Political Decisions with Personal Consequences: Languages, Nationalism & Democracy.

ladies and gentlemen it is hot enough
i consider doing this live stream shirtless i do not know if my youtube channel would be more or less censored if i started doing shirtless live streams i also do not know i do not know if this would increase or increase my audience or change the composition of my audience with that let's change how seriously my uh my political views are taken i have two really meaningful emails from supporters um long time viewers the channel people who support me on patreon et cetera that i wanted to read out and respond to here and they get at questions that i've tried to summarize in the incredibly long title that this live stream has i assume i'm not going to change that title it's you know there are actually guidelines youtube gives you how to have a shorter more concise title which i'm violating both in principle and practice here but any case you know there are questions about politics that have much greater personal consequences for us and they have you know outcomes in terms of changing society as a whole but we nevertheless make those decisions because we care about those broader long-term social goals so i mean to give an example if i decide that i'm canadian that i'm part of the canadian problem canadian you know history of genocide and what have you and that it's important for me to learn the kree language or the ojibwe language or the denial language if i commit myself to doing that over many years and many hundreds of hours of hard work for many years it's not it's not like getting a tattoo getting a tattoo is easy getting a tattoo for the sake of nationalism hanging a flag on your wall that's easy but you know if you're actually going to make the commitment to learn a language like korea or ojibwe or you know if you're in the united states could be nabo if you make the commitment to do that obviously that's going to have enormous transformative effects for you personally what are the transformative effects like for your side is your society as a whole it may be zero or next to zero but this question i ask many times in many different political and ethical uh contexts on my channel is if not you then who you know if you aren't gonna take it on yourself for these political reasons to learn kree to learn ojibwe one of these languages who who is who is better qualified who's better suited to do that and we live in a world where people do learn klingon klingon is a fictional language from the star trek tv shows and movies people learn klingon just so they can go to a star trek convention people were learning the languages from the game of thrones tv show i don't know if now that would be diverse no do they do those people now feel crestfallen and like they've ruined years of their lives like this useless language because the last several years of the game of thrones tv show disappointed everyone see that there are people who learn languages for relatively silly reasons there are people who learn a language just for the sake of tourism they like going to italy on vacation and they start learning italian this sort of thing so there are examples of people who make that commitment and put in the hard work um without any particular political ambition of mine but we're talking here about both positive political ambitions and what i think we could frankly call negative political motivations such as guilt such as feeling beholden to learn this language you know you feel guilty because of your part in the genocide or you feel you don't you don't want to be on that side of history there is certainly a sense in which you may be motivated to do this not out of a positive sense of making the world a better place but of a negative sense of not wanting to make the world the worst place not wanting to be part of uh uh you know something something terrible so we have two questions that i'm gonna respond to and the first comes from a viewer in ireland i have to say i was anticipating this i wasn't expecting this particular viewer to write in but i knew i'd hear back from the irish i knew i had quite a few uh longtime irish viewers i knew somebody would take the time to either challenge me or reflect further on what i what it said in the video so this guy i'm going to use his name he was a youtuber he on youtube he used the name doorny as far as i know his youtube channel has either been deleted or he or it's so obscure i couldn't find it searching around anymore but he's uh he's not making youtube videos anymore in any case anyway a message from dorney in ireland who's watched my videos from any of you and who have heard who i've heard from you know have chatted every so often over the years so he writes in and says hey isil i'm currently catching up on your live streams the times i broadcast that are not convenient for him in ireland maybe even more inconvenient for people in new zealand but i got to do what i got to do um he says your live stream on the sovereignty of indigenous peoples and languages caught me big time particularly when you mentioned ireland so i had to drop in the statement or rhetorical question quote what's the point in sovereignty if the irish people continue to speak english question mark rings true it shocked me for a few seconds but then i settled into a kind of resignation so just pause here um if you guys haven't seen that earlier video which is completely understandable i i don't expect you have memorized my corpus of several thousand videos and many of these videos are more than an hour long so let's just uh you know recap basically you know i identify myself as an historical nihilist so nihilism has many meanings my particular school or philosophy is historical nihilism which has a great deal to do with learning from history and basically you learn what not to believe in from the study of history you learned that there is nothing to be believed in from the study of history and in the study of history of course some people believe in god some people believe in god's plural some people believe in ideologies like communism but they also believe in abstract concepts like sovereignty and those are problematic in a different way like part of the problem with believing in god is that people cut their penis off have you heard of circumcision i know people do all kinds of unbelievably irrational things because they believe in this word god which is nothing more than a word um sovereignty is nothing more than a word people kill each other over this word you know even if it may be extraordinary or unusual you know this has been a tremendously powerful concept in shaping you know human action but beyond that beyond those kinds of extremes of behavior linked to the the word and the concept and the belief you know um people tend to live their lives without questioning without reflecting on what their assumptions are bundled up in this world so i made a video really challenging the assumptions about sovereignty what do i mean by an assumption many people assume that the problem our indigenous people have here is a lack of sovereignty and that the solution to their problems will be sovereignty or more sovereignty right now there are many different ways in which i think that's untrue and misleading and people need to stop and reflect on sovereignty the part of the video he's alluded to here is where i challenged the irish said well what is your nationalism for what is the point of your nationalism what are you pursuing you know looking at sovereignty not as an end in itself not as an unassailable uh benefit to everyone like as a word or concept that's just beneficial to everyone just because of the sound of the word or something but questioning sovereignty looking at it as a means to an end if what our indigenous people here in canada need is access to university education world-class excellent university education and by the way also access to drinking water and sewage systems world-class excellent drinking water and sewage and these are not things you can take for granted for native people well separating them from canada granting them sovereignty and then they won't have access to canadian universities or you know the canadian taxpayers ability to provide them with sewage treatment plants and you know running water and so on actually you could be locking them into kind of dead-ended poverty in a microstate they would have sovereignty they wouldn't have universities they wouldn't have dreamed well they wouldn't have a lot of the benefits that are now taken for granted under the canadian government now it was a long video it wasn't a simplistic dismissal of sovereignty but in turning to a country like ireland which is a very different position in ireland they have world-class universities they have in general world-class social safety net as people like to say they have world-class government services for the poor and what have you they have running water i've been to ireland the highways were still under construction was there i was there many many years ago but actually there were still some science at that time of how new the affluence of ireland was there were some of the basic first world assumptions about life were still being built around that time they were being built rapidly today ireland is more wealthy per capita than england something the england are not the pardon me something the english are not comfortable talking about by the way but ireland has become an affluent and successful place okay but nevertheless sovereignty is a means to an end and if the if the purpose of sovereignty if the purpose of your nationalism is just racism i can't sympathize with it i can't uh uh can't support it anyway so i'll pause show it to everyone in the audience i am happy i'm doing this as a live stream rather than pre-recorded video oh gee my camera angle is not great okay i'm trying to improve that um i'm happy to chat with you guys uh so i'm obviously a very clear sense of what doesn't want to discuss in today's video but i i can pause if you guys want to ask me a question you want to contribute to discussion if you want to hit thumbs up it'll help more people discover the live stream while we're while we're going but come on if you if you guys think i'm motivated by money it's it's really not about the money um total digression plant-based powered says vegan gains is on antidepressants and they are working so you have a typo you misspelled there but um i am very surprised to hear that richard is taking antidepressants if that's true obviously i haven't fact checked this this is just a claim from the audience as you guys know many years ago richard and i were friends for a couple of years so i have to say i am shocked to hear that he's taking antidepressants if it's untrue it's untrue it's just one person in the audience told me this richard had a lot of problems psychological problems physical problems intellectual problems moral problems he's a troubled soul but his experience with hospitals i thought had given him a bit of a scientific skeptical attitude towards medical treatment of various kinds you know he's just had surgeries and treatments and obviously he was someone who was very skeptical about the use of um steroids and performance dancing drugs so yes that's that is shocking for me to hear that he's now joined the the antidepressant camp if you guys haven't seen it melissa made a meaningful set of reflections that include antidepressants i'm just going to provide the link because it's again it's a long title we're in the long title club now um the the first prototype is permanent sedation uh permanent sedation drugs alcohol and antidepressants it's great video but you know i think i think some people so just i just posted the link to that that's melissa's video i think some people might not realize that that video does really deal with in a meaningful way uh the culture science and pseudoscience of uh antidepressants also so let's give you guys the title um okay well i'm gonna return to my main topics here a question but how do you feel about vegans owning pets