Israel, Canadian Genocide, MLK's Death, Ancient Rome.

good evening new zealand
good morning europe good afternoon to the west coast united states of america i suppose this is close enough to prime time in new york city um better time than usual for my viewers in uh australia and new zealand i'm going to start with a short letter from the audience so i get email i get messages in various forms but this was actually the thank you note that was included with this copy of a heavy tome on the milai massacre and yes by the way although i have studied cambodian lotion pali numerous languages modern thai numerous languages of southeast asia and asia i did double check what is the pronunciation is it milai or is it my lie it's in fact pronounced mila it's the milai massacre uh it's a book that's actually bigger and heavier than i was expecting but maybe a shallow point but think about buying the book it's a serious consideration i thought this is going to be a little pocket-sized novel to be perfectly honest with you anyway so this is the latest and presumably definitive scholarly work on the history of the milan massacre i have not read it obviously but we received the date with this note from the viewer from the audience and the first thing he says is actually quite moving to me he says fan since game of thrones so i mean you guys may not remember but there was a time when game of thrones was really a significant source of inspiration to me not so much the tv show i could even say not so much the books on print i used to listen to the audiobooks not of the works of george rr martin in general not just game of thrones i used to listen to when doing push-ups and lifting weights to the gym maybe that's what my workout is lacking right now make sure you get back to listening to the georgia heart and i was i was lifting weights very heavily in those days which i'm not at the moment in case you hadn't guessed but you know when you're really lifting at your limit you then sit there out of breath you know between sets and so on i remember going through that that literature and you know we all went through the tragedy of what happened with the television adaptation which basically got worse and worse and worse as the years went on but that was adds up to quite a few years of my life i started watching that show when my daughter was a newborn infant and now she's a fully grown human being anyway yeah so it's interesting but this is someone who's been watching my youtube channel since the days when i discussed game of thrones and for me what was so interesting about that series of books and so on had a lot to do with politics uh politics critique of religion and so on and so forth also it was just this fan since scheme of thrones here are two topic suggestions that would be fun personality tests like mbti so mbti is the notorious mayor's briggs uh personality test i am naughty right now so now you have heard of us as obvious as that is i hadn't thought of that so she says that people give their personality profile on their instagram profile i guess i have i've seen that i was going to say it's the topic of innumerable sort of cosmopolitan magazine articles it's the the stuff of pop psychology in this in this sense um anyway i'll i'll leave out the rest of his his comment i'll treat the rest of it as private but you know one of the most fundamental things i say this to my girlfriend i say this to my mom i says to my personal friends and i say this to my enemies than the internet too and the middle of debates he says you know i think of philosophy as a problem-solving method and to some extent also over time over the centuries you know you have the accumulation and comparative study of many problem-solving methods like you look at buddhist philosophy and think about how that shapes society and contrast the catholic and muslim philosophy and atheist philosophy so you know at some point you get the you get kind of meta philosophy the philosophy of philosophy but fundamentally why do we do philosophy why do we think philosophically it's to solve problems and it's not to create problems and i think that this type of personality test first and foremost is a great example of people creating jargon for the sake of creating jargon people creating problems for the sake of creating problems you're creating these distinctions really invidiousistic distinctions if taken seriously between different personality types and for what and why to solve what problem they'll give you hypothetical it's not so hard to relate to what if the air force is trying to distinguish between the people who drop out of the program and people who succeed they say well you know what every year we recruit 200 people into this pilot training program and so many of them just for one reason another give up and then there are these other people who succeed an even better example would be the submarine service something like above 95 percent of the men who think they've got what it takes to be in the submarine service and who get through the initial program of rigorous testing like 95 can't cope with being on a submarine this very small percentage man so you might say okay let's let's take this new science or this new philosophy of personality tests and let's try to figure out what type of person you know can hack it in the air force what kind of person can succeed in the navy and the submarine service and this this would solve the problem for us right so that would be a i think a really serious philosophical and ultimately scientific approach to personality tests okay some people succeed at learning languages and some people fail and now i could add to this a long paragraph of what conditions we're talking about when i lived in thailand my boss so i used to work in the publishing industry non-fiction publishing i was an editor of non-fiction books i guess i guess i should start hyping up that part of my background more now that i'm identifying with hashtag booktube right and like hashtag bookstagram now that i'm on those hashtags i should emphasize that i'm a former former non-fiction editor but hey i was at this uh remarkable nonfiction publishing house based in in thailand and my boss he'd been there for decades and decades and he labored with such fundamental errors in the thai language like his errors were mind-blowing to me you know what i mean and i'm sorry i've probably told the santa before maybe five years ago on the channel or something but it would be things like you know there was a name for a certain type of building like a certain type of municipal office building so it's not quite the mayor's office but it's a certain type of government office and he thought that was the name of the city that the building was located in there were all these weird errors he had and i remember one of them was it was again just a place name a top of them that was literally written on the side of the highway like and it wasn't just one sign like he was driving past this sign like 10 times a day every day for more than 10 years and he had this place name wrong i'm just not giving the particular place names because i don't wanna i don't wanna dox people whatever i'm not gonna give away this actress or something but like there are all these kind of mind-blowing language areas and you think okay so i've been here for a short time and working hard in the language like really really i've been studying for a very short time and i'm i'm catching all these things and you've been here for all these years so you know you could try to devise a personality test that solves this problem now my former boss the guy i'm talking about in town so he was a white german who moved to thailand and been there for decades and you know in some ways he could use the language well but you could say incredibly sloppy with incredibly poor accuracy and you know he he slept with prostitutes and lived a very he had he had what the french might call joao de vivre you know he enjoyed his life on his terms in a way that i wouldn't he was a bit of a brute centralist he was a very self-confident person uh he didn't care if he hurt other people's feelings he didn't care if he he was not sensitive to other people in that way and so many he lived a kind of brash reckless life treading on everyone's toes including his own and the brash reckless life sexually and in every other way um so very stark contrast to me at that time i was a scholar of buddhism leading this very tightly disciplined controlled self-examined life and so on so you could try to assess the difference between our personalities and say well okay a certain type of personality is noticing these errors really sharp on the details and a certain about personality is kind of reckless and sloppy and there's a sense in which he's learned the language he's able to communicate but he's getting things wrong all the time he doesn't notice it yeah it seems as if you could start to put together something that's both philosophically valuable and has some scientific validity for the army for the navy for language education maybe for the teachers also the different personality types of teachers all right and absolutely none of this can be said for the myers-briggs personality test absolutely nothing like this can be said for any of the psychological profiling and personality tests of our time and one of the most telling aspects is that these personality tests do not include any negative traits how about laziness right does laziness show up your personality test now again not to insult anyone who has dyslexia right but if you were doing this study whether for the military or for language a condition like is dyslexia you can call that part of your personality or not it would be crucially important to measure something like dyslexia well this isn't part of personalities my introduction to um the strange world of pseudoscientific personality tests was finding a tome on a bookshelf in a secondhand bookstore in toronto canada a big heavy tome and it was the famous minnesota personality index test which is mmpi oh so melissa's heard of this yeah when i worked for the psychologist you have some professional experience yeah was he interviewed and he used this point scoring system the m in all the api so i saw all the test questions so i i had this tome that i bought second hand and it was the collected life stories of mmpi profilees people have been profiled and i forget the original purpose was to do something like profile them in grade six and then again in grade nine and then again at the end of high school this kind of thing it was you know and to describe the personality and it was so tragic i think the first entry i read sailing to some other dogs i'd like to discuss today if the audience is into it i think the first entry i read was about a first nations girl an american indian girl and describes her whole terrible life you know in the midst of genocide and it's trying to describe her personality it's like well you know obviously she's a person of resilience and boldness and she was born in these terrible circumstances and this was her mother and this was her father and you know this unbelievable struggle to overcome you know terrible circumstances and you know she does she does really badly in school but when the teachers are asked about it the teachers will say oh well it's not because she's stupid you know she's a bright kid but she comes from a tough background you know like she got this kind of fascinating emotionally moving profile of this girl and this series of numbers of course you could take this serious number this was what the book was created for so you could see what the numbers meant in practice and then you could look up another profile for a boy the same age who got the same rating the same numbers and says you know jim was a dull boy none of his teachers thought he was particularly interesting or intelligent described as a boring person by the way that's all they did they interviewed the kid and they interviewed a couple of the kids teachers and uh i think so maybe a couple of their schoolyard friends or something asked when asked about the school board nobody thought he was distinctive one way or the other and look some of the profiles that's all they said it was like this kid is nondescript there's nothing interesting about this i mean um and you know of course some of them was like oh this kid is already an alcoholic or what have you and the point is when you compared the narrative data about these children or teenagers because as they recall went to the end of high school or something uh to you know this set of numbers that was supposedly quantifying their personality it of course it completely you know revealed how how ridiculous this this attempt to quantify personality is yeah but so you know babe so it is interesting to hear people are still using mmpi the minnesota personalities for clients who are doing child custody evaluations so he would interview adults how crazy they are basically yeah this was they did show some negative characters like some negative traits yeah anyway um yeah so it's interesting to still be used diagnostically well i was reminded that it hadn't completely disappeared from the world because it is considered debunked old-fashioned it is i mean i would say it's not the state of the art and the in the jordan peterson does not use the mnpi for example um he uses the big five personality test and so on but um i remember there was an episode of the simpsons it is the episode in which the secret origin of ned flanders is revealed and it extensively makes fun of the mmpi system so yeah anyway this is the question i had in from the audience is what i thought about these types of of personality tests and i think you can tell part of what i'm suggesting to you is that there is a tragedy here that there is the potential for something scientifically valid and meaningful and philosophically rigorous you know to come out of these kinds of questions but they have to be posed as questions and that's not what we're doing here we're starting with a solution and then proliferating problems and proliferating jargon and proliferating categories that have absolutely no problem solving value so you know if you want to know specifically about myers-briggs my assertion here is that the myers-briggs profiling system will not in any way differentiate who will succeed and who will fail in the american military it will not in any way help you to differentiate who will be a good language student who will be a good language teacher or an even better question what type of language teacher would be best suited to what type of language student that could be fantastic research to do say okay well this is the kind of kid who doesn't forget kids do this with adults this is the kind of adult who you know is naturally not sociable and not you know prone to speaking so they need a teacher who's going to encourage them to speak obviously you could come up with some really useful you know conclusions this time alas this is not uh this is not the way of of science in our times and it's not the way of cosmopolitan magazine so it's a great a tragedy that what goes on in universities on the one hand is not really linked to research and on the other hand is not really linked to education so following up on melissa's video you might want to write this down to the timestamp following up on melissa's video i had one long time uh viewer uh right into the channel and he objected at first he said no i i disagree with what melissa's doing in the video there's the scientific evidence that music education is fantastically productive helpful and he didn't get angry at me but i really made fun of him and really insulted him after this and i it only took a couple google searches to find out what the source of this information was and it's this shameful you know perception of music laboratory in montreal attached to mcgill and it's this is really what universities have become today and it's this guy who's a snake oil salesman who's had a best-selling book he's had a book on the new york times bestseller list about how music education has all these wonderful effects you he has this laboratory where he does experiments such as having you immerse your hand in a bucket of ice cold water while listening to one kind of music and then have you immerse your hand in a bucket of ice cold water while listening to a different kind of music and see how well you endure the pain and well listen differently you know none of it proves anything all of it's just to excite and entice the you know get you know get people you know buying his new york times best-selling book yeah getting no no getting people to donate to university right it's fundraising for the university this is the kind of show business side of academia today which again it neither has to do with real research nor does it have to do with yeah yeah yeah and um obviously there's a lot of self-justification in these claims that the study of music will make you more intelligent or something but in this case there was a whole another layer of scam anyway the long time viewer the channel uh i think i'm sure that was andreas out in in los angeles that was i wrote it to me i don't think he'll be very scared to be shown about and he seemed to concede the point i think he felt like he watched this ted talk or heard this thing that was quoting this book and he assumed this was real science and the moment you googled in the moment you looked into it you uh you know so okay so uh guys i'm happy to answer questions from the audience um yeah anyway not show business comments about the big five personalities i do not want to get into the big five personality test um i could easily make a youtube video discussing the big five personality test um but yeah i mean i think you can guess uh what kind of critical direction it's taking uh james writes in and asks isil i'm curious to hear your opinion of prime minister justin trudeau and your opinion of kansas mainstream political parties well it's great that you should ask that so just today i produced my incredibly sophisticated and elaborate taxonomy of canadian democracy so i'm going to give you the link to that right now you can see this in-depth diagram that in one image in one postage stamp size image exhaustively and in great detail explains to you my analysis of how canadian democracy works or it doesn't work so this diagram for those of you at home who are not clicking on the link to not see it it divides canadian politics six ways the pro-cbc left the pro-cbc right the pro-cbc center then the anti-cbc left anti-cbc right anti-cbc center this is my uh this is my proposal for understanding canadian politics look guys um a lot of what i've been writing about lately so i'm still answering your question james this is still applied important question about the prime minister you know a lot hi lydia hi natasha nice to see you nice that you're here at this time of day i was hoping we'd get some people from new zealand but we'll see uh i guess new zealand is also celebrating the end chronovirus quarantine and are out dancing around in the sunshine or happy for the first time but for i know right now my whole youtube channel is fewer views because this is there's not a time people want to be sitting at home listening to morality lectures and for me morality lectures never go out of season uh okay sorry it's the question about justin trudeau and the canadian political system a lot of what i'm writing about right now for my book no more manifestos buy your copy make a down payment mortgage your house um i'm writing this book no more manifestos a lot of what it deals with is the problem that so much of our political discourse is focused on the moral quality of a person's character and not on their actual political responsibilities how the system works or what what it is they're supposed to deliver or accomplish if we vote for them or if we elect them like what is it you are exchanging your your vote for now for the most part in our culture and in our political systems plural um all we can say for ourselves is that we voted for the person we felt was morally superior with no expectation no understanding of what what they would do in return no commitment from them what they would do you know give very easy to understand example most people felt they were electing barack obama to close down the torture chambers in iraq and in guantanamo bay cuba so at that time those who aren't old enough or those who weren't following american politics those may now seem like minor footnotes in history those were huge issues right at the time barack obama was elected and people thought the first day he came into office there'd be some kind of decisive change that would end the use of torture and close down those specific facilities uh in iraq and afghanistan but in guantanamo bay cuba above all else now what did barack obama do in afghanistan and in iraq it is very fair to say that he continued and expanded on the policies of george w bush there wasn't some kind of sudden shift in policy you know that the war in one sentence the war continued and many of the you know distinctive strategies strategic approaches of uh george w bush versus the use of drone strikes which left when people did not like i by the way i'm not i'm not a stereotypical person there are many things people in the left say that i don't particularly agree with i think the hysteria about drone strikes was misplaced it was based on a misunderstanding of the technology and more but any case the people who voted for barack obama they hated drone strikes they were morally opposed to drug strikes i'm not but you know and they thought that was going to change and no it was massively expanded under obama there were more drone strikes so even i don't know if you guys remember this there was a particular artist uh who made iconic posters for obama and they were obama's face with the word hope and a very distinctive color scheme and he proposed that he redo the poster with the word drones instead of so this just shows at that time this was really perceived as a big deal now what could anyone say oh well they voted for obama because they felt morally and ethically he was the better person than the alternative but there's no particular commitment you know the moral and intellectual quality of our leaders matters and my opinion of justin trudeau if that is what you are asking me is that he is morally and intellectually a bad person i think he is stupid and immoral all right i don't think justin trudeau has read aristotle i don't think justin trudeau has read thucydides i don't think he's read anything else to compensate i think he is someone who was born rich and became lazy and got a little bit too comfortable a little bit too early in life he has been photographed partying in blackface repeatedly he himself admitted he does not know how many times he wore blackface and this was not such ancient history this wasn't in the 1930s or something you know he's not that old you know and it wasn't that many years ago but i mean in every way you know including this it is an indication i'm sorry for any of you in the audience okay alexa how old is justin trudeau justin trudeau is 49 years old okay alexa stop okay justin trudeau is 49. okay i'm 42. okay it's not ancient any of you in the audience who are in your 40s did you did you did you wear blackface at a party like repeatedly did you dress up in blackface you know i'm sorry i know this is a kind of uh you know small and symbolic indication of how stupid a guy the guy is but yes i that is really genuinely my moral and intellectual evaluation guy now it's interesting to note i met with one of my chinese professors at the university of victoria right around the time justin trudeau won the election so this is someone who is ethnically chinese as well as being an expert in chinese politics you know he's a professor who is chinese and who studies and teaches things chinese and i remember he said to me with this very worried expression on his face he said you know all of my friends probably his friends are all left-wing academics they're all excited and hopeful about you know prime minister justin trudeau with this new and different prime minister you know and he said but i'm not and you know english is a second language i think you just said i'm not i think it's bad and um uh you know i smiled at him we knew each other pretty well i wouldn't say we're close friends or something we talked many times i said i think it's bad also remember started in this kind of very esl way you know um you know and we talked about how low our expectations were for justin trudeau so yeah you know unfortunately i do think justin joe's a bad person and a stupid person he came into office with an incredibly vague set of promises and you know aside from massively increasing the bankruptcy of canada i mean massively overspending being really you know economically irresponsible what indeed do we have to show what are the accomplishments of his time in office and i think when he leaves we can ask this same question now you know a real contrast here is joe biden joe biden had the most shocking first hundred days in office certainly during my lifetime he really came to office with an amazing list of things he wanted to do not just to change the united states of america but to change the rest of the world now i don't know if joe biden has another 100 days in it just i'm skeptical maybe for the rest of joe biden's demon office he's going to accomplish nothing maybe nothing's really going to change possible but you know that was somebody who came with a very strong sense of mission and mandate and purpose and he's already really changed the world forever and he's changed life united states america forever and he may he may continue to do so but you know justin trudeau did not come into office with any such agenda obviously