Nihilist Booktube (the American Constitution and Its Discontents)

good evening good afternoon
hello world as we used to say at the beginning of the internet i'm going to start by reading a short passage from woody holton's unruly americans this is a book that has gotten mentioned a great deal on my youtube channel lately and it is a book that i've quoted in writing my own strange volume i'm writing a book right now that is titled no more manifestos i would just mention the discussion of the history and present political implications of the american constitution has got to be the least popular topic on my youtube channel and i don't get it if you look at the videos i have discussing woody holton's book and i did several close succession because i've been doing so much reading and research lately about the american constitution uh they get fewer views than my discussion of the politics of belarus the politics of chile the politics of china out in xinjiang and so on right like i've covered some pretty obscure political topics on my channel and uh it's strange to me you know the american constitution influenced the writing of basically every other constitution in the world as it now exists it influenced the writing of the japanese constitution and of communist china's constitution and so on it is not you know it is not purely an american affair um by any means and you know obviously it seems to me 2021 is a year when there ought to be especially profound um introspection about the american constitution and you know as i keep saying what next what now now i'll just uh before we dispatch your mention you know i have had some email back and forth with professor woody holton i very much appreciate his uh taking the time but that also i mean i feel a certain connection to you and fondness for the book if you look him up on youtube you'll get to hear him stating his opinion although most of the youtube videos are fully 10 years old uh one of the main sentiments i expressed to him in correspondence is this in case you haven't picked this up from my my youtube videos dealing with these issues either directly or tangentially you know it's really false to assume that the elite are wrong about something just because they are the elite and it is wrong to assume that the poor and the oppressed are correct something in politics just because they are uh porno pressed now i also know there's a rule here that the very best anthropologists are familiar with unfortunately i can't say as any good anthropologist would know anthropology is a field in a in part a powerless condition 21st century paulus parliament uh but you know if i if i were to talk to you about the politics of thailand and i said you will you know in thailand there is this small american educated economic elite there are these people who are wealthy and they own the shopping malls and they partly got inspired by going to america and seeing what american shopping thailand has much better shopping malls in the united states america i am not a shopping mall aficionado but still you know if you were to say well there is this kind of pro-democracy uh american-educated and culturally americanized elite in thailand and here's their agenda here's what they want um in the current debates in thailand about how they're going to rewrite the constitution how many constitutions have been written in thailand during my lifetime in which they are more or less constantly drafting a new constitution in thailand because it's happened again and again and again nobody in this audience would suppose oh well these must be terrible people the people whose opinion about politics matters are the poor and downtrodden farmers it must be that we get out to the rice paddies it must be that we get out and talk to the most illiterate most backward people in the remote hinterland we have to ask them what the constitution should be and what the future of the country you know uh politically should be they must be the benighted be knighted in every sense the word you know they must be the people gifted with some kind of uh benevolent attitude and profound insight about how politics and country ought to work now given that we would not see the politics of thailand this way given that we certainly would not see the politics of afghanistan this way or iran when you look at iran we seem to only care about the western knife of one percent of the population those people we think have enlightened attitudes about what the past present future of iran ought to be why when we look at our own uh history we have this very peculiar anti-elitist bias oh i'm just gonna you know my you know my steez i keep it all the way real this is something i had to go out of myself you know i think it's i'm canadian i utterly despise elite canadian culture i've i have no respect whatsoever for someone who was born the child of wealthy landlord parents in toronto like their parents own apartment buildings and collect their rhyme from those apartments and it went through uh one of our elite law schools uh you know in downtown toronto and then served a role at queen's park and so i have absolutely no respect for those people i even i even have some very active disrespect for those people and you know although canada is not a hotbed of rebellion i think the vast majority of people feel the same way i do there is a you know this is also i mean frankly this is one of the characteristics i would say of the majority of american culture democrat or republican it's so widespread that people don't question it sort of healthy contempt for elites you know characterizes all of america very different from british culture you know that someone within a refined accent an elite education representing the city representing london england that an elite barrister in london has some kind of social status and respect and so on uh you know that um in american society i mean i really think that's fair to say you know whether you're talking about the state of michigan or the state of texas i think there is a kind of healthy contempt for people from elite backgrounds where it's like well you know maybe you have something to teach me maybe you know something i don't but you haven't proved it yet let's see what you're made of um now there are doubles you know disadvantages to this this attitude also you know i have to say growing up in the culture that i did in canada having no respect for the elite no respect for my own teachers who were terrible people no respect for my professors who were with almost no exceptions terrible people you know um having nobody to look up to in this particular society which evolved in the shadow of slavery and genocide and my generation could never forget it you know i having grown up in the shadow of the anglican church that nobody believes in i mean if you think catholicism was discredited in my generation talk about british anglicanism the status of the anglican church in canada or in england itself it's you know level of esteem has fallen much much lower so you have um a very different relationship between the the social strata than what you have for example in communist china let alone uh let alone england so you have this to begin with it certainly was a habit of mind i had as a young man both in looking at canadian politics and when i was first getting involved in the politics of thailand the politics of cambodia the politics of laos and so on that you would look at this situation with the assumption that the people at the periphery whether that's literally and geographically the rural periphery the farmers living in poverty on the cusp or people who were just uh part of the downtrodden poor that somehow those are the people whose political opinion matters and whatever it was that was being said by the elite must reflect some kind of self-interested conspiracy that ought to be uh rebuffed or scoffed at as you know mirror mere self-serving nonsense so you know there's a certain bias and okay in some other context i might say that this were a stereotypically left-wing bias typical it is right now the right way the whole donald trump rested on the shoulders of you know a generation of americans some just for rednecks who were willing to say willing to presume that everything said on the news was some kind of you know tissue of lies that everything everything said by an authority figure whether it be a university professor or you know an elite educational establishment uh elites connected to practice of medical science you know elites explicitly or implicitly connected to the the political structure of life this scoffing at elite figures and presuming that they have their own self-interested reasons to say whatever they say that they're they're only saying something because it's going to make more money for a corporation like pfizer or madarina you know that they represent big farms on that runs really deep in the 21st century both on the left and on the right so anyway this is a digression and yet very much the point when i wrote to uh professor woody holton the main thing i said to him was apart from giving him the link to my video which he watched i'm glad he found the time to watch it the main thing i said to him was look we really make a profound error in judgment when we presume that the elite are wrong just because they're elite or we presume that the poor are right just because they are poor just because they are the oppressed you know i think we all have a sense that you ought to make a special effort to listen to the voices of the oppressed because they're oppressed because if you don't listen if you don't make that effort they're not going to have this kind of institutional force and broadcasting behind them um but nevertheless you know they can be 110 wrong and he replied to me i i'm not going to disclose the details of anyone's private response but he didn't reply to me thoughtfully and saying well you know now in 2021 after the events of january 6 2021 happened we all have to really you know as i said we have to kind of re-examine our positive bias in favor of poor and uneducated farmers so i mean i'm guessing that in the social circles he moves in uh where i mean okay if you're a career if you're a career university professor in the united states of america how much time do you spend with farmers how much time do you spend talking politics with high school dropouts how often do you meet someone who unironically goes to church you know there's a there's a whole range of political perspectives that you may be willingly or unwillingly you know blind to those are not the people you meet that's not people listen so hey guys um i just see some questions from the audience uh what a totally reasonable question let's say you'll like this isil what do you make of the whole situation with the uyghurs in concentration camps in china and someone has said oh google xinjiang on his channel and you'll get some videos so yes i have made several videos with that and we have the world's most slow-moving research project on it which is discussed in an earlier live stream we have a stack of books here we're going to present but yes you will find that i have my own shockingly unique and original perspective on that that rather challenges uh what the mainstream media has been chewing on for the past uh several years um speaking of speaking of revivaling the mainstream media is nothing but nothing but the issue of lies look the reality is you can't be an expert in everything i didn't say anything about this in the last video um i remember the first time i met a young woman with a master's degree who had just returned from xinjiang she might have not yet received her message but she was doing her m.a research in the field in xinjiang i heard her give a lecture and i talked to her directly afterwards that was my first that was probably the first time i ever really heard of were talking about xinjiang that was when i was in toronto about 2001 that kind of put in my mind when i was at cambridge england i spoke to there's one i really remember speaking to but maybe there were two researchers connected to synthetics one guy spoke to it like they've been living there and learning the language talking to people and doing uh doing research and then i was physically in china when the xinjiang stabbing olympics happened when there were riots and stabbings on the streets and i saw the chinese government response to that so at that time so there were many points in my life that you know peaked to my i always said uh i would not list it in my top 10 research interests but it is something i have been interested in reading about for much of my adult life intermittently to say the least when i wasn't studying cambodia or laos or history of genocide and canada the american constitution these other things we're talking about uh but the people who work for nbc and abc and the ppc most of these they don't they don't even have my level of background so if you want to say that i'm an interested amateur and dealing with xinjiang and the politics of western china and central asia nevertheless if you add up all the hours and you add up the number of brain cells devoted to this um you know you have to recognize most of the people playing this game they have not put in any of that any of that time but yeah i don't know i mean i seriously suggested to my girlfriend melissa that the two of us could take on a kind of research project in central asia i have sent emails to universities in central asia proposing the idea that we actually moved there that we would go and live there for a time not xinjiang itself that would be politically impossible but just over the border into those adjacent central asian countries i think at 42 i'm 42 years old now i think i think it might be too late for me to go out and boldly strike out i don't i don't know if i can do again in xinjiang what i once did in cambodia put it that way but you know it's it's something i take seriously and you know we've we've talked about it take it seriously and look compared to other well hey we're just talking about attitudes