Privacy is a False God: Repzion vs the Vegans.

but overall
uh i've made a change in my viewpoint regarding veganism hands down um i support the vegan diet i support a vegetarian diet i'm not against these things like i used to be this idea this excuse this is how i view it this black and white extremism this militanism that you have to be vegan and if you're not vegan you cannot and you will never care about animals is just simply just not true i love my cat i love my dog but you know in another part of the world they consume these pets that doesn't make it okay trust me i'm all against um people you know eating cats and dogs if i have the chance to try a product that is non-animal related that doesn't use animal products i will absolutely jump at the opportunity to try it in fact in my refrigerator right now i have oat milk milk oatley i think it's the brand oatley i have oatly ice cream it's actually ice cream's amazing and that's vegan there are some really good vegan products out there and i'm being as fully transparent as possible i don't want to dedicate the time to having to look at everything that i buy going the extra effort on everything like i'm doing welding i'm exhausted constantly i'm in 110 degrees cement cubicle i want to eat food that's gonna fill me i just don't i'm lazy that's what ultimately boils down to i am lazy uh that's why i don't wanna go vegan is because i'm lazy and that's [Music] too much effort for me to do if you wanna go vegan that's your personal choice i will support you as long as you're not hurting anybody personally i don't really care what you do what you ingest you know i go to a restaurant um i've actually been to a couple of vegan restaurants but if i go to a restaurant a lot and they have vegan options i'm gonna dab at some point i'm gonna try that because i love to see what options are out there to not consume animal products if i have the chance to do so i definitely will but it's not a way that i want to live my life and it's not really anybody's business if i consume animal products what does it mean to say this is a private matter this is a personal decision i went vegan for like once i think one one or two months and it was it was hard um it's doable but i just i don't want to be vegan it's just that simple it's not something that i will enjoy doing and i do enjoy eating a nice steak every once in a while and i don't think that you should be angry or upset at people who do eat steak every once in a while because again it's none of your business what people do with their own body if they want to consume meat that's their business are you really saying it's my decision alone how dare you question me are you really leaning on what's ultimately a notion of religious tolerance that this is my private faith how dare you question it how dare you challenge it this kid repsian he got famous in the first place as an internet atheist as an advocate for atheism and telling his own sad story about being raised in a religious household and rebelling against it you know the challenge we're into here is pressing beyond the limits of a religious way of thinking about values and concepts in our culture that are not normally put in the same category as religion mind your own business today american currency says in god we trust look into the history of the american dollar bill look into the history of the very first coins that were minted in the united states of america and you will find that the slogan on them the slogan on some of the very first coins that ever existed in the american empire is mind your business some of these ideas whether it be the right to bear arms concepts of freedom personal responsibility bedrock ethical notions in the american and english-speaking world okay they rule over us they shape our behavior just as profoundly as a formally organized religion and it can be much more difficult to get people to question the concepts that they've received in an unexamined way from the american constitutional tradition from so-called secular american culture can be much more difficult than getting them to question prayer circumcision whether or not they personally should remain celibate until marriage questioning the concept of god and the implications of god what god means in their lives it's quite easy to get people to do questioning privacy personal responsibility in what ways it would or would not be appropriate for one person to confront another about an ethical commitment like veganism about their diet about their drug habit about the choices they're making they're gonna have tremendous consequences for their own lives for the lives of others around them and sure ecological consequences whether it be for animals or the environment thought of as a kind of abstract system i had a professor here at the university of victoria she's now retired she was about 65 years old the time i had this conversation and um she had she had a double chin she was so far overweight i've got to tell you she really had no chin at all and uh she told me she complained to me that she was at that stage of life where it was very difficult for her to buy clothes she had to go to a special store to buy clothes for overweight women and this this kind of thing so she was at that point of obesity when especially as you get older in life you know the negative consequences of that choice start to really catch up with you and i say to you honestly today i don't know if she's still alive would not surprise me at all if soon after having this conversation she'd been in and out of hospital with a heart attack or high blood pressure problems or any other chronic ailments that come along with those uh those lifestyle choices which again for the people making them they may not perceive it as a choice at all they may not think they're making a decision just in the same way that being born into a christian household and carrying