Michael Knowles DEBATES Viral BLM Activist | Joshua Joseph
Michael Knowles goes head-to-head with viral BLM activist Joshua Joseph (@jwilliamj)! In this riveting exchange, we dive deep into pivotal topics currently defining and dividing the socio-political landscape.
Knowles and Joseph dissect and confront various contentious issues, each presenting their perspectives with passion and conviction. Whether it's social justice, systemic racism, or police reform, no topic is off-limits in this enlightening dialogue.
Are you Team Knowles or Team @jwilliamj? Watch, decide, and jump into the conversation!
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Race has no root in biology, but the impacts of race are still felt.
You think America's a racist country?
Yeah.
I'm not sure that black people have more rights today.
Black people don't have anywhere near the right to life that they had before Roe v. Wade, which is why more black babies were ordered in the womb in New York City and born.
Oh, boy, do I gotta teach you about some racial issues?
Can a man become a woman?
This isn't an ultrasound.
No, this is a nine-week fetus in a petri dish.
In a petri dish?
That's just really ghastly to show a picture of a person These debates usually take place in the matrix.
One person in one digital universe, and then another person in another digital universe, and it's reactions on reactions on reactions.
And it's too much!
It's not conducive to human flourishing or productive discourse.
And so, today, I have invited JJ, and he's graciously accepted, to come on over here and have this discussion in person.
This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN.
More from them in a moment.
Now though, JJ, thank you for being here.
Absolutely.
Anytime.
And it's not going to stop.
We're going to keep going back and forth in the Matrix after this.
Absolutely.
It doesn't stop.
It's my job now.
This all started because I was talking to another young liberal lady, and I made the claim that when you have sex with somebody, you are consenting to the possibility of pregnancy.
And you found this very objectionable.
No.
No.
You agree with that?
No, yeah.
I do agree that you're consenting to the possibility of pregnancy, but you said you're consenting to the possibility of pregnancy, and she agreed, and you said, well, if it's consent to the possibility, then it is consent to pregnancy.
That's what I took the issue with, because I don't believe in any other scenario do we hold the concept of Consenting to an action means that you're consenting to every feasible outcome of that action.
But the possibility of pregnancy, the only end of that is pregnancy.
I'm not saying the possibility of pregnancy or this or that or some other thing.
I'm saying the possibility that this action will result in a pregnancy.
I don't understand what the distinction would be.
What do you mean only end of that?
Just the term possibility means that something could happen.
So there's multiple possible outcomes of sex, right?
So one thing that I like to pull from is not just the pregnancy aspect, because, again, I mentioned to you in one of our videos going back and forth that humans have sex for multiple reasons, and you took a little issue because you said, well, there's supposed to only be one reason.
No, no, there are multiple reasons, but some reasons are more important than others.
Yeah, and I would say that, especially if we're looking at what sex is naturally ordered to, sure, producing offspring is one of them, but also communication, relationship bonding, those are all very critical things that also take part in a relationship.
You can even have sex with a person and not further that relationship.
There are various things that take place.
Well, you'll further some sort of relationship.
If you were further, a relationship, but that, if you want to do hookups or if you wanted to do like a one night stand or whatever, it could take place, but you don't need to furtherly engage with that person.
But now, what if you have the hookup or the one night stand, and maybe you're even using artificial contraception, but it doesn't work or it breaks, and the girl gets pregnant?
Then you're not going to have anything to do with her?
That relationship's not going to continue?
Well, no.
I think you could have nothing to do with somebody regardless of whether or not they get pregnant.
But I'm asking in this specific case.
In this specific instance, then it depends on what the two people want.
If you guys like each other enough, you want to stay together, I'm not saying that you necessarily need to be like, kick them to the curb.
I don't even know where that necessarily comes from.
But, again, Sex has multiple different possibilities.
It could be that someone gets pregnant.
After that point, it could, you want to still further the relationship.
You could say you don't want to further the relationship.
That's not necessarily what the point is.
But if you don't further the relationship, then you would be abandoning your child and the woman that you've left.
I'm going to take issue with that a little bit because I feel like you are, there's this concept of an intuition pump, right?
So if we use the term child, intuition pump.
Yeah, so essentially it's when you push loaded emotional connotations into words that don't necessarily meet them in a given scenario.
So, for example, if you were to say a child, right?
Me and you aren't dumb.
When we colloquially use the term child, we're referring to birthed people, people who are already born.
No, I refer to offspring.
Yeah.
Offspring.
I mean, see, I can understand why you can use the term offspring, right?
Because you are still referring to offspring when you say the word child.
But if I say child or kid or even baby, those all three things are connotated of people who are born.
And those are actually definitions, too.
I don't think so.
I mean, when, for instance, when my wife first became pregnant with our first child.
before the baby was born, people would ask, "Oh, how's the baby doing?" I would think about my future son, my child.
I'd get the bedroom ready, we'd start buying clothing.
So I certainly, when I would refer to my child, I would be referring to the baby in the womb. - Do you know why you were referring to it as a child?
Because it's my child.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, but also you were under the impression that that child was going to be born, correct?
When people ask, how's the baby doing?
And that also works the other way, because a lot of times you can say it's impolite to ask, necessarily, if you don't know someone's pregnant.
Or you don't want to call someone fat.
Yeah, you don't want to call someone fat, but you also don't want to assume that, like, either everything is just peachy, or that they want to keep that pregnancy.
Well, I want to assume that someone is not going to murder her child.
I do make that assumption.
Well, you're factually wrong on that, because murder is a specific legal definition.
You could say it should be murder, but if you're going to assume that they're going to murder their child, that is assuming that the killing is unlawful.
And that's also assuming that abortion is... It is unlawful, because it's not merely... It's a moral law, maybe, but not...
Law, law.
I don't know what law you're talking about, which abortion is.
The natural law and the moral law, from which we derive the civil and the positive law.
What do you mean natural law and moral law?
I mean laws that are true for all people at all times.
So we have certain civil laws and positive laws.
You know, the state of Louisiana might have a different kind of traffic law than the state of New York.
But there are certain laws, like it is wrong to commit murder, that are true for all people at all times.
Yes.
And so the way that we get our civil law and our positive law is in part by deducing certain conclusions from the moral and natural.
Yeah, but you're also shoehorning in the legal term while trying to define why it's wrong for like everybody.
Murder has been understood to be wrong since... Yeah, no, what I mean by that is that the term murder is the unlawful killing of a person, right?
But if someone kills somebody in self-defense, that's not an unlawful killing.
Still killing.
Yeah, it wouldn't be murder.
Right?
So you can't say that necessarily like, oh, it is murder when it isn't because the killing in this instance, the termination of the pregnancy, which would entail the death of the fetus, is lawful.
So it's not an unlawful killing.
No, no, no.
It's not lawful.
Oh, because you believe that it shouldn't be lawful or you believe that it is a crease.
Well, right.
We have a difference of opinion here.
You say that it is lawful.
No, that's the fact.
That's the reality of opinion.
That's a fact.
That's not even an opinion.
It is lawful.
What do you think an opinion is?
Opinion is something that's subjective, up to your interpretation.
On the books, the law is that abortion is not murder.
So if you say abortion is murder, you are factually incorrect.
So before we get back to abortion for a second, I think you're mistaken about the meaning of the word opinion.
Because you seem to be conflating an opinion with a preference.
Do you understand the distinction between the two?
There is a distinction between the two, but that's not the connotation which I was using.
Well, you were saying an opinion is subjective, right?
In the way that a preference is subjective.
You know, I like vanilla more than chocolate.
That would be a preference.
That's not what an opinion is.
An opinion is when you make a statement of fact.
So, here's how I would show you an example.
Well, that gets into the whole alternative fact realm.
You can make a proclamation about what you perceive the world around you to be, and that can be your opinion, but there's a specific distinction between opinion and a fact.
Now, you can say that a preference and an opinion are similar in that they're both subjective, but that doesn't mean that necessarily they are the same thing.
They're not both subjective, because a preference can't be wrong, whereas an opinion can be wrong.
So, for instance, I can say, I think that the moon is made of green cheese.
It is my opinion that the moon is made of green cheese.
That is my opinion, but it's wrong.
I could also say that I think the sun is shining outside today, and that would also be my opinion, but it would be correct.
So some opinions can be correct and some can be wrong because they're statements of fact from your perspective.
No, some opinions can be correct and some opinions can be wrong because of the underlying data and the underlying evidence that is to Right, the reality to which they refer.
Yeah, so you can say that it is your opinion that the sun is shining, and that's also an opinion that is based off of the fact that the sun gives off light.
But you could also say it's my opinion that the moon is made out of cheese, but there's literally no evidence to back that up.
Exactly, that's why it's wrong.
Yeah, I think reducing it down to a preference versus an opinion is kind of trying to misconstrue the words there.
No, no, because I could have a preference.
You know, I could say, I like cigars, which I do, and you don't like cigars.
And that's my preference, and that's your preference.
Neither of those is wrong.
They're just our tastes.
And de gustibus non disputandum est, as we say.
But I could say a cigar is made of tobacco, and you could say a cigar is made of green cheese, and I would be right and you would be wrong.
But that's not a statement of fact from your perspective.
That is.
That's what you believe to be a fact, which is what an opinion is.
So you can't say— So that is a statement of fact.
Yeah, so if I have a preference of what type of cigar, whatever, those two things cannot be wrong.
But if you're saying an opinion is really a statement of fact from your perspective— That's what you just said, too.
Well, that's what you believe to be a fact.
It's not a fact.
So that's what I'm saying.
If you get into this realm where it's like a fact is entirely dependent on what you perceive it is, that inherently means that one person cannot have a wrong opinion, but you said that one person can have a wrong opinion.
It's not that the fact relies upon my perception.
It's that my perception can accurately or inaccurately describe the fact.
So I could say this is a glass of seltzer.
I think this is a glass of seltzer.
It is not a glass of seltzer because it is my opinion that it is.
It is my opinion that it is a glass of seltzer because it actually is, in fact.
But if you said this is a glass of chocolate milk, and it is my opinion that this is a glass of chocolate milk, your opinion would be incorrect, and your perception would be defective.
No, I will say, I think that the way the language is getting parsed here, it's like an opinion is a statement of what is a perceived fact from your perspective, but it's not a statement of fact from your...
Because you see where the distinction is?
You can't say that it's a statement of fact from your perspective.
It's a declaration.
You're saying, I think this.
I think X. But in reality, the truth is actually Y. So if you're saying, oh, it's a statement.
Yeah, but if you're saying it's a statement of fact from my perspective, if I say, I think X, It's a fact that you think X, but that's as far as it can go.
It's not really a fact from your perspective.
I feel like the reason why I'm making the distinction here is because it's kind of like putting my subjective opinion on the same level as like, because it's like, oh, you can't say that I'm wrong because it's a fact from my perspective.
That's kind of, maybe I'm reading into what you're saying wrong, but that's kind of the vibe I get.
I get the alternative fact vibe where it's like, I'm not sure what vibe that is.
That's the, you know, Trumpist vibe, the thing that I'm getting, where it's like, you can see people in a crowd and be like, well, it's my opinion that I had the biggest inauguration size of all time, and that's just an alternative fact, because it's from my perspective.
But in reality... He had a digital audience, he actually did, but that's a topic for another time.
Digital audience is crazy.
I don't think Obama was pulling too much on the livestream forums in 2008.
He probably wasn't, yeah, exactly.
That's why such a statement would be true, too.
But I guess the reason it's important to clear this up is because we have a disagreement here over whether a baby in the womb is a baby is morally significant in the way that you and I are morally significant.
We have a disagreement.
You say, I think that it, well, no, actually what you're saying is it is simply a fact that the baby is not a baby.
And I'm saying it is my opinion that the baby is a baby.
No, I wasn't saying that.
So we have a difference of opinion, but at most, One of us is going to be right.
No, my statement of fact was that abortion wasn't murder.
But that would presuppose that the baby is not a baby.
If the baby is a baby, then abortion would be murder.
Right, because you'd be unlawfully killing a person.
Well, no, because again, when you say the word unlawfully, you're talking about your moral, like, your moral law.
I'm speaking of the objective moral.
Yeah, and the law in the United States is that abortion is not murder.
If they overruled it and said, yes, now abortion is murder, then it would be murder.
But you can't say abortion is murder because it's unlawfully killing a baby or a person or whatever when it is lawful.
In many states, abortion is murder.
Substantially or entirely illegal, according to even the civil positive law.
Yeah, so at the best, you can have, it is kind of sometimes murder, depending on the state, but you don't have caveats in that statement.
You say it is murder.
I think the mistake that you're making, though, is that you're suggesting that the positive law, or the civil law of the state, is the ultimate law.
Oh, and the laws, I'm sorry, but also the laws in those states do not rule abortion as murder.
They'll usually put a really short time frame that's like almost impossible for the woman to know that they're pregnant, and if you still have the abortion, you still are aborting that zygote that is unique human DNA, but they don't consider it murder.
I think taking it to murder is the draconian position where it's like, okay, well now we need to prosecute as if it were murder.
But even Republican states don't do that.
No, that's not true.
And including in liberal states.
If, for instance, though New York just changed it because they wanted to liberalize abortion.
But if you were to murder a pregnant woman, you would be charged with double murder.
Because you've killed the mother and you've killed the child.
And that's true even in liberal states.
Yeah, that is true.
And I think the rationale behind that, that's not saying the same thing as abortion, the process of terminating a pregnancy, is murder.
Because the reason why... But the murderer terminates the pregnancy.
Yeah, no, the rationale is because there is no distinguished, you can't predict whether or not a woman is going to bring a pregnancy to term.
So if you have a pregnant woman and you kill, thinking from a legal sense, if you have a pregnant woman and I kill you, and I kill the woman, and then the baby dies too or whatever, I get charged double because we don't know what was going to happen.
We're under the impression that they were going to bring the pregnancy to term because it wouldn't really make sense to prosecute otherwise.
But you're not, the murderer would not be charged with Murdering the woman and violating her right to decide whether or not she wanted to take a pregnancy to term.
Yeah, no.
What he's charged with is double murder.
The reason why they're charged with double murder is because when you kill the mother or whatever, so that's what I'm saying.
Abortion is a separate concept.
But to be charged?
No, because abortion is the ability to terminate a pregnancy, right?
So if you're killing somebody, terminate a pregnancy.
Well, you're using a euphemism.
Because if it's an ectopic pregnancy, then the baby's already dead, but the abortion procedure... Hold on, how did we get to the topic of ectopic pregnancy?
Because the procedure is still an abortion.
I think because you're kind of moving away from the homicide issue.
No, no, no, hold on, hold on.
Because I think you're... Wait, how am I moving away from it when you cut me off and then I'm trying to explain to you why what you just said was wrong?
What I'm saying is an ectopic pregnancy, you would still get rid of that pregnancy via abortion.
The term abortion is just...
What percentage of abortions do you think are in the case of ectopic pregnancy or threat to the life of the mother?
pregnancy in particular.
Abortion refers to the termination of a non-viable pregnancy?
Yes.
What percentage of abortions do you think are in the case of ectopic pregnancy or a threat to the life of the mother?
That's a different question.
No, no, because what I'm saying is far more than 99% of abortions are elective where the baby is viable.
Yeah, no, no.
So what you said isn't true.
What you don't understand is the concept of viability.
80% of abortions take place in the first week, not the first week, the first trimester.
Oh, you're saying viable of living outside of the mother's womb.
Yes, yes, that's what I'm saying.
That's why, so the vast majority of the time.
But the baby would still be viable inasmuch as the baby would continue to develop and live just like you continue to grow.
That's not, again, you're mincing words because that's not what the term viability means.
I'm just trying to get through the euphemisms.
You're saying that it's not euphemisms, it's literal words.
I don't know what euphemism, maybe I'm... Do you know what a euphemism means?
Yeah, I know what a euphemism means and I'm not using one.
But the thing is, I'm telling you... A euphemism is a word to try to paper over a harsh reality with a language that would be less evocative and clear.
I'm going to assume— Which is why I'm referring to a human being in the womb, and you're trying to refer to, say, a pregnancy or the product of a pregnancy— Hold on, did I—wait, hold on, hold on.
I didn't say that the pregnancy or the fetus isn't a human being.
It is, but I'm telling you— Oh, okay, good.
I'm telling you that— But then why won't you call it a human being?
What?
I said a pregnancy.
Right, but why do you use that?
Because I'm describing what the term abortion refers to.
It's referring to ending a pregnancy.
Meaning, it doesn't necessarily mean killing a human being.
If the human being is already dead, you'd use the same procedure.
But abortion doesn't operate on people who are already dead.
abortion, you could- That's why I'm bringing up ectopic pregnancy.
No, the threat of an ectopic pregnancy is the baby is continuing to grow and threatens the life of the mother.
No, but no.
So if it's like develops cancer, if like the cells that are developing into the baby turn cancerous, or there's something where- Well, the mother could develop cancer separately, which would be- Yeah, no, but I'm saying in terms like that, where the baby is dead, or you have like a miscarriage The issue of... The process on, the process by which you terminate that pregnancy is still abortion.
