two weeks before and so on um she was and again this may have been part of why she she was a victim novel envision ball she oh she obviously was a person who had cycle psychological problems now again there's cause and effect there there's the the so-called chicken and egg problem that's a misuse term but um obviously you can ask what was she psychologically disturbed because she was a victim or was she someone who had these psychological problems and was victim was sort of more targeted and more susceptible to be a victim for that reason and you know I mean it's probably both because I over the years I got to know her I later later in life she and I got to know each other very well again and you know probably she would have had a lot of her psychological problems anyway but this experience made them worse uh but I had to recognize that almost nothing she was telling me was reliable and I had no independent source information to verify anything and she was someone who lied to me about quite a few things pathologically you know what I say I'm going to be really real on this okay let's let's be a hundred percent honest I also had an experience with her uh where we were alone she was a very good-looking woman extremely attractive and she did play sports so she was quite strong I had an experience there where she assaulted me she attempted to rape me and at the time i mean the the only reason she did not have sex with me was that I physically you know restrain tried to hold her to wrists and say you know what are you doing stop this etc and she didn't stop she tried again and at the time I mean I was really aware many people who have been victims whether they're victims of childhood assault or rape would have you a lot of them will act out some of the same behaviors later in another context for various reasons now but anyone who's done kind of psychology 101 um like I wasn't mad at her for this this incident where she she assaulted me I mean really I would just say I mean she was pretty strong and she was like literally like wrestling me down to the ground and trying to have sex with me and you know kissing my neck while she was doing it it was you know that extreme um but it I didn't feel angry about it but it really showed me this is someone you know to what extent could I trust anything she tells me without some kind of outside verification and years later I mean I remember by coincidence I had a really short conversation with her mother a few little things attended to confirm me I think in broad outline a lot of what she was saying was true she probably was lying about particular details and maybe maybe not lying intentionally I mean she was someone who maybe her grip on reality wasn't that strong but I did I did hear some things that I think you know confirmed parts of her story but but she also lied to me about about many things and I told her years later we didn't talk for like five years not worth explaining why and I bumped into her and we had many long conversations than after a gap Sun fighters and once we kind of warm to the friendship began I said to her you know when I first knew you five years ago this had a really big impact on me because I really wondered if I should intervene and if I should if I should murder this guy because you'd already exhausted you know the legal options open to you and this was such an injustice and you know etc and she was shocked at that and she explained to me that she was very glad I didn't that I hadn't and she said that she had to think about it herself whether or not she should murder the guy because in Canada at that time and I don't know if the laws have changed we had a legal precedent that basically any woman who was a victim if she had exhausted legal methods if she had gone to the police and tried to get the authorities intervene and if the authorities failed to help her out then that woman basically could get away with murder very interesting I don't know how many countries in the world have a law or a principle like that on the books candidates is probably one of the very very few and it's also interesting anyway III assume it's a matter of time before the Canadian government changes that law or you know somehow revises sanders practices for that and they may they may have done so already cuz i've been living outside of canada for so many years i may not i may not be up to date on that but anyway she had actually really thought that through and thought through the implications of it and she had decided that even though she was the victim of this terrible thing it was the wrong thing to do and that you know among other things she really thought about what happened her and she did not think the death penalty was an appropriate punishment anyway and she she had really thought it through and it was very very interesting for me to hear that that perspective but the big lesson that I had to take home from that for the rest of my life in a non-trivial way in a profound sense was how skepticism applies to these things these human personal reaction skepticism is not just about the progress of science skepticism is not just about you know gravity and whether the Sun orbits the earth of this sort of thing skepticism impacts you know personal emotionally moving difficult to deal with situations of this kind and that's when it's hardest to be a skeptic in a meaningful sense that's when it's most of a challenge when it requires the most self discipline now look this video shouldn't go on for too long but I mean on another level I have also seen I have