The Personal is Political. Especially if You Take Politics Personally. ;-)

we begin with a discussion of
genocide lately this is june 13th 2021 and uh canada manages to keep a pretty good public profile for itself we're known as the version of the united states of america that didn't start the vietnam war note that i say we didn't start the vietnam war i don't say that canada didn't participate in the vietnam war didn't fight the vietnam war or oppose the vietnam war no no no we did we supported the american side we fighted blah blah blah we were deeply involved and deeply corrupted by the experience of vietnam war was a big deal for canada canada also is full of vietnam war vets contrary to popular belief but but canada manages to keep canada manages to maintain the somewhat sainted public profile in international politics and recently if you haven't heard 215 graves were discovered at just one particular residential school now again if you're not canadian you may not know this is a term of art this is a special piece of jargon when we say residential school we mean the special system of schools that was used to carry out forced assimilation of our indigenous people and and eugenic policies that included physically depriving them of the ability to reproduce and perhaps 6 000 of them were killed in these schools perhaps 6 000 is a round number and it's an estimate that as you can imagine uh does not come out of social science research as pure as what i might conduct myself great question from the audience james todd asks isil have you ever considered running for elected office so by the way guys i'm happy to digress i'm happy to talk with what about whatever's on your mind [Laughter] someone else wrote in and said they're pretty tired of canada anyway um have i considered running for elected office the question is where right the question is where are you gonna live um here in victoria bc look the short answer is yes the last time we had elections here if it had been possible for me to get 70 signatures i think it was 70. if it was 70 or 120. okay really i don't okay i'm just saying from memory i thought it was like 70 signatures you needed at the at the uh at the first stage of the matriculations i had to go and get 70 cigarettes signature to the first one and i know look hey you may think my youtube channel is a huge success i talked about this six years ago on the channel no it's not it's a failure precisely because i can't get 70 signatures in one place at one time so that i could run for so i could stand for election why stand for election obviously in my circumstance in this city in this culture it wouldn't be to win but you could at least bring you know serious questions to to public attention you could you could bring you could shift the debate uh one way or another and i think that is a very morally real morally important reason to participate in elections like i think there is a moral purpose in losing in standing up for what you believe for and giving voice to what you believe in you know politically what it is you're striving to achieve and you get to measure the depth of your rejection by uh the majority of citizens uh in your in your jurisdiction uh thanks for the donation from creative nothing uh currently as as humble as the donations are to this channel they're the majority of income uh generational i mentioned to you i've actually never talked about this so we'll get back to you to genocide you know um you guys might not have noticed but i disabled the advertising that interrupts the regular length videos because it was really bothering me on youtube the level of advertising kind of works more unfortunately even if i disable the advertising youtube send out a reminder they have the right to add in advertising anyway so that's called mid-roll advertising as opposed to advertising that's the beginning or the end you know end role versus mid-roll um but anyway on these on these streams that are two hours long i have one ad every 30 minutes and then otherwise my videos that are under 30 minutes spending no visual at all so the amount of advertising has gone down and these kinds of donations such as from creative nothing are now a larger percentage of the money generated by this youtube channel than ever so yeah obviously if you were in it for the money you'd have to have your head examined that's that's ridiculous um anyway guys i am happy to talk to you about whatever's on your mind in part because this isn't the video that i've come into with a stack of books to review or discuss that i've been reading i have been busy writing and uh yeah writing my own book has been a distraction to say the least from reading anything that of anyone else's imagination this lightning is not so great for me turn that up yeah yeah oh well oh well this is not going to be uh hopefully nobody tuned in for the lighting um have you read seneca yes many many years ago i have not read seneca in the last five years but yeah i think i read pretty much everything seneca wrote 20 years ago or something yeah yeah um seneca i mean i'll sir just all of these all these questions are worth digressing on i'll come back to these other questions uh the interesting thing about seneca is measuring his influence on politics in different periods of time so i have several books on machiavelli here i can physically whip out these books we have a bookshelf on wheels which is great by the way i totally recommend switching to having a bookshelf on rails but you know um the extent to which somebody like machiavelli is actually reacting to and criticizing seneca that's an interesting example of the kind of influence uh seneca had even if even if negative but yeah at some periods of time seneca was a major influential author and in some periods of time in some cultures totally ignored i will always remember this um i had one professor and i've emailed him i've emailed him like within this year i think last year and a half i had one professor and we were we were friends back at the university of toronto uh you know he was friends with me enough to talk to me about his divorce and other struggles in his life they're not you know he i was a teenager and he was a professor but still it was an unusual sort of friendship and he recognized immediately that i was very different from the other students and uh also uh he was desperately lonely because he hated all the other professors he was a deeply flawed character but in his way that god was a real intellectual and i actually tore down a poster to take it to him and show him because there was this bizarre cult that was recruiting people to attend one of their lectures and the poster said learn the philosophy of happiness and had this incredibly simple drawing of a sun the sun shining this guy with a happy face drawn on it there's a you know it's a little kid with draw it's a circle with rays of lights the shining sun smiling at you study the philosophy of seneca and i thought this too it showed me he knew he really showed that you know he wasn't intellectually he could show that some president huh what was the point he also he he really laughed out loud seneca is bleak i mean seneca is you know you you feel like your teeth are whiter you feel like the you know i feel like the uh the plaque has been stripped off your your teeth uh reading seneca you're looking at the the bleakest and most disturbing aspects of human nature unlike discussing the history of canadian genocide and what we're going to do now about it all right so as well seeing as i'm digressing from a digression a question from creative nothing quote why do you strive to make the world a better place and think about the future even if the universe will die at the end does it imply that helping people right now is still terrorism uh you know this kind of question we were discussing this the other day during a walk there is a very strange kind of egoism at the root of this question right so if somebody said to you why build a mansion if it's gonna cease to exist after a hundred years what's the point of building a mansion what's the point of building the pyramids if they're only going to stand for 5 000 years or maybe 10 000 years you know so implicitly you seem to be comparing yourself to the biblical judeo-christian god and thinking that your creations count for nothing if they don't last for a million years or a billion years like oh yes well vanity of vanities to build the pyramids and only have them change the world for say ten thousand years then why would you build a house just to live in it yourself for say 50 years knowing that it will be demolished after you die and some other house built in this place perhaps an apartment vanity of vanities that you should do something so evanescent and impermanent yes imagine if i publish this book now that i'm putting all this time and effort to do and it only influences people for the next 100 years just do the new lovely people in the audience and other youtubers who listen to me that ods and so on these other guys yeah if if the only influence i should have is on my own daughter and you know my you would circle with my closest fans and friends and what have you if my own daughter and my own grandchildren and so on for the next hundred years how pitiable as opposed to creating monuments not even monuments in stone monuments and stone don't last that long trust me take a look at the rate of erosion in cambodia under that cambodian rain you can you can write something in stone and if it's out in the rain it's not going to last that long you know so i mean the question was just restate the exact word of the question why do you strive to make the world a better place and think about the future even if the universe will will die in the end so you see the difference between you and i uh dear viewer is that i do not think of a project i do not think of my ambitions as being beholden to the universe this concept of the universe is dangerously close to the judeo-christian god it is not in the service of the universe that i write my book or paint my painting or recite my poetry or build my pyramid out of bricks perhaps merely bricks of clay bricks of clay that one day will dissolve in the tropical rain you know and wash away bricks of clay that may be washed away with climate change thousands of years now yes you know in fact i don't do this for the universe i do this for myself and relative to my mere span of say 100 years i mean isn't 100 years of let's say i'm vegan i'm vegan i don't drink alcohol i don't smoke cigarettes i could have a solid century on this planet guys you know me publishing this book me building an object out of bricks building a house or whatever that may be very meaningful within this period of time and for a couple centuries thereafter um and that's issue so i don't i don't know you with the the person who sent in this question like i don't i don't know what kind of history you read or something but any given any given empire any given great accomplishment in the history of many it's normally about 300 years the maximum extent in 300 years sometimes 400 years you know some people will write back and say oh well what about china what about india well if you say that you really haven't studied the history of china india because the the periods of you know continuity within the thousands of years you're talking about are brief and the whole language changes from one period to another a lot of people don't want to admit that i'm sorry not to digress on chinese history too much but uh look at the poetry of the tang dynasty tand the tang dynasty um it's not written in the same language that they speak today and call chinese and that's because what we call chinese today is beijing hua it's a dialect of modern beijing the language that that tang dynasty poetry is written in is actually closer to hakkien h-o-k-k-i-e-n totally different language totally from this so you know you can pretend it's all china all the time but the differences between the different regions that ruled china are much greater than the differences between italy and france italy and france are almost the same language in the same culture compared to hockey and chinese as opposed to beijing chinese no i mean how long can anything last 300 years is a pretty good run guys you know you know what i mean like if you can if you can change the world or accomplish something over a period of three years and then beyond that you know there's also the question of meaningfulness and and meaninglessness um we can pretend that shakespeare is just as meaningful today as he was in his own time no he's not you know don't don't get yourself you know shakespeare is barely comprehensible to anyone today you know politically philosophically religiously it's a lot of religious mystery pardon me there's a lot of religious imagery in hamlet that people don't don't uh don't pick up on you know what do you think he's talking about when you say about queen mab what do you mean he's talking about when he says what's old is new again you know there's stuff going on in hamlet it was written for real reasons that we can pretend oh yes we all sit around and appreciate this but no you know the 300 years is a pretty good run so yeah it's fine but it seems to me your question quite explicitly is phrased with the assumption that the universe has an objective reality and standard that we have to live up to and measure our own accomplishments next to for for whatever reason you know you're asking what's the point of making the world a better place and i'm instead beginning with a human scale and talking about human life you know i don't think anyone who lived through the rise and fall of communism in cambodia would say oh well uh when you think about it whether uh cambodia is ruled by a communist dictatorship or has a democracy uh when you consider things you know from the perspective of the last 10 billion years and the next 10 billion years uh you know when you when you consider that eventually everything in the universe is going to disintegrate what what difference would it make to you know struggle to achieve democracy and freedom of speech in cambodia a question that can still be asked today year 2021 in very different circumstances you know the period of the khmer rouge of extreme communism and cambodia is a really stark moral challenge in so many ways so look it's a i'm not criticizing you i know you asked this question with with the best of intentions um but maybe this question illustrates the difference between cosmological nihilism and what i call historical nihilism my form of nihilism is all about learning from history including the meaninglessness of history and tearing apart the mythology that we think of as history but isn't really history and so um you know it's partly a critique of history and a rejection of the ideologies that we express through history and that we pretend have inherent meaning and history and so on rejecting the way marxists think about history but in theory rejecting what conservatives think about history i don't know how many trump supporters who really fix their ideology on study of history but you know so this this though begins with and ends with a sense of human scale whereas i know the cosmological nihilists they think much more in this sense of oh well you know think about radiocarbon dating think about 50 000 years i think about 5 million years and all your aspirations well what's what's the conclusion of that way of thinking is your point that when you look at the world from a perspective of a billion years that the question of whether or not you spend your own life just sitting on the couch playing super mario 64 again and again as opposed to you know being involved with some you know grand sense of purpose are you saying that that's trivial well that well you know so this is uh this is a line of thinking i i don't uh particularly guys great to have you here we have 32 people in the audience if we could have 32 thumbs up it will help other people um discover the live stream that's really the advantage of is the more people will join us and ask uh questions as it's ongoing so if you want to change your mind later i'm sorry i keep saying this but it's true if you give a thumbs up now it's not like voting for president you can't change your vote later when you when you vote for president united states or prime minister of england you can later undo your thumbs up or you can change to a thumbs down so don't worry about it but sure we'll get some get some more people in the audience if we get a thumbs up all right so i'm just reading through some of your um oh okay here's a question do you like the qing dynasty flag