Abortion is simply referring to terminating a pregnancy of an unviable fetus, which means, or a non-viable fetus, which means that In the time in which it is terminated, it cannot survive outside the mother.
That's the term abortion.
Now you can say abortion could be used for killing a baby or everything.
That's all it's used.
But it doesn't change the fact that there are circumstances in which the baby's already dead, and that procedure is still called an abortion.
So outlawing that procedure... It isn't, though.
It is.
Because you used the word terminate.
That's conception.
What does the word terminate mean?
End.
A pregnancy.
Okay, and what do you mean by a pregnancy?
The fetus is inside of the mother.
And doing what?
So the termination of a viable... What do you mean?
When you say you're going to end the pregnancy, by which you say, you mean the fetus that is inside of the mother, but... Well, I don't mean ending the fetus that is inside the mother, I mean ending the process of pregnancy.
And what is that process?
The process is the continued growth of that pregnancy.
Yes.
Which is life, that's why it's not dead already.
The baby is no longer growing or something, that's still a pregnancy because it's still inside the mother.
The termination of a viable pregnancy is delivery or c-section.
So I don't think you understand.
So the termination of a non-viable pregnancy would be when the baby cannot live outside the mother, right?
And you get an abortion or whatever, that's how you terminate it.
But you could do that.
That's not an ectopic pregnancy.
That could be just any time before the baby could live outside of the mother.
Yeah.
Okay, so we're no longer just talking about ectopic pregnancy.
Yeah, no, I was never only trying to make the point that ectopic pregnancy is the only, I'm saying the term abortion refers to terminating a pregnancy.
That can be at any stage of the pregnancy.
If you terminate a non-viable pregnancy, that is abortion, that is usually what will happen in the first few weeks or the first trimester of, which is when most abortions happen, when you terminate a viable fetus, meaning a fetus that can outside the womb, unless it's like a threat to the mother, which is very rare, that is a delivery.
If the pregnancy ends on a viable fetus, that is usually because the mother has pushed out the baby or got a C-section.
You don't like me using this term, baby or person or human being.
Because I think that you and me and everyone watching knows that the image that pops into mind when you say a baby or a child, we say the term, how's the baby, how's your baby to a woman who's pregnant because we're under the assumption that they're going to bring that baby to term.
No, that's not why.
Yeah, so we make that jump that it's like you're going to give birth.
Perhaps that's how you interpret it.
The way I interpret it, the reason that I would ask, how is the baby doing, is because I'm inquiring into how that baby at that particular moment is doing.
That's why I use that line.
Yeah.
No, that's the same.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
You could be inquiring into the condition of the baby, but the reason why you're using the term baby is because when you see someone who's pregnant, you don't think about Hey, do they want to bring this to term?
What's going on in their personal life?
You see, they're pregnant, that means they're going to have a baby.
That's the logic.
So this brings us back to the point that's at hand here, because what you seem to be suggesting here is that the identity of the being inside the womb is contingent upon whether or not the mother wants to have an abortion.
So if the mother does want to have an abortion, let me at least explain what I think you're saying, and then you can correct me if I'm wrong.
You're saying if the mother wants to have an abortion and get rid of the baby, then you wouldn't refer to it as a baby.
You wouldn't ask, how's the baby doing, obviously.
But if the mother wants to bring the baby to term and then raise the baby and send the baby off to college, then you would ask, how is the baby doing?
And the question of whether or not that baby is a baby depends upon the wishes of the mother as pertains to that baby.
Is that what you're saying?
Well, no.
So what I'm saying is the language that you use, right?
So when we're using the term baby, there's no point in which you're growing up through childhood and you stop and think, Huh, let me consider the complex natures of pregnancy and the way the mother, you just kind of assume, you see someone showing, they're going to have a baby, how's the baby doing?
And most times it's not offensive because usually if you're getting to the point where you're showing, you're probably going to already carry the baby to term.
But when we're talking about the fact that the vast majority of abortions happen within the first trimester, a lot of times you're not even showing, you don't ask.
Yeah, and at that point, you don't even really get the opportunity to ask, how's the baby doing?
Because a lot of times, you don't even know that somebody is pregnant, or they don't even know that they're pregnant, and then they get the thing.
So it's like, when you see somebody who is obviously pregnant, a lot of times they're further along, they're planning for a baby, so we make that jump, hey, how's the baby doing?
Because you are under the assumption that, yeah, most people are going to bring the baby to term.
But if that baby, okay.
So if the baby is a baby and you're going to call it a baby.
So if you asked somebody, hey, how's the baby doing?
Then you'd listen to them.
And if they're like, well, we're going through some stuff and I don't know, I might, I'm looking into getting an abortion.
If they get that close to you, I don't know, I don't really equate that information like something close to me.
But if they got close to you and they're like, yeah, I don't know, you'd probably be better off if you didn't like, oh, but your child, how's your child doing?
Because you know what that's invoking.
Sure, okay, so let's leave it at baby.
If you're granting that you see a pregnant woman and you say, hey, that's a baby, I'm acknowledging that that thing is a baby, then don't you necessarily have to conclude that it would be wrong to kill that baby through an abortion?
Because you're saying it's a baby.
Well, yeah, if you use that language.
But you just said you would use that language.
I'm saying, yeah, if you're saying, oh, how's the baby doing?
And they're like, yeah, I'm going to kill this baby.
No, I'm just asking for your opinion on that.
Yeah, but I'm saying- Assuming you support legal abortion.
Yeah, you get two separate things, right?
So if you say, oh, how's the baby doing?
And they're like, oh, I'm planning on murdering this baby.
That's one thing.
If you're saying, oh, how's the baby doing?
It's like, well, I don't really know.
I think I'm going through some stuff with the pregnancy.
My doctor's told me that.
X, Y, Z is going to happen or I'm just not in a position right now.
I think I'm going to end my pregnancy.
That's going to be fine because most humans can understand.
It's like, okay, this person doesn't have the, this person doesn't have the, I didn't say, I didn't say, oh, I thought you said funny.
No, I wouldn't find that fine.
Why wouldn't you find that fine?
Well, because we both just agreed that Whatever it is that is inside the mother's womb is a baby.
We both agree that we would... You just said baby, but fetus means... No, I'm saying you using baby.
The reason why we colloquially use the term baby is because we make the assumption that they're going to give birth to that baby.
It's a lot of times when we see someone pregnant, if they're obviously showing that they're pregnant, they're probably far along enough to where you can make the assumption they're going to give birth.
But if I was a medical professional, or if I'm talking about the concept of pregnancy, or a term relating to that pregnancy, like abortion, I'd use the term fetus.
Because we're talking in scientific terms now.
There is no room for, we're not talking about, oh, what value are we going to assign to this kid?
We need to give the mother time to actually decide what's going to happen.
What does the word fetus mean?
What does the word fetus mean?
It's a stage of human development.
Do you know the meaning of the word, though?
I don't know, like, what are you talking about?
It's a Latin word.
Yeah, oh, I thought you, okay.
I don't know, like, the Latin origin.
It means offspring.
Yes.
And?
Yeah, so if I say that I have a teenager at home, that's offspring.
If I say I have a child at home, that's offspring.
If I say I have a baby at home, that's offspring.
They're all offspring.
Say you have a fetus.
Yeah, fetus, offspring.
You shouldn't kill any of them.
Four different stages of development.
Yeah, but of the same thing.
Yeah, but they all mean offspring.
If I use the word term, same thing with fetus, same thing with everything.
And so it would be wrong to kill your teenager.
I'm not saying that using one word over the other means that it's not your offspring, it's still your offspring.
Right, so we grant it's four stages of the same person.
So it'd be wrong to murder your teenager, it'd be wrong to murder your child, it'd be wrong to murder your newborn infant, and it would be wrong to murder the fetus.
Yeah, because if you murdered them, then that's unlawful killing.
You keep using that word.
You can say kill because you believe that it should be murder.
Do you think there's a moral law?
A moral law?
I believe morality exists.
from the positive laws of any given state?
- A moral law?
- Yeah.
- I believe morality exists.
I don't believe that there's a moral creed that we all-- - What is morality? - That's a tough question for me.
I think morality to me is, well I don't know, kind of what we feel, I don't want to say, I don't necessarily, because I think it's a little bit deeper than feeling.
Kind of like our nature or our feeling of what's right and wrong.
I think the way in which we ground that, I like to ground my morality in human well-being.
Um, and trying to like reduce as much harm as possible.
But I don't, when it comes to like a specific definition, I don't know if you're looking for like a dictionary.
No, I think we've gotten reasonably close.
You make a good point, which is you say, I think it's more than a feeling, which necessarily it must be.
It must be reasonable.
So if we are to know anything about morality at all, it's not just going to be from our feelings, which might change with our passions, but it would have to be through the use of our reason.
We would know, using our reason, that certain things are better than other things, and that certain things are right and certain things are wrong.
Yeah, but I don't necessarily, like, if you're gonna say a moral law and that a lot of us, like, all of us have a moral core, like, things that we tell ourselves, like, oh, I would never do that, or I could never do that.
No, I don't think I have a moral- If you mean, if you mean that in, like, a figurative sense, yes, but I don't mean, I don't think that there's, like, a moral, like, declaration of specific things we all need to live up to.
I think we all have an idea of what's an ideal that we try to live up to, and we try to get as close to that as possible, and try not to violate it.
So, but the ideal is objectively true.
Or it's just subjective.
What do you mean?
It seems to me you've contradicted yourself a little, which is, you're saying, yes, we all have an intuition of morality, of ideals that we would like to live up to, but it's not like a declaration or a law.
Like when I say that I don't, like when I say that I mean it's like not, I know you are religious, I don't believe it's like divine, like commandment written down somewhere.
I think that it's more, like I said, like what we intuit, what we feel like strongly.
Why do we feel it?
Why do we feel it?
I think there's a lot of reasons for that.
I think A, it comes from our being as a social species and our ability to think sentiently that gets us to think about some complex stuff even like, is what I'm doing right or wrong?
How would this make other people feel?
I think that that comes from our evolution of Being around each other, having to communicate to survive, having to make compromises, see what's right and wrong, recognize that if we kill each other then we probably just keep going at it and no one gets any benefit out of it, and it's like, it's those things that kind of develop as humans.
But then if it were merely that, you know, we don't kill each other because that would probably produce some problems for society over time, so we just basically have a truce not to kill each other, that wouldn't be then to say that it is wrong.
To commit murder.
It would just say that we just kind of agree to not kill each other.
So then, this is crucial, you're not grasping at an ideal that you are intuiting using your reason.
You're just kind of coming up with a concordat to live together.
No, but I think that before there's a time where we can sit across from each other and discuss what the meaning of right and wrong is, I think that there's a time where there's these feelings that we have through our evolution and everything where it's like, cool, I don't want to kill this person, not just because it's gonna cause some problems down the line, but it's like, we can recognize what loss is, we can recognize we don't want that to happen to us, and it'd probably be better as our species if we worked together to accomplish things more than we fight.
And then that further, that same ideal gets put into words when we get more words to describe that.
And we're like, okay, this is wrong.
We don't agree.
And I don't think that it's subjective in the sense that, oh, we could just decide what's right and wrong.
I think it's objective, but that's only given that we all agree on the framework that we do all agree on, which is well-being.
So then it wouldn't be objective, it would be relative.
It's objective given, no, it's objective given like a scope.
So I don't think that you can go out and find morals in the ground.
But I think if as a... But could you deduce morals using your reason?
Or do you even have a reason?
Deduce morals using your reason?
I think you can use your reason to understand and come to a more moral position, yeah.
I don't think that you can... I don't think it's like...
You make it up, but there are certain things that you feel and then you use your reason to get to the best of it.
Yes, so that is what I'm getting at.
You keep saying that, well, because in certain states the positive civil law has a license for abortion, that therefore it's legal and there's no moral conundrum here.
But what I'm pointing out is that sometimes the positive civil law is unjust.
Compared to the objective moral law.
This is something like Martin Luther King talked about a lot.
That's again, you can't, you can't say that it's, I mean, you can say that it's wrong according to the objective moral law, but according to my objective moral law, there is, it's not wrong.
I just think, I think you're wrong.
But if, if there is a distinction between your moral law and my moral law, then there can't be an objective moral law.
You understand?
No, because we can also, we can argue about what, do you value like human well-being?
Oh yes, very much.
And I assume that you value that because you come at the position of, oh, it's killing a person, we don't want to kill a person, that's a bad thing, right?
No, no, human well-being is much broader than just laws about murder.
Yeah, no, I'm saying that's one of the things where it's not, if you track it all the way back, it can be, at the end of the day, it is very not conducive to human well-being for us to kill each other, or in your...
Or, in your view, the killing, like, the innocent child, all the language that you put on it.
Being murdered is not conducive to one's well-being.
So, I think that if we're talking about abortion, you can stop there and say, it's wrong to kill, therefore, this is not- It's not always wrong to kill.
Yeah.
And I can take, yeah, and I can take that and I can say, it's not always wrong to kill.
And I think that- But it's always wrong to commit murder.
And I think that, yeah, which is why abortion is not right.
So it's always wrong to take innocent human life.
I don't think that that's... Okay, we're gonna get into what innocence is, but I think that when it comes to the case of abortion... Innocence is not culpability.
Yeah, when it comes to the case of abortion, I don't think that...
You saying that, oh, this is murder, or this is killing, or everything, and that's wrong.
I don't think that's necessarily a wrong take to have.
But I can say, I can say that when it comes to human well-being and what we both agree on, human well-being is a positive that we should shoot for, I think the best way for us to achieve human well-being is allowing half of our population to have more bodily autonomy.
Right, but so we obviously disagree there.
So, I'm saying it is conducive to well-being and, objectively, morally good not to kill babies in the womb.
You're saying, Michael, I see your point and I respect your opinion, but I think that it is conducive to human flourishing and well-being and perhaps even morally good.
No, so yeah, we're still agreeing on the groundwork of well-being, because at the end of the day, you're arguing— Clearly not.
No, you're—yeah, in my opinion, clearly not, because I think you're flat wrong.
But what we're saying is, the groundwork of what is best for human well-being is still there.
And even though you could say, like, oh, well, we're disagreeing on this thing, we don't disagree that we're trying to operate for human well-being.
That's where our morals are grounded.
Now, the way we go about it can take different routes, and I think you're objectively wrong, because I think that if you have half the population being a slave to their biology, meaning the millisecond that there's a baby inside of them, they're There's no autonomy.
There's no autonomy?
You lose your autonomy?
You lose your bodily autonomy, yes.
What are you talking about?
In your framework.
Have you met anybody who's ever been pregnant?
What do you mean?
What do you think I mean when I say lose your bodily autonomy?
Do you think that I mean you can't go to Kroger or something?
I mean that you can't make that decision.
That's what you imply.
If we make abortion illegal, I'm saying you no longer have control over the developmental process that's happening within your body.
And I think that it's not conducive to human well-being because when we're talking about granting rights, respecting people's rights, granting equal rights, if we say that a fetus is a person, deserves all the equal rights of everybody, I could even agree and grant you that.
They do deserve all the equal rights of everybody.
Right.
But one of those things is not getting to use somebody's body for life without consent.
Oh, well then we have a contradiction.
So then we have to figure out if that's really a right or not.
Is the right to abortion really a right at all?
Yeah, I think... It would seem like you actually seem to have concluded that it's not before reversing yourself and saying that it is.
No.
Because you've just said that the baby is entitled to... I'm saying for the sake of argument, I can grant you that the fetus is a person with all human rights.
Right.
But one of those human rights that no one else gets in any other circumstance is getting to use somebody's body against their will.
No matter whether or not you put them in that situation or otherwise, you don't get to be forcefully, the government shouldn't get to forcefully connect you to somebody and then you cannot disconnect from them.
Well, that's a right that nobody else has, but you're trying to give to people.
You know how the baby ended up there, right?
Yeah, I know how the baby ended up there, and that's what we got to get consent to sex.
It probably wasn't a gun point.
It was probably because of a willful action of the mother and the father.
Yeah, it probably was a willful action of the mother and the father, but if I have a kidney disease running in my family, And I know that if I give birth, or my wife gives birth to a child, there's a high likelihood that they will have the same kidney disease.
And then they're born, and they have that kidney disease, and they need a kidney.
Does the government have the right to force me to connect, to donate my kidney to keep them alive?
No, it might be a good thing for you to do, but no, the reason is because your kidneys are for you.
They're for the functioning of your body.
Well, they're for the functioning of filtering blood.
No, no, no.
You can say they're for me in the same way that I could say a woman's uterus is for her.
For her baby.
No, it's for her.
No, you just made my point.
So, you said the purpose of a kidney is to filter blood, right?
For you.
My kidneys aren't for filtering blood for you, they're just for filtering my blood.
They're for filtering blood, though.
But they're my kidneys, right?
They're part of me.
