Unnatural Vegan vs. Ethical Vegans; Insanity vs. Sanity.

look guys I've remarked recently that
the difference between me and many of my detractors here on YouTube is shallow even if it's very obvious and could be easily resolved in many cases even if the conflict has been red-hot I can say in some of these cases all that's needed to get over them is for people to say they're sorry apologize for lying apologize for defaming me and you know let's be reasonable human beings and move on whether or not that's for the sake of a personal friendship or connection between those two people whether or not it's just for the sake of conviviality here on YouTube within the digital vegan demi-monde or whether it is in another sense for the future of the movement right it's a real question I get asked why can't I cooperate with somebody like a natural vegan somebody who has so many things fundamentally in common with me a natural vegan is anti-religion she is pro science she has taken up courageous positions on some issues that are unpopular within veganism to give credit words do I mean she really challenged a lot of vegan assumptions about the use of pesticides about genetically modified organisms in farming about medicine itself I never saw her take on the natural hygiene people or you know people with soap and clothes but in general she has in in a context in a social context that was dominated by fruitarian naturopathic hype she took a very interesting and challenging moral position of saying that she was not going to fetishize nature neither in the context of natural hygiene or the natural diet and you know she was going to challenge our assumptions about science in the modern world the role of science and technology including biotechnology within veganism and so on so you know there are obvious grounds there for mutual respect and cooperation but you know less than that at a lower level even than cooperation there are grounds for debate and I think of maybe a simpler more fundamental question asked wouldn't be why can't a natural vegan and I cooperate it might be why can't we even disagree okay I see so many people going after me in terms of ad hominem attacks where the whole point of their video is not even to explicate what it is they disagree with me on as a matter of fact it's just to explicate what a terrible person i am and therefore my opinion is invalid the problem with ad hominem attacks really is that it distracts us from it directs their attention away from what we really should be debating and I feel that many of these debates are worth having it's always been for me a kind of sad irony that unnatural vegans mean position on me is that I'm incapable of hearing criticism I'm incapable of engaging in debate and then she goes on to in an offhand way accused me of pseudoscience and of being a cult-like leader comparable to during Ryder people forget she got ad hominem with me right off the bat and the real difference between us never gets delineated and never gets debated so in a much lower level even than cooperating I think the question is why can't we even disagree and again I've just lately been looking at people who are still trying to villainize me and defame me over my position on mental disability okay now it's an interesting enough example I'm gonna get back to a natural vegan but let's outline what this is my position is that again I come out of a political science background equality in terms of human rights does not equate to equality in terms of responsibilities this is not even debated we're all equal in a sense and yet we are not all equally entitled to drive a car we are not all equally entitled to perform surgery certain kinds of responsibilities like being a surgeon or performing a surgery involve all kinds of special rights privileges responsibilities whoever you want to say it and we are by no means equal in asking to exercise those privileges or and actually exercising them for one person performing a surgery is a job and for another it's a crime for one driving a car with a driver's license is permitted and without one it's a crime and my whole point this isn't a distraction from my point this is an illustration of my point this is my point about mental disability mental disorders of any kind including personality disorders in the broadest sense there's a whole range of mental impairments that would render you unfit to serve as a police officer it's an example but it actually isn't an illustration on that point this is my point now I myself have actually applied I've gone through like step one of becoming a police officer in Canada at a few different points but I talk to people in Canada people who were police officers already about the process and got information and at several points people have said to me that they they would like to recruit me or the be interested they think I would make a good police officer not worth explaining why and maybe they're wrong maybe I would be a terrible police officer ok the reason why I use the police officer as an example being a police officer doesn't require brilliance doesn't require genius above all else being a police officer requires reliability and many of the people who disagree with me vehemently on this issue of mental disability again in a very very broad sense ranging from personality disorders to other forms of mental impairment they often argue that even somebody with schizophrenia diagnosed case of schizophrenia if they're receiving treatment if they're receiving therapy if they're taking their drugs they're taking their meds then they may live a normal life 90% of the time 95% of the time 99% of the time but guess what for being a police officer that's not good enough then you know what if you have schizophrenia diagnosed case of schizophrenia and you look at what a normal police officer does in his day maybe that person can do 99% of the job 99% of the time whether it's you know traffic tickets enforcing you know the incredibly dull banal world