Recap: vegan rhetoric vs. vegan reality (why this channel is so different from others).

hey guys if you've been following the
channel closely you know that we until recently have had no furniture at all and right now I'm sitting on the first tables to arrive we have a few more tables and chairs arriving in the days to come just got a comment from realist central on live stream having a discussion here on you nail every so often I post the link to you now on my youtube channel and on Twitter and anyone can join the conversation ask me any questions to talk to me without even paying the $1.00 to join my my patreon if I did it as a patreon exclusive I'd have very very few people participating in the conversation in the audience it's probably good way to invite people to get more involved but yeah if anyone complains I don't answer questions I would sit back what are you talking about I come on I come on livestream and make myself available all kinds of different ways to interact with the audience and answer questions but no I don't I don't waste time herding trolls you might say so real a central asked first a question he said what do you think of speciesism yes this question in general and I had to start my answer by saying look this is a question if doc doesn't past on my channel because I have it's coming it's coming couple different times I've talked about speciesism and I've talked about the ways in which I do actually find it a counterproductive and confusing way to present the argument for veganism in terms of presenting veganism to the non vegan public presenting the concept of veganism to your parents or your grandparents and I often find it hilariously awful when people have public protests where the slogans they're chanting or craft into speciesism and I've criticized some specific protest some specific slogans that way however I have a specific footnote there of some importance that once in a while speciesism actually is a useful concept to employ just a couple of video videos ago on this channel I was talking about Hinduism and the potential for Hindus to get more involved with vegan activism and how Hindus perceive vegan issues in a culture that values vegetarianism but at the same time valorizes drinking dairy milk and eating cheese and that kind of thing and I pointed out that within India this is an example of speciesism gone amok there they they valorize the lives of cows but cows only cows cattle boss indicus as a species and that doesn't extend to for example water buffalo so water buffalo the buffalo of india we're talking about here are a very similar species of bovine they have somewhat different horns but I mean this is you know from a human perspective you say well how is it possible that one of these animals is considered sacred and given legal protection and then another one is exploited by animals killed for meat is milked you know to produce milk and cheese and so on you know from from a not from a scientific perspective from a late person perspective you look these are just two types of cows this is this is really speciesism this is ridiculous we are you're attributing something to a difference between species that doesn't make sense and once while there are discussions like that about pigs versus dogs where this idea of speciesism is is of some utility what's the one uh but yeah I do think it's a misleading optic and then the very next comment from the same guy oh I've never spoken to before in my live stream realist central comments it is rubbish so I'm quoting him quote it is rubbish but over 90 percent of vegans believe we are all equal humans and animals so again equality but if sometimes it's a useful concept and sometimes it is not normally when vegans really kind of formally deploy the idea of equality they then have to follow it up with so many caveats they have to say well I don't believe that a dog should be able to get a driver's license I don't believe this I don't believe that there were a whole bunch of exceptions they have to lay out that they mean equality and only some very limited in a specific sense and if that's the case then you probably shouldn't be using the word equality at all right you have a whole bunch of caveat C or a whole lot of explaining to do after you you use this this concept then it's probably not that contribution be using on a deeper level I do think that a lot of what's going on is really thinking of animal suffering and animal rights in terms of the soul in terms of the idea that human beings have a soul animals have a soul and that therefore they extend certain rights and privileges and consideration humans and they should also extend those to animals because animals in human are in in that respect equal that's their ancient part of European culture not only in terms of Christianity and Judaism but even you go back to ancient theories about the soul in Greece and Rome in pagan Rome in ancient Athens you get theorizing about that and philosophizing about that so it's not something new that just come out of nowhere a lot of people reason about humans and animals and relations between them in that way and you know I've had many videos here arguing from different angles about the kind of ineluctable contradictions that leads us into as vegan activists not merely questions of whether or not our rhetoric makes sense but whether or not we are espousing a philosophy that's actually crazy that's actually insane it is impossible to grow wheat without killing animals to grow wheat and not just insects but really highly intelligent mammals like groundhogs and ground squirrels and related animals so if you really do believe that this groundhog has rights equivalent to human rights if they deserve have equal rights less if you believe it has a soul and therefore is entitled to this kind of consideration for us then we have to stop farming wheat and I'm not joking when I say that we're vegan activists who devoted their lives to vegan activism like Gary fronts in a Gary Franchione a who pronounces his own name francy own Gary there it's on tape you can see video this of him really being brought to a standstill by very simple and earnest questions from the audience about this kind of problem like well if this is your approach if this is a few human rights then how do we deal with the fact that forming you know farming wheat matters we're not gonna stop farming wheat as vegans how do you deal with exterminating cockroaches that are in your in your basement or maybe in your kitchen or what have you you know or exterminating rats and what have you how do we deal with even the role of a park warden who is surveying and responsible for you know many species in a forest but he may have to do invasive things in terms of keep you know within a national park keeping the different populations healthy you may have interventions against specific species that are there numbers are bringing out of control or dealing with a specific outbreak of a disease the long story short Park wardens do sometimes kill animals and I'm not just talking about hunting for profit here I mean as absurd as it sounds for the benefit of the forest as a whole they may decide to kill wolves that may decide to introduce more wolves to try to control the deer population they make those kinds of decisions and that's a situation that is compatible with veganism but not compatible with this view of one animal one soul and is not compatible with view that animals have rights equal to human beings you're getting into so many caveats it becomes ridiculous you're getting into the Cabot's of saying animals have human rights except when it's and can be in front of us you want some animals to have some rights some of the time and then you fall into the trap of the first concept here speciesism so now all of a sudden you're arguing that dogs and cats have have human rights or some human rights but that the groundhogs don't etc etc so you can see how quickly this this really does lead us down a kind of rabbit hole into into madness into impossible contradictions and yes if our opponents are astute they'll notice those contradictions and though they'll debate them with us or they'll ridicule us for having them but it's also not just a matter of how to present our arguments it's a matter of whether or not our beliefs are in fact crazy um so this has been like a good recap video of things that have been discussed in 800 videos on this channel from different angles in different elements ultimately my conclusion here is that we give we treat animals as if they have rights when they are on a national reserve when they're in a park when they're in the forest when they're in the wilderness wilderness that's been designated by human beings with laws to be for the animals and for the trees for that ecosystem to exist and persist and benefit and then we cease to treat them as having those rights as soon as they step over the dotted line on the map possibly by no fault of their own as soon as they go past the fence so for example a bear when it's inside national park should indeed be a protected species but then as soon as it claws its way through a fence and comes into a dump or comes into a person's home all of a sudden it doesn't have those rights and so on so that's ultimately a territorial ization of animal rights and I've said in many videos I could give a link below this channel I do not believe in animal rights as such I don't use any of those phrases animal rights equality speciesism to espouse in advance my approach to veganism and the future of this moment