They're an integral part of me.
So, my lungs are for taking in oxygen.
My yeah, it's for taking an oxygen not your not for you It's for you because it's for you because you're using but so what is the if the end of the kidney is filtering blood and if the end of the lungs is taking an oxygen and if the end of the eyes is seeing What is the end of the womb?
The end of the womb, or the end of the uterus, would be for procreation.
There you go.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that anything that happens to that thing is now out of the jurisdiction because it has the ability to fester life.
So the thing that I'm talking about is, well, we're talking about blood cells, we can talk about life, those things technically are alive.
They don't have the same, I can grant you they don't have the same.
They're not a human being.
Yeah, they're not a human being.
A cell of my hair.
But you can't say that, well, no one else has a right to my kidney because it's for me.
At the end of the day, a kidney's a kidney.
You can write off about donating kidney before you die, and then once you die- You can donate your kidney.
Yeah, once you die, you can donate.
But there's a distinction between your kidney and my kidney, which is- Yeah, there's a distinction between your kidney and my kidney.
I think that my kidney's for me, but again- Right, we agree.
Again, when we talk about, it's not necessarily what it's for and its utility.
The process, the thing that kidneys are for, are donating blood.
And you can say that it's a moral good.
I can say you're morally virtuous if you're in that situation and you decide to donate your kidney.
I can say that's a morally good thing to do.
I would never legislate that you must do that.
And just saying, well, it's for me.
That would be disordered.
Yeah, but I'm saying if you're just going to offer, well, no, because it's for me.
Well, it's like, okay, if we're operating based off your framework, it doesn't matter whether or not it's for you.
You put your child in that situation.
You knew that if you had sex and you procreated, chances are your child was going to be born with a debilitating kidney disease.
And as a parent, you have to take responsibility for that and forcefully give them your kidney.
No, but this is a fallen world and everyone... This is a fallen world.
Everyone endures some suffering, so it's not, we don't sue our parents in a law court because of the inevitable suffering that comes along with life.
That would seem rather unusual.
Yeah, but that's just not traditional suffering, though.
It's kind of analogous to sex and pregnancy, because if I am having sex with a person, and I know that there is a non-zero, even a high probability, that they will have some defect or some, like, for the example, a kidney disorder, and I know that that's a possibility when I go into it, If we're saying that you know that getting pregnant is a possibility when you go into it, therefore, when the pregnancy happens, your uterus is their possession now, and you cannot control it.
No, it's not their possession, but it does what its natural end is.
I mean, I think we've arrived at something that's important here, which is that we know what things are largely by what they're for, right?
That's the distinction between, like, if I have a microphone here.
Let's say I had a bigger microphone, like a rock star microphone.
You might ask me, Michael, what is that in your hand?
I would say, well, it's a microphone.
What distinguishes this microphone in my hand from some other similarly looking object that I could hold in my hand?
For instance, I could use the microphone to hang a painting on the wall, right?
I could use it and I could hammer a nail into my wall.
And it would probably hammer the nail.
Probably wouldn't do a very good job at it, but it would hammer the nail.
It'd probably break the microphone if I did that.
So I could use the microphone for that purpose, but it would be a better order.
It would be a better use of the microphone to use it for amplifying sounds.
Would you outlaw using it for hammering it into a wall?
Well, not necessarily, but if it redounded in the murder of a child, I probably would.
Oh, see, again.
There's the intuition bump again, because now we're going to go back to the whole, it's not murder, because it is lawful, and then you're going to say, oh, because the moral law that you subscribe to.
Which you agreed to.
My moral law, that is not murder.
No, but there can't, again, there can't be multiple moral laws.
We're just disagreeing over the moral law.
Yeah, well, we're not even necessarily disagreeing.
I think we are.
We both arrived at the conclusion of human well-being, and you just think that it is murder, therefore it is not human well-being.
And I'm saying, well, no, it is letting a woman decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, seeing as consent to sex isn't consent to pregnancy, and consent to pregnancy isn't consent to staying pregnant.
So, I think giving them that option is conducive to well-being, and you think it's not because it's murder.
So, the well-being part is still there, you're just using the... So, you keep coming back to this phrase, well-being, which is quite interesting, because it's a core aspect of ethics, going back many years now, going back to the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle.
And it's good, we all want human flourishing, eudaimonia is one way to call it.
But you seem content to just leave it at that and say, well, we just disagree over the nature of well-being.
But can't we dig in a little bit deeper?
So if we say that morality is objective and we are simply perceiving it in different ways and we're having a disagreement, therefore, about the true nature of what is good for human beings, then can't we continue to interrogate that question?
So I think you arrived at it, though.
You tried to jump off it very quickly, which is, you said, the baby in the womb is entitled to all the rights that everybody else has.
But the mother has the right to kill her.
I said, I'm going to grant you the argument that even if it is a person, it does not have.
If you're going to say that it's a person, therefore it is endowed with all the rights of people, one of those rights is not to use somebody's body.
So now we arrive at this issue of a contradiction.
How is that a contradiction?
Well, because you just said that the baby has a right to the same rights that we have.
Now, one of those would be the right to life, that would be the most basic right.
What do you mean by right to life?
The right not to be murdered, let's say, in this case.
The right not to be murdered.
So, let's say, Is that, that's all you mean when you say the right to life?
In this instance, yeah.
So, okay, again, murder is a specific, okay, so, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
No, because you can say that you disagree with killing from a moral standpoint in certain circumstances, that's completely fine.
The term murder only means the legalistic one that we have.
It doesn't I don't mean that it's calling to even into question objective morality.
Murder, the concept of murder is unlawful killing or unjust killing of an innocent person.
Those are all things that we agree morally are bad.
You shouldn't kill an innocent person.
You shouldn't unjustly kill somebody.
But at the end of that, it is kill.
Murder is calling on our moral intuition.
You're taking a legal term that has specific legal definitions and trying to apply it to a moral sense when all you really mean is that you think it should be murder.
Let me try a different tack here on the same question.
Do you think slavery is wrong?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you think slavery in the American context was wrong?
Yes.
Do you think slavery is unlawful?
Yes, today.
If I said back in the day, no, it's not unlawful, that'd be a statement of fact.
That's not me saying, I agree with the instance.
So why do you disagree?
Why do I disagree?
Why would you, if you were living in 1860, in some regions of the country, why would you say that slavery is wrong, when it would also have been lawful by your understanding?
Well, again, you can say that murder is wrong, but if I said that Working for somebody is slavery.
That would also be a wrong statement.
You can say slavery is wrong, but I can't say this one aspect of, like, working is slavery.
So what I mean by that is, if I say that murder is wrong, that's a true statement.
Cool.
But if I say abortion is murder, you're just trying to get it to, well, therefore abortion is wrong.
But you have to prove that abortion is murder.
And it's not.
The way you would argue that is you would say, That the baby in the womb that you're calling a fetus or embryo.
On top of that, I'm sorry, on top of that, we don't even, we don't merely legislate on morale.
So even if you think that abortion is immoral, that is different from what should be legal.
All laws derive from the moral law.
That's cap.
But we'll get to that.
That's a nice one.
This is really important.
The argument that abortion is murder rests on whether or not the baby is a baby.
So I'm saying the baby is a baby.
You're saying the baby is not a baby.
In exactly the same way that the injustice of slavery rests entirely upon whether or not the black person is a person or not a person.
Well, no, because then it would be whether or not the fetus is a person.
Correct.
Not a baby.
Right.
But even then... Exactly.
Wait, I'm sorry, because I'm going to need you to repeat what you said after, but you just casually slipped in there that all law comes from the moral law.
Right, because what is law?
So, question.
Speed limits.
Do you have, like, a strict moral position on, like, what a given speed limit should be?
Yes, a speed limit would be arrived at as a matter of prudence, which is a cardinal virtue for the well-being of the traveler and also the safety of the people around him.
Okay, so— Those would be moral considerations.
So, is driving 40 miles an hour in a 35 immoral?
Uh, it's probably not too imprudent, it's probably not too reckless, and therefore not too unjust.
I wouldn't say there's any moral value in driving 40 in a 35.
And the reason why I say that is because... Well, it's a disobedience to the civil authority, that would be.
When you go a certain threshold over a speed limit, say you're going like 20 over, and say it's a school zone.
You can say that's immoral because you're seriously endangering people, right?
But when you're talking about what we have as law in our society, driving 40 in a 35 will get you no moral condemnation, nor should it.
Well, it could get you a speeding ticket, though.
Because there are different degrees of stuff, so you can't— And then something like— It may be less morally significant than criminally speeding in a school zone, but it would still have—the way you would arrive at the speed limit.
Would be through moral debate and moral deliberation.
Yeah, you could talk about moral debate and moral deliberation.
That's all I'm saying.
For developing, like, the threshold of... Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Even if you take the speed limit example, and you can say, okay, well, at this threshold, it's not immoral, and at this threshold, it is immoral.
That's what a speed limit is.
Yeah, you could do that same thing with anything, with abortion.
But you might be right or wrong.
Yeah, you could.
Some laws might be unjust.
I'm sorry, like, what do you mean by that?
I mean, like, for instance, when the abolitionists came around in the 19th century, they said it is legal according to the positive civil law for white men to enslave certain black men.
But according to the higher law, that is deeply unjust.
Wait, hold on, that's a contradiction.
If all law comes from the moral law, then how did slavery becoming legal even happen?
Because this is a fallen world.
Because this is a fallen world.
And because people have sometimes defective reason, defective will, so they sometimes legislate evil things.
Like abortion.
Law, or all law comes from the moral law.
Moral law is objective.
And then you say, well, slavery was a legal process, but you believe that that's wrong.
Now you're saying- Because our reason and our wills are imperfect.
Yeah, but I'm saying, you're saying that if all law comes from moral law, right, you could just be wrong about abortion, about your stance on abortion, right?
Right, that's why there's a mismatch- So you're saying that abortion is murder, and murder is always wrong because it comes from the objective moral law.
Yeah.
But there are other things that come from objective moral law that we wouldn't say, or we should say in its application, no it doesn't, because how would slavery come from an objective moral law?
Because of the defect of the intellect and the will of the people who legislated it, which is why after comparing the Clearly defective positive law with the objective moral law, which we can use, which we can do through our conscience and our reason.
We realized that there was a mismatch here and that the civil positive law was unjust.
That's why we got rid of it.
So you're saying the natural state of like our having moral law is that slavery is wrong, but it's our reasoning that twists it and made it so it was correct.
No, it's that this is a fallen world with defects in our intellect.
What do you mean by fallen world?
I mean it's not perfect.
Was it ever perfect?
Well, before the fall, yeah.
So that's a religious concept.
Yeah, but what is religion?
Religion is a certain subsect of beliefs that tend to be in theology.
What is theology?
Theology is the study of gods, the study of religion.
Faith-seeking understanding is sometimes what it's called.
And religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to render to God that which he deserves.
Well, that's, again, your opinion.
You can say that religion is a habit of virtue, and I can list off a bunch of different ways religion has been used in a non-virtuous fashion.
- Well, right, but I'm saying one of the-- - And even in the texts of certain religious books, there's non-moral-- - You said that what I've done is just explain the fallen world in religious terms, and then you've criticized my definition of religion because it takes into account-- - The reason why I'm saying is that if there's an objective moral law that everybody knows, that everybody does-- - They don't know it perfectly.
That's the problem.
Because our wills and our intellects are defective as a result of the fall of man.
Okay, so you're saying that there is an objective moral law that is dictated to us by a god of some sort.
Yeah, and it's knowable through reason.
Yeah, and it's knowable, but we've been fallen and therefore we don't know the moral law without substantiating.
No, no, we do have a reasonable degree of certainty about certain things.
If you get 100 people in the room, at least 99 of them are going to agree that murder is wrong.
But we don't possess perfect intellect and perfect will.
The thing is, the reason why I don't subscribe to that is because there is no demonstration, there is no substantiating that this That any of that even happened that led to a fallen moral world, and that's why we're here today.
What do you mean by that?
When I say that there's no demonstration, I mean religion is an unfalsifiable concept, in that you can... It's falsified.
You could try to make an argument.
You can't falsify because we have no way of even measuring a supernatural phenomenon, because we have no way to even develop a criteria by which we measure supernatural.
We can know that there are, for instance... You can believe.
Well, but I guess this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, right?
I can believe, and I can think things, and I can have opinions that are my perception of reality, and they can be more or less correct.
But when it comes to religion, say, the question is, does God exist or does God not exist?
And it seems to me there are many very good arguments for the existence of God.
It seems to me that there are many very good arguments against the existence of God.
I've never seen a good one.
Well, that doesn't mean that there aren't any.
I thought I've looked for them.
I haven't found them.
I'm not sure how confident I am that you've looked for them.
I've seen some of your stuff reacting to certain people.
I was an atheist for 10 years.
I've seen some of your stuff reacting to certain people, how you portray their argument off.
Again, and it's completely fine to voice or frame an argument in a particular way if it goes against something that you deeply hold.
But the reason why I don't develop... I don't understand what you mean by that.
You think it's fine for me to...
You're saying that I've articulated a view that you find wrong, but you think it's fine for me to articulate a wrong view?
No, I'm saying that I think that it's, like, you're, I won't say fine, I said I think that it's understandable, which I should say, that you would couch certain arguments, yeah, but no, that you'd couch certain arguments that, like, disagree with your religion in a negative light or whatever, because I don't think that you've genuinely, honestly gone and searched some good arguments for and against religion.
JJ, I was an atheist for ten years, I was a pretty ardent atheist for, like, ten years.
I was quite taken with people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and more serious atheists too, like Bertrand Russell, one of the great logicians of the 20th century.
I believe that your reasoning in this fallen world has been clouded.
It clearly was, because I was taken by the atheists for ten years.
No, I mean after you went away from atheism.
That's a whole other meta-conversation.
But it's pretty important because, you know, ultimately these questions are going to rest on Ultimately, they're going to come down to whether or not God exists, because really basic aspects of how we're even speaking here will come down to that.
How is it possible?
It can come down to that, but again, you have no way of demonstrating that a God exists, that you know that... There are many good arguments for God.
There are many good arguments.
You have no demonstration of whether or not a God exists, what their moral code is, if your God is the correct God, if your God is the only option over other... Yeah, according to you.
But I happen to be correct.
According to you.
So again, what I'm saying is, if we're going to derive our sense of morality from an unfalsifiable claim, which again, you did do in our video when you said that consenting to being in a bar is by default consenting to being drunk because near instances of sin, which is... The near occasion of sin.
This is a really important point.
The near occasion of sin.
Because it gets to what we're talking about, which is that in a fallen world we have defects of our intellect and our will.
So, we're not perfectly free all the time.
But think about Hunter Biden.
We'll get to the morality of Hunter Biden, you know, sleeping with the 50th hooker of the week.
How did Hunter Biden come to sleep with the 50th hooker of the week and film himself doing it?
Well, he probably went on a long bender, and he probably drank a lot, and he probably smoked a little bit of crack, and he was probably half out of his mind by the time he called up the hooker and then slept with the hooker.
At what point would you say he consented to those sorts of acts?
I don't really believe in adequate consent when you're under the influence, but... Bingo.
So, I want to continue that in one second.
First, though, when you want to protect your data, you've got to go to expressvpn.com slash MichaelYT.
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Momentarily, after I finish this point, with JJ.
As we were saying.
I don't really believe in consenting when you're properly under the influence.
Bingo.
That's great.
So, why not?
Because I don't believe that you are fully within your I want to say, like, within your mind.
If you're doing all the stuff that Hunter Biden has allegedly done, then you're probably out of your mind.
But you're not fully in a state in which you can give consent.
You're not in full command of your intellect and your will, is what you're saying.
Which is true.
Or any of your faculties.
Right, right.
Your bladder, probably, at that point, too.
So, that is a great description of the near occasion of sin, which is that We can do things that compromise our will and our intellect and lead us more into temptation, such that by the time that we're ready to call up that hooker on the Hunter Biden hotline, we've already so compromised our will and our intellect that we have very little control over ourselves.
That's insane.
You just said it.
No, but the reason why it's insane... No, I didn't say the part about, oh, by the time we have so little control of ourselves that being in a bar means that you're... If they can't consent, then how is the act of simply being in a bar... I'm just saying what you said.
Yeah, I know what I'm saying.
If they can't consent, then how is it that they are consenting by simply being in a bar?
What you said in the video was that because of the near occasion of sin, You, by the time you go to the bar and it's a Friday night or whatever, you're beginning the process of consenting to being drunk.
For me, it's not that dangerous because I'm not an alcoholic.
For all my many sins, that's not one of mine.
But as I pointed out, I think, in that video, if someone were a drunk, if someone were an alcoholic-inclined kind of person, then to go to the bar, on the one hand, doesn't seem like you're consenting to getting drunk.
But if you know that you are so inclined, Then, by putting yourself around all those delicious-looking bottles and all those drunken people, you are more inclined to take the first drink.
And once you take the first drink, you'll be more inclined to take the second drink.
