(SLIGHTLY PHILOSOPHICAL) Vegan Gains: Channel Deleted.

if you guys know me you know my channel
you'll know that when I comment on a crisis or news story the moment I try to do so in a way that produces a video that would still be interesting to me if I came back and watched it myself five years from now when those fleeting circumstances had long been forgotten the controversy and crisis at the moment is that YouTube has deleted the channel of vegan gains and in deleting his channel they have deprived him of his livelihood he has been economically dependent on YouTube for many years a dependency created by his success my father said very few wise things to me when I was growing up but I remember each and every one of them quite distinctly was once talking to my father I was a really little kid I was so young at that stage that I had never watched normal television I had never watched a mainstream movie my parents at that age only allowed me to watch two TV channels that had no advertising and that played a lot of educational programming you know documentaries about owls in the forest and that kind of thing and I said to my father even though it was such a little kid you know I had been thinking about becoming a comedian but I've heard about this thing called advertising like really I'd heard about advertising on the schoolyard children were talking about some hilarious advertisement that was on TV at that time they were laughing about some jokes made in an advertisement I said you know don't you think that's a better way to earn a living to do comedy to be a comedian but to work in advertising my father's answer was and this haunted me for at least many months and I was a little kid I really thought about it he said well you know I think that comedians have a necessary job I think they perform an important social service because people need to laugh and he said I don't believe that advertising serves a positive social purpose he went on to say a few more things than that if you guys watch this channel regularly you will know my father was a left-wing extremist even with the in communism he was a communist extremist he was a radical compared to other radicals so obviously his view of this of who is a social parasite and who is not was extreme also but as the little kid I then really looked around the world and it was such a strange frame of reference because I suddenly looked around the world which you know at that time still largely consists of the schoolyard and my teacher and the parents of my few friends the friends I'd made at school and I started asking myself who here is doing a job that positively benefits society and had a father who was really teaching me this this was his sincere perspective he really did think that comedians did slim positive for society he really did think that an actor performing Shakespeare was doing some positive for society believed in theater and the arts in that sense it wasn't a kind of narrow wasn't a narrowly utilitarian view of what you should do to serve society nor nor a humanitarian view or charitable view or what-have-you he really was not interested in getting out in helping the poor he wasn't probably the aspect of Richards act that I sympathize with the most is comedy and you guys have seen me comment recently on the deletion of the YouTube channel by monkey Jones monkey Jones is also comedian and if you've been watching this channel regularly out of my last ten videos many of them have been comedy really like you guys may not see it this way but I think that veganism as a movement is going through a very dark period I think a lot of us need to be able to step back and take a laugh have a laugh at ourselves maybe reflect on what happened in the last five years and look ahead to the next five years and you know I'm not saying we should only laugh at what's happened but sure I think there's a real need for comedy sort of now more than ever when veganism is at a low ebb when veganism is at a kind of needy okay well that haven't been said I also do see people like Richard people like vegan gains as partly at fault partly to blame for why veganism is is at this okay so I do sympathize with the role of the comedian the role of the satirist and the importance of comedy as a source of social criticism reflection and even just kind of emotional part of people's emotional well-being put it that way and I think that people like Richard and even people like monkey Jones even comedians who do things that are very offensive and edgy or what-have-you I think they can and do play a play an important role and I've been tempted at different times in my life to go back to comedy to do stand-up comedy - like formally prepare and rehearse script and do it on stage and then upload that to YouTube within the last five years at several points I've really seriously considered that ie I remember discussing it with one of my professors and I know it's unusual he was a university professor who actually his main career was being a comedy writer and including live live stand-up comedy acting and comedy that was very much his background so I wasn't discussing it with him for no reason Richard eliminated himself and you know the size and success of your YouTube channel does not reflect the depth of your understanding of how YouTube works many of you were shocked when I came on here just a few weeks ago and I praised the website patreon but that praise was sincere the way censorship works within patreon is infinitely better than the way censorship works within YouTube or the way censorship works within Twitter twitter is probably the worst of these examples in Twitter you can have your whole account eliminated instantly just for using the wrong verb um if you quote a rap lyric on Twitter that can result in your Twitter being deleted and there is no human face-to-face process where you can say hey look I was just quoting rap lyric or I was just joking around the wrong word can result your Twitter account being deleted forever now admittedly most people do not earn money from their Twitter account but still it's scary mmm it's scary to know that's the line you have to walk on Twitter and nobody explains it to you nobody gives you the list of forbidden words and they Twitter could just pop up a warning you know if you're gonna post something that would violate their their code you know there is kind of there's no seat belt with Twitter right I have more experience than most people I probably have more experience than the vast majority of successful youtubers with YouTube threatening to delete my channel so I know I am not remotely as successful as Richard in terms of the size of my audience but put it this way I have been targeted for deletion for unfair I've