Vegans who want to kill every lion & shark… for not being vegan… ARE INSANE.

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we are gathered here tonight to discuss a political and philosophical misconception so outrageously stupid so ridiculous that i think every one of you in your heart of hearts knows it must be wrong knows that it must be refutable and yet it may be that you lack the vocabulary to talk through rationally that you're not confident you'll be able to convince someone from the other side that you are in fact the one on the right side and uh i find these things that my fellow vegans struggle with very easy to reason through very easy to talk about because i devoted my life to the study of politics and the mistake vegans make is that they think about political issues unpolitically they think about these things as if they have to do with the laws of nature as if they have to do with the laws of logic is it has to do with the laws of physics as if they're part of the cosmology of the earth itself the the order of nature in a very ancient sense right it's like no no no no we're actually talking about political concepts and we have to engage in this critique in a political way my sweet i would like to turn off the light that's over the the kitchen stove i think it's screwing up my lighting game here okay so we get a cameo appearance yeah show it to heymudan if you don't know her youtube channel she actually does have a new youtube video today some of you guys might not know that so it's actually a good good opportunity to plug uh hey mudan the youtube channel yeah i'm gonna give them the link but yeah she's got a new youtube video up today and if you follow me on patreon you would already have a link to that okay yeah that's about as much effort as i'm willing to make with the lighting so if you the last video i made you could actually see the color of my eyes and this one you can't this is much you i have inky black eyes here but it's a complete illusion show it to james showed it to nacho shout out to cool cruelty free cosplay has joined us just imagine all right so yeah we're getting into getting into a topic that actually he and i discussed from a totally different angle years ago the last time he appeared on my channel i forget how many years ago that was but yeah these types of issues have come up again again so look there are two ways i can express this and i can answer any questions in the audience some of you may have dealt with this problem uh in real life or in your internet life i got a question from a supporter on patreon which is the reason for making this video now who wrote in saying i could give this guy's name but i don't know a supporter on patreon wrote asking quote hi isil could you delve deeper into the transhumanist philosophy of david pierce on redesigning the global ecosystem so animals don't suffer in the wild he's one of the first people to introduce this idea in the vegan sphere and has interviews and podcasts other vegans and youtubers and published books going into detail on this quote unquote can biotechnology abolish suffering so let's just be clear in terms of who my opponents are in this my opponents are vegans who want to live on a planet where there are no sharks they feel that we as human beings have come up with a philosophy that is so morally superior to sharks that we should eradicate all sharks in the name of our philosophy all right that's that's what we're talking about here we're talking about shark genocide or shark aside i'm going to trademark that okay but it goes much further than that and now as observed as that scene so again as i began this video saying before we had the lighting the lighting change before i called in my technician to fix up the lights here this is something most of you will just be flabbergasted by whether you're at a vegan conference an animal rights conference or more likely you're talking to a friend or relative yours who eats meat maybe you're talking to your parents or grandparents people who are not vegan and who are weirded out by this they say well look i think you vegans are crazy because i've heard you want to kill all the sharks what uh gary yourofsky is among the people to call for this killing all the sharks killing all the lions right in the name of our morally superior uh philosophy anyway as soon as as so i just said this is the kind of context where you might be confronted with this and you might just respond by saying that's crazy that's self-evidently monstrously stupid but you might like that you might be lacking the vocabulary the familiarity of how you're going to talk this through how would you talk it through with someone who actually believes in it and supports it how will you talk it through with someone who's your your enemy your opponent someone who's actually arguing with this okay but of course it's not just genociding all the sharks it's not just genociding all the lions as soon as you let yourself think it through coherently there really ain't that much difference between a shark and a dolphin there ain't much difference between a shark and a whale there ain't much difference between a shark and an octopus in fact you're talking about eradicating the entire natural world as you know it because none of it lives up to this human created ethical value of being vegan or being vegan enough now of course there's another step into absurdity taken here by people like david pierce which is that they are talking about not just destroying the entire natural world but replacing it with a uh a kind of series of marionettes a series of cybernetic androids or a series of what you call cyborgs like oh well we are morally offended uh by alligators and crocodiles so so it's just a given to these people that they're gonna go ahead and eradicate all of the uh alligators and crocodiles because they're not they're not vegan enough um but then you know there would be something lacking in our lives aesthetically right i mean you know when we look out the window of our cottage in florida onto the swamp we we feel something was missing so naturally we would therefore want to replace uh creatures like alligators and crocodiles and sharks and dolphins with some kind of indescribably horrible human created marionette cyborg robot or you know biologically mod bio-technologically modified uh animal right like we've created a monster we created a vegan shark a vegan uh alligator etc so that we can still enjoy the appearance of these things without being morally troubled by them without feeling outraged so this is the this is the the question i receive i'll finish reading the question for the sake of it he says quote i think you may be able to provide a unique and meaningful critique i haven't already come across if we can do something about the perpetual and immense suffering nature brings shouldn't we do so question mark my reply to this in text form was just one word long bruh i could drop the mic right here or just end the video but let's keep going for another hour shall we how much time you guys need from my perspective this is actually a simple problem with a relatively simple solution um so look i i am going to talk as a president so this video i'm going to talk about politics i'm going to explain to you that the main problem vegans have in reasoning these three things through talking about them in a way that's coherent and really sane is that they think about political issues in an unpolitical way in an almost cosmological way they think they're talking about the order of nature when they're not they're talking about politics but uh as a preamble here i'm going to address the implicitly utilitarian aspect of the argument now i've made many videos specifically kind of debunking utilitarianism i can't remember anyone ever debating or disputing this with me i did have utilitarians who responded just with kind of mute astonishment like how can you possibly not support utilitarianism people basically got in touch with me and say oh but you must you must believe in you must believe in utilitarianism just like santa claus you know what i mean uh utilitarianism is an incredibly easy philosophy to overturn and it's much more dangerous because people tend currently in the year 2021 people tend to be unaware of the extent to which it's implicitly folded into other political philosophies other political moral you know arguments uh so i would compare this to um the difference between growing up with parents who are communists and growing with