so guys check the playlist section of my channel you may not know that there's a playlist actually but boy have i ever have i ever covered this topic thoroughly uh we have hours and hours of videotaping what the one that melissa's in that's one of my favorites so what that what's that called uh pet ownership and yeah it is captive animals are not companion animals that's it so that's a really great thing but honestly it it's not it's not the only great videos here you go title equals captive animals are not companion animals this is one of i mean at least 30 in-depth substantive discussions of this stuff um knock yourself out all right we return to this uh complex question so i i digress there to talk about what i have been saying lately about sovereignty um i guess i will just argue against my own point briefly this is a very important thing for youtubers to do it's very important thing for people in politics to do is to talk about the extent to which you're wrong or the extent to which the concepts you're trading and analysis you're training in has uh limitations it ceases to be meaningful ceases to be workable seems to be applicable at some point i think the most powerful argument someone could offer against me on on sovereignty and nobody's done this the questions that respond today don't argue against me on this um is to talk about defensive sovereignty and defensive nationalism so you know there are cases where you say well look these people are being driven to extinction or they're being somehow colonized they're on the receiving end of genocide and the way to defend them is to offer them sovereignty or some of this you know there are cases where it's one very large country beating up on a smaller country what have you where you could frankly i mean i think again so this isn't my argument i'm saying it's the most powerful argument against me well there are some small islands close to australia that have sovereignty but they rely on australia for everything including access to hospitals and actually i think it's quite a difficult argument to make to say well these small countries are really better off having their sovereignty than just being a province of australia even wikipedia level reading about those islands but when you talk about defensive sovereignty then you're really making the army say well at least these people are protected against the predations of the terrible australians now another example on an even smaller scale sri lanka is a small country it's surrounded by even smaller countries there are some small islands that sovereignty are independent countries if you see an ocean there and they rely on sri lanka for hospitals they rely on sri lanka for universities and these things and you get into a similar sort of discussion about uh um the defensive justification for sovereignty and sorry again so you can tell this is not i do think there's a meaningful conversation whether i do think someone can argue against my possession how about hong kong house house sovereignty working out for hong kong as opposed to you know the giant of china and indeed um canada why does canada exist you know this this is really getting to the same question as mentioned very briefly why does ireland exist why should canada be a separate country from the united states of america well what canadians have tried to do for more than 100 years is to advance an argument in terms of defensive sovereignty defensive nationalism which is totally incoherent and nonsensical i mean you you would have to believe that the americans are a hoard of barbarians who are going to loot and pillage and rape our wives or something and carry away the diamonds and gold of canada if we allow them to come over a border nobody believes this you know so defensive sovereignty it can become ridiculous uh sure but really briefly you know i remember talking about this in a very sensitive and nuanced way in laos so laos is a small country also known as the lao people's democratic republic just north of cambodia just east of thailand just west of vietnam why should laos be a country instead of becoming a province of thailand or instead of getting into an even grander coalition with say cambodia and myanmar it's it's a sensitive topic but they have to ask themselves that question all the time and there has been i mean until recently the the contention with these other national identities it has been intense enough that there's been a real argument for defensive sovereignty that if the oceans joined one of these other countries they would cease to be lotion they'd lose their language that lose their culture interestingly even members the communist party talked to me about their fear that lotions would lose their distinctive form of buddhism i remember it was a really fascinating conversation a guy who's a communist party commander communist party apparatus he was saying to me really passionately that he was afraid of cambodian buddhism uh assimilating or what would be the word um taking over lotion buddhism lotions losing their form of buddhism to the relative giant of cambodian buddhism now anyway it was interesting in in many ways including that i just i just don't think cambodian buddhism is that charismatic but in any case it was interesting to see that that was really there there was a defensive notion that if lotions want to continue to exist as lotions they have to cling to their sovereignty and their nationalism all right so long but i think necessary digression before um getting further into this email all right so again he just written to me dorney saying that my live stream talking about sovereignty indigenous peoples in their languages impacted him quote unquote big time um he said it rings true for him he felt shocked by it and i agree it is shocking uh it's it's so outside of our normal range of political discourse but after a few seconds it settled into a kind of resignation okay i continue to quoting quote now in ireland we're lucky to a certain extent that we have other forms or practices which preserve our so-called cultural identity which are very much alive and well as we speak so now he names several sports some of which i can't pronounce so he mentions gaelic football and hurling and one another i'm not gonna look up how to pronounce it okay so these are team sports played on a grass field uh et cetera sorry hurling hurling might sound like the hammer toss it's not curling is similar to field hockey in some ways uh similar to a sport we have here in canada called lacrosse so hurling sounds like a very different sport than this it's a team sport guys and a gaelic football i've honestly never googled but i would assume the same all right um he says the downfall of these would be as detrimental to us as a people as the extinction of the irish language period okay so let's just pause on that there's a lot in this email that i i sympathize with okay now the shocking challenging assertion i made is that if irish nationalism is only justified by racism then it has no place in the 21st century like i just don't think racism is a justification for the existence of a sovereign country a nation it's just not good enough racism alone right now of course it's especially observed when you're talking about the racism of the irish against the english or vice versa there was a study this was cited in a formal academic context i don't know if it's true but allegedly 25 of white english people who identify as english when questioned will say that yes they are partly genetically irish they're aware they have a grandparent or something who's irish so obviously that sounds like it was just based on a survey and not actually doing dna research but the irish and the english are in entwined and inextricable ethnic groups you know they don't just look like each other and speak the same language there is racism there is racism against the irish and they're vice versa they're irish people are racist against there is i'm just saying it's not good enough justify the existence of a country now you know if you think about two countries in africa or um the caribbean where you don't have you know a personal stake then likewise it'll probably become very obvious to you that racism alone can't justify these things okay well are you really telling me that a sport like gaelic football or hurling justifies yourself i know it's less odious than racism uh but you know would you be willing to take that seriously there are a lot of people who want to leave china i still i still like china i even kind of love china okay but obviously i sympathize with people who are sick and tired of living in a communist dictatorship and want to leave okay if i said that canada starting tomorrow will accept any chinese person who puts in the time and effort to study the ojibwe language i'll say ojibwe ojibwe by the way is also known as uh anishinabe moen everyone uh so that's one of our largest indigenous languages right now if you go to amazon.com you can get textbooks to help you study it you can get an audio cd so that's one of the few languages where you can readily buy and start saying say okay look if you're chinese and you put in 100 hours of hard work and you've really memorized the vocabulary in this book so that's not being fluent in the language but you can sit and write a test saying that you're at level five or something in ojibwe we will give you canadian citizenship you can permanently immigrate to canada estimate for me how many people from china would take that you know chinese people are willing to work hard to learn english with no certain promise it's just not clear what they're gonna do with the language where they're gonna go but some of them are thinking there's a one percent chance they'll become a canadian citizen or american citizen if you just say openly this is the deal anyone from china who does this work and learns a first nations language up to a certain measured level maybe you have a an exam for them every five years i don't know you get the passport you get to live in canada first off how many people in brazil would go for that if you offered the brazilians we can keep going down the list and by the way obviously brazil is not hell on earth i've been very surprised to meet and hear from brazilians who really felt brazil was a place they had to escape from but some of them do um some of them really feel that's a life and death struggle is to get out of brazil and some people go on vacation there what can i tell you obviously they're not going on vacation and these kind of hopeless uh fellows okay now look you know that would be taking language indigenous language seriously as the criterion and i can now extend this to ireland what if the government of ireland passes a resolution they have a very interesting system for reforming the constitution there which i won't now describe but they have this council and they then have a referendum they say okay starting tomorrow anyone in china who learns the indigenous irish language most people say irish gaelic i just like to call it irish anyone who learns irish not english irish they will be given a passport they will be allowed to live in ireland permanently if you buy the books listen to cds do the work now you're an average citizen thing's going to change there are going to be some chinese people they're going to be some people in heilongjiang and compared to heilongjiang the climate in ireland is beautiful compared to yunnan compared to dil hong not so much there are beautiful parts of china lifted but um there will be people who want to leave heilongjian and you know what it might double the population of ireland let's be real how many million people in china would buy the cds buy the books study for the test and they've got the discipline if you can learn to read and write chinese you can learn any language i mean it's so hard being being literate in chinese they can sit down and crack the books and learn irish gaelic no problems that would be taking language seriously how many million people are you willing to accept from south africa just because they learn to play hurling how