Beauty ≠ Advocacy ≠ Activism (Vegans & Animal Rights)

the realest thing you can do is have a
drumbeat with nothing but a drum P Joe best can't rap pal simian can't rap what is the deal with white male vegans coming on the tube pretending they can rap nobody else is pretending with you man you're pretending all by your lonesome um look man uh this issues been raised in number of different ways last two three years of my life the idea that promoting beauty is promoting veganism and you know it's a broken-down concept at a bunch of different ways first and foremost I noticed that these same people who want to defend lifestyle veganism who want to defend the portrayal of yoga vegans as beautiful and veganism as a way to become beautiful whether that's as a diet lifestyle or what-have-you um at the same time they're not letting go of the pretensions of being activists they're not letting go of the save-the-world vocabulary they're not letting go of the notion that what they're doing is radical a challenge to Authority that it's changing society changing cultural values etc and you can't have it both ways you really can't I think it's cool if you just say hey this is a lifestyle I'm showing off how I stay in shape what I eat in a day etc it's cool but it's not activism and the other hand activism is not pretty alright all the questions we get into like check the videos on this channel talking about direct action everywhere questioning whether or not those protests are effective and what would be the most effective mode of activism um effective activism is not pretty and by that I don't mean a street riot not necessarily I can't think of in situations where a street riot is the the best mode of activism vailable to you but it can mean sitting around at City Hall it can mean paperwork and legal challenges it can mean a whole lot of you know principled meaningful political action that will never be on the cover of Vogue magazine and of course the fantasy that a lot of vegans are playing out on their websites and on their YouTube channels is exactly I've wanted to take a photograph themselves and pretend they're on the cover of Vogue magazine I think also there's a kind of self-selected blindness an intentional ignorance about the reality of beauty itself I don't know if these people have really had the experience of sitting and spending time with someone who is so ugly that you feel uncomfortable looking at them directly normally when you know a particular person like that whether it's due to disease that has scarred them in some way that's made their face misshapen or whether it's due to birth they were just they were just born ugly or they were born with a disability or disfigurement that makes them ugly that's part of life that you never see on TV you know even even like comedy shows where the actors aren't selected for being beautiful there is definitely a minimum standard of attractiveness even for the funny fat guy on a TV show even for the ugly girl and it's like a running gag in Hollywood the ugly girl is always a gorgeous actress but they give her a pair of thick glasses and less appealing makeup you know less appealing hair can fake him that's the ugly girl you know you know real ugliness exists in this world I remember meeting a guy in England who was just born with with a horribly deformed nose in the middle of his face and you know he had to live with that for his whole life and he was used to it like with the first time you looked at him maybe if you knew him you maybe just like if you were a co-worker of his for a few weeks you'd get used to it but when you first look at him you'd kind of flinch the man he would he was used to that he was used to going to buy his groceries and having people were respond really negatively one of the reasons I remember that was at that time when I was in England there was an ongoing debate ultimately involving parliament in the government about whether or not the the government should support plastic surgery like the government should pay for plastic surgery in some cases and what would be the line like at what point do you actually have a deformity or disability that justifies the government paying for non necessary surgery that will make you more attractive or at least more normal-looking and obviously that guy his whole life would have been different if you had been just kind of moderately unattractive instead of being frankly hideous in a way that people respond negatively this is part of real life on earth man and again it's edited out of the highly artificial reality you know currently shows you Thailand without showing that it's a military dictatorship that shows people sitting in their bikinis in a restaurant eating dinner and pretends their legs aren't being bitten by mosquitoes as highly sanitized glamorized view of the the permanent vacation and they're literally editing out the ugly people God knows I mean there are a lot of war cripples a lot of people crippled by war in in Thailand also but in in Laos and Cambodia next door one of the events of my life that really changed my own thinking about beauty and ugliness and how we all live together in society was meeting a man on the Cambodian border he was a border guard he was in the military in some capacity and he had a bullet wound in the middle of his face the middle of his face was caved in with what I assume was a machine-gun round not a pistol round and he had not had reconstructive surgery he had just survived he was what you look like when your face has been caved in by a bullet and your immune system just recovered like period no reconstructive surgery whatsoever and he was you know especially first he was hard to look at it was hard to look him in the eye I did it and I talked to him in the Cambodian language I was in quite a difficult situation on that border there was no bus there was no transport there was no way for me to get from that border into Cambodia proper and he couldn't just walk through the forest or anything there's still Mayans he