And by the time you take the second and third and fourth drink, you'll be more inclined to have your hunger.
Yeah, more inclined is not the same thing as consent.
If you take the first drink, that doesn't mean people are...
granted to come up to you and give you more drinks.
If you're in the bar and you're an alcoholic and no one really knows that you're an alcoholic, that doesn't mean that people are permitted to come up and just give you alcohol regardless, or force you to drink it because you did not consent.
It doesn't matter what you think you are tending to do based on your preconception or your pre-election of, maybe I'm alcoholic, maybe I'm at this bar.
Unless you drink and you are physically doing that, you aren't consenting.
When I said that you can't consent sometimes because you're in that state of mind, that means that even if you were to be drunk, say you went and you drunk a bunch or whatever and then you wanted to have sex with somebody, right?
Even if they say, yes, I do, it's not consenting because you're not in the right state of mind.
You're trying to say, oh, because you're not in the right state of mind, You not even doing the action means, well, I just can't control myself, which means the same thing as consent.
It's not.
Some people can't.
What I'm doing is just taking the principle that you've agreed to and taking it to its logical conclusion.
No, you're not.
Because the principle that I agreed to is that if you're under the influence, you cannot consent.
You're saying that because you might have a predilection to being under the influence, what you do is not necessarily governed by consent because you have a predilection to do things that take you out of the influence.
I'm saying if Hunter Biden drunk a bunch, right?
And he did a bunch of drugs, right?
And then some girl wanted to have sex with him.
He said yes.
In my book, that still doesn't count as consent because he has no governing over his faculty.
And I'm also saying that if he was sober, And he said, I didn't want to have sex, or I do want to have sex.
And someone else said, no.
Also, that is not consenting.
So I'm saying consent is both revocable and it's not something that you can give if you're under the influence.
Right.
So if you were to go to a bar and you get alcohol anyway or whatever because, you know, I'm an alcoholic and me being here means I'm more likely to drink.
Unless you drink, you still haven't consented to being drunk.
I guess then my question is, does Is booze or crack cocaine, is that the only thing that can compromise our will and our intellect?
It doesn't matter what compromise.
You're saying other things could too.
Like if you're a sex addict and you go to a brothel, that could compromise it too.
Any number of things.
If you're a big fat glutton and you're around a bunch of cupcakes, that could take you out of your mind too.
Put you in a cupcake filled ecstasy.
So the point is that the concept of the near temptation of sin is that temptation can increase And that we can do things that more or less incline us to fall further into temptation and more or less compromise our wills.
Which I think you've read it.
No, what you're saying is a slippery slope argument.
You're saying because we can do things that can compromise our will, that means we could do something else that compromise our will, which means you could end up sitting down at the bar, which means you could drink, which means that the first part when you walked in the door, that means you're already consenting to being drunk.
That is a logical leap that is phenomenal.
You get a world record for that long, Joe?
It means that you're consenting to the possibility and the increased likelihood that you wind up drinking.
Not that you inevitably would.
I wouldn't even, in the bar analogy it's so dumb because I wouldn't even say that you're consenting to the possibility because you could go to a bar and just not drink.
But you're not an alcoholic.
I'm not an alcoholic.
Alcoholics have a hard time going to bars and not drinking.
Yeah, I mean, cool.
But that, again, does not further your argument because it's applicable in one situation where someone might have a predilection and even then they still haven't drunk.
But that's the instance I'm describing.
Yeah, okay, so then you're saying that... To show the broader point of the New York Asian No, but you can't draw that to the broader point.
You're saying because an alcoholic might have a higher predilection to being drunk when they come into a bar, even though they haven't drunk yet, they're saying being in the bar for them in particular is much more tempting.
It's not consent though.
You said consent.
Yes, you're consenting to that great increased temptation.
So you're consenting to a possibility, but you're not consenting to being drunk?
Yes, you're consenting to the possibility.
That's precisely the point.
No, but you were saying beforehand that... And then you therefore incur some culpability for it by placing yourself in the near occasion of sin.
So, by being in a bar.
Okay, so again, I don't think you understand what consent is, but... What do you think consent is?
So, consent is giving the okay, being willing to partake in an action.
Not only just saying yes, but also being enthusiastic.
Not saying that you have to be like, yes, I'm so ready!
But like, having a will about it, where you're like, I want to actually actively participate in this thing.
So, if you're telling me that the process of being in a bar in itself means that you're consenting to, and keep in mind, because if we're going to draw this back to pregnancy... Well, not for me, but for the drunk.
Keep in mind, we're drawing this back to pregnancy, so it's not just, like, this one outcome.
Because you could consent to sex, but you don't have to consent to a relationship, or you don't have to consent to, like, engaging with each other past that point.
You consent to sex.
If you're saying that that means you're consenting to every possible outcome of why, then you're saying being in a bar is consenting to every possible outcome of being in a bar.
So, again, what is the problem if you're in a bar and someone comes and shoves tequila down your throat?
So, you're saying consent is a matter of willing.
Right, that's what you just said.
Partially, yes.
And so, how does one will?
Will presupposes thought, intellect.
If you're consciously willing something, enthusiastically consenting, then you are reasoning about that thing and determining, is this going to be good for me, bad for me, true, false, whatever.
So, to consent, you need to have reasonably solid faculties of will.
Which presupposes a reasonably solid faculty of reason.
And if you don't have reasonably solid faculties, then it's not consent.
That's the thing.
So if you're in a bar and you don't have reason and you don't have your faculties about you, you drinking or you being in a bar still isn't consenting.
And when we are in the proximity of sin, when we're in the throes of lust or gluttony or whatever.
Well, first of all, again, I don't want to bring us all the way back to a meta-ethical conversation, but you would need to even substantiate that sin is a real thing that exists and that is your, and it's the sin that you believe in, it's the actions that you believe in that are sin and not any other religion.
You need to deduce that via reason and evidence, and then after you establish that, could you only then say that being in near instances of sin is, but you don't even make that logical.
Do you think that some things are better or worse than other things?
Yeah.
Okay, so then we agree that there is such a thing as morality and there's such a thing as virtue and sin.
There's such a thing as morality, there's such a thing as virtue, but if you're telling me that... And therefore sin, too.
Yeah, but if, no.
Because if you're telling me that wearing mixed fabrics is...
Is a sin?
Well, I can disagree with you there.
I don't think so.
It might be a sartorial sin, but it's not a moral sin.
Do you know what sin is?
I mean, that's a commandment.
You mean a sartorial sin?
Don't wear mixed fabrics?
Yeah.
Oh, well, to understand the Christian religion, one needs to understand it in the light of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion and the Resurrection and the history of the Church, which is the rock on which our Lord built His Church, against which the gates of hell will not prevail.
So, there are certain ritual laws of the Old Testament nation of Israel.
There are certain moral laws.
So, there are different kinds of laws that are prescribed in the books of the Bible, which could be a long conversation in itself.
But you've just said that there's good and bad, and so therefore there has to be sin, because sin is merely privation of the good.
That, again, I don't think that sin exists.
That's my thing.
I don't think that... But you said good exists.
Yeah, I think there's good and bad.
Do you think that something could be deprived of good?
What do you mean by deprived?
Could something be bad?
Yes, things can be good and bad.
Then you agree that sin exists.
That doesn't mean that sin exists.
That's the definition of sin.
Again, you can say it's, yeah, because sin is a specific religious concept.
So if you're saying that bad exists, I'm saying there are many things that are bad that aren't sin.
If I'm walking next to somebody and they're in a wheelchair and there's a ramp, Right?
And I could go up the stairs that's right next to him, but I choose to run in front of them and go up the ramp.
That's not a sin.
I can look at someone who does that and be like, you're able-bodied.
The stairs are right there.
You didn't have to cut the person in line and go run up the ramp, and they obviously need the ramp to be used right now.
You could have walked up the stairs.
That's not sin.
That's just a bad thing.
If I lie... You don't think it's sinful to injure a disabled person?
How is that injuring?
I said walking up the stairs in front of them.
No, you cut them off.
Yeah.
That's what you're saying.
Yeah, I don't mean cut them off as in, like, push them out the way.
I'm just saying, like, if you guys are... Yeah, you could just cut around them, go up the stairs.
You didn't need to go up the ramp.
But you're not inconveniencing them.
You just said you're not injuring them at all.
Yeah, what do you mean by, do you mean physical injure or do you mean like tort law type injure where it's like any, any like damages.
I just mean to harm them in any way, you know.
Well, I wouldn't say.
Inconveniencing them for their meeting or?
Yeah, I could say that it would be an inconvenience to them and I could also like put my moral thing on it.
Again, like legality, morality, that's a whole other thing.
I don't think it should be illegal for people who are able-bodied to walk up the ramp, but I can say morally, That's not my most favorite action.
You could have walked up the stairs just fine, but you chose to cut in front of this person who needs the ramp now to put yourself ahead of them when you had a whole other option that wouldn't even get in their way.
So I can say that that's bad, but that's not a sin.
And sin is dictated by religious creed, and it's set out specifically in Christianity with the various things that are sins.
But that doesn't mean that everyone else is, or that doesn't mean that there's things that you can't do that are bad, that aren't sins, or things that we can consider good.
Like we're white after Labor Day.
That would be bad, but it's not a sin.
But it's like, I don't think that when we say that something is sin, or a near occasion of sin, therefore means that you're consenting to being drunk by being in a bar.
That's a logical leap that you would need to even prove that sin exists first.
And by you trying to prove it by saying, well, good and bad exist, that doesn't mean that your religious concept of sin exists.
You would need to substantiate that first.
Well, sin, or religion rather, is, as I said, just giving God what he deserves.
That's what religion mostly is.
Religion is the thing that presupposes that God is a thing that you can give what you deserve.
Well, it certainly also presupposes that God exists.
Yeah.
No, so that's what I'm saying.
You can't define religion as giving God what he will, but that's the whole thing.
You're kind of sneaking the definition in without substantiating it.
Orient themselves toward God.
That's true.
So if you're an atheist... So it's a belief system that orients itself towards a God.
Right.
Or tries to theorize about God or gods.
Yeah, it just acknowledges that God exists.
Yeah.
Well, no.
Belief.
It's a belief that God does exist.
You see what I mean there?
It's a true opinion.
I know that you see what I mean there because I know you're a smart guy.
So I know that your rhetorical strategies can be on point.
But the thing is, if you're saying that... Why do you think they're on point?
I think it's on point because a lot of people who are watching this who don't really, who might not like me or might not be too versed.
Maybe they do like you.
Maybe they do.
But a lot of them who might not be too versed on rhetorical strategies can see because they believe.
It's like, yeah, it's just acknowledging that God exists.
Why do you think my religion is persuasive in this case?
Is it perhaps because it's well-reasoned?
No.
It's not at all.
I think it's because of the way that you say things, if you would let me finish explaining why I think it's on point.
I think because when you just said it right there, you said it's acknowledging that God exists, right?
Yeah.
That's because it's a common sense statement to you and to your audience.
If you say religion is acknowledging that God exists, that of course they're going to say, yeah, because I believe that God exists.
And if you're religious, you acknowledge that God exists.
But you kind of leaped past, which is why it's not reasonable or sound, you leap past the part where, wait, do we really know that a God exists?
And if we do, how do we demonstrate?
Well, here's how we demonstrate.
Things are in motion, right?
We're in motion.
You and I are in motion.
Earth is in motion.
The stars are in motion.
The galaxies are in motion.
Things in motion do not put themselves into motion.
So, like for instance, if I had a ball here, I could take this ball and I could throw it at another ball on that desk over there.
And then that ball, this ball that was moving that I threw, would hit the other ball and that ball would fall down on the ground, it would roll.
And that ball would maybe roll over, I don't know, another little tiny ball on the ground and it would keep, you would see things continue to move as a consequence of those actions.
So, we can go back and say, well Michael, how did you start moving?
And I'll tell you how I started moving, because my mother and father loved each other one night and they created me.
And you can go back through all of these actions that caused movement, but ultimately you're going to have to come to an unmoved mover.
Who is Scott?
Or no, you could actually, so it could be an unmoved mover.
It could be that there's a finite amount.
It reduces by finite amounts, the amount of movement.
So in that ball analogy, when you throw the ball and it hits another ball, it would be slowly slowing down because of the force of friction.
So it could be something that was moving or maybe has the potential to be moved that just hasn't been actualized yet.
It doesn't need to be an unmovable mover.
And if it is... No, no, I'm not saying... I'm saying...
The unmoved mover is at the beginning.
Yeah, I'm saying the beginning doesn't need to be an unmoved mover, and if it is, and we're bringing it back to a God perspective, then if God is the same today, tomorrow, always, and is the unmoved mover, then what does prayer do?
Think about it, if God is changing their mind about something, not changing their mind, but say I pray to God.
Say I pray to God about something, right?
I want Him to fulfill something for me.
I want Him to make my water into wine right here.
Let's say that I pray to God for that.
Do something that he wasn't doing already in order to make that happen.
You'd have to answer my prayer, correct?
If God were to exist, God would be the creator of all things, by definition.
So God would create not only space, but time.
Mm-hmm.
Right, so God would necessarily be outside of space and outside of time.
Oh, he wouldn't necessarily.
He could.
He would.
Again, we're talking about- If he's the maker of all things, then he made time.
No, well, I mean, if he's the maker of all things, he could make time, but he could also make himself subject to time because, again, this is the power of a God we're talking about.
We're operating on the framework that as we understand time, the thing that has to create time has to be outside of it.
But like I was saying, like I was saying- God does enter into time in the incarnation.
Yeah, but like- There's an important distinction between Christianity and Islam.
Before we get to the distinction, I want to press down on the fact that if God has created this water right here, this water currently is not wine.
It doesn't matter at which point he decides to make it wine, he has to decide to make it wine.
That is, in a sense, the unmoved mover moving, because you have to be in a state of mind to, okay, I made this, this is water.
I now want this to be wine.
That is you making a decision.
You are changing your mind about something.
If that's the case, Then God has to be a moved mover, because you cannot say that, oh, well, you know what, he's just an unmoved mover, but I'm going to pray to him and he's going to do something for me that he hasn't already done, because he has to change something about himself in order to do that thing.
Well, our lives unfold in history, and the way to understand God's relationship to history is through a concept of providence.
Christianity is especially an historical understanding of God, because God takes on human flesh in the incarnation, then lives for 33 years, and then is crucified, and then on the third day rises again from the dead, and then he's on earth for 40 days, and then he ascends up into heaven, and sends the Holy Spirit to his church, which is the visible expression of God's kingdom here on earth.
So, I'm with you in God's role in history, but the error you've made is that you've No, I'm saying, but again, this is assuming that he did any of those things, but I'm saying, how do you know that he couldn't have made himself subject to that time?
How do we know that it's outside of the possibility of a god to both create time and create himself in the time?
How do we know that one has to proceed?
How do we know that one has to precede another if we're operating on the framework of God?
Because the creator has to precede the created.
Space-time is created.
It's part of the physical creation.
Well, does it have to?
Again, we're talking about God here.
If I create something, I have to precede that thing.
If God creates something, we don't know what God can do.
We're here talking about abortion and life and everything in our aspect.
Apparently, there are angels and everything that are subject to a completely different realm when it comes to life and how they perceive it.
Subject to God's sovereignty.
No, no, I'm saying, yeah, I mean, of course, but I'm saying that we, for all we know, life could be created on, in a billion different ways.
It doesn't even just have to be the way we came about.
If we have angels, we have other things up in a different realm in heaven, that's life.
Please don't get into the aliens.
No, no, I'm saying that's life, but it's subject to a completely different sub-sector rule.
So we're saying the way we internalize it is, well, obviously something has to precede this other thing, has to precede this other thing, has to precede this other thing.
That not only does not have to be the case with a God, even if that is the case, all it could imply is that there could be various things.
It could gradually decrease.
It doesn't have to be a singularity.
A string of things that are kind of gradually going about.
It doesn't even have to, it could be an infinite regress.
Yeah, things develop in history.
Yeah, it could be an infinite regress for all we care.
We don't know.
It can't be that.
How?
Why can't it not?
Because there has to be an unmoved mover.
Or, I'll give you an, let's say, if this doesn't persuade you.
Okay, so if we're looking at change, right?
If we're talking about an unmoved mover or whatever.
How is it that change is just conceptualized as just something proceeding after another, right?
Change could be a change in color, a change in property of something, right?
We could say that something created something, or whatever, and it wasn't even necessarily just a progression of it.
It just kind of shifted in color, or it gradually decreases, or anything, any of the above possibilities.
So we're talking about a God here.
For you to assume that because one thing must cause another, must cause another, must cause another, and we can't have it go on forever.
I'm just saying they did.
I'm just saying, yeah, right.
The things that happen now, just by definition, has followed the thing that immediately preceded it.
Yeah, in our world, yes.
So I'm saying if we're working within the scope of a God, we have no idea what laws or physical... We do because we're made in the image and likeness of God.
That's how we can reason.