been flagged and reported and had to face complaints to an unbelievable stunt and if you look through the videos in this channel you can guess to some extent why but just one person my ex-wife alone her efforts to get this channel deleted it's a lot it's a lot to deal with and the various people have criticized they all have fans they've all come here trying to get this channel deleted and the process of the YouTube is very unfair very arbitrary and sometimes you get a notice where you have like 48 hours to reply and there's no explanation even what it is you're supposed to be explaining I've faced these kinds of hostile and reasonable threats you know they're really kind of the same thing no matter which heading the runner I've faced threats from YouTube again it's indirectly of course this all comes from someone in the audience flagging what you've said a for copyright violation but again really it's this kind of political censorship with copyright violation being the excuse I have been accused of racism and hate speech and I've had to counter that I've mentioned that in the past videos in which I was criticizing a neo-nazi for openly being in where I was criticizing someone else for that people flagged the video as if I were in support of the views that I was very clearly harshly condemning and YouTube didn't care I was still punished as if I were the one guilty of hate speech we've had a bizarre example that just the last week with an isiand having one of his channels delete a Tennesseans a mainstream comedy youtuber but he got his channel deleted for hate speech and he ultimately won on appeal basically every excuse in pretexts but including including harassment I've had harassment complaints made against this channel now very briefly what YouTube will not explain to you is that they are part of the American tradition of jurisprudence and in the American tradition the reason why freedom of speech is protected the reason for freedom of speech ultimately is political criticism and commentary and that's why I get away with being as harsh as I am on YouTube so I just now I was at the gym and I was because I heard my girlfriend told me what was at the gym that Richard got deleted I was going through my past criticisms of freely and asking myself did I ever really say anything harsh enough that I would get my channel deleted for it when I was criticizing freely and you know there are two things one listening to it it's not that harsh it's not that brutal but to the things I said that were so harsh were very much in the context of a political criticism I was talking about vegan activism I was talking about the political movement of starting with the politics of what's going on in veganism and that is your shield with YouTube say hey look I'm doing sling here that serves a legitimate political purpose right and that's that's see this is like the positive definition of freedom speech that's what freedom of speech is for that's what puts you outside of the area of harassment right so you can imagine if I criticized Sarah Palin Sarah Palin is an obscure now obscure American political leader if I criticized Sarah Palin saying that she has no talent and she only got ahead in politics because of her appearance that's very different from a high school student criticizing another high school student that and YouTube they literally have to deal with that just teenagers who come on and say that you know some girl in their math class only got an A on the math test because she's good-looking or something so it's it's very strange and YouTube they're making the same mistake Twitter makes they don't give you a seatbelt they don't give you a warning they don't give you clear rules the rules are intentionally vague and a fuss Kotori however I did discuss this with Richard years ago when I had the threat that my channel be deleted I got a formal strike or even afraid of as a series of strikes maybe just one strike against the channel for quote-unquote bullying and harassment in a very mild video you can still see on this channel against Ted car but I was criticizing Ted car for his diet advice and for his philosophy of Education and career what he said about dropping at a school and not having a career this this kind of thing and it was very harsh I I did criticize him very harshly on Thurs I assume it hurt his feelings and from my perspective that's legitimate freedom of speech for political reasons but I see why it was that video not my criticism of freely not like talking about future the vegan movement politically it was that video that I was punished for by YouTube that's harassment here's the thing Richard recently made a whole series of comments on this channel say more than a dozen comments that absolutely qualify as harassment and bullying by YouTube's definition now I did not flag them I did not complain but they have that on file right and I don't know maybe someone else flagged those comments maybe someone alerted Richard to this or maybe he just felt ashamed a couple days after you posted them but Richard took the time to come back and manually click on each one and delete each of the comments he made here to cover his tracks if you like well you know YouTube the comment they'll still have a record of that if you make a racist comment and then delete it they still have a comment taste over that the definition of harassment and bullying on YouTube as soon as you're not engaged in legitimate political criticism it's it's very very tight there is no doubt that Richards channel could be deleted just for him coming on my channel and making vulgar insulting bullying and harassing comments about about my penis size that's what he was doing right it was really immature he was acting like high school students acting like a twelve-year-old okay the Richard knows this Richard knows the rules of the games that we play here on YouTube he knows exactly why his channel got deleted I say this with the awareness it's it's possible it's really likely that YouTube will reinstate his channel but when YouTube is looking at his record if I know I know he said things much much more harsh and brutal and with threats of violence and this kind of thing I know he said things both verbally on camera and in writing in YouTube comments they'll have a list of hundreds and hundreds of comments that count as bullying and harassment about YouTube's definition and those comments do not serve a legitimate political purpose and coming back to my first point in this video Richard it's not funny it's not comedy so those are two justifications for doing what we do here on YouTube and Richard you really messed up because you stepped outside the balance of either one and for that I think unfairly you have been eliminated