DID I CROSS THE LINE? Freelee & Durianrider, Political Critique & Personal Defamation.
11 November 2016 [link youtube]
A lot of people genuinely do not know the information shared in this video: they hear, e.g., that I called Durianrider "insane", and they're not aware that I actually addressed his own (specific) claims that he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia --and his claims that he has cured his own condition. That is, really, not the same as just insulting (or defaming) someone on the internet for being insane.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
I really know how lame it is to come on
to youtube and watch youtubers talking with each other about YouTube it's part of our lives if you make youtube videos if you spend your time interacting other people making friends on YouTube you know it's like the old days there used to be shortwave radio ham radio and when people make friends over this type of radio the first thing you're going to talk about is how to use this special radio right if you make friends over YouTube right away right off the bat when you first meet them if you start talking the one thing you've got in common is that you're both on youtube of course if you're both vegan and you're on vegan YouTube you're going to talk about vegan YouTube it's not an intentionally constructed echo chamber it's not an intellectual ghetto but like I did I did a conversation yesterday to our broadcasts we recorded a podcast together with a guy who uses the nickname dumb vegan obviously the names a joke and because he's a vegan on YouTube now I'm a vegan on youtube it's the first time we've ever talked naturally you're gonna talk about what you have in common see talk about making YouTube apologies apologies but it's it's a real part of my life and when I meet these people we first strike a conversation naturally it's one of the things you first talked about off the bat okay under that heading under that rubric one of the things we all end up talking about is who is crossing the line what is the line what are the ethical lines or what are we even the lines of good taste of good conduct here on YouTube what we do in this digital vegan debbie monde as aspiring activists as aspiring advocates for veganism as people who want to make the world a better place or in some cases as shameless fame [ __ ] who are just trying to get their 5000 views and there are eighty dollars a month in Adsense revenue or whatever they make um because different people play the game by different rules different people have different objectives and you know like anything else I mean ultimately YouTube is an art form it's just barely an art form it's a very spare art form the questions of what is good taste what is good content what's a positive contribution those questions will always be there they're there for the theater therefore stand-up comedy they're there for radio you know do I mean as an art form obviously it's it's similar to radio broadcasters if you come on every day and try to talk about politics on the radio we try to talk about your own life in the radio whatever it is you talk about um they're going to be those questions when he crossed in line is crossed my net cetera when I first started talking to vegan gains years ago now i think his channel was new etc um one of the first stops conversation i had with him was I was really talking about i thought he was crossing the line for me it's not a legal line but for me I think whipping out a knife on camera is crossing a line I think whipping out a gun on camera is crossing the line now I believe he's only used fake guns on camera you know he's waved a gun but you know I don't I don't think that's cool now it's different when it's a sketch comedy or a drama or a script if you're acting out a scene from Hamlet you use a sword drafting at a scene from Macbeth you know that's different oh but you know I did think back in the start of his channel I really said to him look from my perspective this is the line and you're crossing the line so I completely supplies the fact that other people write to me and from their perspective they're saying that I'm crossing the line that's part of what we do on YouTube so with that caveat hadn't been stated yeah Here I am a vegan on YouTube talking about vegan youtube this is how you get stuck into the echo chamber but it's also a legitimate set of ethical and political questions and it's even a legitimate set of artistic and entertainment related questions right but you say sorry to come back to being gains briefly you know inition he has a gun on camera all the time but he's acting out a script I don't think in this scene has ever whipped out a gun or a knife and and made threats to people in real life that comes like so mean drawing the line it's a conversation that may never end for us here on YouTube um and obviously ultimately with durianrider he made real threats of violence against me he really defamed me etc and I had to draw a line in more ways than one and now we got a court case together and he can pretend the court case is fake but he knows it's real and the court case again may end in failure everyone is innocent till proven guilty and it's totally possible that the judge is just gonna throw it at a court and say yeah good story bro we don't care we ain't giving you no justice happens so a court systems work you plead your case you find out what the judge wants to