only for its looks so someone has finally mentioned that's the first person to ask about the flag in the background uh or do you have any other meaningful reason for having displayed well you know uh we're an anti-communist household here you know i grew up with communist parents and now as an adult i'm i'm really a very active anti-communist now there aren't a lot of positive symbols you can display to express your anti-communism in a meaningful sense um you know i'm not going to have a communist flag with an x through it or something you know i'm not you know you're gonna have the no smoking sign imposed on the russian communist flag or something that wouldn't appeal to me and you know also let's just keep it all the way real we had some other comments about vietnam i'm happy to talk about the history of vietnam war ii here you know of course many of the forces that have opposed uh communism you know uh historically are also completely ethically deplorable i mean well terrible people fight against communism i knew a guy who fought literally fought against communism in colombia you know as a very tough situation it's like well you have this kind of totally corrupt horrible anti-communist government and the other side you have these totally corrupt horrible cocaine dealing uh communist gorillas in the jungle and he literally was you know uh it's very sorry i'm saying this if it's a big deal if you know anyone from colombia pretty much any able-bodied man has experience in this kind of situation i'm exaggerating but a large percentage of men there have done some time in the military this kind of thing but he he was out patrolling uh the jungle i mean he was very disturbed by seeing things like uh chopped up human body parts uh floating down the river which the communists did in order to intimidate the other side to show hey we killed some more people and we're floating floating their remains down the river doing bits and pieces chop them up with a machete and this kind of thing that's you know it's a real war war ain't changed you know i mean the reality of combat and all that stuff hasn't changed but you know i would not display the flag of the anti-communist parties in cambodia sorry pardon me in colombia neither one i mean they're both terrible i'm sorry that's a good example too i'm not gonna have an anti-communist flag relating to the anti-communist forces in colombia who have their own moral shortcomings shall we say you know it's very hard to have something that shows i mean in this case it's really saying look i'm someone who cares about china and chinese politics i got this soap bottle out of the way i guess there you go that's the flag we're talking about you know i'm someone who really cares about chinese politics chinese history the chinese language is now apparently going to remain my language scholarship until i'm an old man and i'm on the anti-communist side you know so it's it's an attempt to bring together you know all those meetings and you know as symbols go um so look i'll say a little bit more about that though you know we have this research project that's ongoing about um about the qing dynasty in part about uh xinjiang and western china where china meets central asia places like uzbekistan and a lot of that has to deal with reinterpreting qing dynasty history because one of the myths about the history of china was that the qing dynasty was the weakest dynasty militarily and the opposite is true so the qing dynasty is a much misunderstood period in large part because of uh communist propaganda so that's also interesting there's a kind of a bit of an intellectual challenge in reclaiming and reinterpreting and understanding a new what happened with the chain the other the other myth again this is this is absolutely part of commerce propaganda about how china became communist and emergency majority the other myth is that the qing sold out china to european empires and european colonists and so on but the qing dynasty that is the period in which china expanded it expanded more than any other period in its history and that included the conquest of um of xinjiang what's now xinjiang in western china by the way if you don't know tiana anyway xinjiang um it means like a new borderland very literally new border you know and that reflects that in the qing dynasty this is this uh this expansion so uh someone's asking if i was sorry i'm i'm happy i'm looking but look guys i i opened this by boldly saying we're going to talk about genocide in canada so we'll try to get back to that someone has to completely oh okay so here's here's an on topic question um do you think it's possible for indigenous cultures to thrive across canada the u.s when the indigenous population in both countries and so is so low okay so look so james you know i i try to keep it all the way real but you know what i'm saying what what do you mean by indigenous culture right now sorry i'm not saying this to attack you i'm not saying this to offend you i'm just saying let's let's really think through what it is we're saying what does it mean here um if you go up to james bay in canada i can't put up graphics here because it's a live stream but look at a map of canada hudson bay is this giant bay you can't miss it this huge huge vacuity in the middle of the canadian shield um and then there's this smaller bay within it called james bay if you go up to james bay who are the cree what is their culture now one reason to mention james bayh this is one of the last areas where people speak the kree language where the language isn't totally extinct what kind of people speak the creed language well on this side they're catholic and they're active catholic mansionaries and their main method of learning and practicing the language is by memorizing and singing songs from the church in cree songs about how great jesus is and they're like almost at a state of war with the kree people over on this side who are protestant and whose main use of the language is like i'm not exaggerating for many of them the only book they have ever seen published in their own language is the bible right a bible and church songs and stuff and you have today a modern cree culture that is completely a product of centuries of employing them as mercenaries employing them as fur hunters and trappers for the hudson bay company for the corporation that was up there and the you know hybridity that resulted from centuries of of catholic catholic and protestant missionary activity them competing with each other and um you know you can't forget to a significant extent they were themselves positively motivated um appropriators of like they weren't just forcibly assimilated they often reached out for and wanted to assimilate those aspects of european culture i mean whenever you look into the history of any particular korea or ojibwe group often part of their history was the efforts they were making to go and recruit christian missionaries to come and live with them or really they were sending people out sometimes by by snowshoe you know like walking and using you know dog dog pulled sleds to say oh we want to have you know a christian missionary come live in our town so you know this and and again there's uh there's this kind of survival bias here those are the those were disproportionately the groups that survived colonialism were the ones that had that kind of active attitude of embracing and assimilating and producing a new hybrid culture so look you know um another another indication if you watch any of the documentary showing the reality of first nations culture today one of the things that will strike you is that a lot of them wear cowboy hats and listen to country music that's kind of been out of style for 30 years or even 50 years you know i think whoa okay now not all first nations people some first nations people listen to rap music and the ones you meet in the big city more likely listen to hip-hop music but you look at that you see this continuing pattern which goes back over centuries where very often their engagement with um european colonial civilization is that they're they're constantly catching up with you know that that civilization and so what you're often looking at and dealing with are attitudes that white people themselves had 50 years ago now that includes extremely conservative christianity already alluded to like this is not woke left-wing 21st century church they're preserving a kind of missionary christianity that existed 50 years ago 100 years ago out in the back woods you know which is frighteningly conservative you know they very often if you talk to these people and live around them they very often are frighteningly racist themselves there was a chief a tribal chief who ended up getting in trouble and people were talking about stripping him of his medals of honor he'd been given some honorary decorations by the government of canada because he made some statements in support of adolf hitler and he made some statements about kind of anti-semitism and racism he displayed you know he was himself a member of an oppressed people that doesn't mean you don't have oppressive attitudes towards others you know so you know if you ask questions do you think it's possible for indigenous cultures to thrive across canada right we really have to start with the question of what is culture right now by contrast so i'm partly answering your question i'm partly refusing to answer your question what about languages that's the real question that's the real answer right part of what i say is don't give me this culture [ __ ] you know don't don't talk to me about culture these people do not want to live in a museum dedicated to their own ancient history you can do the archaeology you can put together a great museum exhibit that shows them hey this is how your people lived 300 years ago and this is how they live 500 years ago and you know you used to hunt bears and used to eat beaver and and here are the tools you used and here's you know you know they had almost no metal it's there's a myth that they had no metal at all metal was very scarce for them before european trade but they did have some metal some metal making bone but wait metal was very scarce so these were the tools you used this was how you survived interesting is that even interesting one day a week you know the reality of who cree and ojibwe people are is they listen to rap music seven days a week they use facebook seven days a week that was actually a big joke they always joked about how addicted they all were to facebook that this was a difference between them well yeah really you know that that you know one of the distinctive marks of being first nations account of being this person that you're always on facebook you know um okay the language that's something objectively real that really exists and then once you have the language if the language exists right then we can start to ask questions about the production of new culture in that language right so you know yeah you could take shakespeare and translate it into cree and translate into japan but if you have languages like korean and joy if as languages they thrive then you get new possibilities politically new possibilities in terms of the creative arts uh so on and so forth so to give you a sense of i mean it's it's all very close to extinction right now um i'm just going to give you an example so there is a tv show called wapos bay and this is one of the only examples you want so i don't know if it's also available with english dubbing but the main version of that show the characters are all speaking cree um so you know there are there are very very few examples like this but that's that to me is really the question i mean convert okay so i could i could go on but you know if you're talking about spain spain and europe not mexico spain any attempt to reify spanish culture will destroy spanish culture if the government of spain starts saying which would in some ways be correct and reasonable enough that spanish culture is disappearing because people in spain today are importing american culture and french culture and german culture and chinese and japanese culture a lot of people in spain watch japanese cartoons they may correctly say oh spanish culture is disappearing but the solution is always to produce a new culture it's always to have something it's not to say hey everybody in spain let's force you back into the museum let's all live in a museum devoted to the glory of what's think of what spain was 500 years ago or a thousand years ago or what spain means in some fixed sense i'm not just saying that won't work that it will fail it can succeed but i'm saying it's destructive so this idea of reifying culture and then carrying out government policy or educational policy to perpetuate that culture that fixed idea of what the culture is ought to be what the culture should be it will always be destructive as opposed to being creative so really brief digression something less sensationalistic because it's not linked to genocide i remember what rap music was i remember what rap music used to be sometimes i may lament that in the year 2021 rap music is not what i would like it to be but i can't respond to that by trying to force people into a museum of what rap music used to be or what i what i feel it ought to be taking that ideal as something for other people to to live up to okay a great question is that almond milk no this is a protein powder it's vegan all right sorry so we have another paid comment from the same uh the same commentator okay so he says quote thank you for the answer about the difference between cosmological nihilism and historical nihilism and let me ask you is helping people utilitarian or not in the conscious of the previously so great thanks for thanks for the donation thanks for following up and i i will readily confess i failed to address the utilitarian answer of your question because i had so much to say about all the other answers so you know to simplify the equation let's say we're talking about just one person helping just one other person now obviously you can scale this up to be a teacher helping a classroom of 30 students a prison warden trying to help 500 people in that prison but just to answer your question let's talk about one person trying to help one person okay so i'm sober let's say i have a friend who is some combination of an alcoholic and a drug addict and i'm trying to help them okay is it utilitarian or not so let's say i help them and help them and help them for a while and then you know what they come to the profound realization that they just like to get high there's no utilitarian outcome right well i say that was a complete waste of my time no because it's about me it's about what kind of person i want to become right and there is this inescapable sense in which you know you make music for an audience yes you know of course you do of course i mean this is the difference between you know writing a book you intend to publish and writing your own diary you write a book for an audience you make a painting for an audience you engage in political activism for an audience we have the question about standing for election i may put myself forward an election and compete in an election i cannot possibly win it is four nights it is for a public it is for people it is to help people right but no ultimately it can't be utilitarian right it can't be measured in terms of its outcomes and the outcomes may be authentically paradoxical right the outcomes may be the opposite of what you personally desire or they may be absolutely nothing at all so i know this guy called eisel mazzard he went to do humanitarian work in cambodia do you think i helped even one person in cambodia you know really now i admit actually if i get it yeah i probably could give you some examples of people to be honest but but let's be cynical here for the sake of the argument let's say i went to cambodia i did this combination of research and humanitarian work and everything right and let's say not even one person benefited from it and i i didn't do drug rehab what i was doing well some of it actually was related to drug addiction but most of what i did wasn't helping drug addicts okay now that i think about it a little bit it was but you know um but just to have something that's easy for everyone to visualize if i had gone to cambodia to help drug addicts one-on-one becomes over what if the failure rate was 100 you know okay so you've got to ask about the meaningfulness of it and of what you're doing right ultimately this is about the kind of person i'm going to become this this comes back to my much delayed topic talking about consequences of of the genocide