Violence and Veganism: The Slippery Slope.
10 November 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey guys this is not a video about a
logical fallacy there's it seems to me like the Internet has really encouraged people to indulge in insulting and reviling one another by invoking logical fallacies people want to shut down each other's arguments people want to laugh in other people's faces by saying oh no that's a blank fallacy actually you know sometimes you need to have a somewhat more quiet and relaxed and respectful attitude when your fellow human beings slip into fallacious modes of thinking and sometimes you know something that's technically a fallacy actually does contribute to the conversation or contribute to the debate in a meaningful way because maybe even though they're telling you something in a fallacious way maybe they're still sharing meaningful information or sharing the wrong perspective or explaining their own bias one of the many fallacies that people like to complain about sometimes in a shallow and cathy way centers in a sincere way is the slippery slope fallacy so one of my reasons for making this video in the way I am there was a comment months and months ago on YouTube little one sentence comment from Olivia B shadow to Olivia if you still watch the channel months later Olivia said izel loves the slippery slope theory more than he loves talking about the Green Party and when she says talking about the Green Party what she really means of course is complaining about the Green Party I have many videos in which I complained that I really disliked the Green Party of Canada I'd like to thank all vegans do or most of you kids do because the green party candidate is terrible for veganism they support the meat and dairy industry blah blah blah don't get me started but anyway real slippery slope fallacies do exist in life if a politician stands up at a podium and says gay-rights should be opposed gay marriage should be prevented because allowing gay rights would lead to a situation in which three men could marry one woman or three women could marry one man that is a slippery slope argument that is a genuinely fallacious argument that's not the way the world works right you pass a law you know if you have a law that allows people to carry a pistol in some countries you can solution that doesn't mean that in the future people will be able to carry grenades it doesn't mean that in the future people will be able to own airplanes or artillery guns or tanks it doesn't that that's a real that's genuine slippery slope reasoning that's a really fallacious way to think much more often though I see people using this word in this concept of slippery slope where it doesn't really apply so one example of this in earlier videos I really cautioned my fellow vegans against engaging in violence of any kind even seemingly small and harmless forms of violence so when a natural vegan denounced Sorcha murabba as an extremist you can see I made a video on that ludacris what what an attribute that I said no let's really talk about extremism let's really talk about the problem the unit some animal rights have had historically in the recent past with violent protests with radicals radicals and I talked through one especially moving example of a guy and you saw that earlier on in his career he was engaged in seemingly trivial forms of violence forms of violence you could laugh at for as well as you didn't have take too seriously he and some other animal rights activists broke into a conference of scientists and they hated these scientists because some of them did experiments and animals and they smashed up a bunch of bottles of I forget now if it was wine or champagne let's say it's champagne it was expensive champagne or something so these scientists at this conference had their champagne bottle smashed by some animal rights activists that's a ok but I warned the video said yeah sounds cute now just wait to see what this video is going and the same guy who I discuss in the video he later went on to put bombs in four shops shops selling fur coats to engage in you know violent activism that has real victims not just your crimes against property and you know i think it was in response to this kind of thing that a libya made this comment saying hey you know ISIL is always invoking the slippery slope fallacy okay that's not a slippery slope LC and i think it's actually worth thinking through in a somewhat philosophic fist gateway what i really am saying and what i really am warning you about and the two the two examples of used really can be contrasted when the politician makes that claimable gay rights it's a slippery slope fallacy because that's not the way legislation works okay when i make this claim about violence having an effect on how your organization itself works is not a slippery slope fallacy I'm warning you another one of the warnings of given vegans repeatedly was look at the IRA within the IRA is silly sir the IRA for those who don't know in the history of ireland the ra was and still is a radical violent group trying to achieve political independence violence they're basically an anti british group okay and whenever you read accounts of people who live with the IRA for many years or see interviews with them very often i shouldn't say always very often they reflect that they lived their lives in fear not of their enemy they lived their lives in fear of other people within the organization purges and infighting and allegations and rumors you know everyone was afraid that someone else might secretly be a snitch someone else might secretly be a turncoat fear of betrayal and reprisal the violence within the organization kept people living in fear right fear for themselves fear for their families etc etc so the type of violence within the IRA this is a warning not a slippery slope fallacy saying look how does your organization change when people can't trust each other in this way