Anti-Left-Wing Dialogue vs. "Perspective Philosophy".

so look i just want to start by saying
the kind of most generous thing i can say to the other side here which is that i completely recognize that a lot of people on the left are trying to make the world a better place and that they get involved with communism and marxism you know with with positive intentions and sorry i was just going to say you know very often when i'm dealing with conservatives or right wingers i can't say that for them where it's like look what motivated you to get involved in politics what are you trying to do like it's it's not universal um i'd also say you know i have a background dealing with um uh buddhist philosophy and buddhist politics a lot of those people do not have good intentions so i can definitely say that when i'm dealing with the far left wing i am very often dealing with people who have positive intentions and want to make the world a better place however you know i do think that you know the legacy of marxism for example is very fundamentally flawed and bad and wrong and when i talk to younger people sometimes older people but now forty two but i started people in their fifties and sixties about this stuff you know um when they ask for advice about reading marks or getting familiar with that i don't tell them not to read this stuff or to slam the door on it but i give them a lot of caution like look if this is the research you're going to be doing here are the issues you're going to be encountering here's the type of dishonesty and misleading material written into the text about a year and a half ago my girlfriend got interested in studying karl marx in his legacy and we did that it was like a university course i gave her this whole background on it and we started going through a communist manifesto in des capital and talking about its place in history so you know my my my position or my perspective relative to that history is not of a kind of ignorant outsider uh throwing stones at it you know i'm someone who appreciates the good and the bad of it but now in the year 2020 things being what they are obviously what i have to say about it is a lot more uh cautionary than encouraging so you know a lot of things are like that and but again that that first concession i made is not insignificant most people who get involved with this they do have some kind of good intentions which is worth the opposite side remembering well like uh to be fair on you like there's also uh people who have not only just like have bad intentions and all like power hungry like stella is kind of like state communists and looking to like take what it can from others and but then there's also the people who are even like well-intentioned but they're so misled and down this kind of um you know and you know vanguard thinking that they dismiss the rationality of others around them and seek to you know overthrow this you know invisible enemy you know this ideological threat that is capitalism and that like it goes to their heads and then ultimately they become these like despotic kind of cruel evil human beings without even realizing it because that you know capitalism has tainted everyone else you know they've become like so ideologically you know embedded within this like um sort of like dogmatic view that they become like nasty horrible human beings without even realizing it i do appreciate that and i think that the horrors of the 20th century have taught us that you know like being like you know the road to hell can be paid with good intentions it's like i have no doubt that in many cases like you know like lenin's philosophy in many ways he was an idealist hoping for like you know this football stage communism in a communist environment which is very much like star trek or something um um sorry someone was that's thomas and essentially um he was an idealist in that respect but ultimately like the regime that he publicated was cruel and unusual it was it was wrong um especially when you see what stalinism went and did right so so look i think there's a really good segue there so what i was wanting to ask you because so criminal but i believe you just identify as a socialist you don't describe yourself as a communist right like you're a kind of intermediate positioner okay so right so i mean the question i was going to put to you is about democracy in a pragmatic sense because i think it puts these other issues into a useful it calibrates all these other issues we're talking about now lenin is a guy who lost an election they had elections in 1917 in russia and he lost and he decided to hunt down and murder all of the members of the winning parties and all the members of parliament right so that's what's called the the russian civil war period now i you've just said some you've just said some positions and i'm not saying this to insult you it's quite possible you've never read about that history that's not the most right but i mean but very fundamentally like when you talk about democracy you know like i could ask you well do you think the people who won the election should have formed the government instead of lenin and i'll let you know the the party that won the election they were called the socialist revolutionary party so they were far to the left but they were not as insane as the bolsheviks so if they had been allowed to rule they would have had a democratic but very left-wing government in power probably a government you would have more in common with than you have in common with london or stalin so this puts it in a very pragmatic context like what you know what what does democracy mean to you and what does socialism watch as would be like communism i would i got you know richard wolff uh he's quite a popular figure in like socialism at the minute and and the what he points socialism to be and then again the way that he's like we've learned from our mistakes and we've learned from the problems of the last century and what we talk about is the democratization of the workplace as well as the political environment and that's where i would say that i rely upon it okay okay but let's okay but but let's keep this kind of uh tangible in its simplicity if you value democracies you just said then morally and politically you must oppose lenin and what lenin did like you must look back on history before right yeah okay okay good you gave a relatively positive statement about that and before which i wouldn't do i wouldn't say you know i wouldn't say anything positive with that about that i think i think you've got to like take lenin like as what lenin was and i do think that again like i say i do not agree with i don't even agree with revolutionary politics i do not see revolution that has it as a way of taking control and power of a state i see this but what i do is think about reynolds lenin's writing and like trotsky's writing is like their overall arcing goals and what they wanted was idealistic and uh what they wanted to do what they saw was like impeding obviously this um overall like what they saw as the best state for the individual was obviously capitalism and they were seeking any way in shape or form of seizing power and opposing um the the capitalist regimes which were causing issues causing issues with within the 20th century but i think that like don't get me wrong like i think lenin was a bad guy and i just think that he's ideal like his overall goal in terms of what he was never anywhere near he's disgusting pragmatism of how he you know sees control and uh you know exercise power and authority ruthlessly against even his own people and it's repugnant but his overall arcing like ends of his um you know communism quote unquote were actually somewhat decent that he just were never going to happen within the way he was approaching politics oh okay so you know i wouldn't agree with any of that but the the type the type of excuse you're making for lenin now i don't excuse you but look it is you're really giving them a lot of possibilities but i don't let me just suggest you it's a useful pragmatic real world comparison i don't think you would make any of those excuses for the government of japan from 1910 through to the end of world war ii and those excuses you've used made for land they're much more true of the government of japan to talk about it as an idealistic thing you know what what japan was trying to do in that period and of course japan was also much more successful japan did not produce the kind of unbelievable dystopia that leninism produced and japan never i mean as repressive as japanese fascism was however you want to describe that regime the air sats mix of japanese shintoism and emperor warship and they did have a parliament they did have some democracy by the way in japan in that period limited democracy you might say but no they did they they kept electing the diet they kept having newspapers that had the freedom to criticize the government there were many important features of democracy you could say even in the so-called uh fascist authoritarian period in japan i i wouldn't make these kinds of excuses for japan in that period either but i'm pointing out once you've adopted that excuse-making mentality of saying and you know i i understand you're being sincere i appreciate you saying that you sympathize with the ideals and objectives of lenin and then you're willing to rationalize this other stuff in that context well it would make way more sense for you to be a japanese fascist both in reference to what happened historically no but and in reference to what the present day situation is right the the present-day result of what lenin did is vladimir putin's regime in russia and you don't want to live there right and the person but it's but it's a sincere argument i mean you may say that's a bad argument i know you come out of a kind of textbook university uh philosophy background but i mean this is real life like we have to make decisions no i'm sorry but i mean this in a shallow real life sense of like ultimately you have to decide would you rather live in russia or italy or japan like these are the kinds of shallow decisions that matter the types of compromises you make like are you willing to come on the internet and say something positive about lenin or say something positive about the history of japanese imperialism those are like it may be shallow but that's the reality of how we live with politics right so i i just say it's partly sharp one for example i wouldn't defend like um i'm not defending lennon's pride like when i say like i was going to talk about lennon's disgusting pragmatism i mean his actions i mean that the way that lenin actually behaved i think was actually counter to to the ideals that he seemed to profess within his writing even like when he talked about the excuse me the end goal of communism and a lot of that was stolen obviously from marx and and they kind of propped up