Democracy is Broken; Veganism is (also) Broken.

i was talking to j.j mccullough the
other day and um he's a conservative political youtuber here and something i said in passing there's a lot of truth to it is that some of these questions about democracy you can kind of sharpen your teeth for biting into the subject by really studying really working on really examining really working with and utterly non-democratic society if you don't have that contrast if you don't really have the lived experience of what democracy is not perhaps you suffer all your life with a little bit of excess vagueness when thinking about precisely what democracy is how it works and what the advantages are you it's not that you learn this by examining the disadvantages of a non-democratic society but it wets your appetite it sharpens your claws what can i tell you i used to live in a uh tropical paradise called the lao people's democratic republic commonly known as laos contrary to the name there is absolutely nothing democratic about laos um there was a story i heard and i only was able to hear it because it was told to me by someone who was a direct witness a witness to and participant in these events this absolutely never would have appeared in the newspapers there or on the radio to discuss this would be strictly forbidden it was a school teacher got all our kids organized for earth day depending where you've lived it's it's possible you've never even heard of earth day earth day is one of these phony united nations promoted did you celebrate earth day in detroit really okay melissa melissa knows earth day so hey but it's it's the day when everyone's supposed to care about the environment a little bit extra and the kids for their school project made up uh different big signs on um bristol board we'd say placards right so some kind of cardboard backing with different slogans about saving the planet saving the environment saving the whales and helping the dolphins whatever was that in my each kid i had to do a little bit of research and make a sign and then they marched together from the school to the nearest buddhist temple it's not a very long walk and i imagine one of the reasons for this was just that the buddhist temple had a kind of yard where they could assemble and do this exercise largely meaningless um you know educational endeavor wasn't thought of as political wasn't thought of as a protest by the teacher or by the students themselves well guess what the police reacted immediately in the time it took these kids to walk a few city blocks from the school to the buddhist temple the communist party left into action they were all arrested they were all taken to the police station every single placard every single school project on bristol board that we held up was photographed documented translated because most of them were in english i think there was some lotion but this is mostly an english language exercise every single student's name and telephone number was written down their parents were got in contact with their id cards were taken right if you think the way to influence politics in the people's democratic republic of laos is by having a street protest is by having a street demonstration you are sorely mistaken in telling this bizarre anecdote one point is to say to you that if i as a white western foreigner had got it into my mind the way for me to influence government policy was to to motivate a bunch of friends and strangers to hold up placards and march in the street chanting right all of us would have gone to jail and we would have gone to jail for nothing it would have accomplished nothing now you know what i did when i was almost i did influence loud government policy unfortunately i did influence loud government policy on the environment i wrote an article that was published in both thai and english not lotion but everyone in the lao educated elite can read tai and i know that that article got read by basically each and every person in the lao government leadership at the elite level it's a small country word gets all right it's a small country and everyone who controls the country lives in one small town in vienna's i'm six degrees of separation these people and i didn't publish it in laos i published it in thailand in both english and thai and that article if you go back and read it today i don't think you would get the impression that i was pro-communist i don't think you'd get the impression that i was in favor of what the lao communist party is doing in terms their record on the environment or specifically deforestation that was really the big deal there was cutting them for us okay but that article was very carefully written to say look this country is led by poverty-stricken ignorant people who don't know any better and guess whose advice they're taking they're taking the advice of the united nations and of a small number of donor countries like france germany and the united states america and those white western powers are giving them terrible advice and that's why the forest has been cut down this country is being irreparably harmed right once the forest is cut down there's nothing else here folks once once that forest is cut down there there is no tourist attraction in house you know that once the forest is cut down and the top soil goes away this is going to be a desolate poverty-stricken country with nothing left to sell and it's you know it doesn't come back it's not going to regenerate once the forest is is clear cut once the jungle is gone once the biodiversity is lost this country is a poverty stricken parking lot nobody wants to pay to park okay it's going to be empty in a sense the people of laos can't imagine i didn't say i didn't say it's not your fault the government was right that's not what i said right but it says some interesting things it's it says for example the problem is not illegal logging whatever the government decides to do is the law i was speaking to the people in power i was speaking them a way they would understand and it wasn't confronting them needlessly but that's saying i know the problem isn't illegal logging i know the problem is legal log i know the problem is you i know the problem is members of the communist party and their families doing the log gates you guys directly profiting from it right and i was asking the question whose advice are you following okay that was a kind of protest that was a kind of lobbying that was a kind of political activism and i didn't go to jail and i would say i had influence vastly out of proportion to my power what i i worked a job that paid less than the minimum wage i had a bachelor's degree in political science new year's day okay i made a difference that i never could have made by holding up a placard by chanting by singing songs in the streets through the types of activism that continue to be glorified in the american mindset so guys this is a live stream it's not a pre-recorded video i'm happy to see you all here in the audience uh frida asks did the donations come with