do with it so I got I got a message here from a guy named Andrew now this is also interesting to me in a sense anyone could have read this message from Andrew and treated him as a troll or treated him as mean-spirited treatments an insincere and it's just a choice um I chose to reply to this assuming that he was sincerely raising these questions about me crossing the line and in this case I think we had a more meaningful conversation for that reason I just want to say I disagree with Andrew I'm not angry at Andrew I'm not offended I really disagree with them and a big part of what we do in politics what we need to be able to do is disagree with our fellow man without hating on uh without okay he'd you know what even hate is permissible in politics okay within the Republican Party there's hatred within the Conservative Party there's hatred within Liberals and the NDP you know what even even hatred is not crossing the line okay but I mean if we're gonna hate each other let's hate each other while maintaining our own dignity and while giving other people so I'm sure it did Lee but understandably Andrew here is challenging me because he thinks across the line and I disagree so let's talk about that for one minute here anter says quote I watched you trash freely and durianrider for months before you went to chiang mai you're deeply ad hominem attacks were brutal you were angry resentful and in my opinion appeared hell-bent on their destruction you used words like idiots stupid fraud fake mentally ill scumbag and many more that I do not recall off the top of my head you also also bashed their festival the festival comma the people who attend the festival and a certain brand of vegan youtubers generally pause okay so I'm going to stop reading the quote now and just respond to that rather bad um I don't think Andrew was doing this intentionally but he is misrepresenting what I said just by depriving these things of their context context matters intention matters ultimately even your tone of voice matters blah blah blah um there are many contexts in which it would be definite tion and in my opinion would be a crime and would be crossing the line to call someone mentally ill there are many contexts in which I think that would be bad and immoral and wrong and when I would delete my own video if I had said that backs and if I said it spontaneously or something and then later I would regret it definitely calling someone insane or mentally ill claiming that they're legally speaking insane i think is serious defamation okay so i would agree if i were guilty with that that i was crossing a line durianrider i read i quoted him verbatim i read his own description his own statement that he had been diagnosed as insane i read and we put the text on screen so you could see the text you could hear my voice reading it i read his descriptions of how he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders and I told people my message was it wasn't an insult it wasn't defamation my message was this is somebody who's admitted to you he has serious mental illnesses and you're choosing to ignore that warning it's not even me warning you I was telling the audience you need to recognize how serious it is that this man says medical professionals have diagnosed him with these disorders that's his claim I'm not defaming him by quoting that claim or in other videos by briefly summarizing it as I just did that's not defamation that's not even an insult and the warning to the audience is obviously very meaningful in this context the particular political dispute I have with during writer okay so to say this man by his own description says he's been diagnosed with schizophrenia very important point to why do I raise it at all why does it come up well yes there's a broader political context of during writers political leadership there are other issues there's during writer defaming denouncing attacking other people there were other ethical issues but above all else he also claimed that he cured his schizophrenia and he claimed that you also can cure schizophrenia he attacked and denounced the whole medical establishment he has many videos describing doctors as scam artists describing all medication as a scam and specifically laying into psychiatrists the psychiatric profession any kind of mental health profession as a scam and saying you should not take meds like if you're currently prescribed meds for a psychiatric condition you should just stop you should quit your meds and him sitting on his philosophy and his diet plan for how you should heal yourself this is serious business okay this and now I do not know if they are true I have seen people say on the internet they followed during writers advice and it had negative effects and lips that they quit their medication etc is very easy to imagine someone being convinced by this a charismatic personality on the internet claiming that you don't need that that your doctor is a scam artist your doctor is lying to you your medication is not making you healthy it's making you sick the type of approach he has obviously has very real negative impacts for people so for me to come on and critique that and expose that and address that that is not at all what you're describing your andrew is coming on the internet hell-bent on someone's disruption calling them idiot stupid fraud fake mentally ill now i do not think andrew was intentionally lying here I don't think he's