Well, so you can't say that, well, I know this property about God and God definitely has this property because I'm made in the image of God and this is how it works.
But you're presupposing that that God even exists in the first place.
How do you know anything?
How do I know anything?
Um, I usually analyze, like, I think the basis for knowing things is subject to evidence.
So basically, when I say I know that I'm, like, here, right?
It's not like I pulled out a bunch of dictionaries and I'm like, what is the definition of here?
It's a known fact about the world that people exist.
How do you know that?
Because we can see that.
We can observe people.
How do you know that what you're seeing is real and not just a hallucination?
That's a big question.
I don't think you truly can know that.
I think I can know with a very... But you're very confident in your opinions.
I think that... But you just said you're not confident that you know anything at all.
And I'm also confident in the things that I don't know.
I think it's confidence being able to say when you don't know a thing.
I think that... But what you've just said is you don't know for certain that you know anything at all.
I don't think you can know anything for certain.
I'm reasonably certain that you cannot know anything, everything for certain.
Well, of course not.
But I'm not asking if you can know everything.
I'm asking if you can know anything.
Anything for certain.
You can know it to a degree of certainty.
I mean, you can get infinitely close to like that 100.
You can get 99.999.
Okay, how can you get that close?
Evidence.
How do you know that you can rely on the evidence that you're seeing?
Well, I think that knowing that I can rely on the evidence that I'm seeing, I can always like see evidence that leads me astray, but it's a process of like mental reasoning that you can see various things that lead up or that Give good warrant to believe in a certain proposition.
That doesn't by default mean that that proposition is true.
If you're going to go for the brain in a vat, it could all be a simulation.
We genuinely don't have an answer to that.
I'm not saying, I'm not even asking that.
I'm asking... Well, that's kind of what you're asking.
It isn't.
How do you know that you can rely on your faculty of reason to communicate to you the truth?
Because I think that... How do you know that your reason is dependable?
I think my reason's dependable, or I know my reason's dependable, because of things like evidence.
So when I look at, when I'm analyzing, yeah, so I'm saying, When you're building your reason, right?
Why would you have reason to believe something?
Well, I know the things that I have to operate within me right now.
I know that I have articles that I can read about abortion.
I know I have studies and everything.
But I'm asking one step further back than that.
Yeah, I'm saying, I can say that like, oh, well, I don't know this for certain.
Again, that can track back to literally everything.
Maybe I'm not asking the question properly.
I'm not asking how you have an opinion about abortion.
I'm asking how you Trust that any opinion you reach, that any perception you have about anything is reliable and has some accordance with reality.
So that's the, again, that's the brain of that question.
Because what you're saying is, how do you even, so if I say, I think that this cup has water in it.
And you're saying, well, how do you know that?
And I'm like, well, we know that water exists.
We have the molecular makeup, whatever.
And you're like, well, how do you know you can rely on molecular makeup?
I'm like, well, there's a field of scientists that have broken down the composition of water.
And you're like, well, how do you know what I'm saying?
And you're saying, well, how do you know that you can even rely on that?
And it's like, well, truthfully, I don't think you can know anything for 100%.
But, you can work within the framework that you're operating in.
It's an axiom, right?
It's an axiom that you're just beginning with.
So, what you're beginning with is precisely where I begin, which is that you are made in the image and likeness of God, and the defining feature about you is your reason.
So, you're saying that the only... What do you think it means to be made in the image and likeness of God?
Okay, wait, so, and it's funny because this argument doesn't even support theism, because you could be created in the image and likeness of a God, but what's to say that that God is the reason for why you have reason?
What do you think the phrase, being made in the image and likeness of God means?
Literally whatever people who believe in a God want it to mean.
What do you think it means?
Christians even disagree about this in the same way.
It could be, oh well we're just, we are just like God, we can be co-eternal with God if we take the right steps.
Or it could be, there's Christian science, no it's not Christian scientists, it's a Ooh, I forgot what the religious denomination of Christianity is, but they do actually believe that.
They have like a... Is it Mormons?
They have a father-mother God, and they believe that each of them can become like God, but they can never excel to the level of God.
That's just their personal belief.
What would it mean to... What would it mean?
It's funny.
Well, I don't... The thing is, I don't know what that... You don't know the answer.
So the answer is... Because I don't believe it.
Okay, but you can know things about things that you don't know.
So whatever properties, what I think that being made in the image and likeness of God is, is whatever properties you attribute to that God, you guys share similar properties.
It's not a trick question.
No, that's what my answer is.
There's a more specific answer, which is our intellect and our will, our reason.
That's the answer that you believe is the case, because you could very well believe in your God.
And people who believe in a different God than you could believe that being made in the image of them is a completely different subset of categories and attributes that we attribute to ourselves.
Again, you would need to demonstrate that yours is the one and only correct one first before you base your axiom off of all that because you're just working off a big assumption.
No matter how deeply you believe it, at the end of the day, it is one big assumption.
And at least I can show you progress and steps.
You just said that you have to assume that your reason is reliable.
You have to take that merely as an assumption, as a premise to start with.
No, but you can test that.
You can test that.
If I come up with various conclusions, say if we wanted to know something, say if we wanted to know what water is, right?
And if we came up with a criteria by which we measure that, the chemical composition and everything, right?
And we see, we study the water cycle.
We study everything that has to do with water.
And we come up with predictions on, okay, well given these circumstances, water should act like this.
If we got all our properties down, and we reasoned through this, and we knew this correctly, we were able to know something correctly, then given that, water should act like this in this given circumstances.
We have yet to be wrong about that.
I don't know if water can just go from freezing to just, like, vanish in an instant.
It could, but we have no demonstration of that.
All we have is a pattern of research and understanding to this point that shows that we're able to make predictions and see, this is actually how this is working.
So, with that in mind, we can say, okay, this is fairly reasonable.
We can rely on this.
If we were just looking at it as, like, oh, water's clear, which means it must have some property of becoming invisible, well, We can say, oh yeah, well I think that that's the case, but if it continuously gets proven wrong and it never happens, then that's not a reasonable thing.
But you're... If you're going to ask me how do we know that patterns are reasonable, well... Or how do you know, I mean, to use the example that you like coming back to, how do you know that you're not just, you know, living in a video game or something?
Again, I don't think that that... That would be an assumption, it's just a premise.
I don't know if I would, I don't know if I, like, I think that I wouldn't call it an assumption or I wouldn't call it a premise or anything because I don't genuinely think that you can know that.
But you live as though you're not just going to be... But I don't think that you, I don't think... You live as though things are significant.
I don't think that, even if your brain was in a vat, I don't think that that means that the things we're experiencing aren't significant.
That's one of the things that gets back to God.
I think if we're living even without a God, I don't think that that means that everything is insignificant.
But you live as though your faculties of reason are dependable and that you're not being perpetually deceived.
Well yeah, and when you talk about perpetually deceived, how do you determine you're not being perpetually deceived?
I think you're lying if you don't realize that it's analyzing the things that are at your disposal and making predictions and analyzing.
But you just, yeah, you have to take it, you have to deal with that.
But if you're going to say because we 100% don't know for certain that everything around us is a figment of our imagination, therefore we're operating on faith and that faith is the same faith as this God who apparently has told you everything you need to do and could never be wrong despite the fact that everyone else believes in different gods.
That's not quite what I'm saying.
But it's close.
You're trying to draw that out.
No, it's close.
What I'm saying is that there are many different modes of inquiry, of philosophical deliberation, scientific inquiry, and a whole number of manner of inquiry.
But they all have to begin with intuitive reasoning and with the assumption of premises.
In the same way that mathematics has to begin with a set of assumptions.
A plus B equals B plus A. You can't prove that, but those are some of the axioms.
You can prove that once you test it.
If I say, if I say, if I say, if I say 2 plus 2 equals 4, right?
Again, we can say that the number system that we developed for it is like a figment of language.
But the principle, if you have two objects, and you add two more objects, and you count... But I'm saying even more axiomatically.
You have to begin with 3 plus 2 equals 2 plus 3, for instance.
Yeah, so if we did that, then we could run experiments or tests to make sure this formula applies in every scenario.
We shouldn't get 3 plus 2 equals 1 plus 7.
We shouldn't get that at any given point if our things are working correctly.
Let me see if I can press this.
If we continue to get these same answers and we continue to not be proven wrong in these same things, you can know with a higher degree of certainty whether or not you're correct about that.
If you can know anything at all.
could never know for sure that everything around you is a figment.
But even if everything around you is a figment, you still know things within that figment.
And it's not necessarily like the same leap of faith.
You just don't know it.
But you could be deceived at any point.
You wouldn't necessarily rely on, say, continuity.
That the world you're living in today is the same world that existed in a second.
But my thing is that you can't know that either.
You say you can.
Right.
I'm just beginning with certain premises.
And then using my reason based on this premise.
Yeah.
And if we're going to begin with certain and everything, what would be more of being deceived?
Us, in reality, all being brains and vats.
But not only do I, I'm comfortable with saying, I don't know that for certain, but here's these things I can work with.
Whereas you say, well no, we're not a brain and a vat.
I know this story, and this story is the one true story, and everyone else's stories are wrong.
While the whole time we're- Greatest story I ever told you, Michael.
Yeah, greatest story you ever told.
So it's like, which one would be more of a level of deceit?
You could say that it's just- The one that's real.
The one that's true.
The one that's real and true would be the real and true one, and the one that's a deceit would be the deceit.
Say the truth is that our brains are in a vat, and we can never necessarily obtain that truth, right?
Because we don't really have a way of proving that we're not in a vat.
I feel like my position of, okay, here's what we're working at.
Let's try to make these observations, see where it gets us.
Okay, this is leading here.
Okay, maybe we can predict this.
Maybe we can predict that.
I think using that method of reasoning is infinitely more likely to get you closer to the truth of the matter, that being we find something that determines, oh, it must be a simulation, as opposed to the belief system of, okay, well, I believe in this deity, and this is how this deity's telling me to act.
And you trying to make those equivalents in leaps because we can't for sure know, That's- I think we're missing the point a little, so let me try- We're way off the point.
I want to get back to emotion.
Let me try it a different way.
But on this point, to use a popular question, can a man become a woman?
That's a weird question to ask.
It's a weird question.
It's kind of weird that we have to ask it, isn't it?
Well, no, because genders in different societies have always been fluid and have always worked.
So it's like, when you ask, can a man become a woman, it's like, well, a person can become whatever they want, but it's like, if you're subscribing to the category of man, then you, unless you stop subscribing to that category.
A person, a person can't become whatever he wants.
A person can't become a seagull, for instance.
Yeah, because we have to stick within our species, as I understand.
We can't physically become a seagull.
So I'm saying can one sex become the opposite sex?
Objective in the fact that a male, and a seagull, and a human is.
Those are completely different.
Yeah, in one we're talking about differences in species, and one we're talking about differences in sexes.
So my question is, can one sex become the opposite sex?
Can one sex become, no.
Can a man become a woman?
Can an individual man become an individual woman?
Yeah, if they were identifying as a man first, and then they said, nah, I'm gonna shift up and I want to become a woman, then yes, they can.
But like the category of man.
How?
You mean how?
How can that man become a man?
So, when it comes to sex and when it comes to gender and everything, there are many different biological processes that go into determining one's sex and then corresponding with that gender.
Someone could be biologically male and their testicles could grow inside of them.
I forgot what the specific gene is, but it doesn't bind to a specific receptor and it doesn't release the right hormones, so you end up developing the same I have a deformity.
Well, not the same body.
You've got testicles.
Yeah, as in, like, everything that, from an outside perspective looking in, everything that we'd associate with being a woman.
Broader hips, breasts, every, like, all the physical attributes.
You could develop all of that.
All the physical attributes?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, obviously, outside of, like, a uterus or something.
And even then, there are women who don't.
But anyway, besides the point.
You could develop all those things that would classify anyone in any other circumstance as a woman.
They're not all those things, you've just admitted.
They're like the central essential things you're not developing.
Is your genitalia the central essential thing?
That's the differentiator between sex.
So what gender or what sex are, so intersex people are real, correct?
Well, people have genital deformities and certain chromosomal deformities.
When you say genital deformities, that's kind of like... Like what you just described.
No, but you're kind of assuming that that's like It's a defect.
I wouldn't say necessarily it's a defect, because again, our genes and our hormones have all types.
We are all born with the same, not the same possibility of becoming a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl, because you don't get born a man or a woman, but you're born with that same genetic code where if a receptor doesn't bind to a receptor, or if it does, or if you have XXY or whatever, that significantly shifts What your outward presentation is going to be.
So if we're talking about what someone's gender is or what someone's sex is, there's always been variation, in humans especially.
The categories that we assign to those variations, we can draw a box around it, but us drawing boxes around it is just trying to best understand to our ability.
But if there are people who are clearly fitting outside of those boxes, there is nothing wrong in just redrawing the box.
We always do that all the time.
Some people have deformities, that's true, and even though they can usually be pretty clearly classified, like if you have testicles, you're probably a man.
But you just said something different.
If you have testicles, you're a male.
Yeah.
But the category of man is something that we ascribe to the people who are traditionally male.
That's what I'm saying.
Right.
A man is a male human.
Yeah, well a man would be, it can be like, again, a man corresponds to the category of male human adult.
Right.
It's not is that thing.
There are more things than just being a male human adult that makes you a man.
If I were to go on like Jesse Lee Peterson's show and I'm talking to him about how I like respect women or something, he could call me a beta, a beta male.
I'm less of a man.
But he wouldn't call you a woman.
Huh?
He could call me womanly.
He's called people on multiple occasions.
He's a woman.
No, I'm pretty sure he would call me a woman.
He would call you maybe womanish.
He wouldn't think you're an actual woman.
He has a lot of things going on, so he could probably call me womanly, woman, all of the above.
Womanish refers to a man who behaves in an effeminate way.
He thinks that people who are liberal are women or womanly anyway, so he could call me all of the above.
The point being that the category of man is much more than just what chromosomal makeup you have.
Even in a society where you can say, "Oh, that's acting womanly." There are societies that have existed prior to us and that currently exist today where roles are flipped.
Men will stay home and take care of children.
Women will go and kill and hunt and everything.
That's been the- No, really.
Like, they say that.
Yes.
We have this notion that it's always been the big, strong man going out to hunt.
That's not even like a realistic expectation, because if your big, strong man is always the one going out to hunt, that means they're always the most likely one to die, and then you die out with that strategy, as opposed to if you all work together, which is why we're such a social species.
That's been established.
So you would send the women, the weaker sex, out to hunt?
There's societies that do that all the time.
There aren't really.
What do you mean there aren't really?
Have you read anything in anthropology?
Yeah, yeah.
And what book told you that there aren't really societies in which they... There are the mythical Amazons and a few examples.
I'm pretty sure you can go on PBS and... Which tribes would you point to in which the women go out and... Oh, for the life of me.
We studied multiple tribes in... What is it?
It's like, it's sub-Saharan Africa.
I know it's southern...
Is it in Ghana?
I forgot exactly what the name of the tribes were.
We had a whole chapter in my anthropology course where we talked about conceptions of gender and sexuality throughout different cultures.
I can't remember the name and it's going to eat me alive, but there are groups in which the women will hunt and do the tackle and everything.
They have another thing called...
It's kind of like self-deprivation, where if someone goes out and gets a kill, they won't brag about it.
If they brag about it, then the other people will joke back at them, but in a fierce way.
Humility?
Yeah, humility.
Yeah, but it's not even you imposing your own humility.
It's like they will humble you because they all feel like that's the right answer.
Yeah, a lot of things that we do are correct or fit for our society because we believe that it is that way.
But that's not to say that there aren't societies in which people work together.
Even in our society, it's a lot more egalitarian in principle because we Women can't just afford to sit at home and not work anymore as much as they used to.
We're all kind of working together to provide that income and make children get a better society and a better life that way.
I'm not sure they're getting a better society.
And also, someone has to take care of the women.
So usually what happens is the woman goes out to work and then makes some money and then pays some other woman to raise the kid at daycare.
So it's not like you've actually fixed that problem.
You've just changed the way the economy works.
That's an assumption.
Someone's got to raise the kids.
Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, both.
It could be a man... But if men and women are both at work, then who's raising the kid?
Yeah, I'm saying they both share time, or you could get a day... No, they're both at work.
And even then, it doesn't necessarily need to be a woman taking care of the kids.
The reason why it is a woman is because we've socially assigned the role of caregiver to woman and of worker to men, despite them both being capable of doing either job, which is what other societies have seen, which is why both of them do each job.
You just can't name them right now.
Oh, no, I can't.
No, I can't.
Again, I like the chuckle, and it is fun, but if you genuinely do care about the issue, you can go look up gender diversity within species, or gender diversity within human societies.
I'm sure that I'll find some Amazon tribes.
Literally, Google gender diversity within human societies, and just because they're Amazon, why do you keep saying...
Because that's the mythical tribe of female warriors.
That doesn't even need to, no, it's not female warriors is not what I'm saying.
