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Aug. 25, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:41:36
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #727
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And we are live.
Welcome to the podcast of the Low Seaters episode 727 for today, Friday the 25th of August 2023.
I am your host Connor joined again by Stelios!
Hello again!
Yeah, I know you're stuck with me a few days in the running.
Don't worry, most of the other hosts are off, but they'll be back next week, so you get a break from my droning voice.
But we're going to have some fun with the topics today.
We're going to discuss why Bill Maher explains how liberalism is brain rot.
I can feel Stelios' glowing laser eyes bearing into the side of my head.
Why Jordan Peterson shouldn't back down, and why the new demographic nightmare has just dropped by the ONS in the UK.
It's going to be a really cheery last segment, that one, but we're going to try and propose some solutions.
Before we jump into today's news items, we have two things on the docket.
First of all, at 3.30 UK time today, we have the Gold Tier Zoom Call, where there will be possibly four of us.
So you're going to get a full house of the lads' hour.
So if you are a Gold Tier subscriber, you can come in, you can queue up, you can ask us questions and yell at us for whatever we've upset you with this month.
Or if you're not, then you've still got time to sign up and jump in.
So, 3.30.
And then, just from the top of the hour, I thought we'd discuss this, and that is Donald Trump's mugshot.
Now, just a little bit of a segment on this, because yesterday I covered the Trump indictments in full, but the implications of this are pretty mad.
First of all, this was Donald Trump's first tweet back on ex-Twitter, whatever we're calling it nowadays, and I wanted to mention the fact that when I went over to Washington recently, I went to the portrait gallery.
They've got an exhibition that's pretty permanent with all of the presidential portraits that each person gets painted.
Donald Trump never had his presidential portrait painted.
So I think this is going to have an extra historical dimension, not just because he's the first U.S. president to ever be imprisoned.
Obviously, he posted bail, so he's not sitting in jail, but he's got his mugshot there.
Very intense look, really exudes vengeance, but also because...
Laser eyes into it.
Yeah, I'm sure there's been an edit of that.
Also because I guarantee you this is going to be in the National Portrait Gallery no matter what happens with the 2024 election.
They're probably going to have either his existing photo and a little one alongside this or, if he wins again, he's going to have a proper portrait painted and probably this alongside it for historical posterity.
Or wouldn't it be amazing if this was the only photo that was in the Portrait Gallery?
I mean, it would be great.
Let's see what happens.
Yeah, so I think here, and this is my prediction, that this was a regime blunder because so far I think the Democrat Party apparatchiks, the Uniparty really, because the RINOs have enabled them, particularly in Georgia with Brad Raffensperger, but they didn't want this photo to exist because the previous indictments didn't require him to have a mugshot, especially not where he showed up in New York because Alvin Bragg said he didn't want a mugshot.
And I think that the dumbest of their diversity hires DAs has allowed her ambition to exceed her competency here and she's let him take this photo.
And this photo is the single best thing for Trump in this campaign because now he is vindicated in his assertion that he is being arbitrarily persecuted by a partisan justice system that doesn't cut both ways for Biden and Trump.
And so the fact that this exists, the fact that this can be on t-shirts, Brilliant win for the 2024 campaign.
And I wonder if, partially, the regime still wants him to be the Pied Piper candidate that Hillary tried to prop him up as in 2016.
Much to her own tragic fall, of course, but I do think this is a miscalculation by the regime rather than a 4D chess move.
And I'm glad it's happened, because this now has a million likes and it is a hell of a photo.
So, just thought we'd give that quick mention before we jump into today's proper segment.
So, without further ado, Right, so Jordan Peterson was recently a guest on Bill Maher's Club Random, his podcast where he sits in a technicolour basement smoking weed and talking about how bad Trump is.
This was a few weeks ago now, and the discussion between the two demonstrated why I think liberalism is a form of brain rot.
Let me hear.
I know, and so I'm really glad that you set in on this one, not just because it's Friday and we're going to have a bit of fun, but of course you are our long-suffering defender of classical liberalism in the office.
Political liberalism, not social liberalism, and so I'm sure you're going to be able to elucidate the distinctions and probably try and defend the tradition a little bit from what it has metastasized into.
And speaking of which, before we jump into today's segment, if you'd like to go over to our website, Check out all of our premium content.
These are our Rumble live streams.
Now, they're exclusive for a certain amount of time, but they are streamed to Rumble first.
We take Super Chat questions from our audience, and this isn't behind the paywall.
It is free, but of course, with as little as £5 a month, you can get all of our premium content.
I'll be mentioning more of the premium content that particularly you have done with Carl recently throughout the podcast.
This one was on James Lindsay's conception of liberalism.
It was a sequel to our discussion of Christian nationalism.
We only did two because we ran over time in the first one because the discussion was so rich between myself and Harry.
Harry spearheaded this one with James Lindsay's conception of liberalism and how actually the complacency of liberalism, social liberalism in particular, has led to the fertile soil from which woke has sprung.
They're not disconnected.
There's actually a continuity between the two.
And I think Bill Maher actually shows that off.
So this was the Club Random episode, and you can go and watch the full thing in your own time.
What I've done here is I've clipped a few sections.
So the first clip I wanted to go to, Bill Maher insists dogmatically that wokeness and liberalism, this is American liberalism, have nothing to do with each other.
So let's play the first one.
Jack, can we go to the first clip please?
Except when do you think the left goes too far?
May I use my lifeline?
fly?
Absolutely.
Call the people who know.
Okay.
I mean, you mean they haven't already?
Well, how do you know?
When Trump gets reelected, that's when you know.
What would you regard as behavior on the left that's unacceptable from the perspective of someone who's essentially liberal?
How long have you got?
I mean, the theme I've been trying to promulgate as much as I can the last five years, partly just in self-defense of people who say, say, I've changed, I have not, is that wokeness is not something that expands on liberalism.
It It's something that undoes it.
And I think you are on the same page generally.
I mean, to give a few examples, colorblindness, wanting to have a colorblind society where we don't see race was classic liberalism.
Certainly what Obama was going for.
That's not wokeism.
Wokeism is race is front and center to everything.
Yeah, so that's part of that.
To me, that's an extension of the insistence that someone's primary identity is ratified by their group.
Right.
Which again, is exactly what old school liberals were fighting against.
Don't characterize somebody by that.
Okay, so they completely inverted and then they get mad at us for somehow we're conservative.
No, no, we're not conservatives.
You're just not what liberals are.
You're doing a different thing, which is fine.
We're allowed to do our thing, but you can't do this whole different thing and then take the term that used to apply, but doesn't apply anymore.
I mean, there's many colleges that have segregated dorms.
Okay.
Again, you do you, but this is not liberalism, okay?
And certainly in the realm of gender.
Liberalism is always about tolerance for let's celebrate and allow everyone to be protected and respected for who they are.
That includes homosexuality, that includes trans, which of course is a real thing that happens.
That's different than rewriting the anatomy book from page one so that every kid who comes out it's a jump ball and there's no such thing as sex, it's only gender.
And again, this is something different.
It's not liberalism.
So you can't say, oh, you don't believe in that.
You're not a liberal.
So.
During this conversation, he keeps bringing up Trump.
He brought up Trump in there as the only example of when the left goes too far.
So his example of when the left goes too far, as you can see, was when liberalism loses, it's shown to go too far, which implies that there's not too much of an overreach that his version of liberalism can do.
He then also later on talks about how he studied the Bible in college but, quote, he knew he was going to become a comedian so he barely paid attention and he doesn't understand how Peterson, quote, sees all the lessons in this and he just read it as some stupid effing stories from the Bronze Age.
So it seems that his version of liberalism is very disconnected from the Christian tradition that gave birth to it in America particularly.
But what did you think about what he said there?
Do you think liberalism has any connection to wokeness?
So I think I will surprise you now.
Go on.
I'm ready, Stelios.
First of all, let me start with something with a very negative comment.
Is it about his shirt?
It's really ugly.
I'm just saying I just never understood what's the magic of him.
Why?
I just don't find him funny.
He dresses up lots of his statements in this sort of smarmy sarcasm and so it makes midwits feel really superior.
Yeah, but sometimes This is exactly what it does and it doesn't look bad.
It doesn't age well.
So I saw a clip of his some time ago with Dennis Prager.
Yes.
I think it was 2019 and he was, he was acting in a very weird way.
Well, because he was acting and talking as if, you know, Dennis Prager is, is a fool and an idiot and he's not, but the whole way, He was acting, was incredibly performative, and it was clear that he was acting like a sophist there.
Now, occasionally, he may have said a thing or two, I agree with him, but to be honest, I don't remember.
It's just that I remember that I didn't disagree with everything he said in the past.
Now, let me say something good.
I think that you said something really good in the beginning and how you phrased the discussion, which after your first sentence, because the first sentence was how liberalism is brainwashed, but then you started qualifying.
And I don't think that there is anything wrong with qualifying.
And actually, I think you qualified quite well.
There is a distinction between classical liberalism, social liberalism, You know, all kinds of liberalisms.
And basically, it is really good to show that there are distinct versions.
And actually, these are umbrella terms.
It's very easy to basically take one view, like conservatism with capital C and attack it wholesale, or liberalism with capital L and attack it wholesale.
But that's not productive.
And there's a reason for that, because A lot of the times when people criticize views, they want to stand out in the crowd and they want, for instance, their criticisms to appear incredibly radical.
And one of the ways in which they do it is take one of the values the other side claims to have, such as, for instance, liberty on the one hand, or community on the other hand, and just try to attack it completely, say that it is not a value.
So when people attack liberalism with a capital L, I think that they are having a problem that any kind of solution that they're going to offer will not include liberty as a very important political value.
See, I disagree.
And I don't think... Let me just finish my point and hear you.
So I think that, for instance, if right now there must be There must be an alliance between classical liberals and conservatives.
I deeply believe that.
Okay?
But if, for instance, each person from each side tries to completely dismiss the other view, they are going to end up with really bad suggestions because their values are going to be very one-sided.
For instance, right now, Extreme liberty is bad.
It's license.
It's anarchy.
It leads to the disintegration of societies and communities.
It leads to what is called actually, what is actually, what we're talking about, the atomized individual.