in like this kind of idealistic thinking but then you've got like obviously i was just telling the audience i'm reading like terrorism and communism uh with trotsky and like the reality is is that like people don't like to talk about how trotsky was actually kind of a bad guy right right right i understand why why do you put yourself in this conflicted position so like i think you would agree like it's not contentious in our culture in 2020 but it could be i think you would agree that the japanese imperial period had both good and bad right now we could digress into naming it off right you know like for among other things it was a period of modernization and as there's and it produced japan as we have today and it was japan being ruled by an elected government the diet there were elements of democracy and freedom of speech so we've alluded to some of this right like it wasn't all bad japanese imperialism and that's part of why japan is this today is not all bad so you could take a conflicted view of that and say i see both the good and the bad in japanese imperial history why why but why why do this with lenin given what you said for me sorry just to finish the pillars given what you said about lenin and leninism why wouldn't your position just be this is bad and wrong and regrettable you know like why put yourself in positions like forms of fascism and another like politically repugnant regime i would never want to mimic them but i would say like you can you know like take for example naughty journey as disgusting as it was had a welfare state uh to some degree and i i agree with the concept of a welfare state i just don't agree with the gutting of the jews you know what i mean and like obviously i'm not cherry-picking parts of that state because i would never want to replicate aspects of that state because it was it was vile disgusting and obviously one of the greatest atrocities that i've ever faced humanity and i i would never be apologetic towards seeing that and even saying that about the ussr i do think that the ussr was a disgusting regime in the first place but then even associating those uh regimes like we've got to remember that all of these regimes would be like what we've been discussing so far have been totalitarian and obviously the type of socialist or communist that you you talk to they may not be totalitarian so for example i'm an anarchist i don't even believe in i don't even believe in the kind of democracy that we have i think the kind of democracy we have is is uh shallow and it's uh you just said you approve of a social welfare state though but go on i'm sorry but you just said that come on so you want anarchy but with a social welfare state okay well that's a pretty big conversation with your thoughts okay like an educated uh an educated population willing to engage in mutual uh cooperation and i think that's what real democracy and anarchy would look like i think the the real goal of like socialism i think like in its truest most pure form is um almost uh it's a a massive long shot away from what we even talk about today it's about an educated population willing to engage within social cooperation for advantage of the everyday individual and willing to genuinely help their fellow individual out of a state of ethical obligation and i think that's what i think that most as you say like well-meaning you know socialists going into it today are actually looking at socialism like that okay so look i'm i'm it's not that i'm disregarding what you said but i'm replying to something you said a whole two minutes ago or something um i think you are correct to raise the issue of cherry-picking but what i'm asking about really is the ethos or the ethic of cherry-picking you can cherry-pick like we can say hey during the japanese imperial period these are some things they did right and maybe these are even things we can learn from today or we could do in canada or scotland or wherever sorry i know you're not from scotland you're from earth but we can talk about scotland as an exotic foreign country both of us i used to live in scotland many years ago um anyway you know you can engage in cherry picking but there were ethical questions involved right now you know so you raised the example of of nazi germany totally appropriate i have no complaints and then the comparison to uh lenin and communism so on you know i think you know what i'm pointing out to you is you know why would you cherry-pick lenin this way and then what does that say about you ethically and what is your relationship you know i can say on youtube between you and your audience but just in general in politics between you and the people you're you're working with if that's you're willing to do so you know today 2020 would you really tell the people of cambodia that they should go back to communism or even in a more cherry-picking specific fashion would you say to the people of cambodia hey you know there are bits and pieces of leninism that are still right and good and you should go back and pick up and see i would not do that i also would not today in 2020 say to the people of germany that they can go back and cherry-pick hitler and that they were possessed but to give an example you may not know this hitler was opposed to cigarette smoking and he was especially opposed to women smoking cigarettes during pregnancy he had a campaign to eliminate cigarette smoking so as absurd as it may sounds you know you can you can revive some isolated things of this but i wouldn't do that even if hitler is correct about smoking during pregnancy if you go back and read what he said it's insane racist [ __ ] you could probably imagine it's about the the the decline of the race through cigarette smoking you know it's really you know like even even even when he's right he's wrong like even when he's right about something it's morally repugnant like i i really think there is a point in politics to saying look lenin is a guy who hunted down and murdered the people who won the election and i am fundamentally someone who's pro-democracy so i am fundamentally someone who's anti-leninism like before we even get into stalinism or mao zedong at this stage i can say here are fundamental problems with communism and even to some extent fundamental problems with socialism definitely fundamental problems with marxism i i think but i'm saying this because i think that's part of your own perspective like that you may not be entirely honest with yourself about that's a necessary implication of some of your own values that you was about don't get me wrong i think that pretty much everything you've said i agree with in many ways i guess the real issue that i have is the conflation between for example for example lenin's ideals and socialist ideas or even communist values right like um okay totally reasonable point that's a very chalkboard point but it's a reasonable point yeah that's the thing so like i think like for example lenin being any democracy that is something that you would not find most socialists talking about today right but they're lying to themselves but that's my point like that's the thing is if you're honest with yourself you have to reject london for that reason right go on what about socialism right so look look there's a great question and we can return that but just to seemingly digress but to me it's returning to the root of this the decision we're making is not about the future of canada or the future of england right the decision you and i are making right now are about is what kind of person do i want to be what kind of person am i going to become right and i'm telling you i am not someone who's going to compromise with leninism or stalinism i'm not someone who's going to live my life making excuses for or rationalizing or relativizing what was wrong with communism and i i don't even do that with the japanese empire of you know 1910 to 1945 or something whatever it is you want to use like i don't i don't even do that which is a much less kind of horrifyingly one-sided you know evil example so you know the point the point i'm raising here like yes we can get into how exactly do you define you know what socialism and what's not to what extent is denmark a possible example but we know you know and i know your whole youtube channel would be different your interactions with the audience will be different your career in the future would be different after you finish this this phd if you start describing yourself as someone who wants the future of england to look more like the president in denmark right that's a totally modern position and if you're someone who says openly that you don't support you don't compromise with lenin or stalin you just rather that's a completely different position morally aesthetically and even pragmatically it's going to lead you into two different things as opposed to sitting around saying that you're an anarchist but you still see value in the legacy of of lenin and stalin and so on right like that's you are making a choice both about the kind of person you actually are and also how you present yourself to other people how you work with others but this has this has implications uh that frankly are are philosophical in nature given that you're a philosophy gym oh yeah yeah i mean absolutely i want to say that like when we look at when we approach life especially the main decision that we do have to make is how how we are going to live our lives and i think that the ancient greeks did a great job of like of educating us on that point in the first place like most of western philosophy has been about that and um ethics is like a primary interest of mine like i'm that's what that's what i do i'm a vegan you know like for that for that reason you know like uh you know you know like the glorious vegan revolution you know but look we're both vegan so you can relate to this it would it would be convenient for me to have an excuse-making mentality towards leather like oh well if it's second-hand leather or if i bought it before i became vegan i can still use leather that would be convenient that would be expedient right but i don't do that because of this question of who do i want to be and then also how do i interact with other people i make the decision no i'm not going to compromise that i'm going to have an uncompromising attitude towards rejecting leather like i think you can see even within your own convictions there is a reason for you to have an uncompromising attitude towards leninism socialism and communism in that same way even if it's not even if it's not practical like even if pragmatically it would be convenient to use secondhand leather or would be convenient to to roll around like [ __ ] vaush and these other like pro communist youtubers and build up that audience my main point is that like like yes absolutely like we do have to choose who we are today we do have to choose like how we are