Why I Quit Veganism: I Don't Want to Be a One Man Movement.
18 May 2020 [link youtube]
Politics begins and ends with groups of friends. #vegan #vegans #veganism
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this is a topic that I thought I had
already recorded a video on but you know I was really suffering with jet lag at the time in the last year in the last two years jet lag has been a huge factor in my life quitting caffeine repeatedly has been a huge factor in my life because I would drink coffee either to cope with jet lag or to just cope with some illnesses like the common cold I had that's known as made jetlag worse yeah I realized this is the least dramatic complaint about my life I got positive awful but yeah I watched the video I made after the fact and I hadn't really gotten the point across and in the same sense that I think every vegan has a video on their channel about why I became vegan how I first became vegan and a lot of people have a separate video about how I became a vegan activist this is really my video about how I became disillusioned with veganism what was for me the last straw and that last straw was when I attended a conference in Toronto Canada like I say I made a video discussing this but I think due to jet lag I sort of talked around the issue though speaking directly on the issue an issue is this went to this conference that brought together the best and the brightest from Canada and the northeastern part of the United States of America and they were not very good and they were not very bright admittedly I do to expect this met a lot of losers I've met a lot of people who were afraid of me people who were literally afraid to sit next to me or stand next to me people who were afraid to make eye contact with me there were also fans of my channel there there were some people who ran up to me and acted as if I were famous there were some people who walked up to me and in a mature and respectable tone said oh hey I know your YouTube channel I really appreciate you that happened also a lot of fear a lot of hostility but you know what really felt like the last straw for me was going to this conference and hearing all of the kind of pseudo-intellectual about the future of the movement all the abstract talk about how to make the movement better and then waking up one morning to discover that the participants at this conference had held a genuinely illegal in my opinion genuinely violent protest at a slaughterhouse it was a chicken processing plant and they had filmed it and they had uploaded it to Instagram later was uploaded to YouTube of course now this some quote-unquote action and you know there were all these pathetic human details the guy who was actually the manager of the plant sympathized with them and he ordered the workers not to obstruct them in any way he said look like he said in effect look I know you guys are right and are you guys are doing something well yeah so as it happened the guy in charge the factory he didn't want them to be beat up or kicked out or restrained or something which obviously the factory workers would have been within their rights to do and you know these same people including John sackers himself John sackers is a notorious youtuber as well as being a vegan activist I mean I just been spending time with them face to face I had a sense of their characters had a sense their personalities I had seen them I've spoken with them I'd smelled them and these people were idiots these people were cowards in the parlance of their time in the parlance of our time someone like John sackers in plain English is what you'd call a it's just just a pathetic cringing excuse for human being he's afraid to look you in the eye he's afraid to talk to you he goes to the dance party and he sits there curled up next to the fireplace and is afraid to get up and dance and all the attention he's so desperately seeking on YouTube when he's there in real life at a vegan conference or who knows where who he is you know he's this pathetic shell of a man and he's in that video you know storming into this chicken slaughterhouse whatever gonna say meat meat processing plant and he's one of the people who inserts himself in liquid concrete just to make it very difficult for the police and ambulance to show up and extricate them from this liquid concrete and they took wire cutters and you know tried to steal some chickens they try to cut through some cages and steal some kitchen some chickens inside they go to this conference and it's not just the absence of new ideas it's not just that a lot of people there fear me and I say fear rather than hate advisedly it's not just that I go to this conference and the one is seemingly new idea people were excited about by the way was the launch of extinction rebellion extinction rebellion that's now basically already ended but that was just before when extents your vote was of the way out way up and they they had this you know Skype conference with the founder of personal I talked to him briefly to I got to ask a question back and forth you know okay so there was kind of the naivete and stupidity on the one hand and then there's really this cynicism and insincerity where they put on the show and dance of questioning you know the strategy and the tactics of the future of the vegan movement how we can be better activists and all this stuff but when it really comes down to it what they are there for they being exactly the same people were in the room with me the same people who are in the room sitting through a lecture on trans rights and how veganism can be more accepting and encouraging of transgender people and all these kind of very specific topics that specific lectures I thought okay well you know when you're wrapped up with all that theoretical talk all that anyone wants to do is be a martyr for this movement get themselves thrown in prison break the law and very often kind of overturning exactly what had just been discussed in the classroom because it was held in a university campus with a chalkboard you know what people have just been talking about the extent to which getting yourself thrown in prison or criminalizing the movement is a bad strategy and tactic and all this stuff has been talked about I can I can discuss what I think about this what really made it feel like the last straw for me was how I felt about it it's just emotionally I had so much contempt for these people and it is a little bit different when you've been in the room with them you've seen them you smell them you've talked to them you've eaten vegan muffins with them or whatever is standing around of this vegan conference and then you see that video go up the next day you see what they're really doing you see what they're really trying to recruit people for right and I've got a Steve all of the intellectual pretensions of what was going on