at canada why is it that there are no white people who are in a position to play a leadership role in actually solving these problems or solving these issues it's because they don't have that prior experience of trying and failing you know you learn a lot from failure you learn more from failure than you do from success most of the time you know so look i'm just going to restate the question let me ask you is helping people utilitarian or not in the context of the previous question so my answer is in effect if it is utilitarian then it's tragic right it's ineluctably and inescapable inescapably tragic to be doing these things only for those utilitarian outcomes you have to be able to go into these things with a kind of radical detachment um a kind of studious recklessness about some of those outcomes where you know it's like someone sitting down to paint who says well i have something that's really worth painting i'm going to write this book because i have a story that's really worth telling and if nobody alive today can appreciate it if there's no audience for it you know there's something really important in this story i have to tell this this may have to be you know now of course you may be insane i think maybe plenty of painters you may be deluded you may but you know um to undertake that kind of action place if you are doing it in a utilitarian way um it's it's it's inelectably you know tragic so guys right now this is this is 2021. do i have a single person in the audience who got involved with syria i'm not saying is there one person here in the last five years has gotten involved with humanitarian crisis in syria so we have ukraine you know mentioned okay do we have one person in the audience who's gotten involved with politics of humanitarian crisis related to helping the ukrainian people this is we know we're not running out of examples myanmar myanmar is happening right now you know now if you were to pose that problem in terms of utilitarian outcome what difference can you possibly make in myanmar like i think from a utilitarian perspective it's going to be tragic but like right now any five of us any ten of us if we put our human mind together in that hat we can make a big difference we can do something that really matters and that's really meaningful for us in our lives and like for your brothers and sisters and for my daughter and for my grandchildren i can do something that's meaningful to me and everyone is connected to me that's meaningful to my youtube followers i can do something that makes a meaningful difference on that scale for the next five years for the next 10 years maybe for the next 100 years we could do something that really impacts you know the discourse on on myanmar right but but what if you want to measure it in terms of like how many lives you save or something or or actually changing the government in in you know or changing the constitution like getting a you know a palpable legal change this starts to become very tragic indeed so yeah um you know it's it's hard to be honest with yourself you know one way or the other about that a lot of a lot of what i recommended people do you know in relation to vegan activism was just virtue for the sake of being virtuous i said well you can do this and it's not going to have any of these any of these outcomes you're fantasizing about um so you know you you have to be very very honest with yourself with what your expectations are and what is saying you are going to be heartbroken or disgusted with yourself if you if you for example take someone into your home let's say you take someone off the street and take them into your home and you're coaching them and helping them to try to get them off drugs and alcohol stop them being so they're mixed alcohol and you know what ultimately they're just interested in taking your charity and taking your support and getting as high as possible you know um all right so uh uh we will get back to oh and i see you're here oliver okay so we got a lot of intelligent uh comments coming in nice to hear from you mandy nice to hear from you clint nice to hear from you brandon um a question from frida so we're going to get into canadian genocide lately here frida says and friday i saw your earlier comment even though i didn't read it frida says do you think genocide and eugenics were done in canada because of racism question mark she says quote that she thinks white europeans have a huge problem with someone's skin being darker and she sees this as as the main problem um you know frida i was just reading appian the historian of of ancient rome and i pointed out to melissa that that concerns a period of time where you're looking at dark-skinned people enslaving lighter-skinned people you know this is really white and blonde and red-haired europeans becoming the slaves of relatively swarthy southern italians um i know from today's perspective they're all they're all white people you can look at the history of the various muslim empires be they arab uh turkish or persian and you're you're looking at a lot of white slavery and there's also history of white people being enslaved in africa which is rarely mentioned but you know again even though they're small numbers um white slaves were very valuable in africa and um i remember reading in detail on account of an african slave trading vessel i suppose or a slave raiding vessel that went to the coast of ireland and enslaved a bunch of irish people to take them away and sell silence and actually another think of it um i've mentioned voltaire quite a bit voltaire he does kind of primarily first and foremost express his pity for the the black slaves the enslaved africans um you know and appropriately not because that was the mass phenomenon of the time but he includes um pitiable descriptions of white slavery of white people uh being enslaved which certainly does also include uh sex slavery you know um so you know slavery went in all directions now you know why was so that all right sorry there are a couple different dimensions so frida um if you google the national portrait gallery in england so they have a big website you can look at portraits of what our indigenous people looked like when europeans arrived so when indigenous people had not intermarried with europeans yet okay our indigenous people especially on the east coast looked white okay they had white skin and you know um obviously i'm not referring to the inuit here the idea that they had red skin that they were referred to as red people actually originated from some ceremonial dances where they had red paint on them they didn't people did not have the delusion that they were red in color but if you look up you know paintings of what the iroquois and someone looked like back then now everyone knows what they look like today they don't get a lot of sun today and they are now most of them are married with europeans so no i mean i'm i'm challenging you here frida i do not think that canada's genocidal history has a cause and effect relationship with brownness and i do not think you know europe's internal history can be explained in terms of trying to eradicate brownness the relationship between england and greece cannot be explained in terms of brownness versus whiteness the relationship between germany and italy cannot be explained in terms of brown as well you know the status of spain as opposed to romania today you know is there more racism against spaniards or eastern europeans like romanians and so on so i i do understand i mean it's it's kind of a facile way of looking at the history as if the purpose of colonialism or the purpose of these genocidal policies was to eliminate a skin color you know um and it's not i mean i think we'll get into what the purpose of that of that colonialism genocide was um uh you know just to give a really brief allusion to it you know uh so a phrase that's said here in this household every time we read a lot about history communism is that part of the tragedy of communism is that once they conquer you once the revolution is over you can never be communist enough this is even true communist dissidents and so on today you know these people in portland oregon and seattle and so on it's like oh well the people who joined that they keep they keep kind of persecuting their own followers because nobody can ever be communist enough is this standard you can't live up to um part of the problem with the british empire was that nobody could ever be british enough you know they kept offering to the native people like oh well if you just join our army and fight for us then you'll be one of us and we'll reward you oh if you convert to christianity you'll be one of us and we'll reward you if you learn to read and write our language you'll be one of us and we'll reward you and the reality was they they could never be british enough that really the objective of the british empire from day one was genocide there was no interest ever in for example having native people represented in parliament and if the objective had been anything other than genocide that's exactly what you'd have that's exactly what there would be there would be seats in parliament for there'd be a representation where they would be proud to represent the native people government would exist for the native people in part or primarily or in whole and that would be part of the definition of canadianism and instead from the first you you had an agenda to to exterminate them however you know um the the distinction between you know the british and the the people they were exterminating was not extinction of black versus white and it wasn't even a kind of distinction between white versus brown and you know again i've known plenty of those people face to face it's very subtle the difference in facial features to give an example of the iroquois the difference between an iroquois person and an italian person really you know really if you haven't lived around them it's very hard to see the subtle signs that someone is is irrequired and you know there are plenty of kore people even even getting into the you know eastern part of the united states there are plenty of indigenous people there and you know again i go back and look at the paintings that were made of them before intermarriage became a factor or you can look at there are also people who have their dna testing done and so on it's no i do not think that's an explanation i think that's something that's in the truest sense the word facile it's easy to to attribute kind of cause and effect a relationship with that but really that's sure it's part of the context for the unfolding of that genocidal campaign but i can put you this way hypothetically if all of our indigenous people had been as white-skinned as those people on the east coast they first encountered because the genocide went from east to west in case you didn't know do you think they would have been treated any better i mean they were even within the indigenous people were the brown skin people treated worse than the white skin people so no i mean it's uh it's not the case that this was racism that was incidentally genocidal this was genocide that was incidentally racist you know it was genocide was really the primary purpose of the british empire project on this continent okay sir so i'm skipping ahead through some of these comments here ah yes well melissa just made a video talking about disability as a political identity and lilac cloud writes in to ask quote what do you think about the term neurodivergent and its use among leftist circles uh quote it seems to me that they're downplaying certain serious disabilities well lila cloud among the most heavily censored videos on my channel are the ones about uh autism and asperger's so i encourage you to [Music] search the i'll give you the link here i've mentioned this before there is a searchable archive of my past videos and if you go and search this for words like autism and asperger's you'll be able to find the videos i made on that if you search within youtube you'll never find them because they're really really shadow banned shadow banning is real um you know wishful thinking is one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature and it's dangerous and it's malignant and it's destructive and it leads to mass murder itself leads to terrible things so you know do i think it's a problem yes do i think it's serious yes are individual people's lives destroyed by it yes we have a long history of specifically so we in the english-speaking world there is a long history of misrepresenting autism as a quote-unquote superpower leaning heavily originally on the comic book the x-men um and of trying to represent people who have autism and asperger's as if this you know as if as if this were the next step in human evolution in the same way that the comic book characters the x-men represented the next step for humanity um so if you don't know the comic books in the movies of the x-men i'm sorry but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna get into x-men lore for this video but yeah and i can see that type of comic book does have huge cultural influence and so on so yeah um all right so i think well i think we'll think we'll wrap up that comment on that but yeah it's it's a huge issue and i have made uh videos talking about it it destroys people's lives on an individual scale and it has destructive effects um on a massive cultural scale also oh james todd here's what i can do quickly james thought asks thanks for answering my previous questions here's another one which political parties have you voted for in canada throughout your life so a long long time on the channel a long time ago on the channel i should say i did mention my personal history with the green party so i got involved with the green party when i was 19 or 20 or 21 around there when i was a young young man and still a university student maybe it was even 18 or i don't i don't remember i'd have to look it up but when i was young man i got involved with the green party and you know i'll just say this a lot of you are used to dealing with human stupidity through facebook comments through instagram dms through digital media when you deal with human stupidity face to face it's different you know i really got to see how people think about and talk about politics i within the green part i'm just terrible terrible political party terrible people you know um i mean i met i met one girl who was quite literally a neo-nazi who was inside the the green party she was trying to recruit people and it was a classical it was like a pro-adolph hitler neo-nazi some people use the term neo-nazi and they just mean no no they voted for donald trump or something no no no no no no um so you know there were there were communists inside the green party of canada there were neo-nazis inside the green party again i just remember that one she was there with a boyfriend at least i mean maybe she was the only one there there were more than zero and you got you got to see um the stupidity and the danger of all that and you got to see how people think and how they say these things there was a lot for me to learn from that face-to-face real life experience even though it's an absolutely terrible political party when i was here in victoria someone is now almost 10 years ago or something so my daughter is now eight years old so it's about seven years ago yeah some of that yeah um i did get involved briefly with the uh with the new democrat party the most left-wing of the mainstream parties because they answered some email from me and they they took some pro i was having political problems at the university and i felt like well if they give me a sincere response on this like if if the political party has done something for me i'll give them a chance whew i mean you know at that time too i already knew i i despised all three of the mainstream political parties but it's like well you know this was my elected representative when i wrote to them and asked them to do something for me because i have this conflict of university they did take the time to get back to me and do some research and see what parliament could and couldn't do and i benefited from that so i i gave them the benefit out i went i went to and participated in some election-related events i mean you know if you if you have any optimism about the electoral process in canada you get to go and see that reality and you get to be disappeased of your of your optimism so no i mean the short answer is there is no political party in canada i could vote for i don't that year the year that i got involved with the ndp with the leftover i did not vote for them i'm just being honest to you like