Stupidity is REAL (vegan / vegans / veganism)
11 March 2016 [link youtube]
Here are links to two contrasting articles (very lightweight and easy to glance over) on India's beef ban, connected to one of the points made in the video:
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ash-murthy/i-am-a-liberal-and-india-beef-ban_b_8136760.html
2. http://www.firstpost.com/india/im-vegan-work-animal-rights-oppose-maharashtras-beef-ban-2183609.html
Oh, and by the way, to answer a common question: à bas le ciel is pronounced, "à bas le ciel".
Youtube Automatic Transcription
stupidity is real and one of the
stereotypes about armchair intellectuals is that they spend their time shaking their fists at the television set and feeling frustrated and disappointed at the stupidity of the mainstream media the stupidity of the type of information that's the most readily available to our fellow man this is obviously starett's have the people like Woody Allen quite intentionally made fun of I think it's something most Western intellectuals are aware of as a pattern of thinking I remember I talked to one friend or frenemy of mine about Cambodia and in that conversation you know he was shocked by a list of facts that you know kind of presented in the course of the conversation and he immediately fell into this kind of shaking his fist angrily at the mainstream press saying sort of how was it possible he lived his life without knowing this stuff and this shows the problem that he's been we ranting about all his life Noam Chomsky's another example that add to it and he was really surprised when I replied in a really Socratic way I asked him why he thought this so well what are you talking about why would that you know well what do you expect um I both sincerely do not expect you know the mainstream press in Canada to take an interest in and do original research on Cambodian politics past present or future nor do I expect it to be easy for a white Western english-speaking intellectual to find out about this stuff now on the other hand the real barriers to learning about it are not that high you know the Google search doesn't have to go that deep you know yeah you may have to actually go to a library you may have to spend some time searching for the information but in English as a language it's always impressive how much there is that's available I mean on Cambodia some of the most shocking facts I remember I was able to back up just by searching the the transcript of debates in the British House of Parliament it's not secret information these are things publicly stated in Parliament and England and that now you can get almost instantly through digital media through through the internet and so on so I never felt hard done by that way and I never thought the appropriate way to respond to these things was we're saying oh the problem is these idiots in the media if only you know if only the newspapers were controlled by people who happen to agree with my point of view and I still do not feel this way now in looking at you know what's on YouTube on what's on social media it seems to me completely natural that people are much more interested in diet and exercise than they are in politics in Cambodia and by the way I mean recent politics in Cambodia are still extreme are still shocking are still worth knowing about do a Google search for 2013 Cambodia election I think even the Wikipedia article I haven't seen to a compete article for a few years the Parliament Sina since 2013 but even the Wikipedia article in that means users will give you a sense that wow something really significant and bizarre happened in world politics in Cambodia in 2013 and almost nobody in the Western world paid attention to it for me I'm okay with that up to a point I'm not okay with it when I meet someone who's a professor is supposed to be an expert in Cambodia then I think hey you should know you should be engaged in what's going on but short of that I just do not expect my fellow vegans to share my interest or my fellow Western intellectuals or my fellow human beings it doesn't surprise me at all that this stuff is not mainstream and I don't think you're stupid for ignoring it I also would not for example accuse you of being a racist because you you failed to take an interest in this and that has been a big trope here on vegan YouTube is you are a racist because you have not made a statement on your youtube channel about this interest that matters this issue that matters to me this this political issue that's that's crucial to what's going on to me and again whether that's you know New York versus London or you know Cambodia versus Canada that's that's a peculiar hypocrisy built into our our situation here yes everyone who's failed to comment on the Cambodian election problem you are a race ridiculous um you know now I have on the other hand drawn attention to these really strange omissions where the problem isn't that this the problem isn't that something is not popular the problem is the total absence of comment the total paucity of comment and you know the choice to ignore the the military dictatorship in Thailand when so many of these vegan youtubers have been living in Thailand have had a big part of their life and their movement and their supposed advocacy talent that to me is shocking it's sure is shocking the word shocking suggests like short term but still to this day that's a problem and when I first talked about that let's say it was a year ago I forget how long ago that was now um many vegans agreed with me through email or Facebook messages or Twitter messages wrote to me saying yeah you know you're right this is really important and it's kind of amazing that none of the vegans connected Thailand talked about this stuff you know when some cared more about the issue of democracy versus military to ship and some cared more about human rights issues and sex trafficking or other