many million people are you going to accept from venezuela just because they learn to play gaelic football right so again so dorney there's a lot in this email we're going to read the rest of it there's a lot i sympathize with but i'm challenging you to really take your own words seriously she's going to read that sense again he says quote i know sport isn't to your taste but these were stronghold activities for us during british rule and the great famine when gaelic was being further diminished against our will they keep and continue to keep our quote-unquote identity intact this day merge with the natural usage of gaelic on the way close quote so he says the downfall of these sports would be as detrimental to us as a people as the extinction of the irish language close quote i'm not even saying i disagree with you i think you disagree with you i think you don't really believe that you know i i don't think you believe and look i mean as i say a nation state or a sovereign nation built on the basis of racism is one that in my opinion doesn't deserve to exist in the 21st century it is racism is just not good enough a reason for it to have a country and a sovereign state and a government and pay taxes and all these other things and have your own university system to have your own authority over the water supply and sewage it is it cannot be justified by racism alone it sure as hell can't be justified by playing hurling it can't be justified by team sports there's no way sports and athleticism can justify a nation state it's the opposite you've got it the wrong way around right like why do why do we have the olympics you know it's not do the olympics justify nationalism or does nationalism justify the olympics guys i'm gonna glance again here at the um uh at the at the comments so i have a question uh isil do you plan on boring from the library the book disrobing the aboriginal industry well if you keep following the channel or if you support me on patreon by the way patreon is one dollar the amount of money i make out of this is purely symbolic you have a good idea of what it is i'm reading at any one time and i'm planning to continue doing uh live streams that i call nihilist booktube so i i created that hashtag hashtag nihilistbooktube i continue to keep doing this you'll have a sense of what it is i'm reading i am just now finishing writing my book um no more manifestos and i assume there's going to be a kind of final proofreading process where i'm going to look at all the typos and actually get it physically printed and sent sent a copy on paper and it'll be available as a book um but you know in terms of what my priorities will be this is this is july then we're into august and september no there's really no chance that'll be my my priority in terms of what i'm reading and you know i'm throwing myself i think as you guys will get the sense from even my videos from the flag in the background i'll be throwing myself back into working on chinese in a major way so another great question that i've already answered quote do you view learning languages as meaningful in itself or do you think what you can do once you have learned languages is the potentially meaningful part or both so you know i have a separate youtube channel that just gathers together all of my videos about language learning i think it's just called isil mazzard um so you can get to it by searching for my name plus the channel i will give you that link here you go um you know the the so okay uh my language so all of those videos do exist on my on about sale my most popular youtube channel but they're hard to find because i have so many thousands of videos um you know the short answer is no and uh you know if it were true that learning languages were meaningful in itself we wouldn't even be having this conversation why would it be difficult to motivate irish people to learn the irish language if it were meaningful in itself and so but stuff that stuff that's meaningful in itself people don't need to be told to do they don't need to be coerced into doing they don't need to be given specific objectives to justify doing it um you know so i think that is the short answer i think the whole conversation we're having very much presumes and is predicated upon the fact that this is an enormous amount of work that isn't in some self-evident way uh meaningful itself okay we've got 24 people in the audience now if you can take a moment to hit the thumbs up i always say this but it's the truth if you later change your mind decide there's a bad video you can undo the thumbs up you can also hit thumbs down but it will help more people uh find the video and join the conversation if if we have 27 people with 27 thumbs up it means more people can join the conversation while we're livestreaming otherwise but i profit from this in no way whatsoever all right i mean i used to post on my blog just how little money i was making out of youtube and it stopped being worth doing because i was only making less and less money anyway but anyway obviously this is uh this is really being discussed pro bono i get eight i guess i get enough money to pay my own internet bill every month if you want to if you want to justify it that way from uh from youtube all right so i'm probably i'm just going to say someone or i imagine i'm going to stay somewhere apparently not okay so moon dog comments i've never heard of this person before francis widowson so i'm going to google this name just as i'm reading this comment sounds like an interesting challenge for a discussion here we will get back to ireland and we'll get back to russia also in this video francis widowson so this is a professor in politics okay at mount royal university which is a terrible university but she doesn't mean she's a bad professor okay so frances widowson she got her bachelor's degree and master's degree at university of victoria her phd from york york is a really terrible university particularly in political science in my opinion okay well interesting pedigree and she's taught in a number of universities in canada since if you guys think i'm jealous reading this kind of not only am i constitutionally incapable of feeling jealousy but wow i'm really glad i got to live the life i did and not this this woman's life okay so this woman is the is the author of the aforementioned book disrupting the uh the aboriginal industry um okay so francis with us and so this is a quote from moon dog quote francis witherson thinks encouraging native selling their language is harmful to them because it takes time away from learning something that could actually make them marketable like st sounds like an idiot i'm sorry i don't i don't know the i don't know the woman or work but that really sounds like a shockingly stupid argument to me anyway um um you know uh i would like to see her perspective on video games [Laughter] what's your perspective on skiing what's your perspective on watching hockey on television and walking watching baseball on television you know uh there's a lot of things that take take take time away from you in life but i do not think that line of reasoning is is viable here um okay mario donkey is saying all right i'm gonna return to my main promise here in just a moment but i'm interested in some things you guys are saying quote learning a language in itself is no harm so i completely disagree i'm just quoting him i completely disagree i continue quote however it is dedicating you to something that may be less useful than learning to play an instrument a musical instrument for example so rich many possible disagreements could be spun out of this concept uh melissa uploaded a video to my own channel quite recently talking about really the harm that's done by learning musical instruments and the misconceptions about and kind of glorification of musical education and i agree with her on that this thing we've talked about from time to time over the years in this relationship i don't know if i can find the video do you know what the title of that was music there we go music education is not really education title that's great it's right to the point so we're pretty harsh critics of music education around here myself and my lovely assistant who's sitting uh sitting off camera and then on the other hand what you say the very first sentence you say that learning a language is no harm that's also something that i am radically disruptively honest about and uh i have many videos talking about here is one titled it feels like brain damage um talking about and you know no offense you may not have that much experience learning languages and i really do and i'm really willing to talk about the extent to which it is harm it is a sacrifice and you have to kind of take that seriously and that's why i don't i don't lightly suggest to people that they should spend hundreds of hours and change their lives to learn language it's a huge huge commitment we're going to come back to that here talking about and talking about ireland sorry yeah well i think i think that's i think that's what we're we're coming to kind of soon enough um so i'll answer melissa's question melissa said what do you think about the requirement of learning a language in high school which is quite different from what we've what we've been talking about it's related but it is a different matter about about authorities uh political authorities forcing you to learn a language or requiring it for you to finish high school or have access to university now i was just talking about the requirement of learning a language for citizenship so by the way many countries do that we looked at the possibility of becoming citizens of greece that's completely natural if you want to become a citizen of greece you got to learn to speak greek you know um so you know i don't i don't think that's really controversial talk about that um you know with uh with learning a language in high school part of the problem is high school you know um that pro i've probably covered how i feel about it just you know i mean language learning it may be incompatible with high school you know like we may be really talking about a stage of life and an institutional setting and context which is really incredibly poorly suited to language learning now you know it's it's not this doesn't completely shut down the conversation but i think that's probably the first thing you know for us to for us to look at um we uh canada it's very very well researched in canada high school education fails to teach people french french is much easier to learn than chinese it's much easier to learn than korea or ojibwe or something so i mean what can be accomplished in the high school setting is already a big issue now secondly okay so what is accomplished by high school it communicates very powerfully to people that their national identity makes them beholden to learning a language you know now i think i think there is an argument that in the united states of america today part of being american means that you're willing to learn spanish to a certain level now it's not in your constitution it's not yes america politically is devoted to being monolingual being just english but there's there is definitely a sense i think anyone grows up in america would talk about it you know like people kind of know the status and importance of spanish in the history of the united states and the current uh economy and everything else in canada there is a powerful message shared with you that you know part of being canadian is learning french and so on and so forth so you know it it does get that sense across now you know we would not be having this conversation this video would not exist none of these questions would be meaningful if there were any truth to that i mean genetically i'm jewish does that mean i want to learn hebrew not at all you know now genetically i'm also irish i've pointed this out in several videos nobody perceives me as irish nobody cares about how irish i am maybe i'm very biased in making this youtube video about ireland because of my my connections to ireland nobody i'm perceived as jewish i mean