his ability to do anything since the start of the coronavirus quarantine period has been very limited but he accomplished nothing before that and now he's just an endless cycle of making excuses for his having failed to accomplish anything and so also for those of you in our canadian who don't already know i haven't been talking about this but yes there is a there is at least one corruption scandal with him i i would say there are two i'm confident in saying he's guilty of you know there have been misdeeds of that kind with uh with him in power and so on and those you know the details of those scandals are very boring but they reflect these fundamental problems both those moral his moral characters intellectual character and you know then we can say in this sense his uh his political character okay guys so i'm i'm happy to talk i'm happy to talk about whatever you guys started with the audience but i also do have my own list things to talk about many of them being books books that i've bought books that i've read or that i haven't read so this book was given to me by a member of the audience he's already been thanked but you say i haven't read this yet if you want to read this along with me if you want to read it and we'll talk about it on live streams right this is an opportunity there's a chance so you know i just say you you the fact that i'm going to talk about books i haven't read yet or that i've only read a little bit about creates the possibility of a different kind of audience interaction and you know so this is a book i will be talking about on future episodes if you order it from amazon or get ordered from the library you probably have this for free from the library guys uh we can suffer through it together and you know maybe i'll reflect on things oh yes good point uh sorry i just assume everyone knows already so first name howard last name jones howard jones and i should say you know what i give you guys that link too there was actually an interview with him maybe that's too boring yeah i guess i won't okay there is a podcast interviewing the guy that i enjoyed but you know what it is a pretty boring interview uh but if you look around you maybe you can find some more interesting because he he did do some interviews and podcasts to promote the book when it was new as so many authors do in this day and age um we actually have an insane troll in the audience who is not fandar how what a that's that's a change okay [Laughter] guys i'm seeing some messages you guys aren't seeing by the way because youtube automatically sensors this stuff and then i if i don't click to unsensor it it stays censored so depending on different uh different keywords things to get uh censored so i just mentioned it sorry this is not uh not doing anything in a particular order but in terms of the book club um another book that i'm still at the the first impression stage with i think you can read that right off the camera right off the screen the plot to kill king the truth behind the assassination of martin luther king jr the final book on this topic from william pepper esquire um okay this guy devoted his life or many decades of his life to researching and talking about the assassination of martin luther king jr this is published by sky horse publishing incorporated it doesn't really sound like a real publisher because it's not and i gotta tell you something this doesn't really look like a real book um it's not well written it's not well organized there are big chunks of text and image that look like they are you know the uh the appendix to an appendix or something and there are there are so this is a huge book i think we got about 600 pages but there are large parts of it you would not read so it's like 700 pages of text so you know you get transcripts and all this stuff so look guys maybe there are 150 pages of text in here that would really interest you now that could be a good thing because you probably don't have time to read 700 pages of text right but i just mentioned the book is shorter than it appears to be um he published several similar books before this and this is the summation of his research covering her many headings she's i'm not against that i'm not against someone writing the same book again and again so to speak and updating and expanding and improving it but i have to say this is not um a literary masterpiece and the question i have for you and one of the reasons i bought this book i've heard many by the way i've heard many interviews with this guy over the years uh william pepper he's been on the talk show circuit and he's been on the youtube circuit and the podcast circuit but you know even before he's been on broadcast television and broadcast radio for many many years raising the question of who really killed uh dr martin martin luther king jr the question is ultimately did he prove this i do already feel i have a good understanding of exactly what happened and why in the death of martin luther king jr but understanding what happened and being able to present something as a proven established fact these are two very different things now likewise i just mentioned i feel i have a totally good understanding of what happened with the assassination of jfk you know however you know could you prove in a court of law that precisely this happened in this way for these reasons as opposed to speaking in broad brushstroke generalities of what happened and why uh so one reason to pay the money to get this book get out of the library what have you is just ask the question can it be proven and if william pepper couldn't prove it in so many decades then i guess nobody can so i will give you guys the link to a youtube video here if you want just a kind of three minute introduction to this okay the infamous tv judge judge joe brown who was also involved in the court cases that were appealing the conviction of james earl ray so in the first three minutes of this eight minute video you will be made to understand i mean if you want to put three minutes into this sometime this will in three minutes let you know that there are palpable incontrovertible scientifically verified facts that prove that the official government version of events cannot be true so the most obvious this comes up in the assassination of jfk and it comes with the assassination of rfk are just uh ballistics so the science of ballistics which bullet comes from which kind of gun so if people say he was shot with this rifle but the actual bullet that entered his body doesn't match with that rifle it's not the right rifle for that kind of bullet there are some simple palpable incontrovertible scientific facts like that that means that one version of events is not true but as i say the fact like the fact that you can say with the assassination of jfk for example that the magic bullet theory is preposterous or is false we can prove that theory is false okay that's one thing but then is there a different theory is there a difference with which you can prove is correct so the onus is on the author here william pepper not just to demolish misconceptions about the assassination of martin luther junior but to actually establish new and different uh historical facts so someone from the audience uh paid five dollars the five euros in fact i just mentioned guys um i used to post how much and how little money i make on youtube uh on my blog all the time this so this five dollar donation that will basically be all the money generated by this broadcast i mean maybe 20 cents or something will be generated by youtube center right now if you'd like i could post that you know i could post that information now obviously if you get 20 cents for every video it does add up to something over time uh certainly i make more than 100 us dollars a month from youtube right now i can get you guys the exact numbers but it is very very little so i just say a five dollar donation i appreciate it and also that will basically be 99 of the revenue generated for this for this podcast would be the nations of this guy this podcast this live stream this youtube video in whatever format you encounter this content we're uh we're producing together right now okay so wicked energy writes in with five five euro donation speaking of have you had any comments on richard stallman or the free as in liberty software movement okay um i'm joking around if you own one of these devices you can't say the name of the robot without a response who's asking about my robot companion here um alexa how tall is joe biden joe biden is six feet tall there you go but if i mention her name she'll start listening and respond to what we're saying so unless we want to join we want to join the conversation so have a do i have any comments on the free software movement guys i have made videos talking about this before my overall approach to this is to criticize the ongoing history we have which is sadly centered in the united states of america of uh intellectual property rights of copyright so let me see if i can get you the link of that i do think we need to very very fundamentally i don't know if i can get you that video i'm sorry um it may take too long i don't want you guys to have to sit here oh here we go so the title of video is the public domain copy pardon me the public domain colon star wars should be deregulated so there you go uh i'll give you guys the link to that if you're interested uh yeah you know i do think there is a need to very fundamentally and profoundly change our legal ethical philosophical approach to what intellectual property is to what uh copyright is so on and so forth um okay melissa could you turn on that light now it's just it's getting a little bit dimmer as the as the as the sun sets i think it's a good time too i have a very simple question oh are you still in china you're more than a year out of date if you think i'm still in china no i'm i'm not living in china now i had to leave uh taiwan suddenly because of the conditions of coronavirus quarantine but i was living in taiwan a year and a half ago more than one year ago i was i was living in taiwan and i'm currently living in canada and indeed i was promising to talk a little bit more about the politics again in this video a question have you seen the jfk movie kevin costner i have uh it is [ __ ] i mean if it inspires you to go out and learn something new and valuable that's nice you can watch all kinds of terrible movies that might inspire you to call it something new and valuable you know like i'm not i'm not against that you could watch conan the barbarian for example but no i mean the um the kevin costner movie it's uh it is a very strange fiction now it lies about many things but just very briefly one of the most important lies in the jfk movie would be um you know the attempt to make jfk into a peacenik hero who was going to end the vietnam war and that the reason for jfk's assassination was that he was supposedly heroically about to end the vietnam war but then because he was assassinated the vietnam war went on longer um you can look into what the origin of that that myth is but i think that is a really dangerous thing to be dishonest about uh in this united states the jfk was a martyr for peace uh that's not true at all and you can take a look into what jfk did in the cuban missile crisis and you can take a look into what jfk's policy was on cuba itself or what he did in terms of diplomacy with the russians uh no i mean so there are a lot of really dangerous misconceptions there however if it gets you interested in understanding what really happened in history um as opposed to you know lies and half truths that may have been told to you by your parents your grandparents or your high school teachers then you know certainly you know more power to you this is one of those moments we're going to change topic do you got to vote babe in particular you want me to you want me do you want me to do israel last time there were people asking me to talk about israel and i demurred so israeli paul is one thing another issue that's on the top of us today yeah canadian genocide the uh the question of yeah yeah give what you want me to do okay so melissa's vote so one person the audience says israel yes melissa's vote is canadian genocide yes oh gee this fanning this is good it's okay no no no i don't know it's fine um someone in the audience says isil can you please discuss the immorality of owning cats and dogs as pets now you know james that really is something i've covered on the channel before i'm happy to have this kind of question i don't mind but i've got to invoke youtubers prince privilege here um i have a memorable video called your cat hates you and there is another very memorable video called your dog hates you but no i did many different videos covering that and there is a playlist called the wildlife management paradigm so let's just note that down wildlife management paradigm uh do i have this i might have a separate playlist for pets and one of the