political issues that are more concerned to them personally in Thailand but now in the years since then some of these same people who wrote to me have gone to Thailand and they did the same BS as everyone else there's a cat who wears a mask on camera called vegan revolution I know he agreed with what I said about Thailand at the time he didn't he didn't yet hate me he was more or less a friend of mine online at the time and he wrote messages back and forth to me you know with his own opinions and in agreement and obviously with his own perspective I know he agreed those were those were important issues I was talking about and he agreed with the criticism of the the shortcomings of other youtubers who go to Thailand and do nothing but ride their bike up a mountain namely Deutsche Tap want one particular mountain and produced this kind of candy corn journalism let's use the word journalism for kicks huh because none of this is journalism but they provide this you know cotton candy vlogging of no real substance um but when he went to Thailand look what he did I was as bad as anyone else or even worse he produced nothing of substance nothing of you know political relevance or what have you and I think his audience would have been looking for it you know he's not a health and fitness guru he's not a beauty blogger I think probably his audience would have really appreciated if he'd made the effort to do what he seemed to agree was necessary and worthwhile in in making this discourse a little bit deeper and broader now if you've watched my most recent videos I've commented recently on what's called the beef ban in India okay so I mean like like everything that's that that's the way it's phrased in headlines the beef ban if you're gonna google it those are the terms to search for this was a huge news story in 2015 huge now I googled this before and after posting my own video and you know did a search you know for example after my video was posted I searched for vegan beef ban you know beef fan in quotation marks and then plus the word India and I had to do it again without India to get more results and you know if I set the time frame to just the last month then my own video was in the top search results just absurd and there was nothing else and the searches before I posted you know my comments again there's just nothing this is a huge story again you don't have to have an interest in India if you're even a little bit vegan or vegetarian you would have noticed this covered in the Western press in discussions of a politics of any kind partly because some people got murdered you know that's the sort of thing that makes headlines sort of thing gets in the newspapers and you know partly because it's a really interesting chapter of the world's history but throughout 2015 and 2016 again I'm not complaining that the most readily accessible sources don't talk about this stuff it makes sense to me complete that more people are interested in diet exercise beauty etc more people are interested in gossiping about Hollywood actors okay fine that's going to be the majority but where is the minority where is the intellectual call just even politically awake politically savvy you don't even have to be an intellectual where is the politically savvy minority within veganism and again that's that's how I feel but the issue with Thailand or all these other things of course going to the beach wearing a bikini all this stuff of course it's going to be more popular than talking about politics but the politics should be more than zero you know and it's disturbing to me how this stuff has disappeared another issue in recent videos here it's genuinely disturbing to me the extent to which discussion of domestication has completely disappeared and you know cuddling domesticated pets is now the sort of central symbolic gesture of veganism online and fifteen years ago it was really the opposite it was opposition to domestication I can remember used to be the people in ecology would make it clear like well we have this cat and we keep it as a house pet because it was rescued from a shelter and this others cat but in principle we oppose treating cats this way and this isn't how a cat's supposed to live and this isn't how a chicken is supposed to live and so on these are supposedly aware where the moral baseline was to look at how this animal lived in the wild where it was not dependent on a human hand to provide it with food but where it fed itself and lived on its own term to when it lived and died on its own terms in the wild that animal rights per se was not based on a model of human beings providing welfare to all animals it was on recognizing the dignity of animals existing in the wilderness of course that gets very dicey when you talk about big animals like elephants because they really do come into conflict with humans and you know elephants and bears and what-have-you anyway there are a lot of issues that are really worth talking with there which again I haven't seen even once now it's always weak to make an argument out of an absence right but during the last year one of the reasons why I've watched so many vegan videos on YouTube is that a foreign thing I eat at home very often at my books out I'm doing work I do indeed put bananas into a blender and then for 15 minutes I'm drinking bananas out of my blender and I'm watching vegan videos on YouTube and then when I stop were here at the gym and started working out at home then also I would watch even more vegan commentary on YouTube because I would play lectures you know on veganism and animal rights while I was lifting weights which I didn't do before obviously when I was working in a gym so this is more time it's something I've been doing you know in between other activities little bits of time this way but I I really have during the last year like 2015 early 2016 I really am aware of what is and is not being discussed