Anti-Anti-Capitalism: Unnatural Vegan vs. the World.

ladies and gentlemen
i am not here to keep scorn on the youtuber known as a natural vegan i am not here to keep scorn on socialism or communism as abstract concepts i'm not here to keep scoring on capitalism i'm not here to heapscorn on unnatural vegan's newly adopted identity as a neoliberal i think that the new videos that a natural vegan has been making provide us with a really interesting opportunity to re-examine what neoliberalism means in the 21st century what socialism means in the 21st century in the year 2021 we are very much living in the post-bernie sanders epoch when the meaning of socialism is going to be questioned and people are going to come up with new answers what it means to be on the left when it needs to be right and what it means to be on the center these are things that are malleable and they're being redefined right now let me ask you a question the audience have you ever once seen joe biden referred to as a neoliberal you certainly haven't seen donald trump referred to as either neoliberal or neoconservative so the significance and meaning of these things is susceptible to change so shout out to everyone in the audience i see just one comment so far the last time i did a live stream uh there was concern about tactical errors provided caused by youtube obviously it's a miracle of our uh modern times that i'm able to do these things in a spontaneous way we're planning to commence today so as you guys know if you support me on patreon i make almost no money out of this it's not my pecuniary interest that i enjoy doing this if you hit the thumbs up or if you share the link some of you might be a member of a facebook group or a reddit group or something or people who enjoy joining the conversation share the link through facebook or reddit or give it a thumbs up and the reward is we'll all get to react to hopefully some more interesting or intelligent comments to the audience all right i i just got to say here my bias in this case is positive if i feel that someone has a terrible youtube channel and they start making more meaningful content i'm happy for them and i'm happy for the audience i'm happy for all of us you know am i a fan of a natural vegans youtube channel past present or future no no i'm not but of course i can recognize that her taking the time and making the effort to talk about concepts like communism and socialism and neoliberalism this is much more substantive and worthwhile for all of us than 99.9 of her youtube videos in the past so you know one of the ways to think about these things i just say i i encourage you to do this in your own uh meditations on social media and in your interactions with others is you know what if this person was my own brother what if this person were my own sister you know i i i have brothers and sisters i'm terribly disappointed in but you know as much as i may dislike someone you think well if this were my brother if this was i'm i'm happy to see they're doing well i'm happy to see they're doing better i'm happy to see they're making youtube videos about something that's more serious or more meaningful or more rewarding for them and like in a natural vegans case i'm happy to see that she's challenging herself that she's getting out of her comfort zone it's certainly much better to lead your audience in a discussion of like what really is the meaning of socialism in the year 2021 than it is to engage in reflections on how morally superior she is to other vegan youtubers who upload images of themselves on vacation with their children includes me because she's so moist where she would never do that she would never put her own son or daughter on camera this is you know to me this is just not going anywhere like you know most of her content this way or you know the advantages of having a high protein vegan diet as opposed to what just you know a comparative analysis of different brands of vegan ice cream great comment from the audience quote you look spattered yeah it's hot as hell here if i if i turn on the fan you guys are going to get the background noise from the fan there you see that yeah so this is likely to be a high humidity video and more so yeah it's uh it's it to quote uh to quote a famous rapper it's it's getting hot in here so you know maybe later maybe maybe we're going to take off all our clothes okay so let's get the you know um i have very few friends you wouldn't have guessed this about me i have a few friends but i put a lot of i put a lot of effort into those friendships and you know one of the things i say to jj mccullough all the time it's it's pretty much a public fact that he and i are our friends some of that you know i say to him look you know i challenge him or i encourage him said look you have to engage in the politics of talking about what it is you want what it is you desire it's very easy to engage in politics completely negatively to just negate what you don't want what's bad what's until you treat which by the way is productive and necessary up to a point but i mean obviously you can imagine if you were um uh if you were the host on a broadcast news talk show uh you could every single episode just criticize what you think joe biden is doing wrong and never once state positively what you want what is your vision of the future what is your own political platform what is the kind of society you you want to live in what do you think is the better solution for example about health care or unemployment any any particular interest there's a different sort of challenge there and there's also a different sort of way of of revealing who you are um as the commentary the sense you're revealing your own weaknesses and stating what kind of society you you want to live in what it is you desire now so i just say that's that's the kind of contact with them i think over the years i've had that conversation with just a few other people where i say look i understand what you're doing here politically but you're not really taking the risk of talking about what you want possibly now another type of honesty that i encourage youtubers to engage in i encourage you in the audience to engage in is talking about where your own political resolutions come from um what the origins of them are which very likely will be in your own reading possibly in watching a movie or hearing a news program on the radio like a documentary on you know some some news station like npr or something or it may come out of you know your own direct experience and i find when people speak that way it gives you a sense of why they believe the things they believe why they aim at the goals they do and so on and it gives you a sense of the limitations and motivations and purpose of what they're saying now so again i'm not i'm real the purpose of this live stream is really not to criticize or hate on a natural vegan i applaud her taking this small step towards a more honest and profound engagement with politics and with the medium of youtube frankly it's it's an improvement i hope she takes more steps in that direction but okay unnatural vegan we know broadly the the arc of her life you guys might or might not have noticed but um uh you know uh she often has movie posters up in the background of pretty like you know the terminator not quite star wars or star trek but different science fiction movies so we know and she's talked to some extent about the movies she's a fan of but she really collects this kind of chintzy crap from science fiction movies she's someone who started off being this kind of hippie into what she would now call pseudoscience supernatural magical beliefs um she was a philosophy major and she has a ba in philosophy right and she was into science fiction and this kind of thing and at some point she has obviously gotten interested in what would either be called neoliberalism or neoconservatism or even right-wing libertarianism now i'm not hating on her again i'm not christian there's probably an interesting story for her to tell there any of us who go through changes in our political leagues and by the way i'm willing and eager to talk about the change in my own political perspective my political perspective has changed just in the last five years and i'm a vicious old man your political perspective changes between the age of 18 and 25 but it can change between 35 and 45 believe me you know but i can tell you what the things were i read or what the experiences where i had in life why my perspective changed why why my sense of message you know the question i would ask and everyone should ask to themselves and if you have your own youtube channel or if you're on social media what is it that changed in her that made her shift to this frankly right-wing view of the world that's very unpopular even amongst conservatives right now it's this is popular around 1992. um what made your shift to this pro-free market so-called neoliberal view of the world now it may be that you read a particular book it may be that she watched a particular movie it may be this is completely speculative that she used to be a bit more of a left-wing science fiction watching hippie and then she met and fell in love with a particular man and started to and that man was more conservative or more right-wing or more libertarian and she started to see things his way or started to watch the movies he watches or read the books he read and that changed your view for many people that's the case male or female associated it's also possible this is totally speculation but many of you in the audience will feel this way i know this is so common maybe she started off being a bit of a left-wing person and then on the internet in her position as a as an internet commentator she had to cope with a lot of [ __ ] from left you know she started having problems and started questioning you know oh so this is where this comes from this is where this goes in her case just given her particular type of fame her particular position in the in the vegan demi-mod the type of people who would be getting at her you know uh talking to her about their political police talking to her about bernie sanders and alexandria ocasio-cortez but kind of left-wing uh ecology ecologically sensitive vegan people maybe in the last five years maybe the last 10 years she's been sitting back looking at those people from her particular perspective and thinking i don't want to be in the same camp as these people maybe she's starting to see cracks in that or she started to see the extent to which concepts like socialism are really just used as bait on the hook to convert people to hardline communism to to draw people into marxism certainly a large part of the energy of what goes on in the bernie sanders camp and in the alexandria cause of course this game uh sorry i am going to reply to stuff that people are saying in the comments you're welcome to comment you're hoping to join the audience you're welcome to hit thumbs up so other people will comment join the audience um okay you know keeping all the way real the worst thing bernie sanders ever did for the future of life on planet earth was bringing in this woman who promoted uh modern monetary theory mmt you know special advisor and all the news broadcast stations covered it and she has her book so you know quote-unquote mmt i mean let's type it out if you guys didn't know quote on quote uh quote mmt unquote [Laughter] you know the the significance of mmt is in economic theory is absolutely nothing other than recruiting people into communism there is no other positive significance complete or [ __ ] no economist can take it seriously otherwise except as as this kind of uh far left recruiting okay guys i'm going to turn to the the comments now i just want to check because we had to restart the live stream so many times i am going to click the mic and i hope you guys can hear three clicks i'm four klex okay so if you guys heard the clicking could someone just say that you heard the mic click because if not the computer is using the wrong microphone which will be uh disappointing to me this is this is the high quality microphone someone encourages me to do a topless stream and says only fans thank you i appreciate it i will just say i got uh the vaccine twice so i am doubly vaccinated as immune as i could possibly be uh it really did cut into my workout schedule i have lost uh strength and i have gained body fat during my the interruptions to my life caused by that so we have had significant side effects and uh from from our repeated uh inoculations however we want to put it so yeah i am a little bit disappointed by how i look with my shirt off at the moment but but don't don't worry i'm absolutely certain that at age 42 i'm going to make a comeback in no time no problem no problem complete reckless self-confidence that i'm not entirely confident it could be all downhill from here folks the days of my shirtless selfies they could be behind me forever but we'll see we'll see to what extent i managed to uh get in better shape uh lazy baby chicken says they just got here did you miss anything yes yes i'm sorry you missed a great what am i supposed to say what do you think the first 10 minutes of the broadcast didn't contain anything of substance of course it did um all right so good question from nacho by the way i regard these questions as totally uh well-intentioned so he says wait is it neo-liberal or is it right-wing okay so this is one of the things i want to say about unnatural vegan and about anyone who wants to engage in this kind of discourse this kind of you know debates okay um isn't it easier to understand what we mean by neoliberal or any abstract category of political ideologies if you put a human face on it what is neoliberalism who is neoliberalism tony blair tony blair is neoliberalism wouldn't it be different if a natural vegan had come on camera this isn't what she said if she had come on camera and said that when she looks back at the history of the 20th and 21st century she thinks the single greatest political leader we've ever had was tony blair and that she thinks you know the the bright the brightest period of the history of the british isles was the governor tony blair and she feels that the people who have been in charge of england since tony blair retired have really been worse whether they were liberal or conservative or they do have a third party in england but it's never in power um pardon me whether they are labor or conservative i should say you know um but anyway they do also have a a liberal democrat party uh and that she really feels that is the way forward that the future of the united states of america should be more like the government of tony player now she doesn't say that right away if some more to say that you know exactly what she means by neoliberal now am i being facetious no um tony blair wrote a book called the stakeholder society i could type it out but i don't think anyone wants to read it i will make the reckless proposition today i think i'm the only person here who has read tony blair's book the singular society anyone else in the audience who read it you know shout out to let me know in the comment section did you read tony player's book the stakeholder society i do not think there is a single human being left right or center anywhere in the world who is holding up tony blair's book and saying this is the future of politics this is the way to go tony blair had it right there is no one who remembers his long period in power positively under any heading it's not remembered well in terms of foreign policy in terms of domestic policy in terms of the economy anything um now okay tony period in government is also not remembered as a disaster like communism or fascism no but i would say at best people remember it as a disappointing period of mediocrity in the british isles right okay so now that's interesting now you know look i asked a question openly is there anyone anywhere in the world who really positively feels possibly identifies with neoliberalism in that sense someone who really says that they feel tony blair's book and his ideas and his ideals and the way he ranked like that tony blairism was a wonderful thing in the history of the world and that's what we should go back to or we should go further in that direction all right no i cannot say nobody feels that