Critique of the Critique of Planet of the Humans.

what was the response from idiots
like George mom Bo the response was to complain that this film wasn't woke enough that it wasn't left-wing enough that it wasn't ad capitalist enough and ooo the laziest trope of all in left-wing politics they had to go ahead and accuse the film maker of racism didn't get me on camera doing this today not being judgmental or trying to play God but we've got to deal with population growth and sustainable resources we've all got to come back every expert I talked to wanted to bring my attention to the same underlying problem there are too many human beings using too much too fast as a global community we really have got to start dealing with the issue of population population growth continues to be the not the elephant the herd of elephants in the in the room many years ago there was a hit website called couchsurfing couchsurfing was very similar to Airbnb except nobody paid a dime it relied on people making friends one another sending messages to one another and then strangers inviting other strangers to stay in their home when they were on holiday when they were travelling etc and in some ways it was a beautiful thing and the community toward self apart and the website failed because it shifted from being perceived as a charity that everyone contributed to equally of the good as their hearts to being perceived as a private for-profit corporation and I say the word perceived because nothing else about the website really changed like what is the difference when you click on the box and send someone a message the website is just mediating people with goodwill and charity doing a good favor of one another why does it really matter when it's revealed to you that the people who programmed and maintained the HTML and created this website why does it matter when it's shockingly revealed that in fact there's a for-profit corporation behind the scenes and maybe they're making a tiny amount of money by having advertising in the corner of the screen so Nizar worth well it matters I mean perception matters and I remember I read different sort of political points of view about coach surfing at that time and one person said very simply was look after having reviewed all the facts and you know why these people were disappointed because they actually donated money and why other people disappoint because they worked as volunteers and donated their time and then find out someone else is profiting from that volunteer work and they're not getting paid all the different broken hearts and disappointments ultimately coach surfing is a website and normally websites are just owned by one person there's just one person whose name is on a piece of paper they're the person who signed up and got that website address got that URL set it up ultimately websites don't really exist as institutions at all so what is it we're really doing here there's a sense in which YouTube also is just a website or at least I can say in a more perfect world it would be just a website but it's not right now YouTube is this unbelievable bottleneck on freedom of speech not not because YouTube has its own standards of censorship which it is entitled to it's a website it's owned by a particular company it's run by a particular executive with the particular court records the problem is there's no alternative to YouTube and we have two wonderful examples of this that just popped off in the last week or so leafyishere a commentator or on an old comedy channel whatever want to say Oh gives millions of views per video so you know one of the most famous influential names who's ever been on YouTube even if there's no particular substance videos leafyishere had a video deleted for cold harassment close quote I was here in Canada the legal definition of harassment is that you do something that would cause a rational person to be afraid for their safety so it's a threat that a rational and reasonable person would be afraid of okay and what did leafy do in this video did he point a gun at somebody or wave a knife around no he said of another youtuber quote I don't like anything about you I don't even like your face close quote so if that qualifies as harassment this video I'm recording right now should also be pandas harassment because of quoted him but the fundamental problem is nobody said when this you know controversy stormed across the internet briefly people were briefly animated upset about it nobody said don't worry you can still see it on the competitor to YouTube called we two or us tube nobody said oh well don't worry it was deleted off youtube but you can still see it on Vimeo nobody said instead of drinking coke you could drink Pepsi right the problem is we don't have two three four five different versions of YouTube different companies with different aesthetics and different moral standards and different modes of censorship right the problem is precisely that YouTube is the only game in town Michael Moore is a wealthy famous successful filmmaker the new film everyone is talking about he actually is just the executive producer for he doesn't do the voice-over he he doesn't seem to have contributed very much to the content at all kind of method but Michael Moore's name is all over this new film called planet of the humans rightly or wrongly it is being referred to as Michael Moore's planted the humans even if that's just a cynical market idea why would Michael Moore put a major film on YouTube why just think about that just think about the era we're living in ok CNN is on YouTube france24 is on YouTube BBC the British Broadcasting Service is on YouTube right all of the most important broadcasters and increasingly the most important filmmakers are putting their work on YouTube it's not surprising it's kind of dark men trees and political films first and foremost Bernie Sanders's on YouTube right YouTube really matters and I spent my time voicing my opinion on YouTube instead of writing essays or articles that could be published in the local newspaper here or I live in a small city maybe three hundred thousand people live here it's really the downtown area is more like a hundred thousand or less this is a small city in Canada and the newspaper they would accept submissions I probably could write in publishers my time is better spent making this YouTube video now to reach you I'll not just reach a bigger audience of a more meaningful connection with that audience bla bla bla bla okay in many ways publishing