how does your organization change when you've closed the door to the possibility of going to City Hall of doing fundraising lawyer of engaging in real open democratic advocacy when you've closed all those doors because you've opened the door to violence things change things change for how you have friendships with other activists within your organization maybe it doesn't become as bad as the IRA but still I mean I new vegans in Canada who were proudly engaging in you know cute forms of violence seemingly trivial forms of violence destroying property destroying cages destroying traps um going out and trying to stop okay you know this you think this is cute now what happens when the police shake down one of your members and then other people wonder did here at me out even if it's so cold trivial so-called cute violence you went and smashed up a bunch of cages used by a wildlife control it's a real example I know about can you think that's cute now the government comes to you and says hey those cages you destroyed were worth more than ten thousand dollars so it's a serious crime it falls into this category we caught one of you now we're going to ask now we're going to look into your whole organization now we've got all your emails now we're asking people to write each other out I understand completely why you would think of this in terms of its slippery so fallacy but for me there are procedural changes in what the activism itself is activism is such a vague term right when you've abandoned a set of legitimate Democratic methods and you've embraced what I consider illegitimate but violence and illegal methods it changes who you are it changes how you and your friends relate to one another it changes the type of trust and distrust within your organization and it changes what you mean by by activism itself this vague term right there's another angle is that which is psychological right the first example of the let's say homophobic politician the politician is opposed to gay rights bureaucracy has no soul bureaucracy has no psyche you can pass a law that makes one type of gun illegal and type II illegal hilariously in many parts United States to have a sawed-off shotgun is completely illegal and it's considered a weapon of mass destruction but in Canada it's not so people in states about that is a very serious criminal charge they possess a weapon of mass destruction because they have an illegally modified shotgun it think it varies from state to state but in Canada the same kind of shocked a snubnose shotgun is permitted bureaucracy has no soul bureaucracy can live with contradictions bureaucracy again so the way slippery slope applies to it's very different human beings you know you can look at you can sit down and plan what are we going to do in the next five years are we going to open and operate a vegan hot dog stand are we going to open and operate a vegan pancake restaurant are we going to open and operate a vegan political charity where we raise money and use that money um you know to to advocate certain causes and government to bring a certain mr. City Hall etc and you can anticipate how that's going to change you how the work is going to change you any project like that people ask you for advice all the time lose one guy who was planning to go back to university get a degree in law and become try to become some kind of animal rights lawyer and I talked to him about it you have to think about not just how your circumstances will change you have to think about how this process will change you because when you go i remember he said he said of himself may be boastful he didn't care about the money at all he said well as long as he has enough money to pay rent he's happy so you feel that way now after you've gone through the misery of law school and an articling to become a lawyer which is a form of internship you go through the law school you go through the internship process ten years from now you might find that you care a lot about the money you might find that having gone through that denigrating boring exhausting process that you say I've been living in poverty and doing this meaningless denigrating grinding exhausting work for so many years now I've got to get paid enough to justify the misery I've gone through in school in the internship and probably having some low level jobs in the law soon thereafter okay your suffering will change you and I mean some people are freed up with the way I use the word suffering yes I do actually consider the type of experience you go through in law school suffering i think i think there's no cynicism ole people really do suffer going through that process for years and years go to law school is not it's not permanent vacation it's not a vacation of course the type of suffering is different from being tortured or what have you you can talk about that you can meet other people who've been through law school but the real lesson I won't draw your attention to here is that suffering will change you not just in ways you can anticipate but in ways that you cannot anticipate and I've seen that again and again in the study of politics in the study of extreme politics to cut to the chase what I in university before September 11 2001 perforce number 11 I studied politics in the Muslim world and you saw all the time there would be guys who at one stage of the career will relatively moderate relatively pragmatic and then they got snatched off the street put into a ghost house tortured and when they came out their perspective on the world was different their perspective on politics was different to say they had been radicalized maybe gives radicalism a bad name so that again in the gap mr. again with communism the type of repression the type of violent experience many communists injured maybe at the start of the process maybe when they first became ideological communists they weren't down to engage in house-to-house searches murdering babies with bayonets