even that's just how he remembers it that's just how he feels about it I appreciate that I really think he's being sincere but he's also wrong so another one he has here is the word fraud on this channel I very specifically addressed free Lee's claims to having a certificate or diploma that she does not in fact have my video was very reasonable I got in touch with the University it's not really University the training institute that her diploma or certificate is from it's not really University no shade but whatever it's a training institute I got in touch with them i scrutinized her claim about what her diploma was supposed to be and in that video i was very generous I said look I'm willing to assume that she's telling the truth based on what she says and what this the institution this educational station says I'm going to assume she's not lying a professional journalists at a newspaper in Australia they looked into it and they concluded that she was lying okay why would you use the word fraud to describe someone who gives dietary and medical advice and who claims to have credentials they don't have again it could be crossing the line all right yes it could be crossing the line to say this sort of thing about someone to say that they're a fraud or to say they're mentally ill by taking it out of context this way it is very clear I was not crossing the line okay then to be honestly when I started making this video I thought I would read this whole message and read my reply this is 11 minutes long I think I'm going to keep this short and sweet I think that is the fundamental point I want to communicate with you right now maybe hearing you now with the chat or read the rest of the message we can talk about it but I admit it sounds self-indulgent when youtubers come on and talk about YouTube talk of 1m cross the line etc what's really self-indulgent is what you're doing in this message if you want to engage in a sincere critique of me and what I have to say it's not just a matter of context you have to look at the intention you have to look at what I'm doing what I'm do I am doing you have to look at this as a real dispute within a real political struggle because veganism is a political movement whether you like it or not what do you admit it to yourself or not the same way that political leaders get criticized for their claims I have to criticize someone like durianrider for lying to you about medication and the nature of psychiatric help the psychiatric care I have to criticize freely for spreading false pseudo scientific information about your calorie intake but how much diet how much exercise you need to burn 4000 5000 calories and lose weight for lying about whether or not you should eat garlic because garlic is a neurotoxin yes these are actually meaningful questions for me as someone who regards veganism as political movement is concerned about the future of veganism it's not just ad hominem it's not meaningless bashing or something this to me this is real and this is meaningful it to you it's it's not that's ok but actually if you Andrew in writing this comment or make your own videos you should do you should have the same level of respect for me that I showed to durianrider I went and I got the text of exactly what during writer said about schizophrenia I didn't just defame him I did just make up I addressed what he said how he said it why he said it and you know to during writers credit he replied to me addressing the substance he had a video that was cold I ten thousand percent cured Crohn's disease my video critiquing his claim to have cured an incurable disease he replied to the substance of that and I respect him for that that you know he didn't just denounce me or defame me he didn't at that time he didn't just say yeah well your girlfriend is only 18 years old or something he actually he saw my video in which I criticized his pseudo medical claim to having cured and curable disease in which he's telling other people that they also can cure their diseases etc and he said he doubled down and he defended his position I respect that okay you guys if you want to be my credits critics if you want to tackle me you think I'm so disrespectful to freely enduring writer because words like fraud appear in their fraud used in a completely reasonable sense if you lie about your university credentials or your certificates of education the educational qualifications you have it is not unreasonable to describe that as a fraud not at all okay a talking about someone is mentally ill in this context again okay so if you want to take me down if you want to criticize me please do but if you think I'm so disrespectful to derail my turn freely I can ask you on the contrary why don't you rise to my level why don't you show me as much respect for what I actually said in criticizing me as I show freely interim writer because I don't invent stuff out of thin air I'm criticizing their actual political positions their actual promises the actual pseudo-sciences in their diet I'm criticizing the real problems within their part of the vegan movement and the problems the direction they were dragging the vegan movement towards and that's real and for a lot of you that's how you discover my youtube channel and that's why you're still here listening to me because there's nothing entertaining there's nothing sexy there's nothing appealing about these video I'm not telling you what you want to hear i'm not selling you a dream I'm not lying to you about the bright future of veganism I'm not lying to you that you can eat 5,000 calories a day and get no exercise and still lose weight I'm not even selling you a dream vacation in Thailand okay but you're still here listening because on some level you know that it's real
