The Vegan Mojo: Real Politics vs. Swimwear

yo what up this is basically just to
show that video to a guy named the vegan mojo he's put up some great videos lately and unlike myself his videos are pretty light-hearted and entertaining and they're about five minutes long whereas if you come to my channel you regularly get 20 minutes minimum of fairly in-depth and exhaustive and exhausting set of reflections on vegan politics activism ethics etc so this guy's potential reach a larger audience than myself because what he's doing is a short format light-hearted I mean he could change but whatever at the moment that's what he's been doing and in recent videos more than once actually he's addressed really the same topics I've been talking about on this channel so all new vegans and social media enthusiasts would argue that social media is the best the most optimal form of vegan activism well just because you prance around your bikini and you get people to eat a certain way it doesn't necessarily mean you're making overall change for the world initially for that person and maybe they're friends yes you're changing their lifestyle but they can always go back to their old ways and statistics do show that people do not necessarily stick to a vegan diet let alone a vegan lifestyle now this may benefit you because it allows you to work at home on the internet to promote a vegan lifestyle but the bottom line is there's a lot more we can really do to help promote a vegan world for instance let's look at the situation that recently happened at SeaWorld SeaWorld set on Thursday that it would immediately cease breathing killer wells going to mounting criticism by animal rights activists regulators and lawmakers over the treatment of marine mammals in captivity okay so a big success for vegan activist right but there is nowhere in that paragraph that said thanks to youtube or thanks to some diet or thanks to some person in the bikini that we're going to stop breathing killer wells we really want to see change and we want to see a vegan world we're gonna have to see laws being changed so the implicit contrast here is between political change explicitly articulated as political change which includes obviously laws legislation and people who really if they were smart would present themselves as advocates of cultural change who would claim that the cultural change is more important more urgent more attainable or more effective than political change now as I say they would say that if they were smarter in reality there is no intelligent chorus of a vegan opinion calling for cultural change there are just people calling for lifestyle promotion people who call for diet exercise luxury put portraying the vegan lifestyle as seductive high status gratifying and they think that if they make this appealing enough that will be the impetus for a cultural transformation now i can i can dream up a hypothetical opponent who would have something intelligent to say under that heading but it's not durianrider and it's not any of during writers fans or any of the writers followers how do you think that this is actually going to change people's behavior or change what is actually going on changing the policy making new laws it's not going to make much difference we all know that it doesn't make much difference at all the chorus of opinion that is rallied behind the Adelaide vegans people from Adelaide Australia have presented a totally incoherent argument why basically self-indulgence is the new politics is the new Clio the political struggle of the 21st century is not on the picket lines and it's not at Parliament and you know it's not even in opening vegan restaurants no it's just in you know the permanent vacation just in this lifestyle activism just in showing off beauty and boobs and bums and bicycles and bikinis and making that as appealing as possible so it's not really even a debate I could have but the truth is if someone did intelligently articulate a culture centered form of act vism then really my response to that would be to point out the extent to which cultural change and legal change actually are linked in reciprocal and one of the most important things that laws do is simply in communicating information it's quite misleading to say for example cultural change is more important the legal change because even when heroin is illegal people continue to use heroin even when cocaine is illegal people looking and user take drugs for example so many drugs are illegal yet they are still widely used yes however when you buy a bottle of soda pop at a normal grocery store you know for a fact it will not contain cocaine as an ingredient because it is illegal it also will not contain ephedrine it will not contain a number of other banned substances that could indeed be insert a pop it's a well-known historical anecdote because of Coca Cola that there was a time when soda pop was made with small amounts of cocaine the coca leaf instead of just having caffeine when it would be an ingredient so yes of course the legal change really does matter and it doesn't just matter in terms of how many people are using cocaine it matters in terms of actually sharing and spreading the information that this is fundamentally bad for you if people nevertheless make the decision after the government is very clearly communicated to them this is poison if they choose to use that poison that's totally different from living in a society where people sincerely believe that a given drug is not bad for their health so the knock-on effects of this are immense and many of them are informal and outside of the law but do indirectly result from the law if you're using cocaine it's quite possible your landlord will take you aside and talk to you I've already used on this channel actually the example of a schoolteacher who smoke cigarettes it's not illegal but it's very likely he's going to be not to do this in front of the children so in this way I mean legal changes such as laws that do not make cigarettes illegal but really clarify to the public this is something they have to constrain they have to struggle to quit this is something unhealthy and no uncertain terms this becomes a cycle of cultural change and gradually we transform from a society that at one time portrayed cigarettes as a symbol of sophistication of aristocratic status of masculinity when women first started smoking in the in the Western world it was considered a bold declaration of gender equality for women to smoke cigarettes as equals with men you know this was to show you a woman who was you know employed as opposed to being a housewife that you were an independent jetsetter smoking had all these tremendous powerful cultural and symbolic meanings and of course they were also fitted featured in the cinema and what have you and to make the transition to a a culture that regards cigarette smoking as a kind of ugly relic of an ignorant past as something to be discarded that is a tremendous cultural transformation but the cultural transformation step by step is actually reciprocal with legal changes and yes you have to fight damn hard politically in Parliament ultimately to pass those legal changes because there's at least one industry that's making millions of dollars out of cigarettes in reality with animal exploitation with veganism there are so many industries there's such a large percentage of the economy and those industries are so deeply rooted in the country you know in most countries around the world you know tell you about the dairy industry in New Zealand the dairy industry is so closely connected to the government that to raise even even warnings about negative health effects by four due to Dairy do two eggs do to meet this is actually a tremendous political struggle and a legal struggle and yeah it does go far far beyond this kind of put on a bikini lifestyle activism the bottom social media is just strictly used for entertainment purposes and there's a world outside of social media just because you think you have a large following or you think you're getting a lot of views does not mean it's changing the infrastructure of our communities if anybody's been in the grocery store lately we can clearly see that milk eggs cheese meats and all that stuff is still highly stocking the shelves and don't take this the wrong way because I highly support veganism on any platform but I am NOT going to act like it's going to revolutionize the world every single human rights feat happen because we change the law it's that plain and simple I'm really gratified when I see some of the ideas and even some of the idioms I've been using on the channel being picked up by other youtubers so you know I noticed he uses the term you know permanent vacation he's repeating you know making use of some of the analysis i sat down in my own earlier videos and that's natural I mean ultimately we're all sharing the same couple thousand viewer you know which also get I don't really regard as a negative thing on this channel I have no pretense to reach a mass audience and I don't even really have a pretense to reach new vegans although I do there are people who send me fan mail thanks I got some last couple of days I've gotten continued to get fan mail from people who became vegan because of my channel or people who were in the process of becoming vegan and came to my channel and my channel was important to them in the transition in some other way but in a few cases um you know my channel really was directly the cause for somebody converting to veganism which is interesting but of course that's not really what I'm trying to do here nothing on this channel is introductory right it's all advanced and what I'm motivated to do is not to try to take people who are completely hostile to veganism and try to make them less hostile or convert them to veganism or give them step 1 introduction to what is veganism instead what I'm trying to do is make better use of the vegans we've already got because I think we've actually got a constituency of really talented people who are scattered all over the world some of you are in Germany some of you are in Israel some of you are in Australia some of you are in India some of you are in America etc I think we do actually have a lot of talent and it's not on YouTube and it you know it's not showing up at you know pedda conferences and I don't blame you guys I think every single one of you has good reasons to not be on YouTube I think you have good reasons not to waste your time with it not to expose yourselves to the kind of inane criticism and commentary and not to expose yourself to danger in your own workplace you know to put your own professional reputation in peril I think there are a lot of good reasons why any person with a respectable job would not do what I'm doing and in case you were wondering what my respectable job is I'll have you know I've signed a contract to be a university professor in China for one year in just one month i'm flying the asia eventually to start work as a professor at University in China haha where my salary relates to works out to be about 850 US dollars per month so in terms of people whose whose salary is lower than what you quite possibly could make through patreon or through uh you know monetizing your youtube channel I might be in that select class of people whose salary is so low that YouTube want it might be tempting but anyway yeah I will be earning next to nothing and having a fairly intense educational experience myself while living and working as a teacher teaching University classes in the people's republic of china soon enough well pointing this video was basically to give a shout out to this dude vegan mojo and haha what I would stake resting to say is what I hope to do is galvanize people who already are vegan I hope to inspire people to become more active more organized more politically effective and more outcome oriented because in general vegans are fracked and fragmentary they don't have a lot in common with one another there are a lot of barriers to get over for them to cooperate or work together and it's hard for them to see common goals it's hard for them to even format units of five people who can cooperate and ultimately a lot of vegans are indolent a lot of them are despondent veganism itself i mean my recent my recent long talk more than an hour long with zaria you can see I mean there's real misery there's a real agony there's real darkness in the vegan experience of the world you know the sadness and sorrow are very real so I think it's quite meaningful to reach out to those people like including zari herself including whoever you people are watching this and you know yeah we talk about our feelings man interview we do we do actually reflect on you know the sadness and the sorrow and also to talk reflect on the potential for making positive change okay so under that rubric I'm here praising this guy vegan mojo he's had a couple of different videos recently or he really skewers the wishful thinking that so many vegans are indulging in when they think that YouTube is the magic formula for social change and when they basically marginalize ignore or denigrate real political activism real political change real legal change and the point this guy's making lately it's again he'll he'll make other points and in his channel he's talked about things the past will talk more than future but lately one of his points is to drum home with different examples look the laws really do matter vegans wearing bikinis not so much you can look at any type of human rights and the reason why those changed for the good is because we change the law you know look look at the case studies of recent legal changes and political changes that have made a difference for the lives of particular animals for the direction of our society as a whole yeah you know what actually lobbying the government for legal change matters now I do have critics at a much much lower level of intelligence who actually directly claimed the exact opposite I do have critics who come out and say no laws do not matter I think for most people this is just wish fulfillment they just want to believe that their vacation in Thailand is not merely a vacation in Thailand they want to believe their vacation Thailand is saving the world and it's not they want to believe that their health and fitness blog is not just a health and fitness blog at saving the world and it's the supreme form of political activism and that it actually literally makes them holier-than-thou and it doesn't and of course I mean there are many things about that are regrettable that set of attitudes but among other things it means that we can't just appreciate a vacation as a vacation because everything is laid in with these phony political / tensions that really do a disservice to both sides like it's both denigrating to real politics and it's denigrating to real athleticism or real travel blogging or real anyway whatever you know if look if you want to do restaurant reviews too that's great all these things can be great but let's not fall into the trap that really people like durian writer have set for us in 2016 the most prominent voice in proclaiming that politics doesn't matter that real political activism doesn't matter it does it matters much much more than lifestyle vlogging and as I say basically I take my hat off uh Gee I could have actually I could have worn a hat for this oh well missed opportunity I take my hat off to the vegan mojo because he's come out and said that really directly been strongly and stridently and he's done it in a five minute format that I think with time will reach a lot of people