Excuses for Ayahuasca, Excuses for Video Game Addiction: the Evils of Youtube.

in the discussion of political issues
were guided but the examples we choose but also through the omission of contrasting examples we are at the same time mislead if you want to talk about American imperialism the American Empire and you focus entirely on disasters like the Vietnam War Cambodia to some extent Iraq oh there are other examples like Japan and South Korea and so even though the first set of examples are important and they lead us down one path of analysis with one set of considerations there is a contrasting set of examples there that we ignore at our peril we are inclined to think about freedom of speech and its significance in our society with reference to examples of people standing up against the government using freedom of speech as a way to limit and challenge the tyranny of the government there was a very significant example from the history of England a couple of centuries ago now of a scientist these were the days when science was struggling to get recognition trying to draw the government's attention in the public attention to the fact that cholera was being spread through drinking water and ultimately the cause of this was the mixture of sewage with the source of drinking water and a certain borough of London at that time so ultimately people are drinking their own diluted poo and the government of England thought it was in their interest to suppress this information they would rather the public not know that people not think about it that this not be debated in Parliament this inspired actually there's one incident inspired many works of art inspired many scientific essays it was an example of the necessity of freedom of speech for you know the man of principle to stand up and speak truth to power right that is one example of freedom of speech being the canary in the coal mine being the one man who's willing to stand up and say people are dying of ha because we're letting our sewage system mix with our drinking water system whatever you want to say and even if that's an embarrassment to the government and even if that causes a shock and revulsion on the public it's absolutely necessary for that truth to be broadcast and we can lionize it and heroin you know most of what we're doing here on YouTube falls into a very different category of the use and abuse of freedom of speech and it actually illustrates the ways in which freedom of speech is something dangerous and noxious and that reinforces the worst elements of human nature helps all of us to justify an excuse or bad pat our bad habits and snuff so human potential on a massive scale saw a video a couple of weeks ago from a from a video game channel pat the nes Punk and he was proudly reporting on this scientific study you know peer-reviewed scientific paper he found and this was a scientific study that both implicitly and explicitly saying there's absolutely nothing wrong with children growing up playing video games for three hours a day so this again feeds into this issue of the selection of examples there are YouTube channels I just checked now that are promoting the use of the mind-altering drug ayahuasca and those people they managed to look around and find the few medical doctors the few scientists who will back up their [ __ ] excuses for using this mind-altering drug and say oh no don't worry about brain damage don't worry about this even the people with PhDs we're going to stand up and say oh no no the experience you have is not hallucination it's somehow something much more meaningful than just taking a hallucinogenic ELISA Natick so you know those sources are out there let me tell you something guys you're a student of history travel back in time to the year 1917 just go through the archives there was never a paucity of people with PhDs who thought that communist dictatorship in Russia was really good idea okay there were always people with PhDs representing every political extremist ideology there are always new people with PhDs representing an advancing every form of insane quack science including curing homosexuality through electroshock therapy you just had to look around for them and here on YouTube the people who want to hear those excuses that people who want to live in a kind of feedback loop of self reinforcing excuses to glamorize their drug habit like ayahuasca they're gonna find that here on YouTube and they're gonna find voices both of them humble personal experience of people saying that this drug improved their lives and they're gonna find videos of people with PhDs and academic response wasn't and the people who want to make excuses for being video game addicts are literally gonna find those few scientific papers that say there's nothing wrong with children growing up playing video games for three hours a day and they're gonna get into this self reinforcing loop for all their bad habits now of course it's a little bit surreal but we even find that with the people who want to justify eating bacon for breakfast every day people want to eat poached eggs every day and they manage to find these few crappy scientific studies and these few seeming experts who are willing to stand up for an unbelievably unhealthy diet and this also comes to self reinforcing and when we deal with these examples we have the chilling contrast to the use of the state-sponsored suppression of freedom of speech where the government is right the government is right to make it illegal to say that smoking cigarettes is okay you know freedom of speech has a limit at some point the government says no you're not allowed to have advertisement saying that cigarettes are healthy and again if you're actually a student of history if you've been to the archives or been to a