i went i read their literature i participated in some of these events you know the the campaign related stuff uh i even did canvassing for them uh with a female friend at the time who i haven't spoken to in years um you know uh but no i didn't vote for them you know and seeing it up close i remember asking them like i remember so they had they had a bunch of pamphlets on specific issues so that when you were going door-to-door like if somebody asked about israel you give them the pamphlet on israel and i remember asking them because like the pamphlet on israel was like 100 perfect hypocrisy it's like has anyone ever told you that it's day and it's night at the same time ladies ladies have you ever been at the bar and a guy's hitting on you say aren't you married and he says yes and no at the same time well you know how do you define married i mean how how do you define supporting the palestinians how you know i mean this was the most hypocritical baffle gap imaginable i remember saying they're retiring the guy he was like he's the leader of like the branch of the parties the leader of the writing association the local branch so you know like you realize like you realize that this is like trying to sell people hot ice like this is saying completely contradictory and big thing so you know uh that that brief involvement with canadian party politics you know refreshed my familiarity with how awful it is but that's that's about all i can say about that um [Music] okay so we get a question that i'm going to treat as sincere we will come back to we'll come back to canadian genocide by the way guys 45 people in the audience if you got a second hit the thumbs up button if you change your mind later you can change the thumbs down but it does help people discover the stream and participate in this conversation while it's still ongoing if you give i'm going to treat this as a sincere question clint writes in to ask uh did you have those models consent before using their pictures in your video so i'm going to choose to treat this as a legitimate question and not as as trolling which is a which is a choice so let me just think lin i do not know if you are american or british or canadian but you know one of the most fundamental aspects of freedom of speech is that i do not need donald trump's consent to use a photograph of him in criticizing him i do not need the consent of george lucas i do not need the consent of the disney corporation to use clips of the star wars tv show or the star wars movie in offering my criticism of it and i have by the way it's not i wonder if anyone in this audience became a subscriber because they um uh you know because they they discovered my youtube videos criticizing star wars but i have i've criticized star wars as a series of movies and as a literature and kind of in its political and cultural significance okay i do not need permission from a comic book company like marvel comics or dc comics to use images of of batman now that freedom was very hard fought for in the united states america the freedom to even engage in lampoon uh the freedom to engage in caricature the freedom to engage in like criticizing disney corporation by making a cartoon that shows mickey mouse in an evil and unflattering light in the past disney would actually sue people for that kind of thing and it came to be established that no if you don't have the right to use someone else's image if you don't have the right to quote somebody whether that's a clip of what they said on the radio where they sit on on tv then you actually don't have freedom of speech at all so yeah some of my videos have images of bikini models some of my videos have images of politicians you know or whatever you know the the people i'm criticizing the people i'm quoting it is a that is a crucial part and that's you know that's part of being a youtuber it's part of being an author it's it's part of being a creative person in 21st century and really it's been an important part of being a creative person in every century since the original john wilkes so let's really get deep on this where does this come from john wilkes is not john wilkes booth you guys can tell i didn't have to google this when you do a live stream people people can tell what you know off the top of your head and what it is you have to dig around and check wikipedia for so there was a historical figure named john wilkes and he was the turning point in the history of england where the right to quote people in parliament was established so a lot of you don't know this i think this is worth just taking a moment to dilate on historically parliament the actual meaning of the word was a secret war party it was to get together to parlay so we still said p-a-r-l-e-y or parley um to have a meeting of you know aristocrats commanders for the army bring their horses together and talk about strategy before going on the field and the idea was you had a parley for the man who provided the horses and the armor and the money to go to war that it was the supporters of the king the aristocrats having their own parliament this is the idea of the prominent and built into that it's just pointing out this is completely different from the origin of democracy in ancient greece or ancient rome this has nothing to do with the athenian penins this has nothing to do with rome's system of senators and committee uh committees no this was a secret gathering of aristocrats and the idea was that none of the aristocrats participating would ever tell someone that was done in secrecy it was done privately and it was a crime and you could be punished and put in prison or even killed for say writing a book that quotes what happens in parliament so again we're going real deep in the answer this way um there was a time when if you're really into political science or political philosophy books that are written about politics have titles like um the meeting of the turtles in the pond it'll have some totally cartoonish title like this and it will say one day you know the turtles in the pond decided that they were not very happy with their king uh old king turtle you know and it creates a fictional like framework to quote or paraphrase a dispute that happened in parliament it's bizarre because it was illegal to actually quote or actually that that was actually our british empire tradition so and with john wilkes that was the political struggle that instead established your right to know just even to know what people say in poland and to quote it and to publish it so yeah that is actually the beginning of the turning point in our history and it is i mean that's a turn point in the english-speaking world in england and america and everything else um i think there's a really genuine question of how freedom of speech would have evolved in a different way and the freedom to quote people and use their photographs if instead of england conquering the world if instead rome had gone like i don't mean ancient rome i mean like catholic medieval realm if italy had become the most powerful country in europe again or remained the most powerful country in the in the catholic period if you'd had a kind of roman catholic cultural continuity i'm sure the demands for freedom of speech would have arrived one way or another but as you guys know i mean the celebrated activists for freedom of speech that we that we remember today were really the scientists in rome was people like uh you know the controversy over heliocentrism uh whether or not the earth goes around the sun and so on there were these different attempts to challenge uh the churches censoring of people but for for long centuries you know censorship and silence were seen as being you know in the public interest and i think it's significant that in england this this happened because hey wait if we can't actually quote what people said in parliament and why they made the decisions they made then there's a sense in which we don't you know we don't have we don't have freedom at all so yeah that's a really interesting turning point in the history of england and the history of the world okay so someone comments uh quote when you talk about native languages you always spot inspire me to learn navajo but it's not like a 20 year old white dude can go to the navajo nation and be like hey i learned navajo let me help you okay so look this is a great question i'm right on topic for this for this live stream all right so the navajo were not the same as the cree the kri are not the same as the ojibwe the ojibwe are not the same as the cambodians the cambodians not the same as the oceans something i said to people again and again when i was in laos talking about the lao people's democratic republic a small country that is just north of cambodia and just south of yunnan china just east of thailand when i was in laos something i said to other white people again and again is never forget you chose them they didn't choose you these people didn't invite you to come here these people didn't ask you to help them these people didn't ask you to learn their language you chose them you took this on yourself you decided you care about the lotion people so don't get it [ __ ] up because people get it [ __ ] up um well look with the navajo specifically what you're saying may be true it may not be my experience with navajo which is like this is that they're they're pretty open to outsiders actually they're um i read a whole book that just dealt with the navajo sense of humor with the com history and culture of comedy among the navajo and okay i won't go into that book and what i learned about navajo culture but compared to other first nations groups they are not hermits like they are not afraid of white people they're not trying to live separate you know the navajo i mean if on a scale of one to ten in terms of being accepting of a helpful outsider um i don't think they're i don't think they're at one extreme or the other of that now you know the cree by contrast are very gregarious very open very happy to have someone come in and help from the outside within canada the big contrast is the dna uh d-e-n-e danny um the dna tend to be very hostile towards outside and of course this is partly culture it's partly their historical experience and if you meet a dna person who's very welcoming to you coming again and learning the damage that's great i'm happy but i'm just saying broadly speaking now you know um the lotion people were much more welcoming and open than the cambodian people you know um but you have to have the humility and self-discipline this comes back to the earlier question about utilitarianism in these things are you doing this for yourself like are you look i'm studying chinese i don't have a single chinese speaking friend definitely i don't have a single chinese being brand in canada you know there's one guy who's still friends with me in taiwan shout out to him showed it to my one chinese friend from that one but you know like i i don't even want to talk practice language me or speak to me or you know no it's like there are untold you know millions or millions of people who speak chinese are you going to make the commitment to learn chinese and you're expecting the chinese to do something back for you you're expecting to go to china and be welcome there or have a job there have some kind of social station there saying are you going to do that with japanese you know it's a very strange thing to start off a kind of humanitarian project thinking this is something i'm going to do for you but then really immediately your attitude is hey wait what what are you people going to do for me hey wait a minute you're supposed to help me or learn navajo or learn learn this language so you know um that comes back to that question of having radical detachment about the outcomes of what you undertake politically socially and and so and so so look just just to give a quick comparison here to music um i think it would be completely reasonable if someone were to challenge my view to disagree with me or saying well look that's crazy nobody would put in the time to master playing the keyboard if they're never gonna have an audience if nobody's gonna if every record is a flop if they could never get a hit song right i'd say that's right that's why you shouldn't learn the keyboard don't learn the violin don't learn the trumpet don't keep don't learn the drum you're right because if you're only doing this for the one in a million chance that this is going to be a hit record you know what i mean if that's what justifies the hours and the self-sacrifices and the transformation then don't do it you know now if it can be rewarding for me to learn the irish language this is a good example irish is kind of semi-endangered irish may go books think that's a marginal language we don't mean english with an irish accent the indigenous language of ireland okay if it's rewarding for me to learn irish it's maybe it's rewarding for me to publish my book if you haven't heard i'm writing a book so when i finish this book maybe i want to pay to have a translate to irish i want to study it i want to have an irish edition of this book or 10 people going to read it now have this translated and published in ireland if that's rewarding for me that's one thing or if it's just because i care or maybe i care about the history of ireland or the current politics of island or the future of ireland if it's something i'm passionate about where i care and i want to do this for you i want to do this for ireland okay that's one thing but if you are going into it like the keyboardist expecting to have a hit record if you're expecting ireland usually you're expecting to be a celebrity in ireland because you're a foreigner who learned the irish you know you have really mistaken your own egoism for charity you know you're telling yourself you're doing something in a charitable way when it's self-serving in a way that's that's deceptive and ultimately destructive and a lot of people do that a lot of people do that with you know they do that with learning the thai language or the lotion language or any any other language so it happens all right [Music] okay another interesting question james asks do you ever worry that your intellectual commitments will be for nothing because you won't be able to properly apply what you've learned i am 100 certain that i will never be able to apply what i've learned james so that's not something i worry about that's something that i know and it is because i'm a citizen of canada i was born into a country with a bad education system and that's it so i know the ocean i know a lot about history and public laws i studied pali for many years i know a lot about buddhism if i were german i'd have incredible options and opportunities for the rest of my career to apply that knowledge okay i'm canadian so i never will i was willing to start again with a blank sheet of paper working on korean ojibwe i was wanting to start again with a blank sheet of paper working on chinese again i had to start with like should be learning japanese which was heartbreaking and mind-breaking i know how much brain damage i got from studying japanese and i was willing to start again as a kind of leader in the vegan movement right i'm not worried that i won't be able to apply the talents i've got to get outcomes i'm a hundred percent certain i will never be able to apply the talents i've got in any of those fields and you guys benefit from that because instead i'm here taking the time to live stream with you right now and give you some encouragement in your life you know all right so turn to the newspaper this has been a very special week in uh canadian politics this is the week of a kind of a lot of aimless white guilt and hand-wringing from people who never care about first nations canadians and they will go back a few weeks from now to not caring about first nations again there is a vein of pretense that something is fundamentally going to change in response to discover pardon me in response to the discovery of 215 unmarked graves secret graves of children it's commonly being reported as a mass grave there's 215 separate graves so that's not a mass grave it's not it's not a mass grave that's the product of one massacre at one time all right let's listen before i get to this guys i have both read and i have heard interviews as you know audio and video yeah mostly yeah mostly audio some some on video from first nations people who directly witnessed you know deaths and bodies being disposed of and rapes and forced abortions and the babies that resulted from the pregnancy being put in the furnace and disposed of by the teachers who had raped the girl and gotten her pregnant