Vegan Activism I.R.L., Beyond Peter Singer & Potluck Dinners.

I buhdeuce yen I was just wondering cuz
I mean it seemed to me like it was there some sage your lap or peter singer or some other utilitarian thinker was really important to you for coming vegan or how you thought about Vito or no I mean yeah I was just wondering if there's some initial II yes i would say initially that was very important to me becoming vegan because I I can appreciate a lot of what he has to say not just about veganism but about a multitude of other topics i'm actually some of his I appreciate that he's one of the values about being utilitarian is you're not going to shrink away from discussing a topic because you you kind of had this black and white view of the world that allows you to just explore these issues is the fact that he's gone into discussing some topics that people wish you wouldn't talk about like euthanasia and things like that I appreciate that because I think that takes a little bit of courage to discuss those things and I'm I think it's beneficial I know you don't I know you can't stand him but Bobby look I mean my fundamental part of you singers that to me his stuff is boring and meaningless but that reflects what what I already am familiar with it take for granted like you know from age to I mean like he's coming he still has a view that I think it's very much set from the 1970s he hasn't really um he hasn't seen the way that we can move forward past that really well I was gonna say like you know somebody somebody else might get really inspired by a kind of introductory book about Buddhist philosophy or let's say a collection of Buddhist philosophical poems the really ancient poems translated in english and they might say wow and to me it would just be nothing because i have already this really deep the background to me you might be boring or meaningless like yeah yeah i've read the Dhammapada already at the this collection of excerpts doesn't you know doesn't hopefully that's amazing thing to me so you know I just say that doesn't really mean that the source material is meaningless but it just might not provide anything new or important or a shocking contrast to what I already knew to the background I already had and like I've been trying to get involved more with real-world activism trying to meet other vegans and things like that and i got to say here that this is a kind of a potluck thing and i don't know what you think about that but that seems to be universally the way that he didn't seem to me I don't want to go to a potluck I know that sounds awful but I just I don't worry cooking I don't like I'm it's just not my thing no why we can't just meet at a coffee shop or something but I guess that makes me weird but I would rather sit and chat with people than then you know right well that's that's also why I wanted to be on the explicitly political side of things right when it's clear that you want to organize real political action than whatever time you spend talking to people recipes and you know sing Kumbaya I know that sounds awful but that's the only well well look at your talking to now I mean I feel exactly the same way but anyway I guess we'll wrap up this conversation is because we've gone on for so long but what wonderful talking to you as you can imagine in terms of real world activism my options will be totally different if I now commit to living on the Burmese border for one year or if I returned to Canada right away just a short time ago I was thinking about whether or not I was moving to Japan or moving to Europe or join the Canadian Army so yeah yeah yeah I already just wish they already do have one BA I have a BA in political science so this esha second be a which is in Asian Studies so then the question is what if you complete the second ba do you now won an MA how many years your life do you want to spend in a university and for me it would be for me it would be quite easy to get in it yeah that's the question for you is like the benefit of that I mean you can certainly work get a masters degree and then worked for a government body doing something but I don't think I ever could I don't think the government would ever hire me I don't think I'd ever get that job I'm just being honest I don't think I could ever work for the Canadian government I don't think they give me a job above camp counselor I just don't think I'd ever get a job yeah well you can wait Oh God will uncover so you can look at my CV and we could talk about it but I was just thinking more like that I don't know that like certainly I can see you doing you know you could do something in education obviously but again that does take time I doesn't it's not it's not easy to get you know I've thought about it myself because I've got a master's degree right so I'm the perfect example of someone who what do you do when you do have a master's degree like I can certainly do a PhD and then you know I be able to do academia fairly easily but well the the other the other shoe before me to become a lawyer but becoming a lawyer in Canada takes a really deep commitment to a particular place because its provincial and you know ultimately to a city so that's years of my life with again no income and in Canada you get the degree and then you go into a very corrupt articling process and where would that be for me Halifax yeah you know so yeah very different you do come back to Canada you can perfectly easily i honestly think eyes like if you're able to to work with people i think that you could easily create your own you know vegan organization i can see you doing that and whether it's a lobbying group or something like that it I think he could do that look I hope your cough it's me but you are the tiny you're the tiny minority of people who don't hate my gosh yeah I'm not oh really humble about it but again when I was actually in Victoria and I was even reaching out to Vancouver where there was a bigger scene none of those people would talk to me and none of them work with me and again doing anything because that may be part of the problem too like there's plenty of people who are just not right well but then like am I more interested in doing politics or am i interested in doing vegan politics like now that I'm Canadian citizen and everything I've been thinking like do I want to get involved in politics I know you I'm always interested later on like some other day because it's late for you but sometime we should I'm curious about your experience with the green party and everything I'd probably not right go with supreme party because it's just not here in Alberta completely personalized but right well I