Veganism: You're Only as Good as the People You Make Excuses For.

you are only as morally pure as the
people you make excuses for I'm in a position now where I get to look around the digital round table of my fellow beacon activists and ask why are you making excuses for this guy I mean the current example Jackal wacko Vigano he's not the worst he's not the first he's not the last back when it was durianrider and freely doing unconscionable thing as it was like wait wait wait wait why are you making excuses for this guy you're only as morally pure as the people you think excuses for quote me on that all right I don't know I just saw a comment from foot soldier on Jaco wackos video again we've seen him commenting on his own channel making videos but why are you making excuses this guy yeah a more harmless example when Nina and Randa meet a commercial for Taco Bell actively advertising a product that had beef and cheese and chicken was a combo deal it wasn't as one type of type of taco as I recall um what when she did advertising Nina ran it what they do that why are you making excuses for it and I'm not even saying you have to condemn these people why are you actively making excuses to me it's really kind of shocking even with the low expectations I have of somebody like footsoldier that he specifically says that Jaco is correct about the ethical side of his argument that so he says well you're you're you're right about your says you're also right about the ethics what do mean also well what else is he right about and of course the ethical side of the argument is where he's most obviously flagrantly laughably wrong some problems can be well understood in terms of probability and in some cases talking about probability is very misleading is there a chance is there a probability that you are one of the special people on planet earth who really cannot be vegan and and be healthy it's one in a million it's one in 10 million but you know what yes there is a probability for that it's more than zero okay gonna digress real quick to put a human face on this some of you heard this story before there was a young woman I kind of flirted with we kind of dated like we went out for dinner but never really dated okay mmm she wasn't smart enough for me but some degree of connection there she was allergic to all legumes she couldn't eat any beans she couldn't eat she had she almost died when an Indian restaurant served her a flatbread that had I think powdered chickpeas in the like in the dough you know it's something like this she ate a bean of any kind she couldn't eat lentils she couldn't eat chickpeas she couldn't eat anything and her heart would stop beating okay now I'm still not saying it's impossible for her to be vegan be difficult and you know so if we had this weird situation where I mean I remember one point she actually grabbed me while I was walking on the sidewalk she was in a bar another time she came to where I was living she was drunk she was kind of like with me and hitting on me see we never dated but there were some pretty clear signs of interest from her uh-huh and I you know I was never really convinced but I remember saying to her that one time we went to dinner together it was kind of a running Jack running gag and dinner I said to her look I'm not quitting beans for you look if this works out if we get married and have kids this goes great I'm not quitting beets I I live on beans and I'm not gonna cry so obviously the way joking around but I mean in her case she had a food allergy that's deadly serious and at least hypothetically I'd be willing to recognize she might be one person in 10 million who really can't be vegan now even if that was let's say parallel universe let's say her and I fell in love and we were still together this day let's imagine I was in the awkward position of being a vegan activist married to someone who had a health condition where they really couldn't for their healthy vegan ethically we would still be in the position of saying that she should be as vegan as possible it wouldn't justify living a life of flagrant relaxed media you like well she has this awful health condition so she eats a mostly vegan diet but for this reason she has think that's one supplement or this one thing whatever it is you know most of us when we take medicine even a vitamin pill most medicines are not really entirely vegan mentioned as before when I gave my daughter vitamins as a tiny tiny baby I tried to get the vitamins 100% vegan and there were some things that couldn't be had vegan so you know you're as vegan as possible being as vegan as possible is the ethos of being vegan we always said I was in a bus today I believe the tires and the bus were not vegan so well don't think there a lot of animal products and car tires if we're gonna do say no no I'm gonna wait for a vegan bus you've been waiting a long time okay not as far as possible and practicable right that ethical onus that obligation is still on you and it would still be on you if you're one of those people so if you think about it in terms of probability is it probable is it possible that somebody somewhere needs to eat some animal products for the good of their health sure it's possible and and the odds are it's not you and it's not me either it's gonna be someone in really extraordinary circumstances or someone with with really extraordinary health problems but the ethical arguments don't rest on this kind of probability if you drink milk from a cow what are you paying for ethically you're paying for an animal to live and die in misery its whole life in a concrete shed with a steel roof pulling on a floor or living in confinement till one day someone comes to slit its throat the cow is impregnated again again the milk is pumped out of its breast by a machine by a robot it's it's demonic you know and it's not like well if I buy this cow milk there's a 50/50 chance it's unethical no there's a 100% chance that it's an ethical probability is irrelevant ecological responsibility what's this cow milk doing in terms of air pollution water use river pollution every cow