best videos when i did with melissa remember that and it was like uh that's also a great one flush your emotional support hamster down the toilet that's a great video yeah that's that's what you're thinking of i was thinking though we talked about pet ownership but i don't know if that's the one that you're thinking about yeah i was thinking when we did two-handed and it's it's like uh companions are not captives it's something like that so let me just see this like captive animals are not companion animals uh so i've really yeah so the actual the actual title oh you look great in this video the lighting is really working for you uh captive animals are not companion animals there you go now guys this is a prolex literature i am providing you with this is hours and hours of viewing on the topic of the immorality of owning uh dogs and cats so you know oh here's a great book how far down in your reading list is the mao book okay well which we have several now which one do you want to get are you thinking of which one are you thinking of alec maybe do you mean tombstone do you mean yeah right how the red sun rose we have we have several okay baby i'll just oh it's okay i don't need to hold the book it's okay i can i can hold the books um you know uh so alec i just say um i i definitely want to want to talk about ancient rome here uh but you know um my assumption is that in september i'm going to be back in class at university of victoria so the assumption is i'm going to be going back to studying chinese as a language and thinking and working a lot about politics of china so it doesn't really make sense you're working on mao zedong or chinese politics now but the assumption is come september so this month well june i'm going to be finishing my book um and then we'll see how much time i do or don't put into physically printing or publishing the book uh so this is my last chance to not worry about mao zedong and politics in china yeah okay so anyway um as uh as mentioned uh melissa's vote was for canadian genocide we have other votes for for israel so alec was in fact asking about how the how the red sun rose so that's when well no but we have the other book you remember the book about uh the history of that's an even better book the history of uh agriculture in in communist china that one that's a great book man so this one guys and yeah yeah we're we're passionate about these books we just don't have them read it guys so there you go land wars this is one to check out guys and this guy did a really good uh podcast interview if you if you look him up so his name is brian de mer or brian brian demar i'd assume it's the mayor but hey brian de mer uh land wars there's really one and hey look how thin this is look at that there's a book that doesn't waste your time guys like that instead of i mean how the red sun rose that's a commitment jeez whew this is this is brief man if you do not include the endnotes or the appendix this is 166 pages this is a lean meme non-fiction machine so there you go and again for us that can make a big difference like maybe between now and september i can read this maybe we can both rate it that's the book we're all passionate about babe can we share the jar of water can you just move it here so i can reach it thanks i'm working up a sweat yeah okay get the winner but if if dogs start barking outside we're gonna have to close one around so another great question uh why politics is china do you plan on moving back there well that's what my university degree is in so we if i finish this university degree then we presume i'm going to be thinking and talking more about politics china the chinese language uh if i don't who knows okay guys so this is may 31st 2021 and the news story of the day is the genocide of canada's indigenous people something that you know it's not the new story every which day you know uh so let me just ask you guys that you can answer this what do you think the annual budget of nasa is for the united states of america but 23 million i believe i misspoke 23 billion yup memory serves so most recent budget was uh 22.6 billion so we're going to round that off to 23 billion um annual budget for the canadian space agency is 421 million dollars all right so let's let's just let's just put that in perspective okay now you know why don't you show me um could you build paradise in the middle of the arizona desert for the last surviving members of the indigenous people there the navajo and so on the nad dna for those who could you build paradise in the middle of the desert for one billion dollars how about 23 billion how about 23 billion a year year after year after year right if we're talking about money okay the united states of america has the money to solve this problem they're spending it on international space station this is the first thing to put a priority here okay it's put into perspective here is the question of priority and people think about priority as if it is not a black and white ethical issue and it is it is matters of priority are questions of who gets to live and who gets to die they are questions of right and wrong good and evil matters of priority are not just questions like the one i was asked a few minutes ago oh in what order are you going to read the books that you're reading okay governments make decisions that involve billions of dollars now coming back to um you know fundamental and profound issues of political science political philosophy that go all the way back to ancient greece and ancient rome you guys might or might not remember that i made a youtube video talking about redistributing land ownership right that video it has more than one conclusion but i'll ask you this about land ownership certain radical left-wing groups in america still today are asking for the redistribution of land they want land to be given to black people who are descendants of slaves they want black pardon me they want black and indigenous people generally to receive land and they want in particular descendants of you know first nations people american indians who were kicked off to be given their land back so this is a commoner frame this is in fact chanted by protesters in the united states america the chantey is quote quote land back grammatically not the best chant but i guess it rhymes with a lot of things okay so this is one approach to politics one approach to the political problem author now again if you think about the budget for solving this problem as being on about the same order as as nasa's annual budget for space exploration if you if you think about it in the tens of billions of dollars the united states of america and in the hundreds of millions of dollars uh for tiny poverty stricken canada our smaller and poorer country than assets america then yes at a cost of billions dollars you could you could try to solve this problem through land distribution i tried to guide my audience to the conclusion in my earlier video talking about redistributing land ownership to i tried to guide you to see the wisdom of instead thinking in terms of redistribution of opportunity not of land and one of the easiest and one of the most important ways to redistribute opportunity is through education so the education system could indeed be described as the distribution of economic opportunity now if you are canadian if you are born and raised and have lived your whole life in canada i can ask you have you ever had a surgeon who was cree or ojibwe or mohawk or inuit you know have you ever met an architect who was cree or ojibwe or mohawk or inuit if you think about all of the kree and ojibwe and mohawk and indian people all the first nations and indigenous people you have met in all walks of life what jobs did they have what was their economic and social status in our society now i'm not going to make the claim that there are zero indigenous people in these types of elite professions but to say they are underrepresented is an understatement and if you are canadian and if you've been listening to the news today it's the news story being talked about today then you all know why okay we had an education system that was designed to exterminate our indigenous people yes cultural genocide but it also involved eugenic methods of population control yes some of them were directly killed some of them also were castrated chemically castrated i know of cases and these are established as real historical fact where just x-rays were used on the testicles of uh first nations men as as boys in these schools to render them incapable of reproduction so this is overt eugenic policy so you know to reduce the number of children they're having and thus erase them from the map of canada so there were various methods of you know eugenic and cultural genocidal policy against them and also just outright simple genocide and now apart from that there was never any concept of excellence in the education program there was never any idea that the school in a small town in northern british columbia which is where these corpses were discovered by the way it was kamloops so just up the road here um it's a long road and canada is a huge country so the distance from here to kamloops compared to a distance within england within europe it's huge but by canadian standards it's not that far from where i'm sitting right now small town in central central mountains of british columbia the idea that the high school where you educate indigenous people or the primary school that this should be the envy of the western world that you should be able to take a photograph of this and say with pride we're not like the russians we're not exterminating our indigenous look at what the soviet union is doing to its indigenous people out in siberia out in you know the asiatic expanse of the eastern russia eastern soviet look at the terrible genocidal policies we are not like that we are providing our people with an education we're proud of and that they can be proud of and our indigenous people are going to go on to become the architects and the surgeons and the senators and the leaders of our society right this kind of very simple idea of excellence it was absent from the system education it was quite intentionally so now you see there are some parallels the parallels are always imperfect but you know um in australia they had a special education system that's i don't know how well-known this is this is something well known to people like me it is it is well known that they set up a special education system not for their indigenous people but for the people who were half white and half indigenous and it was the openly stated purpose of this special education program to train these people to basically be janitors to take up the lowest forms of employment in the cities with the assumption or assertion being they would neither be accepted by the indigenous community nor by the white community they would have to have this special status um yeah as as the lowest of the low and unskilled you know positions of labor and so on yeah now you know um i know various anecdotes about what you know what the framers of the canadian constitution thought about a heart attack and what their plans were them primarily their plan was for them to just not exist right but if you ask what kind of education were they being provided with what kind of job training what kind of preparation uh for the world i have done i have done some research on this i was used to be at first nations university and so on and it was always very instructive who the exceptions were who was actually successful so when you read about people who did well who actually got a good education and led to a good job i'm thinking of a real example but i think you have one in particular but this is not a pattern you see again again there was a young man who was extremely talented at hockey and in another case it's a young man who's talented at lacrosse and the teachers and the priests took him aside and like oh well we have to make sure you get good food because you're the you're the hog you're going to be a hockey star you know and he was he was he was getting ahead oh don't read the the books the other kids are we're going to provide you with better education and better tutoring because we know you're going to go on to a real school or a real college or you're going to be an illegal you know we don't want you to embarrass us we want you to leave you're like a semi-literate like these other kids the way in which people gathered around and supported this kind of talented youth who was treated as a positive exception because they were going to go on to be a hockey player or they're going to go on to be a lacrosse player or on the olympic running team in contrast to the other children who were being starved and beaten and raped and taught nothing and ended up semi-illiterate or completely unreal or what have you just it was a bad education in that sense they didn't show up you know learned and prepared to go to college with