going to live our lives in the most ethical way possible you know i think even that like you know jordan ps and like you know take responsibility for yourself tell your people kind of mentality but i think like slovakia is a great point in responding to that and just says like yeah but what happens when somebody else is messing your room you know what i mean and taking responsibility and like um understanding your place within women in the world is understanding again like how what states should be formed and how we should obviously interact with one another politically and if we accept that then we have to understand that okay so looking back upon history what um what can we expect from certain like the implementation of certain states and all and also what moral responsibilities should we expect the government uh if it exists to to perform what uh responsibilities should the citizens have how should corporations um exist in relation to you know even like employee employer relationships should be allowed them to be propagated onwards forever and i think that when we start asking these questions i think that the moral the the moral decision that comes out of this is honestly i would say is a democratization of the workplace and there's a democratization of how we how we live our lives in terms of like as a workforce like the employee to employ your relationship i would say is an inherently exploitative relationship the idea of a wage for example like i think the marxists and early 20th century um communists even um the ones that were even anti-leninist at that time showed like even worker even um women's rights movements at that time were showing that like the concept of a wage they rejected that like when that was being like promoted they were saying that a wage is is uh is wrong you are rending an individual you are not paying them for their labor or the product of them they love and so i would say that like the rejection of these unjustified kind of economic distributionary methods is the primary goal of like most like like many socialists not all socials get your tankies and your legalists and you you people who are full of [ __ ] but like you do have the moralists who are you know tradition who are who are socialists and i would say like don't get me wrong i'm not going to cherry pick glenn in and say like there are good parts of london i don't need to like i don't even look at london's regimes i'd even look at trotsky's regimes i don't need to look at you know like uh what went on in like all these horrible regimes in the world people were like oh well this was good that was bad like i i just meant in a philosophical level but i think that is i think that is a significant decision for you to make you know publicly and and privately i mean i'm part i'm really just encouraging you to have a more uncompromising attitude in living out your own ethical values but i'm not really trying to change your ethical values in this conversation but pointing out to your ethical values are are in your in some political decisions you made like being fundamentally pro-democracy making that central to your view of the world well that's incompatible with a lot of this [ __ ] you're you're compromising how is democracy incompatible with like anarchism like so for example like good question i want to reply to something you said about three minutes ago oh sorry i would just happen but it's okay but we're kind of several different topics here and self-directed which is good sign up good conversation but a couple minutes ago um you were talking about ethical decisions and fundamental commitment to being moral okay and i want to point out you know i'm radically open-minded and flexible about that but there has to be a point and you have to be honest with yourself about what is the point of making this moral compromise or even doing something you know to be evil apologies if you already know this but you may not i signed up to join the army to fight against isis it's only a couple years ago when that war was very much hot and ongoing so isis the islamic state right now there are all kinds of immoral elements to that right and just to give a really quick one if you're vegan in that war you know they had a lot of problems with sheep on the road you know in afghanistan and what have you and i you shoot people but it may sound ridiculous you also shoot sheep in that war it happened quite a bit now if you ask me on a chalkboard you know like we're in a philosophy classroom in a university is it moral or immoral to shoot a sheep you're not even going to eat the sheep you know and everything you're shooting you're killing an animal just as an obstruction to traffic you know oh sure in a sense it's immoral am i willing to do it yes with no hesitation i'm at war we're trying to win this war we're going to shoot cheap we're going to shoot people like there are all kinds of immoral and unethical things i am willing to commit to do and i am not going to lie to myself and i'm not going to lie to anyone else i'm not going to lie to my girlfriend or my wife or my grandkids about what it is i did or why but yes i'm willing to make the commitment to do evil and unethical things for a reason for a reason that i know right just to clarify your girlfriend and your wife depends i mean if i convert to mormonism no it's just whether my point is whether it's your girlfriend or your wife or whatever however it works out you know the whatever your situation may be uh but look you know that's one of the temptations converting to mormonism or converting to islam you get you get more options uh i'm all right but look you know look man i used to live in france i used to live in thailand there were a lot of alternative lifestyles there all right really that's the kind of standard model for marriage in france let alone getting into thai culture look you could commit to embracing what's bad and evil and wrong with socialism as a philosophy or anarchism as a philosophy or even communism as a philosophy if there were a point but like i'm suggesting to you in current circumstances in 2020 there actually isn't a point and in some ways like you may be doing yourself a disservice like you may be really limiting positively what you can do with your life by by making these compromises now like you know right now there's a revolution going on in thailand okay and it it may be unsuccessful i mean i if you were gambling on it it's pretty like it's quite possible it will fizzle out and nothing's really going to change at the end of this attempted revolution [Music] yes there are there are fun to put it this way there are fundamental questions about how democratic or not democratic thailand is going to be in the immediate future okay all kinds of people have to make the compromise like they don't they don't agree with everything in the revolutionary party let's say but they say okay i'm going to make this garmin's i'm going to commit to joining this party to achieve this objective and then after the revolution is over we can debate all kinds of other things right people do make those commitments but what i'm saying to you is making excuses for lenin like fraternizing in this way or compromising this way playing these games with these particular ideologies it makes no sense in cambodia in 2020 it makes no sense in canada in 2020 i think it makes no sense even in in england or scotland in 2020 like even on that level of like being willing to embrace something evil for an outcome you're pursuing i still think this is fundamentally wrong like i really think in 2020 so i really think just just in one sentence because you just saw that video you know i have many many videos talking about the history of communism and social hundreds or something but you know the ones that you just saw what i'm saying to members of black lives matter to the blm movement and i've made other videos talking about it that are more than 30 minutes long greater length is no in 2020 the correct choice is to actually reject marxism not to like play this game of trying to appropriate from marxism or where the worth the cape of being a marxist like no like actually that's the right choice to make and and i don't just mean it in a chalkboard sense i even mean it in this pragmatic sense of being willing to to do something evil for some kind of one like i outcome wouldn't advocate anyone to do anything evil necessarily anyway because i'm not revolutionary so i'm not arguing that people do anything that is uh like cruel and unusual trying to overthrow the capital of state level like that i'm not i'm not advocating for that like in terms of like advocating for like a socialist um recording revolution or social change i would talk about um i don't know if you're familiar with it which is called the long march through the institutions in which we try and uh democratize our institutions and slowly to move towards um a socialist state and a socialist state as being defined as a state which is based around mutual cooperation and for um the for the benefit of the general population rather than let's say that the production of profit versus capital in which of our capitalism right and then like so when we talk about like you know the the the moral responsibility of the individual and like what people would be or would not be willing to do i know that like black lives matter for example talking about the abolition of the police force talking about killing the police someone doing some horrible things like don't be wrong i'm critical of the movement myself um i i'm not actually a fan of like the way it's being led or like lack of relationship even um or other way of its overall political goals if it even has any because legislative like change um it has its issues and it's and it's certainly different to necessarily what i would say that there should be advocating for um and and i do think that obviously as you say many of the the leaders for example have been influenced by some of the the tanki kind of you know leninist stalinist like regimes and maybe being influenced by this idea of like direct revolution because you know at the end of the day like people like the whole communist like aesthetic right i mean like the the the um you know the stalinist like you know red revolute like the london red revolution like kind of aesthetic that was deliberate propaganda in the first place like it's it's sexy you know what i mean that the people like you like the revolutionary like life it looks sexy right i don't i don't want any of that like my philosophy is not so sexy because it's actually about making the world a better place right right so look i know that's that's why that's part of why i've raised this conversation the way it is is that like i feel like your packaging your wrapping what you're doing on the surface isn't really consonant with doesn't make sense for who you are at your core or whatever