on vegan YouTube on the vegan internet and as I say I am NOT hating on idiots I'm not it's it's natural that stupid people especially good-looking stupid people are gonna dominate the majority of what's going on especially if sorry especially good-looking and especially if they're entertaining if you're stupid in a funny way you know if you drive your bicycle into a wall and you record yourself having the accident you laugh about it afterwards obviously that can get millions of views on YouTube and that's human nature and it's always been that way it's always gonna be that way I I don't have any hate in my heart against these folks I don't even have any hatred for the people who attack and insult me plenty of whom are already 'its and pretty much identify themselves as such oh come out and and give a preparatory remark saying well I'm an idiot but you know a man you got your struggles in life and I got mine I really do I really have sympathy across the board and I'm not that Woody Allen stereotype of the intellectual who's full of resentment about you know what's not being talked about on the top shelf readily available information I don't need to see you know the Cambodian elections on the front page of a Canadian newspaper I think it's ridiculous to expect that and I don't need to see these issues in veganism you know on the front page of YouTube put it that way but I need to see them somewhere it is disturbing to me that this stuff and not that it fails to be the majority but that the minority is absent and yeah you know I do get a lot of fan mail and a lot of it's from older people who've been involved in animal rights for more than ten years and what they're saying is why is nobody talking about this stuff some of them say they gave up watching YouTube entirely because of how shallow and apolitical the material was and their sense of exasperation and incomprehension at what's happened to veganism and animal rights I guess in the last five years or ten years or what have you um and you know I give you one example one guy wrote in agreeing with me specifically on the dietary information you know my criticism I cry teak of them during Ryder and freely and he wrote in he said look he's a fully qualified nutritionist and I think his university diploma was in biology of some kind of sorry I forget which which discipline within biology so he's both a nutritionist and has university credentials in biology and he was saying that he's been waiting so long to hear someone say the really basic things that I said um if you've seen the videos you know once aha but part of the problem is I could ask him in my reply why didn't you say it you're the guy with the grimace I'm not I'm not a nutritionist I'm not a health coach I don't do any work of this kind and I don't have the kind of academic background that this guy does so why didn't you take it on you know and this also is is part of the problem only a certain personality type in general gets on camera this guy wrote but I think he's highly intelligent and as I say highly qualified and what-have-you but he obviously doesn't have the combination of personality traits the mean one of which normally is seeking Fame but also sometimes just stupidity that gets people to come on camera and make fools of themselves and I don't know how fun and talk about their breakup with their girlfriend or boyfriend and do all the things that makes YouTube a lively and energetic place to be and of course I can sympathize I have no idea I'm applying for jobs right now I've been doing a lot of job interviews if you guys noticed there were a couple videos where I was wearing a suit on camera that was because I did a job interview by Skype immediately after I was sitting there waiting for the Skype interview and when I recorded that it's very possible that I would stop using YouTube for six months or a year depending on what the next job I get is I can completely understand you know professional real world reasons why people aren't coming on and talk about this stuff but even when I search for text-based articles I did really extensive google searching for any any comments on the beef ban any vegan response to that to what's going on in India in English of course and there is shockingly little I'm gonna provide two more links below this video just because et is really interesting if you look at these two links before that below this video I think you'll just even just glance at them you'll ask yourself the same questions I did which is just oh well this is something really interesting and really relevant that vegans ought to be talking about and we're not um so again I totally accept him what the majority is gonna do we do have to now question the silence of the minority to provide the other aspects of the discourse and I'll just add one point of disagreement with some of my biggest fans a lot of people write to me with the concern that meat eaters will judge vegans by the most high-profile people we've got many of whom are idiots and the way I've described many of whom are whatever good-looking and entertaining but fundamentally stupid and don't have a lot to say and what have you and I think we've got to get over that I think that's a real misconception if you think about it I mean it would be a false optic to say that African Americans have a huge problem because the most famous African Americans at any time are not intellectuals are not scientists are not even Paulette but our entertainers rappers singers athletes or what have you that is just a feature that applies to every ethnic group in every political faction I don't know who's the most famous Democrat who's the most famous Jew I mean Judaism is even though Judaism has famoust electrodes associated with it at any given time the most famous Jew is going to be somebody like Seinfeld it's not going to be an intellectual or a politically important figure and likewise I don't think it's a problem that the most famous and the most prominent voices for veganism may be people who are good looking but vapin people who are ought to know actors models athletes or what-have-you as I say my concern is not the shallowness of the majority it's the Silence of the minority