way out of the billions of people on planet earth but let's let's be honest shockingly few people feel that way how many people today support tony blarism by which i just mean oh okay i mean neoliberalism more narrowly defined as the ideology of tony blair so let me just justify the connection between the two prior to tony blair coming into power in england there was neoconservatism well okay i guess they're through words there was conservatism there was neoconservatism and then there was the far left um a form of socialism in england that was deeply beholden to labor unions and a small number of other kind of patrons of the labor party as it then was so you call that kind of paleo labor leftism and what tony blair did was offer a new direction in politics basically taking neoconservatism and painting it with liberal social and cultural values so for example being pro-homosexual pro-transsexual this kind of thing uh and also just in favor of having a more generous approach to uh healthcare policy more in terms of government spending so they took neoconservatism and gave it a kind of liberal coat of pain and it became neoliberalism now the contrast between neoconservatism and neoliberalism is very slight however the contrast between tony blair's labor party and the type of labor party that existed before and after the dominance of tony blair is extreme right so i like tony blair it was totally epoch-making it was this total turning upside down of british politics uh turning inside out of british politics it was an inversion of the natural order as they'd seen it you had for the first time a nominally left-wing party nominally left of center party that was preaching decentralization deregulation small government fiscally responsible government the old-fashioned 19th century sense of liberal free markets and what i would consider a recklessly corrupt view of government and private industry working together rather than answer that that is my opinion i think that's a huge factor in neoliberalism and what was both what was successful and what was unsuccessful but it was the idea of what the relationship between government and the private sector was so that goes beyond the the specific claim about deregulation but this is really a broader idea that big business and the government can be friends so you know one symptom of that was that governments including the united states they stopped enforcing anti-trust laws they stopped seeing monopoly and corporate power as their enemy which it had been at least since the 1930s uh yeah um so there were there were a lot of kind of cultural changes and government okay so this has been a digression but i do think it was worth doing because in the year 2021 it's not like i can just refer to tony blairism and expect you guys to know what the [ __ ] i'm talking about or what tony blair had to do with neoliberalism all right i would say that tony blair is probably the purest example of what uh neoliberalism really means that he is kind of the perfect example of neoliberalism now you know by contrast if you really get into the details of who bill clinton was what he represented and what he did politically it's kind of like well in some ways he was neoliberal but not others so again i'm not even saying this as a good or a bad thing but i would not describe bill clinton in the same way and again i think bill clinton actually has written some books but none of them are a manifesto for neoliberalism the way uh tony blair's book was so great someone in the audience says oh yeah tony blair i have his poster on my wall lol okay so look again i digress from this point before i cannot say there are zero human beings on planet earth with our billions of people who really admire tony blair and own his book and hold it up and talk oh the stakeholder society by twenty but this is their manifesto for a better future right i cannot say there's nobody who has uh you know a poster of tony blair how many people support tony blair's you know again kind of narrowly defined idea of neoliberalism and how many people support karl marx how many people support bernie sanders or aoc or let's let's be honest mao zedong joseph stalin like the extreme left today in 2021 is way more popular than tony blair and guys we can put this into you know a kind of comparative perspective what were the big political issues in the year 2020. i know that was a long time ago one year ago you know if you think about the race riots that broke out the riots in response to police violence there were very loud very prominent communist voices there were very loud very prominent anarchist voices the blm organization since restricted strictly strictly defined they openly said that they were marxists and that that kind of came out 2019 2020 the extent to which that really was a marxist organization the founders were marxist you know that connection there so i mean you know the year 2020 if you look at all the ideologies that were blossoming and that were contending to capture the public's attention in response to uh protests concerning initially uh police brutality and as you may know it then spilled on to question racism more generally racism against indigenous people the history of genocide the history of slavery you know the names of uh sports teams that's a whole year ago it's easy to forget you know should the cleveland indians baseball team continue to call the cleveland islands so anyone who lives through that could say oh yeah you know there are significant numbers of communists and anarchists out there okay sorry um where were the utilitarians did anyone did anyone see any protests people carry the utilitarian flag were there utilitarians out there that was a natural vegan's former political identity before she started calling herself a neoliberal she identified as a utilitarian and a consequence what is the utilitarian solution to the pressing political problems of her day tell me some people feel that the united states should build a wall should build a wall between themselves mexico what would the utilitarian position be on that what was the consequence it's complete horseshit okay so what is what is the neoliberal position now that she's switched you know what why was there no neoliberal voice in those protests and i don't just mean like on the street but even like in the newsroom like at the cnn broadcast center where they interview some person and you know they predominantly they interview people with phds and other kind of elevated so they're either have a phd or they're a former employee of the state department or some [ __ ] or they're a congressman okay so where where were the neoliberals in the whole year 2020 there were all these political issues what was the neoliberal position on the history of slavery and genocide and statues of the name of the cleveland indians and race riots and police brutality why did neo-liberalism not have a voice the banality the irrelevance of neoliberalism the politics in our day is shocking because in case you didn't know during my lifetime neoliberalism has been one of the most successful political ideologies it's one of the most successful political ideologies of the last hundred years it was successful right up to the moment when it failed and now it's [ __ ] discredited forgotten to an amazing extent i'm sorry tony blair himself even if tony blair were the only neoliberal in the history of planet earth which he's not neoliberals with a much broader phenomenon but tony blair personally was an incredibly successful politician and he was imitated by other politicians all around the world for a whole generation right so it was incredibly successful and now it is gone now it's more marginal than the communists and the socialists or the anarchists or a lot of other voices that that also is you know so i just mentioned so by the way before i said you know it's important to be honest about your own kind of origin story for how you got interested in these things what it is you read or what movie you've seen or some of that uh you know in my own relationship with melissa more than a year ago melissa said to me she was going to read karl marx's communist manifesto so is that closer to two years now okay so way back in 2019 melissa said she was going to read the economy's manifesto of by the way we're not communists guess we're anti-communists but you know so much of our own reading overlapped this and i was like okay all right we're gonna do we're gonna do fundamental fundamental philosophy and history of marxism and communism okay and i kind of blew the dust off of those books and at that time i did make several youtube videos talking about marcus and consciousness so here we are two years later and she finally finished doing the reading um no i mean really sorry there there have been different uh distractions and dramas in this relationship but laziness has been an issue okay she's she's safe i mean she would not deny and she would affirm that yes her own her own laziness and lack of work that has been an issue um but given that she finally did catch up on that and she caught up on it after finishing reading several books about the horrors of communism and trying i get a hold of the book but it doesn't matter don't worry about it anyway they've seen the books before they know we have a lot of books on our shelf on this stuff um you know so now within this relationship it's something talked about again um we talked about it about two years ago when she started doing that and and uh you know and now now we're kind of kind of looking again oh that's interesting naco clarifies that nacho the the commenter known as nacho is in fact female not male so you could have gone with the name not yet okay okay hear me out on this instead of nacho not yet you see what i'm saying you see what i'm saying feminine ending to the word no [Laughter] or would it be nacho wet no no you want to keep the o ending all right sorry i'll just uh take it home this is good a moment today but i just say in terms i think it is important for everyone to be honest about why you're thinking about this at all why it's relevant in your own life and then of course also why it's relevant to politics on on on planet earth all right right so ryan michael's comments now ryan could be male or could be female yeah there's also an example it's a woman's name once small um yeah there was that one hollywood actress it was a woman named brian i remember the there was a woman on star trek i i'm not a star trek fan but i remember no and but i remember the time thinking really you know i'm sorry i haven't anyway um anyway so ryan michael perhaps male preps email comments that uh he or she remembers the backlash a natural vegan got from her videos against blm last year and then says maybe that's sweeter politically right i mean you know and i wouldn't i wouldn't ridicule her for that you know what i mean i think that's a sincere thing that people go through i mean i think a lot of people maybe at first they felt that blm was a completely positive thing i mean the actual catchphrase you know what i mean that draws you in and then you start to see who those people are and what their agenda really is and what's going on and you maybe start to criticize and reconsider you know what what is going on in the far left um [Music] you know i know someone who identifies as a conservative and who admitted to me that he supports uh joe biden more than donald trump you know like i mean obviously now it's comparing it's comparing apples to oranges it's comparing what joe biden's been doing in the last year to what donald trump it's like yeah well that's not really surprising because joe biden is a moderate conservative what are you gonna say like you know but but i mean those those types of things you know i you know um you guys probably know i have some appreciation for joe biden some um i am probably further to the left than joe biden on on some issues at least but there are there are some issues i'm very happy with joe biden on you know and you know when i talked about bernie sanders it's like well there were some issues i was further left than bernie sanders on but there were a lot of issues and further to the right on than bernie sanders and you know so i mean when you deal with things in that kind of nuanced way and don't deal with these kind of jejune self-instantiating and self-justifying political categories that's the way people think about socialism right oh well socialism which just instantiates itself and justifies okay and now i'm just going to evaluate whether things are good or bad by whether or not they fall into this category that we've called socialism so it's a fundamentally religious way of i think in politics anyway this is digressing from saying yeah it may be i mean maybe ryan is correct that was a turning point for swayze and her videos would be more honest and more interesting and more rewarding if she said that like you know look let's say she got this criticism of blm maybe she went and watched a particular documentary movie maybe she read a particular book you know what i mean there's a book i haven't bought because i don't have time for it i can get it off of amazon uh i'll give you guys the link for this just if you're interested but this is a book by a guy who's considered um right wing what is it called i think his name is here we go i got the link so the title is unmasked uh inside antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy so now this guy is all right how much of this how much of this link do i have to post i think this will work sorry you know when when you get a really long url anyway you know so this guy is considered some kind of horrible right-wing person but i gotta tell you i've listened to interviews he's done and so on i've heard his point of view and i thought he was raising a lot of worthwhile warnings where he just he just basically traced back the pamphlets going around with these organizations well who's publishing the pamphlets who is behind these organizations that sometimes describe themselves as anarchists sometimes as communists sometimes they hyphenate it and you know guess what you know these are pretty terrifying hardcore communist revolutionary people this is what their agendas you know i felt that was a really worthwhile sincere thing even if the guy is a bit of a right-wing wig nut or something like even if he personally has some some defects of character so you know i'm just saying it is possible that a natural vegan read that very book you know it's possible she read one of these books looking at what's really going on in the left wing and what is what is their demanding so i mean likewise you know i've given the example of so-called mmt you know there are all these things that could could lead to um a deeper reconsideration of one's affiliation with their flirtation with the left all right scrolling ahead here okay here's a question for melissa did melissa have friends that got into radical feminism lots of women fall into these theories of patriarchy and then turn and become traditionalists so i think the answer is no he wants you to stand up do you come to the position my roommates majored in women's studies i would say she was more of a feminist but i'm just going to be honest i i didn't really talk about i had very shallow relationships with people in college so you know why i didn't even get into that you know discussing political and philosophical feminist broadly speaking melissa's life was not a hotbed of profound political controversy before she got into bed literally with me i mean you know i think that you know part of what makes our relationship work or what made it eventuate in the first place you know was uh you know that melissa had this desire to have a more meaningful life and to really be engaged with the seriousness of these things but the people she was surrounded by high school university or in the workplace or otherwise there wasn't any uh you know there wasn't any engagement of these things and no offense but we could say that with your family too you didn't grow up in a politically active or divide you know your family they were not people who were seriously discussing you know the news and politics of the day you know you just probably speak not every family is like that so you guys know my own family background is is very different