I'm saying egalitarian societies.
I thought you said the women go out and fight.
Yeah, I'm saying there are some societies where the women do that, but there's also more societies in which it's more an equal thing.
Even since we were cavemen, it's more of an equal thing.
So getting back to what we were just discussing.
Since you grant that a man can become a woman, then getting back to even what we were previously talking about, how would that man know that he is a woman?
And how would you know that that man is a woman?
That's a completely societally formed thing.
So the way I would know that somebody who's a male doesn't want to be a man anymore, they want to be a woman, I'd know by things like how they outwardly present.
Things like the type of societal roles they want to ascribe to over a different one.
Sometimes, there's nothing, there's no rule saying women must have long hair.
But whenever people think of a woman, they usually think of somebody with long hair.
So if you want to subscribe to that role, a step people will take will be to grow out their hair or something.
Doesn't mean that they need to do it, but that's just something that we kind of assume is womanly, despite the fact that there are many men with long hair.
There are certain roles that you can pick and you can choose, and you're like, I want to- I thought you said the roles don't matter, and they're all just sort of socially assigned.
Just because they're socially assigned doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
Race has no root in biology, but the impacts of race are still felt.
What do you mean race has no root in biology?
I mean that it has no root in biology.
There's greater genealogical differences between members of a given race.
And members of completely different races.
Black people in the United States are the most diverse race when it comes to genealogical perspective because we live in a society where race is based on ancestry.
So if your great-great-grandpappy was black, you technically could be classified as black depending on how you present, despite the fact that I'm way darker than that person.
You're black and I'm at least vaguely white.
A little Sicilian, but I would be identified as white.
No one would be confused about that fact.
Even if I took on all the cultural attributes stereotypically associated with black people and you did that for white people, no one would be confused.
That's the conflation thing, is that because two subjects are socially constructed does not mean that they're socially constructed in the same way.
Of course.
Attributes that you could take on as a black person that would make people confused about whether or not you're black because the conceptual, the concept of being black is specific phenotypes that are dependent on heritage and then also like... You're talking about like your hair is different than my hair.
Yeah, like my hair.
Your bone structure is different than my bone structure.
Not even bone structure, necessarily, because there's not that much variation in bone structure, at least in African-Americans in the United States.
But I'm saying between different races.
Yeah, but the reason why no one would confuse you for being black and no one would confuse me for being white and everything is because the way we conceptualize race in today's society is, well, this category, what I look like, certain attributes that I have, classify as black.
Your body, yeah.
That's biological.
Yeah, no.
Your body is formed through biological process, but the value in the terms and the boxes we draw are not biological.
So, in Rome, in ancient Rome, it was either you were a Roman or you were a barbarian.
If you were a member of Roman society, if you were a Roman citizen or whatever, you were considered a Roman.
They had different skin colors in Rome, but that doesn't mean that they didn't see you as race.
They saw that their race was Roman, and every other race was barbarian.
That's barbarian.
They didn't say, oh, I'm black Roman, I'm brown Roman, I'm white Roman.
Those are boxes that we've drawn in American society.
Why do you think that isn't true?
Why do you think that?
How?
Well, there's a good book that came out in 2006 on racism in ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
It's by Benjamin Isaac, who is a Princeton historian and classicist.
And he points out that the concepts of race and even racial hostility were extraordinarily present in the ancient Roman and ancient Greek worlds.
And it goes back much earlier than that, actually.
It goes back to like the Egyptian Book of Gates, which was written roughly 3,500 years ago.
In the Egyptian Book of Gates, you see a discussion of different races of people.
Not merely cultural differences, but races.
So what were the races?
So that's my thing.
Well, Libyan, Nubian, Egyptian, I forget the fourth one.
No, no, no, this was 3,500 years ago.
Yeah, I'm saying race as we conceptualize it in this society.
Yeah, there can be other races in like ancient society, but their racial categories were not what our racial categories are.
And even then, I'm not going to dispute what the word of the historian is right now.
I'm going to look it up after and I can guarantee you probably misrepresenting it.
But, assuming that you're not, I'm going to be charitable and assume that you're not, when we talk about race in ancient times, a lot of times, at least from the scholarship that I've seen, it's things they'll talk about like eye color, and they'll do hair color, but they wouldn't like refer to it as, we are one united race, and you guys are a different united race.
Because an empire conquered all that territory.
Yeah, so even from a logistical standpoint, it's physically impossible for them to have the racial categories that we did today.
No, they still had racial categories, though.
This was true through the Middle Ages, too.
It's a myth.
There's a myth pushed by liberals, especially in this one book that was written by some random op-ed journalist, the new Jim Crow, that suggested that race is a creation of the last couple hundred years invented by white people.
No, in the United States it is.
The thesis goes even more ambitious than that and says, as you've been saying, that antiquity didn't have conceptions of racial differences, but that's not true.
And through the Middle Ages it's true.
You see it in the Muslims?
No, what I'm saying is they had conceptualization of racial differences, but the concept of race are completely different depending on society.
So, in Roman times, you could probably get away with being confused as being a Roman, because they were very specific things.
They weren't even like very specific things, but if they considered you a barbarian, it was an outsider, somebody who isn't like us.
You could slip into a given society and assimilate enough to where it's like people could confuse you as a Roman, but they'll never confuse you as black and me as white, because in America, the categories we have drawn is skin color.
And certain phenotypical features, despite the fact that we have gender and we have a genetic diversity across genders.
I mean, across races.
The thing is, those categories have always existed.
That doesn't mean that they're biologically rooted.
Because a group of people is born with blue eyes does not mean that the blue eyes is a thing that must be assigned value out of some biological reason.
We assign value to it out of something.
I'm not saying anything about value at all.
I'm just saying that... That's how the racial category is.
But you're making an historical point that in antiquity through the Middle Ages, people did not conceive of race based on these biological or phenotypical characteristics.
I'm saying race is not biologically rooted.
I didn't say there were no racial differences, but I said like in Rome, Roman was their race, barbarian were other races.
I'm saying that's not true.
Because I cited, for instance... No, but what you cited was them saying there were racial differences.
And racial hostilities.
Yeah, again, but that does not... I said there were, but it varies depending on the site.
But you were saying there was no distinction other than between Roman and barbarian.
I'm saying that isn't true.
I can grant the point that there are probably other distinctions besides just Roman and Barbarian.
But I'm saying, while there are racial differences throughout history, the racial categories that we draw are societally based.
There is nothing inherent about black people that make them more likely to have negative stereotypes.
There's nothing inherent about white people that make them more likely to be a dominant group in society.
There's nothing inherent about the skin color of Of various Asian people, even though that's not even consistent because we just classify them as Asian.
That makes them have whatever values we assign to Asian people.
Those are boxes that we drew.
Perfect example is Irish people.
Irish people in the early 1900s and late 1800s were not considered white.
They were pushed into the same- That's not a disputable- That's not even disputable, Michael.
They were discriminated against.
They weren't considered white.
You would have a better argument if you pointed to the Southern Italians.
For instance, the largest mass lynching in American history was against Italians in New Orleans.
You might say that in certain parts of the South they were considered lumped in as black rather than as white.
Even that is kind of overstated.
That's not overstated.
Based on?
Based on American history.
I've sure looked at and researched a lot of American history, and Irish people were not considered in the same racial category as white people.
They were distinct from the English.
There's a certain thing, even if you go to Ireland now, there's a thing called black Irish, right?
And that doesn't mean that they're actual black people, they just like, Irish people would like suddenly tan.
It's like a slightly tanner white, but it's like even just that, just being of a different nationality that wasn't considered conducive to broader white American culture deemed you as not being white.
In the same way that Barack Obama is equally as white as he is black, but he's considered black.
Right.
He didn't run as Barry Sotoro, which is the name he went by for much of his life.
He went as Barack Hussein Obama because he thought that would give him an electoral advantage.
Well, I mean, it probably has something to do with both his dad on his African side doing that, but I don't think he just changed it.
But he went by a different name.
He went by Barry.
His nickname was Barry in his childhood.
I think he's always been named Barack.
No, but he didn't present himself that way.
My name is Joshua William Joseph.
I go by JJ.
If I said I'm going to go by Joshua Joseph on the ballot, that doesn't mean I'm trying to, I'm deserting my name and I'm going with that name to get me electoral advantage.
That's just my government name.
Politicians do this all the time.
His government name wasn't Barry, is what I'm telling you.
That was his nickname.
Sure, so why did he go by a different name for much of his life?
Because he's running for... I'm not going to run for president as JJ.
That's a colloquial term that people who are close to me refer to me as.
If you want to know who I am... Teddy Kennedy ran for office as Teddy Kennedy.
Mitt Romney ran for office not as Willard Mitt Romney.
He ran as Willard.
Yeah, I'm saying, Ted Kennedy ran as, he ran as Robert Kennedy.
Robert Kennedy was his brother.
Wait, are we talking about RFK Jr.?
Or are we talking about JFK?
No, Teddy Kennedy was a younger successor.
Oh yeah, I forgot, that was another Kennedy.
And then his brother was Robert.
Yeah, again, but that doesn't necessarily mean that like, there's an electoral advantage in him getting, I don't think in 2008 America it's an electoral advantage to go by Barack I think the only reason people voted for Obama is because he was an impressive speaker and because they could say they voted for the first black president.
I don't think he had any accomplishments other than that.
Whoa, any accomplishments at all?
You mean prior to becoming president?
I think that he was a fresh new face.
What did he do?
He didn't accomplish anything before he was president.
Well, I mean, he was a senator from Illinois.
What did he do?
What did he accomplish as a state senator from Illinois?
Well, he was a U.S.
senator before that.
I'm not sure.
I know he was very outspoken against the Iraq War.
I don't know what he introduced in the Senate in 2006.
Nothing.
The answer is nothing.
I'm going to take you at your face value and just say, okay, he didn't.
Even then, I don't think that Barack Hussein Obama is the thing that would give him the electoral advantage.
I think people voted for him, yeah, in part because he was a black president, or he would be a first black president, but a lot of people also voted against him because he was going to be the first black president.
Perhaps, I don't know.
He won a huge portion of the American electorate, a clear majority.
I'm pretty sure, yeah, he won a majority of the electorate, but what were the racial breakdowns?
He won a ton of them.
I'm pretty sure 56 to 60 percent of white people voted against.
In 08 or 12?
Huh?
In both.
I know he lost the white vote by a big, by not a big margin, by like a pretty substantial margin.
In the re-elect?
Because he was a terrorist.
No, both times.
White people weren't like swooned over by Obama and then in 2012 they were like, oh this guy's trash.
They thought he was trash the entire time.
White people also tend to vote for Republicans.
Yeah.
Much more likely to vote for Republicans than Democrats.
Yeah, no, but I'm talking even white Democrats.
Like a lot of them, it wasn't, it's not like, I'm pretty sure Obama won the majority of the white Democrat vote, but if you're talking about the entire nation as a whole.
I agree that white Democrats are racist.
I agree.
I certainly agree with that.
We're going to agree to everybody racist now.
Well, I agree that some white Democrats are racist.
I agree that the vast majority of white Republicans are racist though.
Really?
Yeah.
What makes you say that?
Oh yeah.
You think America's a racist country?
It's really hard to say no, and the reason why is because of how racism has been baked into so many of our institutions.
I wouldn't say, I think there's a difference between saying, I feel like when people say, is America a racist country, they're trying to add the moral pejorative that it's like, well, he thinks everyone is, or all of America is a racist country.
I think the way in which America has been founded and operated, like, yeah, I think so.
Today, it's a racist country.
Yeah, oh yeah.
How many black people have immigrated to the U.S.
over the last 20 years?
I'm not sure.
Three million.
Two million from Africa and a million from the Caribbean.
Why would they come to America if America was so racist?
That's a great question.
That is a real great question.
Why do you think a lot of Muslim people and a lot of people from the Middle East still come to America despite the fact that they were literally profiled and targeted all after a terrorist attack that really had nothing to do with them in particular?
Yeah, I don't remember any anti-Muslim pogroms.
Why did Asian people come to the United States despite the fact that... Because they face very fair and equitable treatment.
That's why.
Asian Exclusion Act?
Chinese Exclusion Act?
Asian Bar Zone?
Japanese internment camps?
What fair and equitable treatment are we talking about?
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about... No, I'm saying, I'm saying, but you're saying why would they come here?
They come here now because obviously America's gotten better.
No one argues that America hasn't gotten better.
But you're saying if it's racist, if America is actually hostile and discriminatory against black people, why would three of them come in 20 years?
Well, first of all, if we want to talk about black people who immigrate here, Yeah.
Oftentimes they come here with, I'm not going to say they come here with a preconception about African Americans here, but there's a demographical difference between black people from Africa who come here, or from other countries that come here, and from African Americans that are actually already here.
So a lot of them will immigrate here from backgrounds of coming over for college, or maybe they already had a family member from a wealthier background that is sending them over for college.
That makes up a lot of, especially a lot of work visas will go to Nigerians and Indians because they're working in tech industries and stuff.
So it's not like these people are, and because in general, maybe wherever they're coming from, the economic opportunity is probably better in comparison to their country.
That doesn't mean that they did a holistic review of the race relations of the United States and determined this country isn't racist anymore.
I'm going to take my chance over there.
Yeah, it's better than it.
Presumably they thought about it before they immigrated.
I don't think that it's a likely thing.
You don't think they thought, is it a good idea to move across the world to this evil, racist country?
You don't think that passed through their mind?
Because A, I think that a country can have done evil, racist things in the past.
But you're saying today it's still racist.
I think it's still racist, yeah.
There you go.
Yeah, but I don't think that that's a determining factor in the—so you're saying that if I go there, there's an increased likelihood that I'll face discrimination.
Cool.
But if I go there, I could also get a job that's going to make me way more money than over here, even if I am poor over there.
Sounds like you're not being discriminated against at all.
And in fact, we know that it's much—you're much more likely to get a job today for a big company if you are identifying as a person of color rather than as a white person.
When?
Yeah.
So, okay, so one of my favorite studies in sociology is when they'll do application studies and they'll change up things like maybe they'll provide a picture or they'll do names, right?
Since 1985, there has not been any change in the likelihood of getting a callback for a job when you are black.
According to these sociological studies.
According to scientific consensus in sociology.
Okay, now let me raise another prospect to you.
There was a study just came out, an analysis by Bloomberg, of 88 companies in the S&P 100.
And it was over hiring practices over the last few years.
Because the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, requires that big companies with more than 100 employees publish their workforce demographics.
And over the last couple of years, 94% of people who have been hired for a job for any of those companies have been persons of color, which is pretty crazy because the country is 60% white, which means the only way they could have arrived at that number is by actively discriminating against white applicants and giving an advantage to persons of color.
I can't even assume that your numbers are 100% correct.
They totally are.
Are they?
You can Google it right now.
You're going to trust me that I'm going to look it up and it's going to say the 94% of people hired for a job at these few corporations.
Not few, it's 88 of the S&P 100.
They're talking about the biggest companies in America.
We're saying that the workforce, 94%.
Of the new hires, yeah.
94% of the new hires.
How many new hires?
So, because you do understand that you could have a high proportion of new hires be hired as minorities and the overall makeup of the company could still be white, predominantly white.
We're talking about the policies in place.
So, 88 of the top 100 companies are attempting to increase their diversity by hiring higher rates of minorities and that means that the racism is gone?
No, it means that there is new racism against white applicants if only 6% of the people hire.
Why would they need to hire?
Because we have de facto and de jure racial discrimination in employment against white people and to a lesser degree against Asian people.
There's de facto racism?
You know what de facto racism means?
Or de facto discrimination?
Yeah.
What does it mean?
So, de jure racism would be as a matter of explicit law, and de facto would be as a matter of implicit practice.
And in the case of affirmative action policies, it's actually both.
Well, actually no.
Well, de facto would be as, de facto would be, so the way I like to think about it is when we had, when we look at public schools today, there's still a lot of de facto segregation left over from the Jim Crow era because there was no serious effort.
And because students self-segregate.
Yeah, well, because they were put in a condition in which they were already mostly segregated.
No, even in mixed schools, I'm saying.
There have been a lot of studies on this, and it's very odd because a lot of people don't like there to be self-segregation, but it happens.
Yeah, it'll happen because of different cultural backgrounds and everything, but that is compounded with the fact that there was never a real ability to fully desegregate public schools.
Federal busing with the National Guard.
What?
Yeah, and they struck that down.
And it's funny, because Joe Biden, back at it again, he was opposed to the forced busing and everything, along with a lot of white America at the time.
And in 2007, Chief Justice Roberts, they had the Supreme Court decision where they decided that attempts to desegregate public schools by assigning kids to schools based on racial backgrounds to try to create a more even mixture was unconstitutional.
So even when we were trying it, It gets struck down and it gets struck down.
So you still have not a properly addressed situation, which is going to, if you're spending all your life around people around the same skin color of you, then when you get in the area, even though there are more people of different skin colors, you're probably going to be more comfortable with these people around you.