towards uh economic and educational elites what would be more meaningful if i went and opened a small hotel in central asia it doesn't matter that much for me uzbekistan or kurdistan but you know we can say kyrgyzstan not that my pronunciation is great you know but if for me to go and open and operate a small hotel there and learn chinese and teach chinese and and make youtube videos about politics or to study and pass the bar here and become a lawyer in western canada what do you think would be a more meaningful use of the next five years of my life you don't have to answer we're not going to have a poll we're not going to vote my point is even if this were a terrible idea it's better than a lot of other supposedly self-evidently good ideas that people entertain and you can learn a lot you can learn a lot while not being you know while not being formally enrolled in any uh educational program okay and in my experience at the opposite it's incredibly hard to find a formal educational program in which you will learn anything at all okay so quoting uh woody holton in unruly americans you'll see why i'm quoting this passage this is just in the last few pages of the book quote anyone who has broken off a chunk of the past and thoroughly scrutinized it will tell you the same thing it always turns out that the truth of the matter is hidden under a thick coat of communist perceptions what is striking about the genesis of the constitution is that the confusion is not limited to the ill informed indeed a different set of myths seem to conceal the framers motives at every level of expertise a 100 donation from the peanut gallery quote hi isil got a question for you is it worth to promote politics nihilism etc through fiction to young adults okay great question i'm going to continue reading this passage and i'll come back and uh i'll come back and discuss further what your questions about by the way it is not 100 us dollars it's 100 of some foreign currency i i know not the name of could be russian rubles no but thank you for the donation i'll i'll just continue reading this you'll see this book it doesn't rely on he doesn't rely on a great deal of so shall we say rhetorical fireworks but he has some nice turns of phrase here uh in the conclusion americans who spend the least time thinking about the constitution often confuse it with either the declaration of independence or the bill of rights i.e these are in fact three very different things they credit the framers with a passionate urge to safeguard civil liberties such as gun rights and freedom of religion and speech authors who mention the constitution of passing for instance in the biographies of the founders and in school textbooks avoid that error they say the dragon the framers were trying to slay was the weakness of the federal government under the articles of confederation that view is not wrong but we will never fully understand why the constitutional convention was held until we grasped the full implications of james madison's october 1787 assertion that the quote-unquote mutability and injustice of the laws of the states had contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the convention and prepared the public mind for general reform than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the confederation close quote a growing number of historians of the constitution acknowledged that one of its architect's most pressing goals was to transfer certain key responsibilities from the state legislatures to a new national government capable of resisting pressure from below some scholars go still further showing that the framers anti-democratic ideology was rooted in their disgust at the damage state governments had allegedly done to the economy but most of these historians who focused on the elitist character of the constitution commit an important error of their own mistaking the federalists biased assessment of the crisis that led to the constitution for reality suppose if you've read the whole book you know there was a great deal of propagandizing involving including and not limited to outright lies about what really was uh what really was going on what what were the reasons for what what the constitution promised and what she said the federalist papers for example if you are reading the federalist papers you are reading propaganda now that doesn't mean it's of no value but in one of the most famous uh books on this topic uh written by this guy written by bernard balen so bernard balin's book written in his youth what it was on the ideology of the american revolution it was a collection of pamphlets used in the american revolution so people have a strange and unsophisticated view of this if you're going to analyze political pamphlets you know during a revolution at all times or you know in the lead up to a revolution you know this to say it's a biased source is an understatement and the federalist papers likewise are incredibly biased and these are presented in high school classrooms and everything else in an unbelievably unsophisticated way so i'm i'm here obviously digressing from the text of quoting but i'm filling in with something that something the reader might already know or appreciate uh when they got to the well they got this point uh in the text i don't know i i i continue my quotation in the damage they do to american civic life these writers surpassed the amateurs and the ill-informed during the 1780s they say some of the most prominent men in the nation accused the american farmer of proving himself incapable of running the country and the farmer was guilty as charged the framers carved this accusation of plebeian incompetence into the cornerstone of the evidence great one verbal type before the framers carved this accusation of plebeian incompetence into the cornerstone of the edifice they constructed in philadelphia and although the document has been amended the attitude that spawned it has not today americans exude immense pride in the democratic republic but beneath that surface sentiments lurk ah heated up he needed a hyphen there beneath that surface sentiment lurk nagging feelings not only that you can't fight city hall but that you shouldn't since we all know what happens when ordinary folk get their hands on the levers of power those at least are the messages conveyed both by the structure of the federal government which was also the model used in subsequent revisions of the state constitutions and by the history lessons that buttressed it so just going to uh just going to uh digress here to mention we've been reading a couple of the state constitutions and uh yeah well look guys i mean i don't know who is still who is motivated to come and uh come in and troll this comment section have you read the book um you know as as this youtube channel becomes more and more erudite and tone maybe we'll get a higher and higher quality of uh of uh troll coming in to disrupt us to disrupt us in more and more inspirational and destructive ways um anyway you know when you look at the state constitutions um it's interesting to note the first was the constitution of massachusetts so for those who are not american boston is the leading city of massachusetts and it was an important place in the revolutionary period it's still a somewhat important place today but not as important as it was back then um massachusetts just for the state just for the state their house of representatives had about 400 people in it at the time of the the time of the constitution in this era and it grew and grew to have more than 700 people in it so just at the state level to have 400 people representation by population rep by pop as we say in canada and then as the population grew and the number of towns grew um they had 700 people meeting to express the will of the local farmers what have you so that was an idea of democracy very different from the federal constitution of the united states of america which began with only 65 people there were only 65 representatives in the house of congress so just the state of massachusetts which is really built around the unique economy of boston at that time 400 growing to 700 as opposed to at a national scale you know uh only only 65 people so i mean uh quantitative differences have qualitative significance when are we talking about a democracy and what are we talking about what aristotle would call an oligarchy and indeed an aristocratic oligarchy at that um you know how many thousands if you have the same ratio of representation obviously there are thousands of thousands of people um in the american house of congress which could also be a terrible system of government incidentally but yeah uh these are uh these are interesting questions that are both asked and that americans refuse to ask themselves in looking back at this this period of history as i said in an earlier video why is it that the american constitution is less democratic than the 13 state constitutions a challenge and every place and why is it less democratic than the ancient constitutions of athens of rome you can pick your own i i think it's even less democratic than say uh you know medieval florence and venice and so on sparta is a more interesting debate to get to is america more or less democratic than sparta and whose version of sparta are we evaluating at least at least in sparta they had a vote before going to war right it was a democratic decision for whether or not to start the war so there was there was more democracy in sparta than you might think there was no vote in the united states americans before the start of the war in iraq or the start of the war in afghanistan there's no vote now at the end either we're not going to have a referendum uh on the war no nor did ever at any point in the united states mark okay final paragraph from this little passage of mark death right here quote of course the safeguards against grassroots pressure that were built into the american political system are much less rigid than those found in countries that do not even claim to be republics on the other hand they are considerably more insidious the framers designed the federal government to be much less accessible than it seems as zephaniah swift put it in 1792 let me just say one of the delights of this book is just the names if you're looking for good baby names you should buy this book you want to get into your kid zephaniah or adonijah they're all these great revolutionary era names that have disappeared they haven't just disappeared from the english language they disappeared from the hebrew language a lot of these are like garbled hebrew names as zephaniah swift put it in 1792 ordinary americans are quote told that nothing confines them close quote and yet they remain impounded the sinister beauty of the constitution in particular the immensity of congressional districts is that when citizens find they cannot influence national legislation their tendency is not to curse the system but to blame themselves i'm going to read that sentence one more time not a lot of rhetorical fireworks in this book but that is a nice moment he left for the very end of the volume this is not the last page but this is the the concluding uh concluding few pages the sinister beauty of the constitution in particular the immensity of congressional districts is that when citizens find they cannot influence national legislation their tendency is not to curse the system but to blame themselves oh so here's here's an interesting question so guys i will come back to the question from creative nothing uh but i've said at this moment it'd be nice to answer some questions directly related to what i've just read you from woody holden's book frida asks to what extent was their racist migration policy to have a preference for northern european center of the u.s shaping american democracy right well so i've got a book you haven't read yet but this is really the book on that topic and maybe it is not honest enough so the subtitle for this one is the peopling of british north america 1600 1675 so even that phrase the peopling of so you know the active genocidal elimination of the indigenous people and the active importing of different types of europeans now let's ask a further question uh what about the level of education of the white europeans who are being imported and this is one of the trickiest things to measure of all the level of education of the europeans who remained in north america because there were highly educated europeans who came from england to the united states for example and a lot of them went back you know you can imagine if you're a lawyer or if you're any any kind of a person with a with a successful career and you're highly educated medical doctor you might try your luck you come from england out to the colonies the same way many went to say india another difficult and dangerous calling you might stay for five years 10 years or 15 years and then once you had the whether you'd saved up some money or you'd lost all your money you'd go back to england so you were disproportionately getting the roughest uh the least educated and the most brutal you know sort of people who were coming and staying but you know um the other thing to remember freda is we're talking about an era when there was no formal education none and by the way not even for medical doctors um look into how medicine was taught how people wrote the exams to certify themselves the medical doctors in that era even to become a naval surgeon which was about the most verified form of surgeon in the british empire was to to say hey i've the i have the paperwork to perform surgery on behalf of the british navy um it was a joke you could just study independently and show up and write an exam and there were some embarrassing revelations that you could study for about two weeks and know everything you needed to know to write that exam so formal education didn't exist so when you say oh well what like if if you're asking about the ethnicity of people who settle north america really what you're getting at is their traditions culturally and the type of