so i think melissa was you know yearning for life that was more serious engaged in this was but uh i have had i have had other girlfriends and no i mean one of my ex-girlfriends maybe two of them even that was a really important turning point in their life i remember one of my ex-girlfriends she related to me how she was drawn into these left-wing views on um the witch trials in medieval europe these really kind of dramatized feminists yeah yeah trying to make women during the period of witch trials in europe into this you know into this kind of saintly cause and uh and kind of militant feminine feminist paganism and you know and then uh and she got drawn into this stuff and then she just reached a breaking point where she realized how dishonest this whole literature was literature written mostly by people of phds you know this ostensibly respectable kind of feminist literature and her her connection to uh to the feminist left you know broke apart yeah um [Music] i got to tell you there was a lot wrong with that girlfriend as sympathetic as that story might be um yeah i blame her more than i blame the the people with phds in that equation yeah well we can see that was yeah with women's studies it was an english literature course that was similar to that we were talking about the women's house it was a women's literature course so but that was basically my exposure to that it failed to radicalize you this one yeah yeah sure all right so good good question off topic but in some ways right on topic so yes some orion comments again interjections into british con pardon me interjections into british politics by tony blair today are met with derision by the general public yes and it is remarkable the extent to which you know tony blair's star has faded and he has become you know uh yeah he has become a laughingstock or just as he is not taken seriously neither in the present tense nor in the past that's an important political leader [Music] okay so here is a um here is an interesting comment by rory tobori he says quote marxist means a lot of different things to a lot of different people to some it doesn't even mean anti-capitalist nearly critical of capitalism can't put so much stock into a theoretical court okay so rory you know i understand where you're coming from here but i really have to challenge you in your own life in politics and religion and everything else i think you have to let go of this habit of mind of this tendency of thought okay you don't get to say islam means a lot of different things to a lot of different people you don't get to say buddhism means a lot of different things to a lot of people okay you know islam is defined by the writings attributed to the prophet muhammad the quran and the hadith you know what i mean we can talk about what is and is not islamic very precisely and very definitively and that's it and nobody gets to change it you get to make up your own philosophy you know you can have a new religion or a new movement or something but no there is one definition of what the islamic religion is forever you know [ __ ] deal with it you know obviously like when you're talking to muslims they will get incredibly defensive about slavery about the status of women about how many wives the prophet muhammad had look it up it's more than you think he had a lot of lives okay some of them very short term some of them didn't work out a lot a lot of marriages in that guy's life um you know the sex life of the prophet muhammad in these things guess what you know everybody gets to have their own opinion nobody gets to have their own facts you know this is what islam is and this is what the life of the historical figure of muhammad was and that's it so no it's it's really a very false mode of thought to begin or end by saying marxist means a lot of things a lot of people now i'd point out even in this discussion for those of you who've been here for the whole 36 minutes and by the way i encourage you to hit the thumbs up button i encourage you to share the link if you know people on facebook you should join us on we should have more thumbs up at this point 36 minutes and you can change your mind later if you decide it's a bad live stream later you can undo the thumbs up you can hit thumbs down instead you can do it you change your mind but any thumbs up we'll have some more people join the discussion and as you can see i'm happy to i'm happy to reply to this okay but look i began this video now 36 minutes ago by really clarifying what neoliberalism means which is something unnatural being fails to do right you know there is one narrow definition there is one meaning of neoliberalism and it's not useful it's also kind of not fair to say oh well everybody gets to define neoliberals in their own way there is a hilarious moment in a natural vegan's most recent video where she talks about neoliberalism as a political identity as if it were equivalent to homosexuality or transgenderism where she says that other people should not use a definition of neoliberalism that they've taken off the internet out of a dictionary or out of an encyclopedia instead of listening to the lived experience of people who identify as neoliberal you can't make this stuff up i wouldn't why you know this is hilarious on many difficulties but in the same way like a gay rights activist could say look you don't get to define homosexuality based on what's in a book you have to listen to the lived experience of people who identify as homosexual now obviously we're talking about something that's that's the kind of complicated emotional psychological phenomenon you know there are people there are people who identify as gay but who have sex with members of the opposite gender from time to time or even regular like you know okay yeah all right so there isn't something that's simplistic you know we all kind of have some um if you're over the age of 30 you have some kind of sense of why there are sort of gray areas around what is homosexual identity and that you kind of have to be willing to listen to people who are uh you know somewhere along the dotted line of what what these terms mean but it's completely laughable it's completely ridiculous to say no there is no one definition of neoliberalism you have to listen to the lived experience not the lived experience of people who are neoliberal but people who identify as neoliberal that is hilarious to me and no you can never do that with marxism with islam with anything else like this no we have to deal with exclusive definitions and when people are excluded by those definitions they get to make up new words you know they hyphenate them or what have you i mean there's nothing wrong with that either but you know um okay so let's so i'm really just doing this as an example but let's give an example of something that is a completely bedrock central definitive aspect of marxism marxists believe and marx himself believed and marks himself said in des capital marxists believe that it is evil for the owner of a company to profit by appropriating the quote unquote surplus value of what's generated by the employee all right so that is that is the that is a fundamental central definitive aspect of marxism now somebody in this audience can say well marxism means a lot of different things a lot of different people okay now what this entails what they want to do about it we could get into this a great one i had a video recently showing you um young women in revealing attire at walt disney world walt disneyland the walt disney theme parks these are young women they're often wearing not a whole lot more than a swimsuit you know the the the one who's the this the female character from aladdin i forget you know the princess jasmine from aladdin they're wearing a very revealing uh the they have these young women dressed up as pocahontas so i was criticizing this for political reasons if you know what i mean and i think that you do but you know there's another whole line of critique there because when i was googling this and getting this information those women are paid shockingly little these women are being paid next to nothing and by definition all of them are good looking enough that they could be working as a cocktail waitress they could be working in the hooters chain of uh sexually provocative restaurants if you're not american you don't know what hooters is you don't ever want to know you don't you do not want to know what that restaurant chain is um they could be working in las vegas in an array of jobs that are approximately as sexually exploited as doing this role at disneyland and making a lot more money now you could add on they could be doing only fans they could be involved in pornography or you could go further but it was like just if you look at the same type of role of wearing this kind of revealing costume showing off your body and doing chit chat with customers they could be earning far more money anywhere other than disneyland they're paid shockingly little now how do you take karl marx's principle and apply it to the situation what what is the surplus value they're generating and what is the value of their labor when abstracted from when removed from the context provided by the multi-billion dollar investment of building a theme park around it right like you get into some really simple questions now you may say this is a ridiculous example no it's not every example is just ridiculous to try to figure out like this this philosophical concept like the idea is that you as a worker are generating 30 an hour worth of value and you're only being paid 15 an hour or maybe 12 an hour whatever being paid that we can calculate this and then we can figure out the extent of the theft or crime being committed by the owner well the owner in this case has to up own and operate the whole disneyland theme park just so that you standing there and smiling at people is perceived to have some kind of value you know like you doing this in the middle of a grassy field it's just not the same without that without that context people are not going to pay these amounts of money to just come chit chat with you while you're wearing a costume in a grassy field you know every job in this way if you are an employee relies on a context of investment and risk and the the money going into other things that that make your make your employment possible sometimes over prior decades and it's over prior centuries uh my point here just being no it's really important to work with definitive and ultimately oppressive definitions of terms and you know you shouldn't be so attached to them if like if you are a marxist and you say that you fundamentally don't believe in x y and zed that karl marx said okay then don't call yourself a marxist you'll call yourself some kind of post-marxist left-wing person make up a new term put some hyphens in it um you know come up with something that describes what your position is reasonably and you can explain to people what your relationship is intellectually politically to karl marx to what extent you were inspired by him or reacted against him that's that's uh that's completely reasonable okay so one little objection here from wicked energy who again could be male or female as a broadcaster you are actually in the position of attributing genders to people all the time wicked energy says simply uh here's a grammatical error careful now look at energy quote isn't there completely different interpretations of islam what are you interpreting so this is properly speaking a begging the question fallacy right oh yes there's more than one interpretation of the quran and the hadith set down by the prophet muhammad which defines the religion right yeah so you don't get to have your own version of islam now again i'm sorry to insult you but have you looked into what the differences are between the different legal schools of interpretation they're called the schools of jurisprudence and islam oh well under what circumstances exactly do you cut off one hand and one foot from someone for being a thief like this is what you're into okay yes there are ambiguities left in the uh the law set down by the prophet muhammad to be interpreted but i mean dude but no the point is there yes there is more than one interpretation but what it is an interpretation of that is definitive that is islam per se and that you know that can't be disputed or reinvented infinitely so you know likewise legitimately there's more than one interpretation of karl marx but what is there to be interpreted right all right just scrolling through the scrolling through the comments all right so wicked energy comments i i do also think this is actually interesting he says it makes sense that a natural vegan changed from objectivism to neoliberalism so that's actually interesting in a few different ways her public her public political identity was utilitarianism but i actually think it's quite an interesting suggestion that her real engagement was with objectivism that would explain a lot probably i mean just be honest i think that's actually a brilliant suggestion maybe her real position is that she is an objectivist and that she used to present her objectivism as this confusing set of claims about utilitarianism and consequentialism and now she's rationalizing and presenting it as neoliberalism so you can let me know wicked energy if you've ever heard her identify with objectivism or the philosophy of anne rand but that would be an interesting [Music] yeah that would be an interesting revelation um i chilling plot twist okay um look guys one of the things i try to train people in my audience to do is to not reason politics through beginning from the sky and then concluding with the ground not to begin from abstract diagrams on a chalkboard and to impose those abstract oceans on reality in the real world um the big question here for the past present and future is what is the meaning of socialism what is the meaning of capitalism and what is the future of a society that ineluctably will involve aspects of each if i take one young man who grew up in kansas and i send him to live in japan for years this is a young man who's lived his whole life in kansas all he's ever known is kansas in the united states of america and i take one young woman who has been born and raised in new orleans and another young man who has been born and raised in detroit and another one who's been born and raised in oregon and again each of these people they spent their whole life just in this one city united states and these four people i said two of them to live in japan for a year and two of them to live in denmark [Music] at the end of this experiment i bring them back and i interview them and let's just say hypothetically all four of them say wow that they're really impressed with this foreign society they've been living in they say you know what whether it's japan or denmark these people have a really great economy they have a really great system of government there are a lot of things they're doing right that we're doing wrong in the united states there are a lot of ways in which everything just works better here all four of them come back and say that they think the united states could be improved by imitating some of the things or maybe everything that's going on in japan and denmark respectively and then i asked those people the four people why do you think that is it's completely possible that one person who went to japan would say oh it's because of socialism and that the other person who went to japan would say oh it's because of capitalism it's completely coherent to analyze what japan is doing right and in what ways japanese pardon me in what ways japanese society is superior to american society you can analyze that as being because of socialism and you can analyze it in terms of being because of capitalism you can make both arguments and you can even explain exactly the same phenomena in japan by indicating it as well explaining or interpreting it as either socialism or capitalist and we can say the exact same thing about denmark someone can go to denmark live for a year in denmark come back to united states america and they can say denmark is better than the united states because of socialism the role of socialism in the society the extent to which it's social social services that are social aspects of the government aspects of the