Veganism's #1 Topless Protester, Rachel Ziegler.

i mean i've had friends who've been to
prison and i know that it's not like federal prison and i feel like i'm someone who can adjust to my surroundings i i also know that it would be difficult i'm sure so the main idea i'm going to try to convey to you in this video is that to waste someone's time is actually immoral so like i so i had done a topless been a part of the topless protest that it happened a couple weeks before that at costco and so i had i had already you know sort of gotten a taste for like on the smaller scale of like what that was like of course then we were covered much more heavily with like fake blood and we even put like these special effects makeup on on the nipples to make it and i in some way felt like i was still covered up i i definitely have some very deeply rooted insecurities and my body image [Music] you know just issues with body image and just feeling um feeling like oh i should be thinner um there's a lot of things there's a lot of things on my entire body that i'm not happy with but on my upper body you know it's like oh i don't like the way my arms look like uh there was like there were years whenever i was younger where like i wanted to you know get like a boob job because i felt like i had small boobs and like um and just just a lot of different things going on for me that i yeah i definitely felt like yeah just just the idea of like not having my shirt on and just like all that exposure to these parts of my body that i'm not um super like happy about uh i'm i don't know i'm i'm pretty much willing to do anything with that frame of mind if i feel that it's going to be effective and get that message out there money fame power respect sex these are the powerful motives shaping human behavior in politics in our private lives in the economic sphere but yes yes y'all especially here on social media especially on the internet let me go through that list one more time for you money fame power respect sex not necessarily in that order for some people sex is the top priority for some people it's money or the fame you can shuffle that deck of cards and each time have a different one come up on top this is not about saving the planet this is not about lobbying government for political reform this is not about promoting the health benefits of a vegan diet this is not about educating people doing educational outreach so that they understand the unbelievable suffering that the dairy industry creates that the fur industry creates the unbelievable suffering that's required just to put meat on their plate no nope this is about money fame power respect sex and you know what this headline fails to convey to you this whole article fails to convey you there were actually four protesters that ran the stage four but three of them didn't get naked who's this woman who's this muslim fundamentalist woman she looks like she's at least a hundred pounds overweight i guess she's a muslim fundamentalist vegan protester why isn't she getting naked why is it only this girl look we got to talk about the politics of beauty and body image rolled into this too priya is the first one to run the stage fully clothed well if you actually believe that getting naked would save the animals what this muslim woman she doesn't care enough to show us her 100 pound overweight middle-aged or elderly body i can't really guess her age is it only young conventionally attractive people who are going to get naked to save the planet is there some reason why is it actually about being sexually attractive is that the point of this is it supposed to be an erotic display and what about this girl this girl just participated in the protest but decided nope i'm not showing my body if you look i agree this is not an effective form of protest if you go back to world war one there was a golden era of nude protests where the nudity was not erotic at all it was primarily to prevent the police from brutalizing the protesters and it was a show of christian humility and kind of abject subjugation where people would march naked in the streets to oppose the war and it wasn't sexy of course it was a lot of elderly people it was a lot of flabby out of shape elderly people it was uh humiliating they were themselves being humiliated through this nude march and they were humiliating the authorities and humiliating others because like well if you think you're gonna round us up and put us in uh put us in paddy wagons you're gonna arrest us you're gonna have to lay hands on us naked so the world has changed a great deal in a hundred years and that would have been more than 100 years ago now those nude protests against against world war one this woman you know she's referred to as topless in the headlines and the news coverage and i completely believe she only did this stunt so that she would appear in headlines in newspapers get news coverage but you know she's not just topless i can't say that she's wearing pants she's not wearing trousers she doesn't have any pockets there for her house keys or her wallet i mean you know she is as close to naked as can possibly be she's wearing some kind of skin tight yoga pants you know i i can't call those pants at all that's some kind of some kind of long underwear she's got on there to add to the revealing or erotic effect i guess of her being as nude as possible and again it's not the middle-aged people it's not the educated people it's not the natural leaders of the vegan movement who are taking on this role of course no i mean what's what's the next step for this guys what is the future of veganism this group direct action everywhere they they initialize their name as dxe direct action everywhere they came onto the scene promising that they had something profoundly fundamentally better to offer than any other animal rights movement in the past and all they are doing is reinventing the stupidity of peta from 20 years ago step by step they're catching up with the same lame methods the same non-functional techniques that peta use and they're going to get the same non-results but the one thing they will get is the one thing they really want money fame power respect sex all these people are on an ego trip and i'm sure if you could travel back in time to 1992 there were a whole lot of people in that organization peta people for the ethical treatment mammals who are on the same ego trip reinventing the wheel but it's a broken wheel and it's going to roll down the same hill with the same results in the year 2019 it is fair to say that vegan activism has settled into a few familiar grooves a few repetitious patterns that we see again and again there was a time maybe just five years ago when a lot of these ideas were fresh and new there was a time when the earthlings experienced they were the first people to put together this idea of sitting silently wearing a mask holding an open laptop computer showing slaughterhouse footage