education they have largely just through talking to their own grandparents going to church and what have you and indeed reading the english book of common prayer this sort of thing so yeah that was even more important at that time because of the weakness of or total absence of book learning among the particular combination of what your pants but yeah one of the things i know that bernard balon is interested in this book and again he was about 90 years old when he wrote this so he's an old man at the end of a long and successful career i'm not his i'm not his biggest fan i'm i am a much bigger fan of woody holden here um [Music] americans often are in denial about the extent to which they were german and things like that but they weren't all british that it was a very strange assembly melissa herself you have the map of the united states written all over your face melissa that's an old prank you you you with the map of ireland written all over your face that's the old that's the old saying so i'm saying melissa you know you i.e you carry the american character in your in your face but melissa is a mix of northern european and german and you have some english in you yes what percentage of you is is english from england 25 not bad it's more more than i would have gambled on anyway we all share this kind of phony british empire identity but um you know again it's circus 1600 to 1675 and given that people had so little access to book learning uh no it's it's it's of terrible crucial importance now sorry the other contrast i want to make i don't have the book series but i don't have to hold up every book i mention um but you know i am very interested in machiavelli and the separate oh we had a hummingbird at the window it's already gone the separate but powerfully related history of uh democracy and renaissance italy well think about all the all the things you can take for granted in renaissance italy or even on the tiny island of of cyprus that people really do have a common language a common education common sort of sense of hierarchy um common sense of cultural values and those will i mean in the case of italy they partly did take pride in democracy they partly did take pride in the idea of the republic and they saw no contradiction in being devout catholics and supporting this idea of democracy and republic that's what that's how they saw their culture they felt that that was their unique uh fusion of elements like they were aware they weren't you know they weren't living in jerusalem they weren't they didn't represent israeli civilization or something like this um they didn't represent the old testament culture in that sense that they represented this from their perspective continuous culture of republics and democracies that had fused with the judeo-christian tradition and this powerful that was that was their sense of pride and joy so they expressed this for example and um again completely unironically um saying that particular christian saints were the patron saints of their system of democracy and of their constitution which is completely fictional i mean by the way guys you might or might not know this but um the the myth for europeans uh to explain the existence of the aristocracy was that they were the people uh who had fought um in uh the the battle of troy so you know most of you will be aware there is this myth about the trojan horse and the helen of troy like you'll have some vague memory of this well why did that matter why is that famous in places like france that are very far removed from well the myth was that the aristocrats the reason they were different from normal people was that they were the descendants of the heroes who fought the trojan war i'd i mean if you think it's where is it more ridiculous in russia or france or germany but people lived with a lot of this mythology that allowed them to uh kind of render sacred in a christian sense a totally pagan tradition of uh republicanism and democracy materials that were there for someone like machiavelli were very very different from joseph america but oh right and so the other people we've left it here are the dutch and you know some some of the positive characteristics i mean i don't want to go to great length here but some of the distinctive positive characteristics of american democracy that set it apart from medieval italy douglas uh came from the dutch including for example the reluctance to just torture people to death because people were really being tortured to death in that period of italy the whole the whole catholic world um now protestants killed lots of people too don't get me wrong these were very brutal empires but some of the hygienic conceptions and uh enlightened conception of government that the dutch were extreme and promotes that that you know modern hygiene was basically invented in the netherlands it's a funny story but the the idea of washing your hands the idea that disease is transmitted by touch um the the the people of the low countries what i'm going to call them the people of the netherlands that was really where a lot of that began and they had their own response to the french revolution and prior to the french revolution they had their own real discourse going on in many ways they were a failed world empire they didn't become a great world empire the way england and uh and france did and so on but sure there were another important component there so yeah sorry that's a long answer to to a short question but yeah i mean if you if you want to get serious about it there's there's a question of how the american character emerged out of those um [Music] components or ingredients and they were being mixed together in a context where everyone everyone had blood in their hands from the ongoing genocidal wars everyone had blown their hands from slavery um and even the people who were trying not to i mean really boston was the source the center of anti-slavery activism and their their own constitution rejected slavery and they they declared themselves a freeport and so on but you know then people were tainted that way also you sort of even if you were opposed to it you were tainted and caught up in it on the other side for all those uh centuries okay um all right so we have some good questions but i think i will go back and pay my my donor who who paid money for me to ask the question you know there's there's a mention here about discrimination towards eastern europeans uh frida if you do the research i mean look everyone likes to complain you know um when you've studied the history of first nations people i mean like where i was out in saskatchewan we had complaints that the ukrainians were oppressed these are ethnic ukrainian immigrants we had complaints that the francophones were oppressed so these were french-speaking people who had one way or another migrated out to saskatchewan in that part of canada and you know it just it doesn't endure scrutiny especially not when you're in the context of doing research on the the often parallel and simultaneous history of what's being done to the indigenous people i mean you know sure i guess if you had a ukrainian accent or a long difficult to spell ukrainian name and you were living in canada in those centuries you had some slight disadvantage but the reason why those ukrainians are still farmers today in canada is that they were given free land guess who wasn't given free land exactly the people who the land was taken away from you know guess what for some reason there aren't a lot of black people who own farms you know in saskatchewan for some reason they weren't actively recruiting and they could have the british empire who were the same polity as you know jamaica and so on now these we could have been recruiting caribbeans to come up and farm and giving them free land so no i mean a lot of those claims um everyone likes to complain everyone likes to kind of tell this history in a way that makes them the victim i suppose because they're horrified the thought that they too are one of the victimizers of the indigenous people and to some extent of black african slave groups but no i i think if you just do a little bit of a little bit of digging you'll start to lose patience with that with that discourse okay so a pivot as barack obama would say barack obama loved that word pivot uh he was a man full of pivots that obama you know so nobody gives a damn what is it on any topic today it's funny people who have the power to kill you suddenly their opinions doesn't matter anymore once they've lost the ability once they've lost their ability to have you executed everyone loses interest in their perspective on politics anyway um so the question was uh is it worthwhile to promote politics through fiction then interestingly the examples are manga or books manga here meaning comic books especially in the the japanese style to young adults so is it worthwhile to promote politics or maybe specifically the philosophy of nihilism you suggest in parentheses two young adults through fiction so you know we had a long walk this morning we walk for exercise in this uh period this is we're still under lockdown here the coronavirus epidemic is still ongoing in this part of canada and you know i said to melissa this morning i felt that one of the differences between myself and other young people when i was a young person was that i really understood and really appreciated that if you make art you are making it for someone you are making it for an audience you are not making it uh for yourself you know and i i think that really is the solution to the riddle here now once you recognize that you have a lot of difficult questions to ask you so to give an example by the way what i'm explaining here it is not the difference between success and failure you could have a very successful stand-up comedian who has no interest in his audience whatsoever you could have someone who decides to become a standard comedian and they have a very let's say they're an alcoholic they're a guy who likes to go out get drunk and make people laugh purely hypothetical example you know guy who has his own his own sense of what's funny and what's not and maybe he likes to ridicule people but likes to poke fun at his friends when he's out drinking i'm not i hadn't thought i actually met one stand-up comic he was like i could tell his story now interesting guy but anyway you might get into stand-up comedy with no interest in the audience or even a kind of disdain and contempt for what the audience finds funny and you you're just a raw looking self-confident person you get on stage and tell jokes now that could be a disaster you know you could um the vast majority of stand-up comics fail but obviously some people with that attitude you know will be successful um but once you understand or once you accept that this isn't about me this isn't something i'm doing for myself this isn't self-expression this is something i'm doing for others and so i'm doing for the audience then you really get into a question of um do you have enough love in you you know do you love that audience enough is there a public you want to reach out to is there somebody you respect enough uh to make that effort to take that time to create that work of art to you know write that right and perform that comedy uh whatever it might be that you're that you're undertaking as a venture so sorry our beautiful hummingbird is back i don't know if you got it we could set up a second camera can we do split screen no we get the view of the window that'd be good add some add some matte shots here of the hummingbird i don't know if we have a good climate for uh for for hummingbirds so you know um i mean look sorry i assume this guy is still in the audience you can tell me to what extent you think i'm i'm answering your question one extent i'm not it's very easy to look at your book like if you're if you're writing a book a blank book here ideally just hold this book backwards you're writing a book it's easy to think about this book as if it's the end and the objective in itself like you're creating this work of art you're creating this object just to exist and you're not you have to have a connection to some kind of public to some kind of audience that you're writing for now you know um i've said that to melissa too in terms of making youtube videos you know one way to do it it's not the only way to make youtube video you can think about who is this for you can think about like i'm okay i know some particular people in the audience here i know lydia i know frida now we've been talking i could make a video where i really consciously intentionally think okay i know frida is going to see this now lydia's going to see this and i'm going to i'm going to make this video talking about the history of genocide or slavery or something and i'm gonna try to make this mean something to this person from mexico i know a few things about from you know as small as that may be if there are five people you know you're creating art for where you have that connection and where you you know what it's going to be for them and it's falsifiable by the way you know you can write a a comic book or write a novel and you give it to those five people and they say to you ah this doesn't work for me i don't even know what the point is you know that sorry this seems self-indulgent that's a very different thing than the way most people take on you know creative projects our projects and and writing projects and obviously i'm saying all this because in some ways it's a good thing about the internet that you get to take on projects on a small scale without committing too much time or money you know to do that so look the question was should you you know pursue political change or even philosophical education of the public through fiction okay so let me ask you what else you got we just saw um kind of the latest propaganda news from hong kong for some reason this morning didn't get any news from afghanistan didn't get any news from iraq where american democracy is working out great there's just no problem with democracy in iraq or