Onision, vegan in principle, not in practice.

people are just assuming themes or just
nitpicking on things about my life because I'm not perfect and for some reason they put me under that standard that you know I can't contribute to any suffering and death otherwise I'm labeled as a hypocrite that's right [ __ ] please tell me I can eat chewy sprees you're after your griddles okay what is egg albumen my allowed to sit on the couch oh no what is it Mariana I I don't know for sure but I'm very certain it's not leather not good enough just stand there okay I'll never be good in this video I'm gonna deal with two issues that for me are related question of how we speak to people who agree with veganism in principle but who are themselves not vegan in practice the example at the moment being discussed it being uneasy on and he seems the name of a comedian here on YouTube and a broader question of how we deal with our fellow human beings when we have genuinely egregious ethical differences and I do not think any scene is a great example that for reasons that will become clear pretty soon initia new position on this issue a couple years ago in the past was to say that vegans were correct in principle that he agreed with veganism in principle that ethically veganism was the right thing to do that ethically veganism was superior to vegetarianism and was a better option than being a meat-eater he agreed with vegans in principle but he himself was not vegan in practice no I actually believe and feel that is quite a strong position for a person to adopt it requires that you have the strength to in effect not defend your convictions it requires that you have the strength to just acknowledge the imperfections and contradictions in your own life and to say look you guys are right it's too bad I'm not one of you here's why and maybe your reasons why aren't that great but there's still your reasons they're meaningful to you I have a lot of sympathy for people in that situation I had a job and my boss at that job this is years ago he was in this sense vegan and principled he agreed that vegans were correct but he continued to eat meat on a daily basis and you know I talked about it with him a few different points but there was certainly nothing I could do I was an employee obviously I was in a I was not in a position to to order him around but also I don't think on a human level it would have accomplished much for me to kind of dress him down to me to take the time to explain to him just how morally inferior I think he is when he's had the strength of character and detachment to admit that he considers himself morally inferior that he thinks that veganism is the morally superior option he just doesn't do it he just doesn't fall through he's vegan in principle but not in practice and in terms of new vegans there's people who are just become vegan most of them go through a period like that so they're currently people use this word Pro vegan I think we better say proto vegan PR OTO proto vegan uh but you know Ivan effects converted one of my Chinese teachers here because where we speak about veganism and animal rights in Chinese and ecology and politics and well this is how I practice the language every day we try to talk about things that I'm interested in write essays and Chinese about things I'm interested in um but I mean she said to me that these discussions we've been having and and things have been doing the actually have had a big impact on her and that she had sat down and talked with her boyfriend about eventually transitioning to a vegan diet and you know her boyfriend was very surprised and they talked about that and she's told me all about her own parents her parents are I would say somewhere in the reduced Aryan camp or vaguely meet avoiding Chinese people so you know what I said to her it might surprise some of you it might not depending on her well you know me I said to her you know partly of course did I hope she'll stick with I said look don't beat yourself up this might take you five years because you have to unlearn everything your grandmother taught you everything your mother taught you and you have to learn a whole new set of skills that pertain to how you feed yourself how you clothe yourself and here in terms of the traditional role of womanhood maybe how you feed and clothe others how you take care of your whole family and really you're not just rejecting the traditions you've inherited directly from your mother and your grandmother you're throwing away more than a thousand years of tradition and you're starting from a blank piece of paper like for example on my video where I talk about why I forced my son to be vegan I said that I feed my son better than other parents that I know that I'm doing a lot better than other parents is what I said and some people got triggered by that some people got offended for some reason it just really irks me when people call me a hypocrite about my lifestyle when I'm actually trying to do something positive most of us vegans we've gotta learn how to boil beans from the internet we never did that most of us you know we didn't used to eat black rice sorry black rice is good - black beans and white rice you know we didn't used to know how to make tofu or seitan or whatever it is that's now a common part of your diet there's a lot of new learning and you're very likely to get that from a book or from the internet not from your own mother if you're the first person in your family line to become vegan it's a big shift and I said to her I would totally respect her if for the next five years she was still eating meat but she was in this position of being vegan in principle and not in practice anyway that obviously that relates to the particular person it's based on my knowledge of her and her family situation it would not surprise me if she needed several years to make that happen it is a big deal and I can also see emotionally my saying that to her actually had had an impact on her and I could see that emotionally she was deeply troubled by the stuff she had just learned about animal ethics of what everyone say factory farming agriculture all these issues led to veganism some of them were things she had suspected or thought about in the past but meeting me and talking about veganism obviously crystallized and brought together a whole bunch of other concerns in her life but from my perspective even if she never becomes vegan it's still a win you know agreeing with the idea of veganism is itself something significant especially given how incredibly marginal and rare and just unheard of unknown veganism has been in Western civilization in the past hundred years past thousand years what have you we're crawling up from a pretty low point so I do not think it's trivial and I do not think it's meaningless that the beginning of these discussions several years ago a nisshin's position already was ceding to veganism the higher ground saying vegans are correct etc this war will face the supreme Pendelton that military of all can provide now can we really make this into an egregious ethical difference you can you can you can take any conflict and treat it that way how can i encapsulate in mere words my school for any military solution the futility of modern warfare and the hypocrisy by which contemporary government applies one standard to violence within the community and another to violence perpetrated by one community upon another i was speaking the other day with a very elderly man here who is a veteran of America's wars in Vietnam Laos and Cambodia he was a veteran in northeastern Thailand the same plateau he was military bases that I have actually visited in places I've visited in addition to it being history in politics that I have studied so obviously it was somewhat interesting for me to meet him and talk to him now this conversation that we were actually three people said Taylor is my him myself and one elderly maybe sixty year old American woman the American woman was not a veteran she didn't have any expertise wasn't involved and you know at one point this guy told me basically about a murder he participated in what we could at best call an extrajudicial killing while he was on duty there in northeastern Thailand involved with Laos Laos Cambodia Vietnam with that war with that theater of operations now I probably do not need to explain to you that I'm morally opposed to murder this particular type of murder is actually something I have research to some sense that I've read about let's say at least and it's something I've talked about on this YouTube channel before although a long time ago the incongruous fact that armies of occupation kill their own allies they kill people not in the enemy side only not only in combat but they there ends up being a body count for example talked about this with in Okinawa Japan dead bodies turn up of Americans killing their Japanese allies of Americans killing other Americans etc of course pregnant teenagers turn up and prostitutes and there are all these strange social and cultural effects South Korea's a huge case study for this to of having a large foreign Army of Occupation on your land even if your allies we're not talking about the relationship between enemies but between allies so the particular type of incident he was talking about is something I know about I understand and you know obviously I disapprove but this basically comes down to know you talk about soldiers who are not under orders who are not on the battlefield soldiers in their own time mostly on the basis of a rumor somebody told them something bad they decided to be Batman and cold and avenge something that somebody told them it happened and they murder people who are on their own side and this I mean is more odious because we are talking about white men going and killing local Asian people and they're you know they're Asian people who are fighting on the American side so this guy tells me this story and to make matters worse the third person sitting at the table I don't know I guess she's the kind of person who gets turned on watching horror movies or something she reacted really positively and started gushing about how you know she had friends who fought in the same theatre in Vietnam war and you know she really enjoyed these kind of stories and she used the word badass two or three times to describe this this type of activity now this is an egregious ethical difference I'm sitting down at a table with somebody who has just talked me through a murder he committed a murder he doesn't regret a murder that I think he is in a sense still proud of and the other person the table not only thinks the specific event is somehow justified or glorious are good but thinks in general this is badass and wonderful and as part of the glory of the American Empire now I could have stood up angrily and shouted at them or insulted them I could have responded in some kind of very emotional way and I didn't and this is this is really an egregious ethical difference and I mean look I'm old I'm used to dealing with these kinds of problems some of you are watching this who are younger really need to think about what you would do in a situation like this and again this is a particular conflict I happen to have researched I haven't have care about been to those places I've met those people I have heard directly you know really tear-jerking stories of people who were you know in the midst of massacres of Americans you give the massacres perpetrated by Americans against you know Lao civilians you know both on paper and face to face the reality of that there are percussions of that are things I've cared about and to some extent seen firsthand obviously I'm not old enough to have witnessed any of the massacres myself I just say so this is not hypothetical I remained completely calm and somewhat laconic and sarcastic and I pointed out in response to this you know because this older woman had just congratulated this guy as if you know he's participating in this so-called badass behavior was the most wonderful thing I said to her you know calmly but you know somewhat sneeringly yeah well you know you can sit here on your ass and use the word badass all you want but you still lost the war okay a country with a budget in the hundreds of millions that murdered millions of people that dropped more bombs on Laos than they dropped on Germany during World War two with all that guess what a couple of peasant farmers with ak-47s still won the war so you know you want to sit here and boast about extra curricular killings you did while you were on base in northeastern Thailand that's fine but you know you guys still got your asses you in that conflict empathy so it's resting Lee now this this impacted the the older woman negatively she caught the point that she was boasting she was really glorying in crimes against humanity and these were crimes against humanity that were between two very unequal sides you know a third-world poverty-stricken country like Laos versus the United States and they were crimes against humanity that didn't even get positive outcomes they didn't they destroyed democracy at the start of that conflict Laos was a democracy which had a parliament and the Communists were a minority party in that kana the Americans destroyed that and the end of the war was a communist dictatorship supposedly what Allan Dulles wanted to avoid that's exactly what Alan Dahl was created sorry the US side Allen Dulles is one very important figure in making those decisions um so she I don't know react negatively but you know this actually kept the opportunity for dialogue open with the guy who was the veteran and he went on to say quite a number of interesting things that he did have some kind of moral transformation in the course of the war that when the war was over I think he did six years of service and then he joined one of the protest groups veterans against the Vietnam War and he was involved in from his perspective some kind of political struggle to meaningfully examine the crimes against humanity that Americans committed even though by his own account he he participated in those crimes now I do not know to what extent that's hyperbole exaggeration [ __ ] I don't know I have to take him at his word I have to take it that just as he's been forthcoming and sincere about actually committing murder which again is not battlefield this is not combat murder that he's being sincere and talking about the other side of his own ethical reaction to the war and what he did afterwards but of course it's it's possible he's bullshitting me about either once possibly [ __ ] about both you know you don't know you sit down with a complete stranger you hear this kind of thing but I got to hear you know this guy's nuanced perspective on the world and he was also patient and address he realized you know I got to talk about mine I had actually visited these places we got to talk about the war for more than one angle um what would it have accomplished if I just told this guy that he's a he's a piece of [ __ ] that he's the the ethical difference between us is so egregious that I just regard him as subhuman what where does it go from there even within the conversation you know I let alone outside of the conversation have this vegetarian meat oh no it has egg whites I could donate it to home shelter they need food right [ __ ] homeless people better dead than chicken tour truck what are you doing I'm sitting in a massage chair made of animal products I'm not totally sure but I hope not your piece of [ __ ] okay you know people on the internet think they get a medal for calling someone a hypocrite and you don't you know you can call an easy an hypocrite you can call this American War veteran a hypocrite what do you get nothing now and what I did instead was to engage in a kind of long and nuanced conversation with this guy and I admitted also many things about myself my own imperfection that don't claim to be an angel you know to try to balance it and try to make him feel a bit more comfortable but obviously I am sincerely interested in his perspective even if he is literally someone who's guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity and I think I think he perceives himself that way I think you know at the end of that his experience was very different but what would it accomplish if I called my former boss a hypocrite and a subhuman what would it accomplish if I called and ecn a hypocrite 'no subhuman day in and day out I get called a hypocrite just because I'm vegan and because people hold me to this very crazy standard that they probably don't even live up to you know I think we're into a very difficult balancing act which is between talking about veganism as a matter of principle and talking about veganism as a matter of practice one of the main things in ecn complains about is the difficulty of reading food labels every time you go to the grocery store I can give you a totally pragmatic answer on that I can say look the reality is you go to the same grocery store again and again you're looking at the same products again and again so like when I was living in Canada if I wanted a chocolate bar I didn't have to read the labels of every single chocolate bar of the mainstream brands there were like two that were vegan so I nina's look see if those are there that's about it how many times in a year does a new product actually appear on that rack of chocolate bars maybe not less than once a year right but okay if there is a new product be it like oh I wonder if there vegan and I can read the label that's it you know that's the reality we live with is going back to the same store reading the same labels there's a totally pragmatic answer someone like Inez you know send you they can't be vegan because they can't be bothered to read the labels but they're also the matters of principle and actually it pays off to be light-hearted about the the matters of principle when you can be I remember I went into a bakery at Baker I went into repeatedly this is in Canada before before I came with China and I had to ask every time you know could you check does this bread contain honey and you know the last time I did it it happened to be sort of the boss it was not doing it was the second time she talked to me she was either the owner of the managed store and she said you know what we should print up a list because every time it would say they'd spend a long time trying to figure out whether or not the bread honey even though they made it themselves that the minute that bakery so you know what we should put up a list of which breads contain honey which breads contain dairy products and which don't so we can you know so the staff know so he does I said you know thank you that's that's all I can ask for you know it was totally positive thing remember one of the times that I went in the same bakery I said oh you know do you mind can you check if the at the bread has honey and the girl behind the counter I wasn't gonna lecture but she said oh you know you're vegan and right away I could see on her face she's already seen the slaughterhouse videos she's already thought she's not vegan but she's thought about it and and I said to her in just a humorous way I said yeah you know save the bees you know it's a matter of principle I guess and you know we had this very humble down-to-earth conversation about the fact that you know there's a sense in which I know refusing to buy bread made with honey doesn't make any difference in the world and yet it is a matter of principle it makes a difference to me it makes a difference for Who I am and in this one bakery my mentioning it every time I went in was probably six times though it did make a small difference in that bakery because they just got organized to make a list of which breads had honey and which ones didn't which before they didn't know you can't always be light-hearted about questions in principle I was sitting down at the table with somebody who confessed to me that he was a murderer a murderer I mean this is you know say this is at best an extrajudicial killing he was talking about to me as your life goes on you may have that experience or you may never I don't know some of you just play video games and don't get out and get don't get out and talk to that many people get out and talk to some gray-haired veterans you'll hear some you'll hear some things that you you want won't learn from any video game kids you know when you reach out to people when they reach out to you if you can be light-hearted about matters of principle if you can be pragmatic and down-to-earth in talking to talking to the practical problems like reading agreement labels then do it because you know short term and long term if you really think through what's the point of reacting to an egregious ethical difference in a in a hostile way most of the time it's going to be counterproductive but hey not all the time and you know your feelings matter too and if you really are upset if you really are breaking down emotionally because of something somebody said whether it's about the Vietnam War or about the slaughterhouse I would be the last person in the world to ask you to suffocate that it is completely ridiculous for vegans to engage with this issue as if it were only the feelings of meat-eaters that matter you know and we ridiculous for me to engage in that issue of the Vietnam War as if it were only the feelings of American veterans that matter you know there are Vietnamese veterans there allow veterans and there were piles of dead bodies and piles of shrapnel from all those bombs that dropped and those things matter too even if they're voiceless and that's always the the ridiculous thing about veganism in the same way that the dead have no voice at the table when we sit down and talk about yesterday's war you know every day the millions of animals that are dying they have no voice they have no representation of that table when we sat down and talked about in an overly hypothet away these questions of animal ethics ecology and veganism