literally murdering babies but they go through a process and by the end of that suffering has changed them and they're completely down to murder babies for the cause in my essay is a good essay about communism and the far east of russia so this is the part of russia politically that really is in asia so they did have russian people there but they had korean people and japanese people and chinese people is very and that indigenous ethnic minority people is is really the russian empire but in east asia and you know when the Lennon has got there when the Bolsheviks got there when the Russian communists got there well they were marching to this town they were giving instructions to the guys hey you know and we get to the next town we're not just killing adult men or not just killing women and children were even killing you know babies and one of the justifications given for this was because children consume too much milk and the milk would be needed for the communist soldiers who had broken bones so this is the old-fashioned supernatural belief that somehow cow milk helps you repair you know broken bones unlike us vegans at SA has some dark dark material in it from human nature it's not a slippery slope the role of violence the role of suffering in general because I mean the example of law school is completely nonviolent but they're still suffering and I've seen that I've seen that with people with PhDs and I made all kinds of degrees maybe if it's even just having to flatter a professor who you have contempt for having to cope with a bureaucracy that you feel too humanizes you doing work that you find denigrating over years and years yeah there can be real suffering and again doesn't necessarily make people bitter but it changes people in ways they can't anticipate themselves I've been through a lot of acute suffering in my life physical psychological and otherwise I can tell you there is absolutely no way I could have anticipated how separation from my daughter would change me I may still be figuring out now how that separation of my daughter change me the type of suffering I went through in going from spending 24 hours a day seven days a week with my daughter you know from her birth through the first year of her infancy to suddenly not seeing her at all suffering is tremendous and some of it is on a very deep instinctual level and you know again even though it may sound like a very abstract form of suffering I can definitely say the type of suffering I went through in bureaucratic situations or no one's hurting me impacted me more and change me more than some really direct forms of suffering like you know extreme illness or broken bones or you know having my life threatened having someone try to kill me with a machete and this stuff didn't really I'd maybe I'm unusual that stuff did not impact me a lot and you know i'd say this actually links back to racism in a dynamic way um you know I really do appreciate and some someone white people can't I really do appreciate how the type of suffering a black person might feel when bureaucracy treats them in a denigrating way even if it's subtle in coping with a white bureaucracy that's biased against them in coping with police officers or any kind of bureaucratic situation there can be very subtle the profound effect on people which again like being a law student in law school or what have you and what I'm talking about the suffering changing it doesn't have to be something as blunt as as broken bones you know and it can be over a long period of time that way um so you know my warning against against violence my you know long-standing argument that vegans have to appreciate the importance of genuinely democratic genuinely opened I think you know of these few people yeah to openly advocate for violence of any kind you know I've talked about this in the channel before some people say violence but they only endorse violence against property not violence against people that's going to have a measure blah blah blah if you think the level of hostility and backstabbing and suspicion and hatred that we have within veganism now is bad I can imagine it getting worse I think when you mix terrorism in to what's already a bad situation I can imagine getting worse but I've studied political history I can imagine veganism being less like a high school prom and more like the IRA and I want to stop that from happening but I know that there are people have met and spoke to people who want veganism to move towards violence or they personally want to join groups that use violence precisely because they feel that violence will discipline their fellow vegans that violence will bring a form of seriousness and earnestness to the movement or to their their group their cell within the movement they want the secrecy and seriousness and self-discipline that violence will bring that the fear of state repression will bring they want the simplicity and clarity of purpose that hostility towards the government will bring whether they're in England or in the United States or Canada I understand that emotionally and intellectually I understand that but I'm here to tell you sincerely that you're wrong and you're not just wrong because getting on that path will put you in a cage will put you in prison you're wrong in your means in your motives in the ends that you're going the Warrens you're wrong in the way that you're going to transform the activist group you're a part of the type of hostility suspicion etc have already described and you're wrong because you don't know how suffering will change you you don't you think you're not a killer but you could be you could become one you think you're someone who won't rat out your friend to the cops but you could be you could become that person or you think you wouldn't kill someone who is currently a friend because they ratted you out to the cops or they ratted out another member of your activist group to the cops but you could be you don't know how suffering will change you that's not a slippery slope argument