parents who have no particular ideology whatsoever it doesn't have a name what they believe in but they drive a ford 150 truck they watch ice hockey they watch american football they eat hamburgers uh they quote the king james bible like let's say they don't even identify as christian they're just they just participate in a whole bunch of flotsam and jetsam from mainstream culture they have an ideology with no name well if you grow up with parents who are communists you know what they are you know what they believe in you know how they define their own morality and worldview and philosophy and politics you can grow up you can analyze what your parents are teaching you you can come to the conclusion this is wrong you can reject it and you can start writing your own philosophy or choosing your own philosophy and start living your own life right in a lot of ways that's easier to do than to look at your parents who don't represent any particular ideology they have an ideology with no name they just have a kind of lifestyle you know and and really pick out what it is that's wrong what is the limits you know what sitting and watching a baseball game for four hours this is terrible like you know then it is it's there may be ruining your life you know what you know my father's excuses for eating yogurt for breakfast don't make sense really i'm sorry i grew up being taught that yogurt was the healthiest thing you could possibly eat it's complete nonsense you know it doesn't have a name it's not a clearly enunciated ideology it's not something you can easily put into its own category to question cross-examine challenge and then come to new conclusions whereas if your parents strongly identify with a clear ideology a clear political philosophical or religious kind of theory then it's easier for you growing up to identify that challenge and debunk it or you know you may choose to embrace it but you'll embrace it with some some more mature awareness of what it really is not just what your parents or pastors uh taught you about it so in this way uh utilitarianism is especially menacing not as a clearly named ideology unto itself but the way in which it becomes an an unexamined part of the unexamined life it gets folded into the dough the leaven of so many other political philosophies in our time now at a very basic fundamental level what is it that these people believe in they believe in minimizing suffering right they believe in the most fundamental tenet of utilitarianism going back to jeremy bentham et cetera okay i do not believe in minimizing suffer i've made videos stating this directly and again most of the response i get from utilitarians is really just gasping in astonishment okay let me tell you a story i met a woman who worked as a caretaker for the disabled and she helped to take care of a man sure this was paid for by the government in canada by the provincial government not the federal government she paid to take care of a man who was both blind and death from birth the only way he could communicate with the outside world and how he communicated with her when she went to take care of him was by holding his hand flat and she could make sign language on his hand so you know normally signing languages young people who are deaf but they can see this guy can't hear and he can't see and she could communicate with him kind of letter by letter word by word okay from the day he was born he was taken care of bottomless budget by the government of canada he's never had to work any job he did receive education that's why it's possible to communicate with him someone very patiently got him to be able to communicate in sign language in this limited slow way you know he has basically had a team of servants taking care of him in an institution since the day he was born until the day he dies he has never experienced any of the psychological anguish i've had in my life he's never experienced any of the ambition i've had in life he's never experienced the passion the sorrow the suffering i've been through terrible sorrow and suffering my life unspeakable agony you know and and the greater your aspirations the more terrible the disappointments are to live through this one do you think i would have been preferred to be born blind and deaf and let's be specific not blind and deaf in afghanistan do you think i would have been prefer to be born and live that man's life to have a team of servants taking care of me to never have to cook a meal in my life to never have to earn money to buy food you never have to worry about the food i there's just a team of servants taking care of him in a special institute for the profoundly disabled from the day he's born until the day he died they answer every question the woman i spoke to she was this special caregiver who took him on outings this is all the canadian governments all taxpayers money that's a beautiful thing in some ways but it's completely real she would actually take him out for example and everything she told me about was to help him choose the clothes you wanted her to take him to a shopping mall and he would feel and try on clothes before deciding what goes about and she would have to describe to him what these clothes are he's been blind and deaf since birth this would i'm sure was the highlight of his week it was probably one of the most interesting things and he would have to try to visualize in his imagination i mean to what extent does he even understand what clothing is or what our society is i mean i don't i don't know i don't know this guy but obviously his his degree of comprehension of the world if you think the meaning of life is minimizing suffering okay you think it's better to be born blind and deaf than it is to see and hear and get out in this world and see and hear all the wonderful things that i've done in my life okay i just say you know briefly i'm gonna get choked up talk about this you know i remember the day i i set foot on the mekong river the first time i got to the banks of the mekong river and i put my hand in it rather than my foot but you know and i i it's just this indescribable feeling i couldn't believe i'd lived long enough that he i had i had made it to the mekong river was just something i never thought i would see in my life and having been through what i've been through in the years before i i really didn't think i would live long enough to see this site you know what i mean just nicely it's just a river guys i mean the mekong river it is just another river you know but what does it mean to me it's connected to this history of study it's connected to this politics it's connected the aspirations i had in my life at that time it's connected to a whole bunch of things i was kind of rebelling against and working for it was so meaningful for me to to just get there and be there and stand on the mekong river and by the way in the months and years that followed the mekong river became a completely normal part of my life i mean you know i rode my bicycle along it if not every day every week of course it became a banal everyday fixture in my life but there was this amazing sense just to see it just to be there now i'm using this example intentionally you know the mekong river wouldn't have meant anything to me without all of this other suffering that's attached to it you know it's like this but it's specific it's knowing the history of war it's knowing about the bomb craters it's knowing about the unspeakable you know uh uh history of conflict the rise and fall of communism the rise and fall of tarabata buddhism there's all this all this meaning you know the water itself is meaningless it's it's no different from any other any other river you could uh you could drag your fingers through or dip your toes into you know but you know i'm there i'm reading about and studying the history of mass murder under the khmer rouge i'm visiting piles of human skulls and all this you know this is tremendous and even just seeing the jungle and anyway being there being that environment okay you are you gonna tell me that's not worth doing are you gonna tell me that what's meaningful and what's worthwhile is to minimize suffering to avoid suffering and inevitably we come to the conclusion as these people are proposing if you embrace this principle that what life is about is minimizing suffering well then why should sharks exist at all and i am asking you fundamentally are you and i such worthless sharks are you and i so much better or so much worse in our own way than sharks and alligators