The Problem with (Some) Vegans
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2024
- Vegans, just like everybody else, try to climb dominance hierarchies. They can be counter-productively egocentric and dogmatic.
"The Problem with Vegans" (Roaming Millenial): • Video
The debate (VG vs RM):
• Video
Lynn Margulis and the Question of How Cells Evolved:
msu.edu/course...
Failing with abandon:
mindingourway.c...
Video footage: • Video
![Seven Complex Lessons in Education (Edgar Morin) [mirror]](/img/n.gif)
Truly awesome message! Thank you!
Thanks for listening.
I strongly disagree with the empirical claims. 11:41 I think the quality of people who are converted by Vegan Gains are generally higher than those converted by e.g. Bite Size Vegan. Those converted by Gary Yourofsky are probably the highest quality. This may be a difference in what one considers "quality vegans". I have several reasons to think they are high quality converts (e.g. won't revert back, more advocacy, stronger and thus more compelling convictions). That said, I do think vegans need to incorporate more street epistemology.
Moreover, I think I have reasonable evidence to support my position. The martyrdom effect, for example, supports the idea that demanding greater effort/discomfort from people increases their willingness (typically studied for willingness to donate). This supports asking people to go fully vegan, but the backfire effect could still apply for _how you ask_ people to go fully vegan. The vegan adversity survey further complicates the issue; one could interpret it as the a version of the backfire effect theveganoption.org/2011/12/04/vegan-pledge-statistics-adversity/
Other common avenues of thought include example of Malcolm X. While I don't think such arguments are strong, they at least provide reason to be agnostic. I think there is no good evidence in either direction, so most of this is just differing intuitions.
This video is dated and I can't exactly remember what I was arguing but a couple quick thoughts:
I agree that it's better to argue in favor of "full" veganism (the term is oxymoronic, really). Although my idea of "full veganism" simply means : avoid exploiting beings that have a central nervous system as much as possible. Some vegans might disagree, but they probably wouldn't protest against people who live a bivalvegan lifestyle, so their opposition is pretty meaningless. This is not the main issue that I have with some vegans, it's *how* they argue it, and whether their veganism exists in a broader framework of total liberation or not. I do not favor single-issue veganism; I don't think it's effective, or that it makes any logical sense, and I think it's part of why people like Yourofsky end up getting burned out and drop off the map (same with Bite Size Vegan, who was a Yourofsky convert).
The problem with people like Vegan Gains and Ask Yourself (some of the people I had in mind at the time) is that they are extremely narrow-minded and arrogant. They fail to take the backfire effect into account, sure, but more importantly, they fail to look at the big picture. If you want to liberate animals/minimize suffering and you think this can be achieved in the context of a consumer capitalist culture, you are a child. Or as an analogy: you are a white belt. And when you have people that *pay* you to *remain* a white belt, or people that tell you that being a white belt is the equivalent of being a black belt, you don't create "high quality vegans". You yourself are not 'quality' because you have an incentive to remain a white belt. This is the situation that single-issue, "anti-SJW" vegan UA-cam 'activists' are in. (I am aware of how arrogant that sounds if you are not aware of the socio-politics of food and animal exploitation, but they are the facts nonetheless.)
As far as creating long-term vegans, I think someone like Gary Francione is probably one of the best, even though I have my issues with him as well.
@@tranquil87 Thanks, that helps clarify a bit. I still strongly disagree with most points. Importantly, I want to point out that Gary Yourofsky has stated why he is burnt out; that it was the SJW vegans (roughly speaking). I believe he still does activism, just offline. P.S. I also like Francione.
It's possible to grant all this and still fail to sufficiently incorporate it into your behavior moment to moment, and especially when the camera is rolling. It's the mirror image of believing in agent-neutral theories of ethics, but still falling way short of moral sainthood.
In terms of ideological warfare, do you think those who come up way short (i.e. majority of popular UA-camrs) would be doing us all a service if they just closed down shop and made room for perfectly disciplined discussants?
I'm trying to think of some names that would fill those gaps. I'm drawing a blank.
"It's possible to grant all this and still fail to sufficiently incorporate it into your behavior moment to moment, and especially when the camera is rolling"
Absolutely, and I do say it's easy to forgive people for getting upset in a heated debate. But when someone becomes abusive, I think they should know they have crossed a line, and they should take some time to re-evaluate their methods and figure out why this has happened. Problem is, people are just not granting this and they're just not re-evaluating. They're encouraging each other to continue as is. Again, part of it is that YT is suited towards that.