exhortations to laos to be more democratic so it's a strangely worded question but you're actually getting at a very interesting point here all right from the start of this humble video and i've been talking about this on youtube for maybe seven years at least six years now right okay i was talking about the ways in which lobbying or activism can have positive outcomes but there's another question that frida is getting what if the real point of activism is to get donations for the activist right and if that is the point maybe going to jail is the best thing you can do maybe a completely counterproductive stunt that accomplishes nothing but puts you in jail makes you look like a victim gets you into the newspaper headlines oh yeah well you can imagine if i had done oh well-intentioned uh left-wing liberal environmentalist vegan buddhist scholar from toronto thrown in prison in laos for protesting against logging or let's say it's something protesting because he's trying to save the last of these this endangered species i could now name several endangered species that were disappearing allows the time oh oh okay so if it's about donations right and where's the fundraising happening maybe the donation maybe it's back in toronto maybe i have a friend from college who is a journalist at the toronto star and i'm directly emailing that journal saying hey make sure this gets into the newspapers in canada i'm a canadian from toronto and i'm here being put in prison because i dared to challenge the government about logging but oh so now a whole different sort of strategic mentality emerges if what we're talking about is not democracy if what we're talking about is money oh we have some people in the audience who know what's up so natasha has just written that is so true exclamation point rachel ziegler from dxe is a perfect example dxe is an abbreviation of direct action everywhere she got she got veneers and hasn't worked a full-time job since moving to california so to my knowledge and this is based on interviews rachel has done uh she was a waitress and she now is has her rent and so on or cost of living paid for by direct action everywhere so direct action everywhere they get more than one million dollars in donations from the most recent debt i've seen him maybe closer to 2 million donations per annum so year after year it's more than a million dollars i think 1.8 million dollars their votes as the most recent data i've seen and out of that money they can indeed pay for many people like rachel to shall we say live off the land live off the generosity of the terms so yeah i mean this is one of those things it's it's shallow and it's deep at the same time so i've been talking to this other youtuber uh cranky vegan right so i am not going to disclose the details of what we talked about or what he said it just seems to be inappropriate however i also think it would be kind of silly or counterproductive to pretend that he and i don't talk at all like we don't know each other or something you know i mean so there's a discourse going on with this all right what i find most troubling and this happens throughout democracy this happens on the left this happens on the right this happens in the center it is not just a vegan issue this is a profound problem with democracy across the board is that people fictionalize history and then stand around pompously and self-righteously demanding why haven't you learned the lessons of history right so they create a fiction that street protests ended the vietnam war that people holding a little sign and standing in the streets saying that's what ended the vietnam war oh yeah what ended the war in iraq what ended the war in afghanistan oh i'm sorry it's 2021 and those wars haven't ended yet what ended the war in palestine between israel and palestine yes is it a lack oh is it a lack of street protest was that the problem did people not stand in the street holding a sign enough did they not was it not was it not enough pamphlets well well we have this scientific evidence right cranky vegan uh the youtuber also direct action everywhere also extinction rebellion all kinds of oh oh there's scientific proof that these methods work uh-huh the largest street protest in the history of planet earth was in the year 2003 we all lived through it in the year 2003 anti-war protests opposed to the americans invading and bombing iraq you got scientific proof that that works huh in 2003 you set the guinness world record there were marches in europe their march of the united states there were marches around the world against that war in the year 2003 here we are in 2021 and the war isn't over yet all right people fictionalize history they manufacture false facts to make it seem that the theory is effective in practice and this theory is not falsifiable this theory of political progress the pursuit of social change through through protest and more specifically through so-called disruption right that's what direct action ever support and that is also what cranky vegan supports okay um wayne syong when he launched direct action everywhere um what he promised was that they were going to be different from every other activist movement in the history of animal rights and veganism because they were going to use methods that had been proven to be effective by social science research i'm sorry but this is exactly the same thing i hear from cranky vegan still to this day so he just made a video uh yesterday of the day before yesterday in which he says just after the eight-minute mark and he says he says it's kind of the whole time he said it in the video the week before also he's a guy does one video a week so it's it's not just me saying this it's been proven in one scientific study after another and you know he doesn't actually read the scientific studies he doesn't actually quote them he doesn't actually examine the examples and question to what extent these do or do not support his case oh yeah i mean just look at the arab spring so we're now in 2021 all right when wayne siong came out with that argument this is a proven scientific effect it's scientifically proven that this form of disruption this form of peaceful nonviolent action that this works they pointed to the arab spring as a great success story the era of the spring was a disaster and it was a disaster most of all for the people who were part of the protests themselves it ruined their lives they died they went to prison okay now i i already mentioned i am not going to disclose anything that cranky vegan has ever said to me privately all right however i'm going to talk about some things that he said publicly because he's made a lot of youtube videos himself and most of what i know about the guy frankly everything i know about the guy is from seeing interviews he gave to other youtube channels it's not from private discussions yet with me so this is stuff that's on the internet and i would suspect he's also done interviews with uh podcasts and some of those have been seen by very few people one of