to youtube and watch youtubers talking with each other about YouTube it's part of our lives if you make youtube videos if you spend your time interacting other people making friends on YouTube you know it's like the old days there used to be shortwave radio ham radio and when people make friends over this type of radio the first thing you're going to talk about is how to use this special radio right if you make friends over YouTube right away right off the bat when you first meet them if you start talking the one thing you've got in common is that you're both on youtube of course if you're both vegan and you're on vegan YouTube you're going to talk about vegan YouTube it's not an intentionally constructed echo chamber it's not an intellectual ghetto but like I did I did a conversation yesterday to our broadcasts we recorded a podcast together with a guy who uses the nickname dumb vegan obviously the names a joke and because he's a vegan on YouTube now I'm a vegan on youtube it's the first time we've ever talked naturally you're gonna talk about what you have in common see talk about making YouTube apologies apologies but it's it's a real part of my life and when I meet these people we first strike a conversation naturally it's one of the things you first talked about off the bat okay under that heading under that rubric one of the things we all end up talking about is who is crossing the line what is the line what are the ethical lines or what are we even the lines of good taste of good conduct here on YouTube what we do in this digital vegan debbie monde as aspiring activists as aspiring advocates for veganism as people who want to make the world a better place or in some cases as shameless fame [ __ ] who are just trying to get their 5000 views and there are eighty dollars a month in Adsense revenue or whatever they make um because different people play the game by different rules different people have different objectives and you know like anything else I mean ultimately YouTube is an art form it's just barely an art form it's a very spare art form the questions of what is good taste what is good content what's a positive contribution those questions will always be there they're there for the theater therefore stand-up comedy they're there for radio you know do I mean as an art form obviously it's it's similar to radio broadcasters if you come on every day and try to talk about politics on the radio we try to talk about your own life in the radio whatever it is you talk about um they're going to be those questions when he crossed in line is crossed my net cetera when I first started talking to vegan gains years ago now i think his channel was new etc um one of the first stops conversation i had with him was I was really talking about i thought he was crossing the line for me it's not a legal line but for me I think whipping out a knife on camera is crossing a line I think whipping out a gun on camera is crossing the line now I believe he's only used fake guns on camera you know he's waved a gun but you know I don't I don't think that's cool now it's different when it's a sketch comedy or a drama or a script if you're acting out a scene from Hamlet you use a sword drafting at a scene from Macbeth you know that's different oh but you know I did think back in the start of his channel I really said to him look from my perspective this is the line and you're crossing the line so I completely supplies the fact that other people write to me and from their perspective they're saying that I'm crossing the line that's part of what we do on YouTube so with that caveat hadn't been stated yeah Here I am a vegan on YouTube talking about vegan youtube this is how you get stuck into the echo chamber but it's also a legitimate set of ethical and political questions and it's even a legitimate set of artistic and entertainment related questions right but you say sorry to come back to being gains briefly you know inition he has a gun on camera all the time but he's acting out a script I don't think in this scene has ever whipped out a gun or a knife and and made threats to people in real life that comes like so mean drawing the line it's a conversation that may never end for us here on YouTube um and obviously ultimately with durianrider he made real threats of violence against me he really defamed me etc and I had to draw a line in more ways than one and now we got a court case together and he can pretend the court case is fake but he knows it's real and the court case again may end in failure everyone is innocent till proven guilty and it's totally possible that the judge is just gonna throw it at a court and say yeah good story bro we don't care we ain't giving you no justice happens so a court systems work you plead your case you find out what the judge wants to do with it so I got I got a message here from a guy named Andrew now this is also interesting to me in a sense anyone could have read this message from Andrew and treated him as a troll or treated him as mean-spirited treatments an insincere and it's just a choice um I chose to reply to this assuming that he was