Wednesday 25 October 2023

An allegory: head chef at a hospital for the severely mentally disabled.

Suppose you trained for many years to be a cook of some kind.

It occurs to you that this expertise you have, rather than merely earning money, or rather than merely gratifying humanity's instinctual urges, could somehow make the world a better place.

Skipping over the vagaries of volunteerism that ensue, a series of seemingly well-intentioned and self-sacrificing decisions results in your being appointed to the position of head chef at a special hospital for the severely mentally disabled.

At first you undertake your work with a sort of default attitude of doing the best you can.  Soon enough, however, it is clear that this is not entirely pleasing to the inmates: they do not share your sophisticated sense of taste, and it is not entirely clear to you if they had become accustomed to being force fed baby food under the prior regime or what exactly.  You have brought with you a notion of cuisine quite incompatible with the expectations of your captives, who can only express their relative pleasure or displeasure with inchoate and stochastic noises.

Inevitably, of course, there are also ethical considerations: they have not chosen to be vegan, but you may be vegan on their behalf, so to speak, and they cannot articulate their dissatisfaction with this decision of yours --nor can any sense be made out of what dissatisfies them with the food from one day to the next.

With the passage of time, however, the most demoralizing aspect of the situation is this: as a volunteer you are paid nothing, but moreover you can never earn any kind of positive response from your small audience.  If you were an unpaid employee at a normal restaurant there would at least be the possibility of seeing a review posted by a customer on the internet, or hearing from one new guest that they'd been recommended to try the place by another, and so on.  There might be some friendship between you and a few of your regular customers, or some esprit de corps amongst you and your colleagues within the kitchen.  All of that is absent from your lonely post as the volunteer chef at this particular asylum.

The significance of your best effort, in this context, feeding captives, unpaid, is increasingly unclear: would you be better off making the least effort possible, and conserving your energies (or even your money) for some other venture, given that there can neither be a tangible nor an intangible reward for doing the best you can at this one?  Given that you can never even make your audience less miserable, why make yourself miserable in the act of catering to their desires?

Monday 23 October 2023

Speaking to Boogie2988 about veganism.

There's a better life he could have lived, there's a better person he could be today, if he'd become vegan.


Perhaps writing to him from my tiny video game channel helped me get through to him (as opposed to messaging from a-bas-le-ciel).

Money: how much (or how little) do I earn from YouTube in 2023.

Less than a hundred dollars per month, in brief:

Thursday 12 October 2023

To quote Coach Z, "These peoples try to fade me."

I have never heard a single word from this person before in my life.  I don't know if she'd just heard of my channel for the first time today or what.

———

[Ortal Citron:]

I don’t know your opinions but I hope you understand that these free palestine chanters are mostly terroist supporters or sympathizers and Vegan Gains said something that made me lose so much respect for him. First of all he said that Israel is an apartheid state which is a baseless claim and he said he doesn’t support Hamas but that it was likely formed due to “mistreatment” by Israel. He also talked about how these terroist attacks were probably the result of geopolitical issues!

Killing, raping, and torturing civilians has nothing to do with politics and it is solely caused by the genocidal and evil ideology that plagues Hamas. I hope you know that and will make more in depth videos calling out the shameful words from these pro palestine people who include some vegans too because they think it’s a part of their intersectional identity or something

———

[Eisel Mazard:]

Re: "I don’t know your opinion…"

How could you possibly NOT know my opinion.


^ Long but easy-to-understand videos.

Whereas my rap lyrics are relatively recondite and esoteric.  😉

———

[Ortal Citron:]

Come on man can you just summarize your thoughts into a well-formed sentence?

———

[Eisel Mazard:]

Do you talk to your university professors this way?

You pay their wages: go ahead and try to talk to them as if they're your employees.  Go ahead and treat your professors as if they're your hirelings.

I don't work for you, Ortal.

You didn't hire me.

Like Socrates, I do my teaching for free.  And I am despised, accordingly.

———

[Ortal Citron:]

I’m not a fan of the socratic method or long lectures but I’m sorry for imposing that on you

———

[Eisel Mazard:]

Do you know what the opposite of "apology accepted" is?

Apology rejected.

———

[Ortal Citron:]

I’m sorry, I am just upset because of the way that people approach this issue and I want to know if you are willing to defend me and our nation. When people sympathize with Hamas it makes me angry but I can’t debate anyone about it at school for fear of my own safety.

———

[Eisel Mazard:]

I'm a 45 year old man:

none of your professors would make the time to answer a question like this from you.  Not one of them.

And you can try to send them an equally upset instagram D.M. right now

if you think I'm wrong

and if you expect to get some kind of sincere and intellectually substantive response from any of them.

^ The earlier-alluded-to rap lyrics, uploaded on the same day.