barack obama was not perceived as white he was perceived as black he's actually half black and half white but you know it's that's often the case you're half one thing half another and that's you're perceived as but you know there is no sense in which i'm beholden uh to learn hebrew that that doesn't make sense i think we're gonna have to deal with that again and again now what if i had gone to a jewish high school in toronto they exist there were many different jewish high schools in toronto that probably would have been exactly the message that was delivered to me was this is who you are this is your identity and you're beholden to this language you know uh so i i just say the the required learning of language i actually again it is one of the reasons for this conversation with dorney and for me recording this video today uh you know part of what he's talking about is that they're they're in in i believe in primary school also but anyway in the school system they are forced to quote unquote learn irish and they don't learn irish we're about one paragraph now we get to that so it is it is okay i will be fair i think that the irish school system is failing to teach the irish language far more profoundly than the canadian school system is failing to teach french however there are different strategic factors that make the challenge more difficult like uh french is spoken in this far off exotic country called france if you're in ireland there is no far-off exotic country where people speak irish fluently it doesn't exist the only place where irish has any kind of foothold you know is is within our own itself and it's disappearing there and so on and so forth so it is very different now also i would i would say that the irish language itself probably is a little bit more difficult than learning french i it's not like the difference between chinese and franchising um okay so there was another there was another um there was another commentary moondog says he's surprised i haven't heard of this woman before um i don't watch television i don't know who you think you're talking you think i watch normal tv and can't not at all i don't i don't watch television i'm not this kind of person then i you think i watch the agenda with steve paken who are you talking to what do you think of me sorry about i mean i don't watch this kind of i also don't watch the marvel movies or the batman movies i mean you know what do you want um i'm i'm an authentic snob i've i've got better things i've got better than these two of my time like having this conversation with you right now i mean you know just saying we all priorities in life i think it's worth my time to have a one hour conversation about this right now with you guys i do not think it's worth my time to watch the newest movie about thor or spiderman or iron man from the marvel corporation okay catching up with your comments okay so um lad in red says quote if you want your videos to be discovered by more people then perhaps consider enabling comments so latin red i'm sorry but what you're saying is just not true i've been on youtube now for maybe eight years more than seven years something like eight years um i'm not saying this to hate on you but everyone everyone needs to get over this ego trip about giving people advice in areas they they have no expertise and no experience in themselves really you know um i'm it's not just youtube it's not just learning languages but really i think one of the tragedies of 21st century culture is that people go around and really feel entitled to tell you what you ought to do in situations and circumstances they haven't even done a google search on they really know what they really know nothing about so i mean there is someone in this room right now who really knows a lot about maintaining a youtube comment section and running and you know i'm sorry but you're really not in a position to tell me something i don't know on that now i'm not offended by your question but your question makes me despise you so i know you don't feel that was stated in a rude way but i'm telling you what the effect is on me it makes me utterly despise you and i do have videos already talking about why the comment section isn't open and that's part of the rich discourse that overlaps with this video of really talking about thinking about what you do with your limited time um you know the choice to play video games or refuse to play video games is significant i mean to choice just this morning when i was in the gym i was thinking about whether or not i should force myself to listen to the news in french how much time i should put into studying french as a language the chinese language these things matter and the choice to uh censor a youtube comment section it is a tremendously time consuming activity and you know it's a real sacrifice and the positive outcomes you're presuming the channel would have from having an open comment section i really know for a fact from direct experience from both research and experience it's just not true okay so return to this and and look you know again i know you think that's not an upsetting or insulting thing to say to me uh but you're wrong so i'm taking a minute out of this this podcast to let you know okay all right returning to the message from uh from dorney um quote you are correct about language preservation it is an utter shambles here in ireland over the last few decades it has become lazy and half-assed particularly when new new vocabulary is introduced etc there's this pathetic mindset now that if you promote the irish language and wish to speak it you are a raging nationalist it is laughable as much as it is saddening the only positive point has been the establishment of an irish language television station in the mid 90s i mean what's the point whilst in school interpreting the myths of tir na nog i cannot pronounce any of these irish words uh the tyranna nog the salmon of knowledge the children of lear etc uh when i can't even say hello properly he then gives me a link to a um gives me a link to a youtube video on the same center it really boils down to people caring and not caring i began doing my own gaelic learning for me i began doing my own gaelic learning sessions at home at the last day of last year mostly kick-started by what you have had to say and what you still had to say on language preservation that took a backseat for a few months due to the completion of my first novel and then he goes on to say he was inspired to write his novel also by my youtube channel this is taking inspiration from my channel and writing my book he says but i'm back to it now and i'm dedicating several hours a day to learning the language it may be a failure but i have to try i have to care this is a great example of my youtube channel having positive impact on someone's life i hope it's positive i hope writing the novel doesn't ruin your life i hope the gaelic language doesn't hurt your life so i mean obviously that's really nice for me to hear that uh from a viewer and it's i i get family like that pretty frequently to honestly i do i get female for people saying they quit video games and started learning a language and started i started doing humanitarian work started doing more meaningful life because of the discussions we've had uh on this youtube channel okay but here's the really tough question so dorney i'm saying this to challenge you and i'm saying this to challenge everyone else in the audience too for what it's worth maybe you can take something positiveness maybe you can't okay the fact that i'm genetically jewish doesn't mean that the best language for me to learn is hebrew that doesn't make that an easy simple decision right you you say you're spending several hours a day learning gaelic so we don't know if that's two hours a day or three hours a day i'm sure it's not eight hours okay let's say it's two hours a day just hypothetically okay you could be learning chinese instead and you're not beholden to anybody by your birth that's where these issues really get difficult and dicey right i knew face-to-face uh first nations people uh when i was in saskatchewan current currently i don't know anyone here first nations sorry and i should i should clarify first nations means indigenous canadian first nations means american indian all these terms i knew native people in canada when i was living in saskatchewan and very often the first conversation with them was oh well i'm learning cree kind of across the street in terms of the layout of the university campus and they would say back oh that's interesting they'd say i am cree they'd say their own heritage is great but they're learning japanese upstairs you know these are individual cree people ojibwe people den a people who were choosing to learn japanese i can't remember anyone who was learning chinese probably i met some who are learning chinese or there are probably some who are learning arabic or other other languages but it was in in my it was always japanese that i'm remembering from experience meeting these people face to face and i i do think that's related to japanese cartoons you know today you know korean is becoming more popular this way with uh korean music videos you know um i am not in any position to say to them that they are wrong to learn japanese and i never did i never said that's the wrong choice you know on the contrary very often the conversation would then be oh i have experience studying those languages and you know you can imagine i have my own experience in asian languages and living in asia you know uh one of the guys hadn't studied chinese but he had actually gone to taiwan and considered learning chinese went as a sort of formal indigenous people's exchange group where he was taken to taiwan and given a tour and met their remaining tribal leaders and people who they were the last people that speak there speak the indigenous tribal languages on taiwan by the way those languages are not chinese um they're the languages that were in taiwan before chinese uh settled on the island um you know so i met people who connected a new voice but look you know what is the decision you're making the fact that you're born in ireland doesn't mean that you should play the sport of hurling you know nobody would say that i mean let's just say you have a kid who's not very good at hurling who's not very good at gaelic football but they have the talent to be a pitcher in baseball would you say to them no no no you know you have an obligation you're born irish you have you're beholden to ireland and your own irish identity you've got to do this traditional sport it's part of your nationalist identity or message no not at all and it's much deeper and it's much more meaningful with language now you know if you are a cree person or an ojibway person who grew up in a depressing dead-ended part of canada you know i can imagine how japan becomes an escapist fantasy like even a way out of the racism you face in canada like you go to japan and they don't they're not racist against you the same way white canadians are racist against you if you're a first nations person you look first nations i can imagine the fantasy move in japan being very meaningful in terms of escaping christianity you're in this christian culture and the actual reservations the first nations people uh live on and so on or even if they've live they're living in the city you're in this intensely christian missionary shaped british colonial culture you can run away to japan where instead they have a mix of shintoism and buddhism and taoism and you know miscellaneous japanese animist a totally different cultural religious tradition all right so apart from just attributing it to the cartoons i see how it could be tremendously meaningful for you as an individual to learn japanese and i have studied japanese myself in the past that's another story right i can even see politically how it could be good for your people your particular tribe within canada they are literally organized into tribes you know it could be uh they're organized into tribal banned councils so the term banned is