mean you know um yes a lot I could say about this and it's already midnight here in China um okay sure sure sure sure sure sure but I mean to me I think if just looking at youtube to bring back to YouTube you do get to see all the different categories and why all those categories excuse exclude me so the yoga people exclude me the raw food people excluded me the people who just care about health exclude me the people who just care about pets exclude me the people who are really dog centered for whom they're vegan because there were people and like I've I've never been friends with any of them I've known some of them over the Internet there are people who spend their time rescuing abused dogs and all their time and energy just goes into house pets well you know it's and to me it's like a totally different version of veganism right when we were talking about Peter Singer earlier that was one of the things that resonated with me the most about him was his whole thing that he just he was not an animal person he didn't like pets he was not in love with animals but he could see the moral wrongness of what we were doing and he had this wonderful story and Animal Liberation about sitting with this woman who was an animal rights activist who's serving ham sandwiches at a lunch and she's talking about how much you know the saving the little animals and how people are so mean to their pets and how it just kind of in she asked him like do you have any animals and she was like horrified that he didn't have pets and here she is sitting and eating a ham sandwich like it's just the cognitive dissonance pennant yeah so you know but I mean she I do think that YouTube is useful as you get to see all those calories get to see how they exclude me and the very small number of people who were explicitly into political organization they also as it happens excluded me we had a party I could send you a link we had a party with his really long name and it was something like the animal rights voters but it was even longer than it was like voters for animal rights and blah blah blah blah blah and I remember the newspapers referred to them as the vegan party because that's such a catchy name by comparison they'd always say we're not the vegan party were not vegan or for an amorous so they were then on they were the non-vegan animal rights party and none of those people are talking working so so yeah common with many vegans either because I am more interested in the political stuff i'm not interested in just vegan food like because it seems like everybody every woman certainly is interested in diet food and neither one of those really interest me you know like it's just not well look ok so again i'm especially we said earlier you know i said before people who are wanting to climb up to getting two thousand viewers per video which is now kind of like my minimum once in a while I video gets five thousand or whatever but you know my anti-racism video broke 15,000 but 2,000 is my real audience and then you look at my situation and see how awful it is think about you really want this same thing I can say when you actually start spending times or if you do but for anyone who hears this when you start spending time at City Hall or at provincial Parliament pay attention to the the lonesome activists who have dedicated years of their lives and have only gotten a very modest reward so I can remember some figures i'm thinking of one in particular minute a couple people this who put in years and years on a particular issue and very often they were men who were lawyers anyway who had some respectable career of that kind that gives them an income because in the certain level of political education and they would take the time to just come into city hall and give depositions on labor rights or you know it could be ecology I don't remember them ever being ecology but some oh yeah one of them was uh cracks in the education system you know like actual like in that sense flaws in education their words I look there are some students who because they transfer from Quebec they put back a year because this either actual errors in the education system and nobody pays him and he has no fame and he's there alone putting the hours and you know the sad thing is in some ways when if you meet people like that and you watch them operate you see what they do at City hello provincial Parliament you have to realize that's not the worst case scenario like me having two thousand viewers you'd have to work really hard to reach that plateau and then once you reach it you know maybe your life is miserable I mean how unhappy would you be if you were putting on your suit and tie and going to City Hall alone to give that deposition whether it's on veganism or ecology or labor rights or the education system in a country like Canada with very weak cultures that there are not a lot of people like that I think many parts the United States actually a more of a civic pride culture where people do those sorts of things and maybe the rewards are greater also but you know you you have to be really honest with yourself as we say in rap music you gotta get in where you fit in which is actually really sad statement light live or visit for if you don't if you're in BC and you do any ecological problem other than save the whales it might be a really lonely road you've got to think about you're gonna feel when you're all alone yeah yeah well I'm really I'm fortunate in that I do have more of the leisure to be able to do that and have the time at least to do it so for me it's just about you know handling the the negative side of it but but it's you know it's something that i think i can do if i if I'm interested in it so um yeah well right and you don't know I mean for me if I actually come back from China speaking Chinese I may be able to plug into and galvanized and motivate a totally different public that's inaccessible to other vegans even with in Vancouver with in Victoria Chinese speaking Chinese speaking people were interested in ecology you just leave it at that whether or not they're vegan and then maybe I can coerce them to become vegan maybe we're maybe vegans aren't always the best people for us to be reaching out to I like I don't know it's it's it's going to be the most amenable to the to these to these kind of ideas like whether it will be vegans or not because I realize that a lot of the kind of anti-science happy food skinny Vinnie images are probably not that interested in it right but that that's why i say i really think it's it's valuable to define it in terms of an ecological niche if you work on river conservation then you deal with river