absolutely no hope of going on to college and also know like uh it's not like it's not like the german uh system of uh you know training you to have a career as an engineer or something sorry germany has famous for this kind of technician system where it's there's a lot less emphasis on literature but there's more emphasis on hands-on training where you learn how to work in a wood shop and working with metal tools no no no no there's this really kind of this education system devised you know for oppression for the sake of oppression and so on um the evils of the system are illustrated very well by examining the exceptions to the rule and then how their lives turned out and how they they benefited from being taken aside and given given this kind of a special treatment yeah so you know um when i hear the current discourse about first nations people in canada the slow motion genocide and what's supposedly being done about it now to rectify it i'm furious um uh you know melissa here's me shouting sarcastic remarks you know at the radio we don't need another statue we don't need another memorial we don't need another apology we need change we need profound systemic change from the bottom top and what i hate most of all is when they claim oh and the federal government isn't going to be doing this alone oh no we're going to be doing this in partnership with native people and and their their communities are going to be playing a leadership role no they're not no they're not and that's precisely because of the education system because when you go to those communities where are the surgeons where are the architects where are the lawyers among them where are the highly accomplished highly erudite people who can sit down and play a leadership role in government now again i'm not going to say there are zero if you go to hobima alberta one of the largest reservations by population in all of canada go to hobima alberta you fight you find just how few people are there who have succeeded in any career in any metier you know again the exceptions often are people who became athletes or musicians things that don't require credentials and this kind of straight and narrow path that you know crucially involves high school crucially involves the distribution of opportunity through education but you know look um so this so this this is the defining tragedy of canada in the 21st century and it is the reason why my daughter was not born here and my daughter does not have canadian citizenship now my i wonder if my ex-wife remembers this but i said to my ex-wife when i dropped out of uh first nations university so i i guess i digress briefly to that i was enrolled in learning cree and ojibwe at first nations universe i was studying first nations language and getting involved with activism for and research related to the political plight of these these native people when i could not continue with that anymore because the program was garbage and the whole institution was garbage and the particular professors involved with garbage there's only a small number of people you know define a program with it and by the way the other students were also garbage there wasn't a single other student there uh learning cree really and i i can quote them on that i i can i can back up that claim um i remember sitting with the professors just asking do you know one other student who is actually trying to learn this language because if i could just have one person to just repeat the sentences back and forth with i get some language practice because currently there's zero in your department you know that would help me that would occur they said no there isn't anybody it's only you you're the only guy here to learn free so you know and by the way there were plenty other students enrolled in the class but that's not why they were there they were not there to learn the language it's another it's another story but yeah sure there's a critique of the students involved here not just to critique the the professors and the institution um um i said to my ex-wife my wife at the time we were planning on having a baby it was where i said look if i can't be part of the solution i do not want to be part of the problem i'm not gonna have my daughter born here i'm not gonna have my daughter raised here i do not want my daughter to be a canadian citizen now yes this directly has to do with the genocide and the fact that it was the door was closed it was going to be impossible for me to be part of the solution for me to be part of the politics of cree language revival and activism and advocacy for native people yeah and of course it's partly also because the actual education system in canada is so awful i wouldn't want my daughter to grow up in it whether she were black or white um and by the way before my daughter was born we didn't know to what extent she might come out looking black or white my daughter is just partly african in her ancestry something it's something that was quite a big deal at the uh at the hospital where we gave birth to her by the way the doctors and nurses there were not cool with our ambiguous racial status bringing us back to the uh anecdotes about racism in australia and the british empire everything else uh so i want to say sir we're wrapping up this this unit wrapping up this section guys one of the main responses to the news in these last few days it's very much news today but it's been talked about for just a couple days now about uh about 212 corpses being found on the site of one particular school the estimate is that about 6 000 students were killed that doesn't include newborn babies killed on site newborn babies that were produced by the teachers raping the students getting them pregnant and then taking the babies and putting them directly in the furnace which is an historically proven fact that that happened it's not a theory um so there were corpses especially of babies that were disposed of in furnaces that there were no remains so there were other corpses buried on site where we do have evidence and we have eyewitness testimony and records right things and the use of shackles and the use of websites records one of the main responses from canadians was to point out that there were schools for white people in the british empire that were just as bad or even worse okay and that is true okay that's not an excuse that's not an explanation but it is true and it is worthwhile to tell this story about how horribly we treated our indigenous people in the context of for example the the so-called homeboy system a lot of you don't know before homeboy was a slang term it was a legal term the system of homeschooled home children these uh the home children that's what they were called homeboys um the various systems i mean ultimately even anne of green gables is about for how children were treated if their parents were in debtors prison if they were sent out to the colonies because it was felt that the slums of london were overpopulated there were all these bizarre forms of you know kind of late victorian and edwardian you know ideas of education that were really absolutely awful that's true that's true okay nevertheless you know this is not to belittle one or the other don't dismiss how awful education was for one group of people by pointing to how awful education was for other people right i mean yes it's important to understand that context right and what what how does this matter today that's this is a big part of understanding how is it possible that the quality of education in canada is so terrible for everybody today everybody my education was terrible i grew up in a labor neighborhood that had lead pipes there was literally i was given lead poisoning my whole [ __ ] childhood in downtown toronto i went to a terrible school i went to school with you know newly relocated refugees from chile and around the world and new immigrants from greece and south america and africa and the caribbean and so on and we had a couple of koreans um i think we didn't have any chinese kids in my school but we had korean by the way you know i grew up in this you know multicultural fantasy of what canada is supposed to be in the middle of downtown toronto with lead pipes i had a terrible education my mother is a member of the order of canada my mother is a knight in france she's a chevalier i am as elite as privileged as anyone in canada can be i allegedly went to the best university in canada and it was terrible even i am the product of a terrible education system and why is that none of these institutions were built with the concept of the pursuit of excellence nobody was trying to create an institution that was excellent where you'd feel people are going to compete to be a part of this institution people are going to be jealous of this institution this is going to be better than the best university in paris this is going to be better than the best university in berlin this is going to be better than the university in london there are going to be wealthy people in london england saying oh we want to send our kid to this school in canada we want to send our kid to this university camp because they are the best they are the best in the world at this topic at what they do with their specialization and the truth is that universities in canada today are not even the best at teaching the cree language at teaching the inuit language and teaching the mohawk language we're not even the best in this one tiny field that we have a unique advantage where you'd think the germans and the french and the japanese would not be able to challenge us because we alone have these indigenous people and universities in canada are not the best at anything high schools in canada are not the best at anything and the shameful ignorance that you deal with okay i used to know a lot of first nations people i used to know a lot of them i've already just got described the context when i was in toronto i knew a few i did have a few first nations friends but there are only a few around i'm sorry they're a tiny percentage i did i did a few first nations foreign when i lived in saskatchewan as a first nations university i was talking to first nations people every day cree ojibwe denne you know some from further away you know mostly from that area cree ojibwe uh okay and a lot of them spoke to me with shame and downcast eyes about you know how ignorant people were in their town where they came from in canada they'd say people you know they haven't read any books they don't really know anything about history and that they're alcoholics that they spend all the time this is how they talk and sometimes they would say not terribly positively or hopefully that they came to this university or they were trying to study because they were trying to try to rise above this background and i was so let's say they would be from some place like hobima alberta some hopima is a horrible hopeless town by the way i'll just walk anyway i could give you a link to a video i made i might as well um [Music] this is a video i made it's only about uh oh i think it's shadowband on my own channel channel maybe i can't get it yeah so i'm censored by youtube so i can't get my own video anyway i had a short video uh on my channel that um is called canada a country that's very different from its propaganda and that includes some short clips of what life is only about two minutes long show some clips of what life is like in hobima specifically hobie alberta um so yeah guys when you search within my channel some videos won't come up they'll be invisible and that's one of the reasons why i made this separate website so if you search here and you put in like even the word canada propaganda well i guess propaganda or something is a good a good uh search term to use and uh you can find this this video that's called canada kind of it's very different from its propaganda might as well just pause to show these guys when i allude to what uh hopelessness of life and who being that's like oh now i just have to click through every single video that has propaganda and it's descriptive here we go and a country that doesn't resemble it's propaganda that's the video so if you want to know about the kind of hopelessness of what that's like that link will will take you to it um anyway so i'd meet these first nations people and they would be from a place like hobima they'd be from one place another so guys seeing that pause i just wanna point out you've been with me here for one hour there are 31 of you in the audience only 12 of you have hit thumbs up i mean you know if you're sitting on the fence if you're not sure that this is a video worth watching that's one thing but it does actually help the live stream it will be for multiple people if all 30 of you hit the thumbs up button then actually it'll be listed more on youtube and more people could have been here during the last hour and more people could be or during the next hour or however long we go on this livestream so guys