The definition of veganism is deeply flawed & still debated.
07 September 2017 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey guys what's up if you've been
watching this channel for a while you've heard me remark on the ways in which making YouTube videos is fundamentally different from writing an academic essay or presenting your thoughts at an academic conference and frankly I think that YouTube has a lot of advantages over that format yesterday I made a video that was 24 minutes long a video I'm not going to upload a video I'm going to delete and it was I guess objectively a good video it would have worked well as an academic paper or a lecture at an academic conference and you know it kind of had that quality of being prevaricate inge and reasonable and representing various sides as if they all have a point and this morning I woke up and I was wondering why it was that I was dissatisfied with that video why it was I didn't want to upload it and the truth is it wasn't really being entirely honest with myself and it wasn't really being entirely honest with the audience the topic I want to discuss in that video was the question of why it is that veganism itself still has a debatable and debated definition within the movement why is it that we have many different people who not only adhere to this diet but are out there pounding the movement building the movement from different perspectives working from a fundamentally different vision of veganism and I think it's true if you were going to present that in a peer-reviewed paper or discuss at an academic conference you would make it seem that there are many different sides to the issue and that they're all somehow equally valid that's not what I have to say what I have to say is I didn't come up with my own approach to veganism for the sake of being different having a new idea or with the impulse a painter might have to fill up the canvas with something original and different maybe just some of that painter hasn't seen before I really came to my own thoughts about veganism because in surveying the existing literature and looking at what else was going on in the movement philosophically political and otherwise I found it deeply flawed deeply disturbing incoherent wrong you know not just crazy in an inert sense but so deeply wrong that it would drive others crazy now what am I talking about you can check out the book reviews playlist on this channel you know I deeply disagree with the social justice approach of someone like Casey Taft and I have a long I think reasonable video which is titled veganism is not a social justice movement explaining why my definition of veganism is not based on social justice concepts and I don't think it's kind of fair or reasonable to define Veena's mean that way I have a book review dealing with a philosophy of will kim luca it was not so well known outside of canada i guess but he's a PhD holding career academic who's been advocating for veganism his entire life he is in his way an influential author and person in the movement and will kim luca his paradigm is so called citizenship paradigm so he is examining animals as if there are citizens in our society as if they are entitled to things or engage in a social contract in the same way the citizen is and by the same token our society or our government can require things of these animals so to give an example of how this kind of leads to madness he believes that rats and cockroaches and snakes all have a right to life that their position within cities you know the government is in no position to exterminate them and on the contrary he argues that the government ought to educate people so that they become less afraid of rats and snakes he thinks that human beings have an irrational fear of these animals that's just based on a biblical culture like because snakes are represented passively into bible people are afraid of having snakes living in their basement and exterminate them for no reason seem for rats and cockroaches and how about bed bugs why don't we take it that far he reasons in a sort of internally consistent way that again leads to madness he reasons that horses and cows are part of this social contract where our government owes horses and cows unlimited free health care you know unlimited veterinary care we would say but that in return our society can demand that they can buuuut onto the same social contract so he comes to the conclusion that's that it's okay for vegans to ride horses drink cow milk and eat chicken eggs because that's how the these peoples construe our society it's absurd so he's vegan but his citizenship approach to veganism leads to conclusions that are under yet even on the level of diet and they practice so again I'm not you know making this about a thin air that I think these these you know definitions are are mad and really lead to madness now I've had many different videos discussing what I think is wrong with the approach of Gary Franchione a most recently I put up a video called the fundamental flaw with vegan abolitionism and that's a philosophy that on the face of it may seem appealing well you just introduce it in a few words or a few sentences but you actually try to live with it you actually dig around you look through in a detail in a deep way and again I think it is I think it is profoundly flawed it's profoundly broken so I mean it is true that in looking at the state of veganism today in 2017 we have a number of different definitions competing to be the legitimate definition of veganism and to they don't have a particular author that are really worth mentioning here one is the pet based paradigm the ownership of pets dogs cats etc call it the love love your pet paradigm or the animal rescue paradigm and another is the speciesism paradigm which guess we should really say the anti speciesism paradigm so the the love your pet paradigm is basically reasoning that says well the proper relationship to humans and animals is the relationship of a pet owner to a dog and then they try to extend this to all animals so to say that our society ought to treat all animals whether cows or pigs or bears in the same way that we treat dogs and cats and you see this in vegan propaganda being taken very seriously sometimes where they show a piglet and they're showing human beings caring for this piglet the same way that would care for a puppy right now I've had many videos discussing this I think you have to look at how that pig would live nature in a pack of its own animals and what the