like i and like i'm not you can tell like this is this is not me saying i hate you or something it's saying look i think if you really think about it maybe you know maybe not today maybe not tomorrow maybe the next few months or something probably you need to think about rebranding yourself a little bit because if this is who you are and what you're about i i see a lot of self-contradictory compromises you're you're getting yourself involved with that just don't make sense for you i also don't think they make sense for england or cambodia or the whole world in general but for you specifically take cambodia right now i mean cambodia is an incredibly poor country when they're in the capitalist regime like uh like take like vietnam i mean like usually as an example vietnam was like you said it was a hybrid between uh capitalism and communism i probably knocked it out it was like totalitarianism and and capitalism like china i would say china's fascist i would say that it's it's a totalitarian government with a capitalist uh economy based around like um uh a somewhat half planned economy around a particular group's interest and ultimately around this nationalistic goal like ultimately like [ __ ] the west kind of mentality and and i would say that all of this is also happening in in capitalism today and so even if we take like your mentality like when we're choosing to be like what we are choosing to be and if we admit that like we kind of have at this kind of point in time this uh decision to be a capitalist or a communist or a capitalism associates or whatever it may be like the choice of being a capitalist is just as fundamentally obstructive to justice as the choice of being let's say even a state so stay communist because i mean like if you have ahead of the black book of capitalism like 100 million people are supposed to have died because of like capitalism and if we talk about you know like poverty exploitation the proxy wars the you know the respect even the wall like for example in iraq like the toppling of uh saddam hussein and then the killing of the civilians there uh afghanistan the the propping up of saddam hussein in the first place by the american government and you know libya syria like many of these um conflicts in the first place have been engineered because of corporate interests but but what what you're engaging in right now this is what this is what the british call what aboutism i think the british know that phrase more than americans this is what about ism and and you are engaging in a no true scotsman fallacy in order to justify communism like now you look you may not realize this but this is what i see and this is what other people who are moderates or pragmatists who are neither extreme left or emergency what you just said to me now i know you're accustomed to it and you've probably said this same thing with minor differences 10 20 times in your life what you were doing there beginning with saying that you don't recognize the current government of china as communist right this is a no true scotsman's value oh oh so communism remains unstained by the historical reality of what china was or is the historical reality of what vietnam and cambodia were in the past or like why do this why do this to yourself you know like look i mean look at mao like i was [ __ ] discussed in person right okay right but let's look but let's keep it simple but let's keep it simple dude dude communism like is this is this right or is this wrong this is the whole point like what do you define these regimes are so for example socialism the combination of socialism and communism how would you say like for example uh an anarcho-socialist who argues for the democratization of the workplace the democratization of the government the removal of corporate interests and lobbying interests that are corrupting our current democracy and how would you can compare them for example against uh something like you know the maoist regime in china which is like totalitarian and uh i remember there was a letter sent in to dan savage dan savage is a sex advice columnist from a guy who said that he considered himself heterosexual he was married to a woman he wasn't attracted to and that when he went to the gym he would receive oral sex from other men but not have anal sex and he was writing and saying do you think i'm gay or straight okay now look you know well you have blow jobs with men but not anal sex how do you want to define it to me this is like a complete [ __ ] self-defeating and no no but but like but let's this is important my whole no but look my whole approach to politics ultimately this is about motivation and honesty and integrity and what kind of person you want to be now what okay look if a man says that to you if a man says to you that he has oral sex with other men but doesn't consider himself gay his motivation is what's important here not the definition of the word gay like in some languages in some cultures maybe gay is defined so narrowly that he doesn't give us it doesn't matter you can see but his sorry just let me finish his motivation is self-justification he's trying to justify himself and his identity right who would have the motivation who would have the motivation to claim that mao zedong was not a communist that is just ridiculous who would have the motivation to claim that vietnam today or or you know cambodia in the 1970s was not communist now i'll tell you who has that motivation other communists right throughout the whole history of mongolia the communist government of mongolia was publishing uh propaganda claiming that china wasn't a legitimate communist country that mongolia was that's who does that right like so i'm just saying i know you want to point towards this more chalkboard world how exactly do we find communism no all of these countries are communists and all of these people are gay there's more than one way to be gay okay and there's more way to be communist and this is communism and who would who would claim it's not they get communism socialists all the time right so but i i think you know the answer to that question these are these are hybrid economies [Music] right oh no i wouldn't say that at all i mean in many of those countries for example you can say they have a socialist university system and a socialist healthcare system so those are significant parts of the economy that are socialist system based around the tax reimbursement of that tax redistribution of wealth based like high tax high tax system uh drawing as much money into the government right but look i tell you you don't you don't do economics but yeah that's socialism and by definition you draw a line in the economy and some things are socialized and some are not so in some countries really quick example in some countries the generation of electricity is socialized you say there are no private companies involved the government directly takes tax dollars so no but that absolutely that is that is textbook definition of what's what socialism what's not so a country a country like denmark is a hybrid economy the united states also is a hybrid economy but they they draw the line of how much is free market and how much a socialist at a different point in different got an issue and that's kind of the ways i was trying to say like i i i would say that if we're if we are like drawing lines it's like you know i like what point is is the guy gay you know what i mean am i holding hands with the guy is that gay is it you know what i get our traps gay you know you know what i mean right right okay but this good this brings back but the point is what i'm questioning is not where you draw the line like it's fine you're asking the question it's a legitimate question what i'm asking is what is your motivation to claim this if you say you only suck dick a couple times a month you don't think you're gay [Laughter] extremely erudite hypothetical academic conversation here but if you were to say that you only suck dick a couple times a month and you still think you're straight what's really important to address is your motivation in making the claim it's not really the plausibility of the claim or where you where you draw the line you still want to assert right in this hypothetical example you still want to assert your heterosexual right like you still want to assert your heterosexual even though you have gay sex in this everything so that's that's the significance of it in terms of motivation but like this brings back who who would claim and you did earlier and this i think this points to this deep fissure within what you're doing philosophically and politically that you need to like i suggest you know again i'm not saying this to you but i suggest in the next weeks or months you really think about it and try to try to make this career instead of incoherent who would say to me or anyone who would make the claim that mao zedong was not communist or that communist china wasn't that's ridiculous who would say that vietnam or laos are not coming of course they're communists that's just ridiculous what are you defining it's like when you talk about like that guy like sucking dick and then not saying that he's not gay it's because that you know sucking dead is gay right like it is like it is a sexual act where two men are participating in this in sexual acting together that is uh overtly homosexual right but like when we talk about china what is overtly communist about china all that we have is the totalitarianism look sorry but look so i am not saying this from social i don't know i don't know if you've read one book about the history of china yes china is overtly communist so i used to work at a university okay the university was controlled by a communist party secretariat i have a photograph of myself standing in front of the door and there's a hammer and sickle logo the government of china today even down to the level of particular hospitals and particular universities like on that small scale of of management it is ruled by a communist party everyone in that communist party studies the philosophy of marx lenin mao zedong a list of communists they write exams proving that they've done the reading and understand the philosophy it is ruled by comics it is overtly ostentatiously communist they sing communists sorry but please please if you ask the question because you did ask the question what is overtly communist about china they literally have parades where the army marches and they sing communist songs in unison and that's the government doing that so if you're asking what is overtly communist i'm saying what are you blind like this is way more absurd this is way more observant than the homosexuality questions but like look at it like this it's like for example stalinists aren't leninists right we're going to agree that like there was a there's a there's a distinction between uh i'm assuming we can agree that there's