economy that are socialists and they could come back and make the argument on the basis of capitalism that you know the danish are getting capitalism right okay this is a way of thinking about politics that doesn't proceed from the sky to the ground it it proceeds from the ground to the sky right like we're working with real world tangible examples with human faces and human costs and human implications we're understanding those and then we're questioning to what extent does this fit into a category that ultimately just works as a kind of catchphrase or convenient designation like it's not the case that the things that are right with japan are right because the japanese people became slaves to the ideology of socialism and tried to live up to its dictates it's also the people of japan did not become slaves to the ideology of capitalism or free-market liberalism and try to live up to its dictates and this becomes clear when you compare multiple capitalist societies or multiple social societies um there's no doubt the elephant in the room here is china right the 1.3 billion population elephant in the room is china have you ever lived in china would you rather live in china than iran i'm pro-democracy i think democracy is better than dictatorship i think democracy is better than communism iran is more democratic than china iran has some democracy china has none guess what i'd rather live in china i'm completely pro-democracy i can think it's uh immoral to live in a city in china and where you ask oh who's the mayor nobody voted for him nobody elected him who's the governor nobody voted nobody liked him who's the prime minister of the president nobody in their government is elected it's ridiculous to me to me this is a moral problem right i think democracy is morally superior but i don't think iran is superior to china right well you get into other muslim majority countries how about saudi arabia or something there are muslim countries so awful politically that you could say they would be improved by adopting the system of government that china now has okay so for someone who's an anti-communist i'm a total anti-communist right this is admitting that these examples in the real world exist on a paradoxical spectrum there are some capitalist societies that are worse than some communist societies there are some undemocratic societies that are better than some democratic societies right these are the paradoxes we live with so you know there is a sense in which we can say what is the [ __ ] point of these abstract categories that we treat as being more real than reality where we start by putting them on the chalkboard and reasoning from those as first principles instead of reasoning from empirical experience in all its richness and all it's in all its contradictions right so this is this is the kind of thing i'm trying to train my audience to be sensitive to because that's not the way in every country i've lived in that's not the way we're trained to think in school that's not the way we're trained to think in church or in a buddhist monastery most people pick up the habit of life of thinking in terms of the abstraction first and then you take the confusing mess of facts in empirical reality and try to force it to fit into the abstractions now look again just to uh make my own bias clear would i rather live in switzerland than in communist china do you think switzerland is a better place to have a child in research of course of course i think switzerland's a better country and democracy is a huge part of that and switzerland has its own mix of democracy capitalism and socialism it can be taken as a model it's not utopia it's not paradise it's not perfect right but i'm just saying my point here is not that i think life in china is absolutely wonderful it to iran though compare china to iran compare china to um afghanistan and in case you don't know afghanistan used to be a communist country there's a parallel universe you know you can make up a hypothetical scenario and ask would afghanistan be better today if they had remained a communist country for all these decades instead of going through what they've been through in these decades all right that's that's real politics baby and that's what you'll never hear on cnn that's what you'll never hear on you know even vice you know vice television they think they roll up their sleeves and deal with repo they don't you know those those are the really hard questions we have to get into and that's the kind of frame of reference you need to have when then turning your attention to uh you know this kind of very practical question but the past present and future of neoliberalism for the united states of america which again shout out to a natural vegan i thank her for you know uh for raising these questions ryan's it's a lot more meaningful than um it's it's a lot more meaningful for for her audience than than what she has been peddling for the last many years matt angio no matt engino says both the right and the left seem to be hell bent on destroying the environment dot dot dot aside from veganism what do you see is the best ways to be an environmentalist under the current consumption based system okay i'm going to turn on the fan for one second here guys yes you can see the beads of sweat i'm not nervous it's just hot it's healthy oh momentary what where do you guys think i'm gonna go with this some of you have been watching my youtube channel for more than five years what do you think i think melissa i'll tell you i i think nobody can write sit up here just give me no no you're wrong see any any let's let's check the peanut gallery you guys yeah yeah melissa was joking that was that was good any any uh any other predictions about what my uh about my uh so just there was a there was a comment somebody said quote i heard china is a dump and that was that was censored i just had to click like it censors things i had to click no don't censor it you know what i mean i get an option so there you go and a lot of ways uh a lot of ways these are okay any uh anyone got any prediction what is going to be my own now i've got to find the comment again the question from matt and giorno uh that both the left and the right seem to be hell bent on destroying the environment aside from veganism what do you see oh somehow oh so some people have been watching my channel one guy says satellites to block the sun satellites oh you guys some of you guys have been watching this channel for many years all right but i'm going to deal with the more more fun i'm not going to particular examples i'm going to deal with a particular uh i'm going to deal with a broad profound uh question being raised here okay um look matt this actually my answer has everything to do with neoliberals okay everything so i was once at a buddhist monastery where a political discussion of this kind was happening and my antagonist the guy was disputing oh see now what you're rolling you don't you don't think this is going to be a good anecdote because we're going to put as much we talked politics what's a joke melissa looked disappointed when i started mentioning buddhism [Laughter] okay so there was a guy at this buddhist monastery and he was actually quite at a senior level in the american government uh he was one of the administrators of the american of virgin islands so you guys may not know this america it's mostly known for being 50 states but there are some parts of america that are not states there are other kinds of dominions and territories and they have very different systems of government and nobody complains because normally they have a very small population and you know it is what it is but he was one of the people who was governing or running the american virgin islands so this is a guy who was a career politician who had actually risen to quite a high level so just that's that is quite a senior position he probably had a whole series of positions of government before being given this this position in the virgin islands um and he said to me something that was really a totally sincere neoliberal view of the world that guy was quite elderly i'm certain he's dead of old age by now just many years ago passed um he was not vegan but anyway he said that on this environmental thing he feels that there is no problem because the way government works this is a neoliberal view he he says the way government works is that you invite the stakeholders together remember tony blair's book the stakeholders say you invite the stakeholders together everyone wants a different piece of the pie and then government provides the kind of round table where you work out a compromise so that everyone's happy everyone feels they're getting you know they're compete there are competing human interests for the use of the environment for example of forest for example okay oh i was in the room i was in the room mostly as a scholar of buddhism that's why i was there but nobody suspects nobody suspects that i actually have this really deep you know history with political science that oh now you're in my you know now you're in my wheelhouse i gave this very passionate denunciation of the neoliberal position i totally weighed in on this guy and i think it stunned everyone in the room it certainly stunned him and i said oh so your position is that everyone sits down at a round table they decide what are we going to do with this forest and some people are from the pulp and paper industry and some people are from you know the water industry some people live in the town down the road and they don't want the water to be polluted and you know they gave a bunch of examples some people from the lumber industry and they want this some people want some old growth forest for tourism there are these humans and then you just you just take the average of human convenience and then guess what the whole forest is cut down who is there sitting at that table to represent the monkeys who is there sitting at that table to represent the pigs or the wild boars or the bears or the birds who is there at that table that represents the interest of the tree itself to continue standing who represents the atmosphere or the water cycle it's like nobody because all the human interests you're talking about government satisfying are just in exploiting the environment you know all of the human interests you say that democracy in this neoliberal format adequately represents all of those concern human beings getting rich through the devastation of natural resources you know um and and i i concluded my you know i had to speak briefly uh there was not a live stream this was a debate in a buddhist monastery but you know um i was saying the illusion of neoliberalism is that there is a balance but what you're talking about is the balance between competing interests who are bidding to cut down the forest it is not the balance between cutting down the forest and having the forest regenerate or you know the balance between different types of wild animals you know wanting to survive and so on so remember i gave a very passionate uh argument okay in the british empire tradition this is a very deep very fundamental problem in government um you know canada australia new zealand especially you could debate whether or not it's a little bit different in a state like oregon where the government itself directly owns the forest which i also find very morally troubling the percentage of the state of oregon that is owned by the government is shocking really i'm sorry from memory i don't know but it's something like more than 70 percent of the lands owned by and it's still not ecological paradise you know there are these really weird uh by the way hong kong hong kong is a capitalist uh democracy before it was taken over by china the government owned 100 of land uh there were a couple sorry i shouldn't say it was about 90 99 there were a couple little patches that weren't known for the government but basically the government owned everything and they just leased and rented it out to everyone hong kong was a society that was capitalist from the grass up but the grass roots down was socialist you know so yeah yeah so you know i paid rent to my landlord and he paid rent to the government and there's a big gap do you know how much rent one paid but everyone was a renter in hong kong so it was a total leasing and renting system where nobody owned the land just given this as an example for how really actually how much variation there is oh ah just imagine okay a delivery i almost never hear that there you go more more proof that capitalism works is it a book perhaps it is yours oh oh oh that's definitely what it is okay great so then put it over there if it was a book if it had been a book that were delivered i'd open it on the screen okay i'll put it put it in my community but now i can't it'll be that'll be fussy all right cool um so that's actually the illustration for the front cover of my book if you guys didn't know i'm writing a book we believe that's what just arrived in the mail it's the original so i'm going to try to photograph it again at higher quality to be the cover of my book i am trying to finish a book on politics called uh the title is no more manifestos all right okay so look i think i have answered that question i could go on and on but on a very fundamental level what is the relationship between government and the land what is the relationship between government and the biome i don't want to use language that's stupid what is the relation between government and wild animals you know these are really profound flaws in democracy quote-unquote democracy in the british parliamentary tradition um now you know just say very briefly there's a different idea of democracy that comes from ancient athens there's a different idea of democracy comes from ancient rome and ancient sparta there is more than one idea of democracy but that british parliamentary system of democracy there is no representation of and no interest in um you know what neoliberals would call ecological services and uh i'm sorry but it's a huge fundamental flaw now just very briefly how have we dealt with how we cope with this this flaw basically by private foundations buying land and turning them into parks turning them into nature preserves you know governments do that also uh the government just decides to declare something of tourist attraction basically this is the only reason why the environment hasn't been totally destroyed in parliamentary democracies and that's basically taking land outside of um the scope of parliament and of democracy making it into something like disneyland that exists as a kind of fiefdom unto itself so which also from my perspective is not really a solution you know this is a kind of non-solution but that is how we've coped um you know france likes to boast that they have a huge amount of land under this kind of conservatorship i don't know what you'd go you know uh and it's it's a joke bro i mean go and go and visit the um the wild boar hunting grounds in the south of france that they describe as a national park you know there is no there there is no ecosystem you know i'm sorry but you know what what actually happens in these things it's a huge fundamental problem um so by the way anyway okay i i could go on and on but i do care about ecology but no i mean i would really say one of the most profound fundamental problems uh with what we commonly call democracy in the west is is this and i've got to tell you also i think it's an incredibly simple problem to solve i don't think there's anything sophisticated or difficult about you know i mean like how do you integrate transgender people into the military it's difficult really it's not something you can you know some people say oh it's easy you know look at you know it's easy i mean no matter how good your intentions are what is going to be the standard of what is going to be the lived experience of transgender people in the military this is not going to be easy to iron out guys including you guys may not know this google it wherever you live around the world what is the status of women with breast implants in the military if you're if you're a biological woman you're a born female guess what there are restrictions and limits on the size of breast implant you can have artificial breast implant or whether or not you can have them at