logical fallacy there's it seems to me like the Internet has really encouraged people to indulge in insulting and reviling one another by invoking logical fallacies people want to shut down each other's arguments people want to laugh in other people's faces by saying oh no that's a blank fallacy actually you know sometimes you need to have a somewhat more quiet and relaxed and respectful attitude when your fellow human beings slip into fallacious modes of thinking and sometimes you know something that's technically a fallacy actually does contribute to the conversation or contribute to the debate in a meaningful way because maybe even though they're telling you something in a fallacious way maybe they're still sharing meaningful information or sharing the wrong perspective or explaining their own bias one of the many fallacies that people like to complain about sometimes in a shallow and cathy way centers in a sincere way is the slippery slope fallacy so one of my reasons for making this video in the way I am there was a comment months and months ago on YouTube little one sentence comment from Olivia B shadow to Olivia if you still watch the channel months later Olivia said izel loves the slippery slope theory more than he loves talking about the Green Party and when she says talking about the Green Party what she really means of course is complaining about the Green Party I have many videos in which I complained that I really disliked the Green Party of Canada I'd like to thank all vegans do or most of you kids do because the green party candidate is terrible for veganism they support the meat and dairy industry blah blah blah don't get me started but anyway real slippery slope fallacies do exist in life if a politician stands up at a podium and says gay-rights should be opposed gay marriage should be prevented because allowing gay rights would lead to a situation in which three men could marry one woman or three women could marry one man that is a slippery slope argument that is a genuinely fallacious argument that's not the way the world works right you pass a law you know if you have a law that allows people to carry a pistol in some countries you can solution that doesn't mean that in the future people will be able to carry grenades it doesn't mean that in the future people will be able to own airplanes or artillery guns or tanks it doesn't that that's a real that's genuine slippery slope reasoning that's a really fallacious way to think much more often though I see people using this word in this concept of slippery slope where it doesn't really apply so one example of this in earlier videos I really cautioned my fellow vegans against engaging in violence of any kind even seemingly small and harmless forms of violence so when a natural vegan denounced Sorcha murabba as an extremist you can see I made a video on that ludacris what what an attribute that I said no let's really talk about extremism let's really talk about the problem the unit some animal rights have had historically in the recent past with violent protests with radicals radicals and I talked through one especially moving example of a guy and you saw that earlier on in his career he was engaged in seemingly trivial forms of violence forms of violence you could laugh at for as well as you didn't have take too seriously he and some other animal rights activists broke into a conference of scientists and they hated these scientists because some of them did experiments and animals and they smashed up a bunch of bottles of I forget now if it was wine or champagne let's say it's champagne it was expensive champagne or something so these scientists at this conference had their champagne bottle smashed by some animal rights activists that's a ok but I warned the video said yeah sounds cute now just wait to see what this video is going and the same guy who I discuss in the video he later went on to put bombs in four shops shops selling fur coats to engage in you know violent activism that has real victims not just your crimes against property and you know i think it was in response to this kind of thing that a libya made this comment saying hey you know ISIL is always invoking the slippery slope fallacy okay that's not a slippery slope LC and i think it's actually worth thinking through in a somewhat philosophic fist gateway what i really am saying and what i really am warning you about and the two the two examples of used really can be contrasted when the politician makes that claimable gay rights it's a slippery slope fallacy because that's not the way legislation works okay when i make this claim about violence having an effect on how your organization itself works is not a slippery slope fallacy I'm warning you another one of the warnings of given vegans repeatedly was look at the IRA within the IRA is silly sir the IRA for those who don't know in the history of ireland the ra was and still is a radical violent group trying to achieve political independence violence they're basically an anti british group okay and whenever you read accounts of people who live with the IRA for many years or see interviews with them very often i shouldn't say always very often they reflect that they lived their lives in fear not of their enemy they lived their lives in fear of other people within the organization purges and infighting and allegations and rumors you know everyone was afraid that someone else might secretly be a snitch someone else might secretly be a turncoat fear of betrayal and reprisal the violence within the organization kept people living in fear right fear for themselves fear for their families etc etc so the type of violence within the IRA this is a warning not a slippery slope fallacy saying look how does your organization change when people can't trust each other in this way how does your organization change when you've closed the door to the