so so infanticide and so on i have heard this stuff i have read about it and so on it's real however the misperception that's happening here is that if you're talking about a mass grave that would be something like the holocaust where they line up 215 people and kill them all at the same time and push them into a grave that's not what happened here the majority of these deaths obviously there's still research to be done but the estimated 6 000 deaths in total the majority of them came about through disease however they were intentionally and eugenically exposed these diseases and again i have read detailed accounts of that where for example boys were trapped intentionally by the teachers put in a room with the windows nailed shut um uh with i'm forgetting now what the disease is something like smallpox in order to kill them you know where they were put together with someone dying of disease to make sure the disease spread so that's it's not uh it's not an accident and now even if you do look at some situation in which it quote-unquote is an accident where they're able to say oh well well guess what the level of you know medical care provided to these kids compared to what would be provided for white children in a white school i mean even in circumstances where you have the argument that this wasn't being done intentionally and eugenically which again in my experience based memory it very often was and i just say this also has to do with um religious eugenics that they would actively prevent people who continued the indigenous faith or people who just hated christianity they were either traditionalists or just rejected christianity that those would be the people they tried to kill and those would be the people they tried to render infertile incapable of having their own children whereas the people who accepted christianity they would try to save and try to let them live and let them have children so that kind of thing was was ongoing but um anyway um it's a dark history however what was discovered in canada that caused this this current fad of people pretending they care people have never done the level of reading i've done i'm not i'm not the world's greatest expert but compared to other white people in canada it's shocking how how ignorant everyone here is um but no we are not talking about a mass grave we are not talking about a german holocaust style extermination of people we are talking about 6 000 people who died as a consequence of a project of cultural genocide that was carried out in a very ramshackle roughshod way um that did include explicit eugenics that did include killing people through disease did include bodies being buried and covered up and and rape and all this other stuff but no we're not talking about gas chambers and we're not talking about mass graves in that sense so let's start with with halifax here because this one really touches me you'll see this is very few words i'm going to write to you from the newspaper quote a task force from last year recommended that the name of cornwallis park be changed edward cornwallis the founder of the city infamously offered a bounty on the scalps of mcmac people in 1749 it was renamed tuesday to peace and friendship park problem solved though not specifically linked to the kamloops discovery i.e the discovery of 215 graves it happened in the immediate aftermath now i remember as a child and as a teenager trying to talk to others other people my own age about the fact that we i.e white people in canada not my own relatives whatever my relatives are jewish immigrants and so on and so forth as you guys know um that white people did actually pay to scalp native people and now some of you might be europeans who don't know some of you are english the second you might not know the use of scalp as a verb okay let's let's be let's be clear this is scalp as a verb not a noun this is white people at the church and some extended places like city halls paying a reward for for others to go out murder indigenous people take a knife go around the skull and take off the top part of the hair and the skin from their head and then bring this human remain bring this piece of the corpse to the church to the chapel to city hall to the authorities to be paid a reward for the native people that they had killed now it gets darker because it wasn't just white people who were paid to kill native people there would be some native people who were allied with the white people and who were at war against another tribe of native people who got involved in this and we have a whole cultural phenomenon of scalping that most people blame the indigenous people for us if it were part of their culture before europeans got there and it wasn't you know this is a european idea of uh scalping and paying awards um our native people up here you know whether you're talking about the iroquois the ojibwe or what have you um you know to generalize about the northeast of the continent you know so canada adjacent parts of the united states you know they had a culture of going to war for honor all right this is a big deal not for money you know the idea of being a mercenary the idea of money is kind of foreign let's let's be real okay they did not they don't have a mercantilist culture when europeans got here all right they would risk their lives yes for a ceremony where they were presented with a feather and then they would be proud and they would show unbelievable fearlessness in battle that all the europeans were amazed with and sorry they weren't naked they weren't people who lacked clothing by the way this is another misconception before i mentioned the misconception that they that they had quote unquote red skin actually coming from the wearing of colored paints which is something we had coast to coast so by the way in eastern canada we had them they painted themselves ceremonially but here here on the west coast also they painted themselves with the ceremony so yeah but anyway the the whole red to skid thing is a misconception but there were paintings and there were drawings and there were written descriptions celebrating these guys going into battle either completely naked or almost naked like you know in a loincloth or like like they will not everywhere right it's not that they didn't have clothes it's a cold cloth they had clothes and again they're also so they had beadworking and they had quite elaborate beautiful clothes their clothes were quite impressive to europeans they were going into battle naked voluntarily for honor to make a name that was their culture and again i am generalizing here about several different language groups and several different tribes over an area i'm not generalizing all the way down to uh the aztecs in mesoamerica and i'm not generalizing all the way down to mexico and brazil but in this if you're talking about quebec ontario michigan this part of north america even down to new york state and so on you know it is a european idea to pay a bounty in money for tracking and killing a criminal that comes out of european culture they had come on the idea of having a wanted poster to kill someone and pay reward this is so quintessentially european and then this was extended to scalping as described and this did then it did transform some native cultures you can look at it in case the case but then the idea of oh when you kill someone in war you take this take this trophy so by the way guys i'm not glorifying the the first nations culture there were horrible things about how they fought wars they killed each other they enslaved each other slavery was very real in north america before europeans got here and they tortured one another to death they did not torture each other to get confessions or get information they again tortured people who have been captured in war out of this bizarre sense of honor um yeah i could i could describe that torture too so there were terrible things about the native culture and that is these things too this is part of the reason why many of them were interested in the new ideas that were coming from europe and becoming a part of the christianized literate more technologically advanced you know european culture so i just say there's you know there were people within that culture who thought we can do better hear our new ideas these people come with books and firearms and pardon me all right so i was gonna say was when i was a kid and when i was a teenager i can remember talking to other young people my age about this about the history of scalping on the east coast of canada and they did not believe me you know this is before the internet this is before google stuff just stays with me it did they did not believe me and here we are you know now of course these things are easy to google and whatever now i'm 40 years old but i remember the level of denial and apoplexy and just what are we supposed to do with this history now you know what i mean the impasse we were all our culture that one of the common responses was just to deny that this stuff had happened that's not to say oh that must be communist propaganda and there was communist propaganda you say my own parents i mean i'm very lord my father he wrote communist propaganda you know cynically employing kind of the history of native people and stuff there still is communist propaganda myself but the real history is is fairly uh horrifying so now that you guys have this i'll just read that again because it's only two seconds long a task force from last year recommended that the name of cornwallis park be changed edward cornwallis the founder of the city infamously offered a bounty on the scalps of mcmack people the indigenous people in 1749. the park was renamed tuesday to peace and friendship is this is this what we asked the germans to do after world war ii was wrapped up it was like well why don't you go around and rename all the [ __ ] that's named after adolf hitler and change it to just change the name to piece of it you know this is not this is not real change this is this is painting over genocide this is painting over a genuinely shameful history by the way this is a pretty shameful newspaper too just want to mention so this is from canada's national post i'll just give you the name to give credit where it's due um there's a real generational divide within this newspaper i assume a relatively young person wrote this article and the first few pages of the newspaper were written by young people and then when you get to the opinion the op-ed to page business with sandwich when you get to later pages of the newspaper everybody is over 70 years old so there's a terrible opinion piece here from conrad black who's over seven years old there's a terrible opinion piece from rex murphy if you don't know who these people are don't google it you do not want to know who comrade black is you do not want to know who rex burgess these are guys over 70 crotchety old men man like well i think this is out of context but you know there's a younger generation of people who are at least looking at these disturbing facts and kind of asking themselves the question what do we do now what do we do next uh you know i don't think anyone in the conservative party approves of this history they don't know what to do they haven't thought about it remember these people you people are my age i'm 42. if you are 42 you probably grew up playing pokemon like it's been the shit's been going these people grew up ignorant you know if you're if you're 52 you grew up playing atari and the original nintendo you know original 8-bit nintendo entertainment system like the fact that they wear a suit now and run for government they're people just like you and me they grew up just as ignorant they watched the same tv shows they watched sesame street they watched batman they watched spider-man like these people are no different from you and most of them they haven't read aristotle and they haven't gone and studied you know korean ojibway like i did and they haven't gone into humanitarian work mostly people have led very shallow very narrow-minded lives and they get into government oh scalping oh the park is named after us well i think we should change the name to um um peace and peace and friendship that sounds about right to me you know these are you these are your so-called elected representatives you know take a look take a look it is just as bad on the left wing where everyone's trying to be more woke than everyone else because they're just as they're just as ignorant just as just as stupid and just as clueless just as lacking in innovation they have the disadvantage of being more certain more self-confident in their sense of moral superiority right that's a change that broadly speaking about politics you know it used to be it used to be the right wing had the moral superiority thing going on because they believed in jesus and that's that's draining out of the race just you can just feel it you just feel that breeze coming through you know what i mean you know that whole christian thing that went on a style like sweatpants you know it's not that nobody wears sweatpants anymore oh you know what i mean and you know on the left wing now that's really where you get this sense of messianic conviction about your own moral superiority all right i'm happy to see your uh i'm happy to see your comments as they're coming in all right so uh you guys may already know this from my youtube channel you may not because it's been alluded to at least symbolically toronto toronto the largest and wealthiest city in canada last sunday the statue of eritrean ryerson let me let me just say let me say have you ever met anyone with the first name eckerton all right and my name is isil mazar okay i mean i'm allowed i'm allowed it's like only some people get to use the n-word okay i have a funny first name i'm allowed to call it other people for having a funny first name okay edgarton ryerson okay all right last last sunday the statue of edwards and ryerson who contributed to the development of residential schools residential schools meaning forced assimilation genocide schools already described was toppled at his namesake ryerson university so two things here one it is interesting to me that the press reported that a thousand people participated in that protest if you watch the video on my channel which is shadow band the hell if you watch my white boy summer video it opens with a video of this statue being torn down so i'll give that i'll give bill here there were not a thousand people at this protest i don't even think there were 200 people i would be surprised if we were wondering it looks like a few dozen people showed up and uh and participated in this i'll give you guys that link um this so i'm gonna fight it so at the beginning just the first 15 seconds or something it shows the statue being torn down that is the statue we're talking about here in toronto from old eggerton ryerson so not sure by the way i'm totally happy to have that question but naturally i have made a video on that eh um type that in i have made a video on precisely that question once in a while i got to kind of stay on topic and uh so the video has uh gnome daguerre in it i can give you the link yeah i have a question here about why my name is what it is and how it came to be what it is and yeah it's i remember that being a pretty entertaining video actually so that's 31 minutes long it's not that it's not the scheme of things it's a long start it's action-packed i had a long story to tell on that but yeah i don't i don't think i should uh digress oh yeah no not sure i'm totally happy with the question i just i call this uh youtuber's privilege i got a question the other day about uh what i think about cats and dogs domestication like look guys this is a good question but i've i've made that video you can watch several hours i'll be telling you about domestication of cats and dogs i'm not going to stop or document now i'll get into it so yeah once in a while i just have to use this youtuber's privilege and say yeah that's a good question but here's a 31 minute video i made already telling you the whole story um all right so i was just mentioning my video is censored to hell white voice summer currently it's not just demonetized it's not just shadow band it is labeled as hate speech by youtube's sensors so you watch that i mean i don't want to post my video white boy summer which is obviously both pro-black people and anti-rioting and anti-violence there's nothing it's not racist against black people it's not racist against white people it's a totally positive message all right that was censored by youtube as hate speech i wrote to them whatever was there two ago about it i'll have to