could be blown up by - am i sorry one story leads to another I don't think in terms of the intellectual leaders the influential leaders in a veganism I don't think anyone picked Gary France he owned a because he was good-looking I'm not saying I'm not a huge fan of Kerry France he owned a you can see my own videos I have some criticisms at work but he's been a major voice you know the woman who founded peda a Petta so that god is such a huge topic but i mean look if if you believe that promoting physical beauty is an effective method of promoting animal rights well peda took it to the logical extreme they made softcore pornography for decades featuring beautiful women 90 percent naked or what-have-you and they were claiming that was effective activism well if it was I could understand why you now want to imitate it but I think the vast majority of vegans not even feminist vegans just mainstream middle their own vegans they look back in the history of peda and they say well you know mmm they did some things that worked but you know mmm it's kind of regrettable this whole experiment with naked women and it kind of it kind of gave peda a bad name it gave animal rights a bad name it doesn't make vegan doesn't look good and it didn't have any outcomes there was nothing possible the positive show for it terms of outcome evaluation and interestingly that Gary Francey only himself he claims that was the reason why he quit pedda that he quit that organization because of what he felt was the demeaning and counterproductive use of sexualized images of women interesting because there were a lot of reasons to quit but that's just one of them that I could think of but look you know the idea that if you get some vegans on the cover of Vogue magazine or appearing in highly beautiful artificial articulated poses models as supermodels dispute the idea that that will convince or compel people to become vegan or to care about animal rights or care about ecology or what have you that's deeply flawed simply by sorry I should say the deep flaw in that thinking is revealed simply by looking at the other magazines on the shelf every store shelf every supermarket is full of magazines that are depicting human beauty especially the beauty of women with plenty of them are showing beautiful men to men's health and fitness magazines as well as fashion and pornography and everything else what percentage of these images of beauty are vegan or vegetarian or ecological ethical in any way obviously enormous number of people are influenced by for example the images of beauty in the x-men movies and I think superheroes are a important example because people tend to be influenced by superheroes when they're still children there are young boys whose view of the world really is shaped by Arnold Schwarzenegger movies action movies comic book heroes like Batman Superman the x-men and the actors who portray them as well as the the images the pictures and the toys and the type of physique the way those depict man the way those to pick women what do you think like how would a couple of scrawny teenagers and bikinis compete with that or why would that have the kind of efficacy you're claiming for it I think it wouldn't you know I can understand up to a certain point like I understand if the point is self-promotion if the point is just enjoying the lifestyle if the point is even to get a small business rolling you know like you want to run out or resort you know when you want to promote that resort sure I I completely understand that I have never in my videos said that you know lifestyle veganism is you know totally counterproductive but it is counterproductive even relative to the objectives that petaa you that when they were pursuing in I don't think they've stopped I just say I'm just talking sort of past tense over decades of them trying to use that tactic with a huge budget with advertising and mainstream newspapers with all kinds of advantages that the average vegan on Instagram and YouTube the average vegan trying to get some certain leader that they don't have um this shows kind of the banality of beauty but look the other reality is these are all hollow promises being vegan does not make you more beautiful it really doesn't and I think this is also being edited out of our kind of digital vegan pseudo reality here to some extent if you go to a conference that's attended by serious animal rights activists or even a conference where it's everyone's vegan they're not better looking than people at other conferences I've been to linguistics conferences academic conferences a study of Asia study of history study of Buddhism there was a philosophy conference eight of the week they all have some good-looking people at them you know whatever I mean not everybody at the linguistics conference is ugly not everybody is fat whatever actually most people in linguistics are pretty skinny I don't know why maybe there's a psychological reason for that nobody's selling the linguistics PhD diet but yeah a lot of lot of scrawny guys in linguistics for some reason um it's just not true that if you go to an animal rights conference everyone is gorgeous it doesn't even look anything like going to a bodybuilding conference if you do go to a bodybuilding conference two of the guys there are gonna be vegan but I was in the vast majority those people are eating meat the vast majority of images on the store shelf and fashion magazines are people who eat meat the vast majority of images of athletes yes there are a couple guys a couple of women who are vegan but the vast majority of these people have a word physical beauty and our eating meat so there is no way you're going to convince the general public and freely like claims this that the only way for you to be healthy and lean and beautiful is a vegan diet or is a particular vegan diet a high carb vegan diet or what have you you are absolutely setting yourself up for failure because those are promises you can't deliver on I'm going to give two more real examples from here