a distinction between stalinism and leninism uh in terms of like how the state would have been run which is why stalin assassinated trotsky right like because he didn't right right but there's a difference there's different oral sex and anal sex too right there's a difference in oral sex everywhere and then usually had a minister um particularly his name that would use lenin's courts of lenin to justify whatever like stalin or the ussr but why are we even getting into these these details do we we know they're both communists stalinism is a form of communism blended is a form of it's not debated it's not about them the point is the same yet stalinism used leninism as an aesthetic to masquerade its actual uh political interpretation i know i know but you this is real what about people at no point have i been arguing that stalinism and leninism are the same like this is what you know that's not part of my argument like so for example like the way that china works today in terms of economics has no economic ties to marxism if you look at the way that workers are treated and the way that workers rights are enforced or the idea of the dictate of the proletariat the alienation of the worker is more far more severe in china than it is in many other in many other capitalist the the whole point is that china does not abide by what would be the economic um the the economic dictates of marxism it doesn't at all not at all not even a little bit and all it has is a totalitarian state so like why would you like so like what i'm saying is like with with china i understand why you say like obviously that that communist maybe in um in ideologue ideology right just as that guy who is uh you know sucking dick is straight in his mind like china is straight they are communist in their minds but in action they are capitalists they do not they do not actually reflect any of the actions that would be representative of a marxist okay right but your choice today is if you're pro-communist or anti-communist if you're going to make excuses for this or engage in cherry pick or not and this so this is what i said because i think i know your answer so if i ask you today so given everything you've just said about china given the current situation chinese this way do you think china would be better or worse if they had elections let's say the exact same system of elections that they have right now in switzerland so elections and direct democracy and people can propose amendments to the constitution and have a referendum let's say let's just say they copied and pasted the swiss constitution into the chinese constitution if they had democracy instead of communism in that sense instead of being ruled by a communist dictatorship a communist leadership that as you have pointed out correctly rules over an economy that's like ninety percent capitalist or something you know what what exactly the percent maybe some people would say it's 70 some people say it's 95 because again you have to count in things like hospitals and universities there are parts of the economy in china that are still more communist than you think in the military and what have you but in any case it is a predominantly capitalist society ruled over by conversation but you now in 2020 do you think it would be an improvement to replace that communist part of the system with the democratic part of the system oh absolutely a democratic might so you've got to leave that accordingly bro like that's all i'm saying is you have to start living your life and pack yourself down with philosophy as someone who is anti-communist in that sense because that's all it takes like that's not socialism these are real world these are real world palpable examples right now the government of nepal is communist now right away i mean like i said before there's a difference between oral sex and anal sex but it's all sex right if if right now if we make a comparison so just real quickly if you make a comparison right now if you make a comparison between the government of nepal and the government of vietnam just to pick two examples and say in what ways are these two places congress it's very different you're going to come with a long list of really meaningful differences right but still if i were to ask you the question do you think the way forward for nepal in the next 20 years do you want nepal to become more like china today or do you want nepal to become more like switzerland your answer your honest true answer is that you want nepal to be more like switzerland and on some level you know it you're just not living where accordingly the next society is going to develop like do i want like for example nepal to be more like scamming like switzerland rather or china well you basically prop no for example perhaps one of the most moral states in the world versus one of the least moral states in the world right so why don't you start if you believe that make that start living that identity if you think that switzerland is one of the most moral states in the world you that should be who you describe you're not even a socialist anymore now you're a swiss-ist we're gonna tell you you're you're a helvetionist you're a helvetian republicist like you have to start living that way man go on but i mean like it'd be like if you met someone who was in denial about being vegan if i met someone who doesn't describe themselves as vegan but they live a vegan diet and they think leather is immoral i'd say look you got to start calling yourself vegan like start living accordingly for example what i admire from scandinavia you said that they are socialist aspects of the economy when i'm talking about like the things that i've met from scandinavia they would be what you describe as them so those socialist aspects of the economy right it's just like when um when we talk about uh and if you genuinely believe that that's a form of socialism and it's a mixed hybrid economy then how can we deny that like for example the world happiness reports of these hybrid economies between socialism and capitalism is not like if if socialism is this degradation uh towards our our identities towards the way that we live in a moral and our moral you know framework then why are scandinavia such moral paragons compared to somewhere like the united states which is by far more right-leaning and more uh traditionally capitalist and that's what i would say it's like would you want nepal to be more like for example scandinavia or would you want it to be more like the united stands yeah right so so just mentioned i'm writing a book right now which makes my political views more clear than you you might enjoy it at various reasons various points in this i thought gee this guy might be interested in my book the book isn't finished yet i'm doing the the final rewrites and revisions and writing the concluding chapter now so probably within a week or something i'm going to finish this book and i'm sharing it as a pdf on on patreon but this conversation is only in small part about me but i don't know how many of my videos you've seen about socialism but my perspective on socialism is not the socialism should be abolished i take the pragmatic view that at all times some portion of the economy is socialist and some portion is free market or capitalist and so obviously the percentage of the economy that is socialist in denmark is much higher than it is in the united states of america and you know uh with a country like canada i think canada is a very very poor uh quality and system of government obviously switzerland is a more positive example for canada to to look at in many ways but you know i i just say like so i assume you're in your your early twenties now uh late twenties okay so i'm i'm i'm 42. so i'm 42. i just said i think it's a hard thing but like my perspective on you is not that you're a bad person it's not that you have bad intentions my perspective on you is that you're someone who's become too accustomed to the chalkboard academic world and i know you're rebelling against some extent too like you were just saying what complete [ __ ] the university system is and university philosophies at this point but like but like in the real world these are the kinds of hard pragmatic decisions we have to make now i'm interested in nepal it's very unlikely i'm now going to move to nepal and make nepal my next cambodia but i'm tempted you know it's a possibility in my mind it's because also the language there is very easy to learn compared to cambodian believe me you and i could both learn a indigenous nepalese language in like three months if compared to chinese easy language but look nepal is interesting to me politically it would be so hard for me to move to nepal and advocate for a more democratic future in a context that is dominated on the one hand by communism and on the other hand by hindu nationalism that is attached to the monarchy like pro monarch monarchist hindu castes that's a really tough political environment for me to be in and it would probably entail really difficult pragmatic sacrifices it might be that the only colleagues i have would be people who were members of the communist party and that would be very disturbing for me to deal with like who who am i going to even eat lunch with and talk about politics with well on the one hand there are these hindus hindu nationalists and the other hand they're the communists and they're only a couple fragments of people who aren't signed up with one of these groups to to fight over the future ball that's that's the real world that's really tough right it involves those those kinds of compromises you know i was living in taiwan very different kind of like in taiwan they don't have a left to right political spectrum right as you know so it's in in different countries in different contexts these choices but when you when you make those questions um the primary questions in your life not abstract questions of how do you define socialism on a chalkboard right but the question is who am i what kind of person am i going to become how am i going to live my life what is the difference in the real world i can make that i want to make and then i'm going to live accordingly right and then i'm going to live accordingly that's that's going to shape you and lead to a very different life and what you've been doing that we should be in life is a person that supports worker movements i would say that i'm a person that would support um you know the the development of workers rights in the like that we see today within within the current states that we have i'll be a person that would support that the continued democratization of our political systems and a removal of this first-past-the-post mildred i'm the kind of person that would advocate away from this mindless consumerism that engulfs the capitalist hedonistic mildew that we live in and move towards an ethical consumerism that exists in something like veganism like these are the kind of real life changes that i would say that individuals can and should make in their lives and i would attribute most of those changes in relation to the bedrock of equality and i would argue that the the foundations of many socialist movements is this uh foundation of equality this idea of rejection of a master-slave relationship between individuals and the propagation of a cooperation between between individuals now that's what i would say okay so i'm not i'm not going to question any of that i'm not going to question that i on some level i'm wondering if you've actually spent time with labor union organization with the reality of that side of politics i i think if you start getting involved in that you might very quickly become disillusioned and realize that's a complete waste of your time but you know i'm not leaving that aside i'm not questioning your commitment to libyans but given what you've just said out you've set out a series of uh changes you want to make in the world differences you want to make in the world okay what i'm saying to you is you may not realize how much it discredits you and makes you into a joke and a lotesome person when you say things that sound like or actually are excuses for lenin excuses for stalin and mao zedong and you have been living in an academic context where that's kind of glad handled it's either ignored or encouraged when you say things like well you define socialism in this way and therefore china and vietnam don't count as socialist and we're never really communist and they don't discredit the fine ideals that you've attributed to lenin and so on dude you you are making yourself into a crackpot and people aren't going to tell you that you're making yourself you are discrediting yourself you are disabling your ability to make a positive school and part of the reason is that you then can't have those pragmatic conversations with people who may also want to have a society that's more like switzerland or more like denmark right and who don't want to have a society like mao zedong's dictatorship you know what do you think communism is in the first place because i see this dude dude that's like dude but okay look fine you know i've made a lot of youtube videos with that you know youtube but look can i just point out to you i'm asking the question i'm asking the question of who do you want to be okay i'm asked question who do you want to be and how do you want to live and you're answering back how do you define communism like don't you realize what a crutch this has become don't you realize what an excuse this is dude real world real world mao zedong was communist there's nothing you can say to me in this conversation but dude that's why why pull this back to an academic parlor debate on a chalkboard about how exactly you define communism we're not going to get into a debate about exactly how you define homosexuality either right there's no point like you are disclosing your motivation of of getting involved with this kind of like debate i was going on the online communities this idea like this is kind of like okay well if it's a girl and then child's a dick does that make it gay but if i have a sexual relationship there are like obviously there are nuances but in obviously uh even aspects of identity in like uh ideological uh frameworks and that's kind of the point like the the the whole thing is like when we talk about like how you define communism like so far like from what i've got from your argument is that you just define communism as totalitarianism where is the economics of the communist regime like tell me what you think economically socialism and communists stand for okay why like in what way is that a relevant answer to the point i'm raising because i mean like i for me this is about who you are and what more confidence is gonna make what economic definition of communism would diminish or distract from the fact that you are willing to positively identify with this you know like that that's that's the point here you know we we can get into what it was lenin was trying to accomplish for the dictatorship of the pole territory with those individuals who existed in catalonia in the 1930s who are fighting the fascists and trying to take back control over their lives okay okay okay okay okay okay totally okay so good good new direction okay so right now you're in your late 20s do you think it's possible that when you are in your late 50s you'll look back on that and laugh you'll think wow what a stupid pointless youthful delusion it was for me to think that i could build my academic career or my political career or change the world by glamorizing this period of five years in the history of catalonia spain and holding that up as an ideal for the future of england like do you do you think an older person could look at that and kind of sneer like is that imaginable to you i mean of course they could but then you've got like people who are elderly for example like noam chomsky who's anything right right so noam chomsky did he change the world compare noam schatzki to bernie sanders okay i completely disagree i look at nomtrowski as a total failure and no chomsky supported the khmer rouge he supported the khmer rouge in cambodia he published on it he backed it up for years decades i i look at noam chomsky's guy completely discredited himself his political career is complete failure and he had the potential he had the fame on the base of his status he had fame and wealth being a professor of linguistics who got famous in that field in his own right even though i think i think his work on linguistics is also completely horseshit um but you know no noam shawsky began from a position of of power privilege and influence much greater than someone like bernie sanders but he wasn't willing to make the compromises and deal with the real world in a way that would actually get outcomes right right and that's i also obvious criticizing bernie sanders because he wasn't willing to make the compromise because the whole political system in the united states is based no no it's bernie sanders owned fault here's why look very soon i could talk about bernie sanders you know what [ __ ] up bernie sanders like you know what destroyed bernie sanders whole life was that he wouldn't let go of this word socialism he kept on calling himself a socialist even when it was completely absurd like i think in his early career he probably was a socialist but after a certain point you have to define you have to define the term socialist way more broadly than homosexuality to call bernie sanders as a socialist but he insisted on hanging his hat on that peg he insisted defining himself that way and it completely undermined it completely discredited his booker and that's why he accomplished nothing or he accomplished one-tenth of what he could have accomplished he could have been present in the united states of america but he wasn't because of socialism because of his attachment to that ideology states of america those people the who becomes president of the who don't have ethics that's kind of the point like the whole point of like who wins elections is based upon who can generate dudes okay dude look your your commitment your commitment ultimately is not to any definition of the word socialist or an economic definition the word communist or a definition of what happened with the anarchist party in catalonia for a period of five years during which time they were all heavily armed and in a state of civil war it's ridiculous the point of this okay i get it i know the history of anarchism and catalan okay i know come on it's not utopia look i gotta finish this sentence bro look your commitment is not to a definition of socialism it's not to a different definition of medicine your commitment is to you okay ultimately bernie sanders has to be committed to being bernie sanders and you have to be committed to being you and all this other horseshit dude it's really holding you back you're pinned down by chalkboard definitions that just discredit you even if we agree that we are ultimately committed to being ourselves and it's like who do we choose to be but that's the first question i open with what i want to talk to you about it's exactly about who you choose to be like and this is the whole point like the point of being a socialist in the first place accusing someone like for example of like richard wolff or chomsky or the anarchists in catalonia being similar to those individuals for example the anarchists were fighting those individuals you are comparing them against like that not not actually like physically fighting them but economically fighting them being you know undermined by the communist parties uh the the control and authority which were like you know basically bankrupting the worker owned industries in that place like essentially was the was done by the communists that you were comparing the anarchists against these other kind of socialists and and even like you know was it like george orwell describing catalonia as like a true era of socialism was the the whole whole point if you listen to this recording back i think you've got to recognize you like you're speaking out of like the extent to which you've just been locked in academia for so long this is real academic [ __ ] you're saying back to me if you go around telling people in politics on youtube just in your personal life if you go around telling people that you are an anarchist in the same sense that noam chomsky is an anarchist that discredits you okay if you go around telling people that you are a socialist who sees positive things in the ideals of lenin although not in his execution blah blah blah and you don't recognize communist china as communists because you have this idealized uh definition of communism you attach you that discredits you and it discredits you not not just in the eyes of 90 of people or 95 people it discredits you in the eyes of a hundred percent of people who really matter and i i completely sympathize that living inside a phd program you're in a phd philosophy i realize that you can't see that i realize you're blind to the extent to which you make yourself a laughing stock by identifying with and making excuses for those ideologies a no machomsky school of thought anarchist who is derided more who is more contemptible or laughable in the political spectrum than the tiny coven of noah chomsky worshiping left-wing anarchists who want to trade stories about their really great excuses for supporting the khmer rouge in cambodia and supporting hamas in israel okay that's who those people are they're pro-hamas pro-palestinian nut cases i mean this is the [ __ ] reality of politics my position in this conversation is to say to police you know i mean so for example as the u.n peacekeeper in in that state and he he faced like you know terrorism from what was