the one of the infusion i saw i think it had 50 views or less i remember asking us is this a secret interview because this has so few views like if you promoted this on your own channel more people would hear it but you know what's the deal with this okay cranky vegan's claim to fame is that he went to jail okay so he knows how the world really works he knows what's really effective in political activism because he went to jail for his convictions now there is an emotional irrational sense in which we all know where he's coming from and we all feel oh oh if you care about this enough if you're committed about this enough that you know you're willing to go to prison for it suddenly everyone takes you more seriously now i would point out that this is emotional and irrational and wrong okay what did he go to jail for every single time i've heard him discuss this or i've seen it in writing it's a transcript of an interview he gave okay he lies in the same way that wayne syong from direct action everywhere lies about gandhi yeah i mean mohandas gandhi the leader from india in the same way that wayne stone lies about protests against the vietnam war and protests against the iraq war and the arab spring in the same way that each and every positive example given by activists who preach or practice disruption is a lie cranky vegan in discussing his own autobiography is also lion he's manufacturing a positive example to support his form his methodology his approach to activism whereas if you actually examine the case if you actually look at it it's a negative example it's a counter example it's an example that proves my point not his point and part of my point is don't go to jail all you lovely people in the audience right now do not go to jail you want to go to jail for five years you want to be checking in you know they do this thing where after you've served your time you have to keep checking in where they check that you're employed and you're yeah you've got some kind of probation officer or somebody checking up on you make sure you don't have any illegal weapons make sure you're not uh using drugs and so on where you remain under state control for a long time afterwards don't go to jail okay if we're gonna have a discussion about how to bring democracy to laos how to bring democracy to cambodia how to bring democracy to hong kong how to bring democracy to canada how to bring democracy to the united states okay any methodology that begins by taking your best and brightest and hardest working people and putting them in jail is a methodology i find fault with okay that does not seem like a terribly effective methodology to me all right the movement he was a part of is referred to as stop huntingdon animal cruelty s-h-a-c some people refer to as shaq all right i used to live in cambridge england i met and spoke to people on both sides of that debate on both sides of that movement while i was in england before i left to live in laos and cambodia and do all those exciting things back when i lived in toronto canada oh this has been 1998 1999 i read the animal rights extremist publications of the day i read um the oxford green anarchist i've mentioned this before and they covered that case in my new detail and i think the senior editor and founder of that publication he literally went to prison for that too he definitely went to court i think sorry so i i think i think he was never sentenced but he was in court and in and out of you know temporary holding cells and so on but i think in the end he was he was acquitted so i'm sorry it's not that he went to jail but he was in and out of court for a long time for that case so he was passionately and directly involved and other people were writing out so i got to read this my new coverage of what went on with shac and how the cookie crumbled on that so there was a case it partly took place in england it probably took place in the united states all right every single interview every single statement i have seen from crankyvegan he makes the claim that they shut down huntington animal labs huntington vivisection laboratories the laboratories in england where these experiments were performed animals and that they somehow turned like the public like public will like democratic will against this wealthy corporation that's based there that is a lie on top of a lie on top of a lie and you can debunk it if you just look up huntington life sciences on wikipedia and read about what happened that company that is one of the most successful companies in cambridge england sorry it's not in the city in the greater cambridge area it's one of the most successful companies in all the united kingdom they went from strength to straight they were fantastically successful during this time and they were powerfully connected to cambridge university now that's not their only client but they have many many clients at cambridge people doing legitimate leading-edge brilliant science and whenever they were challenged by these animal rights activists they were able to call those people in they would appear in newspaper articles i remember once they did a pro-vivisection protest i'm not kidding you in the history of the world that might be the only one in cambridge england hunted in life sciences well it wasn't the company but one of their supporters organized and all these scientists came out and they said this is a good company what they do is crucially important to our research and they were able to name off all these legitimate scientific research projects at cambridge and scientists came forward and talked about their experience and they said yeah i'm researching the cure to this disease and we paid them to do this research and this is the reality and these are the guidelines about torturing animals to death that they have to follow and there was a huge groundswell of democratic public support for entertaining life sciences it has since changed its name sorry that was part of it forget if they were purchased by a larger company they had a merger or something but they did have a rebranding they changed it but that same facility that same company it is and so you just look at how many thousand people they employ they were a huge employer they're a huge success story that is partly because they have a proven track record of doing research yes for corporations but uh universities like cambridge and oxford which are not that far apart by the way cambridge i took the bus between cambridge and oxford a few times um cambridge is not really one university it's many small universities in a cluster so these different departments and labs and agencies in cambridge each one of which contracts with uh this laboratory for animal research for whatever kind of things they're doing there was a huge amount of public sports they were a huge success it is not true that cranky vegan or anyone who was part of the shac movement accomplished something great or permanent through their protest what they accomplished was putting themselves in jail okay they did not cut