On the other hand, an extreme focus on community would lead us to a kind of collectivism and the extreme rejection of individualism.
And I think there needs to be a marriage of these two.
And in order for us to do this, I think we need to be a bit more Careful and do what you did to qualify.
And instead of saying, I'm attacking conservatism, or I'm attacking liberalism, or I'm attacking any other view with a capital front letter, we say, okay, let us see what are the fundamental values that each of them advocate.
Let us see whether these values are really important values that we want to uphold, and whether actually society can survive without them, because society cannot survive without a focus on community, or also a focus on liberty, the way I see it.
Right, okay.
So I am going to attack liberalism with a capital L. Absolutely.
And the reason is, one, it doesn't have monopoly on liberty, but two, I think Bill Maher, over the course of this conversation and in here, demonstrates how you cannot Distinguish, particularly with the evolution of these doctrines and their common precepts, political liberalism from social liberalism.
I think they have an evolution here.
I think liberalism has a tendency to liquidate social bonds because political liberalism is a framework without a normative ethic.
That's why liberalism and Christianity are compatible.
But without Christianity, liberalism evolves into social liberalism, because if you can't quantify what the good life is under liberalism, all you can just say is, we need a system of political checks and balances so the state doesn't become that communitarian collective tyranny, then if you look for an affirmative value system, then because it can't say what you should do, all it says is what things are getting in the way of what you want to do.
So it becomes an eternal crusade of liquidating any kind of constraint that seems to be an imposition on individual liberty or at the very best you get people like bill maher who are these complacent liberals and who say well that's not liberal the civil rights movement was about individuality despite the fact that mlk cavorted with and was funded entirely by communists and wanted affirmative action but we'll gloss over that anyway
what you get then is a blindness to the movements that are using your liberal precepts to undermine your civilization.
This is why when he says, oh, Obama was for individuality.
No, he wasn't.
He was fully on board as a leftist lawyer, so he would have been familiar with critical race theory, with things like affirmative action.
He was fully on board with group-based identity.
That's why he said, if I had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin, giving legitimacy to the Black Lives Matter movement.
And so I actually share Schmidt, and I know you don't like Schmidt, but his criticism of liberalism, where the value neutrality of liberalism is the cover of night by which subversive forces can enter your civilization, like critical race theory, and use your own values against you, like freedom, liberty, equality, material abundance, and subvert like freedom, liberty, equality, material abundance, and subvert your values.
And then you stand around going, well, what happened?
I thought the left used to stand for free speech and anti-racism.
No, no, no.
They were always against you.
They were just using you as a useful puppet.
That's my concern.
Okay, you raise a lot of excellent points, and I will surprise you again.
First point, you said that liberalism does not have the monopoly on liberty.
I fully agree with you.
In fact, I have Symposium No.
2 that I did with Bo, Conceptions of Political Freedom, where we are actually talking about this.
Now, and we are saying that, for instance, there are many traditions.
We are talking about three traditions.
One is the negative one, which is the kind of liberty that classical liberals are mostly talking about.
The other is the positive one and the other is the Republican one.
And at the end of the day, we are saying none of them in isolation works.
We need to fuse both of them.
So if what you're saying is that Classical liberalism does not have a monopoly on liberty.
In that sense, then we're in full agreement.
What I would try to say is that in attacking classical liberalism with a capital L, or liberalism, as you said, with a capital L, we are very likely to miss the importance of negative liberty, which is freedom from government interference and also by the deliberate interference of other people.
Because at the end of the day, the point is that What classical liberals want, to a very large extent, is for the government to not tell us what we want, what we are to do.
Maybe you are really happy with that idea?
Well, no, no, no.
I'm saying, I think Bill Maher goes on to explain why that's not the case.
Wait, now, when it comes to the religious connection you said between classical liberalism and Christian values, yes, I think that there is such a connection, and the connection is not so much conceptual as much as historical.
So, yes, when we live in societies where people, for instance, become nihilists, and I don't mean necessarily atheists, but nihilists with respect to value in general, that is a very big problem for everything.
But let me go back to the thing you said before.
There are ways in which liberalism and people who espouse liberal ideals can be led into into wokeness.
There can be.
And let me just mention two.
But before I mention them, I want to say that this is much more an issue of rhetoric and judgment.
That is foremost.
Which means that the slide is not particularly a problem for classical liberalism.
It's a problem for every ideology.
Why?
Because words change.
And he said something unbelievably wrong.
He said, this term does not apply anymore.
No, actually, if you have read any Conservative literature, you will know that history matters to a very large extent.
We're historical beings to understand ourselves We need to understand our society and our history.
So it just doesn't apply when he says that the term does not apply anymore.
That's just a wrong way to view it.
But let me just say one thing.
I'll give you two ways in which this can disintegrate, in which liberalism can disintegrate into Wilkins.
And it has to do with, for instance, how we understand concepts.
One is the concept of harm.
Now, in the classical period of liberalism, there were people who were saying, for instance, that Harm is just physical harm.
Then at some point with Meal, people started saying that there is such a thing as psychological harm.
And I think we both agree that there is, because, for instance, we are saying things regularly, but when we have, for instance, children who are exposed to particular kinds of events, this is psychologically harmful.
But the question comes there with interpretations of harm.
So when people come and say, for instance, that they see harm everywhere, they can be claiming that actually they are espousing Mill's classically liberal harm principle, but they are applying it in a way that shows that they have zero connection or zero Respect for the idea of negative liberty.
That is why we have a kind of wokeness that tolerates zero disagreement and actually wants to tell us how to live.
It has a code of ethics that they want to enforce upon us.
And this is not classically liberal.
So I'm glad you brought up Mill because going into the next Mark clip, just because I'm wary of time, Mill was actually a defender of liberal imperialism in order to spread values outwards.
And my contention with this, we've spoken off air about this before, is that how liberalism positions itself in the evolution of philosophy is that this is the apotheosis of How to have negative liberty, and it is the culmination of the Enlightenment.
It's the dominant philosophy that came out of it.
We live in the liberal paradigm.
And so, because it seeds to itself that moral legitimacy as being a kind of end of history ideology, therefore, why should we not roll it out everywhere?
And Bill Maher, despite saying, well this isn't liberalism, woke isn't liberalism, it's nothing to do with it, it's basically imperialist, then goes on in this next clip to talk exactly about why You know, I've taken my lumps, especially after 9-11, talking, I think, honestly about the problem, the same thing Sam Harris has identified so beautifully, that there is a unique problem with the religion, whatever religion it is at any time in history, that is the most fundamentalist.
And at this time in our history, that is Islam.
Well, might be.
Might be woke liberalism.
Hey man, it's a talk show.
No, well, that is a religion too, yes.
But you know, it also might be which religion is being gamed most effectively at any given moment by the psychopaths.
Right.
But if I draw a mean cartoon of AOC, I'm not going to get killed.
But if I draw the wrong cartoon in the other religion, I will.
Yes, that's not a good thing.
So I'm going to make that important to me, like which one could really kill me.
But things, I really feel like things have changed a lot.
I haven't talked about this in a long time.
They have changed.
Because, you know, terrorism hasn't really been in the headlines and... Yeah, well, the Abraham Accords were a big step forward too, man.
They were a big step forward.
And I, and things change, you know, um, I thought it would just amuse me.
There was a, I think, you know, must be in Minnesota, I think, where there's a large Muslim population.
I forget the city, but they, the liberals, they were very proud of themselves that they elected a majority Muslim school board.
Which then, during Pride Month, refused to do the Pride plan.
And that's always the conundrum liberals have found themselves in, which I always ridiculed, and of course they hated me for it.
That, how can you be liberal?
And because they're a minority, or a different religion, or their skin is brown, support them in the most illiberal actions.
You know, just the way the women with the Really?
We're putting a fucking tarp over a woman's head?
And this is not like job one on your woke agenda would be to get the fucking... It's like what they put on a prisoner, you know, when we're kidnapping you.
That's not job one to get that off every woman's head in the world?
That would be mine.
If I was like, okay, welcome to the meeting of liberals and wokesters, and we have the social justice warriors, and we must establish social justice wherever it's being violated, that would be very high on my meeting agenda.
Right.
You'd go for the countries where there's real oppression.
I would go for that specific act.
Just justified global liberal imperialism based on the precepts of these people are illiberal, therefore, it's the MLK quote from Letters from Birmingham Jail, an affront to justice anywhere is an affront to justice everywhere.
Yes, but.
Go on.
Okay, there is a but here.
Go on.
I like buts, Elias.
Same.
That's going on the out of context.
Yeah, there we go.
Anyway, continue.
Sorry, okay.
Now, this is one way in which this can eventuate.
But I really disagree with... What I see here is a kind of weird game with words.
Because he says, how can these people...
claim to be liberal and support these mostly illiberal activities.
And actually, this means that he has actually fallen for the rhetorical game.
He has fallen for the rhetorical attempt by illiberal people to incorporate the name liberty for their agenda, Why?
Because post-Cold War, the term liberty has become a symbol.
Now, yes, most people understand it in a very uncritical and wrong fashion, but it has assumed the status of a symbol.
And that is why we have woke people and people from all over the place who want to claim the name liberty for themselves, despite the fact that they have nothing to do with it.
Now, with what you were saying before about the Enlightenment, this is one way to view the Enlightenment, and I think that also it's a bit wrong to use a sort of quasi-Marxist language where we are talking about, for instance, classical liberalism seeds itself the moral authority.
I think that it's people at the end of the day.
And we shouldn't try and give agency to ideas, to conceptual systems.
But the ideas are posited by people.
And this is part of my criticism.
That is why it's better to say people who claim at this time and place to be liberals have said this.
And the problem is that when they claim moral authority and they use a particular kind of rhetoric, this is a pervasive feature across the board.
Because at the end of the day, I do think that political realism is an indispensable tool in explaining things.
We have people who want to use power and they use rhetoric to sugarcoat it.
So, it stands to reason that many people who have nothing to do with respecting liberty will say, how am I going to give an air of legitimacy in my attempt to exercise domination upon all other people?
I will say that I'm doing it in favor of their symbols.