has got to eat food and it's got a poo and it's generating manure all day every day every cow like it or not has got to be pumped full of antibiotics there are a lot of other dimensions to this a lot of other forms of social responsibility that make this unethical now optimal health is another intentionally misleading lens to bring to this ethical question optimal health optimal if if someone told me that they were in competition for the Olympics so they needed to use some animal product for their optimal health to be able to compete at the same level as the other as the other athletes optimal health doesn't involve eating hamburgers it doesn't involve eating cheese doesn't involve eating cow milk if you look at what guys who are really professional bodybuilders eat the animal products in their diet it's a very very strange diet made up of things like arctic char you know but even they even those guys most of them really are not living in terms of optimal health optimal health and which is something that effects some of the concerns way less than 1/10 of 1% of the population optimal health do you think do you think most astronauts really live in terms of optimal you think they never drink a beer I think they never eat a hamburger and then every pizza with cow cheese no almost nobody is really living their lives in terms of optimal health even amongst athletes like professional athletes even among so this is something if you think about it in a probabilistic way well if there was someone totally devoted to their optimal health that this would justify using some an apart and then it's really it's at the opposite end the extreme if there was someone so crippled so disabled by health condition that they needed to eat animal products just to survive okay on a probabilistic scale whether it's one person in a million or one in ten million okay none of these things are gonna impact the ethical argument or the ecological argument all right in terms of what's really going on here on the one hand I have a kind of shallow scientific point to make and the other hand to have a little bit more of a profound and peculiar psychological observation to offer you guys on the psychological side a lot of people go through two phases of their life a phase of the life in which they question Authority and reject the authority of their parents and a phase of their life in which they aspire to have the same kind of authority that their parents once had or that they imagine their parents and grandparents once that is a very fundamental pattern and people can make that switch at any age doesn't necessarily happen on your 38th birthday or what have you and of course people can get pregnant and have kids at almost any age some people come parent very young some very old what-have-you for some people it's when they hit a milestone like they have their first job where they wear a suit wear a suit and tie and where people call them sir people call them man and they really switch the way they think about Authority and then they'll look back on their own heritage and family and you know what they've been taught including what they've been taught about things like eating meat and survival and what-have-you they look on tradition and they're rolling it suddenly very differently I knew a young woman who had just made the switch she had decided to become a career bureaucrat inside the Canadian government and in her younger days she had been a goth in high school in college so she'd put a huge amount of effort despite the rules of the dress code at her Catholic High School like the Catholic High School allowed you to wear boots as high as your knee so she wore leather boots with a million holes going although after a knee and you know she wore black lipstick and white foundation and black fingernails and whatsoever thing but it was all within it was all within the Catholic school dress code to get rebelling against the gay and her whole mentality was was defined in terms of challenging Authority you know a she was it was a form of teenage rebellion and then she reached a point in her life where she switched where she wanted to become a conformist where she wanted to become the authority figure that the cheetah rebelled against and I hear this I hear this in the voices of a lot of the ex vegans not all not all there's an african-american woman who made a video about how how and why she quit veganism and she actually describes to you that for her a turning point was going and spending more time with her grandfather she's a middle-aged woman too and feeling that she had to have respect for the way her grandfather and her ancestors survived and some notion of sustainability and health and you know she was setting out for you psychologically all of the dominoes but not really describing you the connection whereby the dominoes fall and I'd say about myself so I think I think I made the kind of transition very very early in life I think I was basically a child where I realized the uselessness of what people considered rebellion has just cease to cease dangerous me maybe because my parents idealized rebellion a revolution but I can remember being at my grandfather's house again maybe it was because it was there that was really thing in this way and my grandfather he played that that grandfather he played billiards he he owned his own billiard table in the basement I never had any interest in billiards snooker but I remember to spend time with my grandfather okay so I'm there and I'm looking at the pool cue going over my hand and just really it was the first my noticed that I already had the hand of an adult man I was really still Kip you know I had the hair on the knuckles and the shape and everything about me I remember his looking at that and thinking wow the period of my life where people are gonna make excuses for me being a dumb kid is over and the period of my life when I'm gonna make those excuses for myself it's over - you know I was just looking at the shape of my hand you know this is and you know there's a lot that goes into that including the awareness that for most of human