the vegan movement seemed to me won like a smoke screen because what they're really recruiting you for is this so-called direct action is the violent and illegal you know site of the movement and then to it it seemed like it was an insincere beard an insincere front for the purposes of fundraising all right um when I first came on YouTube I said very clearly I'm here to make friends one of the reasons I said that was that there were a lot of hostile militant vegans who would say to you sort of strange angry self-righteous way I'm not here to make friends like they would they would boast that they're not here to make friends are here to save the planet or they're here to liberate the animals they're here to achieve you know someone they don't they don't care how many enemies they make those same people of course turn out to be cowards they turn out to be namby-pamby they turned out to have no spying and no sense of purpose and resolve but that's kind of another story there was a lot of that kind of tough and I'd said it people oh you're not here to make friends well I am I am because when I look at the history of intellectual movements and political movements what I see again and again is they begin with people forming a soul they begin with five or twelve intellectuals who meet at a salon and drink coffee together talking about their ideas publishing a magazine publishing a journal publishing a book doing the research right and in so doing creating a crossroads for like-minded people with common objectives and common grounds to meet a mass and get organized in the pursuit of political change okay so I actually am here to make friends and I see friendship as a very necessary first phase before taking those other steps that can include things like publishing books right you think publishing books isn't radical I can name six books right now that completely transformed the world including the gospel of Jesus Christ a book I disagree with the book I despise I mean I also despise Karl Marx and a lot of these other people but you can't deny people wrote books that transform the world in a way that a street protest never can write writing books can be the most radical activity we can engage in of all purely empirical observation here I don't like Muhammad the Prophet either but the book Muhammad the Prophet wrote changed the whole world all right go through a long list here and you could even argue with someone like Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte who did become a dictator nevertheless what he wrote down on paper including writing a new law that Napoleonic Code but you could argue that his writing had even more influence than the battles he fought in the wars he won okay I said from my first appearance here on YouTube I am here to make friends I think that friends are an important part of intellectual life political organization and the future of the vegan movement one way or another is going to hobble forward on the basis of friendships between highly effective people who are highly motivated to get slim-fast and when I went to that event in Toronto it really felt I went to several events in Toronto truth be told vegan events and I thought wow there isn't even one person here not one person who would be my colleague not one person who would be my friend there is neither the beginning nor the ending of a salon of a movement of a publication there's absolutely no hope it's just me it's all on me and if I'm gonna be a one-man movement let me tell you something that movement is not gonna be called veganism
already recorded a video on but you know I was really suffering with jet lag at the time in the last year in the last two years jet lag has been a huge factor in my life quitting caffeine repeatedly has been a huge factor in my life because I would drink coffee either to cope with jet lag or to just cope with some illnesses like the common cold I had that's known as made jetlag worse yeah I realized this is the least dramatic complaint about my life I got positive awful but yeah I watched the video I made after the fact and I hadn't really gotten the point across and in the same sense that I think every vegan has a video on their channel about why I became vegan how I first became vegan and a lot of people have a separate video about how I became a vegan activist this is really my video about how I became disillusioned with veganism what was for me the last straw and that last straw was when I attended a conference in Toronto Canada like I say I made a video discussing this but I think due to jet lag I sort of talked around the issue though speaking directly on the issue an issue is this went to this conference that brought together the best and the brightest from Canada and the northeastern part of the United States of America and they were not very good and they were not very bright admittedly I do to expect this met a lot of losers I've met a lot of people who were afraid of me people who were literally afraid to sit next to me or stand next to me people who were afraid to make eye contact with me there were also fans of my channel there there were some people who ran up to me and acted as if I were famous there were some people who walked up to me and in a mature and respectable tone said oh hey I know your YouTube channel I really appreciate you that happened also a lot of fear a lot of hostility but you know what really felt like the last straw for me was going to this conference and hearing all of the kind of pseudo-intellectual about the future of the movement all the abstract talk about how to make the movement better and then waking up one morning to discover that the participants at this conference had held a genuinely illegal in my opinion genuinely violent protest at a slaughterhouse it was a chicken processing plant and they had filmed it and they had uploaded it to Instagram later was uploaded to YouTube of course now this some quote-unquote action and you know there were all these pathetic human details the guy who was actually the manager of the plant sympathized with them and he ordered the workers not to obstruct them in any way he said look like he said in effect look I know you guys are right and are you guys are doing something well yeah so as it happened the guy in charge the factory he didn't want them to be beat up or kicked out or restrained or something which obviously the factory workers would have been within their rights to do and you know these same people including John sackers himself John sackers is a notorious youtuber as well as being a vegan activist I mean I just been spending time with them face to face I had a sense of their characters had a sense their personalities I had seen them I've spoken with them I'd smelled them and these people were idiots these people were cowards in the parlance of their time in the parlance of our time