"For me, the difference between 'vegan' and 'plant based' is not the difference between 'ethical veganism' and 'health based veganism'. Veganism proper: it's never going to be satisfied with a merely personal decision to be vegan."
Fifteen minutes from season one.
LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EwpOopH8jPRIp2Zk6Qx2X
^ I'm never going to explain anything that clearly ever again… so don't even ask. ;-)
The problem is adumbrated somewhere in the middle of my (relatively) recent podcast, Youtube is dead: the lost avant garde of intellectual dissent on the internet: although right-wing propaganda on carbon relies on flagrant falsehoods, the left and center are playing an even more dangerous game —in part because their lies seem more plausible —in part because a whole generation of gormless idiots (globally) has been groomed to believe in them. Neither the electric engine nor the electric airplane can drastically reduce carbon levels, reversing climate change: veganism can.
Ironically, if you want to put a pro-China spin on this tragic tale, it would be that China (with several centuries of Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian cultural tradition behind it) could now lead the world in creating a new cultural tradition of eating drastically less meat and dairy —or none at all.
Link to the aforementioned podcast, "Youtube is dead, etc.": https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wFSB1chYtTpJmWwVuWYxr
[This is, in fact, the page immediately prior to the excerpt shared on October 4th. Yes, as may be implicitly obvious, today I've gone back to the beginning of chapter 4, to make minor revisions throughout 4 and 5, again.]
The cardinal, of course, is willing to go much further, but having never eaten human flesh, his reasoning has more of an abstract air than the raven's speech before: "Modern humans are the masters of many tools, and yet your tools become terrible things once you've come to see yourselves as serving a role defined by these instruments. The law creates the lawyer, and then he lives his whole life in service to the law. 'What a terrible tool!', you think, as if you could liberate the lawyer by tearing up the law. How little you can imagine what dangerous people these same lawyers will become once you've deprived them of their law: a workman without his tools soon discovers that he still has claws."
The blue jay, hopping on his perch, now warns: "Destroy the bureaucracy, and you still have a society ruled by bureaucrats. Destroy the belief and the believers remain."
The raven presses his old argument even further: "Even if your civilization provides nothing but a veneer painted over barbarism, you need to learn to appreciate the veneer! You see little difference between bureaucrats and barbarian kings, but as soon as the bureaucrats return to barbarism, you'll appreciate the progress of a thousand years that dragged them down from their thrones, deprived them of their dueling swords, and taught them to care for the technicalities of the law, romanticizing the arbitrary procedures of limited government."
"Only a fool blames the highway for the brutality of the highwaymen: demolish the road beneath them, like pulling the carpets out of an abattoir, and what have you got? A gang of killers, all the same."