it's fine and i wouldn't say this in the first 15 or 30 minutes if you just got here at the beginning i understand you're not sure what this is going to be about you're not sure if you're gonna enjoy it fine but if you hit the thumbs up button it will help the youtube channel it will help this particular live stream if you do it now if you do it while the live stream is ongoing it actually does promote it it's advertised more than you do because then they think oh okay 30 people are watching this and all 30 give the thumbs up okay um some other people can watch this okay so look i talked to first nations people you can click on that link and you can see how hopeless and awful life is in hobie alberta and there are some other clips they're not it's not entirely about people you get some really striking vistas about how awful life is out there they said look people in their community they come from they're generally alcoholics and they're ignorant and everything is helpless and i'd say them so i did this i had the same conversation many times with people from different first nations community first nations and saying oh yeah tell me something what's the nearest town what's the nearest white settlement like what's the nearest small town there on the countryside that's full of white people because that is how these people live there's there's one town over here that's all first nations people all native people someone over here that's all white people that's what rural canada is like and they would name the town and say when you go there what percentage of those people do you feel are alcoholics you know how well-read or well-educated are the white people who are living like just down the street from you like in the nearest community out there and every time they'd be kind of dumb struck by they'd realize whoa that wasn't the comparison they were making in their own mind they realized and they would say in slightly different words every time yeah you're right like the rural communities down the road it would be a couple the one of the north the one of the east the one of the south those are also completely populated by incredibly ignorant poorly educated alcoholic people well it's not just us and that's that's really how they feel they feel like on television they see white people who are highly educated highly erudite sober well-dressed clean living you know like they have this image of white western civilization through television they watch a lot of television i mean so so do we all in canada you know you know and then they see themselves they look in the mirror and they look at their neighbor and they look at their parents and they look at the squalor and poverty and hopelessness and low levels of education alcoholism and that's the contrast they live within their minds and they're not thinking about the next town uh down the street one of the one of the people i said this to was over the internet most i think all the conversations except for this one were face-to-face conversation i remember once i talked to a cree activist on the internet so this is this is probably still on the internet somewhere and i remember i just tried to make it easier to visualize i said have you ever gone to the nearest white town white majority small city or town out there near this this reservation and gone and walked down the street on recycling day so not everyone has this but in canada commonly there's one day of the week where people put out a blue plastic box in front of their house that's full of glass bottles okay and when you walk down the street you can see who's an alcoholic i mean you walk down the street and you are seeing bottles of whiskey and bottles of wine you are seeing bottles stacked up going you see an indication of just how much drinking there and i said if you did that do you really think that the level of alcohol consumption is so much higher in your community than it is in the white community down the street or next door you know if you know those people and i say most of the time there's some level in which they do know those people they have to deal with the alcoholic rednecks that live down the street but they don't see it as a continuum so the failure of our education system it is not a tragedy for indigenous people only it's a tragedy for all of us and to solve the problem whether it takes 1 million or 10 million or 100 million dollars or 10 billion dollars a year every year if we provide them with truly excellent education the best education in the world education that's so good that there are people in paris and berlin and london who say they want to come and study with the mohawks they want to go to that mohawk university they want to go because they're the best at something you know i'm not saying each university is going to do the best everything maybe one of them is the best at surgery and one of them is the best in architecture there could be a mohawk school of architecture that is admired by the germans in berlin for the excellence of its programs and what you would actually be doing is redistributing economic opportunity right you can redistribute the land you can't you can give people land to farm on you can but in terms of the failure in terms of what went wrong in the last 50 years in canada a crucial concept to understand is redistributing opportunity all right i've made already videos talking about the ways in which redistribution of mind is in some ways kind of a false idol it creates some problems and it doesn't solve many of the problems people present to me okay so i end here my segment on our ongoing slow motion genocide in in canada i have a ten dollar donation from charles hannah so thank you charbelle um i assume we're going on talking about israel now as the main subject is that was number two in our elections for what what talk we're gonna we're gonna deal with um but thank you for the donation i mentioned earlier that my youtube channel generates incredible little money and in the past i've posted screenshots of exactly how much i've also provided how much to my uh to max wife's lawyer for example that's a i remember at one point my my lawyer asked me can i provide an average amount for how much i earned from youtube every month and i said no an average amount would be very difficult but i can tell you the precise amount because that's kind of thing it is youtube so you can you can you can print out the exact amount but thank you um this youtube video will generate basically zero money aside from donations of this kind or aside from support on patreon and thank you guys for just paying one dollar a month all right and by the way if you do join my patreon you get to read the chapters of my book now so you can read not all of them but you can read at least the first five chapters of the book or something as pdfs immediately this book that i've been mentioned uh mentioned repeatedly okay so i'm going to read to this question and i assume we're going to talk about uh israeli politics at some length apologies if you've covered this what is your view on the actions of israel and hamas in their missile firing is one side more justified than the other oh yeah it was very well thank you for the donation very broad question okay i thought we might get something more uh more specific here um james newman regrets that he saw the live stream beginning earlier but he was too busy to watch um i think that's a good thing james i think it's good that you're busy i'm happy to hear that you're busy it's virtuous to be busy in life and i'm i'm glad to hear that you're busy i'm i'm not terribly busy and uh you know i think you and the audience are benefiting from that in numerous ways including including the stack of books i'm working my way through and so and then sharing with you what i'm mentioning what i meant to get out of it um oh okay you know my main problem with the israel-palestine conflict is the left-wing misperception of the issue now one of the reasons why that's my main problem is that i spend my life surrounded by left-wing people it's difficult for me to imagine how different this video would be if living here in canada or going to the university or even my own family life if i were surrounded by right-wing people and dealing with their misconceptions about or misperceptions of israel but i don't just a couple days ago i sent a message to another vegan youtuber i will leave it anonymous as to this is but there was another vegan youtuber who on instagram had used these hashtags indicating that she supports palestine that she's anti-israel and pro-palestine and so on and i said to her look i'd be happy to have you have a discussion with me you can come on my next live stream or whether it's by skype or whatever method um i'm surprised to see that you're pro hamas [Laughter] but i'm quite happy to i'm quite happy to you know discuss with you and talk you through the political history and talk about what's going on now she was shocked at that and she wrote back saying that she didn't realize that she was identifying herself as pro hamas in the hashtags and she went on to say that she feels that she only wants to talk about veganism on youtube and that she's not comfortable talking about the israel palestine conflict she's not comfortable being judged by these hashtags she uses for what her political position is and i wrote back to her in a charming and affable way like i'm i'm not gonna by the way the first message was also from my perspective charming an affable that wasn't insulting her or picking a photo and i was being warm and friendly i was genuinely encouraging her look if you want to talk to me i'm happy to talk to you about it it didn't it didn't say i'm going to prove you wrong so i'm going to be happy to talk through the question um but i said to her look come on live by the hashtag die by the hashtag of course people are going to judge your political opinions based on political statements you make accompanied by a hashtag on a public platform like instagram people are also going to judge you by the slogan that it says on your t-shirt if you photograph yourself wearing that t-shirt and put it on come on let's let's be honest so that's one side of it i think it's interesting that left-wing people get in fairly deep to the rationalization of and the support for hamas i.e the terrorist leaders of the pro-palestinian side in 2021 and specifically in the gaza strip you know and then they're shocked when they're not sort of confronted with this even but just ask to discuss it just ask to talk about it oh so when did you decide to become a hamas supporter let's let's talk and i think if people really were detached about you probably could have a kind of interesting and productive uh discussion about it um i currently have one palestinian friend in the past i had two uh the one one of them stopped being my friend because he became ex-vegan just mentioned that he became a meat-eater really crazy meat-eater too he really went nuts that guy but anyway i used to know in the past uh back when i lived in laos i had a palestinian friend when i lived in toronto at a palestinian friend uh maybe yeah in different times of toronto i had two different palestinians i've known palestinians i've known people who were to whatever extent refugees some of them didn't identify as refugees but basically the reality was they left the region you know even if their legal status isn't refugee they left the reason because of how awful it is militarily and politically uh some of them are wealthy too not only for poor people by the way so that's why they may not have a status as a refugee but you know whether i am talking to palestinians themselves or i'm talking to left wingers who have been brought into the orbit of this pro-palestinian cause you know i ask them questions and then you see how they deal with their ability to answer or not answer now to me these are not gotcha questions these are not barb questions this is not setting a trap for somebody i'll give you an example so by the way i'm happy to have 36 people in the audience now we're now talking about israel and palestine but guys if you're here all 37 of you why don't you hit the thumbs up button why not have 36 37 thumbs up if you're sitting on the fence and you don't know yet you can wait you can wait five minutes 10 minutes but it really does help the channel it really does have more people discover the live stream if you hit the thumbs up button more people will know that's going on and they can join in right now so guys you know but if you're waiting to see just how offensive my view on the history of the israel palestine conference you can wait you can and you can press the thumbs you know what you can press thumbs up now and you can change your mind and press thumbs down later it's actually not indelible you can change your mind on you that's a good feature all right the kind of question i ask in terms of shaping the discussion and these are questions they're not