stereotypes about armchair intellectuals is that they spend their time shaking their fists at the television set and feeling frustrated and disappointed at the stupidity of the mainstream media the stupidity of the type of information that's the most readily available to our fellow man this is obviously starett's have the people like Woody Allen quite intentionally made fun of I think it's something most Western intellectuals are aware of as a pattern of thinking I remember I talked to one friend or frenemy of mine about Cambodia and in that conversation you know he was shocked by a list of facts that you know kind of presented in the course of the conversation and he immediately fell into this kind of shaking his fist angrily at the mainstream press saying sort of how was it possible he lived his life without knowing this stuff and this shows the problem that he's been we ranting about all his life Noam Chomsky's another example that add to it and he was really surprised when I replied in a really Socratic way I asked him why he thought this so well what are you talking about why would that you know well what do you expect um I both sincerely do not expect you know the mainstream press in Canada to take an interest in and do original research on Cambodian politics past present or future nor do I expect it to be easy for a white Western english-speaking intellectual to find out about this stuff now on the other hand the real barriers to learning about it are not that high you know the Google search doesn't have to go that deep you know yeah you may have to actually go to a library you may have to spend some time searching for the information but in English as a language it's always impressive how much there is that's available I mean on Cambodia some of the most shocking facts I remember I was able to back up just by searching the the transcript of debates in the British House of Parliament it's not secret information these are things publicly stated in Parliament and England and that now you can get almost instantly through digital media through through the internet and so on so I never felt hard done by that way and I never thought the appropriate way to respond to these things was we're saying oh the problem is these idiots in the media if only you know if only the newspapers were controlled by people who happen to agree with my point of view and I still do not feel this way now in looking at you know what's on YouTube on what's on social media it seems to me completely natural that people are much more interested in diet and exercise than they are in politics in Cambodia and by the way I mean recent politics in Cambodia are still extreme are still shocking are still worth knowing about do a Google search for 2013 Cambodia election I think even the Wikipedia article I haven't seen to a compete article for a few years the Parliament Sina since 2013 but even the Wikipedia article in that means users will give you a sense that wow something really significant and bizarre happened in world politics in Cambodia in 2013 and almost nobody in the Western world paid attention to it for me I'm okay with that up to a point I'm not okay with it when I meet someone who's a professor is supposed to be an expert in Cambodia then I think hey you should know you should be engaged in what's going on but short of that I just do not expect my fellow vegans to share my interest or my fellow Western intellectuals or my fellow human beings it doesn't surprise me at all that this stuff is not mainstream and I don't think you're stupid for ignoring it I also would not for example accuse you of being a racist because you you failed to take an interest in this and that has been a big trope here on vegan YouTube is you are a racist because you have not made a statement on your youtube channel about this interest that matters this issue that matters to me this this political issue that's that's crucial to what's going on to me and again whether that's you know New York versus London or you know Cambodia versus Canada that's that's a peculiar hypocrisy built into our our situation here yes everyone who's failed to comment on the Cambodian election problem you are a race ridiculous um you know now I have on the other hand drawn attention to these really strange omissions where the problem isn't that this the problem isn't that something is not popular the problem is the total absence of comment the total paucity of comment and you know the choice to ignore the the military dictatorship in Thailand when so many of these vegan youtubers have been living in Thailand have had a big part of their life and their movement and their supposed advocacy talent that to me is shocking it's sure is shocking the word shocking suggests like short term but still to this day that's a problem and when I first talked about that let's say it was a year ago I forget how long ago that was now um many vegans agreed with me through email or Facebook messages or Twitter messages wrote to me saying yeah you know you're right this is really important and it's kind of amazing that none of the vegans connected Thailand talked about this stuff you know when some cared more about the issue of democracy versus military to ship and some cared more about human rights issues and sex trafficking or other political issues that are more concerned to them personally in Thailand but now in the years since then some of these same people who wrote to me have gone to Thailand and they did the same BS as everyone else there's a cat who wears a mask on camera called vegan revolution I know he agreed with what I