it into they did not disrupt that company in any way they disrupted their own lives i'm gonna pause and and look at the uh uh okay so we have an interesting error in the audience so ddp all right ddp you got it wrong all right i don't know er ddp no it's so you have said that it's mahatma gandhi well you have neither studied sanskrit nor pali old boy mahatma is not a name maha atma it's a title okay mohandas gandhi is his name mahatma is a title okay you think you what you thought i mispronounced mahatma please please who do you think you're dealing with here aren't i always talking about uh sanskrit and pali etymology come on sanskrit and prac right here come on what kind of youtube channel do you think this is um but no i mean it's it's a big deal the way in which figures like gandhi are made into mythological representations that are convenient for the particular political agenda uh people are driving on the 21st century and it totally represents who they really were and what really happened we have a profound question here do you shave your head um yeah i have haven't i yeah that was my popular demand too at that time bunch of people um there were some questions about that there were some questions about masculinity and and shaving one's head and what what attitude once you take towards that's a couple years ago now but yeah that's right so if you search my if you search my youtube channel uh you know um okay so sam says on patreon uh cranky because 334 patrons receiving 1 736 dollars per month and he then says jail tickets okay so this is a digression but he does not actually use that money for himself interestingly or not what he does on patreon is he collects donations and then he donates each month all of those donations to an animal sanctuary or some animal rights charity and i believe the patrons vote on it i don't know what extent is done randomly or democratic but he has some kind of discussion with people he says okay so out of these four who do you want to donate it to so it's a very peculiar exercise but there is there is a lot of support for him and look we are the last of the white elephants here people i mean there are very very few talented hard-working people talking about being in politics in 2021 and i appreciate that he's doing the work he does and i'm not surprised people want to donate money to them now you know meanwhile you've just heard me point out earthling ad earns much more than 100 000 a year earthling ed just through patreon alone it's more than one hundred thousand dollars a year and this is not the only source of income so there are people making a lot of money of the vegan movement but to my knowledge uh cranky vegas is not one of them now that being said do i know what his day job is no he never mentions it something i said to him in our discussion i said look i don't know anything about your intellectual background i don't know what books he reads i don't know what books he's ever read i don't know what he studied in university like ever like i don't know what he studied just in the last five years you know i don't have any sense of his intellectual background or interest you know on my channel over time but even in this one video you get some sense okay this is a guy who's a backer and studying buddhist philosophy this is a guy who has a background in studying ancient greek and you know by the way i did not learn ancient greek let me sorry ancient greek sources in english translation you know you you quickly or slowly start to realize what it is i'm reading when i'm not physically holding up the books on camera i'm telling you about what i mean you get a sense of the intellectual background what isn't researching and who i am you don't get that with cranky vegan and you know fair enough everyone's playing the game by different rules but when you have this sort of question you know i'll come back to it after dumb reading and respond to your comments uh you know we i have a conflict between i can say you know a real question of strategy tactics morality i mean there are matters of principle here as well as matters of pragmatics right um i'm i'm talking to someone where in every important way they're just totally unknown to me because i don't know this is because he doesn't share that stuff he doesn't give you some sense of who he is uh you know ethically intellectually philosophically or even politically i've never heard him talk about bernie sanders or joe biden or you know or alexander ocasio-cortez or donald trump and how he feels about those things you know so you you really don't get that no why is that i would say it's because he comes out of a violent background you know i'm not saying he's currently violent but he came out of a more extreme form of animal rights activism i have seen him endorsing and approving of illegal and violent methods of protest that i do not approve of on my channel that i partially criticize and tell people not to do on my channel so that may give you a reason maybe even if you're not aware of it like maybe you don't consciously think i'm gonna come on camera and be evasive about my background intellectually personally professionally maybe it's just you're aware that you're playing with fire you're doing something dangerous that he's endorsing terrorism ultimately he's enforcing crimes against property and so on and so forth that he is he is definitely he is constantly endorsing uh breaking into laboratories and breaking into farms and breaking the slaughter houses and and stealing the animals out of them this kind of disruption yeah yeah yeah yeah so-called quote-unquote open rescue and this kind of thing which again puts him in the same camp with wayne siong and wayne steen has had many many criminal charges posed against him to my knowledge he's never been convicted that one way or another uh he gets that he gets out of jail so to speak to one way or another he's acquitted or that the charges are dropped but nevertheless there are there are people who keep breaking the law this way and direct action everywhere in that camp so if you guys are watching my my channel from time i'm not in that camp you know there are many reasons for that one is democracy but another is talent is scarce don't spend five years in a cage like you know you're wasting the opportunities that we have in a democracy and that people don't have in laos and don't have in cambodia and don't have in hong kong and don't have in myanmar hey hey guys if you believe in disruption if you believe in direct action if you believe in these protests the war in iraq should have ended in 2003 and little myanmar should have you know open and free and fair elections do you do you think let me ask you this honestly okay so this is a series of questions that answer themselves here guys do you think that veganism will ever be able to organize a protest as disruptive as what the people of myanmar just organized in 2021 in in all the months of 2021 the pro-democracy movement in myanmar versus the vegan movement in california who