Talking to a slaughterhouse worker (vegan steez)
26 November 2015 [link youtube]
Warning: this video contains the word "peripatetic", and I can't imagine how the computer-generated subtitles will misinterpret it in transcription.*
* Footnote: apparently for this word alone, the transcript is perfectly accurate.
And, yes, there's some implicit criticism of DxE / Direct Action Everywhere in this video (although I wouldn't claim that Socratic Method is the cure for all ills by contrast).
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this video is going to be a short
relatively simple anecdote about a conversation I had with a slaughterhouse worker vegans often find themselves cornered into the situation of having philosophical discussions in the ancient Greek sense in the Peripatetic sense and the platonic sense and so on which is that unlike many other belief systems if you are vegan very often people really will sort of corner you and ask you to justify not only your own life asks you to make sense out of the whole world well explain to me how evolution works you know well if you're vegan make sense out of the food chain for me fundamental questions what the meaning of life about biological history about history of human civilization the future of Agriculture vegans actually much more than other people get confronted with this stuff but anyway I myself had to deal with that in my own life it was worse than France God in France the level of defense of this and hostility about veganism is unbelievable one of the things I get fan mail both at this channel I have had people writing to me saying that they enjoy watching this channel because they feel like they're rehearsing their own ability to in this sense philosophize about veganism so this is philosophizing in the sense from 500 BC in Athens which really just means being able to talk about the meaning of life being able to have some kind of meaningful conversation about fundamental questions of ethics and metaphysics and what have you not philosophy in our current sense of an academic discipline publishing books that nobody reads or professors publishing books that only get read by other university professors and you know another guy stands out here on YouTube Ali Tabrizi what really made me like his channel was simply seeing him at protests and other actions talking to factory workers talking to the guys drive the trucks to and from the slaughterhouses talking to normal people as normal people instead of screaming in their faces now some ecological protest groups and some vegan protest groups really believe that screaming in someone's face is the most effective means of activism I disagree that for many reasons but the screaming in people's faces the people being screamed at are unlikely to learn anything and the people doing the screaming definitely are not going to learn anything I think we see an ally to Breezies Channel I can remember him talking to some some truck drivers that way I can also remember though he was just talking to some people in Trafalgar Square one of the public squares in London and you know just talk to them as know and listening to their answers and being engaged with you know what they have to say in a human and open way everyone can learn from that and before I get onto my main point here this is this one anecdote about this guy worked in a slaughterhouse I've seen in her vegans trying to depict slaughterhouse employees as the ultimate victims of the meatpacking industry so not as people who profit from a benefit from this industry but as people who are themselves in some sense traumatized by hmm exploited by the meat industry and as if all the employees of slaughterhouses are desperately trying to quit or escape their sad fate this is a stereotype that would not endure scrutiny and also just wouldn't injure thee you know practical open-minded experience of having talked to people who had those jobs including people who felt some sense of pride in those jobs so my former landlord he was Australian and he thought of himself as a macho guy he drank a lot of beer he watched a lot of sports Australian Rules rugby that sort of thing constantly he worked for many years in a slaughterhouse and he said to me very proudly and with this sort of contemptuous snorting that British and Australian people do constantly suggesting that there was there was no possible view to the contrary that not only was he proud of his years working in a slaughterhouse but that it was one of the best jobs he had in his life and he would gladly go back to that job if he could that he would take up the same job again I think he said that I think he's specified the last part in response to my question because I was using Socratic method I was asking questions rather than contradicting him and among other things I said well yes you worked in a slaughterhouse and you say you're proud of it now but I noticed you're not working to slaughter us anymore you've moved on to other things and you probably don't want to go back to it so he said no no on the contrary that he would very gladly and he gave some of the other justifications you'll hear from meat eaters such as claiming how tremendously efficient the slaughterhouse was and that no part of the animal was wasted this sort of thing now what look to highlight here is how different people's reactions are when you refer to the past or when you refer to the future in these sorts of moral questions so he felt that his time at the slaughterhouse was a very positive thing in his life because he was my landlord I knew his wife and I knew his daughter I didn't know any of them personally I just say I I knew them in the way you know people you've met and chatted with a few times he had a very cute a very naive daughter she had led a sheltered life which is a wonderful thing it's not a criticism she was the kind of little girl who would walk up to a complete stranger and ask if they would play badminton with her you know so she still had that kind of really childlike innocence and as she went around her life and my landlord who had all of these justifications and all this blustering self-confident all of this [ __ ] to be frank about what a tough guy he was and how he didn't feel anything you know it didn't have any traumatizing or negative effect on him to witness thousands and thousands of cows being slaughtered on a daily basis in this way and to be literally involved in the machinery of that process because that was role sharpening the blades and so on and welding the medal back together because you know the cows thrash against the metal rails and their agony and so eventually the metal gets bent or