India's Beef Ban & Vegans in Power (Hypothetically Speaking).

hey what up I just made a long
reasonable video that takes 20 minutes and in this video I wanted to be brief and unreasonable and a little bit more action-packed to be blunt um what happens when vegans take over the government something all the world fears and you know I think actually we ourselves I think people who are a little bit thoughtful and reflective and philosophical about veganism we might be afraid of that scenario also we have a very interesting analogue a very interesting case study in India right now with the controversy surrounding the ban on beef and various sort of halfway bans on meat meat production slaughter of animals now if you read the American press on this it's completely hypocritical completely shallow in and sincere and the way Americans respond to this is by saying the only story here is of one religious group oppressing another this is just the tragedy of Hindus oppressing Muslims and there's absolutely no possibility the American imagination that the oppression of the cows could itself be an issue that the production of meat and milk might have other elements philosophical ethical and ecological aside from and in addition to the religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims although definitely the Hindu versus Muslim conflict is part of the story I had a lot of interest a few years ago in the debates in Sri Lanka Sri Lanka is a small country just south east of India where instead of Hinduism it's Buddhism that's the most popular religion they also have a significant Hindu population but in a majority rules circumstance the the Buddhists are the most powerful people in Parliament and there were real debates about whether or not Buddhists should try to minimize or make illegal completely the slaughter of cows the production of beef and there again there are interesting religious elements partly because Buddhists do eat and pee beef but they buy beef from non-buddhists slaughterhouses it is very common to hear Buddhists say things in that part of the world like don't worry the butcher is a Muslim ie the bad karma from killing this animal doesn't go to me and doesn't go to a fellow Buddhist instead goes to muscles so ok these are somewhat bizarre issues the the questions involved are can only imperfectly be applied from one cultural setting to another but still the questions are really worth thinking about when the Bolsheviks took over power in Russia 1917 give or take a few years there was a civil war there were a few other interruptions in there the Bolsheviks were not supported by the majority the population and if you don't nee look at the election results from the the elections of as I recalled November 1917 quite late in 1917 there were elections held in Russia Lenin didn't win the Bolsheviks didn't win a remarkably small percentage of people voted for the Bolsheviks but they seemed to somehow take over power and keep power anyway the Soviet Union was not known for having a tremendously fair or democratic system of government as you may have heard um but those elections proved it so you know it does happen from time to time in history that a majority a minority has the dynamism and organization to somehow take over government or have a significant control of government and it's not inconceivable people make the defensible claim that that Israel is about 7 percent vegan in the near future a place like Taiwan a place like Sri Lanka a place like India four totally different cultures Israel Taiwan Sri Lanka India these could have you know minorities of vegans who somehow get organized and take over the power of the state and start imposing the and others and in reading history as something very different from living through history in reading history it's always easy to feel sympathy for the oppressed party even if they're wrong even if they have blood on their hands even if they're terrible people in so many ways in reading about communism which I do a lot of at the University when the Communists are the ones being persecuted when it's the Communists who is living in a cave in the jungle sleeping with a gun under his pillow he has no electricity he's on the margins of society and he's being persecuted because of his beliefs it's very easy to sympathize with the the communist side when the Communists take over the government and start doing the persecuting when they start murdering millions of people then obviously he know your sympathy is instead with the people being persecuted the people being slaughtered I'm sorry sensed no exaggeration lately I've been reading them reading some first-person eyewitness accounts from the Russian Revolution of atrocities committed by the Communists and boy whew if you haven't already been scarred for life really studying that chapter of history will scar your life I'm not quite immune to the emotional effect that studying that type of history has on you but I've already worked on Cambodia China many other dramatic and extreme and revolutionary changes in the world's history but lately I've been learning some things about Russia that I did not know before and how Russia fits into this tree of Asia but I digress look I think it really is an interesting and genuinely provocative question ask what would happen or what will happen if vegans get a little piece of state power in any of these countries it certainly isn't gonna happen in Canada or in Germany or France in the next ten years because vegans are too tiny I might already there but in the history of the world for a well-organized highly motivated minority of 7% of the population to really get some traction can happen in a cultural context where either Hinduism or Buddhism magnifies the significance of veganism because people who are non vegan whom recognized this is something morally important that's really the effect Buddhism as Buddhism the vast majority of Buddhists do eat meat but still they recognize that abstaining from meat is important and they recognize that the production of meat is itself violent the that's a huge difference from the American journalists who write these ridiculous articles I'm gonna give you a link to a typical example below this video it's not the worst but it's just smarmy American attitude of O banning the production of beef in India this can't possibly have any legitimacy this is just about Hindus pushing around Muslims and there's there's nothing else there's no other substance story well what happens when vegans are the ones doing the pushing around it's it's hard for me to imagine that they'd want to take a sort of gradual halfway approach to stamping out say vivisection performed on primates it's hard for me to imagine they take a gradual or halfway approach to reducing the production of beef would vegans say let's try to reduce beef production by 50% or um would they actually try to basically burn down that sector of the economy overnight I just said I made a much longer video with a much much more reasonable humming and hawing but in this video I am just putting forward the question and saying that all of us can watch the peculiar contradictions of history that now unfold in places like India Taiwan possibly Israel and we can look in the mirror and look at our fellow vegans who show up at events and meetings and we can ask ourselves these difficult questions