all and it's different between every country now there are reasons for this you know like for the military they have pragmatic concerns about having women with enormous fake breasts on duty it's so this is this this is a complex hard to solve problem you know really um it's it's hilarious oh you know in most of my recent videos i've been talking a lot about circumcision as an example how are you actually going to eliminate circumcision in the 21st century difficult problem but you know this the the politics of land also by the way the politics of indigenous people i find incredibly easy uh problems to solve the reason why we haven't solved them is that the type of person who's in power in a neoliberal western democracy doesn't want to solve them all right so a lot of great uh comments so i'm going to try to run through these sasha dixon comments now sasha could be a man's name could be one's name have you known yeah because yes sasha right in eastern europe especially in russia etc um there you get a lot of men named sasha it's a i believe it says a a an abbreviation for alexander some of that yeah anyway uh so sasha says sorry this isn't about the current topic do you think you could make a video about feminism and your thoughts on different types of feminism i've done maybe two videos on that i would like to say apropos of nothing i remember one of my videos about feminism was made before i got together with melissa in response to a woman who was trying to sleep with me i just like says i had very unfeminist reasons i was completely honest in it but i remember there was this woman who was writing to me and she was kind of interested in you know getting she's like well you know i'd really like to make i'd really like you to make a video talking about your views on feminism and i did not say anything in that video to pander to her or flirt with her i was like oh yeah you know i just kind of recognized i'd never made a video stating my position of feminism and i did my usual did my usual act i i have no regrets that the relationship that the romance with that young woman didn't didn't work um you know how we roll here at a bella sale um another question eizel these questions are off topic but what are your views on cultural relativism somewhat related to what you're discussing now and where in canada do you live so you should be able to tell from the angle of the sun that i live on the west coast again i joke but yeah so we're on the west coast in a small city called victoria but victoria actually is the political capital of this province and the province is larger than most countries in europe it's an enormous province but a province with actually a very weak economy most people do not realize that this is an economically tiny place although geographically massive and we live at sea level on the west coast so that's part of why it's so warm here uh anyway sorry a great question uh cultural relativism so look i mean i think i've coined the phrase uh in response to my most recent video of cultural nihilism uh now look ask another question if you think i'm wrong but i think that my position on cultural relativism is completely explicitly articulated in the last two videos i did about multiculturalism i mean i think if you put those two videos together i think there were kind of no questions left unanswered about that um so i i'm not uh evading the question but i do think i made more than two hours of video really talking about that and it's a neat term you could say that my position both in contrast to multiculturalism and to cultural relativism is one of cultural nihilism fundamentally a critique of the culture of the past with an eye to what will be the culture of the future oh so he followed up by saying he's curious about where i live and how it influences and shapes reviews okay so you guys probably will not guess this by the way thanks for the thumbs up uh we've got 47 people here it'd be great if we could have 47 thumbs up again it'll just help people find the video if you guys know anyone on twitter who want to join this conversation share the link on twitter because if you do it while the live stream is ongoing people can join the conversation it's interesting and maybe they'll hate my channel that's fine i can make more enemies i can make more friends i'm uh i'm cool with either one so something i wanted to say earlier but i digress from my digression this this this reminds me of you know um for for many years people have talked about my tenuous and conflicted relationship to the american left you know they they ask in various ways in what sense am i left of center or what is my relationship to left wing and and by the way often people kind of embrace me as someone who was anti-left although few people perceive me as conservative or right-wing what somehow people do uh you know but i'm obviously a critic of a great deal of what's what's going on in the left and you know what i would emphasize most of all and i've done this recently in some of my personal friendships personal relationships is look you may not realize you as a viewer of this or you being a friend of mine who's known me for years you may not realize the extent to which people on the left refuse to talk to me the extent to which the left regards me and treats me as a pariah it's amazing that the term pariah is not yet considered politically incorrect by the way it's amazing that that's not acceptable given the uh you know a pariah is actually the real meaning is suggesting someone within the hindu caste system of india someone who is regarded as untouchable uh someone you wouldn't touch or talk to or be associated with because they are so low they are an outcast in the in the cast system so yes i could i could sit here and try to brainstorm uh less offensive uh terms for than than pariah probably all of them have have specific cultural connotations but you know i've said recently to a friend of mine you know you may not realize the extent to which left wing people and left of center left to center people hate me like really viscerally hate me and cannot stand to listen to me talk and cannot be my friend the extent to which left-wing professors at my university intensely hate me you know for example that i have to deal with that in a situation of unequal authority you know um and yeah i'm not criticizing people for saying you can't imagine this i'm probably as soon as i've said that a lot of you are like oh i can imagine that you know my point is not that it's that it's hard to imagine but many of the people in my life they have not considered the extent to which i am actively excluded and snubbed and really hated by the left now i've many examples and many experiences but if you're having trouble visualizing it um the left wing where i live is unbelievably pro-palestinian and anti-israeli to an anti-semitic extent frankly there's plenty of anti-semitism on the left the left wing is anti-police and anti-prisons to a couple of folks that have had experiences who would never talk to me again i do not believe in abolishing prisons i think some people need to be in prison sometimes for a short time i won't digress too much i think people can go to prison for three weeks and really turn their lives around as a result i think short prison sentences are underrated people can go to prison get the message and then be like okay i gotta i gotta change my way of living i think short terms can really change people's lives but sure some people need to be in prison for 10 years some people need to be in prison forever i i'm not an idealist that way the left here probably where you live to wherever you're watching this they define themselves as being against the existence of prisons the left define themselves as being against the existence of borders you know and then being pro-illegal immigrant and most of all yes yes y'all the left where i live the left in the pacific northwest the united states and canada the left here is pro-drug addiction they're in favor of marijuana of course they're in favor of alcohol it's not even question they're in favor of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine and ecstasy or mdma they're and they're in favor of antidepressants they're in favor of living a totally self-indulgent life this way they're in favor of video games they're in favor of stamp collecting they're in favor of skiing they are in favor of enjoying life in a way that i'm totally morally opposed to i'm even against stamp collecting people i'm half joking but you know i think that is aesthetically what a lot of conservatives respond to positive with me i think there are a lot of conservatives who look at me as this kind of um defiantly self-disciplined sober figure who's looking at the left saying you people are a bunch of degenerates and i think there are a lot of people on the left who feel like they're a degenerate when they're in my presence and they don't like that i'm vegan and they don't like that i'm sober and they don't like that i'm willing to talk in a real brass tax way about the reality of war foreign policy like what joe biden is doing in afghanistan and india and china and everything else like you know that down-to-earth talking about war in a realistic way thing there are all these kind of aspects of my character where the left feels the kind of danger of just even allowing themselves to have a conversation so many times i mean i if i try to talk to left-wing people about drug policy they will get incredibly angry and storm out of the room before they they cannot let themselves sit so look the question was to what extent are your views shaped by you know where you live that's the main way it shapes it and you know i am not going to sit here and praise conservative rednecks i had a conversation with a conservative redneck um more than a month ago not not too much long ago a guy here who's who's vegan but he is frankly a conservative and he he jokes about himself that way too he's he said of his own values that he's struggling against being a redneck hippie i thought that was that was a charming kind of phrase but yeah i was talking this concern and now you know i'm not going to praise this guy to the sky there are a lot of things he's wrong about but a conservative redneck right-wing and moderately right-wing they will sit and talk to me and listen to me and they will hear me out and they will just give me now not to put you finally i have sat at a table with many of melissa's relatives like getting into cousins and aunts and uncles like you know the larger extent i have sat and i have talked to those people now what would you say that they were conservative attacks or what do you say they were hippie right they were at different points on that spectrum uh uh yeah but you know going yeah yes yes no you're right that's so true that's so sorry so it was a big round table situation this i forgot there were some left-wing people in the room that's true and the left-wing people they stood there like it's kind of lim lemon-faced disapproval there were there were maybe three left-wing people in the room and then there were all these conservatives who were i mean at that time like most of them they were they were kind of they weren't right-wing enough to really support trump they were probably people who would more support uh i don't know like george george george bush or something you know like they were kind of conservative republicans but not that far not really dumb enough to be a trump person you know not extremely trump and but those people were totally delighted to talk politics with me they would like they weren't just they weren't just tolerated they were really animated oh wow there's this guy with this so yeah you're right i forgot no it's true though but the fact that the left they really stood there and said nothing yeah yeah yeah i forgot i forgot about them they were in the room that's right yeah so yeah wow that's a telling so anyway there you go there's a really full answer answer to that uh that question all right a slightly tangent uh attentional question i am working my way through the through the comments i see tcat is in the house shout out to tcat um what are your thoughts on the recent vegan society controversy with pro-intersectional anti-capitalist trustees quitting due disposed racism etc okay ryan here's my answer talent is scarce there are very few talented people you can work with like look if you go to hollywood and start making movies which is something i'm apparently going to do if you start making movies you think it's really easy to find talented people talented hard-working self-disciplined sober people who are about the film you're going to end up working with people and you're like why are you working with this cocaine addict and you'll say talent is scarce this is the best guy i could get to do but both in front of the camera and behind you're going to work with terrible people in how people will ask me probably oh if you're making this film why didn't you work with all vegans why didn't you have an all-vegan cast and crew [ __ ] kidding me talent is scarce okay now and why why is talent so scary do you know anyone who knows a lot about politics who has a degree in political science who could play an administrative role and a leadership role and a public relations role for a vegan organization can you think of anyone like that and it was years long of a proven track record i think of one person and it's me well tell me why didn't the vegan society recruit me into one of those positions during the last couple years how much do you think they would have had to pay me do you think i would have been saying they're like oh no dude 200 thousand dollars minimum if you want but there was uh i'm actually yeah there was one uh vegan organization it was private sector that tried to recruit me to do a pr role um yeah yeah i could talk with ever yeah yeah yeah very i'm i don't know how much i just would i want to anonymize that example that is true actually to be fair once someone tried to recruit me uh we had i had a long skype conversation with a guy but i decided against completely but anyway you know so look talent is scarce and then beyond that why is talent so scarce is because people are being excluded without even being considered in this way right now look coming back to the title of this video and all these issues so same question how good or how bad a job do you think a natural vegan would do if she was put in the same kind of position of power but also kind of administration management and public relations all those things are involved with running a vegan foundation i think she'd do a terrible job she has some redeeming qualities but you know in the whole vegan demi monde i have very little competition there are very few people and like the other people you could even put on the kind of top ten this way and dealing with i would never want to work with i would never want to be in a foundation who's that guy who does the vegan three minute thursdays okay right so like cranky vegan i think he'd be terrible in that guy i wouldn't want to be in an organization i don't want to be associated with him i don't want to be on the team with him and he's one of the best i mean he's not one of the worst he's okay vegan foot soldier like who else is these people are all terrible people talent is scarce so that that's the reality you know and now like if i did if i tried to put together 10 people to cooperate with me in a vegan foundation probably some of them would be like conservative christians or something because like who can you work with you know who is not a nut job who is not incompetent and crazy they're probably people who really disagree with me on some religious and political issues but it's like well you're sober and hard-working and not great you're not a communist and you're not a communist you're not a nazi and you know okay well all right let's let's try to figure out what's coming around you know i just mentioned there are there are vegans who come out of a hunting background who are more conservative and christian and stuff they come out of the critique of duck hunting and that kind of thing they're interested in conservation in the forest i can imagine working with those people and yeah there are a lot of scary people you don't want to work with in politics all right oh