of paperwork and enforcement and regulation that police officers do there's no doubt a large part of the job is boring and almost anybody could do it okay but there's a question here of reliability and if you're talking with someone with a disorder and they live they are perfectly normal they may even be exemplary the majority of the time but once in a while they have a seizure once in a while to have an emotional breakdown once in a while their disorder interrupts the normalcy of their life in a way that causes them to behave erratically or irrationally or act out that's a problem and there are many jobs they can do in life but being a police officer is not one of them even though a police officer only makes life-and-death decisions once in a while maybe once or twice in their whole career a police officer is really in a life-and-death situation even though police office job it may be stressful sometimes and other times may be boring there are requirements here there are hard requirements that do exclude people with a whole range of disorders whether that's bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia and it's easy sympathetically to put yourself in the position of somebody doing the hiring if you're the Chief of Police and you're sitting there and drawing up the guidelines or you are doing the interview for someone who wants to be a cop and you see that they are diagnosed with one of these serious disorders or a serious mental disability this is why I'm treating them in one category for you making that decision to put a gun in somebody's hands to put handcuffs in somebody's hands to put a badge in somebody's hands and give them the power of life and death are you going to hire someone who is a schizophrenic on medication as opposed to someone who is not that again that is my position this isn't illustrating my position this is my position and then I asked the question to what extent if we're being honest if we're not playing the game of just flattering people with serious disorders serious mental disabilities etc to what extent are we getting into certain types of responsibility that you know where these things become problematic I see people responding to this in every possible way blackening my character because they find this so shocking they find this so upsetting that I would speak in a down-to-earth way about the fact that again it's not an inequality in human rights it's an inequality in terms of responsibilities that we can take on and ultimately it's just that an inequality that has to do with reliability as I've said reliability is really the word here I've seen people defaming me and blackening my character and saying what a terrible human being I am in so many ways and you know what I've never seen and never heard is a single person responding this actually disagreeing with the point I've just made I have never seen a single person disagreeing with the premise and saying that no you should have police who are neurodiverse we have these catchphrases that it would be a good thing to hire a police officer who is a schizophrenic that would be a good thing to have more police officers who are schizophrenic have bipolar disorder borderline personality disorder not one has actually disagreed with the content of my argument because that's what the content of my argument is and this is why ad hominem attacks are such a problem you can get into saying what a terrible person I am and fill a 20-minute video whatever we can carry on this debate forever without anyone delineating what their own position actually is delineating what their disagreement with me actually is or debating the point itself and I'll say it's the thing this is not private I remember among the people who disagree with me politely on this which is a tiny matter I remember mod vegan made a comment which is reasonable but disagreeing with me in terms of what I say about mental disability and what have you and I put to her the example I said okay so if you are hiring a babysitter for your own child a certain kind of responsibility is required certain kind of reliability is required are you actually claiming that it does not matter to you that you're willing to hire someone as a babysitter for your children who's diagnosed with schizophrenia diagnosed with bipolar disorder has another very serious very grave disorder disability personality disorder or what have you again I'm using a broad category here because I'm not trying to conflate these things as if it were the same I'm talking about the limits of responsibility and reliability and in relation to that question for the purpose of this conversation they all fit into one category because that's what I want to discuss and Maude vegan wrote back to me and she said I mean you know she still disagrees with me it's a polite disagreement but she had to concede the point now that's imagining yourself in the position of the person doing the hiring that you're the person hiring the police officer or you're the person hiring the babysitter there's another perspective here I would invite you to sympathize with instead of just responding to me in this ad hominem way what if you're the person being arrested what if you're the child being taken care of by that babysitter dealing with an authority figure whether it's a police officer or something like a border guard like being interrogated at the border by a border guard or something if you've ever been in that situation being interrogated the border or being targeted by a police officer and the person interrogating you is just a little bit incompetent just a little bit crazy just a little bit incomprehensible and you're in no position to question them or correct them and you're sitting there trying to answer their questions trying to go with it it's terrifying I've never had to deal with a cop or a border guard who was schizophrenic or having an emotional breakdown or you know this kind of thing take a minute to imagine if you're the child and