afghanistan there are no intellectual dissidents there who i need to see interviewed on the news but you know i i wake up today and i get some propaganda from hong kong and about how these uh poor peaceful protesters the protests in hong kong were not peaceful they were massively damaging and massively disrupting and destroyed the subway system whatever okay but these these peaceful protesters in hong kong their lives have been ruined because they protest against the government of communist china in this way huh okay so you asked a question here is it worthwhile to promote political change and even some philosophical ideas through fiction okay well would you rather go to jail you know how does that compare to other modes of so-called self-expression in the pursuit of political and cultural change that we have as options in our lives now i don't know what situation you're in specifically so we're talking about hong kong specifically if you're a hong kong intellectual probably manga is a great option instead of breaking the subway system instead of causing physical and economic damage to the city you're living in you know instead of engaging in violent protests and there was indeed some burning and looting and what have you you know instead of physically fighting against the police you know and doing these kinds of things how would it compare if you think about just five years of your life like anything about five years left we have this one moment of rebellion violent rebellion followed by some number of years in and out of court and out of jail and so on and then of course you look ahead to 50 years of your life in full context how would that compare to if you spent five years working on what you think is a really great work of art a great work of fiction you're sisting a comic book or uh you know maybe an animated movie or something a cartoon or something you know how how would that compare and certainly hong kong and you know you could you could publish in japan and so you could work with artists in japan or south korea they'll have manga culture also this kind of thing well no matter how humble no matter how pathetic the road taken by the author of fiction may seem that starts to seem pretty positive in that in that context and last live stream so uh episode 003 i talked to quite some length about how voltaire is one of the most positive uh examples you know uh one of the most positive uh i i mean someone who wrote something i'm sorry even though the book is terrible his writing is awful but he had this profound impact in the world that nobody has ever had by holding up a protest sign or chanting or singing or you know the types of protests the year 2020 had the united states they burned down a kentucky fried chicken that was it yeah it was kfc wasn't it wendy's sorry that's right it was a wendy's you know i just do not believe that burning down a wendy's is going to end police brutality and as humble and pathetic as it may sound to you know write a work of literature or create a create an animated movie to really address police brutality that sounds a lot better than burning down a wendy's to me that sounds a lot better to the riots that killed far more innocent civilians than they killed policemen and i did read the detailed accounts of they were innocent black people killed by other black people at these protests it's terrible that lasts forever you know what i'm saying anyway comment from the audience wendy's also ends many people's life that's consensual frida that's consensual um and wendy's is not going to uh uh is not gonna someone wrote it in so i think i think most of my own is melissa is out of your league there you go that's that's uh guys if if you prefer melissa's content you're getting plenty of my youtube channel we just uploaded one today but melissa does have her own youtube channel so those who those who are bigger fans of melissa there's enough content from the both both of us to go around so this is a comment from wicked energy quote i can't believe how many trolls are in chat but can they get hashtag free melissa trending yes no no no hashtag free eyes all ask anyway guys look i tell you two things one it comes to the territory but two you know um if you're talking about trolls you know i encourage critique i encourage dissent for the record when um pardon me when unnatural vegan cross swords with me you know um the the the emails are now public you know the emails that back weather the main thing i said to her was look if you want to criticize my work as a scholar of buddhism if you want a christmas just read it first just do the reading i'm so happy to have you like even if you think my work is trash if you think what i have to say about the history of buddhism is is garbage or something by all means have at it you know let's let's let's see what you got criticize it as harshly as you as you possibly can but you have to do the reading first you can't uh you can't criticize it enough to share arguments and you know um i mean i i really haven't i mean and she didn't by the way she never did regret he was completely surreal and what she said about me was just it was lies about lies about lies it was just total total fiction it didn't really even mean anything recorded she called me a cult leader oh okay well yeah i'm welcome to the cult guys um yeah in my in my cult we read books and uh criticize american politics apparently um and i make about two dollars and fifty cents out of every video it's not it's not much of a cult uh but you know um you know i i really wish i had more uh critics i wish there were more of a culture of uh descent and and and you know kind of steal sharpening steel this way you guys might know this but i i'm on a first name basis with the live uh the live streamer the youtuber uh crankyvegan you know we we talk um you know he knows i've criticized his channel you know i think it would be a different world in a better world if he responded by criticizing me back or you know he could agree or disagree i know we've seen that video we've chatted about kind of unrelated things but you know he and i chat every so often and uh you know i've said this in so many times in a different context if you engage in film criticism it doesn't mean you hate film you're trying to improve film um you know if people criticize my youtube channel it doesn't mean they hate my youtube channel or trying to destroy uh you know my youtube channel like that's that's really fine for me i'd encourage people by all means you know put put the time and energy in and whatever it is i mean i but you you guys tell me right now do you think anyone do you think anyone is going to make the effort to read a single one of these books i've mentioned and then make a youtube video saying my interpretation of it is wrong that has never happened once on the history of this youtube channel a few times i criticized a book and the author got in touch with me furiously and i said well look you're welcome to respond like what do you what do you got to say but like look i read your book this is legit criticism of your foot like it's legitimate this is my you know this is my analysis of your book like you know what do you what do you expect if you publish a book unless nobody reads it it's going to be this kind of critique um but i've never even had one of those authors attempt to answer uh criticism with criticism so anyway uh yeah you know really what i would what i would like is for anyway i'm i i'm sure that is asking too much but obviously people like dorian nor vegan none of them were ever interested in the actual substance of the actual content of what was discussed in my channel uh not about any historical political uh issue or what have you um okay one person wrote to me by email disagreeing with me about aristotle at length i've gotta i've gotta give credit and i still have notes literally on the desktop on my computer to do a follow-up video uh talking about that guy's criticism ultimately i think he was wrong i i do i do stand by my interpretation but he was guy who made a kind of concerted effort to argue that my interpretation of aristotle was wasn't correct so that was in the whole history of the youtube channel and might be might be unique all right sorry man so this this one passionate credit card channel this one uh one troll keeps uh opening new accounts um to try to contribute again and again to our our conversation so we have someone said i can't believe how many trolls are in chat no it's all the same guy today it's it's exactly one guy but by all means reach out to uh who else used to join me reach out to um forgetting the guy's name uh ask yourself reach out to you guys piece of trash anyway so lydia lydia says she's still my number one fan so yeah well if you want to i can give you banning power but i think you'd ban everyone but yourself you know um yeah anyway lydia by all means give us give us an update on your life we don't we haven't heard about you in like four years but you know yeah we used to we used to know you pretty well four years ago so yeah uh all right so quote i think a natural vegan doesn't even quite understand what neoliberalism is yes um okay so i i don't want to go into a big long uh discussion of the psychology of of a natural vegan but i think it is fair to say she is the purest kind of phony and she is she is really someone who uses words and doesn't without knowing what they mean uh she's a serial offender at that she talks about books she hasn't read you know she really does quote and invoke ideas she doesn't even have a passing familiarity with we saw that to a massive extent with um peter singer you know and it was like oh and then after a few minutes oh well i don't really know anything about peter really because after you know five years of fronting like you knew the first thing about peter sanders and she that was what you fought with me about you know so yeah i mean i i do assume she has a diagnosed learning disability a natural vegan she took many many many years to get a lowly ba in philosophy and never anything beyond that i i do i genuinely think she's a mentally disabled person or a learning disabled person i mean i've interacted with her for years and watched her for years i think she to say that she doesn't know what she's talking about is really an understatement if you look at she's done very few live streams she does very few spontaneous videos but one of them was about me you know she did a live stream after durianrider and freely went after me and she seemed to me very mentally disabled that and really not able to interact with and speak the arts there's a gap between her pre-recorded scripted videos and what she does uh spontaneously so you know when you when you look at that you have a sense of that over years because she's she's now someone knows like five five six years maybe it's like seven years by now i don't know i mean she's someone i have some sense for and some feeling for yeah to say that she talks about things without knowing which time but it is it is really an understatement and the controversy about socialism and capitalism when she came out and made of serious statements about what neoliberalism is and so on that was embarrassing for her she got caught with her pants down but i think that just revealed what she's doing all the time that she is really skating by with no without even wikipedia level knowledge of anything she talks about oh right so let's say let's just say really briefly one of the biggest ones antidepressants i mean she made her name by being a so-called pro science channel and the one and only topic she ever did research on was splenda she she uh researched artificial sweeteners like splenda and nutrasweet and i again i've never looked into it maybe maybe that was just the wikipedia article but she went around and did some reading to present this uh this video but then anything else she's ever spoken on whether it's you know antidepressants or any other issue that comes up in in science or cats you know when she talked about you know raising pets and castrating cats and dogs and things it's just and you know peter singer and everything else it's to say it's stupid or to say it's ignorant it's really an understatement so i see her as someone who is trying to cover up for a learning disability and that statement about neoliberalism it was one of the moments when her cover you know failed when it would be obvious that he'd attached outlook or just how old to see she was and that was you know nobody was rushing her she was working with her own camera at her own pace and she was her own editor she could do her own fact check you know it wasn't a live stream and it wasn't that she was being pestered by an interviewer or something and and even so you know yeah so uh frida says she boasts about taking many antidepressants so yes and she took antidepressants during pregnancy with both babies so antidepressants do harm to your health taking antidepressants during pregnancy harms the baby and that's not hard to google verify it's not hard to check into we did videos talking about that on my youtube channel so yeah uh uh well so my my one and only uh troll here i thought you got a full-time job man you were just boasting the other day this guy sent me an email saying he was so proud that he had a nine-to-five job now and i simply wrote back a one word response i said congrats i said congratulations but whatever his nine to five job is uh this is uh this is neither nine nor five at the moment in his time zones um okay there was also a question sir i want to move on to more profound things but uh james mcpine is asking about uh whether or not i have a uh a schedule or structured in my days so we are now waking up around 6 a.m our target is 6 30 a.m but we some days when we have at 5 40 a.m sundays at 6. so waking up early is one aspect we do try to get exercise every day um there was more structure to my days back when i was learning chinese and when the challenge was to balance learning chinese versus doing everything else in my life i see myself right