so this shows that i don't actually watch disney movies i just criticize them turn of all comments while on the fleeting topic of aladdin this is disney's aladdin let's talk about the scene with a brothel in the movie where the women all knew atlanta so they get aladdin runs into or runs through a broth deep deep cut i i have always felt that the sega genesis aladdin game is really overrated super nintendo 2. i just mentioned people worship the aladdin video games of that era but it's not so great all right so tcat says if you get 100 marxists to define what is the working class you will get 100 different answers all of them wrong oh so wicked energy backed up as formal comment i did not know that wicked energy says that unnatural vegan was previously an objectivist and did a video on anne rand okay guys let's just check has that video been deleted or do you listed i am shocked okay so that i my speculation before that a natural vegan's so-called consequentialism and so-called utilitarianism was a mask for an arabian objectivism wow so she made a video one year ago that has five sorry pardon me it has 56 000 uh views and it is called why i gave up objectivism so that is a small number of views by her standards i'm not criticizing her but obviously it was less less popular than her videos on many other things so there you go i did not know i did not know that side of her story i was a speculator that's the that's the that's the link so that's unnatural vegan confessing her objectivism okay well there you go nothing every day um i mean i you know i guess then we can ask the question uh what is stupider her former objectivism which probably did relate to the science fiction she liked it did there is there's a lot of that and randy and objectivism in american science fiction um to what extent is her current flirtation with neoliberalism stupider than her flirtation with uh objectivism but yeah um the way she talks about so let's just address this the way she always talked about utilitarianism as if the benefits and costs of things are evident to any of the people involved in the political negotiations that always seemed you know bizarre to me so i actually sorry this is a good time to bring in i have a question from a member of the audience this is set in by a supporter on patreon so it's not in the comments now someone who sent me a message via the website patreon patreon.com i think you can support the channel for one dollar a month and talk to me there um so this relates very directly to a natural vegan utilitarianism objectivism neoliberalism so you'll see so i'm going to quote this person writing the audience quote are the minimum standards set by government set by the measurable harm caused to society question mark so are the are the standards set by the measurable harm caused by a policy or a problem and continues if this was the case then substances like alcohol or meat should be banned from consumption since alcohol or meat causes more measurable harm to society out i i don't know how old this guy is like to me i read this like what are you 18 like you know like you think harm and benefit are like self-instantiating self-demonstrating self-defining you know quantities you know uh like not even with designing a sewage system or water water in the pipes there is no you know self-quantifying measure of harm oh have you not heard of this this policy called quote-unquote harm reduction so one of the most popular excuses for the left to decriminalize hard drugs to make heroin and cocaine legal not to mention marijuana and everything else to make fentanyl and all these other opiates and everything they say oh well it's harm reduction they seriously claim that there is less harm in allowing people to inject themselves with drugs or smoke crack cocaine than paying the police to enforce the law put them in prison kick down doors carefully that's justified as harm reduction so you're going to sit here and even just entertain the notion man i realize this guy's asking a question but if you're going to sit here and say oh are the minimum standards set by the measurable harm done by a policy how do you measure the harm done by people becoming addicted to crack cocaine heroin other fashionable opiates of our day like fentanyl how do you measure the home how do you measure the harm caused by having the police enforce the law that's basically the contract politically many people are willing to perceive the legalization of addictive drugs as as harm reduction so you know i'm sorry this guy i don't know he could be 40 years old he could be 18 years old people write to me if they don't tell me how old they are i have no idea how mature or immature you are i don't you know i don't know what what james is but to me that's just laugh out loud ridiculous and unnatural vegans own reasoning about harm and benefit and utility it has this similarly teenaged twinge to it which is a teenage tint to a tint tint is the word you know this very strange thing of of talking about these things as if they have any kind of self-evident uh quality now you know sorry there are many things about this question actually i despise um so to finish his sentence he says quote if this was the case grammar if this were the case if this were the case then substances like alcohol or meat should be banned from consumption since alcohol or meat causes more measurable harm than circumcision close quote how do you measure the harm caused by people drinking beer or eating hamburgers i can measure the harm done by circumcision right i can measure the number of nerve endings you're being deprived of for the rest drive this is a literal physical disability being inflicted through a medically unnecessary surgery right are you [ __ ] kidding me like are you 18 years old do you think it is easy to convincingly demonstrate in a democratic society that allowing alcohol like the legalization of alcohol causes more harm than prohibition which is our fancy american term for making alcohol illegal there's a lot of harm done by making alcohol illegal and enforcing those laws and we all have experience with it in this part of the world you know actually having the police kick down the doors of every speakeasy every illegal like you want to talk about harm on a massive scale you want to make alcohol illegal there's going to be harm you know really i'm sorry you're most of you in the audience your own parents and grandparents are going to be thrown into prison because they'll carry on drinking whiskey or something there will be people who don't change there'll be people who make beer in their basement and who make whiskey in a still in their backyard you are talking about draconian enforcement on a massive scale to outlaw you know um alcohol and and by the way you know this is the same argument the left-wingers used to talk about harm reduction they say legalization was harmonious now another thing to note if you follow libertarian politics it is interesting to note that the right wing the libertarian right wing they also support quote-unquote harm reduction they support total legalization total decriminalization of all drugs including heroin and cocaine so interestingly both the far left and the far right in america at least support making illegal drugs legal with this kind of reasoning yeah and anyone can look at saudi arabia even malaysia basically alcohol is illegal in malaysia unless you're a tourist unless there are some categories that they allow it on the beach for tourists and stuff you know but alcohol is is somewhat illegal in malaysia i've been in malaysia it's a distant memory you know people will visit saudi arabia and say what do you mean what are you talking where's the benefit this is a horrible society these are not easy arguments to make okay harm is an idea in your head okay benefit is an idea in your head beauty and ugliness and harmony and disharmony these are human created aesthetic notions in your head and i i just don't know i mean maybe you're 18 years old do you know what it's like to stand up in front of city hall and try to make an argument for a particular policy that you think has benefits and has very little harm and where other people don't agree or don't believe in you this is the real theater you know where where politics unfolds so yeah i i find this question um horrifying but um you know this really seems to be the kind of objectivist utilitarian consequentialist demi-mod that initial vegan has been living in for so many years where she she presumes that these these values um exist in an objectively real way now look guys let's take it all the way just with veganism um what causes more harm killing rats or passing a law that makes it illegal to kill rats i talked about this last my channel more than three years ago i think but i talked about it it's like look guys if you're actually reading political discourse then veganism all these people with phds are supposedly elite highly educated leaders in the vegan movement they are saying that rat lives matter that literally you can't kill rats that you know the whole world should recognize rats as citizens of the cities they live in this is called the citizenship approach i kid you not and that you know it should actually be a crime to kill a rat or a snake that a rat has just as much right to live in your basement as as you do okay now do you think there's some self-evident measure of harm i mean the rat it loses everything it has to lose the rat is losing its whole life and if you actually have experience killing rats it's a saddening thing you kill adult rats and they're the squirming little babies they're little baby rats that are cute and nestled up with their mother they're mammals too they have feelings too they have suffering and pain too it's a horrifying thing if you want to live in a house made of bricks you have to kill rats if you want to operate a green farm pretty much any kind of grain doesn't matter if you grow lentils frankly as opposed to wheat or corn you are going to have to kill rats i it's ugly it's evil it's barbaric i think there's an argument to be made if we're talking about a science fiction time scale like in the next 500 years you could try to develop some technology that will reduce the barbarity of this so we don't have to be killing rats all the time some kind of rat control that's less horrendous and there are there are things you can do in the design of a city that'll stop rats and reproduce okay there is no utility there is no harm and there is no benefit but thinking makes it so there is no beauty and there is no ugliness your desire makes it so okay because you desire one thing or another you perceive something as harm and you perceive something as benefit it's all relative to you it's none of this is objectively real okay i want to live in a society full of sober people not happy people i don't give a [ __ ] if you're happy all right i want everybody to be sober like if people are miserable because they just got divorced i don't think they should go out and get drunk i'm not disputing that it makes them happier all kinds of people cope with the miseries of life by going out and getting drunk that's not my agenda politically and you can talk about harm and benefit you can you can really argue what's the harm of allowing these people to go out and get drunk go and wallow in their sorrows and what's the benefit of allowing i don't want to live in a society where people are happy because they're smoking methamphetamine or using heroin or using cocaine or you know one of the other great drugs of our time is just testosterone injections unlike antidepressants you know antidepressants don't work ssri antidepressants you know they don't work guess what shooting up steroids performing it for performance enhancing drugs and testosterone it actually makes people happy i i don't want to live in a society full of happy people i want to live in society full of sober people and i want them to struggle with their own misery that's my agenda that's okay so beauty exists in the eye of the beholder bread only tastes good to a man with an empty stomach it doesn't objectively or intrinsically taste good right water has no flavor at all when you don't desire it but when you're thirsty it's the most delicious thing in the world when you're exhausted when you're on the verge of collapsing you have no idea how tantalizing the taste of water is until you push your body to those limits and then drank water that's a totally different flavor from right now if you go to that go to this tap your water could taste like nothing it tastes like everything right um [Music] the value of sobriety the value of uh so-called harm reduction legalization of of drugs having a drug policy that encourages them you know the notion of harm right this is all relative to who we are what we assert and what we can convince others of subjectively um and hilariously i think one of the very few exceptions is when we get into something like circumcision or if you get into something like amputating your leg is kind of the same thing um of course then we're dealing in an area where look guy is amputating someone's leg for no reason that is harming them in an objectively real sense that's not subjective well guess what amputating part of the human penis or amputating a woman's clitoris this is harm in an objectively real sense that isn't up to your up to your subjective perspective and by the way if you haven't been following muslim politics there are always women who will stand up and say that they're perfectly happy after undergoing uh female circumcision there have always been defenders of that from the muslim side so you know great comment from the audience by the way quote as a swede i'm obliged to point out that denmark is the absolute worst so not not everyone regards denmark as a positive example and i know denmark is not paradise sweden also is not paradise i have been tempted at some dark points in my life i've been tempted to move to sweden you know i thought i thought maybe my life would be better if i were the only jew in stockholm if i were an exotic no exotic jewish intellectual and uh but you know no i mean i i've known swedes i've known swedes in real life i'm not going to digress and do a critique of swedish culture talk about talk about alcoholism talk about having a culture built on public drunkenness jeez let's talk about a culture where everyone's happy because they're all taking drugs that's swedenborg anyway but yeah i realize that many of the western european democracies that that americans praise as being better than america they have some advantages they have disadvantages also all right okay so a lot of good questions here whoo yeah a lot of great questions thanks guys thanks for joining the audience thanks for joining the link thanks for giving thumbs up so as a result i have a lot of good questions too to uh respond to all right there was a question from tkat here about democracy tcat asks quote do you think democracy is a moral necessity or an engineering device that produces good government a very leading question very provocative question what happens when it's not good at producing good government right so i think he already is anticipating you know part of my answer so i gave a very nuanced statement about democracy before and i pointed out that there are some non-democratic non-democratic societies that are better than democratic societies so even though i think there's a moral argument for democracy like fundamentally you know why is the mayor in charge well we elected him okay so now we have to respect them there's a kind of moral argument there when the mayor is not elected when nobody is elected are relationships of authority what they mean and why they should exist and what the role of the public is in scrutinizing government and informing government the extent and the extent to which government really serves the people starts with questions so i'm going to just digress slightly many years ago i made a video it's quite a poorly made video um where i said look you know the fundamental thing i want is government that is by the poor and for the poor and of those two for the poor kind of matters more um i'm not going to digress in a huge way here but you guys probably all know who needs buses is it the rich or the poor you know you might have rich people