Vegans on Issues OTHER THAN Veganism

hey what's up just got back from writing
my final exam on Russia in history and politics an exam that was held from 7 p.m. till 9 p.m. on a Saturday night two other universities on planet Earth have exams on a Saturday night that's really strange to me this is not night school very very peculiar anyway I thought I would address a misconception that I've heard from a few different people a few different ways about this channel and about me I guess I am NOT on here advocating that people should only narrowly talk about veganism and I kind of get complaints both ways from my fans I do get people complaining if this channel ever talks about something other than veganism and I also get people sort of complaining and just questioning about going off topic about is it positive is it permissible is it good for veganism as a movement or for us as individuals on YouTube to go off the script off topic and engage with totally unrelated issues or tangentially related issues so I find that peculiar given the the stuff of talked about on this channel one of the main things I'm known for talking about although I guess it's it's about a year ago that I first started talking about it so some people may not have seen was that I was asking the question of why do these vegans who go to Thailand take no interest in other social issues in Thailand notably the military dictatorship the collapse of democracy prostitution human trafficking poverty disease malaria anything I am and my point was I was open mind it was like well it's really weird to me that there's a lack of interest from these vegans in the world that said the window or anything in life more substantive than wearing your bikini going swimming etc so that was a very broad complained about the shallowness of the vegan discourse as it was coming back from Thailand but I was totally open minded and positive that people should in general engage with whatever issues they they care about they know about or that they're learning about right now I know a lot more today about Russian politics in this than I knew three months ago or six months ago I especially know a lot more about the history of Sakhalin Island let me tell you Cullen Island is so far east that it's much closer to Japan than it is to any inhabited part of Russia I'm still learning new things all the time and I like to challenge myself by talking about things that I've just learned or that I'm still passionate about still learning about I don't define this channel narrowly as being about veganism at all and that's why if you look at the front page for this YouTube channel it doesn't say all about veganism it's about my life but what's going on with me as I continue to grow and adapt as a as a scholar and as an intellectual when I moved here to Victoria I had absolutely zero expertise in Japan I have considerable expertise in places like Cambodia Laos Thailand you nan but Japan was a totally unknown country to me and totally unknown language and I was learning new things from page one of that book I have sometimes warned against vegans talking about things and taking opinions and things taking positions on issues they know nothing about it's like well if we're going to talk about the Israeli Palestine conflict how much do we as individuals know about that how much time you actually put into researching it or what have you I'm obviously a in general though I encourage people to talk about whatever they're passionate about and I hope that that passion brings you into doing some original research I don't think I've seen a single vegan on YouTube discuss or even mention the civil war in Syria now that's an example something I do not have expertise on not at all though I did study political Esther Syria a little bit back in about 1999 and I do watch the events unfolding and I probably know more than the average person in Canada about the Syrian civil war may not be saying much but I mean I am interested and you know emotionally as well as intellectually it's something I am really concerned about I remember back in 2011 when the Civil War was first starting I heard an intelligent guy on the radio making some comments as you just say he was not a politician he was not a he was not a scholar or a specialist but he was an American guy who had lived his life back and forth between United States and Syria and had first-hand knowledge of both he was a Syrian American who really you know his whole life had one foot in each country and I remember I actually broke down weeping briefly I wept hearing him on the radio he was talking in a down-to-earth blunt way that he expected in the next year 40,000 people were gonna die and his his perspective was he basically was saying it would be worth it he was saying that you know democracy doesn't come for free and you know there's a price in blood and you know he accepted that now why did that bring up various emotions in me well if you've been watching this channel I'm someone who's done a lot of research on different wars revolutions and conflicts around the world and you know a lot of thoughts went through my head in hearing him say that and hearing the whole tone and tenor of his acceptance of death on the scale of tens of thousands but I remember in that moment thinking well what if it's not 40,000 what if it's 80,000 what if it's 160,000 and what if when we get to that point of 80,000 160,000 dead what if you still don't have democracy what if you still have a dictatorship and no hope what happens then and you know again that's that wasn't even really based on my knowledge of Syria specifically but it's based on a knowledge of many terrible internecine conflicts in history of the world and today this is 2016 I remember it hit me the emotional impact really hit me when that conflict passed the 200,000 dead mark we are now about a quarter of a million were probably above 250,000 dead in the Syrian civil war and you know some estimates are higher and there's no telling where it's gonna stop and there's very little hope for it ending with democracy discuss I mean you know I care I know a little bit more than the average pedestrian but it's not my topic to speak on I've just mentioned during this year I've done a hell of a lot of research on Sakhalin Island Japan politics of China you know in general politics of Southeast Asia East Asia and so on has been my area of expertise I'm trying to build new areas of expertise I'm now going back to learning Chinese so the Syrian civil war isn't for me to speak on but more broadly and generally do I encourage vegans to talk about you know issues other than veganism yes absolutely I encourage the hell out of it I've been on this channel been encouraging people to talk about anything real and I've often said like in reference to people like freelee and durianrider I'd say like the only thing about their channel I can appreciate is when they're talking about something really real to them that they really know like it freely is talking about what it was like to be a waitress how she disliked being a cocktail waitress with a job like to me that's good content that's quality content and I mean I'd encourage anyone to make that kind of content about your life but yeah ultimately I'd love to see more material here in the vegan intellectual demi-monde that reflects socio-political reality in Syria and Thailand and Cambodia or anywhere else to me that is all built into this concept of keeping it real which is admittedly a turn of phrase I say too often because I listen to too much rap music with that side I don't mean it sincerely this whole keeping a