now as in a transitional period where i haven't finished writing my book go to instagram for updates or support me on patreon for updates when the book comes out but i'm trying to finish writing the manuscript of my book and i'm doing research that's related to writing the book thus some of the books that are mentioned in this video today and um you know presumably i'm going to return to university in september as a student so you know um right now no there's not a whole hell of a lot of structure beyond that it's but we try to get the most of every day um yeah it's it's hard when your life is a series of transitional periods and you never really know what it is you're transitioning to and you you may be transitioning to nothing at all um to say i'm [Music] pessimistic about the university of victoria would be an understatement and you can search for university of victoria in my youtube channel and you can find out more about why it isn't so pessimistic someone comments quote i actually really like your videos about jordan peterson and about unnatural vegans antidepressant use most people believe the serotonin dopamine thing yes that's called the monoamine hypothesis which indeed uh you know which is indeed much disproven um so he says i actually like your videos about jordan peterson and natural vegans antidepressants most people believe the serotonin dopamine thing uh even though medicine has moved on to another model yeah there is a book um that i have not read let's see if i can just get this on amazon this is a book i considered buying and never i think it's like 15 bucks um the the subtitle is the anatomy of an epidemic so i can get it that way i'll give you guys the link if you're interested i have seen many interviews with the author who wrote this book here we go robert whittaker anatomy of an epidemic there we go so hold on i'm just going to get the so this is from the olden days of 2011. um and robert whittaker i mean he's an interesting guy i think everyone who writes in this field is an interesting guy so you can get this pretty cheaply um [Music] you know he was not a psychiatrist himself nor was he a patient he was really a traditional investigative journalist and he brings that investigative journalist's view to it and he was himself so i don't know if you already know this story babe sorry i just said this guy well so i don't i hope i'm not getting this mixed up but this is this is from memory but as i recall when he first started researching this he completely assumed that these were legitimate uh you know medications just like uh treating someone with diabetes you know like by giving them a chemical that's missing from their body and he thought he was going to be investigating the unethical practices of these researchers in putting people on the drugs and taking them off because if you really believe it's something like that i mean you never you would never do the same kind of experimentation with someone who was diabetic like okay now we're going to take you off the drug and see how you recover or see how you attack or something but as i recall he gave that as an example that like when he started he wasn't he wasn't skeptical about this he assumed this was just literally biologically valid medical science and then he starts getting deeper and deeper into it he realizes this is just kind of a set of debunked marketing claims that people have come to regard as biologically valid science yeah so uh interesting guy i mean i think genuinely well intentioned um in researching and writing that book and it probably helps him that he's an outsider i mean we have just lived through um what's his name completely uh uh kind of debunking discrediting himself so peter bregen if you guys don't know the name peter bregen he has just made a whole series of really unfortunate conspiratorial remarks about uh coronavirus and the vaccines and so on and he's shown his limits as an intellectual you know i'd seen other things in the past that showed he wasn't the brightest cabbage in the cabbage patch sort of thing you know there were certain but peter bregen was really one of the most important voices he wrote talking back to prozac and he gave interviews and he really you know um but uh sorry let me just say this it's one thing to be smart enough to criticize antidepressants which peter bregman was but then you know whenever peter bregman returned to talking about the type of treatment he favored instead you'd think ah this guy's kind of lightweight this guy kind of actually what i mean he could then see his limits like oh intellectually he's not that deep you know i don't know if you've heard this but so i've quoted peter bregen many times on my channel and obviously i have some respect for the guy but he determined me give this really hard hitting critique this is like the film clips that i'm editing to use in my videos you know this hard-hitting critique about like prozac has been debunked and these are the effects and these are the side effects this is how we you know give this their sims and then he'd say but you know the people with these uh uh you know the people with these problems if only they could sit down and spend time you know with their parents then they're probably just spend more time with your loving and supportive family and so on you know and again it's it's well intentioned but uh you know wow you know just uh anyway so he's somebody who's kind of fallen from grace um in uh 2020 in the last year but yeah it's interesting to see who steps up and who wants to take on the fight there is there is so much to win there's the question of what is the next 100 years going to look like on planet earth has a lot to do with drugs legal and illegal and i mean what if we if we walk to the grocery store right now you know the city we live in the lives we all live and where we choose to live and everything all of this i mean drug addiction all around us and you know i thought i thought one of the most interesting questions to come out of 2020 was about police being on drugs if police are taking psychiatric meds or illegal recreational drugs um are we going to start testing police officers like if if you are taking a drug that is labeled antipsychotic that is what one class of these psychiatric meds is called or you are taking one that is called antidepressant are you really competent to hold a gun and make these decisions you know as a police officer and i think if you just read the label about the side effects on those drugs i've seen them in some of them we're looking at haldol i made a youtube video talking about how dolls specifically because another youtuber is taking help and it's like well you shouldn't even operate heavy machinery you know you may not be able to drive a car it's like okay and these are some of the most widely prescribed drugs the united states of america these are the warnings you're getting okay and then we're gonna have police officers the power of life and death and making you know important judgment i think that's a really interesting question that came out through this right so i won't go on and on about it but once you've allowed yourself to ask that question right then what what next what's the future you know are school teachers allowed to get high is it okay if school teachers are using marijuana and cocaine and antidepressants and antipsychotics if they're walking around in a howldoll and the cbd haze or you know there's a lot of i think you know more and more you start to ask who is taking on a responsible role in society and why why should we lower standards of expectations once we've established those standards for police officers for example um huh interesting question from jonathan l because jonathan l asks did you talk about money and your philosophy and what part of your morals and ethics would you sell for someone with a more gray outlook i think i have to ask you that sounds like an interesting question that needs to be reworded it sounds like you're getting at something interesting i i think that was just too unclear so jonathan i don't know it could be english as your second language it could be you wrote that on the phone there there are a few different grammars in there why don't you why don't you give it a second uh a second shot let's let's see what you got to say you know it'd be interesting all right okay so so uh someone in the audience anonymously they just gave their initials st says this is probably because in a rationalist society suffering is only taken seriously if it can be biologized or narrativized into a single condition you know i think the truth is darker than that st i think people take your suffering seriously if you have the charisma and the art to compel them to take it seriously you know what i mean that's that's really you know your suffering only matters if you get out there and make make it matter make it matter through demonstrate to them why it should matter why they should care then people will care then only then you know what i mean um [Music] so you know i i guess you know i don't think it's the case that in a rational society once you can identify your suffering with a biologically real condition that anyone cares they don't care i mean we don't have a very caring society period but if you are very charismatic for example let's say you were the lead singer of a rock band you know maybe you could go hey can i use this question i just noticed guys so we have 28 people in the audience right now you guys all members and we have only six thumbs up i i don't mean to complain but is there some reason if you've been listening to this for over one hour you've been in you've been science why would you not hit thumbs i mean if you've just been here for five minutes like let's see how this goes let's let's hear him read the passage let's see where this goes because it seems to me if we have such a small audience we have 28 people in the audience that i know plenty of you you know what i'm saying i think we could have a total of 28 thumbs up for some of that is it's no you know there we go okay and you guys know when you do that it means some other people will get the alert and some other people say look i mean it just seems you know whatever and if you want to give it a thumbs down you're an hour and eight minutes deep into the bucket i i get it maybe it's not skipper the last time we did one of these people are apologetic give me the thumbs up the last time we did one of these live streams we had two people unsubscribe from my channel because uh youtube isn't those and that i wonder what expectations those two people had am i if that was not what you were looking for on my youtube thumbs up you channel say this true be sure to like share and subscribe i am just asking the question given the numbers and you see a couple other people just joined because people gave the thumbs up so i just said a couple more people a couple jumped in because that is what happens youtube will uh will promote your link but anyway oh okay i'm just scrolling through here we got some other intelligent comments [Music] okay so another good question this relates to haldol specifically so james writes in james says what are your thoughts on anti-medicare what are your thoughts on medication in relation to things like anti-seizure meds look it's a different story in every case but when you read the label when you read the fda labels this is the food and drug administration that says america you get a lot of damning information about these drugs the fda label they will very often admit that the mechanism of the drug is unknown and unproven for the anti-seizure medication so i've seen several examples that i'm not saying it's true in all cases but a drug like aspirin is very well proven in its effects in the medic the mechanism of action the theory behind it the the positive benefits you get from treating a fever with aspirin are proven and they make sense we know ideologically step by step mechanistically cause and effect how does aspirin affect your body and therefore what medical benefits do you get from aspirin right you might think aspirin's not a serious drug but it is right you know aspirin is made from what what is what plant is aspirin made from did you guys in the ice ever actually it's made from the opium poppy aspirin and heroin are both products of the opium poppy now the uses of opium are also proven you know what i mean you were very often looking at psychiatric meds where we was looking at one the other day it was like oh well this was started to use to treat cancer patients and that didn't work and then they started using it as an antidepressant antipsychotic because it seemed to have mental effects where you know it really is people i'll use somebody else's idiom people throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks where there's just been a very short process of trial and error to see what apparent benefits it has where often not always but often you know the real effects of the drug through your whole body are not known and by the way also when you read the fda label so to be clear i'm just encouraging you to read the government's own information the fda label you know when it's listing those negative side effects to the rest of the body or even other positive side effects you know um it's significant just be aware even if you don't suffer those side effects that it is having effects on all those symptoms so if it impacts your your blood pressure think about that okay so this doesn't just affect you know my nervous system this doesn't just affect my my mental attitude or mood this also affects my nervous system because it has these side effects the side effects that are listed are significant also in just telling you what are the parts of the body that are that are somehow agonistically impacted where there's some receptor or there's some chemical that is that is impacted by your body and many of those drugs again when you go through the list of side effects it's everything say okay this affects your ability to have erections and this affects your heart your blood