sincerely raising these questions about me crossing the line and in this case I think we had a more meaningful conversation for that reason I just want to say I disagree with Andrew I'm not angry at Andrew I'm not offended I really disagree with them and a big part of what we do in politics what we need to be able to do is disagree with our fellow man without hating on uh without okay he'd you know what even hate is permissible in politics okay within the Republican Party there's hatred within the Conservative Party there's hatred within Liberals and the NDP you know what even even hatred is not crossing the line okay but I mean if we're gonna hate each other let's hate each other while maintaining our own dignity and while giving other people so I'm sure it did Lee but understandably Andrew here is challenging me because he thinks across the line and I disagree so let's talk about that for one minute here anter says quote I watched you trash freely and durianrider for months before you went to chiang mai you're deeply ad hominem attacks were brutal you were angry resentful and in my opinion appeared hell-bent on their destruction you used words like idiots stupid fraud fake mentally ill scumbag and many more that I do not recall off the top of my head you also also bashed their festival the festival comma the people who attend the festival and a certain brand of vegan youtubers generally pause okay so I'm going to stop reading the quote now and just respond to that rather bad um I don't think Andrew was doing this intentionally but he is misrepresenting what I said just by depriving these things of their context context matters intention matters ultimately even your tone of voice matters blah blah blah um there are many contexts in which it would be definite tion and in my opinion would be a crime and would be crossing the line to call someone mentally ill there are many contexts in which I think that would be bad and immoral and wrong and when I would delete my own video if I had said that backs and if I said it spontaneously or something and then later I would regret it definitely calling someone insane or mentally ill claiming that they're legally speaking insane i think is serious defamation okay so i would agree if i were guilty with that that i was crossing a line durianrider i read i quoted him verbatim i read his own description his own statement that he had been diagnosed as insane i read and we put the text on screen so you could see the text you could hear my voice reading it i read his descriptions of how he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders and I told people my message was it wasn't an insult it wasn't defamation my message was this is somebody who's admitted to you he has serious mental illnesses and you're choosing to ignore that warning it's not even me warning you I was telling the audience you need to recognize how serious it is that this man says medical professionals have diagnosed him with these disorders that's his claim I'm not defaming him by quoting that claim or in other videos by briefly summarizing it as I just did that's not defamation that's not even an insult and the warning to the audience is obviously very meaningful in this context the particular political dispute I have with during writer okay so to say this man by his own description says he's been diagnosed with schizophrenia very important point to why do I raise it at all why does it come up well yes there's a broader political context of during writers political leadership there are other issues there's during writer defaming denouncing attacking other people there were other ethical issues but above all else he also claimed that he cured his schizophrenia and he claimed that you also can cure schizophrenia he attacked and denounced the whole medical establishment he has many videos describing doctors as scam artists describing all medication as a scam and specifically laying into psychiatrists the psychiatric profession any kind of mental health profession as a scam and saying you should not take meds like if you're currently prescribed meds for a psychiatric condition you should just stop you should quit your meds and him sitting on his philosophy and his diet plan for how you should heal yourself this is serious business okay this and now I do not know if they are true I have seen people say on the internet they followed during writers advice and it had negative effects and lips that they quit their medication etc is very easy to imagine someone being convinced by this a charismatic personality on the internet claiming that you don't need that that your doctor is a scam artist your doctor is lying to you your medication is not making you healthy it's making you sick the type of approach he has obviously has very real negative impacts for people so for me to come on and critique that and expose that and address that that is not at all what you're describing your andrew is coming on the internet hell-bent on someone's disruption calling them idiot stupid fraud fake mentally ill now i do not think andrew was intentionally lying here I don't think he's even that's just how he remembers it that's just how he feels about it I appreciate that I really think he's being sincere but he's also wrong so another one he has here is the word fraud on this channel I very specifically addressed free Lee's claims to having a certificate or diploma that she does not in fact have