"In terms of ideological warfare, do you think those who come up way short (i.e. majority of popular UA-camrs) would be doing us all a service if they just closed down shop and made room for perfectly disciplined discussants?"
I don't know, but I think at the very least they'd do people a favor, including themselves, if they didn't debate. As you probably know, I'm profoundly deterministic when it comes to human behavior, but that doesn't mean that I think people can't improve their behavior. If they're smart and willing to be introspective, I think they just need a moratorium. Putting the brakes on the preaching for a while and putting effort to try understanding people's motivations and your own better. If you're successful enough in doing that, it'll open up new deterministic patterns of behavior that are more suited towards cooperative success.
"I'm trying to think of some names that would fill those gaps. I'm drawing a blank."
I can think of plenty of vegans who are not competitively trying to get the last word out there every time someone makes a bad video saying vegan diets are problematic. I can also think of many vegans who have started emulating Vegan Gains and who contribute absolutely nothing of value.
Yeah there is a world of difference between creating a domineering shtick for yourself on YT and having the odd adversarial slip-up that bares resemblance to egocentricity.
I'm finding that the "argue with an idiot and he'll bring you down to his level" adage rings true in more ways than one. If someone is uniquely annoying with their adversarial style and also refuses to go away, it's only a matter of time before I catch myself replying to them in the unproductive manner this video spotlights. The style that sees me giving random readers license to The Backfire Effect. Those random lurkers are presumably innocent, but knowing this isn't enough in the moment.
The question is; do certain ideological camps start the fire, or are all ideological camps equally or mostly prone to starting these types of fires? There's a study I'd like to see done. This would be essential data to have if you care to avoid time-sinks and outbursts.
I'm sure you've noticed that plenty of these quantity-over-quality channels have been demonetized over the last few weeks. I think this is a good start for moving toward a more detached mode of debate. Cottage industries and profit-motives entail pandering, and pandering is always at odds with intellectual honesty.
Well, when you have an ideology, you are pro-something which means you're also anti-something. Everything outside of your subgroup is a threat and you're wired to either want to fight them or flee from them if they are more powerful than you are. I guess those that start the fires most often are those that are most confident in their fighting abilities and they also have a strong enough belief that it will change something.
Not sure demonetization will change much. There's always Patreon, and at the end of the day, most of these people are not just doing it for the money. It's a strong motivator, but it's secondary to the desire to assert oneself and try to climb a dominance hierarchy you have access to. When you believe in an ideology, you can't just be inactive, even if you're not financially compensated. You have to act. If they really believe in what they're doing, they'll keep doing it for as long as they have the freedom to do it.
'I can think of plenty of vegans who are not competitively trying to get the last word out there every time someone makes a bad video saying vegan diets are problematic.'
Although his focus is broader than veganism, Inmendham is a perfect example of this.
Very interesting video, a couple of points though:
1. Vegan Gains has anger issues by his own admission, as well as being either on or very close to the sociopathic spectrum due to his lack of empathy, as you show in that clip around 14:30. With these two things in mind I'm not surprised when he acts the way he does. Does that excuse the behaviour? Obviously not, but honestly I'd be getting frustrated as hell when self described 'skeptics' approach veganism with the level of dishonesty that Roaming Millenial has.
2. This debate comes shortly after his debate with Kraut and Bearing, two other skeptics who were intellectually lazy and got onto a stream only to faff around extremely obvious points, whilst just replying 'I don't care' to almost all points made by Vegan Gains.
Simply put, Roaming brought a knife to a gunfight. Vegan Gains shouldn't have brought out the bazooka perhaps, but she could have armed herself a lot better.
She's the one who made the video about vegans. I don't mean to sound immature but she's picked the fight here and bit off more than she can chew.
Consider the points Roaming makes about the ethics of veganism in her video; despite trying to weasel out of this by claiming that that's not what her video was intended to be, she makes a very serious health claim : "Humans are omnivores, we just are, it's what our system requires".
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in my opinion. I don't know, just something to think about.
How do you know that they are being dishonest? Someone can be lazy and misinformed. Someone can be arrogant and wrong. Dishonesty is harder to diagnose.
Your comment is very interesting to me. You seem to disagree with me but I can't put my finger on what exactly. It seems like you believe in the necessity of having these ego battles with people? You've not given me a reason why.
For me, when someone is wrong, the ideal course of action is not to go to war with that person, call them names, etc. It's to try to calmly educate them. I've said in my video that it's understandable when people fail to do this in a heated debate -- the problem, to me, is when most of your online presence is you indulging your need to dominate others, and you rationalizing that behavior.