relationship would be between animals and pigs in the forest in the wild and ultimately long story short you come to some deeply unsettling conclusions that know in the same way that castrating a dog to change its behavior is wrong castrating a pig to change its behavior that's what wrong and trying to take what would be a wild animal a pig that even if domesticated would very gladly become a feral pig to force it to be a plaything for human beings to force it to live its life on a couch you know lying around on a couch while you watch TV this is a deeply unnatural relationship between animals and humans and a depleted ethical one ultimately I don't even care that it's unnatural I care that it's unethical as I say this to me is flawed both in principle and in practice but this is a major paradigm this is one of the most popular ways to define vena's of the think of veganism now again I don't have any particular author for the anti species anti speciesism approach to some extent Gary Fran Sione's himself a representative of that but I mean I've seen footage of used footage on this channel of a protest in Toronto where the animal rights protesters were actively shouting at people and repeating to people conversationally also that their fundamental belief was that speciesism is the root of all other oppressions that speciesism is somehow an irrational prejudice similar to racism and that if we could overcome speciesism racism would also disappear that somehow people just have an irrational prejudice towards say a wild boar wild boars unlike the cute piglet in pedo videos will very gladly kill and eat a human being in the wild and I've had people write in to me I had that experience being attacked by wild boars in the force of the Philippines maybe in the forests of Thailand other places were they they go feral and really become a menace I've also read about that in the United States and Australia of course can happen anywhere the idea that your attitude towards a pig or a wild bear or the snakes in your basement or the rats of the cockroaches that all of this is just an irrational prejudice that can be removed and what will replace it when we remove it is loving relations between equals such as today presumably unites black people and white people in contrast to the irrational racism of the past or in contrast to the model of slavery of the past again I think this is a deeply flawed model this is an approach that's wrong in principle and in practice the same way that will Tuttle again I've done a book review of will Tuttle will Tuttle offers the promise that all violence in the world will end if we could remove the fundamental violence of human beings killing animals now I don't believe that and I think it's really useful to talk about racism in context where people aren't overly familiar with it maybe you're watching this video in Chicago when you're very familiar with racism between black people and white people well you have you given any thought to racism in southern Cambodia between Vietnamese people and Cambodian people that that's a culture those are two cultures that in many ways have a huge advantage in terms of vegetarianism they have deep roots in Buddhism Theravada Buddhism especially it's quite possible that in those cultures veganism will now grow will become a bigger and bigger part of their culture but let me tell you something the Vietnamese are not going to stop hating the Cambodians and the Cambodians are not going to stop hating the Vietnamese it's not gonna reduce racism and it's not gonna remove the fundamental causes they have from being at war with each other they have a long history of being being at war over that border and if moving the border one way or the other I find that incredibly asinine and deeply flawed so my point in this video is I didn't come up with my own approach with what I call the wildlife management approach there's a playlist on this channel just talking with the wildlife management approach I didn't come up with it just to be different I didn't come up with it just have a new idea of the sake of having a new idea I really came up with it because the definition of veganism itself that I saw my fellow vegans using across the board in the academic literature and just in street protests in rhetoric and privately when people talk to themselves I found them deeply deeply flawed and they'll both to be crazy in an inert sense just evaluating the philosophy and saying this is crazy and also to really have very negative effects on people that drive them crazy you may think it's cute and harmless to see a video of Gary Yourofsky telling you that you should never kill cockroaches that you should never kill mosquitoes that you should never kill bedbugs and I have a video on this channel criticizing Gary Yourofsky and his claims that vegans should never kill insects you may think that's cute it may sound morally uplifting to hear this kind of this kind of rhetoric but again I actually think it's crazy when regarding isolation and I think it drives people crazy when they try to live with it you've got one person who's vegan and their roommate is a meat-eater ridiculing them saying well you say you're vegan but in reality you kill insects and you kill cockroaches and then to have that person that vegan trying to articulate coherently what's really an incoherent philosophy trying to take the internal contradictions that live with and put a good face on it and present to meat-eaters that this is not contradictory that this is the philosophy that makes sense not only for them personally and privately but for the whole world that this is something they can make a political mandate out of to go ahead and change the world that's putting vegans on a very very weak footing and that is why ultimately you know having done the reading having really made a survey of what was going on in the animal rights and vegan world I rejected all those paradigms and decided you know what we do need some new ideas and long story short you can watch the video that went up just before this one which is titled I don't believe in animal rights my own ideas are in fact simpler and more flexible and in that sense of the term more pragmatic because they more respond to the real circumstances that we live in in the world around us they don't present us with principles that are impracticable and I note that the official definition of veganism from the vegan society includes that crucial word as far as is possible and practicable so we have to think about what's practical for ourselves as individuals and for the future of the movement