attacks they're not insults but i will ask a question line you notice that it's called the west bank the west bank of what do you know why it's called the west bank do you know what its political status was before and how it gained the political status it has right now i have never once whether the person i'm speaking to was palestinian or a white westerner who was left-wing and part of this pro-palestinian cause or a couple times probably southern asian people i've lived in asia for a long life you know but whenever this came up they were surprised or dumbfounded this and to be fair my current my current palestinian friend because i say i only have one at the moment he did know this he did know the answer like as i started talking about he was like oh yeah right but it was so far from the top of his mind you know it was kind of forgotten about it wasn't thought of as a currently important historical fact it was something that at some point he'd read at some point he'd been aware of but you know oh what what do you what do you mean right the west bank this is just its name right most people don't wonder how did canada come to be called canada okay the west bank was a province of jordan it's the west bank of jordan it was represented in elections in the parliament of jordan the people there were jordanian right let me ask you right now in 2021 do you think that the muslim people who are living in the west bank would be better off if they were again a province of jordan and if they had elections they weren't controlled by hamas and they weren't controlled by the plo you know they weren't controlled by fata they weren't controlled by any palestinian terrorist organization if they had elections in a normal popular democracy where people competed for ideas and elected representatives who went to debate what government policy should be in the same house of parliament that they have in jordan does that sound to you better or worse than being under a combination of israeli occupation and the sort of semi-legitimate plo local governing policing organization that you that you've got right now now again most people find this very shocking they've never considered this before oh the west bank was a province of a democracy called jordan oh the west bank could be a province of jordan again oh that is a solution that's not a one-state solution and it's not a two-state solution that sounds like a three-state or a four-state solution now how oppressed do you think the people who call themselves palestinians who are living in the west bank how oppressed do you think they would be by jordanians now if you know these people face to face if you know them almost every single one of them has a family member who's living in jordan like oh yeah yeah my uncles jordan and jordanian you know they have they have family living across all of these borders they know to what extent all these people if they are not exactly one and the same are intimately connected with one another i mean almost nobody feels like oh no the jordanians there's some foreign people who would be tremendously hostile the hostility of the modern state of jordan against the palestinian people was created because the palestinian radicals attempted to assassinate the royal family and the leaders in jordan okay there were acts of terrorism against the government of jordan by the palestinians including acts of assassination and attempted assassination and the elite level in politics in jordan became so pissed off with the people we now call the palestinians in the west bank that they decided that it would be in jordan's interest that they would be better off if they handed the west bank over to israel and recognized israel as the legitimate government of the west bank rather than trying to police it themselves rather than trying to engage in anti-terrorism offense themselves if jordan were to take over the west bank they would also have to get rid of muslim radicals they would have to deal with hamas they would have to deal with terrorist groups that are more extreme than hamas hamas are not the most extreme i mean we've seen the rise and fall of isis and so on right every muslim government including saudi arabia engages in brutal tactics of political control to suppress muslim radicals in the territory the government of saudi arabia imprisons and tortures its own people to prevent muslim radicals from taking over or influence the government and of course the government of saudi arabia is itself a muslim fundamentalist government right so these things are not mutually extricable right basically every single muslim majority country its government is to some extent or another in a state of siege against its own citizens because there are radical elements and there are also some elements by the way that aren't necessarily radical in the same way as hamas but there will be elements that are allied with and working for iran does this sound familiar does this sound like the politics of iraq and yemen you have heard of yemen you know so there will be some muslims who are of a pro-iranian political or religious inclination and then the government of the muslim majority nation is there would be some oppression in the west bank if they were governed by the jordanians and if they were electing people to parliament and participate in the same problems however obviously the majority of reasonable people people who are not radical muslim fundamentalists in the west bank today they would be more comfortable being ruled by in being a part of one government with jordan than being ruled by the israelis right the gaza strip what would happen if it were ruled by egypt what would happen if we gave up the pretense that this tiny piece of land ought to be and must be its own country governed by hamas there's no chance now for the gaza strip even that it can be governed by fatah or the plo right what if they elected representatives what if they participated in the same government as the rest of egypt what if all that hatred and resentment and anti-semitism against israel were allowed to depressurize in the relative enormity of egypt right egypt is in every important sense a bigger country than israel in terms of the number of millions of people insurance the economic opportunity right what we have created partly through united nations policy partly through israel's policy sure is a culture of perpetual dependence on the status of being a refugee within your own country the palestinian you know refugee agency set up by the united nations uh perpetual you know handouts which is indeed those handouts are feeding and arming hamas you know people being educated in schools that really the schools that palestinians go to they do radicalize them they do teach them to hate israel they do teach them that they have this unique political ethnic and cultural identity as palestinian the reality is this distinct identity was carved out by for in the west bank a lot of people when the plo took over when this unique political status emerged you know in a sequence of wars with israel and again with the rest of jordan getting more and more fed up with the west bank right a lot of people crossed the river and maintained their jordanian citizenship and continued living in jordan right it's the people who stayed behind and now we're into several generations of people who have been raised in schools that are controlled by the plo or by you know hamas or worst right people who are given a radicalizing education and who are told that they're the indigenous people on this land and that their whole purpose is to kill the jews anti-semitism is not a minor or incidental feature of the muslim faith um who killed the prophet muhammad who poisoned the prophet muhammad i ask people they're often shocked at this question what was her ethnicity the woman who poisoned the prophet muhammad that led to him being permanently ill he died several years later but he never did recover from the poisoning this may be a simplification to say that the poisoning killed him but it weakened him and sickened him and uh led eventually to his to his death he was he was poisoned by a jewish woman wasn't he oh did you not know that do you really not know the extent to which the muslim faith is profoundly and integrally anti-semitic that this is something they're raised with really from birth is this intense hatred against the jews how many jews lived in baghdad let's say in 1930 before world war ii look it up what was the jewish population of baghdad oh and what's the jewish population of baghdad today oh and where did they go oh oh oh really oh and what was the jewish population in iran and what was the jewish population in uzbekistan what was the jewish population even in egypt all these places had ancient continuous jewish cultures jewish neighborhoods in the major cities oh oh oh you weren't aware of that oh oh oh you thought palestinians were the only refugees at the time why don't you look at the math how many jewish refugees were produced by the genuinely genocidal political circumstances that surrounded the creation of the state of israel and where did you expect them to go the creation of the state of israel is a tragedy in more ways than one but it deserves to be asked of each and every one of these arab states that claim that the state of israel should not exist where are your jews you had a jewish population you had a jewish minority right up to approximately world war ii and today their descendants are either in israel or in some cases they're in the united states of america they fled because they had to flee there was a period of time that scholars routinely referred to as the second holocaust more often what i see in scholar literatures people say the period of the fear of a second holocaust the potential second holocaust that right after world war ii wrapped up and you have the beginnings of the creation of the state of israel that you have this militant rise of anti-semitism across the muslim world i can't even say across the arab world sorry the arab world is one thing the muslim world is another aha geographically right oh yeah there used to be there used to be a lot of jews in morocco remember if you ever read 19th century travelogues there used to be jews in egypt you remember when napoleon arrived in egypt and everywhere he went there were these big jewish populations who came out and talked to him and interacted with the french soldiers where are they where are they today all right there was a huge relocation of the jewish population from across the muslim world the arab world etc yeah and turkey is remembered relatively positively in this history when you talk to israelis they always feel like the turks were the exceptions the turks were okay that they weren't part of this uh but a lot of jews got uncomfortable and moved this way also right so yeah although it is tragic that in this creation state of israel some people lost their homes the telling of this story with the left wing in the 21st century presents it as if only muslims lost their homes and not jews and the reality is precisely the jews who were being resettled into israel were people who just had lost their homes some of them had just lost their homes in baghdad some of them had just lost their homes across the region and they had been resettled into israel and the people we call palestinians yes some of them did lose their homes but they also were engaged in an armed and genuinely genocidal series of uprisings against the israelis many of them i mean in in most cases based on everything i've read the know of it's not even the case that they were formally kicked out of the state of israel as it became but it was just that they were aware that they had been engaged in an armed struggle against israel they had been out shooting people in the streets they've been out fighting and they say oh we lost the war we gotta go we gotta retreat like where they just literally retreated they ran away in that sense like in terms of a moving battlefront you know and that they were combatants they were engaged in the struggle you could say to prevent the rise of the state of israel or to push israel into the ocean they would say right this was a war that was fought i was going to say on two sides on many sides this is what created the state of israel so it was a tragedy on many sides for many different people right let's ask this wraps up what i have to say about the current israel palestine but let me just ask broadly do i support the state of israel do i support the state of saudi arabia no i say no to both for the same reason i don't support any government that is based on in this sense theocracy i do not support religious apartheid i do not support religion period i'm an atheist and i'm a nihilistic atheist i think the relationship between church and state and israel is toxic and shouldn't exist in the 21st century i don't think it should exist in saudi arabia either the reality is that americans and