has more numbers who has more passion who is going to have more outcomes who can point to so if this works if this method works it should work 10 000 times better for those disruptive protesters in myanmar then it is working for so-called disruptive protesters in the name of veganism in the name of ecology so on and so forth parallel question for you do you think that vegans in the united states of america do you even think that vegans in the state of california will ever have the numbers will ever have the money will ever have the organization or will ever have the level of passion behind them as the anti-abortion protesters if you believe that disruptive activism is effective if you believe this kind of activism is effective then the anti-abortion movement in the last 50 years should have been 10 000 times more effective than vegan activism today or veganism that vegan activism ever has been in the past or ever could be in the future veganism as a movement will never have the advantages of the burmese pro-democracy movement of the pro-democracy movement in myanmar or of the pro-democracy movement in hong kong in case you've been sleeping through the news for the past two years right never we'll never have those numbers we'll never have that much money we'll never have that much passion we'll never have that much organization never not today not tomorrow not in the year 2050 never so if this methodology can't work for them why do you think it can work for us we will never have the level of backing the level of interest the level of support that the anti-abortion lobby has the anti-abortion just compare institution by institution the anti-abortion lobby has it all okay they have high paid expensive lawyers in washington dc they have foundations of that kind they have complete lunatics they have rednecks who are ready to kill and die they have like the most extreme violent protesters imaginable right they have the full spectrum they've been causing disruption constantly and they have no shame right they think they're on a mission from god they'll show up they will disrupt all five points of disruption they will pay for air time i don't know if you've seen this they will pay for advertisements on tv about abortion right they will pay for posters they will pay for you know like professional advertising huge billboards right sure right they'll do that right they will also show up at the abortion clinic they will show up at congress they will show up at the state legislature at city hall okay this the level of success represented by this failed movement is so many levels higher than anything vegans ever have accomplished ever would could or will accomplish but it has failed and you know what the chart to look up is i've posted on youtube before so you can go watch my old video about this if you want to see the actual chart number of abortions per capita per annum in the united states of america okay because ultimately just like eating meat just like buying meat whether or not people have abortions is a personal choice all right even if it's illegal in your state you can choose to go to another state you can choose to go to canada or mexico or europe you know most of the time you cross state lines from an anti-abortion state to a pro-abortion state if you want to ultimately it is a matter of personal choice and the number of abortions in the united states of america per person per year has not declined on the contrary i talked about this before where it has declined the cause had nothing to do with all of this activism instead the cause had to do with multiculturalism that you have huge numbers of people moving united states of america who are latin american you know central american eastern european chinese japanese they come from other cultures that are more opposed to abortion on that personal level than white anglican americans are than white protestant americans are they have a much less relaxed attitude towards that i won't die stupid thing with that a lot of people don't realize that about chinese culture you may know say catholics catholics from central america latin america that may be the stereotype oh yeah those people will refuse to get abortions unless they absolutely have to have one guess what the chinese also are really setting this portion you have an increasingly multicultural okay so i'm asking i'm asking seriously okay as a matter of strategy as a matter of tactics as a matter of morality as a matter of principle as a matter of practice why why would vegans imitate what is already a failed paradigm used by anti-abortion protesters and used in hong kong in myanmar in opposing the vietnam war in opposing the war in iraq in myriad examples so i'll just say again i'm not going to read out any of this stuff we said but at one point cranky vegan was asking me to clarify what my position was totally appropriate i have no i have no complaints about the way i was contacting this debate or discussion right i said no no i think you've really misunderstood what i'm saying i'm not saying this is 50 50. i'm not saying it's 60 40. like i'm not saying that your method and direct action everywhere's method that this protest is searching with i'm not saying it works half of the time and not saying it works 40 of the time i'm saying it works zero percent of the time i am actually making the claim that this is a bad method like it's not not it's not about relative effectiveness this is a total nihilistic rejection of exactly the kind of politics you have dedicated your life towards and you are still dedicating your life on youtube to propounding and encouraging other do it's not it's not that i think it's 10 less effective than something else right or 50 percent i am saying this is zero effective and you know what the effect is it puts people like you in jail it ruins your life right people's lives really do get ruined by this form of political activism all right so guys i'm going back to looking at the comments okay so natasha says it's all ego with social activism just functioning as a quasi-religion they're about self-expression and group affiliation period narcissist okay look so here i'm going to argue against you know my uh my my position for a moment so if you were to ask me you didn't ask me but if you were to ask me what positive do i see in this type of organization whether that be direct action everywhere or anonymous for the voiceless or even peta people for the ethical dream of animals and let's let's be clear uh wayne chiong when he found a direct action editor said that he was going to do something bold and new and different than what anyone had done before because his methods were based on social science research they were proven to be effective by science as a matter of science and cranky vegan on his youtube channel he's still saying this to this day he's still saying oh scientific scientific facts can't can't argue it's not me saying this is not my opinion the reality is all that wayne seong has done is reinvented exactly the same methods