DxE: Is Vegan Activism Science or Showbusiness?

so I just recorded a video talking a
little bit about friedrich nietzsche and the history of philosophy in the Western world and the light motif of that video really was questioning why do we think of the progress of philosophy as if it were the progress of science when in so many ways it's more like show business there is a vegan activist Network network is the word they use called direct action everywhere and a most remarkable thing has happened just within the last two weeks they change their whole methodology and they started uploading videos to YouTube that are from my perspective garbage content they started uploading videos of cute cats and cute piglets and cute cows one of the videos is oh it's a cow cuddling with a kitten there's another one that's a baby a baby human cuddling with a piglet this kind of crap alright now the unique claim of DXE of direct action everywhere when they came into the game here was that their methods their form their their ideology of effective activism was based on science was the day alone unlike other vegan groups animal rights groups that they had learned the lessons of the social sciences that so they would put it now quite a few people have questioned this or even ridiculed it the long book review discussion I did with mod vegan we mentioned in there that Gary francais on a really ridicules direct action everywhere and Gary friendzone a really says look they say what they're doing is based on science when you look into the science it's not even though these are the Social Sciences and Gary Franchione is right about that unfortunately the same criticism also applies to Fran Sione himself there's a lot of that criticism to go around but on some level you know some questions can be answered by science and some cannot what is Shakespeare's greatest play if you're hosting a Shakespearean festival and you've got to choose which plays you're going to perform and which ones are not which play is going to reach an audience which place is socially relevant and meaningful to perform today it's not a scientific question it's not going to have a scientific answer and whether you're talking about political activism or lobbying or street protests I think we actually get into a lot of questions that are closer to the arts closer to the creative arts maybe closer to literature than they are to science and yet you know direct action everywhere they started off by claiming they had this unique methodology that was so much better than everyone else because it was based on science and they felt that they had drawn these objectively true and real conclusions from their very selective and one-sided study of history completely cynical misrepresentation of a few figures from history like Mohandas Gandhi little bits and pieces of the u.s. struggle to abolish slavery misrepresented and cherry-picked and what and we come up with this diss methodology and anyway others have already pointed out the use they made of social science research is laughable if you actually have a background in social sciences which I do my first University diploma is in political science and from my perspective you know what starts as science ends as religion from any of these many of these political organizations for direct action everywhere if you want to be a part of their little group that in some ways is quite cult-like you simply have to accept as a tenet of faith that what they say is effective activism is effective effective activism ceases to be something empirical ceases to be something you try out and test and evaluate and tinker with in the real world it becomes a principle of faith that all members of the group have to subscribe to I don't even say that with any agent of our but then you see this the other you know aspect of direct action everywhere that was discussed in my earlier podcast over an hour long with Maude vegan right off the bat I point out look you know groups like direct action everywhere they make all these sacrifices to get their name into the newspaper for them that's in reality the main focus of their activism they do outrageous things sometimes they do criminal things sometimes they're facing criminal charges for their protests for their activism just to get their name in the headlines just to get their name in the newspaper and they feel they've had a big success when their disruptions get their name theirs because that's their idea of effective activism are these disruptions okay and now nobody wants to hear it they have no audience nobody wants to hear what they have to say remarkably my videos including my really boring videos reach a larger audience than theirs on YouTube even though they're doing things that are in the newspaper where I say is not being covered in the newspaper I'm not going out and breaking into barns I'm not running on to the sports field and a baseball games right disrupt the baseball game I'm not showing up at a Bernie Sanders event and jumping the fence that this is the stuff they do to disrupt Bernie Sanders talking to the crowd or whatever you know I find their their methods totally immature and totally reasonable and totally ineffective but again if you join their group it becomes a barrier to entry it becomes a principle of faith you have to believe that what they're doing is effective right and you believe that it's based on this ridiculous interpretation of history and this ridiculous selective reading of the social sciences but of course it's not a science of course what are you gonna say to me are you what was your scientific basis for believing that jumping over the barrier to interrupt Bernie Sanders and being immediately pounced on by his security guards nobody heard the vegan message that's more effective than running a vegan