wait a couple days and write to them again i'm gonna have to fight it again and again and again uh and maybe i'll get that overturned and maybe not you know what i mean so all right that turn of all comments let's make this yet another cat themed video not every topic can be derailed in this way um anyway guys thanks if you're new to the audience please do hit the thumbs up button i'd be happy to have some more people join us here we're now we're now down to 39 but we have a total of 47 thumbs up i can't remember having more thumbs up than people during the livestream so some people were here before gave the thumbs up and had to leave they had to they had to go to the gym or whatever they're doing on this on this fine sunday um all right so last sunday the statue of eric ryerson who contributed development of residential schools was toppled at his namesake ryerson university an insider within ryerson university forwarded to me a hilarious set of emails of the professors fighting with one another and many of the more woke and left-wing professors are now referring to ryerson university as university x refusing to use the name varsity they also refuse to use the name toronto for toronto and refuse to use them canada for canada because all of those are not folk enough so the renaming of things you know the rectification of names there's a term from the history of chinese politics the rectification of names by thursday the head of the statue showed up on a spike in caledonia ontario the site of an ongoing land dispute between the six nations of the grand river and local developers also in toronto the church and wellesley village so church in wellesley is the gay neighborhood it's the gay nightclub district right besides that that's what's implied here if you guys don't know toronto also in toronto again the use of villages because you know that village has now been associated with homosexuality the village and you're just supposed to know that they mean the gay district by calling it's not a village it's in the skyscrapers in the middle of all the buildings it's a village it's you know residential skyscrapers and office now the village you know you know what i mean the village the area with the canine clubs all right also in toronto the church wellesley village bia has asked the city to remove a statue of alexander wood the statue erected in 2005 was meant to honor wood as a forefather of toronto's gay community referencing a sketch pardon me referencing a sex scandal in 1810 but the bia said wood who died in 1844 in scotland was a member of the society for converting and civilizing the indians he was on the the wrong side he was on the wrong side of the the genocide equation there ottawa the federal capital unsurprisingly canada's capital has had a lot of stuff named after the country's founding prime minister sir john a macdonald so i'm sure nobody in this audience knows who john a macdonald was none of the prime minister's camp are famous we don't have a single famous prime minister ever there has never been one prime minister of canada who is famous for not even the guy during world war ii i mean really what do you think sound learning the lessons of history here people um but johnny mcdonald is the closest thing to a famous name we've got with anti-canada what is he famous for well guess what genocide once back when i was studying korean ojibwe when i was in saskatchewan and i was enrolled in those languages dealing with those politics i went into this somewhat old-fashioned second-hand bookstore i just said this is what secondary stores were like before the internet kind of destroyed everything a whole bunch of uh handmade cheap wooden shelves and they had a section which was just the biographies of canadian prime ministers this is how the publishing industry works they all had similar covers and there were similar sizes and similar spines so there's this you can imagine there's not really a big market for the biography of canadian prime ministers but if you publish a kind of official scholarly historical study of a given prime minister of canada every university in canada every high school every library will will order one and maybe major universities in the united states and europe you know at the the most important universities in the united states well we need to have this book because this is this is the official political history of this prime minister's time in office in canadian politics maybe we're going to need this book sometimes order anyway remember they all had they had kind of plain white covers it was this kind of uniform style so this was you know the official biography of diefenbaker the official biography of john mcdonald there's nothing official about it by the way i'm just saying that it's the the publishing company is trying to prevent present this as some kind of official and definitive statement but you know uh it's just a for-profit enterprise trying to impress you with the size and scope and see and i took every single one off the shelf and went through the index and went through the table of contacts trying to find one word about first nations genocide because each of these guys every single one of them had their part to play some more important than others but all of them all of them were part of this you know this phenomenon of you know step by step slow motion genocide and it was never mentioned in the index even once you couldn't find the word indian in the index you couldn't find first nations of course later you couldn't find indigenous you couldn't find and yeah but look for like the word korean ojibway too some other words that might be nope so you know that sense of it just being erased from history and you know where it was mentioned it would just literally be like this meeting took place at about the same time that you know the settlement was signed with the ojibwe people like like it's mentioned in passing that way just oh yeah that was one of the other pieces of legislation that like no absolutely no interest in evaluating just even in terms of outcomes guys the majority of white canadians still to this day are pro-genocide right but for my parents generation and their members they're they're all pro-genocide but can you say if that's your ideology did it work like what are the outcomes when you look at these people today when you look at what the residential schools what this stuff did to them are they dentists and doctors and lawyers are they a successful and productive part of this society you've genocidely created or are they including your society i asked melissa the other day have you even once gone to the bank and had the bank teller be an indigenous first nations person like it's a reasonably humble form of employment have you even once gone to the bank to withdraw money or cash a check and the person on the other side of the counter is an indigenous person and now think of all the ethnicities you have had i've had jamaicans working in banks i've had chinese new orleans like every ethnicity from all around the world i have spoken to at a bank sometimes they don't speak english well so if you go to the bank the person has this thick accent people from all different backgrounds and russians and koreans i've met all sorts of people working behind the count of the bank never once in my life a first nations person a native person a so-called indian never how's that how does that go like if you believe in this [ __ ] if you support john a macdonald or you support the whole history we have this kind of like obviously even if you thought that was a good or moral thing in the first place it failed so why aren't you interested in the failure why isn't there an evaluation of the failure you know so anyway so now we're in this situation in 2021 where all the name wants to do is is tear the statues down you know it's that's gonna help you know rename the park rename the park peace and friendship part you know that's that's gonna help all right so in ottawa we have a question of i mean what do you do you're going to tear down the statue of every single prime minister and guys the thing is if there were something positive coming out of it i'd be cool with it like i've said that if we were going to cancel the space program in order to do something positive that money i'd be cool like that is destructive i mean things would be lost if you just suddenly scrapped the whole the whole space program you know scrap the missions tomorrow scrap the international spirit this is a loss right but if you say you know what in canada we're going to stop spending billions of dollars on what's ultimately just a vanity project to put the canadian flag into outer space and have the canadian flag on a shuttle you know just [ __ ] you know what you know what really matters is the fate of our indigenous languages and indigenous people and instead of that being the lowest priority that's going to be the operator if that were happening i'd say hey great destroy all the statues you want destroy all the laboratories you want for the space program you know put them in mothballs if i tear down the [ __ ] space shuttle fro i care you know if you want to tear down the space shuttle and stomp on it and spread okay but that's not the positive and constructive point we have to actually be interested in solving problems we have to be actually doing something new and productive and different but if you were if you were going to tear down the statue of john a macdonald there is not a single prime minister in the history of this country whose statute you're not going to tear down right you're not going to it's not like oh well you know some of the prime ministers were none of them there were no exceptions all of them were pro-genocide down to and including jean-claude jean-chretien if he were hauled into the hague he'd be guilty of crimes against humanity so jean-claude hayes within my lifetime if you guys know don't know jungkook absolutely john christian was just as guilty of crimes against humanity as you know the leaders of poverty-stricken african countries who actually do get pulled in and tried at the hague you know i just say pull down the statues of every single again you know i'm not defending the statues i'm just saying why is it that all of our interest is in a purely theatrical and purely destructive response to this as opposed to something that's actually substantive and actually constructive like there's no interest in solving the problem you know there's no interest to even talk about what that would mean what would solving the problem mean at this point 2021 you know anyway there's no interest in the leftist notice they're right here it's okay great so i have this this outfit okay all right sorry back to our five senses from the newspaper all right um okay unsurprisingly canada's capital has a lot of stuff named after the country's founding prime minister sir john a macdonald including the sir john a macdonald parkway the mcdonald cartier bridge and the ottawa mcdonald cartier international airport in early june three ottawa city councillors called for a renaming of sir johnny macdonald parkway because of the complex jurisdictional issues the parkway isn't a city responsibility it involves the federal government and the national capital commission so it is not clear what will happen with the renaming of the of the parkway the renaming of the renaming of the highways so on and so forth protesters in kingston the hometown of sir johnny mcdonald covered a statue of him in a tarp and are calling on the city to remove it meanwhile global news reported there are calls for an indigenous art installation to go beside the statue so here in victoria oh yeah they just canceled other people are just canceling the celebration of canada day you know well that'll that'll help a few other renamings a few other statues torn down just a few days after the the discovery of kamloops was announced so just a few days after the discovery of the 215 corpses of dead children city council in charlottetown voted to remove a statue of sir john a macdonald it was taken down and put in the back of a pickup truck the next day quote a statue is not history by removing this statue it's not removing any history close quote uh councillor greg rivard told the cbc earlier this month so what can i tell you folks pack it up pack it in your history is garbage get a new history in picton ontario the local city council or county council voted to remove a statue of our former prime minister sir john a from downtown picton and to toss it into storage that statue like others in the country had red paint splashed on it so nacho one of my regular viewers here nacho says true history is still not taught in schools well you know i remember when i came back to canada i was actually coming back from laos but my life already involved laos and cambodia both in that whole region uh i was backing up for something like five days um i had to get a new passport you know so i did it i flew back i got a new passport and then went back again so i was camped for a couple days and i met up with an old friend of mine who i now haven't heard from i hadn't heard from many years then i haven't heard from many years now um he's gone on to become a university professor unlike myself and i was telling him some of these basic shocking facts about cambodia he was saying [ __ ] that he had kind of heard firsthand and secondhand from noam chomsky about cambodia you know noam chomsky and people have spent home shops and i was telling him look i don't know we're getting ready from but the united states was on the pro-communist side in cambodia you know what the americans were fighting for communism yeah history is complicated bro um the united states was in a lot in in an alliance with china against rival communist groups you know so china the united states and the khmer rouge the cambodian economy on the same side he was really shocked by this and he responded in the same way kind of saying that it's kind of horrifying that the truth isn't taught in schools or something and you know i really challenged him that i said to him you know is it too much to expect you to go and get an encyclopedia off the shelf like is it too much to expect you to do a little bit of research for yourself like you know i don't i don't expect i remember saying the wording here is not that different i could i could reconstruct the whole conversation i'm cursed with their account memory for these things um you know i don't expect my ideology to be taught by the schools and i don't expect my moral concerns my ethical agenda to be reflected in encyclopedia britannica for example you know what i mean i think that's an unreasonable expectation you know what i mean um you know there are very difficult questions about what you've done schools but like let's say this for example you guys many of you have heard what i have to say about christianity right i'm an atheist i'm i am not a mild atheist you know if i were a dictator of canada or something would i put my anti-christian ideology into schools no i mean i think you really have to make a kind of responsible set of decisions and recognize look what teachers should say in the classroom is not the same as what i should say on youtube you know i think i think there are tough questions to me sorry there are tough tough decisions to be made there now you know are the right decisions being made right now no no they're not um [Music] but i'm just i'm just encouraging you to examine nihilistically you know your your own assumptions now look so germany is being mentioned as an example here very various different ways switzerland is an even better example right oliver how honest is the swiss school system going to be about switzerland's role in the holocaust you know like how honest is poland gonna be about poland's role in the holocaust like if you guys don't know what polls polish people is paul offensive now what polish people generally do you know is to insist no no no all of that was because of the germans like we were good and pure and fought against the germans the germans just came here and they carried out these atrocities on our soil but poles weren't both of course if you do a little bit of ring the polish people were incredibly anti-semitic then they're still incredibly anti-semitic now you know um you know um [Music] is it reasonable to expect the government-funded polish education system to teach the people of poland an indictment of of polishness you know is it expectable to teach the is it respectable for is it is it are we going to demand that canadian schools or commit canadian textbooks you know engage in a kind of demolition of canadian ideology