library and looked at all the things just when you look up old news magazines if you go back far enough you can see the ads that used to really say with no humor that cigarettes are good for your health and by this brand of cigarettes cuz it was better for your health and the other kind of cigarettes are this kind of thing that use of freedom of speech was wiped out what exactly they're allowed to say on the label for a box of cigarettes this is incredibly tightly controlled and it would be virtuous if the government forced YouTube to crack down on the YouTube channels and they are myriad that are promoting the use of ayahuasca as a drug it would be completely virtuous and completely positive if you crack down on freedom of speech in this form that's destroying people's lives and the stories to the contrary are probably out there somewhere probably if you search for the needle in the haystack you can find someone who's sitting down on the front of the camera and saying honestly as a kind of broken man look they used to believe that this drug liberated them and improve their lives and only now they realize that they were wrong and that this is just it's just a hallucinogen it's just brain damage and that all the religious and philosophical pretensions that are attached to this are no better than the [ __ ] that meth heads that methamphetamine addicts make up to glorify their habit or cocaine addicts or glue Huffer or alcoholics or anyone else they look back and they were wrong and they were wrong though that message is out there somewhere but if you don't have government regulation and government restriction to freedom of speech what you'll see do that do the search for the term ayahuasca on YouTube right now and you know you can change the time you can search for videos the word ayahuasca in them from this year from this month from this day lasts 24 hours every day there's pro drug Pro ayahuasca you know propaganda being uploaded day after day after day and it is it is changing people's eyes now video games they have a Lobby that's much more extensive and it influences much more people's lives much more profoundly all right so me and my girlfriend talked a lot about this but my girlfriend grew up with their own kind of brain damage from playing video games I would say that of myself - one of the ways I was lucky it was just that video games were so much more simplistic when I was a child I mean I I literally played the original Zork Zork was just text no graphics I played the original nethack just letters no graphic since we had plates I played you know the original space invaders I played really really simple video games no as a kid but it's very easy for me to imagine how my girlfriend for her generation so Nintendo 64 14 oh that video games were more sophisticated more immersive just more beautiful more glittering there were more things there that appeal to a child and draw them in and keep their attention for hours and hours and hours and yes you can find a peer-reviewed paper that reassures you that 3 hours a day doesn't have any of the negative effects of quote-unquote addiction and you can imagine you start using a technical definition of what addiction is and you start talking this kind of thing if you go to school and you do the dishes and you take a shower and you eat dinner with your parents there were not that many hours of the day left for a kid for their intellectual development their emotional development for learning for their roles if you are spending just three hours a day playing video games this is a huge huge impact on the development of a child's mind and yes even on their ability to to just talk their ability to to verbalize to communicate in their own first language is I think strictly speaking [ __ ] by playing video games for three hours day and what do you know the news this week is that the government of Communist China the horrible dictatorship of Communist China has come out and legislated if passed a law that children all children in China should only play video games for one hour and a half per day maximum and they are going to limit the number of hours that children can log on to online video games so that will be through various platforms the equivalent of steam in China or it's done they are gonna prevent children from playing online video games at least for more than an hour and a half a day and hilariously if you now search within YouTube the same way that the ayahuasca people will just tell you you are gonna find a course of opinion saying what a terrible oppressive thing this is that the government of communist China is I guess taking away the childhoods of of these kids but only allowing them to play and that's by the way that's on a school night an hour and a half they're allowing serve from memory three hours on on the weekends or on holidays but if it's a school night a maximum of an hour and a half which again is still a significant portion of your hood being ported to playing video games day after day selection of examples and we examine a political problem its fateful it guides the observations we make and the conclusions we come to and the considerations we fail to direct our attention awards yes if you think of freedom of speech entirely in terms of the embattled individual standing up against the oppression of the state then it seems like a wholly good thing but if you think of freedom of speech in terms of a popularity contest in which people can become more popular by affirming one another's excuses mitigating one another feel better for there were excuses about why there are failure in life why they indulge in their bad habits in life whether that's alcohol or vision use these examples then the really negative the really threatening the really menacing elements