is there no point in the lives of uh of bloodthirsty predators such as you and i my dear viewer or should we really be done away with and there's no doubt that this same line of reasoning uh if you think you can replace the bloodthirsty alligator with some kind of uh mechanical cyborg vegan alligator do you think these people would stop short of doing that to human beings do you think they would stop short of doing that to your own shoulder and their grandchildren that they should modify human beings to have an anodyne existence and existence without any suffering without any fear without any risk without exactly these films that we ourselves also become mirror props mirror marionettes right you know what i'm saying so that we also can live in this uh you know in this painting um that's been conjured up lacking you know the color of black it's lacking the shades of gray you know what would life be without death you know let's let's be real here guys you know and what what would any of this stuff mean without the the suffering that that surrounds it so it's ridiculous you know you can ask you the same question it's interesting you know how different is when you're thinking about yourself you think about your children i just told you i'd rather be able to see and hear even if it means i have to go work at mcdonald's turn a living which is entirely plausible you guys don't know how bad my financial situation is but it's tough for me it is quite plausible that season three of a balacial is gonna be you guys watching me live stream sitting on the back steps of my of the mcdonald's where i have a day job i may be going on to doing some very humble work and i'll love it i'll still love my life right guys just saying you know i hope you'll be there with me when i'm live streaming from mcdonald's or something i've applied for some really humble jobs i applied for that terrible job at the airport terrible job at the hospital whatever just you know i still even if the next chapter of my life is working at mcdonald's or some other minimum wage up guys i'm committed i would prefer to be able to see and hear and endure all this suffering plenty of which is psychological in nature rather than directly physical right you know terrible suffering of being separated from my own daughter these sorts of things you know not direct physical suffering only i i'm gonna stick with this two eyes two ears thing that i'm on okay what about if it's your son what about if it's your daughter if you had a choice would you disable would you [ __ ] your own son or your own daughter so that they would live a life without suffering would you choose to have your son or your daughter live in that hospital with a team of servants to take care of their every whim i know i wouldn't i want my sons and daughters i want all of you in the audience i want all of you i want you to go out and experience suffering okay i want you to pursue a life that involves and includes meaningful suffering not meaningless suffering and then we get into the whole discussion about what is the meaning of life and what does it mean to lead a meaningful life which i've already done so many videos on right like i also don't want you to spend your whole life uh being in video game competitions the competition to be the greatest video game player that involves a certain kind of suffering and you know and to me i've got to say look i think that's a lot less meaningful than doing something else with your life and that might involve more suffering you know like but i think you should embrace the path that's more meaningful and uh and involves more suffering um okay so anon comments quote it's very easy to exalt the meaning extracted from suffering when you have never been shot in a war or burnt at the stake and are instead the person symbolically contemplating these things well anon i notice for example you do not use your real name or your real face fascinating i think i think this is hinting at the real difference in you and me and on i think you're a coward and i'm not and i think you haven't read the history of people being burned to the stake people being shot in the front and people will be shot back i need to tell you something it's guys like me who make world history and it's guys like me who go smiling to their graves and who aren't afraid to get shot and who aren't afraid to be burned at the stake and or even proud of ourselves okay it's the world belongs to people like me and if you are one of these cowards whether you're a utilitarian or not if that's who you are if that's you which which i'm guessing because i noticed why don't you use your this is my government name homie you can look me up in the phone book anyone can come to my doorstep okay call me i i take risks in my life i'm the same dude who went out to cambodia and went out of the laos this stuff in my small way in everything i'm doing even on this youtube channel right now yeah my boldness shows i'm ready to live and i'm ready to die but no man it's just not the case that everyone's a coward you may be a coward you may be afraid to fight and die of war i signed up to join the army the only reason i couldn't join the army was that i couldn't give the addresses of all of my brothers and sisters my father had nine kids so i'm just saying i said look i can't fill this out it's the only reason i didn't go to fight isis in the last war okay i literally was disqualified for paperwork reasons ridiculous but it's true and by the way my father doesn't have the regret i couldn't i couldn't ask my dad you know the mailing addresses of all your own children because he doesn't or he's deceased now but he didn't at the time but no no i'm sorry you were talking to someone and i got bad news for you and on you may not go to reddit groups really go with me the sad fact is people like me are normal and if you read the history of any century in any culture you're going to figure out how normal we are and that's why human history has the body count that it has put it that way i was just reading so there's a little bit of a direction just reading um i haven't yet finished the autobiography of uh benjamin franklin and i mean that guy's remembered for so many things but people forget that he was involved in combat himself with no training with no preparation he led uh i believe 560 men uh in arms in a combat this is not in the revolutionary war not in the civil war this was fighting against the french um you know alongside the british it's an earlier war he had he had all kinds of direct experience with people being shot and killed and massacred and burning down villages and and this kind of stuff he lived he lived through all that too and i mean he was a publisher now he was a you know sorry you know i don't know if i can quite call him an intellectual but he he was in the book trade all his life from from very early teenage years he was a printmaker and and publisher you know um that those kind of guy was but no i mean it's it's not uncommon that kind of heroism you know people rise to the occasion people are willing to throw themselves into tremendous danger and suffering including in long centuries where there were no painkillers and there really was no surgery or surgery was surgery was more likely to kill you than help you you know what standards of medical care were abysmally low no i'm sorry homie but there's something abnormal about you and men always been willing to fight to the death over a point of honor and a duel and all these other things and you see that you see that perennial side of human nature uh again and again you know do do do do all right so anyway somebody's bringing this back to buddhism cruelty free cosplay says quote the most basic tenet of buddhism life is suffering everyone has to start from the self and evident truth and build from there well you know i do like that catchphrase from buddhism the original pali is more like all this is suffering rather than actually saying life is suffering but i mean i think the philosophical point we want to make is instead to live is to suffer right open that out for you which is not i mean just saying this is not really the buddhist tenet and implicit in that formulation is the idea that if you do a lot of living you're going to do a lot of suffering like more living is more suffering and maybe if you're living less like the example of the the blind and deaf man or something or if you're just someone who stays indoors and plays video games you're maybe kind of doing less living but