that was a new and exciting idea i think people including myself first found out about on tumblr that was before veganism was was so big on youtube tumblr was where it was at for people sharing that idea the earthlings experience spread other groups knocked off and modified the idea etcetera there was a time when each of these techniques in terms of street theater open protest and even digital slacktivism such as more engaging now there was a time when these things were exciting or new and that time is now in the past so increasingly i have people sending me sympathetic email reflecting whether they're just looking at what they've done in the last few months or in the last decade that when they get involved in vegan activism they feel that their time is being wasted so the main idea i'm going to try to convey to you in this video is that to waste someone's time is actually immoral this may not occur to us because in our intimate lives uh relations between husband and wife boyfriend and girlfriend uh even grandparents and grandchildren there's a sense in which we're expected to behave as if wasting time is no waste at all that you know don't drive for three hours just so you can see your grandparents and sit around kind of doing nothing in particular for several hours and drive back this is um part of the pulley tests of the bourgeois class that everyone ought to have time to waste and we're not to behave as if it is nothing it is that it is merely gracious to waste one's time with someone else well this doesn't extend to things like politics education work really it's a fiction it's a fiction in our times maybe very roughly analogous to the way in which people used to engage in animal sacrifice to welcome a guest into their homes taking something tremendously precious and destroying it as if to prove that it's nothing as a symbolic way of of receiving a guest well the sacrifices we make for one another in the 21st century are largely sacrifices of time and to a much lesser extent sacrifices of money uh several different people wrote in to me about their experience with recent protests just in the last couple days since my most recent critiques on this issue one of them was describing to me what it was like to drive five hours each way to attend a protest that he felt accomplished nothing and didn't even say anything interesting to the people attending the contract so you're talking about driving five hours stay in a hotel this is time as well as money being spent attend this event drive back i assume he's only got one night in hotel and not two this is a big sacrifice if you're talking about people who are raising kids and have a full-time job it's a big big sacrifice and what do you get in return for that sacrifice for the most part what's going on within these familiar grooves and patterns and veganism it's accomplishing nothing but providing one spectacle after another one occasion after another for vegans to pat themselves in the back for vegans to affirm their own sense of identity now i'm not going to say that at zero value somebody asked me this question on the internet a few days ago someone asked me do i really feel this kind of activism has zero value and i said no i would not say zero the value is greater than zero but most of the value is just in giving vegans a chance to meet one another there are lots of people who met their boyfriend and later got married at a vegan animal rights protest or an anti-fur protest or whatever there's a sense in which meeting other people could be the basis for more meaningful forms of activism in the future but in most of these cases that is the only positive thing i can say about it the events themselves are meaningless they're a waste of time and the actual lectures i mean there's a reason why most of them don't get uploaded to youtube what's the actual the actual content of the lectures is people standing there prompting the audience to cheer like probably guys to applaud the speaker in response to the speaker telling the audience how wonderful they are i mean i made fun of james aspie for this you know only so many months ago james aspie stands there and gives a speech to vegans and it's like you have to realize you people are the future you people are saving the planet you people are saving the animals you're the best people the crowd goes it's they're applauding him applauding themselves it's like a it's a self it's a cycle of self praise that's going on here anyway i i find it deeply embarrassing but again above all else it's a waste of time what does it mean to say that there's a question of morality in wasting someone's time several years ago i had a chance um i think a very remote chance to enter a master's degree and phd program at a university in montreal canada now why did i why did i gesture like this because i was living in saskatchewan canada and my wife of the time my wife and i together devoted a considerable amount of time and money to fly in an airplane from saskatchewan to montreal just to have what was i think supposed to be a one-hour meeting with this professor and he only talked to us about 15 minutes i could get into the details of that but it was truly hurtful in that circumstance this guy was a professor of buddhism and i had prepared for the meeting i'd read his phd thesis i got his phd thesis he had not published a whole lot of research in buddhism since then so i went and got a copy of this phd thesis and i read it and i was prepared to really talk about my own research in buddhist philosophy and his research in buddhist philosophy and i show up as someone who has years and years of background on the discipline and i get fobbed off with a kind of aimless 15-minute pep talk and i'm told look you can study here if you want to um i didn't feel so upset about it at that moment it took a little while for it to sink in but i was really being robbed of one of the very few opportunities to get higher education i would ever have before or since and you know this was a person who had who had no respect for the fact had no respect for our time for the extent to which he was wasting our time also again hotels in montreal are not cheap the flights are not flights within canada are not cheap you're better off flying to thailand or flying to las vegas than flying between any two cities in canada it's miserable it's a huge waste of money and you think this person has no respect for my time and in a sense they have no respect for me as a human being so this is a minor and yet crushing disappointment that had really serious the long-term uh long-term effects of my life and you know i've got to say um as detached as i may be about this experience as low as my expectations may have been going into this meeting with this professor it left me with a deep and lasting sense of resentment um it's possible i'll meet that guy at some point that has happened sometimes where i meet professors of buddhism years