someone like John sackers in plain English is what you'd call a it's just just a pathetic cringing excuse for human being he's afraid to look you in the eye he's afraid to talk to you he goes to the dance party and he sits there curled up next to the fireplace and is afraid to get up and dance and all the attention he's so desperately seeking on YouTube when he's there in real life at a vegan conference or who knows where who he is you know he's this pathetic shell of a man and he's in that video you know storming into this chicken slaughterhouse whatever gonna say meat meat processing plant and he's one of the people who inserts himself in liquid concrete just to make it very difficult for the police and ambulance to show up and extricate them from this liquid concrete and they took wire cutters and you know tried to steal some chickens they try to cut through some cages and steal some kitchen some chickens inside they go to this conference and it's not just the absence of new ideas it's not just that a lot of people there fear me and I say fear rather than hate advisedly it's not just that I go to this conference and the one is seemingly new idea people were excited about by the way was the launch of extinction rebellion extinction rebellion that's now basically already ended but that was just before when extents your vote was of the way out way up and they they had this you know Skype conference with the founder of personal I talked to him briefly to I got to ask a question back and forth you know okay so there was kind of the naivete and stupidity on the one hand and then there's really this cynicism and insincerity where they put on the show and dance of questioning you know the strategy and the tactics of the future of the vegan movement how we can be better activists and all this stuff but when it really comes down to it what they are there for they being exactly the same people were in the room with me the same people who are in the room sitting through a lecture on trans rights and how veganism can be more accepting and encouraging of transgender people and all these kind of very specific topics that specific lectures I thought okay well you know when you're wrapped up with all that theoretical talk all that anyone wants to do is be a martyr for this movement get themselves thrown in prison break the law and very often kind of overturning exactly what had just been discussed in the classroom because it was held in a university campus with a chalkboard you know what people have just been talking about the extent to which getting yourself thrown in prison or criminalizing the movement is a bad strategy and tactic and all this stuff has been talked about I can I can discuss what I think about this what really made it feel like the last straw for me was how I felt about it it's just emotionally I had so much contempt for these people and it is a little bit different when you've been in the room with them you've seen them you smell them you've talked to them you've eaten vegan muffins with them or whatever is standing around of this vegan conference and then you see that video go up the next day you see what they're really doing you see what they're really trying to recruit people for right and I've got a Steve all of the intellectual pretensions of what was going on the vegan movement seemed to me won like a smoke screen because what they're really recruiting you for is this so-called direct action is the violent and illegal you know site of the movement and then to it it seemed like it was an insincere beard an insincere front for the purposes of fundraising all right um when I first came on YouTube I said very clearly I'm here to make friends one of the reasons I said that was that there were a lot of hostile militant vegans who would say to you sort of strange angry self-righteous way I'm not here to make friends like they would they would boast that they're not here to make friends are here to save the planet or they're here to liberate the animals they're here to achieve you know someone they don't they don't care how many enemies they make those same people of course turn out to be cowards they turn out to be namby-pamby they turned out to have no spying and no sense of purpose and resolve but that's kind of another story there was a lot of that kind of tough and I'd said it people oh you're not here to make friends well I am I am because when I look at the history of intellectual movements and political movements what I see again and again is they begin with people forming a soul they begin with five or twelve intellectuals who meet at a salon and drink coffee together talking about their ideas publishing a magazine publishing a journal publishing a book doing the research right and in so doing creating a crossroads for like-minded people with common objectives and common grounds to meet a mass and get organized in the pursuit of political change okay so I actually am here to make friends and I see friendship as a very necessary first phase before taking those other steps that can include things like publishing books right you think publishing books isn't radical I can name six books right now that completely transformed the world including the gospel of Jesus Christ a book I disagree with the book I despise I mean I also despise Karl Marx and a lot of these other people but you can't deny people wrote books that transform the world in a way that a street protest never can write writing books can be the most radical activity we can engage in of all purely empirical observation here I don't like Muhammad the Prophet either but the book Muhammad the Prophet wrote changed the whole world all right go through a long list here and you could even argue with someone like Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte who did become a dictator nevertheless what he wrote down on paper including writing a new law that Napoleonic Code but you could argue that his writing had even more influence than the battles he fought in the wars he won okay I said from my first appearance here on YouTube I am here to make friends I think that friends are an important part of intellectual life political organization and the future of the vegan movement one way or another is going to hobble forward on the basis of friendships between highly effective people who are highly motivated to get slim-fast and when I went to that event in Toronto it really felt I went to several events in Toronto truth be told vegan events and I thought wow there isn't even one person here not one person who would be my colleague not one person who would be my friend there is neither the beginning nor the ending of a salon of a movement of a publication there's absolutely no hope it's just me it's all on me and if I'm gonna be a one-man movement let me tell you something that movement is not gonna be called veganism