Yeah, but I don't think that... Hang on, but we're running out of time.
Just one thing, look behind the rhetoric and what they're doing.
And the same rhetoric, a different rhetoric could be used for the same purpose, to actually enforce to those who disagree with you their view.
But I think the justification for the imperialism is to create the prerequisite conditions to express liberty by removing any and all perceived barriers to that, including a head covering, even if a woman would want to wear it.
I, by the way, think that that religion is barbarous and backwards, but I also don't want to invade every country around the world practicing it.
You could use it and you could use all other Political positions to do that.
You could give arguments in favor of imperialism because you want to secure some values.
So it depends on the value.
If you say people who value community, for instance, I'm going to justify imperialism because I'm going to enforce the community in the way I have it in mind.
Oh yeah, but currently we don't have that as the value.
We have the liberal conception of liberty, and that's why they've been able to subvert the paradigm.
That's what I'm saying.
It's like, if we had another dominant paradigm, I'd be critiquing that paradigm, but we don't.
And funnily enough, I think the inability to articulate a normative moral value structure within political liberalism is why personalities become politics.
And so we go on to this one.
I just wanted to contrast these next two clips, and that is that Jordan Peterson talks about the dark tetrad, right, that's behind wokeness.
It's Machiavellianism, sadism, psychopathy, and narcissism.
Josh and I have spoken about the dark triad before in relation to why women love serial killers in a contemplation.
So let's just watch these guys talk about that.
When you got sick, I feel like there's a little team.
We don't all agree on everything, but we all kind of agree that there's a thing called sanity, and there's a certain amount of stuff that lands in it and certain stuff that lands out, and we don't have to agree.
We kind of like the fact that we don't have to agree on everything, but we're... Well, you don't learn otherwise, do you?
We don't learn, but you know, in general, we don't have that many...
Things to disagree on.
So yeah, I agree.
The idea that we would lose any member of the team, this little Avengers squad that we have, I feel like is, yeah, it's very threatening, because I feel like There are people who only think all day long about how to cancel people, how to get rid of people.
That is their raison d'etre, and they would like to think of themselves as social justice warriors, and they're just fucking mean girls.
It's not about the worrying, and it's not about the social, and it's not about the justice nearly as much as it is about I got this scalp on my wall.
That's the sadism part.
That's right.
I found somebody who's less morally aware than me and my friends because they didn't get the memo about Latinx.
We say Latinx now.
Oh, shut up, fetch girl.
I like the Mean Girls reference.
You see when there isn't an audience in front of him that he makes more sense than usual.
Yes.
And it's funny that he makes that amount of sense.
Basically, almost verbatim quoting Jonathan Haidt, right?
Of where he's saying the moral foundations of the people in a vacuum of normative values are the things which unconsciously drive you.
So if you're just permanently wedded to the value of equality, then that becomes the gravitational force around which all of your politics swim.
He can say all that, very insightful.
And then Bill Maher demonstrates himself to be one of those exact mean girls who is resentful of other people's successes and gets super defensive and insults Jordan Peterson without even knowing it and demonstrates exactly why the American liberals on the Democrat side are as awful as they are, and as he was awful to Dennis Prager, as you've elucidated.
So I just wanted to play this one.
Except relationships.
It took me a long time to learn that I'm not really built for the standard...
When you were ticking off those five things you need to be happy or whatever, I must say that's the one time my bristles sort of went up.
I don't know if you're saying this exactly, but I've read it in other places.
I forget the guy's name, but he's a famous doctor and he wrote a book on how to live to be a million years old.
Don't die if you don't have to!
You know what, it really is.
And one of his things was, you know, he had like 40 things you're supposed to do.
And I agreed with most of them, you know, obviously stay in shape and, you know, don't eat sugar.
And one of them was be married.
And I was like, you know, for you.
It bothers the unmarried, and there's actually, I think, probably now more of us than married now in America.
I think that we tipped over that point a few years ago.
I think singles are the majority.
It's just that idea that, you know, well, you're this doctor, you're supposed to be really smart, a lot of what you say is smart, but you don't get that that's like a personal thing.
You know, I hate to put it this way, but sometimes when somebody gets cancer, and they're like, I couldn't have gotten through it without my wife, or I couldn't have gotten through it without my husband.
And I always want to say, yeah, maybe they gave it to you.
Yeah, well, you know, relationships can be definitely... Yes, the stress of one, I'm talking about, of course.
It's funny, though, you know, because is it... how much of it do you think is the stress of relationship?
And how much do you think of it?
How much of it do you think is the difficulty of maintaining a relationship through the stresses of life?
A, not B.
Not life.
Life is not the problem.
It's the relationship itself.
It's the monotony.
I mean, again, people are different.
Some people, they love that.
I know guys who are like, they cannot wake up alone.
And that's not me.
People are different.
And I don't think we give that enough respect, that idea.
I think there's a lot of this assuming If you want to be happy, be married.
Just get in line, buddy.
Come on.
This is what we're doing here.
We're doing the marriage thing.
You do you.
Yeah, we don't give it respect because, frankly, why is Bill Maher a respectable person?
I mean, just look at the two of them there, right?
Bill Maher's dressed like an overgrown child, he's got loads of booze and dope on the side of his table, Jordan Peterson is teetotal, and Bill Maher is sitting there suggesting that the stress of a relationship which he couldn't maintain might have given the other partner cancer.
So Jordan Peterson, who has just recovered from a debilitating illness, because his wife had cancer and they've been able to maintain their relationship, But the resentment exuding from Bill Maher is actually the prerequisite reason why he wants to be a liberal.
It's why he wants to dissolve those cultural expectations.
Because he feels bad about falling short in himself, so he wants a doctrine of politics, imperially, which makes him feel less bad by other people living out standards which he knows he could never live up to.
Well, I think that this is a bit psychologizing.
I'm happy to psychologize, especially with a man in that shirt.
I mean, it's okay.
I mean, I generally don't like it, so I will abstain from psychologizing.
But I want to address the substance of the issue you raised.
There are people who are afraid of responsibility in all political positions, and they could be attracted to any kind of political position for all sorts of reasons.
And very frequently, they're attracted to illiberal positions because they don't want the liberty and the freedom of choice.
They don't want this responsibility of choice.
A liberal with a little L. Why?
Because, as we've already established, there are socially liberal doctrines which dissolve standards as the prerequisite to liberty.
So those people would be more attracted to the doctrine which allows them to evade the standard.
Yes, but that's not unique to liberalism.
But it is to our current paradigm.
Exactly.
I don't accept the collapse of the current paradigm with what liberalism is.
I think it's a logical extension.
I think it's a logical extension on your part when you attack classical liberalism with a capital L, or liberalism with a capital L. And at the end of the day, it goes back to the fundamental question.
On how do we relate to people who disagree with us on value systems?
I think if Bill Maher is a person who thinks that, for instance, marriage is not good for him, most probably he's not going to be a good parent.
So what would happen if, for instance, people like Bill Maher were forced by society and the kind of moral pressure We're forced by society to have children.
Maybe he would be a bad father.
Yeah, but you're saying moral pressure, you're saying state pressure, because this is the difference between... So with moral pressure, I think moral pressure should be exerted to the level where you are the type of person, you are formed into the type of person that's worthy of being a parent, like Jordan Peterson tries to do.
And Bill Maher is saying, actually, not state-mandated marriages, just even advice that you should get married is actually oppressive and it's upsetting to people that can't quite hack it.
We need to dissolve the standard so I can feel better.
I understand.
There are people who say this, OK?
But I don't see why, for instance, this is unique to liberalism.
Oh, I see.
There are people, for instance, who want to say that, well, I don't want the burden of choice, so I want to ask my local priest to tell me what should I do.
Sure, but he's not saying that because he's identifying... He's not saying that either.
The same way that you wouldn't accept this argument against another position, I don't accept the argument you make for this position.
But I'm saying that his version of liberalism, which I think is a logical extension from the paradigm we currently inhabit, is, in the same way as the wokesters that he says has nothing to do with him, trying to dissolve social expectations so everyone can have the fundamental supposition of moral equality no matter what their behaviours are.
Well, when you have people who have, let's say, the freedom to act, not all of them are going to act well.
But the same applies for, let's say, if you had a completely tyrannical regime.
You would still have a person who would call the shots on everything.
That person is almost guaranteed.
But you keep moving into state power.
I'm not talking about state power.
I'm talking about cultural pressure.
And he's saying, I want to dissolve cultural pressure as well.
Yes.
And the reason I'm doing that is because we are doing a category error here.
Because I think that political liberalism is supposed to be A doctrine that has to do with the relation between the state and the governed.
It doesn't say that we are going to give answers to every question.
It actually shows a lot of trust to civil society.
Now, there should be more pressure in civil society.
I agree with you.
But we should always think when we want to try and force people into a particular play, let's say, we need to also be aware of the actors.
Some people may not be good enough to be parents.
It's not about forcing, it's about trying to provide moral guardrails.
And those people that aren't capable of being parents should also have strict vocations or that can't have kids, for example, that allow them to serve as spiritual parents in many such ways that Jordan Peterson is capable of being.
So like a father figure to multiple men that he hasn't directly fathered himself.
And Bill Maher is happy to tear asunder all of those social expectations, which would allow people to do that.
I don't understand how this is an attack against liberalism.
Because the paradigm is the logical extension of it.
Yeah, but okay, that is posing a kind of necessity in things that I just think is unsupported.
It's just an observation of how it's evolved, I think.
You cannot justify claims about necessity and universality by just observation.
Well, I'm not saying necessity.
I'm saying that it has evolved out of that because of the exact precepts.
Well, some people have evolved that this way.
But, you know, there is wokeness in all sides.
You could be a big C conservative and become woke.
I don't think you can become a C conservative wokeist.
I don't accept that position.
Oh, you could.
It depends on if people slowly, in a matter of decades, start eroding the idea of a community and then you want to say that your ideal community is a community when everyone is respected and to be respected is for all their wishes to be granted and for no one to disrespect them, then it follows that as a matter of wanting to establish a good community, you need to actually do that.
Now, I reject this kind of community and this conception of a community, but I'm showing you how With language we can play along and justify all kinds of things with everything.