pressure it affects your ability to sleep many of them they list that it affects the the your regular heartbeat it affects sleep apnea invasive ability to sleep your ability to breathe during your sleep the heartbeat irregular heartbeats while you're asleep okay so this is affecting your nervous system that way then really think about that even if you don't notice it you know wow these are the knock-on effects so you know i just say just really read the with the fda uh information and you know the exceptions will be drugs like aspirin there are some drugs like aspirin where we know the benefits and we know the harms and it's real science and naturally those are those are not controversial it's just inevitable you know um all right i'm just reading through the comments you guys know why i'm wait if you want to know why i'm multiple silent here okay so there's a question here from james about objective versus subject of morality i think i've done that topic to death on my youtube channel so i sometimes invoke youtubers privilege here uh i will search my own channel but i think if i just look for the words objective and subjective i'm going to get those videos that is i mean i can't say it's an interesting topic to me i think it's one of those topics where i seem to be in this tiny minority of people who understand it really clearly but yes so i have several videos dealing with that it's not in its own uh playlist but i've got videos dealing with objectivity responsibility moral realism versus nihilism objective morality i i do have videos talking about that already um so i think i think that's one of i've beaten to death um all right so frida says i've heard about aspirin being good to take when you are heartbroken okay if you're talking about depression i'm sorry i didn't mean for this to be a depression antidepressant livestream but i mean it is a big issue that influences a lot of people we have new studies now that are proving um you know that um drugs like ketamine have more of a positive effect on depression than so-called antidepressants now i do not endorse using ketamine to treat depression whatsoever jordan peterson was recently given ketamine um but once you have that standard establishment oh well well it's more effective than prozac once you understand how low that's setting the bar sure sure it's possible people would use aspirin or ketamine or all kinds of drugs that have some kind of um you know mind-altering effect of course they could be more effective of course even you know there are studies supporting the use of marijuana and i'm opposed to these marijuana but sure i mean if you're comparing marijuana to um prozac and some of these other really debunked antidepressants sure marijuana could uh it could be positive relative to that very low standard all right we've got some statements about utilitarianism which i'm habitually going to skip over so jonathan clarifies this earlier question quote i just wanted to hear your nuanced thoughts and money and i believe you're a person who might already have a videotape about it i do i remember a very passionate video i made talking about money and my own motivations for what i'm doing in life boy i don't know if i could find that today though um i have made videos really talking about you know the jobs i've applied for and the jobs i didn't get and you know the meaning of money in life and the extent to which you know the meaning of life is something you pursue despite the pressure and money i have definitely made videos talking about that but boy when you've done more than 2 000 videos um it is not easy i used to have some fans of the channel who have all that stuff memorized they they're not in this they're not in this live stream right now but yeah no it's it's um boy i can't remember the name of that video the particular one i'm thinking of but i remember making video you know one of the reasons i had to think about it was jonathan we both enrolled in bacon college and then when you're talking about a career as a baker you get to really look at how you earned your money as something very separate from the meaning of life like okay this is who i really am and this is my nine to five job more likely to be at three a.m until two in the afternoon job or something get up real early as a baker but those things are very separate so i've definitely made videos you know philosophizing about it yeah okay real simple question what are your thoughts about the controversy surrounding bill c-10 in canada so i'll just i'll just uh well i feel like just uh copying and pasting that here in case people don't you know the question so that is certainly something people outside of canada have not heard about um look you know [Music] laws are made by people the problem with bill c-10 in canada is that it shows you that we are ruled by terrible people in canada these people aren't so much older than me i'm 42 now uh bill c-10 is a very badly worded very poorly thought through attempt to regulate free speech on the internet its primary purpose is to force canadians to watch canadian content like if you are a canadian watching youtube that you should watch youtube in canada rather than youtube videos made in the united states or somewhere else and it has been through various drafts and revisions none of which makes sense i really think i mean if you were if i were just talking that with melissa out of the blue one day like hey what do you think about the idea of having a law that will change free speech how do you think we do that i really think any two reasonably intelligent people having an open-ended discussion would come up with a better set of proposals than that law it's unbelievably stupid um i just mentioned i mean another another kind of thorny example that from the other side of the world every so often in sri lanka there's some law proposed to basically try to limit islam to say well look we believe in freedom of religion but they have their own problems with muslim terrorists they have no problem with hindu terrorists also and they're always very poorly written and the funny thing is normally when those things are proposed the majority of people do agree with them in broad outline yeah somebody should redefine what we mean by freedom of religion you know because we don't we don't really mean the right to cut off part of a baby's penis it's actually not freedom of religion we don't believe in circumcision you know like there are all kinds of things that really we don't believe in under freedom of religion but they're currently commonly practiced and unquestioned so you know but this tells you something about the type of people who are in that privileged position in in canada and you know i mean if you guys don't know already what a low opinion i have of our our version of so-called democracy in canada by the book no more that manifestos uh coming soon but yeah i mean i just say that bill i'm sorry if i'm saying this in a slightly inarticulate way i don't think that tells you anything about freedom of speech i don't think it tells you anything about canada i think it tells you something about the culture and intellectual caliber of the type of people who are in positions of power in canada and in brief that is abysmally poor and uh abysmally low spicy dragoon asks what are you currently doing for work now you're looking at it you're looking at it bro this this is what i'm doing for work right now believe it or not believe it or not this this is my job i pay taxes on what i earn from doing this job [Music] um oh so we got it we got a question about height and weight so yeah i am six foot three in the morning um your spine compresses during the day so about six foot two and a half later on but yeah uh durianrider would be happy to meet up with me now i mean i just say he's he's changed his whole tune um you know very strange guy but i've had email back and forth then so if i did meet up and have a boxing match with durianrider now it would be friendly there wouldn't really be any hard feelings so he and i could we could still have a boxing match you know but he's not mad at me anymore he sees the whole thing in a very different way and if you you know if you didn't know when he was accused of rape by nor vegan you know i did the right thing because it's the right thing to do even though durianrider has been an immoral person towards me and others even though he's a bad person i was not gonna lie out of political convenience and blackness character i i said the truth i said what i knew of the truth and so on um i i stood up uh you know i stood into everything and it took him a long time to figure that out and appreciate it i think just because he wasn't watching my videos or whatever a very strange guy obviously but no in that sense there's no conflict you know in that emotional sense there's no conflict between him and i now um he really figured out that i was a person of integrity that i really was telling the truth about everything of course he also claimed sir just very briefly but he claimed i was lying about the court case and he found out i was telling the truth about all that so i told the truth about everything throughout the whole controversy but even when it would have been convenient for me to lie or to blacken through mary's character i never did that and i did have evidence i was a witness to what the reality was before those rape allegations were made up and i wasn't the only one there were several other people and so you know there was a very very strange sad controversy but sure obviously that that impacted the way durianrider sees me and i think the way he uh he sees myself okay um a question from the audience how come you won't talk about vegan gains what do you you guys don't know there's a search feature within within youtube what are you what are you talking about how many videos have i done about vegan gains should i search for vegan games plus the word idiot or something i mean you know sorry but if you i'll give you the link bro but if you if you just search for vegan gains in my channel i mean we've we've really kind of set it all so that's the i'll just mark that's the search search results for vegan gains oh on abortion right i did an abortion uh discussion i also have a video snappy title coward versus coward vegan versus vegan yeah keeping it real with vegan gains yeah so there's a long history a very harsh critique directed towards vegan gains on my channel sure yeah i think i think it's 191 centimeters bezel maybe i'm wrong 191 centimeters in feet and inches some of that i forget the only time i have to do that is when i'm filling out paperwork for the government some of that 19192 it's not a round number i remember so yeah some of that um [Music] yeah so someone else is here is remembering old critiques i did so this is it's nice to have when people of substance ask questions of substance i'm happy to answer it i mean uh but anyway someone says thanks for making videos about earthling ed that guy is a sleaze and makes ten thousand dollars per month in donations but where does the money go so look let's let's list some some names of people who have gotten a wretch out of veganism and are getting rich right now and nobody knows where the money goes yes earthling ed is one okay wayne syong and his sister at direct action everywhere they are now well over 1 million dollars a year to my knowledge they are either closer to or beyond 2 million a year in income you can go to direct action everywhere's youtube channel right now where does the more than one million dollars a year go and you can look up their reports uh dr greger so dr greger what did you do nutrition facts some of that dr greger nutrition factor i've made many videos multi-million dollar scam where is the money coming from where does it go i mean look where does money come from i i presume these are all good-hearted people who want to make the world a better place they're doing this money but there are millions of dollars going down the drain now look guys i have asked for money i have done fundraisers on my channel before if i asked you for money to publish my book you will know where every dollar goes i'll say hey this is how much the paper cost this maybe you have to pay you know an illustrator for the front cover or something or for the old you know this is how much you paid the illustrator this is how much the shipping like just break it down and say hey if you donated money the book and now presumably i send you a free copy of the book or i sign it and send you say hey thank you for supporting the publication this book that's how you do charity guys i i used to be involved with the humanitarian sector i'm still tempted we talked about central asia i would love to go back to cambodia i would love to go back to laos and do humanitarian work if i ask you guys for money i can give you a receipt for every blanket like yeah we bought 10 t-shirts and 10 blank and i can make a youtube video this is me handing the blanket to the poor person and here's your receipt that's the reality and then nobody is being ripped off and if if some of the money is being spent on my hotel room or whatever just be real about it just like yup this is the hotel we got this is where i'm staying like why not why not be transparent um now you know i just say i mean i normally do not so this is a live stream it's a little bit more informal if i were making a video about earthling ad i would never call him a sleaze because that is an insult that is too vague to mean anything all right i believe i'll tell you exactly what i mean by an idiot i think his philosophy is [ __ ] i think his method of activism is totally counterproductive and moronic i think his videos are meandering and self-indulgent and stupid i think people donating his money would be just as well off to take their money and put it in the toilet and hit flush you know i will tell you what i think but i i do not call people a sleaze i do not call people a creep unless there's some particular reason i just say like i avoid this kind of vague insult or vague complaint