seen rumors and malicious lies and accusations spread on the Internet in all kinds of circumstances I remember there was one young woman who I talked to she was vegan there was no reason I knew her and she intentionally lied that I had been the basically hitting on her that I had been trying to start a relationship with her start a love affair with her she intentionally lied on the internet about that and at the time I was married I wasn't looking for any college I was married and I was raising a newborn baby and I remember with that young woman like the very first message I sent to her said oh you know I'm married and my wife is an expert in the same area that you're studying University you should let me put you in touch with her so like right off bad the nature of that email relationship was that I was you know presenting myself as someone who was interested in her academic work who was also vegan and where you know I mentioned I was married there was absolutely zero um sexual component to it I remember when that girl made the accusations my my wife really laughed out loud because uh she that this young woman is not my type my my ex-wife knows what kind of women I'm attracted to and whatever dress them we know each other really well um we're still in the legal process getting divorced as the story but she just laughed out loud at that it was there it was laughable just those circumstances but she also remember because I told I said oh you know there's this younger woman and she's studying something you know similar related to your expertise and university and you know so that was situation where I my involvement was nothing but goodwill but goodwill and boredom it was the other reality at that time you know you don't sleep much when you're taking care of a newborn baby and you have you also have sort of funny periods of free time you know you just put the baby to bed and you're burnt out you're sitting anything so you know I did I spent time you know writing email and I had had a blog back then so you sort of have this combination being exhausted and and you're busy but then you have free time so as you know partly goodwill partly boredom that I ever talk to that person but wow I mean she denounced me in a malicious intentional attack to intentional attempt to blacken my character and make it seem in vague terms that I was a creep or what have you so obviously that's you know and look I mean none of this stuff hurts my feelings nopee if people call me fat on the internet it doesn't hurt my feelings but I would say this that's a case where someone was lying intentionally so in some ways it's the simplest sort of case anyone watching this video if you ask yourself what if your ex girlfriend or ex boyfriend put a testimonial here on YouTube put a video on the internet in which they did not lie in which every single thing they said was true but just stated out of context and in the most unflattering way possible anyone can be made to sound like a criminal okay without even lying and I don't care even if you're 16 years old or something you know if you have a situation where like you'd be anything would be that you know I remember this have no friend of mine where you know a guy was weeping and knocking on her shoes crying in the hallway and knocking on her door to get into her apartment well how do you describe that how do you present that you can make it sound like he was trying to break into your house you can make it sound like you know and and if you if you call the cops what are you going to tell the cops and you know uh the human heart encompasses so many strange situations but I mean if your honest self if you stop and just think about your own ex girlfriends or ex-boyfriends there are situations you've been in where you had nothing but good intentions and where maybe even there was no conflict but where if that person came on the internet today without even lying just stating things out of context in an unflattering way they can make you sound like a criminal they can make you sound like a sex criminal they can make you sound like a threat to the public and that is why in every country and in every culture we need a robust system of checks and balances we need to have the principle of being innocent until proven guilty not just in a court of law not just in Parliament but in our own heads and our own hearts when we deal with people face to face in this world if you're going to live in Thailand you're going to be surrounded by a lot of people who are there as sex tourists if you're going to live anywhere in Southeast Asia you're gonna meet and talk to people who are literally war criminals people who have blood on their hands whether it's from the border between Thailand and Cambodia or the border between Thailand and Myanmar don't kid yourselves a lot of you guys have your heads buried in the sand you'll meet people who have a background as stone cold killers okay of all ethnic groups of all races if you have your eyes open your ears open its life goes on you'll meet people who have committed shall we say war crimes are the most brutal to kind and one of the most surprising things for you to learn as you develop the maturity and detachment and his life goes on is that many of those people after the war is over go on to become completely normal productive members of society and that in its way can be more haunting and more disturbing than any of the silly mythology we grow up with and we choose to believe in that we learn in an unexamined away from religion literature comic books Batman etc