it's your babysitter or if you're the person being arrested if you're the person being interrogated okay again I come out of a political science background I am very comfortable talking about these issues of human inequality in a way that the majority people are not I appreciate that and a lot of what goes on here on the Internet is people who are just looking for their opportunity to show you how morally superior they're right oh you said something I find insensitive about mentally disabled people here's my chance here's my chance to get on my high horse and judge you show show to the crowd show to anyone who will listen on YouTube how morally superior am to you and guys it's a funny example but if you watch the recent video I did for example for example on a Nishan an isiand sex life that's not what I'm doing it would be so easy to say here's my chance to show you how morally superior I am too innocent and I don't do that I actually in a kind of sympathetic and helpful in constructive way say hey look an SDN is messed up here's where it's at and you know growing up part of what we're doing is honing our social instincts we're practicing these behaviors again and again what does it mean to seem sensitive what does it mean to seem responsible what does it mean to seem politically savvy and you know there's a flipside to that which is honing your antisocial instincts which is practicing how do I challenge these presuppositions how do I challenge people's assumptions how do I get people to reevaluate things they may have never questioned or may have learned not to question for so many years when I was working like you know in the nonprofit sector in the charity sector broadly speaking humanitarian sector broadly speaking in Cambodia you know I can remember talking to people about the strange ego trips that the target populations get into the recipients get into you can talk to people who all their life have been beneficiaries of charity and it can have really strange impacts on their perception of the world where you know if you're talking about a person in Cambodia who's become accustomed to someone flying from Switzerland to Cambodia and getting off an airplane just to help them that has an impact on their view of the world you know and I mean when I was in Canada talking to people who were deaf part of the the deaf community their whole view of politics of the function of government because they were really used to most of their political struggles are demanding more handouts and more support for the government they're used to the government providing them with their own schools and their own curriculum and helping them to such a radical extent their perception of politics remarkably different from yours or mine assuming you're not deaf because you're able to hear this video it's true that you know again the social instincts the charitable instincts step by step they can draw you into a set of assumptions that everyone in the game perceives as charitable and well intentioned and kind and morally good but that also step by step are leading you further and further away from reality especially the harshness of political reality it's so easy and it would be so rewarded for me to say flattering things about the mentally disabled people with serious mental disorders and personality disorders it would be so easy for me cynically to play to the crowd the way these other people do and I'm not doing that okay instead there's something that it really is a practical problem in my own life even just in this kind of discourse than feeding them saying no I want to talk about this honestly I want to talk about the risks and the consequences of how we handle people who have serious disorders whether their personality disorders mental disabilities etc within the movement okay unnatural vegan and I do not differ on a trivial or shallow matter we differ on the definition of ethical veganism itself and the conflict I have with a natural vegan for me it's most worrying because it illustrates what how many thousands thousands of thousands of vegans are willing to overlook what's morally wrong with her message and at the same time to respond to me in the challenge I posed by just launching into ad hominem attacks I guess my character and that's that's what a natural being in herself did I'm gonna pull you up a 1 second clip here from a natural vegan in a video in which if you read even the description below the video she openly says she's attacking or criticizing or rejecting the claims of ethical veganism itself [Music] again she says that almost exactly the same words in the text written below that video that is her video number two on tentative veganism as she phrases it ok I've stated this before at length and I've stated before in brief unnatural vegan takes as central to her definition of veganism the idea that not all use is abuse that it is possible to have animals being raised in captivity domesticated animals being used as pets being used to produce milk being used to produce eggs and even being used to produce meat it is possible to keep animals in this way and to eat their flesh or eat their eggs or eat their milk or just keep them as pets to decorate your home or play with without exploiting them without harming them and she comes to this perspective logically starting from the intellectual legacy of Peter Singer Peter Singer already invites us to imagine a world in which it is possible to kill an M an animal without harming it I'll repeat that Peter singers position is that you can kill an animal without harming it because he has a so-called cognitivist position that animals do not understand the future they do not think in terms of Futurity and therefore depriving them of their future he's depriving them of nothing he believes it is possible to kill an animal rapidly and painlessly and in so doing you're not harming the animal so it's a small but significant lit logical step for someone like a natural vegan to then claim that