It's a possibility.
Which is why I think you need a theological basis.
I'm just conscious of doing the last clip so we don't run over on your segment.
So let's just go to the last one because I just wanted to examine the character of Bill and exactly why he then gets defensive as soon as Peterson decides to say, well, maybe, you know, it works for me.
Why don't you give it a try?
I'm not the boyfriend.
I wasn't good at that.
I'm the king, okay?
You know, it's great you can have your boyfriend or lancelot, but it was just never the role that I was meant to play.
So I just got more comfortable the older I got to this day, you know.
And of course, at some point that will end because, you know, we are pushing, you know, the age where I guess that is around the corner.
But, you know, Until they stop me, I'll continue to live young.
So, you know, to answer your question, what keeps me going?
I think a lot of it is that I like the fact that I didn't have kids because then I didn't like Pass on... I didn't trade my life for someone else's life, which is what you sort of have to do when you have kids.
It's noble, and it's... I get the sacrifice, but like, I'm... What really... What has sustained you?
I mean, you talked about your parents, and you're grateful to that relationship.
Yeah.
Why do you think you were so successful in terms of maintaining long-term friendships, but not successful in terms of maintaining... Because I don't see it as a success!
Right, but you do see how to be friends as a...
Just the way the question is phrased, you're not successful at keeping long-term relationships.
Yeah, I threw the game, okay, Doc?
I didn't want to be successful.
I took a dive in the third round.
Right, but it's curious to me that you...
But that isn't the case on the friendship front.
But it's so different.
Friendships don't get tired of the sex!
I still love hanging out with Jim Bally and we never ever expect sex.
Ever.
Not once in 45 years.
So there's just not that dimension to it that is always hanging over the head like the sword of Damocles over relationships.
The clock's always ticking on them for when the passion runs out.
And that's the dilemma everybody finds themselves in.
Everybody finds themselves in it.
It's just how people handle it.
Some people cheat, some people leave, some people don't care.
Some people just suck it up.
You know, everybody has their way of dealing with it, but it's gonna happen.
No one, I mean, and no one who's in a long-term relationship is gonna say, oh yeah, 20 years on and we still like attack each other when we walk in the door.
It's just, come on.
That's true in my case.
You still attack each other?
Yeah.
We just stumped the band.
Sorry, man.
You win dinner at Pepe's.
Thank you, thank you.
Wow, that's very impressive.
You got me.
You win dinner at Pepe's.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Wow.
That's very impressive.
It's really, it's really, it's better man than I.
I think that's probably the best bit to end on.
Better men than Bill, because Bill is very willing to project his personal insecurities and get very defensive as soon as someone else paints a happier, healthier picture of life.
Let me just say two quick things.
I think, first of all, what he said is completely wrong.
Because friendships could still end up badly.
So when he talked about friendship is not a double-edged sword, but marriages are.
That's completely wrong on his part.
But also I want to say that it's fine to not want to have children, but it's quite another thing to try and actually make a virtue out of it and try to preach the whole message to everyone that they shouldn't.
I find that repugnant.
Yeah, and I agree.
But I think the extension of his version of liberalism, where autonomy is all that matters, well, I think the only note I'd like to end on is perhaps if liberal individualism is your sole value, then it might be able to liquidate everything that's meaningful, and it just ends up with loneliness.
So you might need a little bit more wholesome heart at the centre of your politics, and that's what Peterson represented.
Okay, speaking of Jordan Peterson, our first collaboration was at the beginning of this year, this January, and we talked about a case where Jordan Peterson was ordered by the Ontario College of Psychologists to undergo mandatory social media training.
I would love to sit in that room when it happens.
Well, there is a very big chance that we are going to see what is going to happen in that room, as Jordan Peterson has said.
Now, what is interesting is that he was ordered by that to undergo media re-education training, and he was told that basically, if he doesn't do this, he's gonna risk losing his license as a clinical psychologist.
Now, anyone can understand that this is more a hit on his image, because he's not practicing clinical psychology for some years now.
And what is even more ridiculous is that this kind of training in social media conduct is supposed to be a training by the college's social media experts, and that technically is not a field.
I mean, also to say that, you know, social media experts is, it's a bit weird.
Also, if they subject them to the unconscious bias training thing, for example.
It's already been disproven that because the test does not have the replicability of the results, because you can actually improve your score each time you take the test, because it's basically testing reaction time, that it's scientifically bunk.
So if they adopt something like that as well, it just shows that these people have been captured not by the scientific method, but by our ideology.
Yes, and also imagine people who claim to be social media conduct experts who don't participate in social media.
I do think maybe someone does need to talk to Jordan about his Twitter, because I love the man, but he's writing in haikus and posting photos of that bloody stalker.
I don't mind.
I don't mind.
I think it's slightly less… It is eccentric, but in a way that it makes you think.
It gives you some homework.
He's probably been more articulate in the past.
I'll put it that way.
Well, he went to court, to the Court of Appeal, and he appealed against the Ontario College of Psychologists.
And sadly, two days ago, the court ruled in favor of the Ontario College of Psychologists.
So that was a really bad move.
But there is such a possibility.
There is a thing such as the possibility of it turning as a boomerang against them.
So I have the impression that he is going to turn it into a big thing and he is going to actually win them and they're going to lose badly.
That's my impression and my sense.
But the question is, society is a bit challenging at the moment.
There are many people who think that we're doomed to an inevitable decline.
Are they right?
Are they wrong?
Ride the tiger.
If you want to find out, I'm riding no tiger, by the way.
If you want to find out, you can visit our website, LotusEaters.com, and you can, for five pounds a month, you can gain access to all our premium content and watch videos such as Symposium 33, where we are talking with Bo about historical inevitability.
Bo is the person to talk to if you're interested in history, and we're actually examining the methodology of the claims that people make, the methodology behind the claims people make, when they're saying that we are either destined to achieve infinite progress and take humanity to the Elysium Fields, or we are doomed to an inevitable decline.
And, long story short, we're saying that, methodologically speaking, both narratives are fishy.
Well, it'll be interesting when we talk to a certain Consolidator of Prophets of Doom that's coming into the studio next week.
Well, prophecy has a factual element into it.
There's a factual sense and I just don't think it's a fact.
And if you want to see why this is, it's basic methodology, basic talk about human induction and that, you know, stuff like that, by all means check it.
Now, let's see this tweet from January 3, 2023.
Jordan Peterson says, To clarify, it has been decided, I am either to submit to social media communication retraining or face a disciplinary hearing and possible suspension of my clinical license and the right to represent myself as a psychologist.
And if you see down here a bit, he says, I'm mounting a constitutional challenge with have little faith in the remaining integrity of the Canadian judiciary.
And I can't believe I am now faced with the necessity of doing such things and not believing they will work.
So there's an issue here, because at the end of the day, I have the impression that the thing that is the most thorny for his enemies is his outspoken criticism of the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.
And let me just show you one tweet.
I remind you, one tweet.
from February last year, where Justin Trudeau says, Canadians have the right to protest, to disagree with their government, and to make their voices heard.
We'll always protect that right.
But let's be clear, they don't have the right to blockade our economy or our democracy or our fellow citizens' daily life.
It has to stop.
And I think, actually, if you see Trudeau's actions, this claim is entirely hypocritical and actually unreal.
Well, he suspended the bank accounts of multiple people, not just involved in the truckers' protests, but who donated to the protests.
And the reason they were protesting was because he was acting like a draconian crazy person over the COVID mandates, whether it be the lockdowns or the vaccine mandates.
So they were completely justified in protesting against this, and Justin Trudeau acted like a tyrant.
And his response was, then stop.
Puppet.
Now.
Watch your endgame, Justin Trudeau.
Lay it out.
So this was one.
Excuse me.
Sorry.
Can we scroll down a bit?
Can I have the.
You're having trouble?
Excuse me, sorry, can we scroll down a bit?
Can I have the...
Okay.
So, he says that he is unwilling to undergo the mandatory training and he is interested in filming it.
So, right now, I have the impression that this is going to backfire on the Ontario College of Psychology.
I did see that Elon Musk suggested he livestream it in the Twitter space, which would be quite funny.
So one thing, just to show you something that came here, we have just a slide.
What I think this training may involve is going to be something like this slide, which says that basically microaggression is a comment or action, whether intentional or unintentional, that expresses a prejudiced attitude towards a member or a marginal group, such as, example, I believe the most qualified person should get the job.
Well, clearly they don't believe that, considering they're going after Jordan Peterson for completely spurious reasons.
Yes.
OK.
But just wanted to show you that basically, if you talk about meritocracy, you're actually committing an act of microaggression.
Yeah, you're far right.
And this seems to me to be what we said before about harm.
This seems to me exactly what we were talking about.
It's the ridiculous extension of the meaning of a word.
And they're trying to find everywhere and everything to be aggressive.
So this is where wokeness begins.
Now, let's see at this court justice, the Superior Court Justice of Ontario ruled against Jordan Peterson and they said, for instance, reasons for the decision.
Overview, he says, when individuals join a regulated profession, they do not lose their charter right to freedom of expression.
At the same time, however, they take on obligations and must abide by the rules of the regulatory body that may limit their freedom of expression.
This case raises the clash between a member to moderate that speech and they proceed to say some other stuff.
But I want to say that this seems to me to be entirely implausible.
How so?
Because I can get the idea of having to restrict speech if you enter some professions.
But I don't see how expressing your political opinion outside the clinic is something that is supposed to, that should be limited.
Well, even within the clinic itself, unless you have all of your sessions recorded and you have your, or even live streamed, and you have your psychologist mic'd up at all times, you're relying on the testimonies of the patients to self-report malfeasance.
And Peterson has already had an adverse experience of that, where he said he was accused of sexual impropriety because while he was listening to a female patient, he was fiddling with his wedding ring, which he took to be suggestive.
Obviously, she's a crazy person.
But then outside of that, it's obviously, I think part of the reason why you're confused is because it's not actually meant to be a workable thing.
It's just meant to be a standard by which they can arbitrarily persecute their political opponents.
Yes.
No, I'm not confused.
It's rhetorical.
Yeah, I know.