And that's due to circumstances that was not necessarily created.
I'm not disputing the fact that there are people of all skin colors.
But, when I was talking about de facto segregation, and the reason why is because It's vestiges that are left over from policies that used to be in place and not a serious act to correct them.
So how in the world is hiring majority minorities in recent years at corporations... 94%.
How is it de facto segregation when the whole reason why they're doing that is because of the policy?
No, I'm not saying it's segregation, I'm saying it's racial discrimination.
How is that de facto discrimination based off of...
Well, unless... When the vast majority of the people at the corporation will, A, still be white, and B, the whole reason why they're doing that is to correct for the fact that... Well, you might say it's good discrimination, which I suppose is what you are saying, but it just is... I wouldn't say it's...
is good or bad discrimination.
Because I don't, again, assuming that the new hires are really 94% minority applicants.
I think that you could say that it's a discrimination in a sense because they're attempting to correct a situation that was only...
Yeah, you're saying it's a good thing.
Yeah, you're saying it's a good thing, because it's correcting a wrong.
But again... I'm just telling you, it undermines the argument that you're making, which is that America today is racist against women, when it's the opposite.
But you do understand that if... Okay, well, because...
First, let me say, you do understand that even if you did hire at a 60% clip for white people, because that's proportionate, right?
I'm not saying, no, I don't think you need to take it to the proportion of the population.
No, but you're saying, you said it was crazy because, look, it's, yeah, I mean.
So perhaps white people should not be able to do any jobs.
Is 60% minority an issue, or is it just because it's 94?
When's the threshold?
I don't think that we should have racial quotas for hiring.
Is it a quota?
It's also illegal.
It's not the same.
That is illegal.
So it's not a quota.
You can do a compelling state interest to have diversity, but you need to have X amount of black people, X amount of white people, X amount of... So as a matter of de jure policy, we have affirmative action, which is a kind of racial discrimination against white people and to a lesser degree Asians.
And as a matter of de facto hiring policy, we have clear racial discrimination because of the 94%.
How is affirmative action discrimination?
Because you're giving preference to one race over another.
You're discriminating.
Let's say that, again, and it's not even, affirmative action isn't even necessarily saying that you need to choose one person over the other.
It's just giving an advantage to one race over another.
I wouldn't say that because, again, we're talking about advantage, right?
How is it that an advantage is provided to a group of people when they are given more opportunity to actually succeed at a level that's more proportional to what they should have been doing otherwise?
So if you put a bunch of institutional barriers, right, and you say, you cannot come here because of race, right, you're making an arbitrary decision or you're, because I'm saying back when Chinese Exclusion Act, say.
Yeah, something like that.
Something like that, right?
If you then proceed policies, if you then put in place policies to say, okay, these people make up a certain subset of our population, they live in this society, they should be participating and we just decided that they're not going to participate because of the color of their skin.
Then if we say, all right, let's give more opportunities to them now.
Do you see the problem if you were to then cry discrimination again?
Because then what is the alternative?
If we just stop having racial anything, no consideration of race, right?
It's the fallacy of colorblind law.
What's the fallacy?
As in, no law is truly colorblind.
If you're talking about, so if we're saying, okay, we're not going to have anything racial in it, right?
We're just going to hire according to a proportion of the population, which again, you're going No, I'm not suggesting that.
I'm saying we don't have racial quotas.
Just higher at all.
So not only by factors of sheer math are you going to have way more white applicants, you are neglecting the fact that the reason why you have so few minority applicants isn't just because they're applying at a proportionate rate and you're just saying no because you're being discriminatory.
They aren't even getting the tools to get there in the first place because of policy that affected them in the past.
What policy?
Why are they at a disadvantage?
Why are they at a disadvantage?
We can talk about black people in particular.
We can talk about redlining and housing discrimination.
We can talk about the after effects of slavery and debt peonage that no one talks about.
I noticed that I never see you guys cover Daily Wire cover anything when it comes to the history of black people that accurately explains where we are at today because the last Chattel Slave released in America was actually in 1942.
And that's not like a crackpot theory.
That's because right after segregation, or right after slavery, the South didn't kind of just like give up and be like, oh, you got our slaves, our economy is just going to go along now.
They attempted to have a system in which they re-implemented it.
Oh look, there are over 9 million slaves going around today, not in the United States.
Yeah, that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
How does it not?
Because we're not talking about the historical, or we're not talking about the context of people who are Living slavery conditions around the world.
I'm saying slavery is practiced everywhere around the world today.
What does that mean?
It means forced servitude.
No, I'm not saying what does slavery mean.
What does it mean that it's practiced in multiple places and everywhere today?
Does that mean it's okay?
No, it's very bad.
But what I'm saying is we're basically the only guys that ever stopped it in all of human history.
We in the West, yeah.
That's funny.
What do you mean by we in the West?
I mean Europe and the countries that came out of the European colonies are the only part of civilization ever that decided to end the practice of slavery.
And they did so for explicitly Christian reasons.
Where do you think that slavery was most popular?
Well, it was the Muslim pirates who were some of the largest traders.
No, no, that's the sheer, when it comes to the trade of the Barbary, the Barbary slave trade.
No, not just... No, yeah, I'm talking about that, the Barbary pirates.
That's sheer number-wise, like compared to the transatlantic slave trade with African Americans in particular, it's a bigger number.
Yeah.
But I'm saying, where do you think it was most popular?
You're taking that one instance of slave trading.
You're saying today?
No, I'm talking about historically.
You're taking that one instance of slave trading and you're neglecting all the slavery that was going around in Western countries.
If you count up that number, that's significantly more than the barbaric slave.
I'm saying even slavery today, for instance, in Africa is still practiced.
A candidate for the president of South Sudan, who himself was a slave and has been speaking out about the problems of slavery all around the world.
At the height of the transatlantic slave trade, there were more slaves who were held in Africa than were shipped over to the New World.
And this has been true in East Asia, it's been true in the Middle East.
And this is because you're failing to draw a distinction between what slavery we're talking about.
These societies did have slavery, and that, again, has nothing to do with American history.
There's a lot to do with extreme slavery.
No, I'm talking about around the world.
The fact that every other nation or other nations practice slavery has nothing to do with the context.
And continue to, throughout every other region of the world.
So does America.
If you look up any study, if you look up any source that tells you how many slaves there are in the world, they'll say there's like 7 million in Africa, and they'll give you a number about 400,000 to a million in America based on their criteria.
Because of sex slavery?
Sex slavery.
Because of sex slavery, yeah.
Of the people being held by the cartels on the open border?
Yeah.
That's true.
We should stop that.
Yeah, in the United States.
Literally in our country.
Because, for instance, like our southern border's open, and so the cartels- Our southern border's open?
Yep.
We have over 3 million people a year coming to the country illegally.
So, it's open.
Does that mean that it's open?
Effectively, yeah.
If you can't stop 3 million people from crossing your border, you probably have a pretty open border.
Do you have anything to compare that to, number-wise?
Yeah.
So, even five years ago, the number was down to about 2,000 people a day, which at that time was an all-time high.
Wait a minute.
Is it 3 million a year?
Over three million.
I'm genuinely concerned because I believe that it was around one.
It's not.
It's much higher than that.
We have a million legal immigrants who come in per year, which is also a shockingly high number completely out of accord with any other country on earth and any other time in history.
But we also have many more millions of illegal aliens crossing into the border per year.
You can look it up.
Illegal aliens is a nice term.
But I'm saying like... He's a criminal foreign national.
That doesn't mean that you...
Alien, kind of like.
Alien just means a foreign national.
Oh.
I mean, no, I mean, in the term, if you're using, like, illegal alien and you want to try to, like, that's, like, I don't want to say, like, incorrect, because I know what you guys get about, like, speech and, like- No, it's correct.
I know what you guys get, but it's not, like, the term alien is kind of, like, I know you talked about- What's wrong with the term alien?
I know you talked about- I'm not calling them E.T.
I know you, no, I'm talking, I know when you talked to Bronte, you mentioned how using the term fetus is, like, dehumanizing.
I think using the literal word alien is also dehumanizing.
But, you know, alien doesn't refer to Martians.
Alien refers to those who are not like us, of a different... No, it just means foreigner.
They're foreign, so they're subject to foreign governments, and they're here illegally, so we say illegal alien.
This is a more precise term.
No, a more precise term would be illegal immigrant, because they went through the immigration process illegally.
You don't have to say alien.
They didn't go through any immigration process.
They immigrated somewhere illegally.
So they're distinct from legal immigrants.
Or you could just say a foreign national.
But there are not, you know, someone in Guatemala today is a foreign national, but someone who's here who crossed our border illegally and stays in the country would be an illegal alien.
Quick lesson about, like, grammar and connotation, right?
So, like, the term blacks.
By our definition of what a racial category is, it is not incorrect to call somebody a black.
But it is technically incorrect to call somebody a black, because that's a word that's kind of been used.
Because you don't like the word.
What about whites?
That's also a weird term.
It's like segregation era terminology.
That's why I don't use whites.
I don't use blacks.
You can say black people or white people.
But if you were to look at someone crookedly after they said blacks, No one would be like, oh, it's just the correct term, because yeah, terms can, just like the word colored is a correct term.
Your skin color has color in it.
White people don't really have color.
Well, it's funny because now the term is person of color, like people of color.
I don't even like that.
I don't like that one either.
I think it's very silly.
I don't like that.
Yeah, because I think you can be more specific.
But the broader point that the illegal alien thing is like, you know that the connotation of alien is like, You can give me the dictionary definition.
I agree with you that it has a negative connotation.
The reason it has a negative connotation is because it is a bad thing to cross illegally into a country.
They've done a bad thing and that's why it's a bad connotation.
Is it really a bad thing to cross illegally into another country?
Yes, it's illegal and unjust.
How?
It's unjust to cross into another country.
So again, it's funny because we're going to get back on morals.
If someone was like running from the cartel and they had like, it was a family, it was like some little girls and a couple boys with them and it was a family that were running across the border to escape from the cartel.
But that's not what happens.
They actually work with the cartels to cross the border illegally because the cartels control the entirety of the southern border.
And the cartels run rampant within the countries as well.
So if you're trying to escape the cartel and the only way you can do that... You don't escape it by crossing illegally across that border.
You have to work with the cartels to cross illegally across.
Do you think every illegal immigrant is working with the cartel?
Yes.
Practically speaking, yes.
The cartels control the entirety of the southern border.
And so what they do is they pay off the cartels, and then they end up in a type of slavery.
Wait, so after they cross over, do you think that they're still working with the cartel, or did they work with the cartels?
Yes.
They owe them a lot of money.
All the illegal immigrants owe them a lot of money, and they're working with the cartel.
Can you substantiate that?
I can't.
That's how they end up in prostitution, which was how we got on this topic, because of modern-day sex slavery.
Or they end up running drugs, or they end up in other criminal enterprises for the cartel.
Who do you think controls the border?
Prostitution is only a thing that is brought into America through the southern border?
No, but it is- Like illegal sex slavery?
Do you think that's only exclusively done by non-Americans?
No, of course not.
So why do we keep making this assumption?
I'm not making that assumption.
I ask you to substantiate that every illegal immigrant that crosses the border is now secretly working with the cartel.
Not secretly, it's often open.
Yeah, and it's funny because it doesn't even need to be cartel.
They can just pay coyotes who are trained at running people across.
The coyotes work with the cartel?
Yeah, they do.
Who do you think they work for?
At times, but that doesn't mean that the people Then work for the coyotes that then work for the cartels.
Do you think the cartels just let these people off the hook out of the goodness of their heart, they ferry them across the border?
Do you think that they have, do you think that the cartel has a database of the 3 million illegal immigrants that come across the American border?
I think they keep track of them.
Do you think they keep track of them?
They have more tracking, they have more tracking capacity than the United States government who lost people's parents under Donald Trump?
No.
When they locked them in cages?
They did, it's literally an image.
So, when it comes to illegal aliens, yes, the cartels actually are better at keeping track of people.
And the United States government?
Yeah, because the U.S.
government just releases them into the country.
Because that's an intentional policy of Democrats.
I'm confused at like how your worldview ends up like, so it's an intentional policy of, was that kind of like Great Replacement-esque?
What do you mean by Great Replacement?
Like the theory that Democrats or political people are like, Deliberately conspiring to bring, to import more people.
Well, they say that.
They say that they're doing that.
There was a major study that came out in 2004 that shaped the political campaign, even of Barack Obama, who described the Coalition of the Ascendant.
You've seen columns like this in the New York Times by Michelle Goldberg about how the Democrats need to import more foreign people, and that will help the Democratic political coalition.
I don't think there's any source that you can find me out there that says that the Democratic Party has said that they need to import more foreign people.
If you're saying that they appeal more to the values of immigrants, they would want to.
On border policy, they favor much higher levels of immigration and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Yeah, they favor a lot more levels of immigration because immigration helps the country.
That doesn't mean that they're saying... How does it help the country?
It raises rates of crime, it raises rates of... First generation immigrants commit way less crime than native-born population.
That isn't true.
That isn't true.
You want me to look it up for you?
Illegal immigrants?
Yeah.
Any immigrants, illegal.
No, not any immigrants.
Any and illegal.
That's the key.
Okay, I can look up illegal for you too.
Okay, that's good.
There are some good studies to this effect.
The Center for Immigration Studies has some good ones out there about how illegal aliens are significantly more likely to be on welfare programs when they come over here and how illegal aliens are more likely to commit crimes as well.
And this is especially focused in the border towns in places like Texas and Arizona and Southern California.
Um, illegal, well, I know that you brought up the welfare issue.
Something about needing to, something about fleeing somewhere and you don't really have anything left could end up putting you on- But what are the- Even then, a lot of times- You're talking about political asylum?
Huh?
Like seeking, like- No, no, asylum is a completely separate process, but I'm saying if you're going to run away from your country and come to another country illegally, A, a lot of immigrants are hesitant in even getting on that point, and B, they still pay taxes to their wages.
They pay some taxes.
A lot of that's off the books.
I'm pretty sure that data out there suggests that they actually pay more into welfare that they actually get back, because there's something about legally being in a country that's going to not Put you first in line to be under a government assistance program in case they, you know, find out that you're- No, that's not true.
This is why we have the concept of sanctuary states and sanctuary cities.
This is why Gavin Newsom in California says we're going to be a sanctuary state.
This is why New York said please bring all the immigrants here until the immigrants caused a lot of problems in those cities.
So that all happens and the Democrats are pretty explicit about it.
The Democrats are explicit about But favoring higher levels of immigrants.
Yeah, so am I. Favoring a higher level of immigration.
Because it's politically advantageous, but it's socially destructive.
It's also bad for the people who cross.
There's a difference between saying I want more immigrants in my country because we should appeal more to them and they can help our country and we want amnesty for them.
There's a difference between saying that and saying we are going to deliberately import people to replace a white population.
That's the great replacement.
What do you mean to replace?
Like you're going to kill the white people?
The more brown people that you bring in, the less they breed.
They breed with the people in the country and then the concept of whiteness gets more and more deteriorated until there's not as many white people.
That's the great replacement.
That's what I asked you about.
You said, well, yeah, the Democrats are deliberately— They're deliberately flooding the country with migrants.
How?
Well, by not enforcing their border policy.
How are they not enforcing the border?
Because Joe Biden allows 3 million people a year to come into the country illegally.
So then how many did Donald Trump allow?
Because Joe Biden's immigration policy has been mostly similar to Donald Trump.
Not really.
The numbers are much lower under Trump, and the numbers in the first months of Trump's presidency, illegal immigration collapsed.
Now, six months out into the rest of Donald Trump's administration, the numbers started to jump back up again, but the reason for that is because the Democrats stymied him on building the border wall, and stymied him on ICE deporting illegal aliens, and made a big hullabaloo about Donald Trump putting families in cages, cages that were built by Barack Obama.
Barack Obama did not build those cages.
He did.
No, he didn't.
He did.
There's a completely different process.
He did, actually.
They literally didn't.
That's literally just a lie.
I mean, I think we can get away with lying when you couch it.
When were the cages built?
I'm not sure exactly what year they were built.
It was 2014.
They were not built by Barack Obama.
Well, he didn't physically build them.
No, I'm not.
Okay.
I'm saying that the whole concept of the cages being used to contain these migrants.
I'm not telling you when they were built.
You can tell me when they were built, or you're just insistent that I'm not right about it.
I'm saying, when you say that the cages were built by Barack Obama, first of all, I have no evidence that his administration constructed the cages.
And even if they did construct the cages, they were not used as cages for people.
You do understand that, right?
The whole reason why the Democrats made a big hullabaloo about containing people in cages is because a bunch of migrants were coming across the border, and then the Trump administration were shoving them in cages.
There was no distinction between whether or not they were applying for asylum, which the U.N.
said that we violated international law on that front.
You can roll your eyes about international law.
But they're not asylum seekers.
How do you know that?
Because we have 60 years of data on migrants.
And they're majority, vast majority, economic migrants.