people and they have their own foundations and back whenever those if you work with have their conservation for forests they were forced people and some of those people are like native Canadians who hunt moose but as I've actually met and spent time with native Canadians ohon moves and they often have a lot of respect for vegans and they often have an intense hatred for factory farming and so on you know I remember talking to one guy who was you know deep into the First Nations politics and so on and he said you know it's it's not controversial at all to say cigarettes are the white man's poison but it's deeply offensive to say tobacco is the white man's it's a great example you know so you know it's true as they say politics make strange bedfellows but if you meet other people are passionate about that river or that forest or it could be the ocean you know in Victoria we have this issue with sewage being dumped into the ocean directly untreated sewage monster there's blah blah blah but um but it all it all has to come from love yeah it's just you know about vegan education and that's the only thing we should be working on because like you said I think there's these small issues that are not right welfare issues that are like we were talking about lobbying for schools to stop having you know egg and cheese pushers come in like that kind of thing is beneficial I think and it's not about wealth or those are small things but I think we can make a difference in that are that are useful okay so one thing kazoo I met a woman here who is not vegan I actually wanted to have her on cam I wanted to do a conversation but she had been involved with vegan activism in England and she was part of a movement that tried to get vegans and a couple of other marginalized groups the same status as religious organizations within the university so I think I meshes you an email maybe so that they would have the right to have vegan food within the University of the University cafeterias so and I think the fundamental she didn't say this I think the judges position was look the university's making all these efforts so that Muslims can have cows slaughtered with a different method of slaughter that's what it helped out too and yet vegans are having such a hard time so there for vegans we're in a struggle to get the same status yeah talk about that more some other time too because there's something my husband's been asking about because he's like where I wouldn't vegans just do that because then you'll get way more you know you can start row you can have open your own church of veganism and you're gonna get nonprofit status and so this other ship almost instantly like it's so much easier sure but look great yes so that's why it doesn't really work to make veganism kind of a religion right so what almost maybe it's maybe it's easier because we're atheists but I was gonna say though all that though you know in terms of the love and respect and cooperation um I used to do ecological activism with a guy who had various um character flaws in Toronto and you know some of his character flaws were related to his drug use he smoked marijuana later he used ayahuasca when he's horrible South American drugs we know that but you know he's like the only guy doing a collage galactus my can work with and making a pause the difference and we did we did real things we did real activism despite notwithstanding his character flaws um the amount of love and respect I can have for you the amount I can tolerate your your your flaws both you specifically and you have my listeners sure it absolutely relates to things like like veganism so you mod I'll refer to you by your screen name oh right okay all right all right but you if I found out you had a gambling problem um you know I'd be aware of that and be like okay well you know we have to be supportive and understanding once in a while she disappears for a weekend you know to go to Las Vegas or something you know maybe she's not the person to give the right to use the checkbook and sign or draw money for the bank for our charity we have to be aware of this but we can still work with her we can still work around this um you know as opposed to Margaret wears leather shoes beep that's autocheck right yeah but I mean you know to me I mean you know in terms of the the type of love and cooperation and tolerance and real-world stuff to deal with with people whether it's you know you have a conference you know so people have spent time and money getting on an airplane because Canada is such a huge country if we have a conference in in the prairies you know doesn't matter where if you look conference in Saskatoon so everyone had to spend a thousand dollars go to this conference and then I sit down and there's one person at the conference eating McDonald's or something you know yeah yeah so you know that that that's all I say is you can't kill yourself but that's you maybe it's shallow or what have you but in terms of the people you're really committing your time and money to working with because they will have character flaws whether it's gambling or something else we can say okay I you know I really at this stage in my life I want to be spending time with people who share that fundamental ethical commitment where they're not willing to eat at McDonald's they're not willing to buy leather shoes or whatever it is so don't you know don't go too far with the reckless humility you know could say it's true i mean its humble to say i'm willing to work with you even though you eat at McDonald's or something is that is true humility for a vegan but i don't i don't think i have to be that humble for me you know at this i don't if you're a high school kid may you know when you're only doing activism of other people your high school probably you do need to be the humble probably need to work with anyone who has any common interest you but yeah everything right and rest LLC okay anyway so a wonderful and as you know i mean i gave you a compliment earlier by email which is that other youtubers keep recommending your channel to me and saying that you're our hope for the future and it's it's very flattering it's good that they say that but the bad thing is it's like well yep we're all excited about my vegans channel but it sure would be better if they or 10 or 20 different channels we were all excited about and she was just one of them where there were so many that you were being lost in the crowd but you're not you stand out and a lot of us have high hopes for future great and China and if you decide to do something here in Canada I definitely simply added you good speak to you soon ah baa loo CL