broken and that somebody has to weld the metal back together and repair it and I simply said to him you know because he had said it he described himself as having pride in this job I said if your daughter told you that she was going to apply for that job would you feel proud of her would you be happy if that was your daughter's future boy he could not respond verbally after all of this [ __ ] claiming that he was proud of it it was a positive thing that the whole factory was wonderful and claimed it was a good thing in his life and he would go back into the same job again simply asking the question for the next generation how and you know in a sense what he was doing was justifying that this was not a job he was forced to take out of poverty it was not a job he was ashamed of obviously the reality is he would feel deeply ashamed if his daughter was forced in the future to take up that job and obviously he had never thought of it before and just picturing in his mind's eye just imagining his daughter being in that factory and witnessing what goes on there was deeply upsetting horrifying him the other reality is at that time I was doing about a hundred push-ups a day it wasn't in great shape I was walking long distances in the tropical heat in Cambodia and I couldn't I couldn't access a gym I didn't really have any weights I think I had a couple of 10 and 20-pound weights but I was in by Western standards I was in reasonable shape and you know this landlord he was the cartoon image of how the basic Western diet destroys your health and destroys her life I don't have any reason to think he was an alcoholic probably by australian standards his drinking would be considered normal but he was drinking beer constantly he was eating meat constantly and he was not very happy with his job in Cambodia with his situation there is a landlord taking care of this building and he did fly back to Australia at one point while I was still a tenant there not to try to get a job at a slaughterhouse again but he was trying to get a job actually at a mine in a mining company and this also related to his expertise with repairing bladed machines haha whatever welding metal together this kind of stuff not a mining site and the doctor looked him over and did all the regular tests of his risk for heart attack his blood pressure standard tests and this Australian doctor employed by the mining company said to him look I know you want this job I can lie and write down on the papers that you're in good enough health to take the job but there's a really good chance that you're gonna collapse and die on this mine site any given day with your health being the way it is and he thought about it and he thought about his daughter and he got back on an airplane and came back to Cambodia he didn't take the job so all this macho [ __ ] has to stop somewhere many men in Western culture are genuinely self-sacrificing they will genuinely die in a factory died in a mine die in war they may be genuinely eager to sacrifice themselves for money or for an ideological or for some reason and then you go to ask yourself when you're looking toward the future when all of these excuses are added up when it's a question of whether or not you're gonna actually live to see your daughter grow to adulthood when it's a question of not whether or not you are tough enough to endure the horrors in that factory and that slaughterhouse but instead it's your daughter when it's not you justifying your heritage or past in your culture but instead it's a question of what people should do in the future sooner or later all that macho [ __ ] has to stop
relatively simple anecdote about a conversation I had with a slaughterhouse worker vegans often find themselves cornered into the situation of having philosophical discussions in the ancient Greek sense in the Peripatetic sense and the platonic sense and so on which is that unlike many other belief systems if you are vegan very often people really will sort of corner you and ask you to justify not only your own life asks you to make sense out of the whole world well explain to me how evolution works you know well if you're vegan make sense out of the food chain for me fundamental questions what the meaning of life about biological history about history of human civilization the future of Agriculture vegans actually much more than other people get confronted with this stuff but anyway I myself had to deal with that in my own life it was worse than France God in France the level of defense of this and hostility about veganism is unbelievable one of the things I get fan mail both at this channel I have had people writing to me saying that they enjoy watching this channel because they feel like they're rehearsing their own ability to in this sense philosophize about veganism so this is philosophizing in the sense from 500 BC in Athens which really just means being able to talk about the meaning of life being able to have some kind of meaningful conversation about fundamental questions of ethics and metaphysics and what have you not philosophy in our current sense of an academic discipline publishing books that nobody reads or professors publishing books that only get read by other university professors and you know another guy stands out here on YouTube Ali Tabrizi what really made me like his channel was simply seeing him at protests and other actions talking to factory workers talking to the guys drive the trucks to and from the slaughterhouses talking to normal people as normal people instead of screaming in their faces now some ecological protest groups and some vegan protest groups really believe that screaming in someone's face is the most effective means of activism I disagree that for many reasons but the screaming in people's faces the people being screamed at are unlikely to learn anything and the people doing the screaming definitely are not going to learn anything I think we see an ally to Breezies Channel I can remember him talking to some some truck drivers that way I can also remember though he was just talking to some people in Trafalgar Square one of the public squares in London and you know just talk to them as know and listening to their answers and being engaged with you know what they have to say in a human and open way everyone can learn from that and before I get onto my main point here this is this one anecdote about this guy worked in a slaughterhouse I've seen in her vegans trying to depict slaughterhouse employees as the ultimate victims of the meatpacking industry so not as people who profit from a benefit from this industry but as people who are themselves in some sense traumatized by hmm