I don't know specifically that they're being dishonest, but in Roaming's case she appears to refuse in the aftermath of the debate to review and re assess her own nutritional citations
That to me is not indicative of someone acting in accordance with their self professed values of logic and skepticism. On the other points, of ethics and morality, I have no idea, even after watching the full debate I'm having a hard time trying to figure out where Roaming is at, because she takes the long winding road to arrive at her points (in that debate, she may be more succint elsewhere). It hasn't been very long though, so we can wait and see, but so far it doesn't look great.
I'm not really disagreeing with you so much as playing devil's advocate and giving some counter points, as someone who also struggles to remain calm and rational in a debate when with a non vegan. I'm not at the level of Vegan Gains in terms of anger issues and lack of empathy, but I've still been pushed to the level that he was at in that debate by some individuals, espcially after they consistently brought asanine points to the table such as 'I don't care' and 'Bacon is delicious'.
I wouldn't say it's a necessity to have 'ego battles' but I would say it's now become a necessity to start holding the skeptic community on UA-cam to account for the ridiculous things they have been saying on the topic of veganism for some time completely unchallenged.
In my humble opinion it's time to see whether or not they can live up to their own standards of intellectual honesty and rationality that they purport to operate by. Which is not the same as wanting to 'Pwn' or 'Dominate' them, by the way.
Fully in agreement there, Vegan Gains went way off the deep end when the name calling started coming out. I was physically wincing when it hit that part of the debate.
I'm maybe in disagreement with you to what extent Vegan Gains' online presence is based around his need to dominate, I think his online persona is simply consistent with his sociopathic tendencies. And for the record I don't rationalise it, I simply understand how it comes about based on the things he's said publicly.
" she appears to refuse in the aftermath of the debate to review and re assess her own nutritional citations"
That's what the backfire effect causes. That's one of the big reasons why I made this video and why I'm against adversarial, egoistic debating. In my view, her reaction is not dishonest, it's the expected result of the kind of behavior I'm critiquing. Not accepting new information is normal when your identity & conditioning is under attack. When you're under attack, your instinct is to retreat into your shell, not to come out of it. You become more and more convinced that you do not want to agree with the person you're fighting with the longer the fight goes on, so you'll look for anything that will lend itself to that goal.
Like most people, she's been conditioned to believe she needs animal products and that there is nothing wrong with their consumption. You only get through that conditioning very carefully. That should be obvious. If sharing facts with people was enough, vegans would outnumber non-vegans by now. I think it's your job as an activist to find the best way to get through people's conditioning and you should do everything in your power to avoid getting angry and abusive in the process because people will not conform to your beliefs quickly enough.
"In my humble opinion it's time to see whether or not they can live up to their own standards of intellectual honesty and rationality that they purport to operate by. Which is not the same as wanting to 'Pwn' or 'Dominate' them, by the way."
Sure, but be aware of what drives these people and keep your expectations in check. What they say and who they are are two different things. It seems evident to me that they are not here to learn and grow, they're here for personal gain and to climb a dominance hierarchy.
"on or very close to the sociopathic spectrum due to his lack of empathy"
Question: is sociopathy a choice IYO? This sounds like an insane question, but I don't think it is. "Sociopath" is what "narcissist" has become as a word: nothing but the latest catchword for someone who is Just Plain Evil. "Heretic" is what we would have said 500 years ago.
Anekantavad I'm not sure why you ask this question, since it's seems like a non sequitur. The point of discussion was about what motivates Vegan Gains, or more specifically how much of his online persona is driven by his alleged motivation to 'dominate'.
Sociopathy probably isn't a choice (if it is, how do you turn it on and off?) but I do believe that it's the individual's choice whether or not to recognise this fault within themselves instead of blaming those around them. In Vegain Gains' case, it appears he has tried to understand his own lack of empathy and address it at least in part, via psychologist appoinments and doing shrooms. Obviously I don't know him personally so I'm assessing his character based on what he shows his audience.
2:45
Which deontological vegans adhere to that position? Of the animal rights advocates who affirm some sort of moral rights for animals and thereby deny consequentialist veganism, many of them ground the moral value of animals in either sentience, possession of interests, being subjects-of-a-life, etc. If oysters fail to meet any of these criterion, then this statement about oysters could not honestly be ascribed to them unless they're saying otherwise. In the absence of any examples or expounding upon the basis of deontological veganism, you're attacking a strawman.