But I want to show exactly what I think is wrong with it, is that I think that they are That they are using a language that has an air of legitimacy, that actually what they're doing is far more pernicious.
But it's not about hypocrisy, it's about hierarchy.
Yes, and I think that this is something important that we should always remember, that behind the rhetoric people use, there are actions.
And we should always compare actions and rhetoric, and very frequently they don't go well together.
Now, let's see on the next page here, in the background, it says page 3 of It says here, since at least 2018, the College has received complaints about Dr. Peterson's public statements.
Some complaints have been formal, but many were tweeted to the College via the social media platform Twitter, and often involved Dr. Peterson's views on topics of social and political interest, including transgender questions, racism, overpopulation, and the response to COVID-19, among others.
According to Jordan Peterson, a lot of the people who filed these complaints have mistakenly claimed to have been his clients.
Yes.
And when you make a case against someone, very frequently you have to say who you are, how you know them, and what happened.
You have to demonstrate standing.
It's not like Jordan Peterson is a kind of organization that people who say something against him need witness protection.
Well, for God's sake.
It's not even that.
It's just the boundaries by which the institution that is persecuting him has jurisdiction is only in relation to his clinical practice.
What he says outside of it, if people claim that they've been upset or harmed or aggrieved by something Peterson has said, in his capacity as a public intellectual, it should have no standing with the, it's the Ottawa Board, correct?
Of psychologists.
This shouldn't be a case.
But they just want to arbitrarily persecute him because he's affected.
I think it's the Ontario.
Ontario, sorry.
Ottawa Court of Appeal.
There we go.
Canadians, name your places better, please.
I like their names.
They have an exotic sound.
What, French?
I mean, some of them are good.
Saskatchewan, I like this.
Bless you.
Also, yeah, they have good... My cousin was born there, so I have an affinity for that place.
Right.
Also, it says here, between January and June 2022, the College received numerous reports about Dr. Peterson's conduct on social media and in his public appearances.
The reports again raised concerns about Dr. Peterson's professionalism, including whether his tweets complied with the College's standards of professional conduct.
And they're talking about his tweets, and they are reminding a tweet that he mentioned about about overpopulation.
And they're saying that he was allegedly incentivizing people to commit suicide.
And a clinical psychologist should never do that.
Shouldn't do that.
But if they look in the context of that statement, it's immediately a ridiculous accusation.
What he just does here is he tells people who are playing the antinatalist card, well, if you practice as you preach, you will have to exit this planet.
That's his message.
He doesn't say, exit the planet.
He actually says, stop spilling nonsense out to people.
And let us just remind this tweet from January 3, 2022.
He had a spat with someone called Roger Palfrey, who was saying, I disagree.
Based on the record of human behavior, we're already overpopulating this small world.
Any arguments I have heard for supporting such a large human population completely overlook the huge loss of species and ecosystem resulting from our absorbed attention.
And Joe Biden replies, you're free to leave at any point.
And he is absolutely correct.
100% correct.
Because what this person is doing is like saying, well, we need less people.
We need less people.
People, we need less people.
Okay?
That's what he says.
But at the end of the day, he is preaching something and he doesn't want to incur the cost of his suggestion.
And I think that this is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
And he is correct.
Jordan Peterson is correct to show it.
So how can this be an incentive?
How can this constitute incentivization of people to commit suicide?
It's actually an incentivization to cut the crap.
Sure.
I mean, the way in which he would leave would be to exit himself from the planet.
And Elon Musk isn't going to bring him to Mars anytime soon.
So the implication is for him to take himself out rather than encourage everyone else to do so.
But it's also clearly half a joke.
But again, context doesn't matter.
Hypocrisy doesn't matter to people that just want to dominate the political.
But they use this precise tweet to say that a further complaint about Dr. Peterson's tweet in which Dr. Peterson responded to an individual who expressed concern about overpopulation by stating, you're free to leave at any point.
The further complaint provided the link to a GQ interview in which Dr. Peterson made a similar comment about suicide.
Well, again, this is an incentive for people to stop being hypocrites.
And when they're talking about anti-Natalist stuff, they're proposing solutions that involve less people.
They're actually saying, no, they want their behind to be safe, okay?
But they want to play that with other people.
So they can have the hat in the back and claim how moral they are at saving the planet.
Right.
Now, let's see the next clip.
The next link, please.
By Joe Pierson, he says here, after the court ruled in favor of the OPC, he says, so the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the Ontario College of Psychologists can pursue their prosecution.
If you think that you have a right to free speech in Canada, you're delusional.
We'll make every aspect of this public, and we'll see what happens when utter transparency is the rule.
Bring it on.
Right, and I think that we can watch the next clip, please, from the interview he did with his daughter.
Can I read just a couple of sentences from the decision so people have an idea of what's in here?
It's linked below, people can read the entire thing.
But there's parts, like this is how it begins.
When individuals join a regulated profession, they do not lose their charter right to freedom of expression.
At the same time, however, they take on obligations and must abide by the rules of their regulatory body that may limit their freedom of expression.
That's just one sentence after another.
That's how it starts.
Yeah, yeah.
Perfect.
That's a great thing to highlight, you know.
It's like, well, you have this fundamental right, but... Well, but what?
What rules?
There's what?
There's a rule, eh?
There's a rule, is that right?
That the College of Psychologists has that I can't criticize Justin Trudeau on Twitter.
That's a rule, is it?
And if someone anywhere in the world complains about the fact that I've criticized Justin Trudeau, let's say, then all of a sudden, that's a rule!
Even though it wasn't a rule, and of course I get to criticize Justin Trudeau, not only because he richly deserves it in every way you could possibly imagine, but because that's actually what freedom of speech means.
So I have no idea what the court means by, you know, abiding by the rules.
So the rules are whatever the bloody College of Psychologists determines constitutes a rule after the fact.
given their complete freedom to make manifest any rules they want.
Yes.
It's beyond comprehension.
And yes, but I have freedom of speech.
It's like, do I now?
What do I get to talk about?
Apparently I can't even talk about the weather.
So I just want to make one note to Dr. Peterson, who I very much enjoy, that I know the suits are part of his character.
He's starting to look like Tommy Lee Jones's Two-Face, so I might want to drop that one.
OK, so what is unprecedented here is the retroactive implementation of this alleged rule.
So most probably what happened, of course, there wasn't such a rule before, but they tried to mend somehow the case and present it in a rhetoric, in a language that seems to answer to the previous rules.
And he's correct that this is retroactive.
After the fact happened.
So after the criticism, suddenly it became a rule that you cannot express political opinion.
And that's mostly what is the issue behind it.
And this is very worrying for anyone who is in favor of free speech.
Even not absolute free speech.
If you think that free speech is important, this is something that is important to bear in mind.
It's really tyrannical.
It's like saying, you know, you can have any kind of retroactive, anyone is guilty.
Anyone can be pronounced guilty because if they deviate to any slight degree from this managerial woke agenda, there will be laws or rules that will be applied retroactively.
And I'm glad Peterson's fighting it, and it's not like he needs it anymore, because it's not going to go back to his clinical practice, because he's serving a much greater role as a kind of cultural father figure.
But I can't really get outraged about it.
Like, I understand why he's very frustrated as a personal slight on his part, and I really want him to succeed in this, but we shouldn't be surprised.
I mean, this is the guy who warned about this happening seven eight years ago now and all of his predictions have come to pass so it's just another in a long line of arbitrary political persecutions by people playing the friend enemy distinction it is but i think that he is in a unique position to fight yes this for several reasons and uh most other people don't have the means to do so yes So he gets outraged for that as well.
I'm willing to bet.
So for him, personally, it depends how we conceive of self-interest.
I have the impression that he doesn't conceive of his self-interest just in terms of losing his license, which, you know, if wokeness, it could be reinstated in the future.
I think he's more interested in the wider significance of the issue.
And the reason is why?
Because, for instance, he does seem to have the ability to, let's say, have good lawyers.
He also doesn't require them to require He doesn't make his living right now from clinical psychology.
He's very well articulate.
And I think that he is in a unique position to fight this fight.
But most people are not.
And most people are likely to fall under this blackmail that the managerial class is trying to do that is extremely unpopular.
And they're trying to create regulatory boards on each profession.
And they're Applying, even retroactively, a set of rules that is actually dominating ordinary people in their workforce.
You could actually be found guilty of anything if you express your opinion.
One in such a way that suggests that you disagree with that woke agenda.
And I think that this is incredibly pernicious.
It is a danger to our current society.
Okay?
It's a danger to any society that praises, let's say, public discussion, because it actually hints that people will be blackmailed by the regulatory board members of their professions to not have a public opinion, to not engage in public and not because it actually hints that people will be blackmailed by the regulatory board So it's like saying, no, if you disagree with the managerial agenda, shut up or leave.
That's the kind of blackmail.
And let us watch the next clip.
What does the average Canadian do to fight back against this?
Get involved in the political process at whatever level they can.
Get involved in the school boards.
Get involved in the political parties.
Get involved in local elections.
Volunteer for election.
Start differentiating between the false government state-funded legacy news and actual news, if you can do that, even though that's becoming possible in Canada, too, because black Canadians can't get news.
It's like, look, here's the rule, Mick.
This is the rule.
All responsibility on the political front, abdicated by the average citizen, will be taken up by tyrants and used against you.
And so, you either take responsibility for this, which means to get involved in the political process, or you suffer the consequences.
Now, you know, a young person might be thinking, well, what could I do?
And I would say, you know, that's actually not a good attitude, and I mean that practically.
Because what you will find, if you're young, if you go volunteer for a political campaign, let's say, first of all, you're going to learn a lot.
You're going to sharpen your political beliefs.
You're going to learn how to put an argument forward.
And then if you're competent and hardworking, you're going to find that avenues of opportunity open for you on the political front so quickly that you can hardly imagine it.
And that's partly because most political organizations are Chronically short of help and absolutely chronically short of competent help.
And so if you step into the political arena, you'd learn to speak more fluently, you'd learn to put your arguments together, you'd learn to be more responsible, you'd take the responsibility onto yourself and strengthen yourself as a consequence, you'd keep the country On the straight and narrow, and you keep it free, and all sorts of opportunities would emerge for you.
And so, that's what you do.
Now, people don't do that, and it's partly also because they're taught, oh, you know, the whole system is so corrupt that nothing can be done about it.
It's like, well, if that's the case, you're in real trouble.
And if it's not the case, take advantage of the opportunity!
Get out there!
Do something about it!
You know, you're a citizen!
It means you have some responsibility.
You're a citizen without responsibility.
You're headed for slavery.
Simple as that.
That's how the world works.
Well, I fully agree with him, because it seems to me that in order to be citizens, we need to assume responsibility.
And wherever we don't exercise, let's say, our civil liberties, and we don't engage in public, and we don't practice civic participation, what happens is the following.
We have gaps of public attention, and people have huge incentives to take advantage of these gaps of public attention.
They engage in practices that are incredibly unpopular, I would say.
I think the woke agenda is deeply unpopular.
It's incredibly unpopular.
They are engaging in these practices and the very few people who talk about it, they get vilified.
Why?
Because the people are not assuming their responsibility to a sufficient degree to get informed and actually get informed about how dangerous and pernicious and tyrannical wokeness is and actually do something about it.
I think they should be able to do something about it in their own lives, but I also think that that is wrong-headed in the conception that everyone should be involved in politics at all times, because that is also another road to tyranny.
I think there should be an insulated private sphere where people are not required to engage, even with our content, as much as most of them do, because they just want to be normies and live quiet lives.
So I think this is actually a pretty important example.
of why the Vanguard elite, for example, Jordan Peterson is very much one of those, can set case precedent in tackling these captured institutions and the rest of people who, let's be frank, aren't as well suited for the fight can kind of just get on with stuff.
I see this, but I think that you are actually adopting the negative aspect of classical liberalism.
Because if you focus so much on negative liberty, and you don't focus on the other aspect of civic participation and informed citizenship, there is no chance in hell that people won't completely destroy this sphere of activities.
People will want to enter into your house.
By the following rationale, the personal is the political, what you do in your own house is actually a political issue, so let's enter your house.
Yes, you should be able to remove those protocols.
This is actually the unappealing feature of extreme classical liberalism, that if we praise only negative liberty, and the extreme case of it, yes, we will end up with wokeness.
Yeah, but okay, let me frame it this way.
I don't think people should be unplugged and underwear, but I don't think everyone needs to start a podcast and speak up because not everyone should be involved in the political fight in such a degree as to where they currently are being forced to.
Of course, I don't think that everyone should First of all, what you're saying is impossible.
Not everyone can start a podcast.
But the problem is that most people, when you try to talk to people individually about how pernicious the woke agenda is, I'm sure many people are really hesitant in accepting your message.
That's a problem.
They're hesitant because they're not informed about it.
A lot of people are still not informed about how dangerous coke is.
Most people that I speak to aren't hesitant, but then they're just getting into anecdotes.
OK, so let's just end with this.
I want to say that there's a survey here that says 3 in 10 Canadians say that Justin Trudeau is the worst recent Prime Minister, and it is very suggestive.
It doesn't mean that 70% thinks he's the best.
Let me just get this out.
Only, I think, around 11% of Canadians say that he is the best recent PM.
But there is a problem that when you have 30% of the population and you are actually contributing to a situation where people are Unable to express their dissatisfaction with Justin Trudeau, that's alienating 30% of the population.
That is not a smart move.
That is actually a very tyrannical move.
And on that note, I think we could go to the third segment.
Wonderful.
Okay.
I'm just going to try and fix this stream deck.
I'm just going to check if this works.
No, it doesn't.
Right.
How about this?
Yeah, that works.
Wonderful.
Tech hiccups.
Joys of a new studio, ladies and gentlemen.
Anyway, fantastic.
So there's some new demographic data that's been dropped by the Office of National Statistics, and it turns out, yet again, we're in a total nightmare.
So if we look at here, we've got the ONS data for England and Wales.
This has just been released on the 17th of August, 2023.
This was for 2022.
In England and Wales, the number of live births to UK-born women, so that's the Native population, but that's not even broken down by ethnicity as well, so the numbers are getting fudged a little bit, decreased from 445,055 in 2021 to 422,109 in 2022.
So that's about a 23,000 person drop.
1,055 in 2021 to 422,109 in 2022.
22-23.
So that's about 23,000 person drop.
22,23.
And so in England and Wales, 34.3% of all live births were to non-UK born mothers.
So a third, almost a third of all births are to immigrant populations in the UK.
So we can see the demographic chart shifting more towards the new diverse Britons rather than the people that have nowhere else to go.
This is up from 28.8 so that's a near two percent Jump!
Continuing the long-term trend of the percentage of live births, non-UK mothers generally increasing.
In 2022, turns out that India, for women, and Pakistan, for men, were the most common countries of motherhood and fatherhood.
So we're seeing a subcontinental resurgence.
It turns out that we're being reverse colonized, I suppose.
In 2022, two-thirds of live births in London occurred to parents where either one or both parents were born outside the UK.
And so we've got some charts here.
But Migration Watch ended up calculating that the domestic birth rate from the raw numbers is 1.494.
Now that's not broken down by ethnicity, so we can only assume that the numbers are being bumped up by India, Pakistan, Romania and the like, and so the domestic birth rate for British women is much much lower than that.
Reminder, replacement birth rate is 2.1, so we are about 6 points and counting below replacement birth rate.
So we've got reality on two TV screens here, right?
It was first it's not happening, now it's apparently a good thing.
UK birth slump dubbed good for the planet as number of babies born hits 20 year low.
Nonsense.
Yep, I knew I wanted to annoy you with antinatalism.
Yeah, no, this is absolute nonsense.
You know why I get pissed off with a carbon footprint?
Yes.
Because they constantly say that, you know, babies that are born in the West and people in the West, they have carbon footprint, high carbon footprints.
And we need to replace, we need to decrease, let's say, our carbon emissions.
And actually their way of doing it is We do calling for the reduction of the population in Western countries as and they claim that it's a good thing.
So it's not a any conspiracy or something.
It's actually an actual title.
But on the other hand, they forget that this is actually the way you live.
Let's say if we even if we agree on the concept of carbon footprint and we sit in we posit momentarily that it makes sense.
The population that will migrate into Western societies will still live in the same way.
Well, their birth rates are also going down, as is Sub-Saharan Africa's, so they're the only ones that are still above replacement, but they're losing one child every 15 years as well.
So globally, the entire trend is going down.
This is why, as I'll get on to shortly, mass migration is not just a problem for scarce resources, the housing market, cultural deracination, it's also not a long-term projected fix for this either.
And as I spoke to Stephen Shaw about this, he looked into the data about this carbon footprint stuff.
It's funny, the graphs, first of all, most of this data is collected by Paul Ehrlich's Zero Population Growth Company, NGO, whatever the hell it is called, which have now rebranded themselves to ZPG because it looks really bad, say zero population growth, and they found that they don't account for the more efficient use of energy and resources that accrue over time with human development, so actually carbon footprint per person goes down, Whether or not carbon footprint is actually a problem as well is never questioned, but hey-ho.
And also, their graphs only start at a specific point and then end at a specific point, not accounting for the fact that birth rates are naturally dropping anyway.
Again, bad thing, but I suppose it's not a bad thing if you just want less white people, as this woman seems to be.
So in this article it says, Britain's top demographics expert Clearly not if she has this opinion.
Sarah Harper, and she's got CBE as well, so she's regime-endorsed, the founder and director of the Oxford Institute for Population Ageing and a former government advisor, said falling birth rates in the West were good for our planet.
Professor Harper told The Telegraph, I think it's a good thing that the high-income, high-consuming countries of the world are reducing the number of children they're having.
I'm quite positive about that.
The academic said declining fertility in rich countries would help to address the general overconsumption that we have at the moment, Let me just say because I like looking at how people use language.
It's sort of a hobby.
It's also bad because it dumps microplastics in our oceans and makes us really ill.
But that doesn't mean that we should be the carbon this woman wants to reduce.
Let me just say, because I like looking at how people use language.
It's sort of a hobby.
The planet has no welfare.
I really think it's really ridiculous when people say good for a planet.
Yeah, who's going to inherit that planet?
Rather than, for instance, saying something like good for the system that sustains human life.
But they cannot say the latter, because they're antinatalists.
And they fundamentally hate humans.
Yeah, they're misanthropes.
Absolutely.
So, speaking of the quality and replacement, this is the next TV screen that we're watching instead, and it's also in the Telegraph, so Telegraphers.
Pretty good these days.
This is an article that says the ONS actually didn't calculate the fertility rate in the latest release of the data, as the numbers I already said that Migration Watch had looked at.
He said it has a fertility rate of 1.62 per woman, so he's got a bit more of an optimistic bent by about a percentage point, but that's not great.
And the live birth rate was 55.8 per thousand women.
According to the World Bank, the fertility rate in Sub-Saharan Africa and other low-income countries is 4.6 per woman.
In a high-income country, by contrast, it averages at 1.5.
So Britain is sitting right on the benchmark of population collapse for high-income countries.
So, just bring the entire third world in and problem solved, right?
It used to be more fashionable to argue that higher levels of immigration were good for productivity and therefore more than paid for themselves.
That may have once been true.
Think of the Huguenots, this guy says, because that's as far back as we have to go to think about the one time we had mass immigration from our neighbor France, which were pretty ethnically and culturally quite similar and aren't just a bunch of Moroccans, but that's fine.
Despite the declining birth rate, the UK's population has risen by nearly 10 million since the turn of the century.
But productivity effectively stopped growing 15 years ago, a hiatus of almost unprecedented longevity.
So, turns out that people aren't just homo economicus, and you can't just transplant them from one time, place and culture into another, and they're equally as effective and well adapted to a certain set of economic and cultural conditions.
Because it turns out that these people just want to sit in hotels and smoke all day.
So, yeah, not quite the solution we thought of.
Also, if you look into the care home statistics from a survey the WHO said, because apparently we need to import a bunch of Africans to care for our elderly, one in three of them admitted to abusing patients.
So I don't want to be looked after by them.
I'd rather be looked after by my own kids.
Not just the reason to have kids, but one in three admitted to abusing a patient.
Yeah, that's on the WHO's own website.
Disgusting.
Yeah, which is why the Japanese are now doing robots to look after their elderly, but that's going to be equally alienating.
You're going to end up in San Junipero or something.
So, not a solution, currently, or in the future.
So, speaking of the future, we've got an image of that.
I've referenced this article before in a discussion with Carl.
This is Japan.
So, Japan, as of last year, the country's population plummeted by almost a million.
It's because so many young people are not actually having children.
In 2022, Japan saw a mere 771,000 births, and this is the first time the number fell below 800,000 since the records began back in 1899.
So that's a 200-year trend that's been broken.
The Prime Minister, so Fumio Kishida, is extremely worried.
Our nation, he declared, is on the cusp of whether or not it can maintain its societal functions.
So, we have a few forks in the road here.
Could go down the route of mass immigration, which destroys the housing market and public services and makes everything more expensive and destroys culture and makes it feel like the people who were never asked whether or not they'd like to be demographically replaced no longer recognize the world on our doorstep.
Even if they are asked, and they say no, it goes forth.
Exactly, yeah.
So they're majorly subverted by the government that said, actually, we're going to get Brexit done and lower immigration.
Now we've got record immigration, thanks to the million plus visas, Boris and the rest of the Conservative Party.
Or we have the opposite, which could be economic restructure to enable more families, right?
So what are Japan doing?
Well, we've got this article in the New York Times.
Can shrinking be good for Japan?
A Marxist bestseller makes the case.
Now.
Well, I mean, out of all the Literature you could, you know, read in order to gain insights for how to structure an economy.
You picked Marxism.
Just not prudent.
No, no.
So what I think happens in this particular article is that he diagnoses plenty of the problems with the wrong economic heuristic, but plenty of the problems, and provides the wrong solution.
And what he calls degrowth is cringe.
But I will make the conservative case for degrowth later.
Just you wait.
So, when Keio Sato decided to write about de-growth communism, his editor was understandably sceptical.
Communism is unpopular in Japan, because Japan is sensible.
Economic growth is gospel.
So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist revolution sounded like a tough sell.
Thank you, New York Times, for interviewing this obscure communist.
So, his book released in 2020 and it's sold 500,000 copies.
Japan, the world's third largest economy, has worked for years to promote economic growth in the shadow of an aging, shrinking population, with a monetary and fiscal policy that is among the most aggressive of any nation.
But there are strong indications that the country's growth-oriented policies of ultra-cheap money and big government spending are reaching their limits.
Yes, because big government spending and ultra-cheap money are reliant on debt, and the world keeps That's pretty based.
debt, particularly with the dollar as a reserve currency going bankrupt, as Dan has spoken about on Brokeconomics multiple times, then the whole thing is going to burst like a bubble and you're going to be left poor again.
Not a very sensible strategy.
So growth should not be the only goal.
The focus on growth is important when Japan was developing.
But now the country is wealthy, Mr. Sato said, the insistence on an endlessly expanding economy described in terms of gross domestic product has produced obviously wasteful spending as the government has urged people to consume more.
That's pretty based.
Pretty true.
Yeah.
There are too many cars, too many skyscrapers, too many convenience scores, too much fast fashion.
you Yep, the things that you own end up owning you in Fight Club sense.
Reorienting Japan towards goals that more effectively reflect the country's current needs, he said, would mean using metrics other than GDP to gauge the country's economic well-being.
The focus would shift from quantity to quality on measures like health, education and standard of living.
I agree in part, but can you see the framing here is still managerial.
It's, we need to quantify other things and just economic.
No, no, stop trying to measure everything on a GDP graph.
You shouldn't have your fingers in every pie.
We should value things differently on a moral level rather than a metric level.
That's the problem.
We're in agreement.
And I think that what is especially managerial about this is the idea of a social engineer.
Yes.
And it is a particular problem that A lot of the people that, for instance, Hayek was arguing against, their mentality is being embraced by the managerial class right now, who have a complete plan for how the economy should be run.
And that is why they're making also the label shortage arguments.
Because there are some jobs, for instance, that aren't needed anymore.
Yes.
And they will be rendered obsolete by automation, which Japan is leading the way on.
Yes.
And actually, Japan is really, I think the Japanese government is really adamant in upholding the Japanese national identity.
Yes.
They don't allow, for instance, lots of economic migrants to stay there for a long time or to migrate with their families.
So they're really strict about their immigration policies.
The Yakuza are also basically state-sanctioned ethnic gatekeepers, so they kick out other gangs that are running drugs and the like.
So even their criminals have a very culturally protectionist element.
I don't know about that.
We'll be discussing that on the Economic of Organized Crime.
They have the same mentality as an honor system.
They're trying to see who's Samurai.
But yes, so, he says, Achieving Digger of Communism is less about personal choices and more about changing overarching political and economic structures.
Marxism, he argues, offers a viable model, since bloody when, for reorienting society around the maximization of public goods as opposed to the endless pursuit and concentration of wealth.
No.
This is why you don't actually understand your own doctrine, my friend, because Marxism shares the same problem as Marx's definition of capitalism, or actually the idea just generally of capitalism, which is the exponential growth of wealth for wealth's sake.
It's the generation of abundance.
Marx actually aims at the same ideals as a materialist capitalist, which is just making the most economic goods and the most amount of individualism for a person.
He just has the wrong way of bringing it about.
I think just push that entire paradigm aside and go back to making the family the primary mode of civic participation.
The family is the prime social unit.
It should absolutely be.
If people... I think there's no other... I mean, if people reject the family, then society collapses.
And that's what we're seeing right now, I think.
And that's why even Oxfam turned around and said, well, GDP, a bit sexist, because you're not treating women like women, who can be mothers, you're treating them as individual, fungible unisex consumer units who need to change their biology and mentality to compete in the workforce on behalf of men to generate GDP for GDP's sake.
Like, why do we care about making things a world that's habitable money if we're not going to impart it on the next generation?
Yeah, there's no point.
And so he says, I'm not saying go back to the Edo period, he said, referencing the feudal era where the country was largely closed to the rest of the world.
His vision for the future is one in which people, less consumed by their endless pursuit of growth for growth's sake, have the leisure time to spend on a workday pursuing new interests as he does with farming.
So he's treating subsistence, which was the economic mode before the Industrial Revolution, where you worked to create products for the people immediately in your own household as a leisure activity.
And that's the most, as Marxists would say, bourgeois opinion imaginable.
And he admits it because he says right at the end, Mr. Sato laughed, I'm definitely bourgeois.
Right, so you're not going to give anything up, are you?
You're just like feeding chickens as a larp.
But actually doing it would be noble, but you're not.
Well, apparently he should read the history of the plague in Europe and actually see the effects it had and how it changed the economic model.
Yeah, yeah.
I wouldn't be shocked.
And speaking of reading industrial history, if you'd like to subscribe to our website for as little as £5 a month, you can get all of our premium content, like this brand new podcast, which the audio is now fixed so you can go and listen to, Evil Origins of Feminism Part 2.
I put hell of a lot of work into this one.
We had an incredible discussion with Carl for two hours, and I mainly focus on Ivan Illich's gender.
And if recently I've been using words that a lot of you are scratching your head, like unisex fungible consumer unit, You can understand how my frame of reference has been fundamentally changed by this, and that is that the Industrial Revolution, when it came about, it brought a disjunction in sex relations.
People had gender as a culture locked in time and place.
Tools were ergonomically shaped to men and women's hands.
It was just how we existed.
As soon as the Industrial Revolution changed it, and so it meant the machines could be operated by men or by women, it set in motion a series of cultural changes that ended up with the digital and sexual revolutions that commanded men and women change themselves in order to participate in the workforce and generate as much capital equally for the sake of making capital.
And so this is, this is the point.
This is the flashpoint where feminism came out of.
It was an, it was an inevitable destruction of the family unit legitimated by technology.
So when people complain, all we need to do is get rid of feminism.
The birth rates will The pill was the reason that feminism has become the dominant hegemon.
Same with the unisex factory machine and the laptop and all that.
What we basically need is a technological change, consciously renouncing some of these things, so we might come back together.
People respond to incentives more than ideas, basically.
This is exactly why I said on the first segment that we need to think about our values and to have a very pluralistic approach towards them.
I wouldn't say pluralistic.
I think we need a unidirectional cultural movement towards something more wholesome.
You are saying something more wholesome, but what you understand as wholesome, presumably, involves a lot of values in it.
Yes, but it's not pluralistic across multiple value traditions.
It's one umbrella value tradition with multiple values contained within it, right?
Because multiculturalism is untellable.
You can have...
I agree it is.
Yeah, exactly.
I agree it is.
But, okay.
That's semantics for now.
Let's leave it...
Well, yeah.
Okay.
And I just thought I'd finish on this.
So there's a Twitter thread, which is quite interesting, that just looks at the maps below and above replacement birth rates.
And on this, it decides to point out, and this comes back to the pluralism idea, that one of the leading countries is Israel in terms of its birth rates, and the reason is they have a strong religious conviction for preferentially wanting children.
So, without that core value, if your society succumbs to antinatalism or just value-neutral material generation, then if you only exist to keep generating wealth for yourself, and you only think about yourself, and you don't have a metaphysical commitment that privileges things over just what you can register on a spreadsheet, Then you can't mount a defense for the family as the primary mode of social and civic engagement insulated from the political and manufacturing realm.
And so I just think that we need a values revitalization that then spearheads an economic transformation that allows men to start being single income earners for their family again to try and reverse this demographic decline.
But until then the country will become far more Indian Pakistani over the future and I think our culture will be gradually erased and economics will decline.
become untenable.
So I think we should probably change that before it's too late.
On to the video comments.
Hello, Lotus Eaters.
It's been a while.
For the last 8 months I've been building a game on YouTube.
48 Chronicles is an interactive gaming stream with the stream itself acting as your game master and the players choosing the actions of the character in real time via the live chat.
Join us this evening at 6pm Fish and Chips time as we embark on another grand adventure.
Jump in and listen along to the narration or play along by tagging the channel with your next move or just be a bro and hit that subscribe button if we reach a thousand subscribers.
I promise I will bully Dan and Connor into starting an OnlyFans.
Thank you as always, Lotus Eaters.
And may the dice always roll in your favor.
I mean, I'm never...
If it hits 1,000 subscribers, you're going to get...
I'm never starting an OnlyFans.
But it's not just because I have a moral principle stance against it.
But it's because out of all of the Lotus Eaters, if I took my shirt off, it just wouldn't be fair on you guys.
So I have to keep a level playing field to keep all your egos in check.
I'm doing it for you.
Anyway, on to the next video comment.
I'm going to go ahead and see what I'm doing.
And for myself, a lot of it, I don't consume, simply because I don't have time.
Okay, well you should consume more of it if you're a purring subscriber, because we put some good stuff out!
Um, thanks Bane!
Anyway, on to the next one.
Hey, Mingo.
Hello.
Thank you.
This is a lovely cat.
I have three cats.
You've got cats, right?
Yeah.
Cats seem to like me, but, well, I used to be really allergic, but I'm just not, I'm more a dog person.
I like, I like the boundless joy that dogs present.
Anyway, on to, on to the next one.
A call to action or protest by conservatives?
Walk cathartic.
Would only play into the progressives' hands.
It would give them cause to increase their fascist policies.
The best revenge is a life well lived.
By merely existing by conservative values, that does more damage than any protest ever could.
Just look at Bud Light, or Richmond, North of Richmond song.
Protest, sure.
They're largely ineffective.
Military coups, which I would obviously never endorse, are probably more effective.
But considering we have absolutely no influence over government at the moment, and they're probably just going to do whatever the hell the globalists have planned anyway, then yeah, just insulate yourself and your family and try and live well.
I must say that Mechnomancer's weapons should never fall into the wrong hands.
He does look like that big thing in Robocop that shoots the guy in the office.
Also on Matrix.
The kind of interruptions they had when they were shooting the things on Zion.
Yeah, I don't really remember the two of them.
The first one's great.
The other two are just unbearably rubbish.
Second, they just wouldn't stop talking.
Hey fellas, you guys have been talking about anime and manga quite a lot recently, so I thought I might share something with you that you might not have been aware of otherwise.
But manga and anime characters actually aren't based off of people, they're based off of cats.
So something for you to think about is that manga and anime characters are not people, they are cats.
No worries.
I'll see you later.
So like half of our audience is furries.
You said that cats have a good relationship with you, but you're more of a dog person.
Yes, which is why I don't like anime.
We're doing Berserk Part 2 soon, by the way, so everyone stay tuned.
Also, nice t-shirt, Freddy Krueger.
Right, last one.
All right, today's California native is the Chlorogallum palmeradium.
It is a very late-blooming one, and it grows from a bulb that is very large and potato-like.
It can be eaten, and it has this husk to it that the Native Americans used to use for little, like, hand brooms, too.
So a very overall very useful item, and I've been trying to catch this one because it only seems to bloom when it's cooler in the evening.
I like the horticultural bit.
So I've been house-sitting for the last week or so.
Two weeks now.
I used to dig gardens for a living and I built this particular garden.
And taking care of that and just sitting out in it in the quiet is so much better.
It's just a really meaningful little activity to do.
I think more people need more gardens.
There's a way of conservative pushback.
I think the Chinese have a good saying where they're saying that, you know, if you want to be a happy person, just, you know, grow a garden.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
They should stick to probably their own gardens rather than Africa.
Most probably.
I paraphrased it wrong.
Right.
So we'll do a few comments before we wrap up.
We'll just run over for a few minutes.
Why not?
Richard, your bloody last name is almost impossible.
Monikinden.
Thank you.
Liberalism is awful.
It tolerates the intolerable.
It stinks to high heaven.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Intentions aren't enough.
If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
Liberty thing, like communist countries calling themselves democratic republics during the Cold War, just political word games.
I imagine that you're not too pleased by that.
I mean, I understand how this can be a reaction to it, an emotional reaction.
Most probably it's not with Richard.
I don't know what Richard has in mind, but I think that sometimes If looked from one position, the idea of toleration, it may seem bad.
It may seem that liberals are morally complacent.
But on the other hand, the question is just think what would happen if suddenly everyone adopted the mentality according to which they should do anything they think is right.
Society would disintegrate into war.
Isn't that basically what the liberal system is currently permitting though?
Well, it leads to that place.
So the question is, do we accelerate or do we try to be a bit more commonsensical?
I'm in favor of the side effects.
I agree.
Accelerate into a reactionary monarchy.
Anyway, so Grant Gibson, 10 years into my marriage and my wife and I still do attack each other.
I would expect that in 10 years it will look the same.
Well, I'm very envious, my friend, and congratulations on the happy marriage.
Lord Nerevar, the issue with liberalism is that it's very susceptible to the cult of tolerance, which is that we can see happening right now.
Well-meaning liberals find it hard to argue that we shouldn't tolerate certain aspects of society, and they have no choice but to accept that into their worldview.
Eventually, you get wokeness from this.
Yeah, it's the fertile soil from which wokeness can spring, if it doesn't have an undergirding philosophy.
It is not the only one!
I would say that it's a bit more complex than that.
particularly vulnerable because it values equality and freedom.
Right.
And if they make, if they, if wokeness positions itself as bringing equality and freedom to fruition, the value neutral liberal would be susceptible to that.
I would say that, uh, it's a bit more complex than that.
And a problem comes, you could say with a conservative temperament of people who are, if, if you understand the conservative temperament to be resistance to fast change, that means that you are really happy with slow change.
Could be for the worse.
So, the question is whether this is also a problem in conservatism.
Not just liberalism.
Whether a lot of conservatives are just saying, well, I want to resist fast change, but they're really OK to get habituated into a new world, let's say, because they are tolerating it.
This is a problem with conservatives as a temperament rather than conserving a certain set of values and traditions localised to a time and place.
Yeah, that's why I'm not conservative in temperament.
One last one from my one before we move on to yours then.
Zombie, completely agree.
Liberalism can't stop itself from falling into degeneracy without Christianity.
Aha, man off to my own heart.
Mainly because the religion stood as the moral authority that upheld liberalism.
Now it doesn't have to be Christianity per se.
Well, you lost me there.
But as long as to hold the values of liberalism but rooted in traditionalism, Christianity is easier, I must say, because it's more grounded.
Well, this is part of the disagreement I will always have with Carl, who I'm very thankful keeps the business going.
But if you want to be a postmodern traditionalist, what did your traditions get shaped around?
It's hard to make a case for the King of England without saying he was ordained by God, because that is the throne upon, the legitimacy upon which the monarchy of England rests.
I'm just not a postmodernist and I just think relativism is wrong.
Yeah, I'm only relativist in the C.S.
Lewis sense, where relative avenues to objective morality.
There we go.
Okay.
So, S.H.
Silver.
Included in the complaints being cited against Peterson are two complaints of rude remarks to politicians.
If the civilian cannot critique the political class, then it's naked tyranny.
Absolutely.
X, Y, and Z. Those who are better positioned to take the heat need to step up and champion the downtrodden.
Jordan Peterson is not pulling the latter up behind, as so many in his position did.
Yep, that's what Nigel Farage seems to be doing with coots at the moment.
So kudos for that as well.
I think he is less effective with engaging in politics than he is in engaging with philosophy, psychology and morality.
And I think sticking to that, he would do a lot more good.
Well, I mean, I can understand why he's better at that because it's his expertise.
Yes.
But I think that it's very good and refreshing to see people who have a wide education to try and enter the political sphere.
Most probably they will make mistakes, but everyone does.
I think it's in the way in which he's done it.
For example, we've done a segment before on him speaking to Mohammed Hijab as a representative of the Muslim community.
It was probably not the best calculation.
I think, just be careful of how far Dr Peters has spread himself thin, but I'm looking forward to Ark.
And Paul Neubauer, the basic problem is that Canada grants arbitrary rights and arbitrates them.
In the US, the Congress has denied the authority to abridge speech.
Well, the problem, I agree, and it seems to me that the way that the court has operated in this case is that it has completely outsourced judgment to the regulatory board of Absolutely.
And effectively, this makes turns them into judges, juries and executioners.
And that's a bad thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
So one one or two last ones for the last segment.
Robert Longshore, the metrics to use to measure an economy against countries should be family health and not GDP.
Sure.
I would prefer that we resist the instinct of making policy off of relative metric comparisons to other countries.
I'd prefer if we had a more internal focus about how the people feel about their own lives, which is more difficult to quantify.
And it seemed to work much to people's health far before we adopted this managerial mindset.
Arizona Deseret, degrowth, call it what it is, depopulation.
Yes, in the way that they think about degrowth, it definitely is, because they're going to rescind the amount of things you can have which will cause deaths.
I would like to think of a conservative case for the degrowth of the remit of consideration by market actors.
There are certain things you just can't commodify, like the Adam Smith theory of moral sentiments thing, which I think we'll have to go through at some point.
Definitely.
That'd be really good.
And one last one, Grant Gibson.
Hobbs first.
Yes, we've got that.
We've got that on the slate, yeah.
And then I'm doing Schmidt.
Grant Gibson, tip from an economic demographer.
Single-year birth data after a major event COVID lockdowns could be very misleading.
Take a look at the five-year rolling average.
Yeah, actually, the five-year rolling average has been continually going down.
In 2021, it peaked up slightly, but it's immediately fallen back down.
And the reason it's fallen back down is because of these adverse economic circumstances which bring the birth rates down reliably.
You can see this happening in Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy all around the 1970s due to the oil shock.
Go watch Stephen Shaw's documentary on that and my interview with him.
He's very insightful.
Anyway, we've got the Gold Tier Zoom call at 3.30 today.
If you're an audio listener, that doesn't apply to you.
Hello from the future!
Thank you very much, Stelios.
Pleasure as always.
It was a brilliant exchange.
Yeah, my brain is now exhausted because Stelios is much smarter than I am.
I am.
I have a lot of reading to do to catch up with the gentleman.
But if you are not joining our Goal Tier Zoom call, one, you're mad.
Two, we will see you back again Monday, one o'clock, live, UK time, with a special guest.
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