you can castrate a dog without harming it and to me that is not a trivial example ok dogs like many other quadrupeds do literally lick their own balls and this is hardwired into their behavior in terms of evolutionary behavior to some extent you may or may not know this but the reason why a male billy goat a goat that is male has a beard as we say in english it has a some extra long hairs around its chin is because the male goat is evolved in terms of evolutionary behaviour it will put its head between its legs and put hormones pheromones whatever you wanna say onto that beard all right so there are many quadrupeds that both have a sense of smell that is keenly linked to hormones and pheromones of their own species so they can tell which dogs are male which dogs are female so that they can engage in mating behavior and competitive behavior so they can tell if a member of the opposite sex is in heat there all these behaviors that are linked to their sense of smell and then believe it or not it's gross from human perspective but yes these animals do actually lick their own balls so again this is not at homonym this is not trivial unnatural vegan starting from a Peter Singer position took a further step into inanity and into immorality from my perspective in justifying the castration of animals such as the castration of dogs as something that does not harm the animal now she has a problem here even though I regard Peter singers position already has deeply logically flawed as wrong morally ethically and philosophically Peter Singer at least is talking about harming an animal after which the animal is dead and so it cannot be harmed any further so how do we get from the position that you couldn't suddenly kill an animal without harming it to the position that you can eviscerate an animal that you can surgically alter an animal and then the animal keeps living the animal survives this and yet the animal is not harmed she attempted to do this by claiming that a dog is not even aware that it has been castrated now the facts have already laid out right now already make it clear that this is impossible to believe a dog literally licks its own balls a dog can smell the difference between male and female a dog of all animals she did not pick it an example that flatters our argument it is actually scientifically impossible to argue that castrating a male dog does it no harm or harms it in a way that it's incapable of perceiving itself alright um no more broadly and more deeply I do have to ask the question why why in her two videos on tentative veganism why is unnatural vegan attacking ethical veganism per se because that's what she's doing she the the phrasing is not much different she says that moral veganism is not defensible is not sustainable whereas her view of the world which she calls tentative veganism she thinks is ok but the first premise there that moral veganism is wrong how is it that more than 10,000 people watch that video who are vegan and they see nothing wrong they nothing alarming they see nothing challenging with unnatural vegans argument and not everyone's an idiot there was a very short sharp to the point response from a guy called think about this I believe he's Australian I forget if he's Australian or from New Zealand but a guy called think about this had a very hard-hitting video that hit the nail right in the head and said look unnatural vegan what she's doing is anti vegan and ethically wrong because unnatural vegan is defending the use of animals which is true I mean both technically and substantively he has correctly identified one of the core problems with her argument okay but a little bit more broadly speaking why is she making this argument at all it completely makes sense to me that a meat-eater would adopt her position because her position is it is possible to drink milk eat eggs or even eat the flesh of an animal if that animal lives under certain conditions and if that animal is killed in a certain conditions from my perspective now look this type of rhetoric is only useful in some circumstances but she chooses I have no idea why she chooses example she chooses examples that are incredibly unflattering to her case like a an elephant being kept in captivity or backyard chickens backyard hens laying eggs in someone's backyard I didn't choose that example she did it seems to me a remarkably weak example for her to choose um she tries to justify that you are not harming the chicken by focusing on the fact that in the act of laying the egg or in the act of separating the chicken from its AG like taking an unfertilized egg away from a chicken you are not harming the chicken right so this is true but it's misleading sometimes on the level of rhetoric it is useful to replace the use of animals with the use of humans and ask why is this logically viable or not viable not all the time but it's a way to approach these problems one of the products traded on the free market is human hair people buy and sell human hair partly to make wigs to make beauty products and for other reasons why can't I keep a human being in my backyard in the equivalent of 8 of a backyard hens a backyard chicken hunch why can't I keep a human being in activity and every few months shave off their hair have in effect a factory for human hair with human beings being raised in captivity why the act itself if we're just looking at taking the egg away from the chicken if we're just looking at taking the hair away from you me causes no suffering and unnatural vegan extends this into you know production of wool like happy wool who could possibly have vegan wool because in principle the Sheep doesn't suffer and having it's its hair taken away why well there are many many ways we can approach this and actually I don't like Gary France aione he approaches this and I think a very convoluted way but obviously we can say it doesn't have to be in based on an appeal to nature this person's life we can say it is not natural for them to live in