you're also doing uh less uh suffering and maybe also when you talk about having aspirations having uh ambitions that bring you far afield uh so on and so forth uh so nacho you asked this in the other live stream but you seem to be missing a very basic point so i'm not going to digress in this life but nacho asks uh uh appropriate enough her name is nacho business because it's not your business not your ass quote i hate to be nitpicky but you've recently said that you would consider working uh at a that you consider working at a liquor store immoral so how do you justify a job males so i don't so you're missing the point i am not saying that working at mcdonald's would be moral i'm saying it'd be immoral it's exactly an example of something evil and terrible one might have to do is survive i'm not i'm not it's the opposite of justifying saying here's something terrible i might have to do i mean so i don't know how you're missing the point no no and morally if i could do anything else and do something else instead sure but no i think it's totally immoral to work at a liquor store i think it's totally immoral to kill animals for money but you know uh people do terrible things sometimes they do terrible things for terrible reasons and so no i'm really directly saying look guys i may be in a situation where i have to do something uh very immoral and unpleasant and so thus i use these kinds of examples that's all oh it's just grounding this uh in that autobiographical reality uh hormone um [Music] okay so i said openly at the uh at the start of the video oh sorry a lot of other interesting avenues to take this conversation down coming up in the coming up in the the the chat um i think the main advantage i have over my fellow vegans especially people in this generation 2021 is just that i'm very good at talking about politics as politics like in this life you have to kind of say to people look what's political let's talk about politically and what's not political let's recognize as not political and talk about not politically like sometimes we are talking about the laws of physics or something sometimes we are talking about nature or evolution as such as we're talking about the sciences or things that are merely factual and are outside of the spec the sphere of politics um however yes i do think in general that politics is the queen of the sciences and that when you really understand politics there's a sense in which you understand everything and when you don't understand politics it's really impossible for you to articulate or reason through practically anything anything of social importance uh to be sure now what is it that some vegans are saying when they make the claim that human beings ought to impose their own morality on bears on sharks on alligators on lions they take the further step of saying the human beings should impose their morality on these other animals even if that entails human beings exterminating all of those animals so they cease to exist on planet earth so that the food chain has changed forever so that ecology as we know it is changed by by hunting these animals to extinction so ironically they're endorsing hunting animals in the name of veganism which you know again this is part of why most people just reacted this is self-definitely observed but as the question wrote and said there are other people who are trying to make it seem plausible by instead of talking about killing the animals we're using some advanced biotechnology to make this make this dream a reality um so i have i have talked about this on the youtube channel before but maybe it's good to have one video that really just just pins this down and speaks about it directly and precisely okay what you are talking about doing is policing it's not a scientific concept it's not a natural concept it's not a cosmological concept it's a political concept okay what is policing at its most basic policing is imposing the will of one person on another imposing the will of one person on millions of people or quite possibly imposing the will of millions of people on a small minority of people let's say you live in a democracy and there is a referendum and the majority of people decide that they are going to make it illegal for muslim women to wear head scarves maybe the same majority of people vote in a referendum and they make it illegal to carry out female circumcision for example they may carry out a whole series of repressive measures that primarily or exclusively impact the muslim minority living in that culture so what is policing policing is the will of these millions of people being imp being imposed on some number of thousands of people i don't know in our hypothetical but i'm just saying it's a large number of people they voted on this it's their will it's being enforced on smaller people now conversely you could have a kingdom where just one person the king let's say he decides the king wakes up one day and says you know what a lot of people when they're young get tattoos that they never think through properly 10 years later they regret it in life this is a big social problem and the king says you know what from now on you cannot get a tattoo until you're 30 years old it's illegal to give anyone a tattoo when they're a teenager in their 20s only when you're 30 years old can you give it to you one man decided this he wrote this law and then everyone's got to live with it how is the will of the king enforced on millions of people policing all right this is at its most basic at its most fundamental what policing is and means right um so whether it is one king or a council of people like a parliament like a senate you know small number of people making the law or you have a referendum and seventy percent of the population many millions of people uh you know vote on this or whatever regardless somebody some number of people decide that human morality is going to be imposed on animals that's policing right now already we have what's hinted at here we're kind of error in categorical thinking so i'm getting a lot of comments so i'm going to i don't think i'm going to forget where i'm at here so i'm going to return to this issue of fundamentally uh what is police say well i pick it up he's like i do want to read your your comments guys i'm trying to sort of make a note cruelty free cosplay says quote vegan gains argument would fit in perfectly with every rancher who wants to see every wolf poisoned and hunted basically honda extinction basically to exterminate wolves how dare they kill and eat my helpless cows on my helpless farm yeah uh michael harvey says quote vegans are generally hyper-political and have reputation for being annoyingly radical uh probably because of that link so michael i disagree i think the problem with veganism precisely is that they don't regard what is political as political so let's give you an example one of the most common arguments made for veganism is that it's natural no it's not it's ridiculous they will make the argument that we are evolved to be vegan or specifically that were evolved to be frugivores fruitarian and then that it's a kind of crime against nature for you to eat meat it's completely ridiculous now i understand why it's gratifying no no this is an ethical decision this is a social and political movement and it has as much or as little justification as any other social or political movement now i would say just disclose my bias i like black people and i like gay people i'm pro-black and i'm pro-gay i have never once made an argument like in favor of black rights or gay rights on the argument that they are natural or it's due to evolution like we're evolved to embrace gay people and treat them well and give them equal rights or you know the people of different that's ridiculous to me this is political i mean this is real politics let's let's face up to it you know and around the world and throughout history most societies have been intolerant to most people most of the time the most trivial of differences imaginable have brought about unspeakable intolerance meaning catholic versus protestant anyone today can say what the [ __ ] what's the difference in catholic and brought us in are you kidding me you know um portuguese against spanish do you have any idea how hard the portuguese fought against the spanish you know in new orleans and so on you know well the difference meant a lot to them at the time they were willing to fight and die for that difference you know again from the perspective today of someone from