on christian traditions you may feel like you're not making a decision at all you didn't convert you didn't choose your religion your religion chose you and none of us signed up for these other these other cultural values none of us really thought through the meaning of privacy of minding your own business and none of us thought through the morality of going around and truthfully policing others and saying how dare you why don't you mind your own business how dare you question me how dare you question him how do you question her how dare you call into question the ethical choices each of us are making in our lives we didn't we didn't choose that we didn't convert to that right you have to press further you have to press past the critique of religion to deal with all of these values all of these assumptions all of these beliefs that delimit your thinking and guide your action in adult life anyway this this particular professor she um said to me i would say laughingly but perhaps scoffingly would be better if it's a word she said to me scoffingly that um as soon as i relocated to china as soon as i started living and working in china my commitment to veganism would just disappear that i would go back to eating meat or eating cheese eggs or what have you like all the other students like all the other students she had who started learning chinese and then went around the world to to live in china and i fixed her with a glare and i asked her do you think that i'm weak she was shocked she really she just didn't see that coming i said do you think that i'm a weak person do you think that i'm an undisciplined weak-willed person is that what you think of me and i i think she just repeated back something about how all the other students who had gone to china had lost the will or lost their nerve to to be vegan and um i said maybe they were weak maybe they were stupid but not me that's not who i am i have a friend and she had a very close relationship with one of her professors over many years they were professor and student but they were also colleagues that professor he looks like he could collapse and die anytime i've never met him i've only seen photographs in terms of his level of obesity in terms of consequences of his health choices and i don't know to what extent cigarettes and alcohol are responsible for that but he's grotesquely overweight grotesque is the word how dare you it's none of your business it's his choice freedom life liberty and the pursuit of happiness who are any of us to question anyone else's choices you know this this friend of mine she had this friendship with a professional one for many many years and one day she just really drew the line with them and said look you know how how can we really be friends if i'm vegan and you're not it's her story to tell so i'm not going to tell it but it's very interesting example where two people who knew and respected each other intellectually at some point there's a breakdown where you say look if i'm really gonna be honest with you this ethical division between us it's not okay and it's it's never going to be okay you know i don't know if she would have used these words but she was basically saying i look you know i know what you say in your lectures i know your philosophy you know i know what it is you preach and i know that you don't practice it so to me you're a hypocrite in my eyes you're a hypocrite and there's really just a fundamental practical sense in which they couldn't be friends and they couldn't be colleagues anymore now as far as i know that's the end of the story maybe five years later this older obese professor is gonna change his mind change his life commit to a vegan diet maybe and maybe five years from now he'll die i don't want to dedicate the time to having to look at everything that i buy going the extra effort on everything like truly living a life of not using or consuming a singular animal product that is used in anything in your day-to-day life is practically impossible i'm lazy that's what ultimately boils down to i am lazy uh that's why i don't want to go vegan is because i'm lazy i don't drink alcohol my girlfriend melissa doesn't drink alcohol do you have any idea how many people take the time to tell us that really we should drink alcohol it never occurs to anyone think oh that's none of my business that's a private matter that's up for you to decide if you don't want to drink alcohol you you do you no this is the first thing and the last thing americans think of when something like veganism comes up right oh it's private it's a personal matter how dare anyone ask how dare one person tell another what the correct answer is to this question it's personal it's private shouldn't even think about it none of us hesitate to use peer pressure on one another whether it's about drinking alcohol watching sports on tv playing video games going skiing the most trivial self-indulgences imaginable right we all engage in lobbying one another to be lazier to be stupider to be more self-indulgent to be more of a scumbag and if you do anything abnormal that's good that other people can recognize as positive they're so eager to discourage you they're so eager to shut you down in this culture we pretend that there is this fence separating each individual from every other and you can look over the fence but you can't reach you can't touch you can't talk you can't comment you can't say a word each of us in our own little backyard is engaged in the pursuit of happiness the reality is people do not hesitate to bully you people do not hesitate to police you whenever you're doing something positive in your life whenever you're doing something that's extraordinary whenever you're doing something that's above and beyond the bare minimum of leading a totally self-centered self-indulgent lifestyle people are so eager to encourage you to get back in that category of what they