like you know the jewish and the jewish women's army and like many of the terrorist organizations at that time you know facing bombs going off in the hotel alexandria and people like small children being blown up around them people being killed you know around what do you think you're doing right now like you think you're getting the moral high ground by raising these like irrelevant antidotes what's the point well the point of the matter is is that when we talk about the horrors of palestine and defending the people of palestine we can't defend the people no no you you you have to decide what kind of person you're going to be like that's that's all you get to control is your little life right like you don't get to cheat like that's also you know why i support veganism i'm talking about making the difference you can make in the world there isn't a goddamn thing you can do about the civil war in syria there isn't a goddamn thing you can do with the palestinian peace process not a goddamn thing you get to decide what kind of person you're going to be and that's what i'm saying to you you know what really matters for you i think like i mean like the fact that we can have an influence on the economics of our system by like modifying the ways in which worker and the workers are involved in corporations then like we can't have a real political influence i mean like one of the things i was talking about recently okay you you think so okay you think so you're you're you're making the claim you're making wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute hold on college boy you're making the claim that you with your phd in philosophy are going to be the leader of a trade labor union and you're going to influence them with your ideals from noam chomsky and from catalonian anderson that's your [ __ ] claim in 2020 we can do another interview in 2025 and look back at what you accomplished in those five years you you are claiming real world this is not academic writing on a chalkboard that you personally are going to become a labor union organizer with your [ __ ] ideology and your excuses for leninism and all this other [ __ ] like have you even thought through the sacrifices you'd have to make as a person to be in that position of leadership yeah but dude i know but you did the opposite also that's what i'm drawing your tissues that you're making these these self-contradictory compromises and waffling dude think about so i don't know if you've known any of those guys who are real labor union organizers they have to go through this incredibly boring process of getting a degree in law related to labor unions they have to spend years working inside that union they've spent their whole life surrounded by the blue-collar schlubs that you and then guess what all they get to [ __ ] advocate for is higher wages higher wages and longer vacations and jack [ __ ] else and then they get to look back they get to look back at the 40 years they spent doing that and say hey i got people a two dollar an hour raise and a slightly longer vacation that's what they spent their lives accomplishing and you will never be able to those people will hate you and laugh at you and sneer at you college boy with your phd in philosophy and your laughable talk about noam chomsky and anarchist you don't realize the extent which like if you think if you think you're discredited in my eyes think about how discredited you are in the eyes of a pipe fitter you think those people are impressed with your ideology this is a joke man what are you talking about like this right like you say that one has to make real world decisions about your ethics yeah you've ended this conversation you must have insulted me like at least [ __ ] ten times oh well i i can apologize i'm sorry i feel insulted and i was trying to try to give a compelling and engaging performance for you but am i sorry i can't understand like you know things are heated like you know whatever like i get it i understand like you know you have your position and you know the thing is is that i would say that like don't get me wrong i understand like having a real world impact is perhaps one of the most difficult things uh ever right like in general right like just having like the ability to to change the way things are in the world and but i don't think that means that we should just give up right i mean that's the whole point of veganism isn't it like the fact that we do that we will come here even though things at the minute or at the darkest night they could possibly be we have to see the stars in the world in the words of martin luther king you know what i mean because at the end of the day this atrocity that is happening to animals every single [ __ ] day is so [ __ ] atrocious that we would outright do anything to stop it because it is disgusting it's so it's so horrific and it's the same thing with like the way that i'm approaching you know the things like socialism and so on the way that the exploitation of the of the working class the exploitation of um of uh other you know the indigenous peoples and various countries and so on like these things are things that i care about and whether i can do you know make a massive political shift versus like actually try and make a difference is how i'm approaching my life and that's the ethic that i'm that i'm trying to do for performing right but i'm listening to your justification of your own politics i was just going to say like make a real life political kind of analogy like right now we have brexit coming up in britain right you know like britain's uh agricultural subsidies right some cities are going to change come on this is off topic come on brexit is off top come on this is getting off topic is because of this like because it gives vegans an opportunity to attack farm subsidies for the first time uh in terms of like educating the population and also by attempting to um change things politically in certain directions in order to minimize farm subsidies which ultimately prop up you know many agricultural businesses i'm sure you're aware of that as a vegan like it's one of the big things that we're trying to fight against and suddenly we may have an opportunity to do that and being an individual who has moral convictions who has ethical convictions like having those convictions is waiting for an opportunity to express what is right in your day-to-day life even if you cannot do it at that moment would you not agree what you and i agree about is having a focus on the difference you can actually make in your own life and it comes out with different phrasings and different wordings right but what i'm what i'm challenging you with is that i really think that what you're doing and how you're living a philosophically politically every other way is actually incompatible with that philosophy and with many aspects of the not even the philosophy but the pragmatic political conclusions you come to so look it's fine you you raised this issue of brexit but the example we're talking about before which just based on how you state your own political philosophy and how you justify your own identity it seemed to be a big deal because you were talking about labor union organization now i'm not painting into a corner i didn't like corner you and forced you to say that what libyanism it seems to me that authentically and sincerely that's a large part of how you justify your engagement with socialism and a particular school of anarchism and the extent to which you flirt with the the far left beyond that so that's coherent like i understand what you're saying but if you told me based on your current situation getting a phd in england in philosophy et cetera et cetera and i'm sorry if you thought i was being insulting but i'm trying to make you aware of how you would be perceived as a vegan with a phd in philosophy if you're getting involved with labor union activism like i don't know and this is your radiology and you talk about noam chomsky and the [ __ ] catalonian civil war like you know like that's laughable within labor union activism like it's just they don't want to [ __ ] with you they want to deal with professional lawyers who are going to get them a two dollar an hour raise and longer vacations that's what's going on in libya like i was i wasn't saying it to insult you is to make you aware of what this path is because it's not even a path you're on it's a path you're thinking about or fantasizing about that justifies your crime but look if you said to me in this conversation that the difference you want to make is in the politics of thailand given what's currently unfolding i would say to you okay interesting you know like this is a narrow road that you're getting on but you can get on and i would talk to you okay you can starting from your current position within the next five years you could you could become like i'm being honest you could become the single most famous english language commentator on and journalists dealing with politics of thailand in the next five years totally attainable and you could become an influential voice both in the east and the west yeah no no but i'm being honest like i'm not saying that you're some idiot who can't accomplish anything in life like i really think that's one example of something you could do now but my point is specifically talking about labor union activism within the united kingdom from the perspective of an anarchist and our co-socialist as you define yourself that i look at that and say dude that is a road that is leading nowhere now you mentioned you mentioned really briefly um indigenous people's rights movement so i don't know if you know this your audience knows this i have a playlist like 100 videos long talking about my own past involvement with that specifically the korean ojibwe those are indigenous peoples in canada took up a couple years of my life something i care about and i know about if that was what you were saying to me i could say okay well yes that's a difficult road but it's a road you can get on and there is actually money involved you get enough money to earn a good living and you could have this kind of impact but not that kind of like you know we could talk if you were even telling me that what you want to do is devote your life politically to dealing with the drug addiction problem there are so many possible issues where i could say yeah you know what there's a road ahead there oh okay and i and i could even see how your own political philosophy and choices would then fit into that road and there might be positive there might be you know negative things like there might be some warnings or huge things but i'm just saying it's not some kind of generalized attack on your character or a generalized attack on on political activism you know what i was saying here was really specifically about your political identity your political process as you presented it to me