japan or china they'd say look what's the difference between spain and portugal and why do you have a why why do you have these words oh what's the difference between northern ireland and southern ireland guys from a chinese perspective or a japanese thing they were willing to fight in that point so no um you know my point is i think that veganism would be less radical if it were more political if it were more overtly self-consciously you know like cognitively political as opposed to suppressing these these political uh issues and and trying to uh trying to treat them as like cosmological facts you know as if as if they're part of the makeup of of human nature or or nature uh with a capital land meaning uh the world as it was created or of course they're also religious delusions you know believing that veganism is the will of god yeah i guess you'd have to say for most of human history um the two most popular ways to try to make politics unquestionable to make you know political authority decisions made by political authorities unquestionable it's either to hide behind the mask of religion or to hide behind the mask of science as i write about my book currently in the 21st century we've seen this other very strange delusion about the law itself that things can't be questioned just because they're a law or just because they're in a constitution as if that's something different than just a decision made by one person at one time that was written down on a piece of paper there are many pages written uh written about that in my book but um uh you know the this strange pattern of thought we have that things become unquestionable when they're called science when they're called religion and the reason why we don't want to admit that it's political is that whatever is political is questionable any decision we make i mean we can we can have a referendum and people decide to make uh abortion completely illegal and then ten years later you have another referendum and they decide to make abortion completely legal actually probably one of the best examples of that would be countries that have flip-flopped on the legalization of prostitution very often people have the idealistic notion that they can completely legalize and liberate prostitution and then they live with the consequences for a few years like let's let's have another referendum let's see what percentage of people still want to live with this once you know uh once you know prostitution has taken over a large part of the city yeah yeah okay um so the the delusion that these people are indulging in is that they can and should uh police the wilderness uh forcing you know these human created values onto uh sharks dolphins so and so forth even if it means obliterating you know the entire food chain destroying ecology as we know it in the name of this ideal this ideal that seems to matter more than the teacher itself or or what have you now i've been kind of hinting at this repeatedly in this video what is the point of policing to use nacho's favorite word what is the justification for policing i don't i don't normally talk in terms of justifying things i think it's very misleading in english what we what we do and don't mean by by justify or saying something is justified um to give an example you know if you have an atheist majority in a country modern atheist democratic majority and they are getting into policing the morality of the muslim minority in the country so this is happening right now in many countries in europe different places around the world happening in some parts of china although without the democracy unfortunately with only the chinese idea of democracy okay what is the justification anyone can argue back and both left-wing and right-wing people argue against this there are right-wing libertarians and there are left-wing bleeding hearts and so on who say well these people have their own culture why don't you just let it let them do it their own way you know they have their own marriage customs they have their own ceremonies their their own music they have their own costume their own style of dress why you know if they want to cut off part of their dick in this ceremony called circumcision why don't you just let them do things their way why don't you just pretend that our laws can't and shouldn't apply to them let them carry on you know in their own way now this question is normally asked insincerely and it's normally answered instantly but i want to answer it really sincerely i want to talk about what is the point of policing okay the justification for sober people policing drug addicts is entirely based on a claim about their human potential okay the reason why i don't want you to become a heroin addict is because i have a definite notion of who it is you could be and should be right now most of you if today with facebook you could really look this up think back to the classroom full of people you graduated high school with right how many of them are dead today i'm assuming i have a middle-aged audience some of you are watching this you're 18 you're like hey i just graduated two weeks ago it's true i do i do some teenage viewers okay all right if you're over 30 years old how many of the people you graduated from high school with are dead today how many of them are dead due to drug use or drug overdose and how many of them are alive but have completely ruined their lives with drug use they've completely rotted their brains or whatever they've frittered away fritter is not quite the right verb here they have squandered their human potential with drugs and alcohol okay the justification for the reason for the point of me policing you whether i'm the king or the dictator or whether we have a democracy where it's the majority of people voting in a referendum the fundamental reason for policing is that you have the potential to be something better to do something and you are going to lose that potential it's going to be snuffed out if i allow you to become a heroin addict when you're 16 years old you're never gonna get there okay there is a kind of potential that a woman has that is snuffed out by allowing her to have her clitoris removed in what is called female circumcision okay there is a kind of human potential that is snuffed out when women are deprived of the opportunity to attend high school and university because they're part of a religion that wants them to just get married the minute they're physically old enough to do so and that that puts them into a veil and gives them this operation and deprives them of ever having an education or career right and guess what guys none of this relies on anything as certain as science or the laws of nature or evolution it's all political okay all of it meaning there's ultimately in a sense no right or wrong right like from the perspective of the people of saudi arabia we are guilty of a great injustice by depriving people of the freedoms freedoms they want to have within their own religious and cultural tradition right and vice versa we would perceive ourselves as being deprived of the freedoms we would value if we had to go and live in saudi arabia right but the justification the point of policing ultimately is a claim made about potential and i will make the further statement that potential ultimately its significance is intellectual in character okay i would just say it is not uh your potential to smell a flower a purely sensual experience that justifies this it actually has to do with the growth of the the human mind and understanding ultimately that justifies one kind of repression or another um i'm opposed to marijuana everyone in this audience right now i'm just gonna encourage you to quit smoking marijuana never smoke marijuana again if you own marijuana right now in your apartment flush it down the toilet start living a better life tomorrow morning as a result kids it's my position number one some people are dying of cancer some people have particular symptoms either caused by the cancer itself or by the therapy they're receiving such as chemotherapy they're getting chemical treatments and different kinds of invasive okay that are horrendously painful i have been told and i am willing to believe that marijuana can be used to treat the physical pain as a painkiller and has fewer negative side effects than other painkillers for some of these people who are dying of cancer great smoke marijuana every day you're gonna die two weeks from now what is the point of me policing your drug habit if you are gonna be dead two