and canadian history i think that's for people like me to do i think that's for intellectuals i think it's for newspapers to do too by the way i mean i think it's for all of us it's out in the panics to do right but you know how do you teach the history of germany to german children how do you teach the history of switzerland does swiss children poland the polish children you know how do you teach the history of israel to israeli children and you know if we're talking about schools and children's children that's great that's great for full-time you know uh just mention this it's hard for historians to be honest themselves or with themselves i bought this book partly because i was wondering how honest it was it was going to be so this is about american history 1600 to 1675 when things are real genocide babe do you want to just grab the other book on genocide the one that has genocide forgetting the name now right surviving genocide it's it's hard for people to be honest about this and you know it's hard to put yourself in the mindset of people who really were this religious so this is surviving genocide uh another book i've read two percent of or five percent of or something um you know these not books i've read they're books i'm mentioning as examples but okay like you know and i did a book review of another book i don't have here on paper called the other slavery talking about the enslavement of indigenous people you know i think it's really important for you and me right now on youtube to be honest about this and to take it all the way you know what i mean and i think it's important for scholars and authors and researchers and newspapers i think it's important in the panics you know in the public space for deciding what democracy is going to do in future i think that's really important but i can't really turn to the school system let's let's say you can't you can't expect your teachers to do your thinking for you you can't expect your teachers to do your feeling for you know what i mean your teachers are going to teach you how to do long division and then you know when it comes to genocide you're going to have to do the math you know i think there's really a sense in which the the school system certainly the government school system can't do people's thinking for them and can't do their feeling for them and can't come to these kinds of moral conclusions for them and of course it's very scary that the non-government school system does all those things if you go to a muslim school what do you think they teach you you know um if you go to a catholic school if you go to a mormon school what do you think they teach it's predominantly um religious schools i have read about a couple of black nationalist schools so this these are people who you know politically are not so different from the black panthers um they're they're not part of the black panther movement but there have been black nationalist schools that are teaching a very warped version of american history where it's you know a kind of revolutionary black left-wing extremist version of american history and you know they do that because enough people donate money to support them like religion ultimately it relies on donations to upgrade school and they they feel they're empowering black youth to go into the world with a very different set of attitudes you know um so ugly bob says i'm not calling him ugly that's his name in british columbia every private school including catholic muslim and jewish schools get 50 or 35 percent of funding from the government per student um so bob broadly speaking in canada religious education gets government money period yes the rules are a little bit different in ontario and a little bit different in quebec and so on correct but that is it you know yes we do not have separation of church and state and we never have and our constitution does not guarantee you or suggest to you that you will ever have separation state for some reason you know the most um you know the people who are most different is that the english the british themselves religious schools are a huge problem within england very old england and people only started to question it when they saw the reality of the muslim schools but catholic and protestant schools are really an even bigger problem for anyone so nobody nobody really is dealing with that okay guys we are coming up on the the two hour mark now i'm going to slow down a little bit i know i've been i know i've been doing all the talking in this conversation but guys is there anything else you'd like me to address is anything else you'd like me to cover in this um you know i i i could launch into my long delayed discourse on napoleon i've done a lot of reading about napoleon i never made any youtube videos talking about it but uh why don't i just take a minute and ask if there's anything you guys want to hear if anything you guys are interested in hearing me speak on and then i mean my perspective we can we can call it a wrap to our live stream is good life yes so edgy intellects mentions the situation in germany where not just schools but a whole lot of other social institutions are run by the church but funded by the state yes in germany there is a unique system of sort of taxation of collecting tithes for the church and i'm very surprised to see germans who are overseas still send that money back for the church and church programs um france too is a very hypocritical attitude on this that i have called out they claim they're a secular country but you may recall i was attacking them in the interest of re pardon me i was attacking them on the issue of rebuilding the cathedral in paris the notre dame cathedral there are innumerable ways in which the government supports and sustains the christian dominance of society the side i don't know about in germany you know in contrast united states america is really the emotional side of it and i actually knew i knew one guy who was a schoolteacher in the uh well okay i'm just remembering i was gonna say he was a schoolteacher of in the in the religious education system but actually he taught religion in the government system and he was a complex situation jurisdictionally but he talked about some of those issues what i don't know about is you know emotionally do germans really go to summer camps and go horseback riding and go camping in church groups that effectively christianize them um i i'm just saying that's the side of it i don't know in america that stuff is very effective people are really kind of radicalized as christians through summer camps through sports teams and music groups and everything that the churches uh run it just seems to me that the cr the germans i have met their christianity is so shallow and so vague they've become such a pagan country again you know to me to me a german you know for whom christianity means anything at all is incredibly rare i'm an atheist but i just say i don't know maybe it deserves to be studied why is it why is it that religious groups in in germany are so ineffective in doing that but i just mentioned you know um you know even the studies of the right-wing of the the fascists the neo-nazis in germany those guys barely have any connection to christianity whereas the right-wing in the united states is very powerfully um connected to christianity so um a couple a couple more good questions here um frida asks are you still reading sallust i have finished sallust so i don't think there's any more of salas for me to read james todd what is your opinion of nelson mandela so you know um my opinion about nelson mandela is negative you know i think that most people are unaware of the extent to which his political position was created by his birth that he was born the equivalent of royalty you know and he participated in tribal ceremonies that established him as a you know a significant person in that way fixed by birth and they're unaware of what the reality of the truth and reconciliation commission was and what it did what the so-called truth reconciliation process was once nelson mandela got out of jail and and took over power now the other thing that people lie to themselves about is that nelson mandela transformed society while he was in jail well he wasn't it was all the people who were not in jail who fought in a struggle to liberate south africa and although i am an anti-communist many of those people were communists or they were willing to cynically employ support from the communists communism was a significant concern there so with nelson mandela there were kind of three parts to his life there's his status before he goes to prison there's the period in prison and there's the period after he's out of prison and i think all three people have you know modern observers certainly from outside there but basically invented myths about like how did he become an important political leader before he went to prison what did he accomplish by being in prison you know like if you attribute the political transformation took place while he wasn't present to him you're really just totally ignorant of the real the real history of what happened and who the rebel groups were and who and even who the white people were who went negotiated with them because ultimately the changes that africa happened when a young generation of more reasonable white business leaders basically white multi-millionaires the wealthiest of the wealthy in south africa went and met with the rebel leaders and you know negotiated a transition um so you know to attribute it to nelson mandela's sitting in prison is the kind of myth and then after he got out of prison you know that so-called truth and reconciliation uh commission and that that in itself really is a crime against humanity and there's been a very very strange you know um dilution of the concept of justice so through the reconciliation commission you take a guy in the majority of cases these people were themselves black most of these sessions concerned black people who were employed by the white people that were employed by the white state but the apartheid state you know the pro-white government but they employed black people to do most of their dirty work you will not be suppressed now so you have a black guy sitting in a church or town hall and you know people read out the complaints against him that he murdered people that he tortured people there will be an old woman there who says i remember you you tortured my son you know my son was tortured and beaten to death or whatever her story is there was all this terrible violence terrible things that were done to sustain the old regime and again a lot of it was done by black people black people who were for the regime you know and then everyone says well there's no use putting anyone in prison there's no use holding anyone accountable responsible for their actions we'll all just go home and pretend this never happened this is so-called truth and reconciliation now of course it doesn't establish truth it's not actual research you know and doesn't accomplish reconciliation and it also doesn't offer anything that anyone could call justice you know um i heard an interesting debate in the american senate i'm still staying on the same telephone i heard there's a debate in the american senate the other day where they were talking about the extent to which guilty people can change and deserve a second chance so you know this is because of sentencing reform which is more or less a constant in the american senate american system of government and i was like oh well you know somebody could commit a heinous crime when they're 19 years old but then 10 years old later or 20 years later they're a totally different person so they should be given a second chance the the most basic concept of accountability the most basic concept that actions have consequences you know that is disappearing from the world and it's so sad and it's so sick to in effect blame the victims in south africa which is what nelson mandela did say like oh well you have to deal with yours your feelings you know don't put your guilt trip on someone else you feel bad because your son was tortured death and executed and this same script they attempted in cambodia you know like oh well we're going to have a truth and reconciliation process in cambodia we're going to you know we're just going to declare the people who carried out massacres for the communist regime that they shouldn't be punished they shouldn't be held accountable for for anyone you know it's true but fundamentally irrelevant that people change people change one of the few guys who was put on trial in cambodia is called comrade this is normally spelled like dutch it's a very peculiar name in terms of how it's latinized anyway you may or may not have heard about this guy when he was on trial in cambodia and he really was the head of the most notorious torture chamber in downtown phnom penh the capital city of cambodia so he was directly responsible for people being interrogated and tortured to death um so on and so forth and you know after the war ended after communism ended he got with a christian missionary group and did humanitarian work and did all these good things he had you know he had lived a morally i'm i'm not in favor of christianity i'm not but um you know he laid uh he led a morally exemplary life in many ways he'd done charitable things and good works you know guess what the people you killed are still dead the people you tortured who survived there were only a few most of them were killed the vast majority you know they're still out here with physical disabilities because of the torture inflicted on them you know and the consequences for the whole country the whole country was held in a state of terror during these years where everyone was being tortured and executed like it doesn't just directly affect the people towards jesus those consequences are still with us though you are responsible for your decisions your actions have consequences and they don't just have consequences for everyone else they have consequences for you because you made the choice you did it and to me what nelson mandela's truth and reconciliation process means is that when political leaders do evil things they have consequences for everyone else but not for the leaders you know or when military men when soldiers because it may not be a political leader may just be a guy as a local commander or something commits some atrocities or tortures people or kills people oh well that has that has consequences for society as a whole and we should all kind of do some hand wringing and apology sessions and talk about guilt and remorse and feelings and resentment and then we should do this sort of bizarre post-modern christian thing and pretend that all is is forgiven you know so there's kind of the consequences for the victims um but not for the victors not for the enough the people who committed these crimes it's it's ridiculous and you know some people who support the nelson mandela approach to politics certainly in cambodia for example some of them do so cynically there were people in cambodia who openly and strategically said here's what we're going to do they would play the nelson mandela card they would talk about truth and reconciliation and then they would repackage the communist party to become sen's cambodian people's party and not just take over the government but continuously control the government this was a way for the khmer rouge for exactly the people who had been the worst communists because there were different camps of communists but so that the most terrible the most corrupt the most guilty the most violent communists could remain in power in cambodia you know with with deploying cynically this card saying okay we'll have this symbolic uh truth and reconciliation commission and we'll all praise as the highest moral value this armistice and this idea of non-violence oh yeah we want non-violence now not before when they were murdering millions of their own people you know oh okay now we'll yeah we'll talk about gandhi and nelson mandela and so on and you know if those people instead had been put in prison like the nuremberg trials in germany or whatever you want you want to use as an example if they had been put in prison or if they had been executed because frankly these if these aren't death penalty offenses you know sort of comrade for example there have been attempts to estimate how many murders he's responsible for and its numbers are baffling and by the way they had no gas chambers you know bullets were scarce uh many of the people who were executed the most of them were exceeded by conrad doy they were starved and then they were beaten to death they