possibility of going to City Hall of doing fundraising lawyer of engaging in real open democratic advocacy when you've closed all those doors because you've opened the door to violence things change things change for how you have friendships with other activists within your organization maybe it doesn't become as bad as the IRA but still I mean I new vegans in Canada who were proudly engaging in you know cute forms of violence seemingly trivial forms of violence destroying property destroying cages destroying traps um going out and trying to stop okay you know this you think this is cute now what happens when the police shake down one of your members and then other people wonder did here at me out even if it's so cold trivial so-called cute violence you went and smashed up a bunch of cages used by a wildlife control it's a real example I know about can you think that's cute now the government comes to you and says hey those cages you destroyed were worth more than ten thousand dollars so it's a serious crime it falls into this category we caught one of you now we're going to ask now we're going to look into your whole organization now we've got all your emails now we're asking people to write each other out I understand completely why you would think of this in terms of its slippery so fallacy but for me there are procedural changes in what the activism itself is activism is such a vague term right when you've abandoned a set of legitimate Democratic methods and you've embraced what I consider illegitimate but violence and illegal methods it changes who you are it changes how you and your friends relate to one another it changes the type of trust and distrust within your organization and it changes what you mean by by activism itself this vague term right there's another angle is that which is psychological right the first example of the let's say homophobic politician the politician is opposed to gay rights bureaucracy has no soul bureaucracy has no psyche you can pass a law that makes one type of gun illegal and type II illegal hilariously in many parts United States to have a sawed-off shotgun is completely illegal and it's considered a weapon of mass destruction but in Canada it's not so people in states about that is a very serious criminal charge they possess a weapon of mass destruction because they have an illegally modified shotgun it think it varies from state to state but in Canada the same kind of shocked a snubnose shotgun is permitted bureaucracy has no soul bureaucracy can live with contradictions bureaucracy again so the way slippery slope applies to it's very different human beings you know you can look at you can sit down and plan what are we going to do in the next five years are we going to open and operate a vegan hot dog stand are we going to open and operate a vegan pancake restaurant are we going to open and operate a vegan political charity where we raise money and use that money um you know to to advocate certain causes and government to bring a certain mr. City Hall etc and you can anticipate how that's going to change you how the work is going to change you any project like that people ask you for advice all the time lose one guy who was planning to go back to university get a degree in law and become try to become some kind of animal rights lawyer and I talked to him about it you have to think about not just how your circumstances will change you have to think about how this process will change you because when you go i remember he said he said of himself may be boastful he didn't care about the money at all he said well as long as he has enough money to pay rent he's happy so you feel that way now after you've gone through the misery of law school and an articling to become a lawyer which is a form of internship you go through the law school you go through the internship process ten years from now you might find that you care a lot about the money you might find that having gone through that denigrating boring exhausting process that you say I've been living in poverty and doing this meaningless denigrating grinding exhausting work for so many years now I've got to get paid enough to justify the misery I've gone through in school in the internship and probably having some low level jobs in the law soon thereafter okay your suffering will change you and I mean some people are freed up with the way I use the word suffering yes I do actually consider the type of experience you go through in law school suffering i think i think there's no cynicism ole people really do suffer going through that process for years and years go to law school is not it's not permanent vacation it's not a vacation of course the type of suffering is different from being tortured or what have you you can talk about that you can meet other people who've been through law school but the real lesson I won't draw your attention to here is that suffering will change you not just in ways you can anticipate but in ways that you cannot anticipate and I've seen that again and again in the study of politics in the study of extreme politics to cut to the chase what I in university before September 11 2001 perforce number 11 I studied politics in the Muslim world and you saw all the time there would be guys who at one stage of the career will relatively moderate relatively pragmatic and then they got snatched off the street put into a ghost house tortured and when they came out their perspective on the world was different their perspective on politics was different to say they had been radicalized maybe gives radicalism a bad name so that again in the gap mr. again with communism the type of repression the type of violent experience many communists injured maybe at the start of the process maybe when they first became ideological communists they weren't down to engage in house-to-house searches murdering babies with bayonets literally murdering babies but they go through a process and by the end of