used by peta by people with ethical treatment panels petta 40 years ago took blood and had a woman in a bikini pouring blood on herself wayne seong's direct action everywhere in 2020 2001 a woman in a bikini pouring blood on herself they're the same methods everything they said they were against when they they have gone on to do exactly that so this is one uh overall problem okay but if i were to argue against that position replying to this comment from natasha here um you know people need friends and these protests i don't think they work as protests i don't think they are protests really you know i don't think they have their stated objectives but they do work as a kind of rally they do work as a kind of conference they do work as a kind of support group where you can meet like-minded people that's the most common thing a shout out to henia mania was barely alive in 2021 she's just barely clinging to her sanity and her heartbeat um but back in the day i remember she just said honestly she used to go to vegan protests to get laid she'd go to meet her next boyfriend or her next girlfriend you know she was there now you know so when you say this it's functioning as a quasi religion people go to church to get laid people go to church to find the person they're gonna marry to find someone like you know they do people go to synagogue to get late i don't know if people go to buddhist temple to get laid good luck with that but look you know um [Music] so i have some sympathy for the devil there like if you say this is a quasi religion for people well a lot of people need religion you know a lot of people need those sources of community and friendship and you may live a life where you are the only vegan you know and then when you go to an activist event like that you you get to meet some like-minded people uh that is the most positive and the most flattering thing i can say about it now if any of you try it you're gonna figure out that guys like me and guys like cranky vegan were really scarce we're really rare we're really precious you're gonna go to these events and meet the people there and go whoa talent is scarce there are a lot of people at this protest who couldn't sit in a microphone and give any kind of coherent account about what it is we're trying to accomplish here in this movement so there are a lot of frighteningly stupid people that you're gonna make yeah and frighteningly immoral people too you're gonna be terrible people going to protest so it's not all it's not all fun and games but it is partly funny games there's there's some possibility to uh you know there's some possibility to really meet like-minded people and start something um yeah so we have a complaint here about planned parenthood yes the history of planned parenthood also if you look into their founder you know one of the sorry so i'll finish that sentence the history of that organization including the actual life and writings of the founder for example what she wrote to adolf hitler her involvement with eugenics uh yeah there are reasons to raise questions about planned parenthood i made several videos talking about planned parenthood in relation to gender reassignment surgery and there are important questions to be asked there but for americans one of the most important questions of all is just why is this a private business and i say business rather than charity because this is currently being debated in the senate they actually receive government funding from the small business administration well that means you're a business and it was disqualified nobody knows how the story ends yet but it was challenged because part of the claim was well they don't count as a small business they're a big business they have more than 10 000 employees so they they shouldn't have quote this but what why would this not be a uh a government function you know this is this is part of the part of the fundamental question you know if you believe that people should have access to abortions you know why would they get it through a charity or private company or a business if access to abortion is not going to be based on your wealth it's not based on your ability to pay but it's something open to everyone equally that's something that perhaps poorer people and drug addicts need especially like people who really don't have money and may not even have all their identity cards you know i mean you can have someone who's a homeless drug addict they don't really have the paperwork even access conventional government services if you're going to make abortions available for the people who need it the most obviously that's going to be a government you know responsibility fill this with you when we talk about some things in education and so on it's like there's a point of diminishing returns like look you can't expect the church to do this anyways it's a digression but i'm interested in this person uh this time um frida comments that she remembers reading about the jehovah's witnesses failed methods to recruit believers uh by creating a sense of belonging with the members yeah um so i was i was involved with cult studies for quite a while and if you google that you'll definitely at least get some written articles i did related to cult studies um maybe just a couple of youtube videos touch on that in passing that's an area of research i'm i've i've really appreciated and benefited from my whole life and uh maybe six months ago i was talking to a professor again about the possibility am i getting a phd in that area in in cult studies um cult studies the study of what cults do and what works and what doesn't what's what's a disaster with them it's instructive also in this way i mean i said at the beginning of this video when you study a completely non-democratic society it gives you some insight into how democracies work also um there's there's a lot for us to learn from what cults are doing wrong uh put it that way but yeah very few people evaluate what it is that cults are doing that's effective how it is they how does that work um so yeah i did just within this last year part sorry partly shout out to my book this is actually discussed in a couple chapters of no more manifestos and i did quite a bit of research on a few different cult groups there's several things in the book that are discussed very briefly but i did a significant amount of research on and i talked to a few professors connected to uh some of these strange cults uh for that for that reason but you know um i would just say so someone's just encouraging me saying i should make videos on called psychology well i have so natasha i have done formal research and writing about that and it's something so when i first started the channel this channel was called a balacial my main channel i assumed i was going to be doing dialogues with atheist channels with anti-religion activists and i wanted to talk about buddhism and cult like aspects of buddhism and so on there was a lot i wanted to deal with but sure also just completely non-buddhist crazy cults