Should Meat Be Illegal? Vegans & State Power.

but as long as anarchism was the kind of
mean aesthetic tendency or the main set of political assumptions surrounding animal rights veganism ecology then some of these questions didn't get dealt with ultimately what is the fantasy what is the ideal for the role of the government in bringing about veganism in this world bringing about the goals and objective even ISM in this video I'm gonna try to talk about a kind of big heavy broad problem or problematic assumption in political science that to my knowledge has never had a name put on it it's never been kind of formally addressed or categorized as a problem or issue and I guess you could call it the assumption that any criticism leads to government intervention leads to something being banned regulated or eliminated by men in uniform kicking down your door searching your house throwing you in prison this may sound ridiculous but if you stick with me for a minute you'll you'll see what I mean one of the reasons why vegans get such extreme reactions from meat-eaters when they set out the case for basically why meat is bad is that sometimes not all the time but maybe kind of sometimes the meat eaters think logically if I accept this if I accept the idea that eating meat is bad therefore the government must make it illegal the next step must be for this to be clear declared a banned substance in the same way that heroin or cocaine or a banned substance and men in uniforms start kicking down doors regulation ensues in this sense now I can't call this a strange delusion or a strange assumption because in terms of the type of political discussions normal people have people who are not you know specialized in political science or political philosophy it may be that most of the debates they're really involved with do begin from a question of what should be legal or illegal and any moral claim ultimately terminates with an argument for banning the the thing in question so therefore in the United States people who think abortion is bad automatically attach that view to abortion being illegal now it's actually I think this is not true in other countries it's actually quite novel and amazing to suggest to Americans that there are some people who believe board abortion is bad but should remain legal that there are intermediate positions on that there are people you know in Europe this is much more common there are people who believe that heroin is bad but it should not be illegal in this sense this is called the harm reduction approach and there are interesting debate surrounding that however it is probably true that today for the hoi polloi for the majority of people who engage with politics only intermittently the assumption is if you are going so far as to argue something is bad then you must be arguing that it it ought to be illegal and that this type of government intervention is soon to follow it's interesting to note that when the birth control pill was first introduced to the world I guess in the early 1960s I've seen film footage of this but I honestly forget if that was within the decade of the 50s or into the 60s there are these really surreal interviews with scientists promoting the technology of the birth control pill who are absolutely denying that the purpose of the pill is birth control who are sitting there with a straight face and trying to make a reasoned authoritative argument for the idea that the birth control pill is a medicine that is strictly to help women cope with the physical pain caused by their menstrual cycle and if any women choose to use this drug and then lead a more promiscuous sex life that's their business and that has nothing to do with us we're legitimate scientists and we developed this pill just helped women with this one physical ailment pain during their menstruation and to help them regulate their menstrual cycle and that's it and no questions can be asked about any other social implications and fortifications a few to me this reflects the same mindset where they're trying to avoid the question even being asked is this good bad or indifferent they're trying to avoid the moral conversation and sociological conversation many people feel that the birth control pill did transform society in a meaningful way in the 1960s or the 1970s or whenever the technology caught up with wherever you're living so if people decide this is bad therefore they will make it illegal you know is the unstated assumption underwriting this whole discourse the reactions I got to comments on my own blog many years ago before I had a YouTube channel where I pointed out that marijuana causes brain damage and I was able to back this up with links to recent peer-reviewed scientific articles that were you know talking about the way magnetic resonance imaging brain scans with the current generation technology were showing in more detail than ever before that yes indeed use of marijuana causes brain damage and we know more and more about exactly what type of brain damage that is and what the implications are and so on some of the people wrote me I wrote I got amazing hate mail for daring to say this it's not it's not really an original opinion and the few people who I wrote back to either because you know they were seem somewhat intelligent or they knew me already you know there weren't complete strangers what I wrote back and said well you know why are you reacting this way I mean I haven't said anything aside from pointing out you know marijuana causes brain damage I discussed specifically also that using marijuana during pregnancy harms the unborn baby which many people do not want to admit to themselves there are pregnant mothers who want to believe very strongly that marijuana a harmless way to cope with the physical pain during pregnancy it's not it's not harmless um but they have a very strong motivation to try to believe this obviously especially if they've already maybe had one child and they smoked or nor wanna during that pregnancy then they want to convince themselves they didn't do something that harmed their own kids so um I can sympathize but I don't anyway getting this kind of hate mail I was writing back and asking why are you responding this June way and I remember about two people wrote back and said well people care about their fundamental right and freedom to use marijuana and you're trying to deprive them of this really deep assumption that we cannot discuss good and evil and we cannot discuss sociological implications or even health implications we cannot judge something to be bad or engage in a critique of something without it being attached to the presumed outcome of making something illegal and making something illegal in the sense again of policemen kicking down your door of you know the most kind of brutal and direct form of enforcement now remember actually the the response that back people was first and foremost to point out I never said anything like that go back and this is you know it's a written blog go back and look at the words of what I actually said I'm also right back then pointing out you know on every US military base in the United States and probably around the world people can get marijuana even though it's illegal so in an environment far more tightly regulated than any city or town in an environment where there is zero percent unemployment we're economically and sociologically the conditions are radically different from any any city any social other setting your name even there it's not hard to get marijuana so you know if you think I have this delusion that calling something bad leads to being illegal leads to it ceasing to exist or something is not the way I view reality at all it can take that one a step further in American prisons to a remarkable extent nor what has still failed um those statistics are really depressing but including if you just talk to people who've been to prison and obviously they only know for the particular prisons they've stayed in they normally have a very good sense of what drugs are available and how many days or how many hours it takes to get different orgs and again a prison is even more regulated than a military base these are all more regulated than a city or university campus so in my making my argument which isn't even arguments just citing facts that marijuana is not harmless that this is something you need to think about if you're reading my blog or you're watching my youtube channel that you need to think about this for yourself I was not in any way invoking the power of the government to kick down your door and throw you in prison I was asking you to think about what's best for you but my readers were reacting this with this deep-seated assumption that what I was saying was implicitly endorsing this kind of use of state power um the most extreme examples this I remember this came from my ex-girlfriend my girlfriend who became my wife who's now my ex-wife we were together for many years as you can imagine but I remember when she was at Oxford rather than Cambridge both very respected universities of course she had some class where the issue of female circumcision came up female circumcision also known as female genital mutilation is a cultural practice not really a surgery that involves very badly and injuring women for the rest of their lives for religious and cultural reasons you can google it if you don't know what I'm talking about there a female circumcision but male circumcision is bad enough female circumcision you look into it is even scarier and one of the women in the class who would have been about the same age as my ex-wife um respond to this she obviously had not heard of it before or thought it before she sat there in the class this is a seminar for everyone there is either a master's student or a PhD student these are advanced graduate students in an esteemed institution of study and simply repeatedly and loudly demanded we should conquer these countries and go to war and force these people to stop doing reaction to reading some academic article about no circumcision no Hill this is absurd in many different ways including the fact that you know for do you really think the problem is a lack of Western bombing in that part of the in the countries being concerned here do you think that the the paucity of Western military intervention is really the problem like and you know looking over the history of the world since the year 2001 um how how do you feel the you know Western bombardment of Muslim nations has done in terms of morally uplifting these countries like you know do do you think this has had a net positive benefit for um you know questions of female genital mutilation and other culture right it's a shockingly June thing to say and in many different ways but this young woman's tenacious certainty that the correct response to being presented with a moral problem of this kind was step one to decide that it's bad step two to call for violence intervention ultimately men in uniforms kicking down doors in this case also bombs dropping from airplanes to solve the problem so I said this is a habit of mind this is a way of thinking about the ongoing history of the world that's very often at work when meat eaters respond so negatively - just being presented with questions of good and evil and better and worse and healthy and unhealthy that's around veganism and ecology the ultimate example of this that intersected with my own what life I think is doubtless communism and anti-communism there really was a time I within my lifetime when you could not engage in an honest conversation about how bad communism was bad in various ways again it's not just good and evil there's effective and ineffective and competent and incompetent and there's so many headings under which you can evaluate and analyze and talk about the history of communism or the what's going on presently with communism and judge this to be that because people around you would freak out in exactly this way because the assumption was if you were willing to admit there was a problem if you were willing to talk about what was bad in communism therefore you were like the McCarthy trials the United States therefore you endorsed starting a nuclear war therefore you must believe in on the one hand military action against whether it's Russia or China or some of the country and therefore also you must believe in you know police officers in men in uniform going from door to door and arresting members of the Communist Party we still have a communist party here in Canada we still have several we saw great many I'm not terribly popular but probably whatever country you're living in where you're watching this video probably has one too so for me this raises a lot of interesting questions about veganism now in 2016 because veganism has drifted away from the anarchistic roots of animal rights of 15 years ago I've talked about that in recent videos which was very interesting were think about in its own right um no I'm not upset about that I'm not an anarchist but as long as anarchism was the kind of main aesthetic tendency or the main set of political assumptions surrounding animal rights veganism ecology then some of these questions didn't get dealt with well ultimately what is the fantasy what is the ideal for the role of the government in bringing about veganism in this world bringing about the goals and objective ISM eye on my channel often make the comparison to cigarette smoking that you know yes we would like as a society to eliminate the smoking of tobacco or reduce it to nearly zero and yet we've had the maturity not to do that by just declaring cigarettes illegal that is really a tremendously important historical precedent it's both visible and invisible all around us all the time you can grow a tobacco plant in your backyard it's not illegal you can have tobacco plants as house pets if sorry house perhaps you could have a potted plant in your living room growing tobacco nobody cares and of course cigarettes are sold almost everywhere you wouldn't have to walk very far to get them but we have a very open conspiracy as a society we certainly do here we probably do wherever you're living in the world to inform people that if they smoke cigarettes what they're doing is wrong it's bad for you it's bad for me it's bad for us as a society it's bad for the planet and just the wrongness just getting across the sense in which this is bad and health is a component of it but health is only one component there are also issues of psychology you know addiction what it means to have a meaningful life there are so many reasons so much cultural packaging tied into this idea that we as a society are going to emerge from an historical period when cigarette smoking was ubiquitous you big with us it was absolutely everywhere - a period in which it's either rare or disappears when it's regarded as old fashioned unhealthy outmoded backward etc not all societies are making this transition equally smoothly if you've ever been to a train station in France boy the struggle to smoke cigarettes despite the fact that it's illegal to smoke inside a train station you get to see that unfolding all around you so that's why I make this comparison to cigarette smoking so often but there - there are still elements of government intervention there are warnings on packages there are myriad laws and legal debates about what the role of the state should be in restricting the right of cigarette companies to advertise so even then there are elements of government coercion involved and I think there are real questions of social planning currently we have both nation-states and the UN the United Nations openly declaring that the amount of meat being produced should increase above it's already absurdly high levels now that it should keep going up and up that as an industry that should bloom and expand and blossom and total meat production for the world should reach an incredibly high point on the in the future horizon obviously social planning for the future even if it is just the government advising that this is unwise not only in the level of individual meat consumption that that should be reduced but that this industry as a whole has to contract there are all the questions surrounding a government subsidy to agriculture which you know like the question of government subsidy to tobacco production gets tied into this so alright obviously I have not presented this to be a kind of simple diatribe with a simple conclusion I think the purpose of this video is to raise a complex set of questions but last things first why is this come up in our lives as vegans again and again because I think this is an unstated reason for the hostility others have in reacting to us this is one of the profoundly unsettling things about veganism it's part of the challenge of the status quo it's part of the sense in which what we're talking about seems to be a threat to the establishment and cultural assumptions even when we feel what we're talking about is not threatening at all as they say for me this is parallel to in the past the terror people had for admitting that the birth control pill is really a birth control pill or the terror and anger that I saw in people reacting to my just being willing to speak openly about the negative aspects of marijuana marijuana use