First, no need to lesson me on what a strawman argument is. Secondly, you have basically answered your own question. Oysters do not fail to meet the "subject-of-a-life" criteria. This is the criteria that deontological vegans will argue we should respect. Am I supposed to link you to threads/screenshots of vegans saying oysters are not vegan [for this reason]?
I'm not giving you a lesson on strawman arguments, so try to pull back on the offense taken. And if you think oysters are not sentient and they do meet the subject-of-a-life criterion, then you actually do need a lesson on the subject-of-a-life criterion. Otherwise, you're back to a strawman. Tom Regan, the philosopher who originally defined the concept, defined subjects-of-a-life as beings with a psychological continuity, those who are aware of the world, those who care about what happens to them, and those whose can have an experiential welfare that can go well or ill for them logically independent of their value to others. He even states in one of his papers that sentience is a necessary condition to be a subject-of-a-life. With that being the case, how can a non-sentient oyster be a subject-of-a-life?
It's just a bit irritating to be engaged right away by a stranger with the presumption that you are attacking a strawman. If someone tells me I'm attacking a strawman, the implication is that I don't know what it is, otherwise I would have been able to prevent it from happening. Not constructing strawman arguments to attack is very easy and using them is a debate tactic -- but I am not debating anyone here. This is a personal channel where I share my own reflections and try to clarify my thinking.
Your second attempt at telling me that I'm back to a strawman argument is ostensibly worse than the first. I have put "subject-of-a-life" between quotes. My usage of the term was not the same as yours, or it wouldn't be in quotes. I was not aware of the expression as per Regan. Now that you bring up the definition you were using, it just seems like you were being redundant to me. You had already mentioned sentience. Are there sentient beings who are not subjects-of-a-life?
I was using those words in a matter-of-fact way: some living thing that has some form of subjective experience is a "subject of a life". Some people argue that plants qualify as living subjects worthy of ethical considerations, some people argue that bivalves qualify or should be given the benefit of the doubt. The point I was making in my video is simple. Many vegans arbitrarily decide that eating foods from the animal kingdom is necessarily more unethical than from the plant kingdom. What I am saying is that I have engaged with such vegans (as a vegan myself, or ostrovegan) who have claimed that all animal life has value and shouldn't be consumed, and they do not discriminate. I find that troublesome. I'm also aware that there are many vegans who instead subscribe to my sentiocentric position.
You weren't aware of the academic usage that I was referring to, instead opted for and addressed a colloquial version of the term that I've never heard used in a discussion about subjects-of-a-life, and you expected me to ascertain this bizarre usage from scare quotes. That's rather disingenuous, and the irritation is shared. I've never seen these particular deontological vegans, but maybe there are people who think being an animal--and that's it--is sufficient to ground some moral standing, so they take oysters off the table regardless of their possible lack of sentience or other properties. However, to say deontological veganism takes this position (or a deontological vegan would take this position) is to ignore the literature behind animal rights, the basis of the position itself, and to fail to engage with the stronger, more prominent position of the frail one you're attacking and seemingly defining deontological veganism as being.
And it's not redundant. Sentience is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to be a subject-of-a-life. Additionally, under this view, sentience is not a sufficient condition to ground the inherent value of individuals--if they have any.
It is not in the least disingenuous. It's precisely the opposite. I am putting it in scare quotes because I am using it differently from what is an ambiguous term to me. It shows that I am making an assumption that you are welcome to correct. The least you can say is that I used it differently, otherwise it wouldn't be in scare quotes. I am not an academic, so you have no reason to hold this against me, unless you just want to be petty.
Maybe I am wrong about deontological veganism. I understood it to be the position that ascertains that one has a duty to avoid eating any food coming from an animal, no matter its degree of sentience or its non-sentience. If I am wrong about this, please feel free to link me to resources that would educate me.
I would also appreciate if you gave me the example that I asked for. Which animals are sentient but are not subjects-of-a-life in your view?
How applicable would the basis of your argument be for the integration of a socialist or Communist political system?
I understand why you'd ask that. It's not applicable because I'm not advocating for an ideology of cooperation. I'm encouraging voluntarily redirecting one's egoic impulses towards self-knowledge and creativity. Consequently, I think that this knowledge and creative output can have a positive spill-over effect on human affairs. If indeed there is a possible way out, this seems to me to be the only one. The problem being that, as Laborit puts it, to rebel is to run to ruin, because when revolt is realized as a group, it immediately recovers the structure of a hierarchy of submission within that group. And when done alone, it quickly results into the submission of the one rebelling. It cannot be the solution.
I'm one of those oyster eaters...
Cool. Nothing wrong with that.