is dead nonfiction publishing is especially dead and YouTube genuinely is in 2020 a more important Agora it's a more important marketplace for ideas it's a more important meeting place for politics and this is implicitly indicated by the fact that Michael Moore published this film on YouTube at all okay wasn't pirated on YouTube it was published on YouTube and it had the potential to reach an audience of millions of people on YouTube so when this film was somewhat mysteriously censored deleted allegedly it just due to a rights infringement case you know people are talking about to what extent that may or may not be the whole story but for whatever reason YouTube decides to delete this film tape Oakview I heard all kinds of reactions to this yeah but what I never heard was don't worry you can't see it on YouTube but you can see it on Vimeo you can see it on some competitor to YouTube alright I've never seen or heard anyone make that statement what people say so don't worry probably if you search carefully you can find some pirate channel on YouTube like someone who doesn't have the right someone who is illegally downloaded it and re-uploaded you so you can still find it to be searched around alright like that's the alternative one YouTube censors you people search within YouTube for an alternative within YouTube that hasn't been censored yet right just like the the system of censorship hasn't hasn't caught up with it think about that think about that this is a situation where there is coca-cola and there's no Pepsi wait there is a really strange market dominance that's unhealthy for everyone it's especially healthy for politics right very briefly the standards of censorship in YouTube I don't begrudge YouTube the right to do that you know what YouTube ultimately is just a website the same sense couchsurfing was just a website ultimately it may be one man's dream or there may be one board of directors who come up with the rules that everyone has to play by and fair's fair if you don't like it start your own website if you don't like the rules on Facebook use myspace if you don't like the rules on Instagram you know join vsco join tumblr joint in tinder Twitter or whatever you both there are alternatives and there have to be alternatives okay right now what if you want to be a filmmaker who creates movies that have as much nudity and violence as is normal on HBO you can't do that on YouTube alright YouTube standards the censorship is much much stricter than a mainstream American television channel like HBO in fact the censorship is much much stricter than CNN alright then the BBC the normal broadcast television for news if you check now the fine print on why your video is demonetised one of the reasons can simply be it discusses sensitive social issues pure him fat sprouts are the modification on YouTube and of course they're right they have worst punishments than just a monetization as mentioned leafy it wasn't just demonetized his video was completely deleted because he told someone I don't like you I don't even like your face alright so if that's not permissible what is and fundamentally why is it not possible for leafy or Michael Moore or anyone else to choose some other flavor even if the alternative is just as much similar to YouTube as coke taste similar to Pepsi why isn't there somewhere else you can go with some other standards for censorship and by the way I would also be interested in seeing a youtube channel uh sorry a competitor to YouTube an alternative YouTube that is much more strictly censored and where they guarantee that every on the website is appropriate for her eight-year-olds to watch where it's you know it's children's friendly broadcasting or you know there are some adults who don't want to see anything that has blood or violence where those are the standards if there's no swearing at all great I would like to make contact and upload to a different website that - I'd like that diversity of my own life be great to see that there versus in it and we don't have that at all we have this surreal bottleneck about this particular film plan of the humans there's a big difference between saying a film is important and saying that it's intelligent if my daughter one day asked me should she see the Star Wars prequels if she one day asked me should she see Dances with Wolves there's a great example Todd what a stupid movie right there are a lot of movies have gone with the wind you can say this is an important movie but it's not intelligent you're not gonna learn anything from it it's it's even kind of dumb and I can talk you through why it was until why was Dances with Wolves such a big deal of Lord of the Rings whatever this was important it had some importance but the importance and intelligence are two very different things in this same way I can tell you with all sincerity that this new film plan of the humans it's important but it's not intelligent it's dumb all right it's a stupid poorly made poorly argued movie when I watched it with my girlfriend again and again I hit the pause button I was ranting why is there no math they make these incredibly vague factual claims and it would take them one second to put up the bar chart and say hey this is how much pollution is created by a coal power plant producing so many megawatts of electricity and here's the comparison to oil and natural gas here's the comparison to the solar wind they could have so easily substantiated their claims what are stated as absolute facts could have been made relative and comparative and reasonable and instead of chooses to be unreasonable there is a lot of stuff in this film that's fundamentally dumb but guess what it's still important it's still important for millions of people to see this film and stop and ask themselves what is biomass all these companies ruining biomass Turner's what does the word biomass really mean I already knew that back 1995 to 1997 when I was in university like circa 1999 I remember going through this stuff and the United Nations definition of sustainability and being a really harsh critic of greenwashing and the corporate technical innovation paradigm of environmental worse I was the harshest critic of all that stuff more than 20 years ago so none of this is news to me all right and for me also that that might lead me to be kind of contemptuous and dismissive this movie but I'm not I appreciate that there are millions of people who need to hear this very simple fundamental message biomass does not mean what you