weeks from now you see you see how that changes it's subtle but it's not [ __ ] subtle at all it's the most obvious thing in the world and once you've seen it you can't unsee it the justification for me oppressing you whether it's the king oppressing you or the in a democracy the majority oppressing the minority or in a parliamentary system an elite minority oppressing the majority the justification ultimately has to based on your positive potential and guys whether you know it or not basically in every western country in the world when someone is on their death bed when they're only going to live for a few more weeks or when doctors assume that they're given unlimited quantities of all kinds of basically of heroin and other opiates they're somewhere because nobody cares and literally there are people who die they don't even know it they die a drug addict because they've been pumped up with painkillers their last several weeks of life and you know if they did miraculously recover they'd have to quit this drug because the doctors have the attitude well they might as well the last few weeks in that hospital bed might as well make it easy on and nobody cares there's absolutely no political discourse about that palliative palliative care last few weeks of life to what extent people should should be robbed of the pain and sorrow and the experience of of suffer right okay so we're making a claim based on your potential your intellectual potential your human potential okay the shark has absolutely no intellectual potential above and beyond exercising its evolved natural faculties to hunt and kill and meet and lay eggs that's it okay if you relieve the shark of its duty to hunt and kill by providing it every day with an ingeniously devised vegan sandwich you go every day out in your canoe and you feed the shark a vegan sandwich that the most brilliant scientists have designed to appease the hunger of the sharks so that it no longer has to hunt what do you think you are liberating the shark to do is it now going to write that novel it was working on you know there is no other nature there is no other capacity right there is no further horizon there is no intellectual development possible for the shark it can only be the best shark it can be it cannot imitate a human being in virtue okay it can't cultivate anything intellectually and indeed i think with most predatory species i don't know this about sharks there are some predatory species where if you give them food this way if human beings relieve them they no longer have the need to hunt because they're being fed some of them will just become completely inert some of them will just become lazy they'll do nothing but others will hunt and kill for sport they'll hunt and kill for fun because that's all they know how to do that's all they enjoy they hunting meeting they have a very you know they have very very limited intellectual capacity so this is this is obviously taking the more uh i know the less horrifying form of policing as our example right this is policing through deterrence or something right the other form of policing that's being entertained here absurdly and is is now endorsed by vegan gains he managed to get that vegan teacher to congratulate go along with it but the other four police used to actually exterminate them because they refused to live up to our to our human standards our human values okay so my point is this you know when we decide that we are going to police the muslim faith and by the way there are plenty of forms of judaism and christianity that are just as bad i'm not joking in canada you can look at the hutterites a lot of the kind of extreme fundamentalist christian cults frankly let me say look the majority has decided that we do not like the fact that your women are being raised without going to high school and university and so on and i know it's ridiculous because it's not compulsory to go to university but we don't like what you're doing the way you're raising young women in this and we are actually going to start passing laws and we're going to break up your closed cult like community you can imagine there are some mormon groups that are like this too because we really want these women to have access to education and be a part of society and all these and all these different ways ultimately it's about intellectual potential it's like look you are depriving these women of the life of the mind you're depriving them of the full range of their of their human nature their human capabilities but that is the justification for what is genuinely oppressive when you prevent people from circumcising their own children you're oppressing them you prevent people from raising their own sons and daughters the way they want to with their own culture you're oppressing them you're saying yes this oppression is justified because we really believe that you have other potential there's a better life there's a more meaningful life for you to live that you'd be deprived of otherwise okay there is in this way no justification whatsoever for civilized human beings to engage in policing the wilderness policing sharks policing leopards tigers lions right and the lion has no other nature no higher intellectual characteristics that i can exercise uh develop or or ever even imagine or aspire to so guys i'll read your comments from my perspective that's a wrap it's simple like that's it we talked about the stupidity and futility of utilitarianism we talked about the extent to which like this whole line of philosophy is just a kind of categorical error right you're thinking about something in the wrong category and then leads to misapprentices and misunderstandings and we talked about the extent to which the fundamental problem is misperceiving what's political as if it were natural or scientific so i'm done if you guys have questions if you guys have objections there's anything else you want to bring to it let's hear it let's hear it you know what i'm saying uh the the other uh you know kind of line of inquiry i opened up here was for us to ask ourselves just how stupid are these people i'm sorry so i made a relatively brief video i think it's under 10 minutes long where i was really pointing the finger at vegan gains and that vegan teacher and we could point the finger in the same way at gary yourofsky and many of the others and we can really say how stupid are these people really and to what extent have we been kidding ourselves to what extent have we been you know in our own eyes making them into uh heroes uh you know making them into our idols and just assuming they have some tremendous uh depth of understanding intelligence uh etc just because they're charismatic or funny or we have some reason to we have some reason to admire them maybe just we find them attractive or something you know so i mean that's i do feel that's ultimately the question um when these people show you how stupid they are believe them you know i mean you have to really take it seriously you have to really take on board the full depth and gravity and implications of the fact that this person just told you that they want to kill all of the lions on planet earth all of the and it wouldn't end there you'd have to kill all the mosquitoes like think about this down to the microorganisms in the ocean you'd have to kill all of the whales whales eating zooplankton this is not vegan i i don't know any creature in the ocean that would be vegan enough to satisfy this so you would wipe out all life in the ocean why for what benefit you know who cui bono you know say in latin you know who who would benefit from this you would completely devastate the world's ecology in the name of this human-created abstract ideal now within so so okay i'll give you guys another quick example you may or may not remember this but many years ago i had another youtuber on my channel she's someone who was inspired to start her channel in the first place because of me uh her name was mod vegan so mod vegan with no space mod vegan thought that human beings should prevent bears from raping other bears in the forest you know so bears generalizing hashtag not all bears but among bears generally speaking rape is common and cannibalism is also common uh lions too have a great deal of cannibalism yeah it's a dog-eat-dog world it's a very bear world also okay so you have an idea of human morality and like this is specifically human sexuality and you want to impose it on bears you want to police bears you want to police the morality of bears the diet