think of culturally as normal oh you don't drink alcohol oh you really should nobody has this nobody thinks oh it's none of my business oh who am i to judge who am i to tell you oh no no no no if you live in a state of sobriety my girlfriend and i both do neither one of us drank alcohol for many years oh no no no the social pressure for you to drink alcohol that's tremendous and that's shameless if you're vegan and you encourage other people to be oh you should be ashamed of yourself right you're crossing the line you're reaching over that fence mustn't do it's none of your business what people do with their own body if they want to consume meat that's their business i'm someone who's very well read in ancient greece in ancient rome it comes up all the time not that it's my own area of expertise but if you care about history if you care about politics if you care about the constitution the united states of america you've got to be able to make shrewd comparative analytical statements about frankly how an historical figure like aristotle is connected to the concepts used by an historical figure like bill clinton and when i got together with my girlfriend a lot of people noticed that she really stepped up the level of effort she was putting into reading on many different topics but this is one of them she started becoming a well-educated well-read person in ancient greece and atrium do you have any idea how many people stepped up and stepped out of the shatters to tell her that she should not do that or even to take a further step of trying to claim that her boyfriend me that i'm a bad influence on her that somehow this is like an unreasonable oppressive expectation that her boyfriend is pretty like oh why are you making the effort to read these books from ancient greece and interim why are you making the effort to improve yourself why are you making the effort to learn there are people in different walks of life in this audience and some of you will have felt this where it's pressure not to be a stand-up comedian or not to be an artist or not to sing when i did humanitarian work in cambodia oh no don't do humanitarian work in cambodia the the peer pressure to be normal for people who want to drag you down to their level everyone's so eager to police you if they're shepherding you back into that category of normal oh you don't watch sports oh you don't drink alcohol oh you don't play video games you should be normal you should be like us you should respond to our peer pressure right to never reach above and beyond your station to never be extraordinary to never even attempt to do something positive they want to validate and vindicate their own laziness their own self-centered self-indulgence the fact that they don't have any better ambitions now and they never did they want to validate that and vindicate that by putting peer pressure on you we all put pressure on one another all the time you know whether that's pressure to smoke marijuana drink alcohol gamble you know this this kind of peer pressure right or i mean in this relationship i think you know invisibly i put pressure on my girlfriend to go to the gym and she puts pressure on me to go to the gym there are times when she's going to the gym more than i do and there's times when i'm going to the gym more than she does in terms of studying languages if you're in a relationship one person is putting the time to learn chinese and you're not you're slacking off you know you you feel the pressure all the time right and it can be positive it can be positive pressure it can be a wonderful thing in your life like hey i'm in a relationship with someone who wakes up in the morning and hits the books and studies chinese and she doesn't say a word to me if i'm not if i'm not doing that if i'm if i'm getting nothing done or i'm spending my time on snake trivial right i feel the difference i see the difference i know the difference if you're in a relationship with someone who's waking up and going to the gym every day it doesn't have to be in the morning whatever you know what they're doing and you feel where you are in your level of effort you know relative to that okay i don't give a [ __ ] if you feel oppressed by it or not oh oh but it's a private matter it's a personal decision mind your own business the fact that it's a personal decision does not mean that there is no difference between right and wrong i wish i could reach out to that same university professor today and save her life and change her life for the better over the next 20 years it is her personal decision and she is making the wrong one there's a big difference between dying at 65 and dying at 85. there's a big difference between someone at 65 who can barely walk up a flight of stairs and has to buy clothes from a special shop someone who's mentally sharp alert productive what does it mean if you say that you believe in privacy that you believe in personal choice is that really so different from saying that you don't care if someone else makes the wrong decision you don't care if they live or die repcion if you're watching this i know you have a history with drug addiction i know you've struggled with relapses with being in and out of therapy for it drug addiction is a personal choice whether or not you get high it's a private matter it's up to you that doesn't mean there's no difference between making the wrong choice and making the right one and that doesn't mean it's morally wrong for someone to break that invidious silence of the isolated pursuit of happiness to reach across the fence and say to you that they care they don't just care if you live or die they care if you're leading a meaningful life or a meaningless one and they want to put peer pressure on you positively not to be a drunk not to be a gambler not to be a degenerate frankly they want to put pure pressure on you to make the right decision and lead a better life