there's all kinds of stuff i'd love to do but um yeah i mean at the moment that's not what i'm doing with my time energy and if i return to full-time studies at the university here then you know um you know that's that's very unlikely to uh to to significant part of the content of the channel also i mean by the way you can look at you can look at what i'm reading because you're doing weekly book review videos and you can look at what i'm planning to read so you know look i'm just being honest with you i would love to do more research on that i would love to do more videos on that one of the reasons why that didn't happen on the channel was that nobody would cooperate with me and if you look at my interactions with atheist youtubers so yeah matt dillahunty is being mentioned you mentioned i think i got an email back from him at one point and they got one reply from that but know for years and years i reached out to uh atheist youtubers anti-religion youtube and podcasts sorry it's not all not all youtube some of it podcasts other forms of activism and it's very disappointing i mean i i believe i never once got anyone who would even just talk to me you know and there are a lot of bad things to say um you know there are a lot of bad things to say about the reality of what uh atheist activism is uh it's certainly in 2021 and it's come downhill a long way since 2016. okay so some nice helpful and largely irrelevant uh comments and questions here but let's just let's just wrap up the topic of this video um [Laughter] [Music] look you know um politics is not entirely about right and wrong politics is in large part about whether or not people care you know and i think if you guys are listening to the you know message of this video as a whole even if a few moments i'm kind of angry and ranting of quotas and comics you can tell i care i mean i've been coming on youtube talking about this for seven years because i care and before youtube i was already on the internet because i care um i remember there was a young woman uh i knew her for something like three years over the internet never met face to face and every time i was talking to her about vegan activism and slaughterhouses whatever i was saying to her stay out of jail don't do this you know and she had rage issues and yes you could see it in stupid comments she made the internet most people laughed at it because she was a woman too people were like oh she's just a girl she does she doesn't actually mean she's going to hurt somebody yes she does because i knew her well enough to know and i remember one of our conversations i started that i said look you know i see this stuff you're saying on the internet i see other people think it's a joke but i know it's not like i know you i don't know where that will but i know you well enough to know what's going on everybody you're this is really what you're about you know when you're going to get yourself put in prison and this is you know uh and you know and also this is wrong i mean this is terrorism i mean it's i think it's bad and evil and wrong and counter-productive okay i'll i'll continue with the editor that young movement okay but look what it says there were protests in england about one week ago now and cranky vegan discussed them on his youtube channel all right and the main method used was blocking the roads that allowed people to access certain slaughterhouses processing centers distribution centers i think it was actually the distribution centers really not where the animals were slaughtered i think after it was packaged when the meat was sent out to mcdonald's restaurants okay okay so this was in one sense effective right like they blocked the roads and for a couple days mcdonald's supply chain didn't work there wasn't enough me now now really really what would be the sign that vegan activism is affected when you look at the chart of how many pounds of beef how many pounds of chicken how many pounds of pork how many pounds of fish every american is eating per capita per year when you look at the chart it's an easy chart to get you can get it right now united nations publishers of those citizens but many many many many sources in the internet you can get this okay when you look at that chart the numbers would be going down right what would be the sign the signal that anti-abortion activism is working when you look at the chart of number of abortions per capita that the number is going down right anything else is failure right and with something like veganism i mean really this is a sense in which veganism and abortion are are similar or are comparable right with veganism you would see incremental progress on that chart it wouldn't just be a binary on off switch it's not like oh we used to have slavery and now slavery is abolished you would be seeing the progress towards the goal as you move closer closer same with abortion right it's not like overnight people would decide abortions are immoral and it would disappear but if their movement were successful you would be seeing declining abortion rates in the chart and maybe you'd even see dips corresponding to particular campaigns like well that was the year they did this disruption campaign i mean it's again abortion activists do the same stuff they block access to the hospital they block access to the abortion clinic and then people can't get them like they will physically obstruct we'll do this kind of thing um but the charts don't show progress the charts don't show that we're winning the charts don't show anything anything uh positive uh you know in terms of the progress of a veganism's movement whatsoever okay all right this is this is real we're gonna say when you look at and you approve of these protests by vegan activists in england where they they were accomplishing their protest by blocking roads having an economic effect some people are morally opposed to vaccines how would you feel if they right now exercise their opposition to vaccines by blocking the roads some people support hamas a terrorist organization quite a lot of people on the left wing paradoxically support ms how would you feel if there were muslim fundamentalists or muslim terrorist groups and their form of activism is blocking the roads blocking the roads strategically to shut down what their political opponents want to do how would you feel if they were catholics morally opposed to abortion who were shutting down the roads if you do not believe that in a democratic society this method of activism this method of protest is permissible for everyone then you believe it's permissible for no one okay and if you set the precedent that you can get away with this if this is okay for wayne seong and direct action airport if this is okay for vegans if this is acceptable for us then it's acceptable for the redneck fascist right-wing extremists then it's acceptable for the muslim extremists then it's acceptable for every other fringe ideology because in case you haven't figured it out veganism is a french ideology i will just repeat we will