said about Thailand at the time he didn't he didn't yet hate me he was more or less a friend of mine online at the time and he wrote messages back and forth to me you know with his own opinions and in agreement and obviously with his own perspective I know he agreed those were those were important issues I was talking about and he agreed with the criticism of the the shortcomings of other youtubers who go to Thailand and do nothing but ride their bike up a mountain namely Deutsche Tap want one particular mountain and produced this kind of candy corn journalism let's use the word journalism for kicks huh because none of this is journalism but they provide this you know cotton candy vlogging of no real substance um but when he went to Thailand look what he did I was as bad as anyone else or even worse he produced nothing of substance nothing of you know political relevance or what have you and I think his audience would have been looking for it you know he's not a health and fitness guru he's not a beauty blogger I think probably his audience would have really appreciated if he'd made the effort to do what he seemed to agree was necessary and worthwhile in in making this discourse a little bit deeper and broader now if you've watched my most recent videos I've commented recently on what's called the beef ban in India okay so I mean like like everything that's that that's the way it's phrased in headlines the beef ban if you're gonna google it those are the terms to search for this was a huge news story in 2015 huge now I googled this before and after posting my own video and you know did a search you know for example after my video was posted I searched for vegan beef ban you know beef fan in quotation marks and then plus the word India and I had to do it again without India to get more results and you know if I set the time frame to just the last month then my own video was in the top search results just absurd and there was nothing else and the searches before I posted you know my comments again there's just nothing this is a huge story again you don't have to have an interest in India if you're even a little bit vegan or vegetarian you would have noticed this covered in the Western press in discussions of a politics of any kind partly because some people got murdered you know that's the sort of thing that makes headlines sort of thing gets in the newspapers and you know partly because it's a really interesting chapter of the world's history but throughout 2015 and 2016 again I'm not complaining that the most readily accessible sources don't talk about this stuff it makes sense to me complete that more people are interested in diet exercise beauty etc more people are interested in gossiping about Hollywood actors okay fine that's going to be the majority but where is the minority where is the intellectual call just even politically awake politically savvy you don't even have to be an intellectual where is the politically savvy minority within veganism and again that's that's how I feel but the issue with Thailand or all these other things of course going to the beach wearing a bikini all this stuff of course it's going to be more popular than talking about politics but the politics should be more than zero you know and it's disturbing to me how this stuff has disappeared another issue in recent videos here it's genuinely disturbing to me the extent to which discussion of domestication has completely disappeared and you know cuddling domesticated pets is now the sort of central symbolic gesture of veganism online and fifteen years ago it was really the opposite it was opposition to domestication I can remember used to be the people in ecology would make it clear like well we have this cat and we keep it as a house pet because it was rescued from a shelter and this others cat but in principle we oppose treating cats this way and this isn't how a cat's supposed to live and this isn't how a chicken is supposed to live and so on these are supposedly aware where the moral baseline was to look at how this animal lived in the wild where it was not dependent on a human hand to provide it with food but where it fed itself and lived on its own term to when it lived and died on its own terms in the wild that animal rights per se was not based on a model of human beings providing welfare to all animals it was on recognizing the dignity of animals existing in the wilderness of course that gets very dicey when you talk about big animals like elephants because they really do come into conflict with humans and you know elephants and bears and what-have-you anyway there are a lot of issues that are really worth talking with there which again I haven't seen even once now it's always weak to make an argument out of an absence right but during the last year one of the reasons why I've watched so many vegan videos on YouTube is that a foreign thing I eat at home very often at my books out I'm doing work I do indeed put bananas into a blender and then for 15 minutes I'm drinking bananas out of my blender and I'm watching vegan videos on YouTube and then when I stop were here at the gym and started working out at home then also I would watch even more vegan commentary on YouTube because I would play lectures you know on veganism and animal rights while I was lifting weights which I didn't do before obviously when I was working in a gym so this is more time it's something I've been doing you know in between other activities little bits of time this way but I I really have during the last year like 2015 early 2016 I really am aware of what is and is not being discussed on vegan YouTube on the vegan internet and as I say I am NOT hating on idiots I'm not it's it's natural that stupid people especially good-looking stupid people are gonna dominate the majority of what's going on especially if sorry especially good-looking and especially if they're entertaining if