who really the attitude rich people live in detroit and they say who needs buses this is a great city it's great you own a car you can drive around okay it's not everyone else's car not everyone can okay like buses are an example of a government-provided social service that is for the poor now in a subtle way health care and education and all these things what really matters is that they are for the poor because the rich the extremely wealthy they will be able to provide their own education one way or another even if it's hiring private tutors or whatever it is ultimately if the rich need a helicopter they can get a helicopter now by the way i don't think the rich are of no significance in society the richer tremendous significant society i've just been writing a chapter in my book where i talk about the extent to which aristocrats really mattered positively in history and it's wrong for us to now write the history of the world looking back at the past as if aristocrats were social parasites as if they accomplished nothing or did nothing no rich people make an important contribution to our society which is is valued it should be valued and it's valued i don't i don't think there's a lack of public appreciation for elon musk i think there's plenty of appreciation but um my point being not not that i'm caricaturing the rich as social parasites or as our perpetual political enemies that's not my perspective but really my most fundamental concern about government is that it is of the poor by the poor and for the poor and i'll just say when i say of the poor i can't emphasize enough how important it is to have poor people literally in the room for those debates so often still in american democracy today certainly at city hall certainly at state government level you're having a discussion about what we should do about the bus system or what we should do about food stamps or some social policy and every single person in the room is a wealthy lawyer or wealthy businessman who went from being a lawyer to being a congressman or a senator or a bureaucrat in government every single person in the room is of that background and you think oh how is it possible that 50 years went by and nobody dealt with the problems first nations people are having like poverty stricken first nations people reservation how is it possible 50 years on buy and they never took took seriously improving the bus system or the food stamp system none of those people are in the room none of them see the problem that way having people in the room even if they're stupid just let's be blunt if you have some room who really doesn't understand the system works but who can say hey look they know what it's like to be on food stamps they know what it's like to rely on the bus system they know what it's like to have spent the last 20 years on a first nations reservation that's mired in poverty and hopelessness and have vague promises of a better life offered by the government the government doesn't do anything whatever the perspective is you know you can't just have government that is of by the rich of the rich and for the poor and i think there's an argument that today that's what china has china has a kind of dictatorship that both nominally and actually is committed to helping the poor it really is however it's also an aristocracy the communist party in china is simply an aristocracy um you're very often looking at the sons and grandsons of people who were heroes in the revolution people were literally like a military leader in the revolution their sons and grandsons now sit wearing a businessman suit as a communist party highly ranked official that's not 100 the communist party but i'm just characterizing it it is in effect an aristocracy and they are rich people there was a hilarious scandal you guys can google about one of these communist party prince princelings so this word princeling it again indicates a kind of aristocratic status but there was a young gentleman born into wealth and power in the communist party and he crashed his lamborghini i'm sorry if it was a ferrari correct me but i believe was another lamborghini for he crashed an incredibly expensive sports car and he had three beautiful prostitutes inside you know at this so it's like you know uh grandson of communist party war hero crashes lamborghini with three prostitutes going at high speeds on beijing um so you know there are many aspects to democracy but the emphasis i want to give in framing my answer to this question is you know you've got to think about government by the poor of the poor and for the poor and that is not what the founding fathers the united had mine that is not what the authors of the american constitution might at all i think the last five chapters of my book are a really in-depth well-researched discussion of the american constitution where it comes from what it is and how it was in some ways uh misinterpreted and applied in different ways but the the real intellectual history of the the american constitution is a significant portion of my book and in many ways it's the kind of uh the conclusion of the book is consumed with this critique of the american constitution that's also why the book took so long that i did a lot of original reading original research to expand that part of it take that part of it really seriously so we're turning the question from tcat he asked do you think democracy is a moral necessity or an engineering device that produces good government so you know i guess you know my answer is neither and he didn't ask what happens when it's not good at producing good government iran iran is what happens and look at iran you know you can have a muslim majority country where you can have a country where 51 of people are religious fanatics whether they're muslim or christian or jewish and you can have democracy will be terrible you'll have you'll consistently have horrible muslim fundamentalist governments elected i mean for the future of iran that's all the name once he's happening iran does have democracy guys they have elections they have newspapers that criticize the government and people get to state competing views how much hope do you have for the next 30 years in iran and you know if the people change government will change you know like that's the that's the good thing about democracy but iran is this terrible regime is this terrible country this terrible government and they are they are an example of what happens when democracy doesn't produce a good government so you know look i i can bring this back to aristotle um people don't give aristotle credit for the extent to which he was an empiricist about uh democracy about politics in general i suppose so i like okay so to criticize aristotle for a second what aristotle says about god and religion physics metaphysics um cosmology uh what he says about logic many of those things are very speculative very abstract and they were very influential he influenced uh catholic church doctrine to an unbelievable stance through the dark ages so but when aristotle talks about politics he is a very empirical ground up working with real world examples you know approach and he lived through a period of time where he was able to survey many democratic systems in greece and he was able to say look most of them failed most of them were horrible they created horrible societies there's terrible failures in the not all but most so just to give you an example here this is from the book that is just called politics by aristotle which is a very difficult book to read if you're a beginner in ancient greek political philosophy i don't recommend it for beginners so he says uh we must now take the different constitutions separately and study them successively in light of these general propositions and what happens in each of the types in democracies changes are chiefly due to the wanton license of demagogues this takes two forms sometimes the demagogues attack the rich individually by bringing false accusations and thus force them to combine i.e for the rich people to get organized against the poor against the common danger that you that unites even the bitterest enemies sometimes they attack the rich as a class by egging on the common people against them the result of such action may be seen in a number of instances at costs so costs is a particular island in greece at cost democracy was overthrown by the rise of discreditable debt demagogues and then the combination of the rich against them the same thing happened at rhodes so again the island of rhodes part of greece where the demagogues first introduced the system of government blah blah blah so he's going through these examples at heraclea on the black sea democracy was ruined by the behavior of demagogues soon after the colony was founded at megura too so mega was an important in ancient greece it's an important city a minor city today it still exists within greece democracy was ruined in a similar way the demagogues anxious to have an excuse for confiscating their property drove a number of the notables and exile he goes on there's a whole list talking about the career of thoracicus and one city after another one island after another okay the the failures of democracy were real uh it's very unsympathetic aristotle being anti-democracy we have we have a book dealing with a terrible book but we have a book just the extent to which the major authors of ancient athens were not just critics of democracy but were really anti-democracy it's very unsympathetic today you think what's wrong with these people they were all pro-slavery and anti-democracy but when you appreciate that they were living through a period of time when in the same way that i can point to north korea and i can point to the soviet union i can point at china i can point to the failures of uh of communism he was living through a period of time when he could very easily point to the failures of democracy all around him uh and his own conclusions actually are basically endorsing a mixed system of moderate democracy which he may or may not get credit for and i would just say i am actually more pro-democracy than aristotle i'm there are many things that would criticize aristotle about i mean also he was pro-slavery in case you didn't know um yeah but i i just say this this empirical aspect of the approach is important and that was the main thing that i was um the main thing that i was endorsing but look sorry come back just one last time that he gets questioned he's asking do you think democracy is a moral necessity or an engineering device in terms of the writing of the american constitution absolutely neither they didn't think about this at all in terms of the the quote-unquote writing of the british constitution it's an unwritten constitution created through several stages most importantly the the english civil war and the uh recreation of the monarchy after the end of the cromwell regime but the the british constitution such as this these are totally irrelevant it's neither created as a moral necessity nor as a social engineering device so you know the real examples of democratic systems we have in the world today these things are not uh true although interestingly aristotle does talk about democracy being a moral necessity but uh in a totally different way his conclusions have nothing to do with elections it's instead this idea of um election by lot sortition the random assignation of offices to people which again is worth talking about that'd be a told a whole different video but on that level he aristotle does believe it's a moral necessity which is very interesting argument okay um one simple suggestion from the audience move to thailand there's so many comments i am skipping over some of them um some more comments about the use of reflective arrays mirrors to manage uh global warming which seems now to be uh an inevitability given the lack of interest in planet earth and becoming vegan um [Music] great question quote who do you who do you dislike more unnatural vegan or vegan gains i will refer you back to um my comments before about the left wing and my interaction with them i think a good question is who could i actually sit there and have lunch with and i think you know it would be impossible for me to sit and have lunch with vegan gains it would it would presumably be possible for me to sit and have lunch with a natural vegan so that's the and it's a mutual antagonism right in both cases i think it's the hostility maybe i'm wrong maybe if i ate lunch with a natural vegan she would throw her shoe at me i don't know i don't know how that would end um someone in the audience confirms that they also are morally opposed to stamp collecting all right a quote from lilac cloud who i haven't seen in a little while good good to hear from you lila cloud uh quote your views on culture really resonated with me when i was 15 i came to similar conclusions all my life culture was used as a justification for really stupid and evil things close quote uh thank you lila cloud and you know i think that i think that that critique of culture it still holds up even when we apply it to relatively harmless examples like museums and movie theaters um you know the extent to which people think it is morally good to show your children batman or the x-men the latest marvel movie is black widow like we think of this as children's entertainment for cultural reasons some of which you know goes back to the 1930s but most of most of which is really the 1970s comic books were really reinvented in the 1970s the current era of comic books i just say you know i realize batman has a longer history but we're mostly thinking about batman from that period forward in terms of what's going on in the movies the fact that you think this is good and even morally uplifting and appropriate entertainment to show to your children that's also a kind of unquestioned cultural tradition i think it falls apart as soon as you ask the most basic questions about it you know um you know i remember when i was still a child i was really a child i could figure out what year this was um this guy uh how am i gonna explain a guy who might as well have been my uncle were not actually related but you know somebody was friends with my family that way he might as well have been uncle i remember him saying to me that he thought the new batman movie of that time was totally inappropriate for children i was just shocked to hear it and he pointed out it was scene i'd totally ignored in watching the movie myself he said it shows a lawyer murdering his secretary by pushing her out of a window which was true i mean it's a short scene in the movie it's like you know you think you can show this to kids and then you know the the secretary comes back from the dead as catwoman in that film alone catwoman is a kind of zombie wearing this skin-tight sexually provocative outfit and like i hadn't thought of it that way you know i just really didn't uh didn't think of it that way terrible movie by the way i mean i don't think i thought it was a great movie but no um so you know i just say even with these kind of more recent and more supposedly harmless things you can still see the fundamental evils of of culture the most fundamentally evolved perhaps being that it leads us to to not question things that obviously we ought to question and by the way uh sorry the title of this video in our original conversation this is also a problem with the culture of socialism there's also a problem with the culture of capitalism on a smaller scale the people who positively believe in capitalism as an as an ideology like libertarians and anirand uh objectivists and so on you know uh that this is a problem where people believe in this in this unquestioning way because it is a cultural tradition they treat it as defining good and evil wise and stupid without asking themselves any of the necessary questions all right lila cloud says further that criticizing aspects of someone's cultural religion is now something very taboo in leftist circles yes and so really briefly obviously there could be a whole separate video to talk about that but what an irony i mean the left of the 1960s defined itself by the demolition of conservative culture you could say very simply the left of the 1960s was devoted to demolishing and replacing the culture of the 1940s and 1950s everything that had