i don't do so just just a recommendation yes whatever it is you got to say about everything ed say it but like to call him us like i don't even know what that means in some other if we're talking about hollywood and you see this guy is a sleazy casting okay i have a sense of what you mean but i do not know in what sense earthling ed could be called i mean he is poorly groomed he's badly dressed and badly shaven but like is that what you mean by you know what i mean so insults should mean something you know what i'm saying you know i would even say the same about like rap music you know if you're going to rap about somebody and you're going to insult somebody and wrap something it's got to be precise you know you've got to come correct you know um uh lazzle uh lapilli who's pardon me at las vegas good pronunciation that uh lazzle lappy that's how she spelled that um comments that she doesn't even know what vengeance is doing i agree and if you look at his numbers they've disappeared he's alienated the vast majority of his audience nobody wants to know what he's doing unless and you know he's now doing porn so if you want to see him naked he's now doing hardcore porn on uh unonly fans but nobody cares and you know i mean you know um i left a comment recently on one of uh freelee's videos i said you know this is what would happen if hollywood just kept making indiana jones movies again and again and again there's no inspiration there's no point there's no purpose there's no verve there's no passion and you know i could say the same about vegan gains it's just the the level of self-indulgence and pointlessness in its contents it's palpably awful and by the way i got other stuff i wanted to read and want to talk about here it's great talking to you guys but you know there's stuff i'm really passionate about and as soon as i hang up the phone here there's stuff i want to get back to doing too i've got i've got a lot of passion and tenacity and verb and sense of purpose i have a lot of ambition and that's why i'm coming on the microphone as often but if you're not if you're a mopey self-pitying piece of crap like vegan gains who just wants to sit around and play video games all day don't don't come on the mic he would have been better off doing what aaron janus did aaron janice uploading less than one video a year but she maintains the mystique right everyone imagines aerojanus is doing something tremendously profound and meaningful you know um you can let your imagination run run wild so anyway i got a question about how do you deal with anti-semitism so again i got to kind of use youtubers privilege here if you search for anti-semitism on my channel you get some i think i think i've made some really meaningful videos with that i have one video in which i'm talking to my daughter about anti-semitism so you know and also i made a video about the ideological origins of the nazi movement you know which i sorry to say two things to search for you can look for the video on the origins of the nazi ideology and you can look at the video which i'm talking to my daughter about anti-semitism sure it's a big deal it's it's not it ain't something new that just came out of nowhere and it's not just about to go away we have a donation of five euros that's going to pay for me to buy a new a new jar i think there's about two dollars each of these jobs beautiful jar beautiful piece of glassware almost indestructible too all right quote do you think there is anything useful that can be learned from meditating or from buddhism uh and if so is it something that you can't get from prayer or christianity ah all right it's a good thing you paid me five dollars [Laughter] all right you know what does my background of studying buddhism you know give me today this world is roughly spheroid in shape i can't quite say it's a sphere it's a little bit bigger around the middle it bulges and flat at the top and but you know what i mean let's just let's just call it a sphere and be done with it okay guys in the whole world historically how many civilizations have expanded massive literature literature about philosophy literature about politics china india europe okay pre-contact south america south america and central america before europeans came and destroyed everything they did have writing they did have written language the spanish destroyed it europeans destroyed it let's not let's not blame the spanish especially the portuguese and the french and the british we were all involved europeans destroyed their written literature including the physical substrate like what it was written on was destroyed okay so in some other parallel universe it's possible they wrote meaningful things down in indigenous north america indigenous silver but in terms of what is extant today that is about all you've got to work from um now okay one tear down what about islam what about the arabic speaking world you could add that and have a fourth so now you've got china india europe arabia and the parts of the world that were conquered and influenced by arabia started using the arab time okay are you going to live your life only knowing one of those four are you going to be kind of intimidated and ignorant any time one of the other three come up most white western english-speaking people don't even really have much familiarity with the canon of english literature english politics let alone french italian spanish ancient greek or what have you um the main thing i can say that's a positive benefit from knowing buddhism is that you get to know another one of those cultures one of those corpuses of literature that's full of politics and philosophy and the human experience right you get to see all those things from another perspective on another side of the planet right and that's all i could say in his favor if you don't know i've made many videos about meditation buddhist meditation is a lie if you believe in buddhist meditation you believe in a lie all right anyone who teaches or preaches or promotes buddhist meditation is making money and promoting their career on the basis of a lie all right i know you know which one do you prefer you want the tibetan lie you want the japanese lie you want the you want the sri lankan a lot you know no it's all lies um if you compare it to prayer and christianity the advantage that prayer has is that it's been so thoroughly debunked is that people are skeptical in in europe and in canada if you say to someone that you're going to solve their problem through prayer people are apprehensive and people mysteriously are not apprehensive at all they're not skeptical they're willing to believe in meditation without asking any of the questions that they would they would apply to christian prayer so if you don't know i was scholar of buddhism for many years i learned the power language i lived in asia i did put a lot of years a lot of work into it um i don't get a whole lot out of it in terms of what i do in my life now but you can learn from my experience i wrote numerous articles that are still on the interview that are still on the internet and um you know you can just watch the the playlist the the buddhist playlist on this youtube channel i don't even know it's 100 videos deep but sure there's there's plenty of depth and plenty of breath there okay all right so i'm gonna get back to reading the book i think we'll wrap things up reading your comments now guys so someone says that earthling as smarminess makes him puke ah and then he comments that earthling ed loves himself i don't feel that way about it i think he's self-loathing i don't think he loves i don't think that you know um i remember earthling ed talking about confronting strangers on the street about wearing fur that kind of thing a very self-confident person i don't think earthlings is a self-confidence person not at all i think he's a self-doubting self-hating person that's just it's just how i feel about his character just being real with you i think he's smallery guy and what was his actual name is gaunt right wasn't that it yeah he had this peculiar last name that that draws attention to how gaunty is you know has this name that seems like a joke about how how kind of scrawny is i don't you know i let me put it this way too he's not self-confident being the leader of a political movement i don't think he's so confident being the manager of a restaurant you know which is now part of his job he said i don't think he's still comforting any of the roles he's taken out and look let's be real i don't think he's well read i do not think he's well read on any topic like in politics you know he's well read about venus he's not well right about anything you know so he's really kind of scraping by i think he's a very shaky you know a self-doubting self-hating character and i don't dislike him for that that's just my reading that's what i feel about him um i think he's a guy who's doing these speaking engagements and feeling that he's just very barely scraping by by the seat of his pants you know um yeah so you know i i just say and you know um what it is people like about him what does they hope he'll accomplish that's really the mystery to be unfolded because i don't really see earthlings making any false promises to people um he just says give me your money and i'll make it disappear that's always promising and you know people are still lining up to give him to give him more money all right uh someone asks someone says that earthling ad is promoted by the same people that promoted tim sheef yes absolutely true no that's actually good that's actually an insightful comment from frieda the same people who would line up to support timothy chief in his period of vegan activism would line up to support it and they probably see him as a very legitimate vegan actress for that reason by that by that kind uh by that low standard uh great great question but i don't want to do a one-hour monologue on it what's your perspective on the israel-palestine conflict so i was joking that nobody ever asked me this the other day you know so here's someone here's the exception to prove the rule uh i think a lot of my my viewers cersei's already know my perspective on that because i have made videos talking about it so that's one reason why they don't ask about it um but sure i mean you know everyone seems to delight in pretending they're an expert on the israel palestine conflict and i suppose i delight in feeling that i know more than those who call themselves experts because sure i i think what's uh what's said in the mainstream media is really a joke um everyone kind of blows the dust off their file in the foul voice oh it's time to pretend that we care about the israel-palestine conflict again and you know all that anyone is promising certainly all that joe biden is promising is precisely things will go back to business as usual the things will return to normal very few people are aiming at any kind of um long long term change to the status quo uh to what you know frankly western democratic political leads have gotten used to over over recent decades and that's why it's most likely going to continue what's what's the situation the status quo for the last several decades it's comfortable for hamas it's comfortable for the plo i.e for the elite members of these groups it's comfortable for washington dc it's comfortable for saudi arabia who's being less less heard from now now that joe biden has broken it used to be that saudi arabia was a significant power broker um the only person who brought any new perspective any new hope into the equation was uh donald trump's son-in-law what was his name the guy who married uh the guy who married donald trump's daughter forgetting his name as soon as people lose the power of life and death over you you don't care about their political offense anyway donald trump's son-in-law he really did negotiate some new new settlement he was he was making big waves out there and changed the status quo which was interesting to see but um it does it doesn't seem uh it doesn't seem now that anything will change under under joe biden and i mean the other person here is benjamin netanyahu obviously nothing is going to change until benjamin netanyahu leaves power so netanyahu's career is on its last legs nobody knows when he'll retire or when he'll go to prison but anyway look you guys can watch her rats um but yeah sorry i stated i didn't want to get into a one-hour discourse on it but sure i i suppose i'm i suppose i'm denying you the opportunity to hear what i have to say about the israel mountain conflict [Music] so someone yes that's right uh kushner was the guy's name yeah google it yourself people you get a lot of great suggestions for this to google from here uh someone uh silly man ali says he would never give to charity unless it's really important if i know exactly where the dollars are going yeah well i mean i i think that that kind of transparency keeps everyone involved honest it keeps everyone involved sharp um the people spending the money need to know what they're doing and why you need to have a very clear sense of purpose to be in the nonprofit sector you need the discipline to uh to really serve a function with your with your journey okay yeah so someone comments that he's learning languages with the michelle thomas method yeah and then it's a bad method well you sound like you've seen my videos giving you suggestions on how to learn languages already [Laughter] all right uh okay so edgy intellect asks i'll answer the briefly before i read this this passage here move on to the next and i presume found but i was gonna cover on my list of things to do in this live stream i was gonna talk about napoleon uh napoleon's younger brother and we we didn't get to it so here all right we'll we'll see we'll see how how long or uh how short a shrift i give to salist here so um a quick question here do you think indigenous traditions can be preserved without the religion guys the year is 2021 any tradition that exists in the world today will have been significantly uh adapted and reinvented for the 