exploited by the meat industry and as if all the employees of slaughterhouses are desperately trying to quit or escape their sad fate this is a stereotype that would not endure scrutiny and also just wouldn't injure thee you know practical open-minded experience of having talked to people who had those jobs including people who felt some sense of pride in those jobs so my former landlord he was Australian and he thought of himself as a macho guy he drank a lot of beer he watched a lot of sports Australian Rules rugby that sort of thing constantly he worked for many years in a slaughterhouse and he said to me very proudly and with this sort of contemptuous snorting that British and Australian people do constantly suggesting that there was there was no possible view to the contrary that not only was he proud of his years working in a slaughterhouse but that it was one of the best jobs he had in his life and he would gladly go back to that job if he could that he would take up the same job again I think he said that I think he's specified the last part in response to my question because I was using Socratic method I was asking questions rather than contradicting him and among other things I said well yes you worked in a slaughterhouse and you say you're proud of it now but I noticed you're not working to slaughter us anymore you've moved on to other things and you probably don't want to go back to it so he said no no on the contrary that he would very gladly and he gave some of the other justifications you'll hear from meat eaters such as claiming how tremendously efficient the slaughterhouse was and that no part of the animal was wasted this sort of thing now what look to highlight here is how different people's reactions are when you refer to the past or when you refer to the future in these sorts of moral questions so he felt that his time at the slaughterhouse was a very positive thing in his life because he was my landlord I knew his wife and I knew his daughter I didn't know any of them personally I just say I I knew them in the way you know people you've met and chatted with a few times he had a very cute a very naive daughter she had led a sheltered life which is a wonderful thing it's not a criticism she was the kind of little girl who would walk up to a complete stranger and ask if they would play badminton with her you know so she still had that kind of really childlike innocence and as she went around her life and my landlord who had all of these justifications and all this blustering self-confident all of this [ __ ] to be frank about what a tough guy he was and how he didn't feel anything you know it didn't have any traumatizing or negative effect on him to witness thousands and thousands of cows being slaughtered on a daily basis in this way and to be literally involved in the machinery of that process because that was role sharpening the blades and so on and welding the medal back together because you know the cows thrash against the metal rails and their agony and so eventually the metal gets bent or broken and that somebody has to weld the metal back together and repair it and I simply said to him you know because he had said it he described himself as having pride in this job I said if your daughter told you that she was going to apply for that job would you feel proud of her would you be happy if that was your daughter's future boy he could not respond verbally after all of this [ __ ] claiming that he was proud of it it was a positive thing that the whole factory was wonderful and claimed it was a good thing in his life and he would go back into the same job again simply asking the question for the next generation how and you know in a sense what he was doing was justifying that this was not a job he was forced to take out of poverty it was not a job he was ashamed of obviously the reality is he would feel deeply ashamed if his daughter was forced in the future to take up that job and obviously he had never thought of it before and just picturing in his mind's eye just imagining his daughter being in that factory and witnessing what goes on there was deeply upsetting horrifying him the other reality is at that time I was doing about a hundred push-ups a day it wasn't in great shape I was walking long distances in the tropical heat in Cambodia and I couldn't I couldn't access a gym I didn't really have any weights I think I had a couple of 10 and 20-pound weights but I was in by Western standards I was in reasonable shape and you know this landlord he was the cartoon image of how the basic Western diet destroys your health and destroys her life I don't have any reason to think he was an alcoholic probably by australian standards his drinking would be considered normal but he was drinking beer constantly he was eating meat constantly and he was not very happy with his job in Cambodia with his situation there is a landlord taking care of this building and he did fly back to Australia at one point while I was still a tenant there not to try to get a job at a slaughterhouse again but he was trying to get a job actually at a mine in a mining company and this also related to his expertise with repairing bladed machines haha whatever welding metal together this kind of stuff not a mining site and the doctor looked him over and did all the regular tests of his risk for heart attack his blood pressure standard tests and this Australian doctor employed by the mining company said to him look I know you want this job I can lie and write down on the papers that you're in good enough health to take the job but there's a really good chance that you're gonna collapse and die on this mine site any given day with your health being the way it is and he thought about it and he thought about his daughter and he got back on an airplane and came back to Cambodia he didn't take the job so all this macho [ __ ] has to stop somewhere many men in Western culture are genuinely self-sacrificing they will genuinely die in a factory died in a mine die in war they may be genuinely eager to sacrifice themselves for money or for an ideological or for some reason and then you go to ask yourself when you're looking toward the future when all of these excuses are added up when it's a question of whether or not you're gonna actually live to see your daughter grow to adulthood when it's a question of not whether or not you are tough enough to endure the horrors in that factory and that slaughterhouse but instead it's your daughter when it's not you justifying your heritage or past in your culture but instead it's a question of what people should do in the future sooner or later all that macho [ __ ] has to stop