used a lot actually for the groups i see even how it could be positive for your community your tribe your band council to have a connection with japan you know it was just escaping from and challenging and thinking outside the box of you know canadian politics i can see a lot of positivity here including sure the potential to earn money honestly earning money is a pretty weak justification for learning a language like this but maybe maybe you can earn some money out of learning japanese and i can't make any of those arguments in favor of learning cree or learning ojibwe right so you know i can say this to dorney too dorney i am not trying to uh cajole you into learning chinese instead but i'm pointing out that even for someone in your position even for someone for whom it is already rewarding and meaningful to some extent to study the irs indigenous language you have to ask yourself those tough questions and you are going to have to look back on the rest of your life even though even though you took my channel as a kind of inspiration or motivation to study this language that was your choice bro that was on you you watched my channel and thought the point well the point was to study the irish language the the moral of the story you took from these discussions was that you should get motivated to study irish you know you could have gotten motivated to learn chinese instead i've been learning chinese myself you know you could have gotten motivated to get involved in politics in a long list of places where we've talked about the politics and the opportunity to make a positive uh difference now i'm just going to say this partly as a segway and partly it's something really interesting itself dorney what about russian you know what if instead of chinese what if instead of japanese what if instead of irish what if you were devoting two hours a day to learning russian as a language i think it's self-evident the way in which russian would be politically rewarding and politically significant in your life even if you never left ireland just being in ireland and being an irishman who had learned russian and who followed the politics in russia now yeah i'm not going to exaggerate what level of fame or renown you might get to i think very easily being the tiny minority of people who care about politics in ireland who learn russian you might start publishing some articles some opinion pieces in the newspaper you might get interviewed on the radio at some point you might start to become appreciated or recognized as someone who has some expertise in irish and it can change your life personally for the better in so many ways there are also a whole lot of ways to get involved in ireland in terms of charity i was reading someone's autobiography the other day you know very short autobiography of the internet and this guy his parents had been involved in um [Music] orphanages in russia so they were americans but they did the fundraisers for and they flew back and forth and they're providing you know equipment and furnishings and money to help these orphanages and i think they they adopted maybe four kids from the orphanages themselves they built these kinds of charitable links with russia there are a million ways in to russia in terms of humanitarian work because russia is still kind of a disaster but even if you stay outside it's already really easy to imagine all the ways in which russia in the year 2021 it's going to raise interesting questions and reflections about your own political situation i mean in the same way that i was saying look these first nations people from this reservation just getting outside of their own you know getting outside of the christian british colonial culture they're raised in having contact with a totally different cultural uh religious and political uh tradition a different literature you know let's put it that way you know you're sick and tired of shakespeare well japan has its own literature you know in its own philosophy well we could say this about russia too you can you can get outside of everything you're trapped within in ireland even just through russian literature through having this kind of different contrasting meaningful cultural context even if the contrast between those two cultural contexts is one in which you really prefer irish culture over russian culture like maybe the maybe the contrast between these things makes you appreciate ireland more entirely possible you know what that young person who was learning japanese in canada it might be that as they really get to know and understand japan they appreciate canada more i have definitely known examples of that uh even jj mccullough he went to japan he thought he loved japan he decided he really hated japan he came back he appreciated canada a lot more after having lived in japan and struggled to learn the japanese language for a while um i also knew a guy who went to india that way and he had i think he had very fantastical notions about india and he really learned the languages he studied several languages plural and when he was done with india boy his whole his whole attitude towards canada had changed he came back uh of basically being a canadian nationalist or positively appreciating canada the way he never had before um so that you know having that that contrast and those comparisons it could have unexpected you know uh uh unexpected effects this way okay so um all right i'm finished replying to the the question from uh from dorney and i'm now gonna reply to a different question from another supporter on patreon called uh elena so i think this kind of brings together and crystallizes many of the cross currents and difficult difficult to answer questions that have that have come up so far in this discussion and you know again i just i wonder should i say more about melissa's question what you were saying about high schools i mean i feel like in principle i've answered it but all the same problems i just mentioned come up again but with much higher stakes much higher consequences if you're then taking those questions you're not talking about mature middle-aged people making that decision for themselves or you've made a decision for themselves and their children but you're talking about the government making it enforcing people through those high schools yeah i think i was surprised when you first told me that you're not really in favor of children learning multiple languages yes it comes from your experience growing up in canada yes a lot of places around the world in taiwan now they're acquiring english so what is the question um right you know at what age well so i'm going to have to repeat most of what you said because people will hear it you know rasmus in the audience says quote i hate the idea of defining someone based on where the person happens to be born so erasmus i appreciate what you're saying it's very easy to talk about that when you're talking about a middle-aged person like me a middle-aged intellectual and i could say oh well i don't define myself based on where i can move to greece and learn greek we started doing that so that's a real thing that happened i can move to israel and learn hebrew i can move to taiwan and speak the horrible taiwanese dialect of chinese i can lose taiwan and speak chinese really badly you know no offense okay offense get offended um uh i'm not terribly fond of the taiwanese accent i must say i i really feel it's important to distinguish the number four from the number 10 in chinese you know i really do um anyway um that's that's easy but what melissa is raising here okay you think someone's identity shouldn't be you know defined by where they were born well which school system you go to which schools you attend from from childhood of course including teenagers as a as a you know as a high school student in the university that is that is defined where you're born so i mean i just said the stakes are much much higher now some people choose to teach their children spanish is this i guess i don't want to get out of the scope of the conversation it's about the requirement of language oh just what's your point what's your it was surprising to me that you you know you took the most most educated people most sophisticated people take the attitude that learning languages makes you a more intelligent sophisticated person this is closely parallel to our discussion about music education we're going yeah it is yeah so it was surprising to me when you said no actually i think children learning multiple languages can confuse them yeah it can delay their development yeah yep yep so i'm just gonna respond to what melissa's saying here um you notice that people very easily preach that children shouldn't smoke cigarettes and children shouldn't drink alcohol i even see this with people saying children shouldn't use cell phones cellular phones mobile phones nobody's i feel like cell phone is an old-fashioned term now as opposed to i just do i feel like cell phone is dropped out of parliament anyway you know uh the health concerns about the radiation emitted from cell phones oh well children shouldn't use cell phones okay but what about you like oh what like the brain damage caused by alcohol you think it only matters for children and it doesn't matter for you you think the brain damage caused by the cell phones only matters for children it doesn't matter for you you know people find it very easy to bully children and they think that the whole realm of kind of ethical discourse consists of adults berating children that the children ought to have virtues that the adults lack themselves i think that language learning fits into precisely this you know oh you do you really think it would make you a more sophisticated person to learn french really if you believed that you would live your life accordingly and by the way i just mentioned i was dabbling with that this morning oh i could listen to the news in french for a little while i was actually writing out the news longhand in french i listen to the news and write it out and try to practice the vocabulary on grammar i don't think that's going to make me a more sophisticated person i don't have absolutely no delusions about that i know it will improve my ability to when i am in france order food in a restaurant like there's no like on a pragmatic level i can tell you exactly how i will benefit from practicing french by listening to news and emotions but no i will not gain a deeper understanding of news and politics by listening to the news in french or by working in this way you know really i think even if you just gauging in socratic dialogue with people there is this assumption that learning languages like learning to play a musical instrument you know um you know has some has some tremendous morally uplifting intellectually refined effect on people and it's the other way around you are exactly confusing cause and effect no extraordinary people make extraordinary sacrifices to learn languages it's not that learning languages makes them extraordinary now a great example when i was living in thailand laos and cambodia there were all these lazy tourists and people who were retired and also white people who went and opened a hotel or something and very often they would be amazed at how well i could speak one one of these languages so maybe for example they go oh wow you really speak cambodian well and i'd be like [Music] how long have you been in cambodia and they'd say 10 years and say oh well i've been here for six months and cambodian is like the fourth language i've been studying like i haven't really been working on cambodia and i've really been working on laotian pali pali's a whole different language thai to a limited extent and like the lowest and least in my priorities was cambodian but i try to fit it in and just for a few months i've been trying to do cambodian and you've been here 10 years oh and that's your wife and those are your kids you married a cambodian woman and you have half company you get like really this is the kind of situation you're in now i know people might perceive me as extraordinary we choose to make