watching this channel for a while you've heard me remark on the ways in which making YouTube videos is fundamentally different from writing an academic essay or presenting your thoughts at an academic conference and frankly I think that YouTube has a lot of advantages over that format yesterday I made a video that was 24 minutes long a video I'm not going to upload a video I'm going to delete and it was I guess objectively a good video it would have worked well as an academic paper or a lecture at an academic conference and you know it kind of had that quality of being prevaricate inge and reasonable and representing various sides as if they all have a point and this morning I woke up and I was wondering why it was that I was dissatisfied with that video why it was I didn't want to upload it and the truth is it wasn't really being entirely honest with myself and it wasn't really being entirely honest with the audience the topic I want to discuss in that video was the question of why it is that veganism itself still has a debatable and debated definition within the movement why is it that we have many different people who not only adhere to this diet but are out there pounding the movement building the movement from different perspectives working from a fundamentally different vision of veganism and I think it's true if you were going to present that in a peer-reviewed paper or discuss at an academic conference you would make it seem that there are many different sides to the issue and that they're all somehow equally valid that's not what I have to say what I have to say is I didn't come up with my own approach to veganism for the sake of being different having a new idea or with the impulse a painter might have to fill up the canvas with something original and different maybe just some of that painter hasn't seen before I really came to my own thoughts about veganism because in surveying the existing literature and looking at what else was going on in the movement philosophically political and otherwise I found it deeply flawed deeply disturbing incoherent wrong you know not just crazy in an inert sense but so deeply wrong that it would drive others crazy now what am I talking about you can check out the book reviews playlist on this channel you know I deeply disagree with the social justice approach of someone like Casey Taft and I have a long I think reasonable video which is titled veganism is not a social justice movement explaining why my definition of veganism is not based on social justice concepts and I don't think it's kind of fair or reasonable to define Veena's mean that way I have a book review dealing with a philosophy of will kim luca it was not so well known outside of canada i guess but he's a PhD holding career academic who's been advocating for veganism his entire life he is in his way an influential author and person in the movement and will kim luca his paradigm is so called citizenship paradigm so he is examining animals as if there are citizens in our society as if they are entitled to things or engage in a social contract in the same way the citizen is and by the same token our society or our government can require things of these animals so to give an example of how this kind of leads to madness he believes that rats and cockroaches and snakes all have a right to life that their position within cities you know the government is in no position to exterminate them and on the contrary he argues that the government ought to educate people so that they become less afraid of rats and snakes he thinks that human beings have an irrational fear of these animals that's just based on a biblical culture like because snakes are represented passively into bible people are afraid of having snakes living in their basement and exterminate them for no reason seem for rats and cockroaches and how about bed bugs why don't we take it that far he reasons in a sort of internally consistent way that again leads to madness he reasons that horses and cows are part of this social contract where our government owes horses and cows unlimited free health care you know unlimited veterinary care we would say but that in return our society can demand that they can buuuut onto the same social contract so he comes to the conclusion that's that it's okay for vegans to ride horses drink cow milk and eat chicken eggs because that's how the these peoples construe our society it's absurd so he's vegan but his citizenship approach to veganism leads to conclusions that are under yet even on the level of diet and they practice so again I'm not you know making this about a thin air that I think these these you know definitions are are mad and really lead to madness now I've had many different videos discussing what I think is wrong with the approach of Gary Franchione a most recently I put up a video called the fundamental flaw with vegan abolitionism and that's a philosophy that on the face of it may seem appealing well you just introduce it in a few words or a few sentences but you actually try to live with it you actually dig around you look through in a detail in a deep way and again I think it is I think it is profoundly flawed it's profoundly broken so I mean it is true that in looking at the state of veganism today in 2017 we have a number of different definitions competing to be the legitimate definition of veganism and to they don't have a particular author that are really worth mentioning here one is the pet based paradigm the ownership of pets dogs cats etc call it the love love your pet paradigm or the animal rescue paradigm and another is the speciesism paradigm which guess we should really say the anti speciesism paradigm so the the love your pet paradigm is basically reasoning that says well the proper relationship to humans and animals is the relationship of a pet owner to a dog and then they try to extend this to all animals so to say that our society ought to treat all animals whether cows or pigs or bears in the same way that we treat dogs and cats and you see this in vegan propaganda being taken very seriously sometimes where they show a piglet and they're showing human beings caring for this piglet the same way that would care for a puppy right now I've had many videos discussing this I think you have to look at how that pig would live nature in a pack of its own animals and what the relationship would be between animals and pigs in the forest in the wild and