were hit over the head with a wooden block and put into a mass grave because bullets were scarce no gas chambers yeah and the starvation was horrible too i can tell you all kinds of details about oh yeah well you know truth and reconciliation you know really um but this is my point so-called mercy has consequences actually now that i think of it i was just reading machiavelli talk about that too um you know you think there were consequences for enforcing the law but there were no consequences for not enforcing the law there are no consequences for mercy well you have so-called mercy towards these killers these violent corrupt terrible people in cambodia who had been the ruling elite in case you hadn't heard you know they ruled they ruled parts of the country for that whole time i mean oh sorry i'm simplifying the history slightly because actually you know there was a border within cambodia and the armies moved back and forth so uh the khmer rouge weren't continuously in control of the whole country but anyway but they continuously existed and were in power and they became more corrupt with time of course they are more involved with cross-border smuggling and the other way is that military hunters make money um you know your so-called truth and reconciliation commission handed the leadership of the country over those people and they and their children and grandchildren still control this country to this day it didn't have to be that way okay you could have put the people who were guilty on trial you could have had law and order and justice and you could have established cambodian democracy you know you could have you frankly you could have disqualified everybody who fought on either side in that way you could have said look it doesn't even matter if you think you're on the side of the angels in the cambodian civil war the revolution no none of you no war veterans can run let's let's hand all the political leadership over to people who are under 20 years of age for a while or something you know you have a transition we say look everybody who has blood in their hands is excluded let's really have people come up who either you know were like not in the country at all they were refugees who weren't involved or who were under 20 years old or something under 30 years old they were talking about you know let's really change and let's get rid of you know what was different so you know there are there are terrible uh consequences now you tell me so look i am not an africanist i am not a specialist in africa you know how much has south africa really changed and how much more could it have changed if you know there have been an interest in real justice if actions had consequences obviously south africa has changed in some ways but i am suggesting to you that it has not changed enough okay lots of other good questions here i'm just gonna scroll through and glance that a lot of them uh okay so i think these will be real quick just some quick q and a and then we'll call it a call tonight um daniel asks do you think that keeping an oppressive system can ever be worth it in order to keep an economy functioning we make that decision all the time so sure it happens all the time um you know life is full of contradictions so sure i mean one of the examples was the military dictatorship in greece you know modern greece you know um it was an anti-communist military dictatorship in greece and if you look into it it was really necessary and really reasonable and by the way it did allow people freedom of speech it allowed people way more freedom of speech than the the greek orthodox church would have allowed them the greek form of christianity for the first time under that dictatorship uh military dictatorship they had nudity in public cinemas they had sexy movies like you have in london or paris or something you know there actually was a period of transition that way but sure there can be circumstances where economic and military extremes make you [Music] tolerate oppression because you know to paraphrase lenin lenin said every society is just three meals away from a collapse you know like if people if people can't eat for just three meals in a row you've got some kind of revolution happening now i don't sympathize with i don't uh lenin but in this in this context sure you know what what you can call um economic uh stability is you know uh often i mean if you think economic stability doesn't matter well does starvation matter and those are the things we're dealing with quite rapidly when um when political conditions fall apart um thanks uh shout out to nicole who's watching from uh ontario somebody asked me my opinion on on bitcoin but i've done quite a few videos on bitcoin just lately so if you just scroll down and search for the word bitcoin on the front of my my youtube channel we get a question here quote do you think the stock market is evil this is something i'm happy to speak about because we we talk a lot about we read a lot about the stock market on this household um you know fundamentally the stock market is similar to a business partnership so i'm going to talk this through briefly but i think it's worth saying because a lot of people don't understand what the stock market is even if they think they do let's say you have a younger brother who's going to start a barber shop and your younger brother says guess what it's a lot of money to start a barbershop and your younger brother says you know um yeah yeah somebody's encouraging me to do more videos in the stock market i've been very talented to do that so we've talked about that a lot here to what extent i should do videos talking about stock market and somewhere so this is genuine interest for me it has been since high school since my second last year of high school or something i've been very interested in you know macroeconomics and microeconomics and stuff okay so everybody's back to my basement let's say you have a younger brother who's going to start a a barber shop and he wants you to loan him 100 000 now if you do this your brother says every year he's going to pay you back a certain percentage with a certain amount of interest well you know what let's let's not even say that let's say he's not sure how much he can pay you maybe for the first couple of years he won't have that much clientele he's going to pay you a certain percentage of the income of the gross revenue and that will you'll keep track of it and he will eventually pay you back you know the value of your of your investment so families do get into these things and you may do this and you have absolutely no right and no ability to influence your brother's business like you show up as business and say the music is terrible the lighting is terrible and he says well i took your money and now you you don't get to choose the music that i play in my barbershop you're a silent investor you know or what have you the stock market is a way for you to be able to take your hundred thousand dollars and give it to apple computer instead for them to make money with for you to take 100 000 and be able to give it to disney corporation with and you get to participate in the profitability of the success of apple computer and you know disney corporation and so on and so forth so that is it at its most morally pure and i don't see that as evil are there problems are there disadvantages to having a society organized around the stock market yes and it's interesting to note that like mainstream centrist politics not just the left wing or something are really aware of this one of the problems is that the stock market massively advantages established businesses it makes it very difficult to have small startups to have new businesses um that can compete with anything or do something really original now you know i was looking at this for the state of michigan but generally all of the states and all of the provinces in all of the government's world they're aware of that to some extent you have really muscular government programs to help and encourage and support small businesses because they know it's small businesses and new businesses that are do not have the money flowing into the stock market they don't get to play so this is just one example now another thing that's kind of evil about the stock market is just human attitudes towards it you know a fool in his money are soon parted there are a lot of fools willing to part with their money um you know obviously i think a great deal of what's going on in the stock market today is ridiculous and i hope nobody gets hurt but i'm completely certain millions of people so you know that side of it again you can kind of criticize in terms of its consequences for society as whole but let me ask you this for anyone who says the stock market is evil which i don't agree with but if you think the stock market is evil why is blackjack legal why is the las vegas casino as an institution legal you know even some forms of online video games that don't do anything positive for the world people lose both time and money um there are so many things that should be illegal or should be morally rectified and limited and regulated before the stock market there's there's fundamentally nothing evil about oh i'll give you an example this is a real example me and melissa have jokes about a lot of time i heard on the news and i heard pretty much the day it happened within 24 hours that one of the crown princes of saudi arabia one of the very politically important people in saudi arabia who also is an incredibly wealthy person had invested a huge amount of money in neo-geo so this is snk corporation of korea famous for the neo-geo video game system which is part of my own childhood and which i've talked about in the youtube channel and to some extent it's part of my life now how many weeks has it been or how many months have been played in the ogo game i don't know but we don't we don't really ever play them but i do actually know own some neo geo hardware and software um anyway you know the crown prince of saudi arabia too probably he probably he has childhood memories of the neo-geo video games or something and i remember saying the melissa at that time said look if we take five thousand bucks and put it into this stock right now i can guarantee you know it's it's going to go up and i don't know why the crown prince of saudi arabia probably knows something we don't know you know but this company some people believe that it's going to be able to expand its market share in the video game market you know if you really think it's so evil for people to get excited about a company like this neo geo snk corporation and say hey i think this company is making great products i think they're going to expand everything to grow and i want to join in i want to give them my five thousand dollars or whatever it is i want to participate in that growth or that success and i'll be paid i'll be paid some small amount or maybe i'll lose money maybe i'm wrong maybe maybe maybe i mean what i said most of the time was also look uh neogeo had just put up this great product that i've reviewed on my channel they put out this great arcade stick it's a joystick with built-in hardware and stuff um it's a joystick that can directly play video games or can be used as a joystick with the differences great product a great product that originally came out at a great price um maybe that's all they've got maybe they can't follow that up with another great product or ten more great products but maybe that's it you know what i mean it's like it's not like the iphone where they're gonna put out a new one every year so maybe the stock will collapse but no very fundamentally there isn't something evil about that guys a youtuber i've known for years i heard him just saying on his channel he actually actually it's a stock market channel you know his nose is is broken and asymmetrical i never i just assumed he was born with his nose looking that way and he happened to mention on a video i saw that no it's because he played rugby as a as a kid as a teenager i assume you know now his nose is broken for the rest of his life people do downhill skiing people play rugby people gamble at casinos there are so many things in our society that have predictable inevitable negative consequences and where nothing positive can ever come out of it you know what i mean so if if you are of such moral scruples if you are at a level of moral purity where you look at the stock market as something that should be illegal or something that you regard as immoral whoa you know what isn't you know where where are you drawing the line with any of these other things no it's funny to me that these two are in one one question no paragraph right between them quote what do you think about freud and psychoanalysis question mark new sentence have you ever played garu mark of the wolves yes video game for the uh that's a kdr [Laughter] uh okay guys i think it's been a stream we're past the two hour mark i think we should wrap it up uh at this point thank you all for the encouragement and i you know i do appreciate it you're writing in and saying you'd like to hear me talk more about particular stocks or what's going on in stock market i i'd like to talk about that too but you know are you gonna make content for an audience that doesn't exist it's very it's very challenging uh kind of a friend of a friend i could say sent to me said to me recently that she really thought i should do language education videos teaching english to chinese people if japanese people want to tune in they can but i'd be presuming the audience is chinese teaching english for politics chinese people so political vocabulary political history you know and then i'd be able to speak a little chinese and have chinese um you know text on screen again japanese people would also be able to make use of that it's like okay so i'm not just teaching you english i'm teaching you the how to use english in a sophisticated way to understand what's happening in the news to talk about politics to articulate and contrast sophisticated political ideas so you know what that's a great idea for a series of videos but nobody is going to pay me to do that you know like that when you really think about it that sounds like a full-time job so to take on that mission and that sense of purpose um not only without the possibility of payment but with the very great likelihood that what you have to say will never be heard uh that's that's very very tough to do and i say that as somebody now who is working very hard to finish writing a book my book no more manifestos it will never earn me any money and it is very likely it will be read by fewer than 500 people now i hope that all of you in this audience we have 50 people in the audience right now apparently we had a few more before i hope that all 50 of you will order and buy a copy of my [ __ ] form manifestos even if you have no intention of reading it i hope you just have it you know as a as a memento as a keepsake it would look good in a book it's a great title we have an artist working on the cover actually so it should be a great cover too i haven't seen the final artwork for the for the cover you know um but to to make the sacrifice and set down your your your thoughts knowing that you are you know to some extent you know screaming into the face of a society that's not only indifferent toward what you have to say but is really quite hostile and contemptuous and dismissive towards every episode you know it's a it's a very very tough commitment to make but if i'm going to do that if i'm going to stand up and and perform my philosophy like i'm saying perform you know if i'm going to tell my story if i'm going to write my book then it's got to be mine right and you know something like language lessons something like stock market analysis advice that's not my story to tell you know that's not my philosophy that's a job and i i don't think it's unreasonable even in the 21st century to say um if you want me to do this job in the parlance of our times [ __ ] you pay me brandon williams is surprised to hear that i'm watching a book yes i'm at the very end of finishing the book if you want to know more about the book you can support me on patreon you can read the first several chapters for free there already as pdfs you can also just follow me on instagram for free because i am giving updates about the book on instagram and if or when it's available in one of their format you will definitely find it by instagram i will mention you on youtube but if you don't want to spend one dollar a month on patreon and read the first several chapters now stay in touch on instagram or however you can great talking to you guys