ourselves extraordinary right like you choose to distinguish yourself but it's it's not the case that uh language education makes me extraordinary you know what i mean i had my own motivations i had my reasons to be doing this stuff and these other people didn't and they lived a better life than me in a new world i'm i'm certain just not learning the language and just swimming at the beach and you know doing the things they did and sleeping around and so on i'm sure there are many ways in which their life was more pleasant than someone who wakes up at 6 a.m and memorizes vocabulary and works through you know tables of verbs and stuff but no um i i think it is precisely it's on the one hand this culture of bullying children to have virtues we don't really believe in ourself and then on the other hand it's confusing cause and effect where it's like we assume oh well someone who speaks several languages is an extraordinarily erudite intelligent person therefore by taking someone and forcing them to learn another language we will make them an extraordinary er every difference but no it's the other way around it's because i'm an extraordinary person that i chose to set aside the time and have the focus and discipline sure oh yeah that's interesting uh i won't interrupt too much more but i just want to say something that relates to this i remember you gave a lecture to a room of chinese yes yes trying to teach their children english right they wanted their children to learn just to mention she's alluding to a lecture i gave where i spoke in both chinese and english it was a very it's the only time that's happened it was an interesting live lecture yeah and and basically everyone in the room was a parent maybe there i think there were a few school teachers so there were school teachers and parents yeah right so it was concerning teaching english to children yes the issue was most of the adults most of the parents in this room speak english and they didn't have any interest or engagement was this issue that you're talking about where you're telling you know bullying children into doing something that you yourself aren't able to do and you you were talking about productive ways for people to practice english in the home and this is uh creative well okay but but long search because i remember the lecture the the the conclusion of the lecture was very similar to saying look if you want your children to never smoke cigarettes what about you you gotta quit smoking you can't smoke in front of your shoulder and preach to them if you if you think your children shouldn't drink alcohol you also shouldn't drink up and then likewise about learning but the conclusion was the parents have to learn english themselves they have to go through this and i know most adults don't have experience with this there is this myth that it's very easy for a 13 year old to learn a language and it's not if you do this stuff you're 40 or 50 you are gonna make progress so much more quickly than your 13 year old kid you're going to be wondering what's wrong with you why can't you why can't you remember the vocabulary we did two weeks ago well it's because you're a 40 or 50 year old person with a much higher level of mental cultivation and self-discipline than the 13 year old it's very very hard it's very ineffective for them to learn language accurately uh anyway yeah so interesting digression i think that is a digression but it runs parallel too um and it both runs parallel to and intersects with some of these other issues where we're we're discussing today someone in the audience whose name i will pronounce don't know which language that's in uh look and comments quote the fact is the poorer the country you come from the more compelling it is to learn foreign languages i completely disagree completely you know i don't i try not to overuse the concept of falsifiability but lick what you're saying here is falsifiable right so let's say you live in any major american city chicago los angeles uh detroit atlanta okay do do you think that poor people who come from third world countries and who now own small grocery stores and uh corner stores or who work at them maybe they don't own them that is where they are do you think that they're especially talented at learning english is that your experience how about refugees from refugee camps who've ended up in the united states america do you do you think they're very talented and adept at learning english and in many cases if you actually talk to those people and study it they often have been provided with an extraordinary level of assistance in learning these languages what why do i say extraordinary because i'm comparing it to what you get in university or high school the level of help you get learning language and university and for high school and the number of hours and the materials and so on and the immersion um actually living in a refugee camp can be a very intense language course if you take advantage of it um so the idea again this is similar to the issue of bullying teenagers or bullying children into having virtues you don't have it certainly is very easy for wealthy people to imagine that the poor have inherent intrinsic virtues that the rich lack or that poverty itself motivates them to greatness and great uh great accomplishments and sorry look doubled down on this and said this is why americans don't bother as if americans are wealthy enough to not bother so dude i have no offense but i think you're really living in a you know very kind of self-contradictory state of series of assumptions that in time i hope you'll you'll challenge and overturn um you know there certainly is a stereotype that americans are somehow less talented at learning language than koreans are well have you have you met a lot of koreans have you met a lot of koreans who speak english have you met and spoken to koreans learning russian you know have you met and spoke to koreans learning you know other european languages you know there's a lot of assumptions that the grass is green on the other side of the hill but there's a really deep really sick assumption that poor people just because of their poverty have some kind of virtue some kind of advantage that that rich people lack oh we're right now doing this with this just this box on screen i don't want i don't want to wrap this this uh i don't want to advertise this lamp no no big deal just just notice in the background um okay so another sorry a lot of interesting comments today it's great great to hear from you guys you guys have had a lot and thank thank you for reading the thumbs up button helps more people discover and join rasmus says that he's been living in estonia for six years but really could never wholeheartedly dedicate himself to learning estonia um even though he studies university in estonia and he knows his skills much better right and erasmus there is an opportunity cost so again many so many of you may not speak english as your first language this is a special term in english opportunity cost has a unique meaning and the same amount of time you could be putting into learning estonian you could be learning russian you could be learning greek you could be learning chinese it will change your future forever you could be learning french you could be learning italian those are much easier to learn if english is your first language you know there is an opportunity cost and it has to be taken very very seriously um okay so i'm going to now read this the second email i hope that was a productive question i hope you feel most of i've addressed your your point enough i mean the other point melissa made that you guys might not have been able to hear was just that she was really surprised at the extent to which or she was surprised at the extent to which i reject conventional theories about learning language and childhood the depth of my despite for learning languages in organized fashion in schools or what have you and you know so obviously many of my viewers are vegan you know it's relatively easy to compel someone to be vegan being vegan doesn't take that much willpower focus and effort does take some it does take some and it's very saddening to see how many people just lack the willpower focus and effort lack the intellectual qualities necessary to to be vegan but you know there is this old saying in latin villa non discater you know the will cannot be taught you could you can't teach someone to want to learn you can't teach them to have the will and what language learning involves especially for a child people have wanted to pretend that we could take the system that was used to memorize tables of latin verbs and just use it for any other language equally effectively and force children to learn chinese or force them to learn french or forced to learn spanish and it doesn't work and it doesn't work for reasons that are really profound and it doesn't have the beneficial effects that people presumed it would have and that have never been based in reality that they've always they've always been as false as the belief in christianity and they've always been as false as the belief in god the beliefs about what that religion should accomplish are also false but the outcomes even in terms of language learning uh are false and you know anyone who thinks about sincerely how a child would become positively motivated to learn a language you know if you want your child to learn spanish for most most americans could go to mexico four times a year very cheaply emile what if you actually take your child to mexico what if your child has just one friend in mexico who speaks spanish and doesn't speak english what if there's another family and you eat dinner with them you know these are things that have a powerful influence on a child these are things that motivate a child to try to learn spanish you know and my parents never did that for me with french they could have done it with french then canada i could have been exposed to the french language positively in many ways my parents could have sat with me and watched the news in french by the way that was specifically in my lecture the lecture i gave in china i talked about parents taking the time to sit and watch the news in english and i or watch movies in english but you can't pause you can't passively watch it you'd have to watch this tv show in english or watch this news program and you have to pause like every 10 seconds and then go through the words that are used like you as a parent you have to be very actively involved you can't just passively sit and none of you understand what's on tv knowledge but you know if you really think about what will motivate a child to learn language we'll reward them for learning language and then how the process of languages is going to go it's not going to be this um simple coercive notion of how a classroom and chalkboard language learning is going to work now conversely conversely if the child is motivated to learn if they already have those other positive things if the child let's say you have a family it's very easy even if you're a family in chicago and four times a year you go to mexico and you go to the same place and he plays with the same kids you know your your son is playing with some mexican kids and getting them they really gain some appreciation of bicultural appreciation for mexico and spanish and it's in their life and you're watching tv together and the parents are really encouraging and getting interested then when the kid goes into the classroom they're going to be able to make so much progress compared to the other kids and learning expansion the other kids can be sitting there the other kids are going to be sitting what what is this why am i being forced to learn this why am i being forced to memorize this table of verbs and no adult ever bothers to give them an answer there are a meaningful answer to that question but the kids will never all they know is that they're being forced to do something they don't want to do the same way they're forced to memorize mathematical tables and this kind of thing that's all that they know so you know the