you're stupid in a funny way you know if you drive your bicycle into a wall and you record yourself having the accident you laugh about it afterwards obviously that can get millions of views on YouTube and that's human nature and it's always been that way it's always gonna be that way I I don't have any hate in my heart against these folks I don't even have any hatred for the people who attack and insult me plenty of whom are already 'its and pretty much identify themselves as such oh come out and and give a preparatory remark saying well I'm an idiot but you know a man you got your struggles in life and I got mine I really do I really have sympathy across the board and I'm not that Woody Allen stereotype of the intellectual who's full of resentment about you know what's not being talked about on the top shelf readily available information I don't need to see you know the Cambodian elections on the front page of a Canadian newspaper I think it's ridiculous to expect that and I don't need to see these issues in veganism you know on the front page of YouTube put it that way but I need to see them somewhere it is disturbing to me that this stuff and not that it fails to be the majority but that the minority is absent and yeah you know I do get a lot of fan mail and a lot of it's from older people who've been involved in animal rights for more than ten years and what they're saying is why is nobody talking about this stuff some of them say they gave up watching YouTube entirely because of how shallow and apolitical the material was and their sense of exasperation and incomprehension at what's happened to veganism and animal rights I guess in the last five years or ten years or what have you um and you know I give you one example one guy wrote in agreeing with me specifically on the dietary information you know my criticism I cry teak of them during Ryder and freely and he wrote in he said look he's a fully qualified nutritionist and I think his university diploma was in biology of some kind of sorry I forget which which discipline within biology so he's both a nutritionist and has university credentials in biology and he was saying that he's been waiting so long to hear someone say the really basic things that I said um if you've seen the videos you know once aha but part of the problem is I could ask him in my reply why didn't you say it you're the guy with the grimace I'm not I'm not a nutritionist I'm not a health coach I don't do any work of this kind and I don't have the kind of academic background that this guy does so why didn't you take it on you know and this also is is part of the problem only a certain personality type in general gets on camera this guy wrote but I think he's highly intelligent and as I say highly qualified and what-have-you but he obviously doesn't have the combination of personality traits the mean one of which normally is seeking Fame but also sometimes just stupidity that gets people to come on camera and make fools of themselves and I don't know how fun and talk about their breakup with their girlfriend or boyfriend and do all the things that makes YouTube a lively and energetic place to be and of course I can sympathize I have no idea I'm applying for jobs right now I've been doing a lot of job interviews if you guys noticed there were a couple videos where I was wearing a suit on camera that was because I did a job interview by Skype immediately after I was sitting there waiting for the Skype interview and when I recorded that it's very possible that I would stop using YouTube for six months or a year depending on what the next job I get is I can completely understand you know professional real world reasons why people aren't coming on and talk about this stuff but even when I search for text-based articles I did really extensive google searching for any any comments on the beef ban any vegan response to that to what's going on in India in English of course and there is shockingly little I'm gonna provide two more links below this video just because et is really interesting if you look at these two links before that below this video I think you'll just even just glance at them you'll ask yourself the same questions I did which is just oh well this is something really interesting and really relevant that vegans ought to be talking about and we're not um so again I totally accept him what the majority is gonna do we do have to now question the silence of the minority to provide the other aspects of the discourse and I'll just add one point of disagreement with some of my biggest fans a lot of people write to me with the concern that meat eaters will judge vegans by the most high-profile people we've got many of whom are idiots and the way I've described many of whom are whatever good-looking and entertaining but fundamentally stupid and don't have a lot to say and what have you and I think we've got to get over that I think that's a real misconception if you think about it I mean it would be a false optic to say that African Americans have a huge problem because the most famous African Americans at any time are not intellectuals are not scientists are not even Paulette but our entertainers rappers singers athletes or what have you that is just a feature that applies to every ethnic group in every political faction I don't know who's the most famous Democrat who's the most famous Jew I mean Judaism is even though Judaism has famoust electrodes associated with it at any given time the most famous Jew is going to be somebody like Seinfeld it's not going to be an intellectual or a politically important figure and likewise I don't think it's a problem that the most famous and the most prominent voices for veganism may be people who are good looking but vapin people who are ought to know actors models athletes or what-have-you as I say my concern is not the shallowness of the majority it's the Silence of the minority