of bears you're going to bring them into court for murder i mean it's for some of us it's just so self-evidently absurd but do you have the vocabulary to reason that through do you have the ability to really explain to someone where it is they're going wrong in applying this this constant policing now by contrast you can take these same ideas and use them within the human sphere and you can immediately see how meaningful and important it is right um why does it matter to police people to make them vegan everyone here has relatives melissa has even talked about some of her relatives you have relatives who've lived whose lives have been destroyed by by meat and dairy and eggs you have people who've died people who are disabled of you know mental as well as uh heart disabilities with vascular disease it's so common so you know the health argument alone there's this card over that cardiovascular kind of argument they said what do you mean people's lives be wrong and again the ultimate justification of policing is human potential it's a big difference dying at age 55 versus age 75 that's it's a big difference since they're probably your most intelligent years of your life you know no i want you to live i want you to have a meaningful life i want you to develop your intellectual faculties and you know do all kinds of meaningful things those 20 years instead of dying because you eat cheeseburgers or because you eat you know egg i don't know egg salad or something i don't know i don't know what people you know there's a very clear justification there no that's the health argument which you know for me ultimately is kind of trivial because i think the the i think the ethical argument is so much more important and because i think veganism is fundamentally political anyway right okay well this is what i'm asking you is are we such bears are we such lions are we such sharks are we such alligators can't we do better i want you to lead a more meaningful life that way too and again i could say reaching out across cultural barriers and language barriers you know you could reach out you can imagine if you're talking to a traditional muslim family who have never really thought about veganism or vegetarianism it's not part of their religious tradition in the same way that like for buddhists they have an idea about vegetarianism at least about refusing to eat meat being morally significant well look i i want you to feel better than this i want you to be superior to someone who just mindlessly keeps on eating cheeseburgers because their parents and grandparents ate cheeseburgers i want you to be the kind of person who's at the level of intellectual sophistication and detachment that you can make this judgment decide this is the right thing to do and then live by it hold yourself to that higher standard i can't say that to a literal shark i can't say that to a to a literal anything can't say to an ostrich either sorry it's not just these big predators the robin the robin plucks an earthworm out of the ground hashtag not vegan you you would literally eradicate every robin every songbird every crow you know you would kill every bird on earth because they would dare to to pull a worm from the ground they would dare to crush up a potato bug they would they eat the insects out of the air and off the ground you know so you want to you want to commit genocide against robbins we're not living up to your standards this is madness and again i've now given you guys a one-hour lecture so you can say something more sophisticated than just saying this is madness it's madness because you are policing them in a way that that's irrelevant it's it's ridiculous and and by contrast you have to talk about what is the positive justification for policing what is the point of policing the point is i'm policing you because i don't want you to become a heroin addict i don't want you to drop out of school and be unemployable and whatever i don't want all these terrible things that happen to you and i'm i'm policing you in a sense also i want you to be vegan i want you to have this more uh sophisticated morally responsible you know uh view of life so it's still worth i am doing that because of your positive potential when you scale it up r positive potential all right afghanistan could be a better country if they became you know 90 atheist and 90 vegan you know these things are linked in many ways if you could bring about fundamental positive changes in their in their attitudes and their level of education and their outlook on life and so on you could you could radically you know improve life for everyone in that society now how are you going to do it you know obviously we've just seen a 20-year experiment asking the question of can you oppress the people of afghanistan into enlightenment and the answer is george w bush can't i think some other president frankly could have done it i think a lot of this has to be blamed on the unique stupidity of two men george w bush and barack obama well they didn't do it they failed but you know uh left to their own devices their their culture is gonna go on they're gonna go on oppressing themselves and they'll present one another and oppressing women and oppressing animals it's gonna go on and on forever and you know the point of policing in this sense you're the catcher the point is ultimately is enlightenment is of wanting people to live an enlightened life and make enlightened choices and become enlightened people become better people that's why i'm telling you to not smoke marijuana i want to tell you also to not use heroin cocaine fentanyl and innumerable uh other drugs but when we turn to a robin a penguin it's meaningless there is just no sense in which we can preach to the penguins that they ought not to eat fish or preach to the robin that ought not to eat the earthworm and uh you know again so there there is neither a hypothetical nor actual uh better world that can ensue thereafter uh because ultimately these things are our intellectual nature okay so melissa if you want to say something you can i mean i'd say from my perspective that's that's it it's mike there's nothing else there's nothing else to say on this and i you know obviously this has been explained in different terms uh with different examples but i don't think my position on this is played in any way it has changed anyway since i first made a video talking about it probably four years ago i i think i was talking about this in 2016. uh keep it real hit it okay it's not anything contrary to what you said however i was just thinking about the woman that we saw sitting outside the market today that you had seen oh yeah on the street a few years ago and now she was riding around in a motor scooter this woman was a self-evident drug addict that we saw today and i she's someone i'd seen back when she was capable of walking normally and with the progression of her drug addiction she's been on these streets i think for five years maybe four or four years but i've seen her around for a few years and she is withering away and is now going around on a on a government-provided motor scooter yeah so it is not because you simply despise people right being drug addicts right because right right right that's right right right right right right you take it for granted every day that they aren't sharks that they could read a book that they could write a book but instead they're drug addicts and they ride around on a motor scooter right so i have talked about that in other videos in the past but it's a good point what you're getting at is the contrast between animus as the justification for legislation and positive human potential now i normally i don't like to use the word justify because it it's just too vague i prefer to say something like what is the point of legislation right you can make an argument that simply you have an animus against something like the king has decided he doesn't like tattoos so he's going to forbid you from having tattoos or the king has said nobody can have tattoos until they're 30 years old the things that have happened in human history uh in japanese history they had periods of time when in the capital city everyone was getting tattoos and then there was a new emperor and everyone was forbidden to get there's nobody like they they had uh they had you know they swung through different periods the way i know in korea you know there's many many centuries men had earrings that that expanded the earlobe that stretched the and then there was a new emperor who