later after my negative interactions with the bahama say hey you know do you want to know what impact that had on my life for the next 10 20 years like for you this may have been a casual and flippant decision but like you know what you make especially with graduate students undergraduate institute you're casually making decisions that have huge impacts on your student's life so you know the question of respect in that case we had an appointment i mean i wrote to him in advance and made the appointment and then we booked the trip so to disrespect somebody to that extent um to to to waste their time there are real real questions of morality involved morality and immorality and you know especially with left-wing politics the extent to which everybody left of center not even everybody on the left they get used to such hyperbolic over-the-top exaggerated ideological language extreme language of praise and also extreme language of criticism you know the fulmination against the status quo um extreme language claiming that the government is totally immoral that the economic system is totally within everything everything has to be uh resolved and some kind of crescendo some kind of terrible uprising revolution and so on this is um antithetical to a more down-to-earth pragmatic planning process where you make it clear what it is you're offering people what it is they should expect what use it is you're going to make of their time and where people feel respected people feel that what they were offered what they were promised is what they were really given so whether that's that you have a conference where you tell people look if you come to this conference i'm going to give you you know one hour on stage when you get maybe 20 minutes where you until you get on stage you get to speak i'm going to introduce you to these and these people you're going to get to eat at a dinner and you're going to get introduced like what is it that you're offering as a vegan movement at a vegan event um is there a certain workshop is there something really of practical value is there some educational value is there some training you're gonna get out of attending this thing um because people are making serious sacrifices in terms of time money i know one female vegan activist and she has two kids and a job not a full-time job part-time job and she's raising two kids and you know time is precious to her and she was kicked out of a vegan group they exiled her because she did not meet their quota for attending a certain number of hours of street protests per month so they wanted a commitment for if you wanted to be inside the organization you had to be spending whatever was eight hours a month minimum or so you had to spend a certain hours standing on the street at these protests all right so i have an email here sorry uh this was a public comment on facebook from a woman named gene i'm just going to use her first name but i assume this is someone whose first language is english you'll see why i mentioned that here gene writes in hi isil i hope you could give me some advice on how to move forward i've been an activist for a few years with a few local vegan organizations and anonymous for the voiceless so anonymous the voiceless are one of the groups who stand around in a mask silently unfortunately none of that ever worked to an extent that was justifying the amount of time i put in it so upon moving to another state in europe i eventually quit so those are the crucial words here none of that ever worked to an extent that was justifying the amount of time i put into it for each so she goes on to say more about her situation she's 20 years 22 years old a good illustrator or painter speaks several languages lives below the poverty line um is trying to study philosophy in a spare time okay so you got you got no money um you've barely got a home i don't actually there's no mention here of a job um well you know let me tell you something you may feel you and the audience may feel right now that watching this youtube video was a waste your time if so i apologize but the level of effort both for the creator and for the audience that goes into watching this youtube video it's exponentially more efficient than showing up at a street protest or even showing up at a conference like an academic conference that are going to see a lecture in veganism and hoping to hear something interesting or be able to speak to some hoping to make that connection so gene for your situation given what you've told me given what you've told me i know just one form of vegan activism that won't waste your time that'll bring some positive people into your life where you can use your artistic talent if you're good at illustrating if you're good at making images i only know one option i can recommend to you that you can do in poverty from your tiny apartment where you're living below the poverty line doesn't require that you own a car doesn't require that you drive five hours each year i only know one option and it's it's right here on youtube so look guys there was a book years ago called weapons of the week terrible book written by a communist [ __ ] and you want to taco it was a hit book weapons of the week and we have this we have this phrase still in english language complete garbage uh in terms of political science and anthropology but but but let me tell you something in the 21st century right now standing on the street chanting slogans these these are not the weapons of the week handing out pamphlets no no no no no options like youtube options like youtube these really are effective weapons of the week and hey i have a lot to complain about youtube i'm really actively considering quitting forever right now because my life has come to such a bad closure to be frank it's been one tragedy after another for me personally professional education otherwise i'll make more videos talking about that but the good news is uh if you take the time to make something beautiful something interesting something thought-provoking here on youtube it lasts forever it stays up whether you think of it as a work of art or or is something closer to having a conversation with someone in a cafe uh if you want to have conversations with a whole bunch of strangers try to spread the message of veganism keep in mind i've had more than 3.5 million conversations now more than 3.5 million total views or total viewings on this channel there's no way i could have accomplished that standing on a street corner holding a placard chanting slow there's no way i could have accomplished that wearing a mask or participating these other forms of protest and for you maybe just maybe you'll be luckier than i was because i come out of this veganism thing burnt and broken [Laughter] but um you know maybe you'll be maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones so my advice to you is be virtuous but be lucky [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes