All Episodes
Previous Next
July 27, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
34:54
A Conversation with That Guy T
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, everyone.
Goodfellow's called in sick this week because he's had an operation at the dentist's on his mouth and he can't really talk very well.
So that guy T from the popular YouTube channel called That Guy T has come along for a chat this week and I imagine you all know who he is, so I won't bother introducing him, but I will put a link in the low bar to his channel.
Right, so hello, how are you doing?
I'm doing fantastic.
Great.
Okay, so I notice you're very libertarian in your videos, which is not something you make a secret of.
And I get the feeling that it's because I'm British that a lot of this stuff seems not unusual or weird, but just not the way I'd approach things.
And again, I really don't want to make it sound like I'm saying that you're wrong, because I don't think you are.
But I just watched the college education should not be free video.
Now, I think I do understand what you're saying with, you know, not everyone's going to have the same opportunities and whatnot.
But did you address in the video why how you think that I mean you won't avoid a poverty gap sort of thing?
Poor people not being able to have the education to help raise them out of that.
Yeah, I didn't go into deep detail about that in particular.
I just basically said that in a free market education system, there would definitely be possibilities for people to get scholarships or grants or private loans, but it just wouldn't be as guaranteed that it is as it would be in a public system.
Right, okay.
Because I am with you.
I'm definitely with you on that.
You made the point that there were a lot of pointless degrees, and having a degree is like, it's too common.
And I agree with you.
But this seems to me to be like an argument for social education, really.
Socially funded education rather than privately funded.
What do you think about that?
Well, like I said, after I made this particular video, I've gotten a lot of response from a lot of my subscribers regarding their public education system.
I didn't realize some of my subscribers were from fucking Finland.
I wouldn't have known.
But they laid it on me.
And it made me reconsider some of my points.
But overall, especially in regards to America, I've seen that the more that government has gotten involved in education, basically quality has not improved, if at all, it's decreased and spending has gone up and up and up and up.
Yeah, I saw that graph.
That was quite insane.
Yeah.
And in regards to the value of degrees, definitely there are still valuable degrees, you know, as far as let's see, like engineering or STEM fields or medical science.
These are things that you have to get a degree for.
But I think that a lot of politicians in particular are pushing the idea that now you just have to go get a college degree because I'm not sure if you if this is like a common thought in Britain and whatnot, but in America there's this idea that pretty much ever since I've been growing up, you know, you have to graduate high school.
You just have to.
It's not worth anything.
You just have to do it.
And I think that's the idea that they're starting to push towards college.
You just have to go to college.
You know, it doesn't matter if your degree, if you're going into something that's a valuable field or if there's jobs available for that field, you just have to go to college regardless, just by default.
And I think that's problematic.
Yeah, they absolutely do have that here.
And I really agree with you on that one, actually.
Like you say, I think it just devalues the point of having a degree in the first place.
And especially in fields that you don't necessarily need a degree, there's really, you know, it seems like a waste of money getting one.
But what I was thinking is, would it not be more likely that if your university was publicly funded, if your universities were publicly funded, I don't even think they are over here, actually, to be honest.
So this is talking in the hypothetical socialist paradise.
Then if, like, you say, how is the spending being affected by government exactly?
Could you explain that to me before I go on, actually?
Because I'm actually not too clear about that.
So spending has gone up dramatically since the government's been involved, but how has the government increased the spending?
Mainly just what they call investing in students, investing in higher forms of technology, investing in more schools, more basically it goes, majority of it goes to a lot of bureaucracy, majority of it goes to new textbook, new information, new tools, but pretty much none of it goes to increasing teacher salaries, which even though I'm against publicly funded education, if they were to fund it publicly,
that would be one of the primary things I would think would need to be addressed.
But it's mainly just going to no good, really nothing valuable, nothing that's helping students clearly become better at tests or better overall throughout their subjects.
Yeah, I'm with you.
So it's going on infrastructure and bureaucracy, basically.
Pretty much.
And a lot of it, you just don't really see where it goes.
Because the students still have to pay for their own education, don't they?
Yeah, there's very little transparency in the Department of Education.
Yeah, it seems that that's the case across basically all government agencies, really, in the U.S.
I don't know how true that is, but it just, that's the impression I get.
I watched, I'm not going to start talking about conspiracies, I swear to God.
But it was, I watched this conspiracy theory documentary about people going missing in the national parks in America.
And it was entertaining.
But the guy was, I can't remember the guy's name, but he was very, very credible sounding.
He just seemed like some middle-aged guy with a moustache.
He was an ex-detective or policeman or something.
And he was just like, he was the guy you'd imagine as the average American, like the average American father from maybe like 50 years ago.
He was such a nice guy, you know.
And he was basically saying, I'm an author and whatnot.
And so I applied to the national parks for all this information.
They just wouldn't give me any information.
And you kept getting shut down at every turn.
And I've seen various things where people have tried to investigate these agencies, and they just get shut down by these agencies.
So it kind of seems to be a problem within the American government itself.
But anyway, what I was going to say is basically the government's spending a lot of money building infrastructure.
People are still paying for their own education.
And so basically, the government's building things that weren't necessary before until the massive expansion of higher education.
And yeah, it's all for profit, isn't it?
It's not like the people are paying money to private entities.
Am I correct?
As far as the government spending, are they spending in terms of trying to obtain profit?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, people are specifically spending money to a private entity that profits off their education.
Well, I was trying to follow you.
You're saying are the people paying, is the money that the people are paying in taxes going towards not the money from the government, but the individuals attending the universities.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, they pay money to the university, which is a private entity.
Yeah, and you're asking what in regards to that again?
Sorry.
I'm just clarifying that that's the case, really.
Sorry, because I'm just making sure that I've got this right before I start making my point.
Because it seems that because the government is taking the concept of free market education and saying, well, we'll build things for you, and then you'll pay a private entity that you will then be in debt for, in debt to for a great deal of time.
It seems that that seems to be a symptom of the corporatocracy, you know, making everything privatized so you're paying, it's just putting money in the hands of people who are already quite wealthy.
Whereas in the social system, I don't think that the government would be spending all this extra money on bureaucracy and infrastructure.
Because are the taxpayers really going to be happy that their taxes are going to gender studies courses?
Well, maybe they will be about that, but to extraneous courses.
Sorry, I've studied this really heavily, haven't I?
I've really come at you with this.
Sorry.
I feel bad about it.
No, no, that's cool.
I agree.
Like, our current system of, you know, as far as paying out to universities, it's basically extreme corporate welfare.
It's just because government's subsidizing the college education, the colleges are raising the prices of the college education, and it's just a continuous cycle.
No one's stopping.
The colleges aren't stopping and saying, okay, let's stop increasing prices.
And the government's not saying, okay, let's stop increasing the amount of loans we're going to give out.
So it's a continuous raise in inflation of the price of college.
Yeah, and then you've got all the politicians, like you showed in the video, constantly, and they are here.
I mean, it's an easy catchword for a catch word, catchphrase, or whatever, to get people to vote for you, isn't it?
Oh, I care about education.
I'm going to put lots of money into education.
Everyone should have education.
And it does sound really good on the surface.
How can you argue with that sort of thing?
But then when you look at where the education is actually, what they're actually learning, it's pointless, a lot of it, absolutely pointless.
And so it seems to be kind of a confluence of interests.
I imagine that these people probably give money to politicians in the form of lobbying.
So it seems to be one of those sort of, again, symptoms of the corporatocracy where it's a self-feeding mechanism.
Everyone in the loop is benefiting apart from the people getting the decrees, but they're the ones being kind of propagandized.
What do you reckon?
Yeah, definitely.
That's exactly the thing.
The end goal is to get as many students into your school as possible.
And if they don't perform well, all you have to do is go to the government and say, look, they're not performing well because we don't have enough money.
So the government gives more money.
And then you get more students in.
We pass those students.
Just go through whatever, not learning anything.
Then you get more students in saying, Same problem, we just need a little bit more money, give a little bit more, then a little bit more.
It's just a continuous cycle of constantly bringing in fresh meat and getting new funding with no results.
Yeah, I agree.
I completely agree.
So, what I'm thinking is if you took out the primary beneficiary of the funding and of the actual money that the students are paying, so if you were to make universities state universities, then taxpayer-funded universities, then they wouldn't be concerned with necessarily making a profit.
In fact, you could probably do education for free, not for free.
Yeah, and I've yeah, and I've considered that because as I've seen in recently research places like Denmark and Finland, the education system is they're coming for you, man.
They're coming for you.
I swear, I thought that place was like close to Canada.
I didn't know it was even in Scandinavia.
I thought it was like a portion of Iceland or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, that was on the other side of Russia.
But I've noticed that their education system is good.
Now, I don't accredit all of their success directly to public school, but their system is working over there.
And I kind of get the idea of getting rid of the profit motive so that the main emphasis is on educating students.
Yeah.
That's that incentive, isn't it?
Yeah, but the thing is, at least in regards to America, all the systems in which we have that, where the direct incentive isn't to generate profit, is to just serve the people, the people are getting screwed.
And the service is terrible.
And I'm just very hesitant to say that maybe that same system should be applied to education.
Because right now, we have such strong teachers' unions to where, you know, there's no, I mean, there's still a profit motive for the schools, the crony capitalistic profit motive, but they teachers basically can't get fired.
It's so much regulation to fire a teacher.
And so basically, even if the schools are underperforming, you know, there's no incentive to say, okay, we need to get rid of these teachers in order to get funding.
And that may be because of the government's part too, because we keep giving funding to poor schools instead of giving more funding to schools that are performing better.
So I'm sure there's a lot of different areas that America's education system is completely fucked up.
Yeah, no, no, I'm not many different areas.
Yeah, I'm totally with you on that, to be honest.
It's not entirely dissimilar in Europe.
Finland's probably more the exception than the rule, which is probably why they're so vocal about it.
I haven't really looked into it, but I'm sure it is a really good system.
I don't know.
I guess, I mean, I saw you talking on Twitter about the roads the other day.
I replied back to you.
I can't remember what you said off that now.
But do you not think that the same sort of thing might happen with privatized roads?
Well, privatized roads, I don't believe.
I'm actually going to probably release a video in a couple of days regarding that.
But with privatized roads, I think I've seen where private roads are much better than public roads as far as quality and efficiency and also in terms of payment where you're not overspending.
You're not spending because our government in particular overspends dramatically everything.
Yeah.
$10,000 for a grain of sand.
And I think that's partly because there's no incentive for good management because all you have to do is worry about getting it done.
There's no what I mean, what are people going to do?
Complain that your roads aren't good?
Then, I mean, who's going to like there's no competition, so there's no one coming in saying, okay, we'll do the roads better.
Or, okay, we hear your grievances, we're going to change things.
It's still the same that's so bizarre, though, because isn't that like the purpose of politicians to be responsive to the needs of the people?
You know, it just that I mean, if this was in England sort of thing, I would be emailing my constituent politician and saying, listen, man, get the roads fixed.
And theoretically, he'd get thousands of these emails and then he'd raise it in Parliament and whatever action would be taken, you know, to allocate more funding to the road repair funds or whatever.
So it seems weird that, like, there's, you know, it seems, you know, the only other option is to let people privately build roads.
Yeah, because pretty much no, well, politicians in America cater to mainly cater to the wealthy.
There's, yeah, if there's a wealthy neighborhood and there's a pothole, they'll come fix it up in a day.
If you go to a lower class, lower minority neighborhood, there's pretty much no response for about six, seven years.
And even then, when they fix it, they do a half-assed job.
But I think there, I personally think there would be a better incentive to have better quality roads if they were privatized.
This is just all hypothetical because as we know, we don't have any situations where all roads are privatized.
But I don't know.
I could see where we could go driving down Walmart Road, and I could see Walmart Road not wanting to have a bad road for PR purposes, or if a new neighborhood was to come up and they built their road privately.
And it would be much easier for people to complain about the quality of their roads directly to the person that they're paying, rather than going through a huge bureaucracy who has to worry about every single road in the country.
That's true.
That's true.
I definitely think they would.
I think that that would only work while there were still public roads though.
Like you're saying, it's assuming that not all roads are privatized.
But when they are, there's a lot less incentive to be competitive because what are they going to do?
Drive on a non-private road?
That's my problem with privatization.
Once it becomes a monopoly, it tends to be very much squeezing the budget to milk as much money out of it for the top as possible.
So corners get cut and progressively more corners get cut until it's a circle.
Yeah, true.
But I think there might be, well, like you said, if there's a monopoly where pretty much two or three corporations are controlling every single privatized road, then I could see where the quality would probably go down and probably start BSing the public.
But I feel that it would be a much better chance of that not happening in a privatized system due to competition.
And this is, I know this is a libertarian talking point where everybody says, oh, everything's going to be solved through competition.
Always competition.
But I think that if you had a lot of competition as far as roads, as far as if you had, let me just come up with an example right quick.
I have two roads near my house, Panola Road and what's the other one?
Snapfinger Road intersecting.
And if there was lead to pretty much the same general area, just different routes.
But if there was a road, Panola Road, privately funded, and their company was doing a really poor job managing the road, doing a really poor job as far as infrastructure, traffic lights, and just traffic or anything.
And while Snapfinger was doing a great job, I think more people would transfer and go to Snapfinger.
And pretty much, I know people always ask where the money would come from to pay for the roads.
Pretty much everybody's not going to pay a toll to go on every single road.
That would be freaking ridiculous.
Yeah, of course.
I see it as possibly businesses businesses which pay the majority of taxes for everything I could see them if they want to set up shop on a particular road they would pay Can I just jump in a second Yeah, this is interesting that you say that.
You say, obviously, you're not going to pay a toll on each road, which is obviously you wouldn't.
But if they were all privatized, then you'd probably end up buying some sort of license from the companies that own the roads around you.
Because they'd probably end up owning areas of roads.
So you'd just be paying what is effectively a tax to the private corporations.
And I'm not saying that's a better or worse thing than paying to the government because obviously the government aren't doing their job properly.
So I mean, it might well actually be a good thing to have, but it would still effectively be a tax.
And so you probably would need some sort of outside regulation of that industry to make sure there wasn't any kind of foul play against the people who are being effectively taxed.
So, I mean, I don't know where I'm going with that, really, but that just is something that struck me there.
Yeah, I could see that scenario.
And I would probably just respond to it by saying if it's voluntary and I have to pay a huge tax for each road, I'm probably not going to be driving on that many roads.
I'm probably going to stick to about two or three different particular routes if that was the case.
And once I start going less roads, possibly the businesses who are along that particular road that's charging high taxes, they'll complain to the road manager and the road manager will possibly respond in order to get more traffic on there.
This is all hypothetical because I always think of things if I was running it.
So, you know, I think I would do it perfectly, but I got to remember that everyone's not as nice as me.
Well, one thing that that actually, what you were saying, that's very interesting because you're right, you wouldn't have to pay a road tax on roads you weren't going to use, which is fair, I think, especially if you weren't a driver, you wouldn't have to pay the road tax.
So you would end up with kind of much more local just a much more local economy, assuming it was a local company that owned the roads.
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting idea, actually.
I'm not normally for privatization.
That's the thing.
I'm normally quite anti-privatization.
But that's interesting.
And I can definitely see the merits.
I'm waiting for someone in the comments to point out why this is a horrible suggestion.
Because it doesn't sound unreasonable, especially given the alternative, like you say, of Congress and just the fact that politicians are so easily bought off.
Whereas in this case, it would be anyone with the money paying for the service would be the ones basically buying the corporation off.
Yeah, and I um I do believe that there could be two for um, you know, like um what is it?
Different um different classes like um far as minorities who well first with the roads regarding I'm I'm not particularly um thinking about if public roads I wouldn't assume that the public would be paying for them.
I would assume that the public would be paying for roads through the businesses.
The businesses who are along that particular road would pay for property rights to have access, to intersect their parking lots or whatever, to that road and that would pay for the upkeep.
Right okay, okay and uh, but as far as like, your average person wouldn't actually pay any money to use most roads, then not particularly.
But as far as um like, unless they like live on in a neighborhood, like if, let's say, it's my neighborhood, I have a road going down my street.
If the was it the homeowners association, if they wanted to add a specific fee to my mortgage that would cover road upkeep and I could, you know, possibly negotiate that or take it or leave it.
Basically, if I wanted to buy the new house in that area and that would possibly be a way to pay for smaller roads, like smaller residential roads.
Right okay, Jessica has just posted which I was waiting for someone brighter than me to come up.
The unreasonable part is very easy to figure out.
If you can't condemn all the property on a roadway, then you as many, then you as many distinct owners as you like, or then you have as many distinct owners as you like?
I think that means, does that make any sense?
hang on let me go to the yeah if you can't condemn all of the property on the roadway Jessica can you explain that a bit more to us we're not all as clever as you you bastard I swear he makes just such fantastic arguments I'm always in awe and I like to think that he became gay as a logical choice he looked at women and was like you know what makes more sense to go with men
and each person's property through which the road goes is free to serve his own toll booth I suppose so.
I suppose so if you're based on property yeah, I mean that's always a possibility, but I don't think it's that likely.
I mean the same could be argued for private, private grocery stores, if they have the right to build their own grocery stores.
Every grocery store is going to charge ten dollars to come in because I mean hey, you can't get your food anywhere else, you have to go to the store.
And don't give them ideas Jesus, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
I think that's prophecy there.
Just because I wasn't born gay, I was sucked into it.
Very nice, sorry.
Should we talk about something a bit lighter then?
Have you got anything you want to particularly talk about?
Um, let's see, let's see, let's see, let's see, let's see.
I'm a terrible host.
I'm really sorry.
That's all good I'm.
I'm trying to remember.
You and Goodfellow brought up a talk subject.
Oh yeah, on your last show.
I'm trying to remember.
I'm probably not going to be able to, so if it comes back across, I'll, I'll merge it up right okay, but Let's just go ahead and get this out the way.
What's your opinion on the Bain666 video that I was talking to you about?
What is it?
Gender discount.
Gender-based discount.
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
It's hard to believe someone would postulate it.
I can barely believe the cohonies on that woman to say that women should get a discount just for being women.
I am just.
I have reduced to a tumblerite.
I cannot even.
I have lost all my evens.
What do you think about it?
It was incredible that she was so openly bigoted.
It was in covert.
It wasn't even trying to make it seem like we need to give women this discount because they're oppressed or because they're underprivileged.
No, you said because they're the majority, because they're doing good, they deserve a discount.
It's outrageous.
The cojones, it's just like, Jesus, I don't think I'd have the balls to say that in public, let alone so proud of the idea, as if it's a great thought that it's just occurred to her and will really help women.
What was it?
Release the power of women or something.
She was saying, It's like, yeah, but Jesus.
You know, that's going to release the power of just financial serfdom, effectively, isn't it?
You know, men are just going to get poorer and poorer and poorer, and it's totally unfair.
And I'm really curious to know.
I haven't gone to their website, but I'm curious to know what businesses are supporting them because it like discounts on gender-specific things like on tampons or whatever, or on women's clothing, or is it just discounts on, yeah, your husband has to pay $50 for this coaster, you have to pay $35.
Or worse on food.
I mean, you know, what are you going to do?
Not buy the food?
I don't have to buy the toaster, but, you know, if it's on essential.
Even though it's stupid in regards to just overall the idea, but even as a business, I wouldn't even think to engage in this.
It's so stupid to think that you're just giving a discount.
Yeah, you're just giving a discount for women who walk in the door.
I would just sit, like someone said in Bayne's comments, I would just send all the women to go shopping.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would never do the shopping again myself, you know, which is going to make my life a lot easier.
But the thing is, I mean, I suppose maybe they just end up raising prices so that the men are paying, you know, raising prices to cover whatever the loss was.
So it's just, yeah, like you said, it's just bigoted.
I can hardly believe that they suggest it.
I can hardly believe it.
And it's just, it's just, I think I mentioned this in the comment on his video that it's people refer, like, feminists hate the idea of people referring to them as feminazis, but their feminists in general are incredibly discriminatory.
They're going for gender quotas or no, what is it?
What's another one?
Gender salary increase just because you're a woman.
Even though you work less, you still deserve the same amount of money.
Everything about it.
Everything about it.
Or the idea that when a woman takes maternity leave, force the men to take maternity leave too.
And now we just have arbitrary discounts because of vagina.
And I'm wondering, because they said gender-based discount.
I'm wondering if they're referring to sex or if I'm a trans woman, if I can get a discount too.
Because I'm not above wearing a dress to get some money off.
I'm really not.
Yeah, I just can hardly believe it.
To be honest, there's a lot thing I've ever seen.
You know, I've just never seen anything.
Did you see that?
Hang on, say that again.
You buzzed out for a second.
Sorry, he did one of his toxic feminism videos.
I can't remember which one it was in.
He had a video clip from something called the Scum Manifesto, which is pretty rad femme stuff, don't get me wrong.
But you know that there are secretly a lot of feminists are probably like, yeah, yeah, fucking men.
Fuck him.
Did you see that?
Yeah, I think I did come across that one.
Yeah, the young girl.
Literature and stuff like that.
Yeah, the video clip for anyone who didn't see it was basically this guy like relaxing in a chair and these girls like filming on a phone doing the stupid girly things.
And then you think, okay, well, this is pathetic.
It's just stupid, stupid girly giggling.
And then one of the girls goes up behind him with a gun and shoots him in the back of the head.
And they all run off.
They play around with the blood and stuff in his body for a bit.
And then they run off screaming and giggling like it was a big joke.
And it was just like it's like Clockwork Orange style stuff.
And I was just watching it in shock.
I remember the first time I saw that, I had to re-watch it because the quality was pretty good.
It looked fairly real.
And I had to reconsider.
I was like, okay.
First, who is this guy?
And why did he agree to this?
How did they go him into it?
What did they say?
This was an artistic move just to show the self-defense of women or something like that.
Sorry about this.
My internet dropped.
I'm just reinviting tea now.
Hopefully, you can get in.
Sorry, I've just got the worst internet connection in the world.
▲
Export Selection