said no no more ear piercings you know i think for men or women but i forget maybe it was just for men but you know that they were going to eliminate europe so i mean sometimes as trivial as those things are you know so i mean one justif one way of looking at the law is in terms of animus and you know we could say well people have an animus against uh muslims wearing the headscarf and then that's all it's just well the majority doesn't like it so they're gonna eradicate it well what i'm presenting here is a fundamentally different approach to the philosophy of law or you might call it meta law the law of law you know what what is my approach to meta law no i think the point is ultimately positive human potential so the the point isn't just that i hate drug addicts it's not that i hate you for being a drug it's not that i hate the drug it's not that i hate marijuana or hate heroin right it's that i have an idea in my mind which may be completely fictional it may be wrong right this is politics like none of this is science right i have an idea in my mind that there is a better life for you if you are deprived of heroin if you are coerced into not using heroin of course that could involve putting you in jail putting you in a rehab program but anyway it's illegal you are getting arrested and your drug dealer is getting arrested we are stopping you we're not giving you the freedom to use everyone because i have this idea that you could be a better person without heroin and ultimately you know getting involved with the coercive eradication of religion whether that is christianity or buddhism or hinduism or otherwise you know and sorry i i do think you know we've been we've been alluding to it you know arranged marriage is a huge one you know well getting married at age 14 through an arranged marriage where you didn't even choose the person you were marrying i have an idea that this snuffs out your intellectual potential and it's my idea somebody could find some example of someone who had an arranged marriage that worked out great oh and somebody who had an arranged marriage at age 14 and it was so much better for them well okay guess what i've got this idea and i'm i'm coercively insisting on it we're going to make arranged marriage illegal and a marriage below a certain age is illegal and getting a tattoo before below a certain age illegal because we have this idea of your of your positive potential so yeah whether we're talking about drug addiction uh religion uh tattoos or any other example this this still holds and yeah i mean um anyway sorry we give this with with prescription drugs uh so on and so forth now i i'd also say i feel that this has always been a difference between me and other vegan activism other forms of vegan activism me the difference between myself and other vegan activists is that actually my form of veganism is based on a love of all mankind it is actually based on a positive love for humanity now the biggest contrast of vegan gains who identifies as a misanthrope and sometimes describes himself as a sociopath and so on and so forth he openly says that he hates people and many vegans do many utilitarians do many anti-natalists do and so on where they they hate human nature they hate human beings but you know what i'm saying is that this idea of veganism is part of an idea of a better life for you even if you can't appreciate it because the heroin addict may not be able to appreciate how much better their life will be with sobriety even alcohol drinkers people who drink alcohol and smoke marijuana just casually they don't think they're addicts they just people who smoke marijuana and drink alcohol three days a week friday saturday sunday they think their lives are better with it and i'm saying no no i'm coercively telling you your life will be better without a trust me they can't trust you that's the only life they know or that's the only life they enjoy there are people in every religion whether it's hinduism islam christianity what have you you know there are people who will say no this is the good life this is what they enjoy most about life this is the most meaningful and important thing in their life and i'm saying no there's a better life for you and your children and grandchildren and it's got to start somewhere this is going to start 50 years from now it's going to start 500 years from now no it's going to start today it's going to start with us making it illegal for you to cut after take off you know like we've we've actually got to coercively uh start taking steps toward progress but but yeah that is the nature of the claim of people who are my opponents may not be able to see that it actually comes from a place of love that it really is a love for all mankind it's a love for this positive human potential which is primarily intellectual it's not in my case it's not sensual it's not uh truly hedonistic it's not really about enjoyment of life in that sense uh you know i think it's ultimately about understanding and learning for me what i think is is good in life um yeah you're going here yeah yeah great stories of living in southeast asia where you saw dogs really smiling like really yes because that yes can do something more intellectually than dogs what's interesting though is you've actually closed the loop because you brought us back to the first premise about utilitarianism right which is that life is not about minimizing suffering and it's not about maximizing pleasure either right but actually having an aspiration to be better than a mere dog better than merely trying to minimize your suffering and maximize your enjoyment that's what life's all about so yeah that's also the most fundamental difference or part of the most fundamental difference that alienates me from that whole utilitarian train of thought and then these other philosophies that are one way or another folding utilitarianism into the dough all right yeah it says someone here remembers when i spoke to in mendom so many years ago i feel i won that debate let me tell you yeah yeah he ran moon away yeah who can who can forget so that's good news from switzerland uh do you want to give me lucas says quote it seems that veganism is winning in switzerland at the university vegan meals have now become the default in the cafeteria it's actually cheaper than meat it's something we always complain about as vegans that we pay the same amount or more for the vegan option in every restaurant when it really should be cheaper just on the basis of the cost of the uh the ingredients so someone says it would be great for a bella ciel to directly talk to vegan gains about this topic let me explain you something about boxing and debating okay these guys they'll only debate people who are stupider than themselves all right vegan gains knows i'm smarter than he is he knows it we spoke for years we've been i've interviewed him there's evidence anyone can see that he and i knew each other for years okay vegan gains knows me he knows i'm smarter than he is okay vegan gains challenges everyone else to a boxing match except me he challenges everyone else to a debate except me okay it's it's not an accident okay vegan games will never take me on all right never uh i also have seen enough of his debates to realize you know just how boring it would be for everyone including myself for me to to interview or debate vegan gains it'll just be a joke but yeah no it's it's not a coincidence that he doesn't act i mean he's still rattling his cage demanding to have uh a debate with a natural vegan because yeah he's aware a natural vegan is stupider than he is so you know so we can win or at least he can feel smart even if she wins because i mean some of his views are so impossible to support you know someone asked uh what are you sipping on uh which is a good question for me to end on this is a vegan rehydration fluid and i'm now assuming that i'm going to hit the end of stream button i'm going to go over to the gym do a whole bunch of push-ups which you do not need a gym to do it's the one exercise you don't need a gym for but i'm gonna go up and down the gym anyway all right guys great talking to you um uh this has not really been a two-sided argument this is a completely one-sided trouncing of the uh of the other side's position but i got one letter from one supporter on patreon asking me to speak on this and so we did if you want to support the channel on patreon your one dollar a month would be appreciated and you know whatever don't act like it's hard to find me