ultimately long story short you come to some deeply unsettling conclusions that know in the same way that castrating a dog to change its behavior is wrong castrating a pig to change its behavior that's what wrong and trying to take what would be a wild animal a pig that even if domesticated would very gladly become a feral pig to force it to be a plaything for human beings to force it to live its life on a couch you know lying around on a couch while you watch TV this is a deeply unnatural relationship between animals and humans and a depleted ethical one ultimately I don't even care that it's unnatural I care that it's unethical as I say this to me is flawed both in principle and in practice but this is a major paradigm this is one of the most popular ways to define vena's of the think of veganism now again I don't have any particular author for the anti species anti speciesism approach to some extent Gary Fran Sione's himself a representative of that but I mean I've seen footage of used footage on this channel of a protest in Toronto where the animal rights protesters were actively shouting at people and repeating to people conversationally also that their fundamental belief was that speciesism is the root of all other oppressions that speciesism is somehow an irrational prejudice similar to racism and that if we could overcome speciesism racism would also disappear that somehow people just have an irrational prejudice towards say a wild boar wild boars unlike the cute piglet in pedo videos will very gladly kill and eat a human being in the wild and I've had people write in to me I had that experience being attacked by wild boars in the force of the Philippines maybe in the forests of Thailand other places were they they go feral and really become a menace I've also read about that in the United States and Australia of course can happen anywhere the idea that your attitude towards a pig or a wild bear or the snakes in your basement or the rats of the cockroaches that all of this is just an irrational prejudice that can be removed and what will replace it when we remove it is loving relations between equals such as today presumably unites black people and white people in contrast to the irrational racism of the past or in contrast to the model of slavery of the past again I think this is a deeply flawed model this is an approach that's wrong in principle and in practice the same way that will Tuttle again I've done a book review of will Tuttle will Tuttle offers the promise that all violence in the world will end if we could remove the fundamental violence of human beings killing animals now I don't believe that and I think it's really useful to talk about racism in context where people aren't overly familiar with it maybe you're watching this video in Chicago when you're very familiar with racism between black people and white people well you have you given any thought to racism in southern Cambodia between Vietnamese people and Cambodian people that that's a culture those are two cultures that in many ways have a huge advantage in terms of vegetarianism they have deep roots in Buddhism Theravada Buddhism especially it's quite possible that in those cultures veganism will now grow will become a bigger and bigger part of their culture but let me tell you something the Vietnamese are not going to stop hating the Cambodians and the Cambodians are not going to stop hating the Vietnamese it's not gonna reduce racism and it's not gonna remove the fundamental causes they have from being at war with each other they have a long history of being being at war over that border and if moving the border one way or the other I find that incredibly asinine and deeply flawed so my point in this video is I didn't come up with my own approach with what I call the wildlife management approach there's a playlist on this channel just talking with the wildlife management approach I didn't come up with it just to be different I didn't come up with it just have a new idea of the sake of having a new idea I really came up with it because the definition of veganism itself that I saw my fellow vegans using across the board in the academic literature and just in street protests in rhetoric and privately when people talk to themselves I found them deeply deeply flawed and they'll both to be crazy in an inert sense just evaluating the philosophy and saying this is crazy and also to really have very negative effects on people that drive them crazy you may think it's cute and harmless to see a video of Gary Yourofsky telling you that you should never kill cockroaches that you should never kill mosquitoes that you should never kill bedbugs and I have a video on this channel criticizing Gary Yourofsky and his claims that vegans should never kill insects you may think that's cute it may sound morally uplifting to hear this kind of this kind of rhetoric but again I actually think it's crazy when regarding isolation and I think it drives people crazy when they try to live with it you've got one person who's vegan and their roommate is a meat-eater ridiculing them saying well you say you're vegan but in reality you kill insects and you kill cockroaches and then to have that person that vegan trying to articulate coherently what's really an incoherent philosophy trying to take the internal contradictions that live with and put a good face on it and present to meat-eaters that this is not contradictory that this is the philosophy that makes sense not only for them personally and privately but for the whole world that this is something they can make a political mandate out of to go ahead and change the world that's putting vegans on a very very weak footing and that is why ultimately you know having done the reading having really made a survey of what was going on in the animal rights and vegan world I rejected all those paradigms and decided you know what we do need some new ideas and long story short you can watch the video that went up just before this one which is titled I don't believe in animal rights my own ideas are in fact simpler and more flexible and in that sense of the term more pragmatic because they more respond to the real circumstances that we live in in the world around us they don't present us with principles that are impracticable and I note that the official definition of veganism from the vegan society includes that crucial word as far as is possible and practicable so we have to think about what's practical for ourselves as individuals and for the future of the movement