classroom methods can work if you already have the will if you have the positive motivation but villa non-discater the will cannot be taught and by the way i've never studied latin i have one friend and i remember whenever i would use a this probably only happened twice but whenever i used a latin phrase in email he would write back something very cynical i remember once he replied he said you have no idea how thrilling it is for me to see you use a latin phrase correctly he had he had steady latin i had but i really am not doing it too pretentious there are just some turns of phrase you learn you learn as latin uh latin loan words or clusters of loanwords you know um in english so erasmus confirms that my reflections were spot on for him he says yeah that's exactly why he hasn't dedicated himself to learning estonia so yep it's hard and erasmus i've been through that with several different countries in several different languages learning a language is hard giving up on learning language is also hard okay a viewer of the channel and supporter on patreon elena wrote in and this connects to a lot of the political and ethical uh reflections in this video she says hello isil in one of your recent streams so i'm quoting her directly in one of your recent streams you briefly talked about introversion actually being a lack of ambition i had been thinking about it too but i failed to solve this problem personally she continues quote i live in russia there is a political crisis here things that happen here depress me at the same time i am usually the person in a company who has the strongest views on politics feminism and veganism well the standard for political views is so low here but at least i seem to be such a person relative to her contemporaries i continue quote and i am not doing anything about it i just wait for changes to happen quote first i thought that i am just a social introverted tired maybe it's the pressure of the big city or maybe i am just a coward because the only thing that seems possible for me to do is migration close quote this may well be why she has learned english to this level you know we said before you know to some extent learning japanese could be an escapist fantasy i think there are a lot of people in russia today who are learning english even if they have no particular plan to migrate to canada or the united states or england or anywhere else but they look at the reality of what russia is politically and they think maybe there's a better life to be had you know somewhere else so she hasn't said that explicitly but she's writing to me in english this is not google translate you know so her her question here in conclusion is not it's not related the answer the response i'm gonna give to this but she says quote so could you talk more about introversion is it a state of mind or a type of brain function does it even exist close quote so i already did as she alluded to i made a video quite powerfully kind of attacking our cultural assumptions about what introversion is this is a concept that comes from the much maligned psychologist carl young it's a jungian piece of um jargon um but you know my reason for quoting and responding to this email now is instead to talk about these issues of politics nationalism language learning and the fact that none of us are beholden to a place just because we live there you know nobody again nobody can say to me that because i'm genetically jewish that therefore i ought to learn hebrew that's ridiculous nobody and nobody can say that because i'm genetically jewish i ought to care about the politics of israel more than the politics of canada or that i ought to care about the politics of israel more than the politics of cambodia laos myanmar if you guys follow me on patreon you know i'm still agonizing over myanmar or even right now uh belarus ukraine these are terrible political situations you know you care about right but for someone who is born russian there's no necessity you don't have to make russian your language you don't have to make russian political struggles your struggles you don't have to make the russian nationality your politics right but you got to make something your politics you got to take responsibility for something somewhere right you can't live a life of total irresponsibility i i know this is going to sound like a very strange comparison but probably for someone like elena here who already speaks english this high level she could probably make a bigger difference in myanmar than in russia right now situation is so hopeless in russia get involved in burmese politics starting with english and russian and then working on burmese as a language burmese are relatively easy uh language learner and so on you know and you could pr in my case i know i know quite a bit about myanmar i can imagine a future for her that's quite meaningful and quite rewarding back and forth between myanmar and thailand being involved with those politics in those languages and what have you and you'll never miss russian cuisine trust me to be fair we've we've been to some russian restaurants in thailand there are enough russians in thailand a lot of russians want to escape the snow and cold in winter if you ever did miss russian food you'd be able to get into thailand there are whole russian neighborhoods for those for those tourists there now i'm going to compare this to a statement i made about american politics several videos ago some of you will remember this some of you won't but i once raised the point that moralizing over the rescue of a drowning man in water standing by the side of a river looking at a man who's drowning and deciding are you gonna risk your own life to save him you know the question is entirely different if we can save his life and for some reason we think about these things hypothetically we tend to leap over those issues of possibility those issues of capability to just think in terms of whether or not we should help this person not whether or not we can now i mean this with absolutely no sarcasm you know if you have only one leg let's say you have one leg and you have a plastic prosthetic leg on the other side the possibility of taking off your leg and swimming into the water is very different what if you have only one leg and one arm and i'm not joking and i've lived in places like laos and cambodia where there are people around with one leg in one arm you know i i just say you know this is not this is not meant to be some kind of cruel joke against disabled people you know you know you could have some other health condition whereby assessing your own health and looking at the water you think if i go in to save that drowning man the odds are i'm gonna drown and i'm not gonna save that person you know but we we don't think about these things in terms of capability first and foremost we don't think about what difference can i make what am i capable of doing we think about it in terms of moral obligation what we should do what we ought to do now in the past i pointed out there's a very real danger in american politics everyone has been debating for almost 20 years now what okay okay okay 10 years for some things 20 years for others it's been 20 years that americans have been debating what they ought to do for afghanistan what they ought to do for iraq okay for at least 10 years now there's been a debate about what they ought to do for syria for example and several other countries that were impacted by the arab spring phenomenon what should america do you know now nobody in europe seems to be interested with the question of what they should do for the ukraine or what they should do for belarus i find that very strange what should germany do for russia real question what should france do for russia okay these are really really serious questions really really serious consequences what should any of us do for north korea what should any of us do for cambodia which any of us do for laos and and as individuals you in the audience and most of you are not not that poor most of you you all have more money than i do no offense but i mean my my life economically has been a total failure in many ways i've lived a wonderful life and very happy with it i'm really you know i was just saying the other day so i said look you know don't feel sorry for me but you know i've had a wonderful life but i mean my ability to even afford an airplane ticket to any of these places is you know dubious at best you know but you know most of you in this audience you actually are at a level of professional accomplishment educational accomplishment and financial accomplishment that you could get involved with any one of these issues not all of them you got to choose but you could you could get positively involved with myanmar today you could get positively involved with belarus today you get paused involved with ukraine any any of these if you wanted to i have one friend who who wants to you could get involved with politics out in syria um that whole part of the world the the levant as we now say more than ever you know i know one guy he's a he's a nurse and he speaks arabic he doesn't not as his first language he's white but he he doesn't have any genetic connection but he's studied on his own time he's been building up his ability to speak read and write arabic for many years and he is engaged with and interested in the politics the world there and then being engaged in a humanitarian way and obviously he wonders what difference he can make either writing as a journalist or in other creative capacities but given that he's a nurse you know his career he has a way um he has a way to make a difference i feel like just pausing to look at the look maybe this is too breathless for you guys but um i realize i'm i'm laying on things so so i'm just going to pause to look at some of that let's go in session so someone in the audience has started reading um the book melissa endorsed anatomy of an epidemic so i'm gonna hold it up for us forth so yeah i've i've quoted this author on my channel several times guys um you may you may have literally seen him and heard him uh robert whittaker and now we have the book here melissa's been reading it so far not me i'd love to if if there were but world enough and time sure uh someone else erasmus raises the issue of um being forced by society to care so erasmus i'll just digress on this briefly there's no such thing you know either people care or they don't you know and the politics that are unfolding right now in the united states about racism show there's no way to force people to care you know you cannot force white people to care about black people conversely you cannot force black people to care about white people i mean some ways it's a very complicated political conflict but you may not know especially in the state of tennessee there have been really tough questions being asked about to what extent children are being taught anti-racism in school into what extent they're being taught racism at school i do not simplify either side of that argument i think that both sides actually have some points to make and it's a very difficult argument to bring a resolution to partly because the quality of the united of education in the united states is poor i would think quality of education in tennessee may be especially poor but you know parents are really asking the question what are you teaching our children about the history of slavery in the history of the american constitution and the more recent history of saying you know world war ii to present about the status of black people in the united states of america why would that be an easy question to answer why would it be easy to teach that history to children you know it's not easy you know there's a huge there's a huge uh you know political clash going on about that um you cannot force people to care you know you cannot overcome indifference with education and the question is the people who are not indifferent the people who do care what kind of education can they have access to and that is the central tragedy of my life is that i was someone who did care i was someone