Insanity & Politics: A Vegan Stabbed Himself On Camera.

one of the issues that I've spoken about
on this channel before and I know I'm going to speak of it again it's the role of mental disability and mental illness within the vegan movement and we have an incredible range so we were just talking about autism schizophrenia all the way over to disorders like bulimia and anorexia within the chat group and we had someone a few days ago here in the digital vegan demi-monde I had someone stabbed himself on camera an attempted suicide while live streaming on the internet and this particular guy who stabbed himself up people in the recent past before that happened asked me to endorse and support his channel I get those kind of request a lot people say oh here's somebody there a new vegan they mean well blah blah blah it's and he's a nice guy is for this channel and you got to make a judgment call if you're in my position not just on their intentions not just on their moral principles on their commitment to veganism or their you know how they interface politically with the movement or something with direction to move in you know you got to make a judgment based on their sanity based on their reliability and there is certainly a school of thought dominant in the world today that have just been hearing from my chat group that we should regard all mental illness as equivalent to physical illness and that we should in no way stigmatize or judge people for serious mental disabilities and you know what I guess we call emotional disabilities for serious mental disorders again from bulimia to schizophrenia from you know autism to I don't know let's throw in dyslexia I mean there's this huge range of things that are that fall into this category ah that's a dream I'm not willing to dream with you folks you know why because we're talking about politics we're talking about veganism as a political movement and there are some people who can't play this game if my own brother had one of these serious mental disabilities I had a serious psychological disorder Scotch such as schizophrenia etc would I recommend that he get involved with party politics no would I get recommend that he get involve with lobbying City Hall no doesn't matter most people with schizophrenia there on and off medication you know they have medication that provides them with some degree of stability for a time and then maybe they encounter a problem and they try new medication I understand these are illnesses that in the modern Western world in the decadent Western world people have access to a variety of forms of therapy and treatment they may or may not be able to hold down a job they may or may not be able to you know use the time productively but of course they're unreliable because they have that underlying overriding mental and psychological condition if you have schizophrenia can you get involved in snowboarding yes can you get involved in a flag football yes I mean there's an incredible list of wonderful things you can do with your time can you get involved with party politics no not really your involvement is incredibly limited can you get involved with radical politics no absolutely not can you get involved with fringe politics can you get involved with animal rights any college about no it's not a game you should play and it's not just the case of it being bad for the movement I think it's bad for you it's bad for the person themselves who has this condition and we just talked about that in a very long video very long sympathetic video where I was giving advice to someone who really suffers with bulimia so I'm you know bulimia has different levels of severity this is someone who's been in and out of you know medical treatment for bulimia asking me about whether or not she should get involved here with YouTube with the digital veendum on and it's a long video it's a long open-ended discussion but the final conclusion is no I think this is not for you and there's a whole range of reasons for that including the really negative impact this could have on her life right now oh there's another side to this story that some of us have lived through and still remember in just the last two years some people such as durianrider have come on the internet and not only encouraged these people to join the movement joey said he evolved veganism but they've promised them that veganism will give them the magical superpower to quit their meds okay so durianrider has a coherent philosophy partly based on his own claims his claims that he cured his own psychological problems that he cured his own physical medical problems that if you follow his advice on diet exercise and sleep you can kill yourself you can recover from even severe mental disorders like schizophrenia and including schizophrenia and I've pointed out in the past during writer himself has directly said he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic he's also said he was diagnosed as having anorexia okay so that's not an allegation on my part those are things he said to himself and we all got to see one young man who uses the youtube name pal simian we all got to see how he for many months was posting videos in support of during writers philosophy and this philosophy is partly based on questioning or rejecting the medicalization of these mental disorders themselves it's partly based on a dismissal of how real you know a condition like schizophrenia may be and it's partly based on a reckless optimism about self diagnosis self-healing food as medicine of overcoming all boundaries through veganism itself of veganism becoming this mega cure and so far as I can see just from his YouTube channel I have no private information we got to see pal simian go through a period when he was elated and highly motivated and he obviously felt he was he was overcoming his serious mental disorders and then we got to see him collapse we got to see him get committed to a mental institution and the videos deleted now but he actually uploaded videos of himself in the mental institution and at that time he said on camera that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia that may not be correct but that is what he said on camera at that time or he may have had a later diagnosis he may have had a first diagnosis and littered in US but just say it's not an allegation that is something he said about himself at the time on camera and again may be wrong he may have Jim he may have just been freestyling he may have misspoken but it also may have been a diagnosis of those place because he is later told me that his current diagnosis is not schizophrenia so good I'm happy for you man but he's someone who obviously had serious psychological problems involving serious medication and from that point forward apparently he was back on the medication okay um politics is nasty I can remember one incident especially when when i was doing this really low level political activism at city hall well you know people said things to me to try to make me cry it sounds ridiculous are you doing like ecological advocacy davis video people say mean cruel stuff to you face to face because when you have a real open democratic process one of the main questions is just whether or not you show up well not you get people to show up at that meeting so they make the meetings hard to find hard to attend and very often the people involved will be insulting and degrading to you once you're there you have an open meeting on government policy on sewage treatment a very small number of people are going to show up and be heard you know there's maybe one professor from the University use an expert in sewage treatment and there's a guy like me and there are a couple other people who make the time to go and give a deposition and be heard in that democratic process one of the best ways they have to control that process is just insulting you it's just denigrating just trying to hurt your feelings and a lot of people mentally emotionally psychologically I'll with that they would freak out a punch someone out they lose their temper maybe that's what they want they want you to get kicked out of City Hall they want you get banned from the premises or something you know I've given a lot of examples on here in the past of you know within the Green Party because the party attracts some people who are eccentric at best and may have serious mental disorders in Canada and you know the same way that in that recent video was warning somebody with bulimia that the emotional damage and even the economic damage the effect on your ability to get a job the damage it will do to you coming on YouTube and engaging in these these discussions you know you need to take that seriously real life politics can be very very nasty just emotionally just verbally and a lot of people I me know you guys know I have the self-confidence to come here and sit in front of a camera do you have the self-confidence to go to a meeting a high-pressure meeting at City Hall sit down at a boardroom table or sit down at a podium and speak to a crowd not everyone does you know for some people that in itself is going to be a you know emotionally harrowing and what have you this is not flag football this is not snowboarding this is not skiing this is not the school audio-video club this is politics this is a political movement whether or not you want it to be whether or not you think it should be whether or not it's successful whether or not it's a failure this may be the world's worst joke of a political movement but it's still a political movement it's mostly successful political movement it's still a political movement right and there are strictures here there are standards people have to live up to to really participate and yes this context it's real it's this is not a good game to play if you have psychological problems emotional problems if you have a mental disability and I've said this many times before you know people seem to think that stupidity is something inert and unmoving and harmless like a rock or like an ugly statue in your office you don't particularly like you know as a decorative statue in the corner of the decade of statue on your desk you don't really like but you can ignore it you can work around it whether it's a rock on the road or a statue and yes you can work around it you can ignore it right so people like to think about stupidity stupidity is fast-moving and destructive and dangerous it's like a small fire in the garbage can next to your desk if you ignore it can destroy everything quick and it's unpredictable maybe you don't see it coming maybe I don't see how it's moving um it can disrupt and destroy everything you're trying to accomplish and yes you know people have reasons for why they do stupid things and in some sense many people have reasons for why they are stupid I mean you know if you are born with a mental disability I know it's unpopular and it's insulting and crude to call that person stupid if you're talking about someone who is not capable of thinking rationally because they have an emotional disability or intellectual disability or a serious psychological disorder like schizophrenia nobody wants to be insulting because we know it's not a choice we know they didn't choose to be this way but it's still dangerous the same guy who stabbed himself on camera a few days ago could stab somebody else tomorrow that kind of erratic violent behavior is not a joke the same guy pal Simeon who quit his meds and had a psychological breakdown and punched out another guy in England before he was taken by the police and put into an asylum what do you think you think he's reliable do you think you'd hire him to be a babysitter do you think you'd hire him to work on the police force do you think a tired to work on the fire department do you think he's the guy you want giving a deposition at City Hall this game we play is not fair it's not open everybody it's not and you know football is also not fair and basketball is also not fair different people are going to have different advantages and disadvantages in these games okay and my role is to be honest about that and there are other people who are not just being dishonest and are not just enabling people with serious cyclist or there are people who are making money by selling them a fake cure and by claiming that veganism is going to solve those problems for you the veganism means you can quit your meds leading to an even more dangerous downward spiral not just for that individual before the movement as a whole okay because one person in your party who acts up at Parliament one person your party who has a psychological meltdown or sizzling ridiculous at city hall at the Senate at your protest you have a you have a stage and somebody gets up at the microphone to speak one little minor mental breakdown it can discredit everything you've been working towards for years I was taught just like everyone else as a child to dream the dream that we're all equal as an adult I had to learn instead that you should treat other people as equal because it's virtuous because it's kind because it's morally good to do so but we're not equal and we have to have the capacity in our organizations to recognize and hopefully politely hopefully that he break anyone's heart deal with those inequalities in a way that's constructive and cooperative and that neither proceeds from the delusion that nobody has these problems and it also doesn't proceed from the delusion that veganism is going to solve all these problems