hotdog stand you could do a great form of actors you have a vegan hotdog stand you don't tell people it's vegan I talked about this ages and ages ago in a podcasting channel the hotdog stand or hamburger stand give it a great name call it dead cow dead cow hamburgers you know and maybe afterwards they eat the burger and in the bottom of the container there's a note saying hey just so you know no animals were harmed in making this burger a dead cow burger we're actually proud to be giving you a vegan hamburger the beautiful form of activism doesn't disrupt anything so god I think there were so many it's like I say it's the creative arts I'm just I just wrote a children's book in Chinese in English I'm talking to illustrate its art its literature not saying it's high art whatever you know it's it's it's a children's storybook getting those ideas across and obviously you can come on YouTube and make music videos you could dance and sing you could do a puppet show you know there are so many forms of creative activism but no they think that science proves that their method is the effective one okay well I think on some level I mean it's just serendipity it's just a coincidence at the same time that I had this conversation with mod vegan drawing attention to the fact that they knocked themselves out they sometimes get themselves brought into court there sometimes facing criminal charges the doing all this edgy stuff just to promote themselves but despite all that promotion despite my name the press I'm looking at videos here that have had 89 views a hundred and seventy two views 169 views nobody wants to hear it nobody respects their opinion nobody is interested right and like some of these videos remember the number of people involved already gets you a certain number of views so they have a bunch of activists doing a disruption that's not worth describing you know the friends and family of the people who were in the video that's already yes of maybe 300 people you know like if you have 20 people participating making a video each of them posted on their own Facebook page and send it to their parent and there are friends from university that already is 300 views 20 if 20 people make a video you should have 300 views and these guys are scraping incredibly low numbers I did a book review on rules for radicals nothing to do with Venus I've got a thousand views in like two or three days I'm deeply grateful to my artists for that by the way I respect the hell out of my audience for watching that kind of video just straight-up political science talk about a meaningful book you know but here's here's the twist just two weeks ago direct action everywhere throw out their own rulebook threw out their own philosophy throw out all the lessons of science and history and all this [ __ ] about the abolition of slavery and they start posting cute kitten videos cute cow videos cute baby pig videos is that what people signed up for when they joined DXE was the arguments supposed to be that the social sciences proved that the way to advance veganism is showing a baby playing with a piglet on a fluffy pink carpet are you [ __ ] kidding me this is what all your intellectual pretensions boil down to is that when you aren't getting the attention you wanted by doing your [ __ ] disruptions you resort to other methods of getting attention doesn't this just reveal that all that nonsense about Mohandas Gandhi fighting against the British Empire in India about the American Civil War about the abolition of slavery about social science research vindicating this method you made up in your own minds what it all boils down to is you want attention and when you don't get that attention that you're screaming for literally screaming for filming yourself screaming at strangers in a restaurant this kind of nonsense well you don't get it you resort to cute piglet videos cute kitten videos you resort to the lowest common denominator of what you see getting views on Facebook direct action everywhere at this point I've got to say shame on you you guys came out and you did debates with other people you debated Gary France aione you've heard criticism but you have failed to respond to that criticism by actually improving what it is you do and I'll just say in closing I don't want to see you guys fail I think you're wrong and misguided and what you're doing is counterproductive but you gotta remember I'm a vegan who wants to make the world a better place I would love to see anyone succeeding at this game but my role is not to gas you up kid my role is not to pat you on the back and say you're fighting the good fight when you're fighting it all wrong okay you're not gonna make the world a better place sitting in a steel cage in a prison cell you're not getting that for that reason you're not gonna make the world a better place breaking the law filming yourself breaking the law and putting that video on the internet where I come from that's called dry snitching and you know I'm not criticizing you for my sake but man I think any of you guys in DXE if this ever was a project that in principle was open minded and empirical learning from experience learning the lessons of history learning the lessons the social sciences why did you stop learning because I think you can still turn this around I think you could still improve the organization you've already got but you've got to stop what you're doing learn from the experience you've already had in the last three years learn the lessons of your own experience if you want to learn from the social sciences go back to the drawing board go back to history learned some new lessons from history different what you've done and take it in a new direction it's a lot easier to reform a bad institution than to start a new institution from scratch nuff said