think it means right that innovations like solar and wind power are not a substitute for dealing with these underlying fundamental problems there is an important message here however imperfect and guess what freedom of speech doesn't just exist for people you agree with freedom of speech doesn't just exist for people who can express their points perfectly backed up with data and charts and facts and figures either exist to the people who are wrong along with the people who are right or exist for nobody at all right either freedom of speech can lead us right now to have this meaningful discussion or it can't and what and what and what was the response from the ecological left-wing what was the response from idiots like George mambi oh the response was to complain that this film wasn't woke enough that it wasn't left-wing enough that it wasn't ad capitalist enough and oh oh the laziest trope of all in left-wing politics they had to go ahead and accuse the filmmaker of racism the only concrete proposal in your film was that there should be a mass die-off because the problem was population you've got to start dealing with the issue of population I actually am scared I lose sleep over all of this our population growth is what people reach for when they don't want to face structural and systemic problems problems such as capitalism the greater part of population growth is happening amongst the world's poorest people who consume very little and so what we see is the phenomenon of comparatively wealthy white people saying we're not the problem our consumption growth isn't the issue it's those people breeding they are the problem this claim is inherently racist I think I don't need to prove to you that this film is not racist that's an unbelievable be unreasonable stupid criticism too directed a film that does deserve criticism that would benefit from criticism where all of us can learn more by giving an in-depth and meaningful criticism and no no no the left-wing wants to say not woke enough catalyst enough that somehow implicitly it's racist there isn't a single word in the whole film that points the finger of blame at africa there isn't a single word that points the finger of blame at South America or China but guess what guys when it comes to ecology a mammals a mammal you think China and Brazil and Africa don't matter they do and there's a really strange kind of racism if you only want to blame white people the way George Maffeo does because guess what the computer I'm using to record this right now the cell phone I have in my pocket the microphone the bench I'm sitting on almost everything you can see on camera right now was made in China there's a lot of pollution in China for stuff we consume in the Western world it's all connected stop pretending what people will believe the problem that's also a ridiculous position to adopt someone could make a new movie you're bad yes overpopulation is a problem no it's not the whole problem and just as there is not a single word in this movie that's racist there's also not a single word in this movie that recognizes the overwhelming significance of meat and dairy consumption we're gonna not bother to mention leather and fur they're also terrible however most people don't buy a new leather every day whereas they do eat pork beef etc fish chicken day after day after day three people's a day so the scale of the problem with consumption in terms of eating meat and dairy is much much larger even though leather also pterygoid should be abolished right the fundamental problem with the approach this film as to overpopulation is not that it's racist it's that it only counts the overpopulation of humans what you need to think about what you need to understand is that the earth is overpopulated with mammals if you take a small island let's just say it's Japan it's not that small the whole main island of Japan if you cut the number of humans in half but you triple the number of cows and triple the number of pigs what have you got an ecological disaster ok cows and pigs eat food every day they poo every day but their poo doesn't go into a sewage treatment system right their pool goes trading theirs so the ecological impacts are worse you think in your mind's eye that you just take a bunch of soy beans and feed them to a cow and generate beef out of it do the calculations do the math step by step that cows going to live for more than a day it's gonna breathe the air and drink water and urinate and defecate and consume soy beans day after day after day after day living in you know inhumane awful conditions until one day it dies and as terrible as all that is to look at it from a completely Machiavellian perspective it's also just an unbelievable waste of resources so the carrying capacity of the earth can't be measured in humans alone it has to be measured in mammals the economic and ecological efficiency of a society of vegans is exponentially better than a society of beefeaters pork eaters chicken eaters so on and so forth so everyone's fitting the elephant room is population well yes and no ultimately the elephant in the room is not human population it's the total population of mammals adding together the billions of people with the billions and billions of animals that we raise holding captivity and exploit for our own necessary unhealthy and immoral dietary needs it's a stupid film it's an important film and it's a goddamn shame that in 2020 people as famous wealthy and powerful as leafy leafy is here as famous wealthy and powerful as Michael Moore are being deep lat formed and silenced by YouTube because YouTube has this amazing bottleneck on freedom of speech on what is the most powerful the most important way to get a message like this out to millions of people I hate this film I thought it was garbage but I wish millions of people could see it I wish millions of people who get inspired to engage in a critical reaction to it do their own thinking do their own google searching find the numbers that the film doesn't provide you with it could lead us in a really productive set of reflections and discussions including on the fact that ultimately fundamentally overpopulation cannot be measured in two-legged creatures at all alone it has to be measured with fluid creatures in the calculus as well but because of YouTube we won't have that opportunity and what is the alternative looking forward in 2020 who will stand up and give us an alternative to YouTube when online video is more important than ever before