history men were joining the army at 15 people were taking on serious responsibilities we're going to Parliament at 15 that stuff - you know and I was in a society the kind of infantilized people until much later so look a lot of people flip this way and I do think on a psychological level somebody like Jacko wakow he has he has just made a psychological flip from wanting to challenge all of the nonsensical excuses for eating meat that his grandparents and parents and a down-home and he's made the the flip to exactly affirming that arbitrary and authoritarian tradition and I think it's no mystery he's a struggling young father he's a father with a kid and he's obviously got a drinking problem and in some ways he's joking around in some ways he's desperate to be taken seriously he wants some kind of tone of moral authority in his life and he's scrambling around for that I don't think he's aware of it I don't think he's aware of the extent to which again you can set it with the dominoes and not exhibit why are the dominoes falling the way that they are he doesn't want to be a teenager anymore shaking his fist at the establishment he wants to be the establishment he wants to be the authority figure and you know the question of whether it's good or evil whether it's good or bad to conform depends entirely on what it is you're conforming to I grew up in a culture in a situation even as a middle-aged man in Canada lived in a situation where I really didn't have the option of can no matter how eager I was to do so so to make a long story short your guys if you live in Canada and you want to learn Cree in a g-way First Nations languages you really don't have the option of being a conformist even though believe me when I signed up for that program I was not there to rub battle against the authority figures at university anyway the minute you get there it's a struggle and in fact you are in a struggle against the authority figures you're on that University that's the reality of studying Korean Ojibwe and Canada I was married to a professor there was no I wasn't there to challenge anybody but you get drawn so that's the kind of thing depending on the society you live in depending on the the political structure of where and how you live sure it's saddening and strange then to hear his scientific line of reasoning which is that if you haven't read the study yourself how can you believe the conclusion of the scientific research and my experience is even more saddening still you can talk to medical doctors hundreds of them thousands of them who look at these studies and only see what they want to see they find a new excuse for eating bacon or drinking bulletproof coffee this is this is very widely you know observed in religion at least we can kind of talk about at least we have a vocabulary to address this it's called reading something with the eyes of faith when people read a book with the eyes of faith they don't really see what's on the page and you can sit down with a Christian I remember doing this with a guy and ask him about the passage where Jesus praised to destroy a tree and then comes back and God destroys the tree and he tells the reader he tells the audience see that's how great prayer is just pray for anything you want and God will do it so if you're and he's in the in the book if you're reading it literally he's angry at the tree because it wouldn't bear fruit out of season so if you're if you're angry that mangoes are out of season God will destroy the tree view that's a literal reading passage now there obviously was intended to be an allegory but if you're if you're challenging a Christian who believes in the Bible literally like we try says think about oh you know think about what this what this means like you know why was this written this like you know what do you think the more the story is do you go around praying to God to destroy a fruit tree you know like let's let's judge a little bit and you can't get them to do it you can't get them to admit to you what it is they just read or they just saw you know it's it's kind of the most amazing thing they read with the eyes of faith now I've course experienced this with Buddhism Hinduism you know be honest you really of course my experience is Pleasant and Hinduism I know really I go to include communism communism also even though it's not a religion it's just as bad or worse you know getting communists to admit what's written so clearly on the page and what really happened in history and so on there are deep deep levels of denial and what have you I I wish I could believe that the problem or as simple as demanding that people read the studies for themselves that's not the problem and it's it's not the solution either what you need precisely is before you read to have an attitude of Doulton people are raised to think that doubt is a bad thing and that faith is a virtue and that's the very opposite of a fact okay in order to really be able to challenge what it is you think you know in order to really learn new things before you come to the text you have to have prepared yourself by setting aside that whole mentality of faith by instead looking at a text with a profoundly open attitude of uncertainty as long as people are reading with the eyes of faith it doesn't matter how many books they read doesn't matter how many scientific studies they read you can lead them through a slaughterhouse and witness the animals being slaughtered and they'll think there's nothing wrong with it and that there's no suffering and there's no harm being done for this book morally positive this happens every day people go on slaughterhouse tours and continue eating beef it's not as simple as that people will read the studies and continue to believe what they want to believe okay it's precisely the mentality of belief the principle of faith the wanting that comes before wanting to believe that's what you have to try that's what you have to challenge before you can have a meaningful engagement with scientific research with the text or even with the empirical reality of what goes on in a slaughterhouse itself