given your your political philosophy and dude you know life is long i had a period of my life where i publicly identified as a buddhist and a scholar of buddhism you know and now i don't and people treat you differently and people talk to you differently and you meet and talk to different people because you're going around saying you're a buddhist and when you go around saying you're a vegan activist you know some people just don't talk to you at all who otherwise would have talked to you and you meet other people these are these are choices we make on that on that human scale but i i think you really uh so i i assume at some point either past present or future i assume at some point you've had a debate with a right wing like like a neo-nazi right-winger like someone who's way out on the alt-right and sometimes they will just ask you questions they will just ask you questions about the history of the roman empire or the history of judaism and even if they've just stated as a question you know right away what this guy has been reading and who he's been affiliated with politically you're like whoa and i'll just mention really quickly that even happens within buddhism there are neo-nazis who are buddhists believe it or not and they'll say something right away they'll say this is a really obvious example some of them are more subtle but they'll say something about the buddha having had blonde hair and blue eyes and being a member of a certain race that begins letter a you know like but some is that obvious sums it's more subtle and you can tell right away oh this is where this guy comes from like i i'm not saying it in a character assassination way when i say to you look you don't realize how much you're discrediting yourself by approaching these issues in this way as opposed to and i'm trying to give you a positive example you know you can talk about communism in an open-minded and accepting and pragmatic way but where you're not you know presenting a kind of excuse or rationalization whether it's for lenin or for vietnam or for china and you know we're sure there's some awareness of the wiggle room you know oral sex is not the same as anal sex communism today in nepal is not the same as communism in laos or vietnam and communism in china today is very different than communism in china in the 1960s of course of course but you can keep your integrity as someone who's fundamentally pro-democracy because i read you as someone who's fundamentally pro-democracy but you're not really living that way i think i would say that actually fundamentally democracy is and even like classic liberalist values in terms of like john locke and enlightenment values are um given their like full fruition i would argue in like um you know like like the the uh the workout owned like democracy that exists within uh like market socialism you know like that's that's kind of like what i would say and i would say like and talk about like comparison like you know i just like anal sex whether this is like oral sex in terms of like you know like i would say that we're not even talking about like the same species and the same like kind of reproductive mechanism if we compare something like um you know the anarchists in catalonia to [Music] like people will approach you depending upon the labels you decide to associate yourself with in such a way okay good thank you for saying that because again i'm i'm not trying to insult you when i say that but when i say like look outside of academia like if you were actually trying to get involved with labor union activism and this is how you present yourself in this so what you talk about your ideology those people will judge you way more harshly than i will you will be a laughingstock as a college boy with a phd who talks about noam chomsky cannot be ideologically regulated by those individuals who would take and seize control power in order to propagate their ethics and their morality above and other individuals despite not having been able to give a justification for it and that's why we call ourselves vegans in the first place okay so you just made an interesting statement and i would say the the exact opposite you just said the meanings of words can't be used by people in authority to in brief oppress us or discriminate against that no so that's right so that's where i disagree because then primarily no of course you can if i call people get if sorry if i say i'm gay people are gonna think i'm gay it's as simple as that right if i if if you say you're a socialist people are gonna start of course that's that's life on earth man of course i can't look at it like it's like it's like it's like when you say like for example yourself okay people think you're gay right but like like even like in the 1930s the word game meant something different i know completely true and what communism meant meant something different in the 1932 agreed agreed but those that's life on earth no i mean so people can use words to judge you and you are using words to define yourself and you're using words to talk about how you feel and what you're a performative sure in which we operate within other individuals and so if i'm scared to use certain terminology because of other people's judgment then we aren't going to be able to have a discourse beyond anything from what a certain group of individuals dictate like what is acceptable what is not acceptable please tell me what i am and what i'm scared to be because otherwise i'm not going to be able to be anything that might be worth being i wouldn't be a vegan right now if i wasn't if i was scared of social um like social ridicule like but the point of the matter is is i would argue that veganism is the moral position it is the thing that we should be doing and i am not i'm not scared to call myself vegan because we should be doing it and i am trying to actively change that stigma by being willing to identify with it and act accordingly but you don't want to call yourself a communist correct you understand the danger in that i mean i think you contradict yourself because you recognize that yeah but you you wouldn't call yourself a maoist correct i mean just yes or no would you close the mosque okay but look would you call yourself a maoist no would you call yourself a stalinist no so it's the same game you can pretend you're not playing the game but you are and that's why you identify with this weird mannerism now look i just want to say um you you made a statement earlier that you think we're not comparing like dogs and cats or we're not comparing two different types of dogs we're comparing two completely different species when you talk about uh this particular form of anarchism you admire as opposed to other forms of anarchism other forms of confidence okay okay okay wait i gotta reply i got i gotta speak to that and this relates directly what you you just said now about how you how you describe yourself how you live with your life as a as a political animal okay i'm gonna tell you something right now that the anarchists in catalonia had in common with lenin and with mao zedong they had guns and they killed everyone who disagreed with them and and and wait a minute wait wait a minute they didn't have elections it wasn't based on democracy it was not right i mean they never even had political control i know i know all the excuses there were a whole lot of people on the internet who are going to make use of you i'm pointing out to you if your position now if your position now is that switzerland is a good thing it would be an improvement right it's not really compatible with it with the game you're playing like no but i think don't get me wrong i don't think i don't think that the end goal but i don't think any of the states that we see today are like the end goal of what humanity is capable of i don't know about you but man i watch star trek can i see something like that for example idealistic as it is as being in reach i think there's a the episode of star trek i thought you know like uh it's one of the first episodes right where you know i don't know do you like star trek did you know star trek uh i watched when i was a child like uh 11 12 13 i think around there so the next the next generation starts at the next generation pirates very brilliant absolutely class and like in that like um patrick stewart is presented by this like omni um unlimited being who's trying to judge humanity for all of its like wrongdoing right and he turns around and he says what hamlet said in irony i know the episode and i know the monologue yes the monologue between patrick stewart and q the godlike figure q yes brilliant brilliant monologue because i mean it's basically shakespeare and basically what he says is that like humanity is capable of becoming something better than it currently is and there's a quote from hegel which actually represents that man by nature is not what he should be and that's what i would say okay okay and my and my response to this is actually more anarchist than yours and more max sterner and more niles there's and my answer to that is what are you going to do in the next five years you know like all this stuff you've got written on the chalkboard this whole world of academic abstractions and then there's the question of what do you actually do the next video okay i gotta call it a day there it's been great talking to you it's our first time speaking one hell of a conversation would help a podcast i hope that the people in the audience enjoyed it uh it's 12 24 on the west coast of canada as this completely spontaneous unplanned direction good to hear from you and i hope i hope you do accomplish a lot in the next five years because let me tell you something was it the native language of nepal you you well i am studying languages right now but not not nepalese um but you know you've i know you've been on youtube you've been on youtube since 2015 right so you you've you've been aware of my channel i'm not saying you watched every video or something you've been wearing my channel probably okay you you've probably been aware on my channel for for five years or maybe even seven years or something uh i just say you've been aware of it not for just a month you know i used to ask people every day asking other vegans vegan activists and other people i would ask them what are you planning to do in the next five years and five years later none of them had accomplished anything and most of those youtube channels are shut down and gone some of them got pregnant and had kids but like you know let me tell you if you if you just step away from the chalkboard and really think about you as one person with two hands and two feet and about five years ahead of you it gets scary in a different way it gets dangerous in a different way and i think you will see these ideological and abstract decisions you're making in a very different way on that in terms of that human skill