captivity yes and we all know it would appeal nature this person's life should not be spent living in captivity just to provide this you know this product for human use it doesn't make sense now what should the person be doing I don't know it doesn't have to be based on a sense of what is a natural person for a life it doesn't have to be based in a sense of what a human being would do in nature it doesn't have to be based on any particular sense of their potential they could go to university they could become a medical doctor that could become an architect I don't know um but the the context of this person living and dying in captivity is already shall we say ethically bizarre the whole scenario that the production of happy milk like ahimsa dairy which are at of a separate video on the production of happy milk or happy chicken eggs the whole context is ethically bizarre I do not have to appeal the nature to say this chicken there is no justification for it living in captivity this way why is this chicken living its life without knowing any male chickens so again this is hen and [ __ ] is the correct term and in English for easily saying male and female chicken why is this chicken not raising its own young why is this chicken not wandering in the forest why is this chicken not feeding itself instead of being fed from a human hand the whole context is ethically bizarre now I don't think it's inappropriate I don't actually think it's a fallacy or logically weak for me to talk about how chickens would live in the wild what would be a natural life for chickens in the same way that I think we can talk about the lives of feral pigs or pigs in the wild of wild hogs in contrast to you know pigs being kept as pets I think those are meaningful contrasts to bring it to the discussion and you can do it in a responsible way or you can do it an irresponsible way but it is not inherently fallacious to contrast the life of your chicken in a hutch in a coop a chicken that never knew its own mother or a chicken that doesn't have a normal relationship between it and its children or via its male may a chicken that is not living anything like a chicken would in the forest that this this type of contrast to say this as an appeal to nature fallacy is absurd and the other hand to justify the context of this chicken living in captivity existing only for human needs and existing only in dependency upon a human being feeding it this is already I don't have a better term for this already ethically bizarre okay even if you subscribe to Peter singers ridiculous view that you can one day chop the head off of this chicken without doing it any harm or you believe that you can take the eggs away from the chicken without doing anything immoral why why why is a natural vegan offering this critique of ethical what can she possibly win aside from uplifting a category of ethically permissible meat milk and Angus from her perspective she is defending a form of veganism that she thinks is more philosophically robust more rational whereas ethical veganism from her perspective is deeply flawed and untenable okay so this is a profound disagreement between myself and her because I am a hundred eighty degrees the opposite I believe that happy milk is ethically untenable is irrational is internally contradictory I think that the idea of harm free chicken eggs or harm free wool is ethically untenable and weakens veganism and she takes these exceptions to the rule and puts them at the center of her discourse to promote a greater they're not exceptions to rule but for her they are she says these are exceptions to the rule she puts them at the center of her discourse she says not all use is abuse and that she redefines veganism and rejects ethical veganism to instead promote so-called tentative veganism okay bizarre bizarre counterproductive and leads us into a bunch of debates that aren't worth having with the future of Venus veganism anyway what I don't understand is why her audience why she has more than 10,000 people on most of these videos sheepishly nodding their heads in agreement and supporting this position when there's so much with it there's so much self-evidently wrong with it guys on any of these ethical differences mcboyd here in this video as a whole is not actually that I'm right and she's wrong my point is for us to get beyond ad hominem attacks on this stuff if you think I'm wrong fine make a video response to this write an essay in response to it criticize me explain why I'm wrong explain why Peter singers write whatever your position is fine but there's really no point in saying that I'm a terrible human being there's no point in reducing this to a matter of personality traits that separates good from evil that's not going to delineate your argument that's not gonna advance the debate even one step and you know I do sympathize with the other side I do sympathize that there are people who heard what I have to say the issue of schizophrenia and hiring a police officer there are people who are so shocked all their lives they've only heard people saying the most flattering and sensitive things about question of mental disability and so on I really do understand why there are people respond to that they're deeply shocked they're offended and they feel they can only respond by laying into what a terrible person I am and you know when I watch that video from a natural vegan I feel the same way I do find it upsetting I do feel even rage and incomprehension and I'm you know I'm face palming and I'm saying how can anyone be so stupid how can she be such an idiot how can these people be such idiots who agree with this and that's real and I even sympathize the people who want to come on YouTube and share that moment to moment the rawness of that reaction but sometimes for the future of the movement for the sake of the debate itself we got to put those feelings aside and at least try to debate the selves to the issue itself not get bogged down in at hominem attacks