of freedom of speech start to become evident and what we've all been doing here on YouTube for the last ten years I think it's fair to say has been a popularity contest and one of the main aspects of that popularity carnist has again been giving people good excuses for their bad habits I knew a man I knew a man in the Green Party we had a friendship that I would describe as important to both of us but not particularly close especially with men in Western culture those are two different things you have a friend who's kind of important to you but you don't really talk about your problems with your parents or how you met your first girlfriend or some [ __ ] you see state you keep it a little bit professional it's important but not that close and I had 10 years in which ahead and talked to this guy and then my first wife got pregnant and at that time I really made an effort to reach out to brothers and sisters and cousins and a few friends from the past who I hadn't talked to in a long time say hey you know I'm having a baby you know do you want to talk on skype or do you wanna have an email but we don't do you want to do you want to reconnect you know so it's during the pregnancy before the format that I was born and this guy was one of the people I reached out to to say hey I don't haven't heard from you in a long time but you know we were once kind of friends we were once important to each other's lives what's what's going on you in the 10 years I hadn't known him he went from having a passing interest in hippy Hinduism in terms of spirituality he went from that into getting deeper and deeper into the cult of ayahuasca drug use he had a girlfriend who was in it with him and she kept getting accidentally pregnant thinking having abortions there were a lot of little little hints around the edges like the head of what I kind of dissolute and ill-managed life he was living and as he progressed in the drug tourism of ayahuasca he ended up getting invited to go to one of the remote villages in South America where the native peoples culture was relatively intact and where they've been using this drug continuously in their own cultural terms so I'm not even gonna digress to express skepticism about that let's just pretend there are still some remote villages in the mountains of South America where there are some tribal people who still use this drug in a more authentic way obviously there's a lot of money involved with having white Western tourists ship up and do this kind of thing so how authentic it is is the question for another time and you know what broke him you know what broke his faith and he did all the reading he did all the research he came here on Google and YouTube and he probably joined a bunch of Facebook groups you know and he filmed all these kinds of excuses for his ban all these self-affirming you know all these people telling you their positive experiences but now this turn their life around it made them a better person and cured their depression and all this [ __ ] right and when he was talking to me just by coincidence I was having a baby he was talking to the first person ever who just said to it like bro you are a drug tourist period like and he this guy done other drugs I was like bro you know that the hallucinations you have on this are not different they're not that different from magic mushrooms or LSD they're not that different from coming down with a fever and who Lucy likes you know this I know you've been like a new person I know you've been sick I know you've elucidated for other reasons like you know like you know these are just to loosen Asians you know you're just a drug yeah yeah that some reason to find that message here on YouTube nor on Facebook or Instagram for the thali with you thing what broke his faith was going to that village and seeing children getting high on ayahuasca somehow all the excuses when they're made for middle aged wine aunts when they're made for middle aged yoga moms trying to have a second youth somehow the excuses when they're made for sexy teenagers going to a music festival and getting high somehow on some level not rationally but instinctually he felt this was wrong when he was looking at six-year-olds and eight-year-olds getting high on this drug somehow his faith in the air SATs religion that excuses for ayahuasca started to come apart I believe in censorship I believe that there should be labels on bottles that say poison do not drink when they contain poison and I think it should be illegal to take a bottle of coca-cola and pour the coca-cola and pour it instead a poison like fertilizer that happens to be brown and you know what cuz even if you just take that bottle and leave it on a shelf somewhere doesn't mean you and someone might come along and drink it and not know that it's poison I don't believe that freedom of speech extends to the front of a package of cigarettes we live in an era when the censorship of what can and cannot be said here on YouTube is unbelievably intense I put up a YouTube video that entirely consisted of material that has already appeared on CNN NBC other news broadcasting networks footage of political protests in China but it was censored because I put it here on YouTube YouTube censors political speech of that kind much more tightly than CNN NBC HBO then broadcast television right there was no blood there was no gore mostly as pictures of people holding signs and chanting and protesting in the streets and it showed police officers you know cracking down of them that kind of I don't have the freedom of speech to upload that video on YouTube and yet people seem to enjoy the freedom of speech of actively promoting that you sign up for drug tourism that absolutely definitely as a scientific fact will give you brain damage [Music]