who wanted to accomplish these things i wanted to make a difference and nevertheless i had no access to education whatsoever and that in brief may be the best reason possible for me to uh for me to go to film school so someone is is following it up directly asking do you have an informed opinion on critical race theory of course i do i think i just very briefly alluded to what i have to say within the the remit of that question and so there's another example being added here um someone's writing in saying that he's worried about moldova so yes uh moldova and bulgaria there were a lot of tough questions to be asking about so he's mentioning moldova i would add bulgaria to that list and you know what what does it take to get into the news i mean if the problems in moldova or the problems in bulgaria are are not so bad if it doesn't become so terrible that you have people starving to death i mean even um even venezuela you know venezuela is again kind of ignored now you know well if it's not mass starvation uh the western press doesn't care and you know there are too few people who really who really do active research who are engaged in these things either in terms of research or in terms of humanitarian work or in terms of real politics without following up on you know the cause celeb of the week without following up on whatever it is the the um the mainstream press is excited about there should be more people there should be people who care about moldova even though it's not in the press there should be people who care about venezuela when it's not in the press and so on but there aren't you know and this too is something i have to really blame our university system for i've found i've found that it is impossible for me even to be a person who cares about politics of china and china's a it's a huge it's not a small country it's not a small issue there's no way forward from it there's no way for me to get a master's degree or phd there's no way for me to have any career whatsoever connected to china and chinese politics in the chinese language none so i mean let that sink in and now ask yourself what chance does anyone have developing expertise in and becoming a political kind of advocate for democracy and progress in moldova or bulgaria or belarus or venezuela or anywhere else so it's it's a really dark time that way oh and the other thing is sorry i don't want to depress this too much the other thing is just that there's no longer any money in journalism right the the money you can now do journalism like you can just get on facebook and get on twitter and start doing journalism and get on youtube that is wonderful but you can't get paid for it the ability to actually have a career and earn money and anytime i read about what people's careers were like just to say the 1960s well people just finished high school and then went out and started working as a work correspondent they had this even if they complained that they're not making that much money that is level of luxury and wealth provided to them just by getting out and starting to do journalism the amount of money people could make uh writing about and researching social problems and political problems um in the past is a real contrast to the current situation so if you're talking about people really um you know if you're talking about people really devoting the time and energy uh to knowing what's going on whether it's afghanistan or any of these other flashpoints in a context where they they cannot seek advancement of any kind through it they can't earn a living they also can't get an award they can't get a medal i mean advancement isn't always economic you know like for me i would be willing to get a phd even if i could never make money out of it just for that sense of advancement you know okay i want to do this research not everyone's motivated that way but i am and even that kind of advancement is impossible for me so yeah this is a this is a huge problem and you know now reflecting on my life it's very obvious i could have had more advancement working on laos than working on china working on the korean egypt within working china so it's it's a very sad situation that is that has deep um deep and distant implications that the the consequences for that problem uh go run very deep and go very very far away all right so elena asked me this question about making a difference in russian politics she already speaks russian this is not that she's learning english and maybe on some level she's fantasizing about giving up on russia and migrating to another part of the world and i respond to this by bringing up this allegory of a drowning man in a river right um it's very easy for us for whatever reason culturally or philosophically or politically in our mind's eye to skip ahead to to rush ahead to this question of should i rescue this man from the drowning river should i be an activist for democracy in russia let's say democracy freedom of speech to put a more narrow focus on it should you be an activist for anti-corruption in russia an activist against corruption in russia now it's not just a dangerous game anyone could say here oh well you could be killed you could die you could also spend your whole life laboring in vain you could lose your life in a very different sense you could labor this for untold years and accomplish nothing i would like to draw your attention to an anti-corruption activist in the united states who is very famous called jankweger and the youtube channel for this is called wolf pack it is a strange name for a channel i hope this isn't going to start playing music or something i'm going to share you guys the link so wolf pack their most recent youtube video has 59 views the youtube video before that has 61 views the youtube video before that has 44 views the youtube video before that from two weeks ago has both jank wieger and lawrence lessig on it lawrence lessig is also known as larry lessig he's known by both names those are two famous people and it has only 105 views okay this is wolf pack blank these people have fame they have money and they have promoted this particular cause with institutional advantages you and i and guys will never have i could tell the whole story of how this first form and how it was first promoted in the mainstream media and so on how they first got the bowl on this okay they have been doing this for 10 years 10 years they've got money they've got volunteers they've got staff they have paid staff they've paid employees which i will never have right you know and they had a lot of mainstream media coverage they had famous celebrities endorsing them and involved including jack wieger himself he is legitimately a famous lover they've been doing this for 10 years and i am going to suggest you that they have accomplished less than even my own humble youtube channel that is in so many ways of failure at ballast yell my accomplishment may be that i'm able to have this discussion with you now and maybe 500 people and maybe 1 500 people will care enough to listen to this and think about it over the passage of time and they don't even have that level of accomplishment to show for the 10 years of their lives they've put into this and it's not just one person's life for 10 years it's a whole group of people right so when you're standing by that river thinking about jumping in right it's so easy in your mind's eye to think ahead to just race ahead to the ethical question what should i do what odd i to do and and you think about it hypothetically with someone else too like i was just saying you know um if not you then who right if if it shouldn't be you who learns kree if it shouldn't be you who learns ojibwe if it shouldn't be you who learns russia if it's not going to be you who tries to make a positive difference in this world in this particular way who's going to do it right it's a great way to phrase the question it's very motivating it's very inspirational right but what if you can't right not everyone can learn cree not everyone can learn ojibwe not everyone can make a difference in russian politics even in the united states of america the united states of america this particular group this is an anti-corruption political movement none of them are afraid of being killed none of them none of them are afraid of even say the russian mob the russian mafia coming to try to silence them like without killing them to intimidate them or right they don't face any repression of this kind in the united states of america and guess what they still lost they lost 10 years of their lives and the people who donated money lost all their money which may be significant i mean you know if you had been giving money what if you just gave 1 000 a year for 10 years and now you're looking back on it and saying you lost 10 000 in addition 10 years left that's pretty modest you know participants even if they were just buying airplane tickets to attend these events you were flying from los angeles to new york and stuff it could easily apart from donations you could have easily spent a thousand dollars a year on this cause right so my point is in russia if you want to be a pro-democracy activist or an anti-corruption activist even if nobody kills you even if you don't have to deal with corrupt politicians intimidating you or members of the mafia intimidating you right you can lose your life you can waste your life and you can have nothing to show you know in the end of it and so guys you've heard me criticize video games you've heard me say don't play video games don't waste your life playing video games right but you've also heard me say if you've watched my videos about vegan activism don't waste your life devoting yourself to a self-defeating and pointless form of activism don't assume you can save someone's life by leaping into a river swimming out and trying to help a drowning man you might kill that person instead you thought you were going to save them instead you killed them you might risk your own life for nothing you might be instead the one who drowns so this comes to the same conclusion that's why i answered this in the same video as talking about nationalism and languages right nationalism provides people with an easy excuse a simplifying mentality because what nationalism tells you is if you're born in russia you're beholden to russianism these are your political problems this is your responsibility you have no choice it's wrong you have a choice you can learn japanese you can move to japan you can you can learn greek you can migrate to greece much easier if russian is your first language it'll be much easier if you learn greek by the way you'll have a big advantage with greek not worth explaining why there's a profound link between the greek and russian languages you can greece needs to help do you think there are no important political questions in greece they're tremendously important you could even play a special role in the trade and political relationship between greece and russia it could be a wonderful meaningful rewarding life for you you know you could be involved in charity work in greece you could be involved in anti-corruption work in greece they also have problems with corruption and politics by the way in case you hadn't heard you know greece has problems with corruption too you know you you could be a great democratic reformer in greece you can make a great difference in the world the fact that you're born in russia doesn't mean that you're beholden to russia the fact that you're born jewish doesn't mean you have to learn hebrew it doesn't mean you're beholden to the politics of the state of israel right everything becomes optional right and then we live our lives in this perpetual low-level state of crisis right because you you could do anything but you have to live with the constant fear that if you commit to any one particular path you are actually going to accomplish nothing that you're going to waste your life you're going to waste your potential even with a cause as obvious as anti-corruption activism whether that is in the united states or at much higher risk to your life in russia