europeans support the state of israel today because of a small minority of jewish people in israel who resemble in their cultural political democratic values europeans and americans right the reality is europe and the united states of america do not support orthodox jews orthodox judaism or the heredi or what have you they do not support religious fundamentalists in the jewish faith i think pardon me i think it deserves to be said that sympathy and support for israel only exists in as much as israel resembles a secular western democracy but it is a resemblance only i have heard right wingers i've heard conservatives many times say proudly if you travel throughout the whole region i.e egypt syria jordan what have you you know where you know where gay people are comfortable you know where you can be openly homosexual and if you know israel israel is the only place where you can have a gay nightclub and where there's an open kind of gay subculture that is surrounded by these muslim states where it's terrible have you talked to anyone who opens or operates a gay nightclub in israel [Laughter] there are orthodox jews constantly trying to shut down the gay nightclubs in israel like it's true they're organic of course it's it's better and safer to be homosexual in israel than it is in saudi arabia or syria or iraq even or iran or egypt you know it's true but to say there's a tension is an understatement you're talking about a country where really the majority of people are religious fundamentalist maniacs and i have no sympathy in this sense for zionism or for you know politicize judaism as a religion if there were a christian country anywhere in the world that was as christian as israel is jewish you know i wouldn't support the existence of that government if uh if if italy became conquered by the vatican city you know if you said a people state uh take over the government of italy it's it's unimaginable now of course but if you had a theocratic government in italy again one might say if they returned to this i would of course this is a terrible step forward for democracy so in this sense the very premise of israel is you know it's made absurd it's made risible it's made immoral by what the israeli government really is however people support the existence the state of israel because they support people like me i'm a jewish dissident intellectual and they support people like jerry seinfeld and the fantasy is that people like me and jerry seinfeld can build a utopia for western democratic values in jerusalem in the in the sinai desert you know the in the middle of this terrible war zone you know what maybe the truth is we can't you know i i get that dream i mean that really is a kind of perfect colonialist fantasy isn't it you know but the reality is that what the state of israel is now and if you look at the demographics what it is going to become because guess who has more babies do you think the people like me and jerry seinfeld have 10 kids each no you know guess who does have families with 10 kids each guess what kind of person is raising 10 kids with extremist values the reality is that both sides of the conflict both the palestinian side and the israeli side it is becoming only more fundamentalist with time um predominantly and proportionately it is becoming populated by and politically controlled by people that i would very readily describe as religious fanatics okay guys so the title of this youtube video was politics israel ancient rome canadian genocide martin luther king jr's assassination so we have we have covered almost everything so i can do a brief reading here i've got some i've got some readings from appian i don't even have to read it to you i could i mean well i could read a paragraph or two i'll just talk about it so if you guys don't know appian um i'm just gonna give you his name we gotta capitalize i think we have to capitalize both the a and ancient and the r in rome you know uh but i'll give you a reading from appian who's made a big impression on me but anyway i'll just briefly uh you know scroll through some of these some of these comments thank you guys by the way for hitting the thumbs up button as opposed to we now got more than 30 thumbs up and as i mentioned it does actually uh yeah so question about the um the discord server anymore uh that's right i've deleted it and moved on [Music] um so exe comments a similar question to ask people so it depends which way the conversation goes i mean when i'm talking real life conversation these people would israelis live better lives if the whole area became palestine and he answers hell no um so look it depends what you're talking about what the purpose the conversation is but sure sometimes it's important to really illustrate to people just how genocidal the intent of the other side is and we've just seen the rise in the fall of the islamic state and you know the form of genocide that islam engages in not just in the ancient past but still today with the rise and fall of isis it does also involve slavery and specifically sex slavery that's one of the main motivations for the extremists with isis so what it is to be conquered by a muslim fundamentalist army or by muslim fundamentalist terrorists and what that would entail what kind of you know what kind of tragedy that would be that is something we're thinking about not just in israel but also in afghanistan and it's a question i i don't know if this will happen but would joe biden sit idly by if the pro-democracy minority in afghanistan were now going to be enslaved and raped by the taliban and other isis and other religious fundamentalists of that kind uh conquering it and destroying the democracy and destroying the education system that the americans worked so hard to to build up there um i doubt it and would anyone want to sit idly by if hamas were to do this to israel and yes it is not inappropriate to say to the women of israel because the policy again this is in the quran and it's in the hadith and it's in the history of islam the the policy is of killing the men and enslaving uh sexually enslaving uh the surviving women that is that is what islam as a religion is built on and we've had it demonstrated to us vividly by the very recent history of isis so don't kid yourself with that being conquered by buddhists has advantages and disadvantages but you know what would it be like if israel were conquered by thailand not so bad i i'm not saying i particularly prefer to be ruled that's okay that's a difficult question would would you rather be ruled by the king of thailand or by the uh or by benjamin netanyahu the current uh government of israel tough choice but yes yeah i mean you know the stakes are the stakes are very high and the the consequences are very very serious and that's why for the most part you know everyone expects that um all the western powers are just going to continue to support the perpetuation of the status quo forever and ever and the status quo works for some people including some people in the plo and some people in hamas you know there was the possibility under donald trump that things were fundamentally going to change and things did start to change in israel i give all the credit for that to his uh his son-in-law jared kushner but now with joe biden i assume that the policy on israel is just going to be to maintain uh the same situation have nothing at all change and again the actual oh sorry let's let's just note both egypt and jordan are pro-israel they're anti-hamas and they're anti-plo and in effect they're anti-palestinian and many palestinians would complain about that too i mean now in reality up until now uh saudi arabia has been pro-american and pro-israel anti-hamas anti-plo so you know and many palestinians will complain about that that they're surrounded by enemies and they tend to cling to they feel they have positive support from syria that syria alone is pro-palestinian pro-pro-hamas pro-pll and pro-other in favor of other organizations and syria is still technically in a state of war against thailand sorry against thailand yes syria still is uh at a state of war with with israel yeah so all right so guys that's that's the end of that um say a little bit about appian then call it call it call it off the night um this is appian describing to you the way in which slavery destroyed the roman empire this is from appian's book on the civil wars um book one the romans as they subdued the italian people successively in war used to seize a part of their lands and build towns there or enroll colonists of their own to occupy those already existing and their idea was to use these as outposts but of the land acquired by war they assigned the cultivated part forthwith to the colonists or sold or leased it since they had no leisure as yet to allot the part which then lay desolated by war which was generally the greater part they made proclamation in the meantime that those who are going to work it might do so for a toll of the yearly crops a tenth of the grain and a fifth of the fruit from those who kept flocks was required a toll of the animals both oxen and small cattle they did these things in order to multiply the italian race which they considered the most laborious of peoples so they might have plenty of allies at home but the very opposite thing happened for the rich getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbor's allotments partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates using slaves as laborers and herdsmen less free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army at the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny who increased because they were exempt from military service thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country while the italian people dwindled in numbers and strength being oppressed by penury taxes and military service what's fascinating about appian is this is not the subtext this isn't an interpretation i have to present to you this is right up on the surface you know so what he is explaining is that the romans had very rapidly conquered a huge amount of land and the assumption was that this land would be distributed in small parcels to the soldiers soldiers who had engaged in conquering the soldiers were citizens the soldiers paid taxes and did compulsory military service and this would be some relatively egalitarian arrangement like whereas in rome a small number of people you know had uh you know all the uh had all the wealth and fortune it's a very unequal society that by expanding they would create a more equal society but instead they ended up creating a much more unequal one um instead they created a society in which a small number of families owned huge tracts of land and the farmers who were working on that land were not italian were not roman citizens were not these soldiers they were slaves slaves don't pay taxes slaves don't do military service and i would just note this is an historical circumstance in which actually the slaves who were referred to as being a different race from the italians the slaves were actually whiter skinned than the slave owners than the italians this situation the people being enslaved were from places that are today germany and france and denmark and what have you also some way into eastern europe in this period i don't know if they were as far as romania yet but they went a fair fair ways east into eastern europe and you know anyway but anyway these were white-skinned and fair-haired peoples who were being enslaved and brought to italy as slaves and it was they were saying we're of a different quote-unquote race from the italians they look somewhat different obviously but this is not actually a scenario of white people enslaving black people not that i'm suggesting you the the roman empire was morally opposed to enslaving black people but the mass phenomenon they're talking about here of the change in the ethnic character of of italy under the system actually was a europeanization of italy and it's bringing in slaves uh from the areas that have been conquered north including by people like in case you haven't heard of uh julius caesar anyway so we get a really kind of um inspiringly brutal and honest account of how republicanism is incompatible with slavery and how republicanism is incompatible with extreme inequality but then also the republic was incapable of engaging in the redistribution of land the redistribution of wealth and so the republic had to die appian's history of the civil war book one a tremendously moving and meaningful book and one that has much more relevance to politics in the united states of america today politics in western europe today than the whole discourse of 19th century german philosophy including karl marx that attempted to talk honestly about social class class war class struggle gotta tell you something if you're interested in class struggle its importance politically past present and future i recommend so you take some time to read appian