21st century uh look at japan you know look at the reality of the shinto religion of japan look at animism in south korea it's partly traditional and it's partly modern no it's not possible for indigenous people to go back to human sacrifice it's not possible for indigenous people to go back to slavery and to my knowledge nobody is even proposing that there are some indigenous people who had you know ceremonies that involve torturing people torturing people to death sometimes and someone's just torturing people as a right of initiation nobody is even discussing this so no i mean in this sense the idea of tradition tradition the idea of cultural continuity it's it's kind of irrelevant and you know keep in mind culture is something that we are either producing new here and now in every generation or else it is something dead it's something that exists in a museum behind a you know a glass case so it's it's one of the other now look sorry someone just mentioned uh uh chinese legalism what do you think what do you think about the kung fu culture in china today people learn kung fu in the chinese army you know i learned there's a modernized version of kung fu and then there's an historical tradition of kung fu that you can read about and you can see in a museum you can see it in movies but you know this is the sort of thing that happens all around the world but the question is are they going to have their own culture which is in large part can be something they generate that's original and new now for the 21st century but that's distinctively theirs and makes whatever use they can of those traditions traditions they will very likely discover by reading the same books i read if you want to know what traditional cree scripture is like let's put it that way they're myths and legends you got to read the same books i read let me just mention you go to the university library and get them off the shelf that's now you could take that and you can make you can make a new movie you can make like a disney style movie if you wanted to with with uh creed so many of them they make a better movie than bambi or dumbo honestly i mean you know some of these legends you could you know breathe new life into them you could make them part of our culture today it could be better than batman you know what i mean you could make a new popular culture that's really uh infused with and inspired by that indigenous tradition but it will be in a very large part you know an act of original creation um to give you another example what if you want to take shakespeare to japan how do you make shakespeare meaningful to a japanese audience today you may ostentatiously use some of the aesthetics of a medieval europe or renaissance europe i mean you might go back earlier i've seen versions of hamlet that really put it in the dark ages instead you know they wanted to have that you know 14th century aesthetic even though the play isn't set in the 14th century but you know you you may you may want to aesthetically evoke that but in a large part you're gonna it's not just gonna be a translation it's gonna be an adaptation and a reinvention to say we're taking hamlet and we're gonna we're gonna do something with it that means something to japanese people today so that's that's the kind of thing that's that would happen if it's gonna happen with and for you know indigenous people in in canada or in uh you know the deserts of the united states or something you know it's ridiculous to think that these people want to live in a museum or they want to live their lives in a backward-looking way indigenous people are people you know it comes about you know they also want to cut down the forests and make money out of the wood and they you know they have the same desires and needs that everyone else has it's not that they want to live in a forest forever just because they're indigenous and never forget i mean the indigenous people of germany are german the indigenous people of france are french indigenousness is not unique to minority or conquered or oppressed traditions and you know if you ask where is german culture today well in some ways it's everywhere in some ways it's nowhere um you know most of the storybooks we have are actually french in origin for children even the ones that we think are german because they were written down by the brothers graham but you do have this tradition let's just hyphenate it and say you have a french and german tradition of of children's stories and you know like when we think of cinderella where does cinderella take place the little red riding hood where does it take place it's some idea of the european past so that is french culture and that is german culture as i say actually most of those stories are more french than german but some of them are german um uh anyway sorry rapunzel story of rapunzel um rapunzel rapunzel let dinner where does that take place and what does it mean today i mean can you take rapunzel and make it more meaningful than batman or mickey mouse or miss piggy and if you can't get off the microphone or get out of hollywood or you know quit and find a job you know that's that's the kind of challenge so just say indigenous people are people indigenous culture is culture it's not a different challenge it's the same challenge um i got some irish viewers you want to make traditional irish culture matter you know huge you can you can you can get into the you know the the the you know the epic poetry of ireland written in ogum uh not really it's kind of an inside joke with linguists but anyway they used to write this writing system called augm which they used for uh gravestones but anyway they didn't actually write literature anyway this you know you have this pre-modern you know tradition okay you want that to mean something today you've got to make it meaningful to people it's it's a big challenge now if you ask me am i am i optimistic about that no i'm not it's i i'm from my perspective i'm living in a very saddening period of cultural stagnation and what am i supposed to give my own daughter to read you know what video game am i supposed to give my own daughter to play you guys know i tried to create my own holiday out of soccer but i think there's very little that's meaningful that you can give children and that's it's not easy for you to give something meaningful to uh to my audience as adults okay guys so we did not get to napoleon today so i get napoleon can be topic number one for next week i want to give you guys a reading from an author that i had only heard of quite recently salust s-a-l-l-u-s-t and i'm going to read you a passage here from salast um so look salust was incredibly influential and incredibly important 200 years ago probably still 150 years ago on that when exactly his fame started pardon me started to fade i don't know i've been gonna read you anyway i think you will see right away uh salust is both of political and philosophical interests and he writes in very blunt very simple latin so he was also one of the texts that was given to beginners and the language many quotations from salas and so on again so apparently he was easier to read than cicero but in many ways his work is kind of linked to cicero so this might have prepared people to go on and read cicero and cicero was idealized as the perfect latin author the perfect stylist who everyone should imitate in their own in their own writing and in their own way of thinking too uh cicero was that kind of ideal so anyway but this is salis who was alive at the same time and he was in many ways actually an enemy of or a political opponent of cicero's okay so i begin my quotation quote i say this because just as the human race is composed of body and soul so all of our accomplishments and pursuits follow either our physical or spiritual nature and so it is that outstanding beauty great wealth even physical strength and other similar things quickly pass away but the extraordinary deeds of intellectual talent are just like the soul immortal simply put just as there is a beginning so there is an end to the benefits of body and fortune all that is born dies all that grows grows old but the soul is incorruptible eternal and the director of the human race it guides it has power over all things and is not itself controlled all the more surprising then is the depravity of those who are devoted to bodily pleasures and pass their lives in luxury and idleness but allow their intellectual talent which is the best and most noble part of human nature to grow torpid with neglect and indolence especially when the rational soul has so many different ways to attain the heights of glory goes on he is really not happy with what uh what rome has become uh in his own generation but of all the paths to glory it seems to me that at the present time political office and military power indeed all public service is utterly undesirable since the honor of public office is not granted for virtuous action and those who use fraud to enjoy these offices are not secure or more honorable because of it this is because the use of force to rule over one's country and subjects even though you could and might correct abuses is still a risky thing especially when every change of circumstances brings with it slaughter exile and other acts of hostility so he's saying here somewhat indirectly every time there's an election or every time there's a change of circumstances uh in rome there is slaughter exile and uh and other acts of hostility um on the other hand it is the height of madness to labor in vain and to acquire from one's efforts nothing but exhaustion and hatred unless of course one is possessed by some dishonorable and dangerous desire to sacrifice one's self-respect and freedom to the powerful interests of the few so again this is interesting because sallust describes catalin's rebellion or catalan's conspiracy as the poor rebelling against the rule of the few and the few means the senate the senate which is comprised of the rich ruling class of rome that he has just been complaining care nothing about developing their intellectual talents you'll see he gets he gets a little bit more vicious here in complaining about his his uh other members of his generation in rome but there were other activities that employ one's innate intellectual abilities and preeminent among these is the reporting of historical events i think i will be silent about its value because others have written of that and because i do not want anyone to think that out of vanity i am extolling and praising my own endeavor which is of course exactly what he is doing um i also believe that although my work is difficult and useful there will still be those who will stigmatize it with the name of idleness because i have decided not to participate in politics these are the men who think that the most important activity is to court and greet the people and to seek influence through dinner parties he really hates this throughout his writing salas he hates these people who spend all their time going to dinner parties flattering uh one another drinking alcohol and sleeping with prostitutes here prostitutes don't come up in this passage but this is this is his percent of his perception of the life of the uh the political elite in rome and again sorry interesting question whose perspective of this kind could we read today um i do not know about the private life of donald trump or the private life of joe biden or bill clinton but actually the complaint here about certainly we know that about jfk jfk had problems with drugs and alcohol and dinner parties and prostitutes yeah yeah we we know you know the archives are kind of open on that so some of what salas is saying here was certainly true but some people in the political elite i don't know if you can believe everything that is said today about bill clinton but bill clinton might be pretty close to the the bottom of the barrel uh on the list of most most immoral uh american presidents in that sense i realize he is not remembered that way today but anyway uh i continue so anyway um but i asked them to reconsider the circumstances in which i attained political office the kind of men who could not achieve the same thing and the class of men who entered the senate afterwards if they do then i am sure that they will conclude that i changed my mind for good reason not out of idleness and that the outcome of my retirement will benefit the state more than the busy participation of others will the following supports my claim i have often heard that in the past maximus scipio so scipio is how we pronounce energy obviously this scipio if you know the letter c was never pronounced as a soft see any john anyway so this is scipio africanus famous person um and other eminent men of our state used to say that their soul was most irresistibly fired to accomplish acts out of manly virtue when they gazed upon the wax images of their ancestors to be sure it was not the wax or the image that had such power in itself but the memory of things done that nourished the flame and the breast of extraordinary men and that flame did not die down until their manly virtue had equaled that fame and glory but who is there today with our contemporary morals pardon me but who is there today with our contemporary morals that would rather compete with his ancestors in moral fiber and hard work than in wealth and ostentatious consumption even the so-called new men who before with their virtuous actions used to surpass the old aristocracy now use underhanded fraud and open violence in their struggle for military power and and to obtain political offices rather than decent moral practices it is as if the praetorship and the consulship and all other offices of this kind were in themselves noble and magnificent things and not things whose value corresponded to the virtue of those who held them but i have digressed too far and freely in expressing my contempt and disgust for our political morality i now return to our subject salist on the political reality uh pardon me on the the political reality and the political morality of his times