never have the numbers we will never have the level of public sport we'll never have the level of organization or money behind us we'll never have the institutional backing that already the anti-abortion movement has we are a tiny fringe movement compared to the anti-abortion i knew this young woman every time i talked to her the last several times i talked to her you know my message to her was i don't want you to end up in prison don't do this i gotta change your way of thinking about vegan activism environmentalism you know animal rights like you know and you know even if she doesn't end up in prison right there is a real sense in what she was driving herself crazy she believed impossible things and she lived her life in a tense anxious awful said sense of moral contradiction at all times right that's that's where the violence is coming from and she told me about an incident where she was driving down the road in her car and she had some trivial conflict with a guy on the sidewalk i think it was about parking and she stopped the car got out of the car ran down the street and punched him in the back of the head as hard as she could she she left up and punched his gun back you know so this is someone who had you know if you can go to jail for that um you could also kill someone i mean you know it's alright you don't know your own strength and you don't know the other person's weakness right like you don't know what the consequences are you get to choose your actions you don't get to choose other people's reactions you don't get to choose the consequences and yeah also that guy could have turned around and punched her back which she didn't apparently you know she could she could have been very badly hurt directly in return you know this is someone dealing with dealing with all these things so you know i kind of had my honor i was talking to her and again it's something i was dealing with my agent a lot you know i am not going to endorse methods of activism that i both i think they're ineffective i think they're counterproductive i think they're an insult to democracy i think they're an insult to your intelligence i think they're a waste your time right and i don't want you to put yourself in jail you know that story ends she got pregnant and had a kid that's the truth you know what all of that [ __ ] all of her commitment to vegan activism just disappeared because she got pregnant had a kid now she had other priorities in life and i don't really know what kind of a mother she turned out to be we haven't kept in touch since then um i wish her the best but that was how she stayed out of prison and i remember she kept it up she really believed she was running back to me and saying oh no she would justify that like oh no like burning down a slaughterhouse like firebomb attacks like real terrorist on this bar never she really believed you know uh she really believed this was effective she really believed this is the future all right guys you know i got more to say but i think i'm gonna put a pin in it and call that uh call that a video um politics is only partly about being right you know or being wrong right politics begins with and ends with human beings you know all the world's history and all the world's riddles all the world's truth and all the world's lies have to fit into the span of one human lifetime you know you have to bring these things down to a human scale and stop thinking about the future of your movement in terms of an abstract truth that you have to serve like the truth is that so many millions of animals are dying every month this is this great truth and this great crime and now you become beholden to it you know now the truth is you're a human being the truth is that you have to live a whole and meaningful life and you shouldn't put yourself in prison for the sake of the abstract ideal of democracy in hong kong and you shouldn't put yourself in prison for the abstract ideal of democracy and myanmar and you shouldn't put yourself in prison for the abstract ideal of of a vegan diet and you know there are counter examples that these people don't talk about they talk about the end of the vietnam war which they're completely ignorant of they don't know why the vietnam war ended when it did now it did they talk about the protests against the war in iraq you know they talk about the arab spring right none of those protests changed the world the way voltaire did when he wrote candide okay voltaire didn't really know anything about slavery he didn't really know anything about torture he didn't really know anything about war you know he didn't really have any deep issue but he was able to write a book where he poured a lot of feeling into it and he really gets it across to you that he cares he gets across to you that this is not fit for human beings this life that's become normal in europe and that time people being tortured to death as heretics in spain and portugal slavery in the new world all of these horrors and what's come to be seen as normal and even honorable in wars within europe he just poured his heart out in this book and this very poorly written book it's a terrible book right he just poured his heart out and wrote a book and told you how he felt and he told you how much he cared and it changed the world okay it changed the world in a way that none of these protests have and that none of them can and none of them ever will in the year 2020 black lives matter protesters they burned down a wendy's they burned down a wendy's chicken and meat restaurant you know i do not approve of burning down a restaurant in the name of veganism and i don't believe in it in the name of ending police brutality and it's not because i love wendy's hamburgers or because i support private enterprise or you know if i believe that burning down every wendy's restaurant in america would actually reform policing that would actually provide a more moral a more responsible a less violent police force of course i'd be willing to do it okay how stupid do you have to be to think that burning down a wendy's restaurant is gonna bring about police reform and it hasn't happened yet this is now may 28th 2021 it didn't work guys that protest movement it didn't get the results it didn't get the outcomes there hasn't been any reform there isn't anything to show the black people who were killed in those protests they've stayed dead they're dead forever the buildings the whole city blocks that were burnt down the stores that were looted and destroyed right that damage is done and it hasn't been repaired yet it hasn't been painted over yet right we have the negative consequences we have no positive outcomes to show for it okay and the problem is we live in a society where the majority of people the majority left or right vegan or meat eater pro-abortion or anti-abortion the vast majority of people believe in violent disruptive protest activism the vast majority of people really are stupid enough to think that burning down a wendy's restaurant in a riot is the way to save the planet