my video was very reasonable I got in touch with the University it's not really University the training institute that her diploma or certificate is from it's not really University no shade but whatever it's a training institute I got in touch with them i scrutinized her claim about what her diploma was supposed to be and in that video i was very generous I said look I'm willing to assume that she's telling the truth based on what she says and what this the institution this educational station says I'm going to assume she's not lying a professional journalists at a newspaper in Australia they looked into it and they concluded that she was lying okay why would you use the word fraud to describe someone who gives dietary and medical advice and who claims to have credentials they don't have again it could be crossing the line all right yes it could be crossing the line to say this sort of thing about someone to say that they're a fraud or to say they're mentally ill by taking it out of context this way it is very clear I was not crossing the line okay then to be honestly when I started making this video I thought I would read this whole message and read my reply this is 11 minutes long I think I'm going to keep this short and sweet I think that is the fundamental point I want to communicate with you right now maybe hearing you now with the chat or read the rest of the message we can talk about it but I admit it sounds self-indulgent when youtubers come on and talk about YouTube talk of 1m cross the line etc what's really self-indulgent is what you're doing in this message if you want to engage in a sincere critique of me and what I have to say it's not just a matter of context you have to look at the intention you have to look at what I'm doing what I'm do I am doing you have to look at this as a real dispute within a real political struggle because veganism is a political movement whether you like it or not what do you admit it to yourself or not the same way that political leaders get criticized for their claims I have to criticize someone like durianrider for lying to you about medication and the nature of psychiatric help the psychiatric care I have to criticize freely for spreading false pseudo scientific information about your calorie intake but how much diet how much exercise you need to burn 4000 5000 calories and lose weight for lying about whether or not you should eat garlic because garlic is a neurotoxin yes these are actually meaningful questions for me as someone who regards veganism as political movement is concerned about the future of veganism it's not just ad hominem it's not meaningless bashing or something this to me this is real and this is meaningful it to you it's it's not that's ok but actually if you Andrew in writing this comment or make your own videos you should do you should have the same level of respect for me that I showed to durianrider I went and I got the text of exactly what during writer said about schizophrenia I didn't just defame him I did just make up I addressed what he said how he said it why he said it and you know to during writers credit he replied to me addressing the substance he had a video that was cold I ten thousand percent cured Crohn's disease my video critiquing his claim to have cured an incurable disease he replied to the substance of that and I respect him for that that you know he didn't just denounce me or defame me he didn't at that time he didn't just say yeah well your girlfriend is only 18 years old or something he actually he saw my video in which I criticized his pseudo medical claim to having cured and curable disease in which he's telling other people that they also can cure their diseases etc and he said he doubled down and he defended his position I respect that okay you guys if you want to be my credits critics if you want to tackle me you think I'm so disrespectful to freely enduring writer because words like fraud appear in their fraud used in a completely reasonable sense if you lie about your university credentials or your certificates of education the educational qualifications you have it is not unreasonable to describe that as a fraud not at all okay a talking about someone is mentally ill in this context again okay so if you want to take me down if you want to criticize me please do but if you think I'm so disrespectful to derail my turn freely I can ask you on the contrary why don't you rise to my level why don't you show me as much respect for what I actually said in criticizing me as I show freely interim writer because I don't invent stuff out of thin air I'm criticizing their actual political positions their actual promises the actual pseudo-sciences in their diet I'm criticizing the real problems within their part of the vegan movement and the problems the direction they were dragging the vegan movement towards and that's real and for a lot of you that's how you discover my youtube channel and that's why you're still here listening to me because there's nothing entertaining there's nothing sexy there's nothing appealing about these video I'm not telling you what you want to hear i'm not selling you a dream I'm not lying to you about the bright future of veganism I'm not lying to you that you can eat 5,000 calories a day and get no exercise and still lose weight I'm not even selling you a dream vacation in Thailand okay but you're still here listening because on some level you know that it's real