been normal including the haircuts and style of clothing and music and drugs and sex and everything else all of the moral verities that were presumed to be good in the 1940s and 1950s were to be challenged with the the new counterculture of the 1960s that's what defined the left for many decades thereafter and it is true there is now a very strange form of cultural conservatism on the left and they will not even let you question culture and religion of say islam even though that doesn't it is not woke from their perspective they nevertheless champion islam um in a totally paradoxical way so yeah that is that's a very strange uh you know and again i think this just indicates the extent to which these categories we think in terms of abstract categories like socialists and communists and leftists are are you know to some extent meaningless and misleading maybe because people want them to be misleading maybe because people politically thrive on misleading others because ultimately all politics all politics in the united states of america rests on fundraising i'll tell you that maybe not the whole world but american politics your ability to engage in politics rests totally on your ability to raise donations and that's how american religion works also so you have to say whatever it takes to get donations coming in predominantly from elderly people a quote from rt rt says isil i'm also on the west coast and i don't like living here for various reasons what would be the ideal place for you to live uh he says perhaps i wrongly assume you'd want to get away from the city so look interesting question but look i so i'm gonna give an answer that has to do with who i am and this is not most you are not going to relate to this okay i liked living in cambodia because it's a disaster not despite the fact that it's a disaster i want to deal with the problems i want to deal with the complexity i couldn't even say that's the only thing i liked about cambodia you know i don't like the food i don't like the climate i don't like the music i don't listen to cambodian pop songs or dance music i don't go to the disco in cambodia kidding me i want to be in a place where i can make a positive difference hey why do you think i got involved with vegan politics because i think vegan politics are great no i think that's the place where i can make a difference that's what i'm drawn to you know so i'm kind of drawn to the weakest and worst place in some ways if that's where i can lead the meaningful life and that's where i can make a difference what do you think i like about living in communist laos communist dictatorship in southeast asia i like it because it's a disaster i like it because i can make a difference and i did as a completely powerless person i had an impact on politics in vienna capital city loss that i could never have in tokyo japan for example you know many others you know so you know that's my agenda so if you think about me moving to detroit if you think about me moving to alabama right exactly what would be rewarding for me is the way in which those places are a disaster you know and i i'm not someone i'm just being honest with you i never think my life would be better in paris or my life would be better in berlin and maybe i'm wrong maybe if i lived in paris or berlin there would really be a lot of like-minded intellectuals like 10 you know i'm not not hundreds but maybe there will be intellectuals who have something in common with me and i can live them i i considered so tcat will remember this i considered moving to los angeles i could consider it again in many ways los angeles is a horrible city horrible place to live but you could make that same kind of argument maybe there would be like-minded people who share some of my political interests and concern maybe there would be people who want to publish my book or want to read my book or publish my children's story books or collaborate with me on youtube or be involved with me in politics maybe there would be or be involved with me in filmmaking you know maybe there's an argument that kind of live a better life in los angeles but in terms of what i respond to and what i care about that's what's kind of led me around the world the different places that i've that i've tried to live and um you know i think there's an argument that the path i've taken in life almost guarantees my perpetual unhappiness you know but i've i've had one hell of a life guys uh when you've had a life like mine it's it's hard to have regrets i try if anything i'm constantly broadcasting and magnifying is that that hell of a knife um all right skipping ahead here okay quote so i've seen this claim repeatedly so melissa this is interesting wicked energy says did you see that vegan gains is now on antidepressants he says they are working and he's not missing so look wicked energy someone told me that before like a month ago maybe like not that long ago and i was very surprised to hear it and i googled around and i couldn't find a trace i am not faulting you i assume this is something he mentioned in a live stream or that he mentioned while playing video games or something like i assume but i do not i do not know about that i was not able to find any evidence of that that is certainly a shocking new low for vegan gains and um you know i guess he's going to join the club of sammy grimm i mean if this is true where that goes next it will raise interesting questions sorry it's way off topic for this video but i i am interested to hear that again that's the second time someone has told me that and i guess eventually he's going to make a youtube video uh promoting vegan so a third person here has written in and saying yes he he has heard vegan gains saying that he was on antibiotics so during a live stream he has talked about it well look so okay i can make this relevant to the video in this following way it is appalling to me that someone like unnatural vegan who claims to be doing a science literacy science advocacy channel would so utterly drop the ball on the science behind any presence melissa could you grab as a prop that book there you go shout out to and shout out to robert whitaker i've quoted him on the channel before this guy i mean i just say i've had clips of him talking this is on the robert sorry how to get that camera to focus robert whittaker anatomy of an epidemic okay guys i it's the book i can most easily endorse what great book great book great guy whatever all right um if you are a natural vegan and you are doing a scientific skeptic show for and you represent utilitarianism and harm reduction and consequentialism and all these all stuff how could you fail to be concerned about the consequence of endorsing drugs that cause brain damage that cause permanent irreparable harm and changes in the structure and function of your brain and that are scientifically proven not to have medical benefits i mean you know it does not take a genius but especially if that is your lane if that is what you're claiming to you are claiming to be the one youtube channel that doesn't just lazily repeat that using artificial sweeteners is wrong i just mean i myself just by difficult i don't use artificial sweeteners i'm not afraid of them but it's just kind of like why you know why do i need this in my life i don't i don't use artificial illusions but she came out and did all this research and made this rigorous pro-science argument that you should be comfortable using uh think splenda specifically using artificial sweeteners okay well why is it that all your your whole you know frame of reference stops that your commitment to so-called critical thinking and research and science advocacy stops when it comes to mind-altering drugs namely antidepressants jacqueline glenn same question vegan gains same question vegan gains claims that he's researched the medical side effects of using steroids to death they're kind of that he's researched the dietary effects of eating meat and eating fish to death i do not find his research credible but nevertheless he's done a lot of it he may do really bad research really incompetent research but i know he has read a significant quantity of things and he backs up his claim by studying studies well you know why wouldn't you research these uh these mind-altering drugs that you're that you're taking so yeah that is i mean of for someone who is such a despicable person that is certainly a new all-time low he has made himself more despicable obviously for a natural vegan i would say her all-time low was justifying taking um taking antidepressants during pregnancy during pregnancy and during breastfeeding sorry but there's hard science on that so why would she not fess up to that and face after that okay so anyway guys it's mostly off topic of this video but thanks for letting me know that i didn't know and you know look honestly i feel sorry for richard i do i you know you guys know we weren't close friends but we were friends for a couple of years there and sure that's that's very saddening to hear but obviously everything about that guy's life is is uh sat in here all right just coming to the end okay guys thank you for being with me it's been a fully a two-hour stream we have 45 people in the audience and 44 thumbs up it's a good sign there's one person there's one hold out oh they just left so then we have 44 people in the audience the 44 [Laughter] it's been it's been great uh having you with me you know so i gotta say on the core topics of this video to sum up when you're thinking about liberalism neoliberalism conservatism socialism and you know the future of the left after the end of you know after the end of joe biden's career let's let's put it that way what what is going to happen to the left after joe biden's term in office that that's a really good question you know what is going to happen after uh alexandria ocasio-cortez fades from her current position of prominence and fame i don't think she's providing a whole lot of direction obviously bernie sanders has already faded from his formerly uh prominent position of fame these are really important really worthwhile you know questions but i really encourage you you've got to think through uh from the perspective of a real world tangible experience first and foremost and then work your way up to generalizations and abstract claims not to proceed from generalizations and abstractions definitions of philosophical terms to then try to foist them onto uh the confusing and often paradoxical reality of what the world is now you know politics is done by stupid people and i want to give a shout out to michael moore if you ask me to evaluate the intelligence of michael moore on a scale of 1-10 i don't know if he's a five you know like i do not have a lot of intellectual esteem for michael moore but you know what i think he pointed the way forward for the american left i think he was 100 right when he made this stupid movie where michael moore goes to europe he goes to italy he goes to denmark did he go to japan i forget i don't know if you want anywhere i forget but anyway i definitely remember okay we watched well there you go there's a bias right there you should you should have gone to africa and south america and east asia too he went to iceland okay anyway michael moore buys a series of airplane tickets and he visits these places like iceland and italy and denmark and he says look these people fundamentally have a better economic system than america they have a better political system than america they have better social services better health care than america and we have to learn from their example um there's a very moving dialogue from ancient rome in which rival factions stand up in the senate i might be misremembering whether it was the senate or one of the committees rome had more than one committee those term used but anyway i believe it was the senate rival factions stand up in the senate and for completely cynical political reasons actually they begin their speeches by stating what it is that makes rome great and one of the speeches i believe this is by a young julius caesar this is caesar long before he comes back he says you know you know what made rome great is our willingness to adopt the ideas of others you know he said you know what the best aspects of government here in rome some of them were copied from athens some of them were copied from sparta or other parts of greece and then you know within the at that time the area that's now italy wasn't one country or one culture there's a whole bunch of different cultures and they have all this contact with north africa and the southern coast of spain so you know we have this whole little galaxy of trading uh ports and posts that we reach out to and you know what made rome great was our willingness to learn from others because we would rather be pardoning we would rather emulate our enemies than be defeated by oh this is a situation of open imperialism where they're they're conquering these people rome does eventually conquer all of greece because he didn't know you know but he's saying we're willing to learn from our enemies we're willing to learn from other cultures we're going to copy and you know um we're willing to take the best aspects of their societies you know i do think that the pragmatic immediate future for both the left and the right is the willingness to get on an airplane and go to japan and figure out what they're doing right and we're doing wrong and learn from it and learn from others now that there's nothing left-wing and there's nothing right-wing about what we have to learn from japan after i finish this live stream i could just walk to a grocery store down the street i could walk to the bank walk to some service i guarantee you i am going to see people injecting drugs into their arms you know i can't unless i ask them i don't know is it heroin they're injecting weight i will see people openly using injecting injection drugs in the street i will see people smoking what's probably fentanyl that could be crack cocaine through a glass pipe and a metal pipe i will see this being done several times and i will see even more people passed out on drugs or in various stages of shaking and quaking passed out on hard drugs on the street here in victoria canada if you're in the wrong part of vancouver it's even worse you know all these cities if you're in seattle if you're in i'm sorry camera's a hoax if you're in seattle if you're in um los angeles if you're in vancouver or victoria right okay and guess what you can go to osaka japan you can go to tokyo you can go to you know i'm not saying there is zero drug addiction tremendous not zero there's very little drug addiction and the the drug addiction that exists there is hidden okay the japanese are doing something right they're doing they're doing something right that we're doing wrong and i don't care if you call it left wing or right wing i don't care if you call it capitalist or socialist we have to be willing to learn from others and then more broadly and more deeply if you guys want to know what i think about this you have to buy my book it's going to be on amazon my book is called no more manifestos that's the short term thing we have to do is to learn from others when they have political policies or institutions that already work and we don't by the way who who has the best universities in the world have you gone and visited universities in other countries and seen how the universities were crippling tourists it's not going to be one simple answer it's not going to be just like oh well denmark they've solved the universe no it's complex denmark has some advantages some different disadvantages like any particular policy that we're talking about hospitals or universities learning from what already works on planet earth is complex and contradictory okay but we do not have i don't think in any of the western mars i don't think we have a culture of being willing to learn from others that's short term that's what's already working now and in the long term one of the things i come back to emphasize and discuss and philosophize about in my book again and again is the importance of asking questions that are not even being asked the importance in politics of not only dealing with problems and solutions that are already known but the importance of as i put it pressing into the unknown okay