that suffering has changed them and they're completely down to murder babies for the cause in my essay is a good essay about communism and the far east of russia so this is the part of russia politically that really is in asia so they did have russian people there but they had korean people and japanese people and chinese people is very and that indigenous ethnic minority people is is really the russian empire but in east asia and you know when the Lennon has got there when the Bolsheviks got there when the Russian communists got there well they were marching to this town they were giving instructions to the guys hey you know and we get to the next town we're not just killing adult men or not just killing women and children were even killing you know babies and one of the justifications given for this was because children consume too much milk and the milk would be needed for the communist soldiers who had broken bones so this is the old-fashioned supernatural belief that somehow cow milk helps you repair you know broken bones unlike us vegans at SA has some dark dark material in it from human nature it's not a slippery slope the role of violence the role of suffering in general because I mean the example of law school is completely nonviolent but they're still suffering and I've seen that I've seen that with people with PhDs and I made all kinds of degrees maybe if it's even just having to flatter a professor who you have contempt for having to cope with a bureaucracy that you feel too humanizes you doing work that you find denigrating over years and years yeah there can be real suffering and again doesn't necessarily make people bitter but it changes people in ways they can't anticipate themselves I've been through a lot of acute suffering in my life physical psychological and otherwise I can tell you there is absolutely no way I could have anticipated how separation from my daughter would change me I may still be figuring out now how that separation of my daughter change me the type of suffering I went through in going from spending 24 hours a day seven days a week with my daughter you know from her birth through the first year of her infancy to suddenly not seeing her at all suffering is tremendous and some of it is on a very deep instinctual level and you know again even though it may sound like a very abstract form of suffering I can definitely say the type of suffering I went through in bureaucratic situations or no one's hurting me impacted me more and change me more than some really direct forms of suffering like you know extreme illness or broken bones or you know having my life threatened having someone try to kill me with a machete and this stuff didn't really I'd maybe I'm unusual that stuff did not impact me a lot and you know i'd say this actually links back to racism in a dynamic way um you know I really do appreciate and some someone white people can't I really do appreciate how the type of suffering a black person might feel when bureaucracy treats them in a denigrating way even if it's subtle in coping with a white bureaucracy that's biased against them in coping with police officers or any kind of bureaucratic situation there can be very subtle the profound effect on people which again like being a law student in law school or what have you and what I'm talking about the suffering changing it doesn't have to be something as blunt as as broken bones you know and it can be over a long period of time that way um so you know my warning against against violence my you know long-standing argument that vegans have to appreciate the importance of genuinely democratic genuinely opened I think you know of these few people yeah to openly advocate for violence of any kind you know I've talked about this in the channel before some people say violence but they only endorse violence against property not violence against people that's going to have a measure blah blah blah if you think the level of hostility and backstabbing and suspicion and hatred that we have within veganism now is bad I can imagine it getting worse I think when you mix terrorism in to what's already a bad situation I can imagine getting worse but I've studied political history I can imagine veganism being less like a high school prom and more like the IRA and I want to stop that from happening but I know that there are people have met and spoke to people who want veganism to move towards violence or they personally want to join groups that use violence precisely because they feel that violence will discipline their fellow vegans that violence will bring a form of seriousness and earnestness to the movement or to their their group their cell within the movement they want the secrecy and seriousness and self-discipline that violence will bring that the fear of state repression will bring they want the simplicity and clarity of purpose that hostility towards the government will bring whether they're in England or in the United States or Canada I understand that emotionally and intellectually I understand that but I'm here to tell you sincerely that you're wrong and you're not just wrong because getting on that path will put you in a cage will put you in prison you're wrong in your means in your motives in the ends that you're going the Warrens you're wrong in the way that you're going to transform the activist group you're a part of the type of hostility suspicion etc have already described and you're wrong because you don't know how suffering will change you you don't you think you're not a killer but you could be you could become one you think you're someone who won't rat out your friend to the cops but you could be you could become that person or you think you wouldn't kill someone who is currently a friend because they ratted you out to the cops or they ratted out another member of your activist group to the cops but you could be you don't know how suffering will change you that's not a slippery slope argument