where I'm living in Canada I live on the west coast of Canada there were a lot of beautiful people here um you know compared to the rest of Canada just the climate is more mild people care about their health and exercise generally the level of physical health and vitality and beauty is high and you know ain't none of these people vegan an incredibly small percentage of people here are vegan if I walk through the cafeteria at my University I'm a tall guy I'm like 6 foot 3 so I just look down as I'm walking to the cafeteria which I often do I'm gonna walk through that cafeteria of a couple of days I can see who's eating hamburgers and who's eating veggie burgers you can see the vast majority of people are eating meat these are all good-looking people eating meat on a daily basis there's absolutely no sense you don't look around that room and see wow all these people are fat and ugly and unhealthy and you know the only the couple of good-looking people are the good are the people eating salad or he thinking meals it's just not true living here in Victoria I'm surrounded by outwardly gorgeous people who eat me if you live in Los Angeles or California or something I'm sure that's true also you have to admit yourself vegans have no advantage in terms of outward beauty and we can get into a long list of reasons for why that is outward beauty it's partly in the eye of the beholder and it's partly based on some objective measurements of good health and completely arbitrary factors that are fixed for you basically from the day you're born part of it is the the luck of the draw the genetic lottery when you're born there was a vegan event here at my university let's assume and only young women attended I don't think there was a single guy a single male student attended this event I did not attend and people who are at the event posted it posted photos of the of the event on Facebook that I saw now I'm not hating on anyone but the young women who attended that event they're the same age as other university students they're not better looking than the young women in the Linguistics club or the history club or you know a random selection of meat-eaters on campus they're just not there is just no truth to the notion that when you meet vegans you're gonna meet people with glowing skin who are outstandingly beautiful or even who are slimmer than the other people right here where I live it's really not true yeah it's some other parts of Canada you might you know chronic obesity might be much more of a problem than it is here on the west coast but still I think there are plenty of fat vegans out there check out the homie Joe best for example of a fat vegan and a guy who doesn't even have the redeeming qualities of of being morally principled about his veganism but that's another story um so look I mean if you're selling false goods if you're making promises you can't back up it's not gonna be the basis for a political movement a social movement or even really a viable marketing campaign um it's just one more example this I mean you know outward beauty is not inner health I have zero dietary cholesterol okay invisibly I really am healthier than other guys my age you eat meat who maybe much better-looking than me who may be more athletic or just have a more handsome face for whatever reason um I was better looking back when I eat meat that's the reality I was slimmer I was more muscular and I was younger and I was handsomer you know if you do a before and after photo with me I don't look better after getting vegan but this business of making promises you can't really back up for me also this fad of selling bicycles as a route to personal beauty it also doesn't make sense there all kinds of good reasons to ride a bicycle it's a mode of transport that works just great as long as it's not raining heavy rain alone makes riding a bicycle pretty much impossible especially if you've got a job you're going to or something but anyway um with that aside you know I saw a video from a vegan guy up here a series of videos that kind of moved me emotionally because he went on a long distance by trip through some of the same places I used to live in work in northern Laos he went from northern Thailand through northern Laos and all Vietnam and he added up to thousands of kilometres thousands and he was doing it as a vegan and he was talking about it and again I was watching it kind of it of political interest and it reminded me of this time my life when I lived and worked there and you know I have an attachment kind of the suffering of the people in that little area of Asia I know a lot about their history and anyway there are different reasons why I was watching it but then at one point during the video he shows himself with his shirt off and I'm not hating on the guy but he doesn't look handsome he doesn't look muscular he looks pudgy and out of shape despite the fact that he has just done an amazing series of climbs on a bicycle over an amazing distance through the mountains eating just rice and fruit and he commented in a joking way said oh well as you can see you know long distance biking makes you look ripped he was joking but he's aware his physique does not look impressive even after extreme endurance sport so you know it just seems to me like a self-defeating approach in so many ways and what makes it work some is that the people selling it selling the beauty package are they're not just making the same claims that cynical fashion magazines and other you know fad marketing agencies would make they're making the further claims of save the world they're claiming the outcomes of real activism when the input when the actual activity is just self-indulgence and the fatuous celebration of a kind of beauty that's already celebrated in so many mainstream outlets in our society whether it's under the heading of athletics you know movies acting entertainment or what-have-you that's a really crowded shelf in the shop and I don't think veganism is going to win by competing for one inch on that shelf