real thing to go just a little bit broader and deeper on this issue I also think it's interesting in general how much my videos are misunderstood by my core audience you know not by trolls or people popping in or out but including people who've now been listening to me talk for years our legal two years whatever but still and you know if you think about for people who are longtime viewers of this channel some of you have heard my voice for more than three hours more than six hours you probably have friends in your life you've never listened to talk for six hours people you consider your friends but you haven't let's do that much and this type of really fundamental misunderstanding of what I'm about what I'm advocating you just what I have to say I don't think it reflects the complexity of the ideas I'm getting across to be honest most of what I'm imparting or discussing this channel is dirt simple and very sincere and slightly emotionally overwrought I actually try to keep my emotions up on the surface in these videos and probably if you met me in real life I would not be as emotive as I am on camera here that's my steez I think the misunderstandings that I encounter again and again with my viewers writing into me really reflect the the breakdown of ethical language in Western culture in general people who were raised the traditional Christian childhood had at least one sort of school of thought encoded into them for how to talk about ethics how to talk about ethical problems if you grew up with a strictly communist upbringing there also you had an ethical vocabulary and ethical system imparted to you now in both cases I've regard those ethical systems as largely surreal and regretable and full of terrible errors and pernicious half-truths and what have you I'm not Pro question I'm not pro communists I'm a nihilistic atheist in case you hadn't guessed but be that as it may it's often very easy to talk about ethics with someone who has some kind of philosophical background linked to ethics even if it's a philosophical background that comes out of Jesuitical Catholicism or something they may be able to they may just have practice thinking in that way debating in that way and they have terms and categories that they can redefine to apply to ethical problems like you know activism ecology veganism etc and those of us have grown up with none of those things I think you know we very often are dealing with people who are who are profoundly unfamiliar with profoundly uneasy with ethical debate period and that's why they find what I have to say on my channel hard to understand even when they're they're already vegan they're already inclined to agree you know it's not out of hostility and not really and what I have to say being complex I know one example that my own life was very striking to me I had a boss when I was working in Thailand and you know we did talk casually up to a point but he stole my boss I've still got to be respectful still that I keep a certain kind of distance etc there's a relationship of authority there now that employer of mine he did regularly visit prostitutes and you may not have guessed this about me but I have in my life refused to do that and living in countries like Thailand and Cambodia and so on you know those were also in China and you nan you know prostitution is ubiquitous around you it's a huge part of the society around you now to be blunt I really try not to be an abrasive and judgmental [ __ ] about that I have known people especially people with physical disabilities where you know I can imagine that if they did not pay for sex with prostitutes they would have no love in their life they would have no contact with the opposite sex at the same sex whatever they were into because of the nature of their disability and you know I regard them as unfortunate but I can also see that they're trapped in circumstances that are very different from mine and in some ways I have the privilege of not having resources things but that caveat having stated this boss of mine I remember he was so confident in his moral justification for visiting prostitutes because he grew up in a completely Christian mindset and he felt that he had the Christian categories beat you know he had this set of justifications that could trump an established Christian argument that he had encountered again and again in his life you know obviously as a teenager as a young man and as an adult he had a lot of practice with this and so he was he was so confident in his moral view of the world and of course he had he had lost faith in Christianity as a child if he ever had it he may have been he may have been an atheist born but he had a Christian upbringing and every time he talked about those issues with me you could just see his worldview crumbling and because he was my boss I was very respectful and I really used Socratic method that's one of maybe one of the few examples my life for Socratic method worked of you know of asking a question of drawing the other person out and getting them to justify their position not attacking them or denouncing them I can remember I asked him simple questions in parallelism because he had these justifications basically why Christian concepts of good and evil didn't apply to that Center and you know I asked him really simple questions like tell me something if you and I both write the same exam would you respect me more or less if we get the same grade but then I told you I paid the teacher I paid a bribe to get that great ask him questions like this and you know he would get it because we were talking about prostitution I would a man paying for sex as opposed to someone engaging in a relationship for what have you he asked these questions that were getting at substantive ethical aspects of prostitution that he did not want to allow to enter his view because I mean for him you know the reasoning was something like you know Jesus didn't die for your sins God doesn't exist you know prostitution even exists in the Old Testament which it does the Old Testament is remarkably permissive on prostitution um in contrast to the Catholic Church or what have you but what I was doing was using a completely different language for ethical discourse and you know revealing other aspects that he had obviously kept his eyes close to you know what's gonna happen next with veganism will veganism develop its own ethical language I hope so I hope that we in effect trained ourselves as a generation and prepare the way for the next generation to think clearly in terms of harm reduction in terms of ecology in terms of a type of individual and social moral responsibility and what I hope is that veganism learns to articulate these things that vegans learn to articulate these things in a way that is realistic and coherent and compelling and convincing and does not rely on magical thinking does not rely on abstract ideas taken from Hinduism or yoga or even Buddhism or what-have-you doesn't rely on ideas taken from Christianity anything else down-to-earth realistic logical thinking and you know that we learn to communicate these ideas in a way that ultimately has to be respected even by those who disagree with us because at the end of the day we're a minority and the position we're playing for is to be a respected minority not to be the majority not to take over the government and run a vegan dictatorship realistically right now all we're scrambling for is to be a principled minority whose views and beliefs are respected and the way to get there yeah it's gonna mean that we learn to articulate ourselves much better frankly much better than Gary Yourofsky