No, yeah, you can say a lot of them are economic migrants, but you have no way of knowing that if you stop them as soon as they come across the border and throw them in a cage.
The legal process that we agreed to on the national front is when someone is declaring asylum in a country, they go across that border, go to the nearest station, and they declare their thing for asylum, and then they get refuge while we await the process.
What do you think the cages are, though?
It's not like literally a dog cage.
It literally looks like a dog cage, and they had foil blankets.
You can Google pictures of it.
Sure, they didn't throw them in a Rottweiler cage, but they threw them in silver cages.
Yeah, but it was a processing center, because there were millions of people.
A processing center?
What processing were they going through?
They lost people's parents.
They were sitting there.
There was disease breaking out.
There was foil blankets.
There was really no element of processing.
The legal element of it all just died under the Biden administration in the same issue.
But of course, the media never made a big deal about it.
I'm saying, well, actually, if you've been paying attention, I mean, Biden has been having a lot of criticism about how his immigration policy, like I said, has not been that different.
I don't see the crying AOC photos like we saw under Trump.
Furthermore, though- Do you think AOC is supposed to go to the border and take a separate picture under every president about- No, I think it was a cynical ploy, and she wasn't even near the centers when she did it.
She was outside of a fence and posing for a picture.
But even beyond the processing of these people, there was a survey that came out from Fusion I'm not sure.
Amnesty International reported in the Huffington Post.
So we're talking about liberal organizations.
What percentage of illegal alien women and girls who cross that border illegally do you think are raped or sexually assaulted?
I'm not sure.
The number is between 60 and 80 percent, which gets to exactly what we were talking about when we were discussing the cartels.
So this is a terrible.
In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 103, 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants and 1,422 per 100 native born Americans.
That is double illegal immigrants.
- According to which? - This is according to the Cato Institute study.
Well, Cato Institute is a pro-migration think tank, but what is their data set?
It's libertarian.
Where is their data set from?
Well, I guess they've conducted multiple studies on the topic of immigration through I'd just be kind of curious to dig into those data.
You can look it up.
It's not even just Cato.
I can find you another one.
There is no data that you will find out there that says that illegal or legal immigrants commit more crime.
Well, I'm focused specifically on illegal here.
Illegal either.
Illegal does not commit, even if you count the one crime of crossing the border illegally.
That's a pretty big one.
Yeah, but you still don't get to the native-born population.
Of course you would, because then 100% of illegal aliens would have committed a crime.
But to your point, and this is where some of these numbers get a little fuzzy, which is why the data are hard to get here, they're not convicted because they're not processed, because they're operating outside of the standards of the law.
And they're doing that because the political leadership in this country wants to keep them that way, because they think it gives them political advantage.
Um, I was looking at, uh, I'm sorry, I apologize that I didn't necessarily hear everything that you said because I was trying to look at the Scientific American, find you some other data about the crime statistics.
I didn't know they were immigration experts over there at Scientific American.
You can analyze data.
They talk about, uh...
That's a sociological study if you're trying to analyze the behavior of people and the likelihood to commit crime.
That's sociological.
Look, I have no doubt that left-wing and libertarian groups want to make arguments.
Scientific American is a left-wing group now?
Oh, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Scientific American has decided against editorial bias.
It does, I mean.
Well, I mean, you could go to Scientific American and you could take issue with methodology or debunk it, but if you're just going to say, well, it's left-wing.
No, I'm just saying it does have an editorial perspective, which is left-wing, and it's kind of silly.
Oh, the editorial, yeah, an editorial perspective where it's like, what?
I think that's kind of my point, though, is the notion that Scientific American would be publishing a study on U.S.
immigration policy and politics would be kind of silly, wouldn't it?
When you say something like Scientific American, do you think that Scientific American is just like, we put a chemical in a beaker and then this is what we have?
Yeah, well, initially they were focused on natural science and not immigration policy.
Sociology is a science.
Well, it's a... Our social sciences are like when you talk about statistics and how those apply to... By that standard, all of politics is a science.
Observational studies.
By that standard, all of politics is a science.
There are scientific elements to politics, but if we're trying to— And a lot of science institutions— You can use science to analyze, because politics is a social system.
So you can look at how people behave.
You want to determine the likelihood that somebody votes for candidate X over candidate Y. There are things that you can measure.
You can do observational studies trying to see Well, you know, this actually brings us full circle, even though I know I've kept you longer than we were supposed to.
Yeah, I think I've been getting calls from you.
But this actually does bring us full circle, which is back to different modes of inquiry and knowing things, because we've arrived back at a very politicized type of science, which is to use a scientific and clinical jargon to mask political priorities that derive from deeper first principles.
And so I guess the question I'd leave you on, we've covered a wide range of topics.
We have, I forgot how long it's been since we talked about abortion.
Well, did I convince you on anything?
No.
I thought, along the way, you agreed with me on a few different things.
No, I didn't agree with you.
I think what you're talking about is when I said, I'll grant you that the fetus has human rights, but the point was, for the sake of argument, a fetus has rights according to everyone else, but even if they do, the one right that they don't have is the same right that no one else has, is the right to use somebody's body without their consent.
So, is there not a contradiction there?
No.
Between the right to life and the right to an abortion?
Because I think that if you're saying, it depends on what you mean, the right to life.
I think everyone has a right to life, but you don't have the right to life at the expense of the body of a person without their consent.
So you can live, you have the right to life, like you shouldn't be killed.
Why do you have a right to life?
Why do you have a right to life?
I feel like I don't have an accurate depiction of what you entail by the right to life, and it's saying the right to not.
You just said we have one, though, so how do you know?
Yeah, no, I'm saying you can have a right to life, because I know you guys are saying, like, well, everyone has a right to life.
You can have that, however you want to think about that, as long as it's not at the expense of another person's body without their consent, and that's something that's consistent.
Do you think the right to life is derivative from some other right?
That some other right would come before the right to life?
I don't think any rights come before a right.
I think they kind of coexist.
I think they're all identically... You don't have one without the other.
It's kind of like a system.
If I took away the right to life, well then you can't have bodily autonomy.
So true.
Because you die.
But if I take away the right to bodily autonomy... You still could have the right to life.
No, that's like me saying, like, you're free, or whatever, and I set you free into a desert.
It's like, yeah, you're free to do whatever you want, but you have nothing at your disposal.
You're probably going to die very quickly.
So if I say that you don't have the right to bodily autonomy, But you have the right to life.
Well, yeah, you have the right to life, until someone needs your body to use, and then they're plugged into you.
And yeah, you're still alive, but what kind of life is that?
No, well, those are distinct things, right?
No, it's not.
Autonomy and life are not distinct things?
No, I'm saying they're distinct things in the sense that... No, but I think you just proved my point.
No, I'm saying that...
I can say that you have the right to life.
You could still be alive, but what kind of quality of life are you going to have if we don't have... I don't think mothers do just that.
Mothers are usually happier than that.
No, I'm saying if we don't have bodily autonomy as a rule, and I say you can have the right to life, you just can't have the right to bodily autonomy.
Well, you can have the right to life.
I could be walking around, but if the government comes a knocking because somebody needs my specific blood type, They can just abduct me and use me as their blood, as their donor, but that's not a good quality life, we wouldn't say.
So you don't have one without the other.
Do you have the right to shoot heroin right now?
No.
So you don't have bodily autonomy?
No.
Because again, when you're looking at heroin, something like that, the same reason why it's not treated the same thing as marijuana, because heroin Not only is it an inherent danger to yourself, which is taking into account someone's bodily autonomy, because it's like, yeah, you have the right to shoot up the heroin, but in shooting up the heroin, you're probably going to be killing yourself or endangering other people.
But you would certainly be hurting yourself.
Yeah, but it's not like something like marijuana.
I think you should have the right to smoke marijuana because those two things are completely different.
But we're talking about heroin.
Yeah, so for heroin, no.
For marijuana, yes.
At least in the case of heroin, you are saying that it is perfectly fine for the government to restrict my bodily autonomy to stop me from doing something that would harm me, like heroin.
Yeah, in heroin.
So now we have limited bodily autonomy.
Yes, bodily autonomy has limits.
I'm not saying it's an absolute thing, in the same thing that I don't think the right to life is an absolute thing, in the example of self-defense.
We all agree that if you kill someone in self-defense, they don't necessarily have the right to keep on living if they're trying to kill you.
In the same way that bodily autonomy, you don't have the right to like, my right to bodily autonomy ends where your pose begins.
So bodily autonomy is worth circumscribing to stop you from shooting heroin, but not worth circumscribing to stop you from killing your own child.
Again, if you say killing your own child, that gets the- To ending the pregnancy, whatever you want to say.
To ending the pregnancy, no, because pregnancy is a biological process that happens within a given group of people, and they shouldn't be subjected to go through it at any given point just because the government's going to arrest you or prosecute you otherwise.
Okay, alright, I guess- Because again, consenting to pregnancy doesn't mean you're consenting to staying pregnant.
So if you—it is your belief that heroin— Heroin has more value than your own child.
Yeah, the right to shoot heroin would be more valuable than protecting your child.
And I know that— More conducive to flourishing.
Oh, no, Michael, and I know that you know that.
Well yeah, I think that's wrong.
I appreciate the couching though.
I know that you know that's not what I meant, but you're saying it.
I think deep down you know that's not true, but you've had errors of reasoning.
No, because again, I think that everything has limits.
I think that your right to life ends if you're trying to aggress on another person and you're trying to kill them.
And it's funny, I'm not going to go as far as to say that the development of a fetus is necessarily an aggressor on that, but you're violating somebody's structural integrity, their bodily autonomy, especially if they don't want it.
At the end of the day, the process of pregnancy is going to be violating your bodily autonomy to a certain extent.
If you're okay with that, then that's completely fine, you're okay with that.
If you're not okay with that, you shouldn't be forced to continue with that.
So I think that bio-autonomy can be limited in, like, shooting heroin.
But I don't think it should be limited in that if at any given point someone is to have sex with you, then you have to continue with that.
And I think that if we are going to say that, oh... I like the way you phrased that, someone is to have sex with you.
Not that you have sex with me.
Yeah, because I... No, because even though, like, rape is rare, right?
But, like, what do we... But, like, is a fetus any less of a person if it's conceived through rape?
No, and I don't think that killing a baby undoes the crime.
So, again, so it's like if we're to say that bodily autonomy isn't really that important and... No, it matters within its proper place.
Yeah, so rape is not one of those.
Yeah, no, that's a horrible crime.
But killing a baby is not going to undo a horrible crime.
It's just going to compound that by adding another crime to it.
It compounds it either way if you have to carry it to term and subject your body and your bodily autonomy to the process that you didn't even consent to begin.
It's a terrible crime, right?
So why is one—so it's funny how we talk about, oh, equal value, equal life.
You're playing this calculus game.
Where you're saying, well, it's not worth killing a baby.
That's completely- No, I'll tell you exactly- No, because you're saying that this fetus has this particular amount of value, and we shouldn't do this, we shouldn't circumvent, or it doesn't matter what bodily autonomy you're saying about, because at the end of the day, you're killing a fetus.
But when a woman is, even in the case of rape, which admittedly is rare, even in the case of rape, you're saying, well, you know, it's a terrible crime, terrible crime, but- No, what I'm saying- What I'm saying is that certain rights are derivative of other rights, and certain rights are more fundamental.
So in this case, the conflict is not between the rights of the woman and the rights of the child, but rather the right to life and the right to, you say, bodily autonomy, which I don't think is a good definition of liberty, but let's just say it is.
The right to life is not just one right among many, but it's the fundamental right without which none of the other rights exist.
I don't think that they are.
Well, the reason is because if you're not alive, you don't have the ability to exercise any other rights.
But if you are alive, but what is the worth in being alive if you don't have any of the other rights?
I think there's a lot to recommend living, even if you can't kill a kid.
If I say you don't have the right to life, but if I say you do have the right to life, but you don't have the right to bodily autonomy, or you don't have the right to like protection or anything, say, right?
If you are strung up and you're tortured by somebody, right?
You're alive, but I think that the reason why we put so much value on this right to life, which is why I wanted to ask you about it, is because we assume that life is this deistic thing.
We tie a lot of theology or religious aspects to the concept of being alive.
I think that if you don't have life in tandem with the other rights, then your life is not worth, that's not a quality of life that we should have.
So you're saying suffering would I wouldn't say just, no, because I'm, no, Jesus.
I admire how fast you like back flip.
Because my thing is, what I'm saying is.
Just trying to follow these ideas.
Yeah, no, but I'm saying, you're not.
But I'm saying, I'm not saying that because someone's life entails suffering, that means that you just get killed.
You're saying, what's the good of life?
No, I'm saying, I'm saying that why are we talking about, oh, the right to life is so fundamental above all the other rights, but if you don't have all the other rights, sure, you're living, But that's no quality of life that you're living.
No, I think life is still good.
I don't think if you're suffering, even if you're suffering an immense amount, that you should kill yourself.
So if you just have the right, you think that life is just inherently good whether or not if you give someone the right to life and no other rights.
At the end of the day, you're just breathing.
No, I don't think that suffering undermines entirely the right to life.
Someone could torture you mentally, torture you physically.
That's off.
Within the inch of your life, and that's preferable.
To being murdered?
Yeah.
Because life always involves some degree of suffering.
Yeah, but the rights that we have in tandem with the right to life decrease that degree of suffering.
Perhaps.
I mean people- Not perhaps.
That's a fact.
You can't have- I don't know about that.
You can get all the way up to being beat within the edge of your life.
JJ.
And as long as you're still breathing, you're good on that.
JJ.
I'm saying we need to have all of them at the same time because without one, you would drastically increase the amount of stuff.
Do people have more rights today than they did 50 years ago or fewer rights?
I'd say more.
More rights.
Are people happier today than they were 50 years ago or less happy?
I'd say more happy.
Well, according to surveys that measure happiness, so take them for a grain of salt, people are significantly less happy, and women especially are both significantly less happy, as relates to men and in objective terms.
And we can see this measured in other ways that are a little more objective.
Like deaths of despair, deaths of suicide, drug overdoses, and the prescription of antidepressant drugs all skyrocketing.
Yeah, but that's not, again, that's a correlation-causation thing, where you're saying, oh, because more rights and less happiness, that must mean that one caused the other.
Well, unhappiness.
Socioeconomic pressures and everything that have gone into it since the 1950s.
On top of that, I'm pretty sure a lot of women were lying about the happiness in the 1950s because you really didn't have rights.
I don't know why you would think that.
They wouldn't be lying now.
Why would they not be lying now?
Because they don't really face as much social persecution for lying.
So you're just saying I just don't want to believe that this chart contradicts my view.
No, I'm saying humans are... What do you mean, what chart contradicts?
Well, the chart of self-reported happiness.
The chart that you're even saying.
Even if I just made up everything I just said, the chart isn't even saying what you're saying it is.
Because you're saying, because there are more rights, and look, less happy.
That means that more rights equals less happy.
I can't help it.
I mean, I don't believe that what we call rights today really do constitute rights, like the right to abortion.
But I can't help but notice that over the exact same time period of the rise of feminism, that women's happiness has diminished, not only in line with the happiness of men, but also relative to men.
They've become even less happy than men, who have also become less happy.
And it would seem to me, look I'm not saying it's firm, but it would seem likely that there might be a correlation.
With the rise of the increase in black rights and black humanity, happiness has decreased.
I'm not sure that black people have more rights today.
You're not sure that black people have more?
Well then, you agreed with me that America's racist, right?
No, I don't think that America's racist.
I mean, I agree with you on some things.
I don't agree with you that America's racist.
No, you just said that we don't have...
No, black people don't have anywhere near the right to life that they had before Roe v. Wade, which is why more black babies are ordered in the womb in New York City than are born.
Oh boy, I gotta teach you about some racial issues.
If you ever looked into why that is, because I can give you an actual correlation that has a probably stronger likelihood of being true.
The reason why a lot of black people get way more abortions is because lower socioeconomic status determines... I'm not saying why they get it or not, I'm just saying that they're less likely to enjoy their right to life.
They're less likely to have the right to their mother and father.
I'm going to operate in your framework.
Yeah, they are very less likely to have rights.
That's a very sad thing.
So I don't think black people have more rights.
That's a product of systemic racism.
I think it's a product of liberalism.
That's what I think.
And I think it's a product of the very... Specific?
Yeah, I think it's a product of the very things that we are told actually give black people more rights.
Things like abortion, things like the breakdown of the family, which I think deprive people of their rights.
We got told that the breakdown of the family gives people more rights?
Yeah, because the right to divorce.
And the right to sexual promiscuity and sex out of wedlock.
Okay, wait.
Oh, jeez.
You throw, like, so many things at the same time where it's kind of like, I don't think that... Yeah, I don't know how you do it.
It's like an AK.
But it's like, I don't think that you... I think when you're talking about the rights or the breakdown of the family and everything, I don't think that that's...
Something that it's also like heavily steeped in this kind of Solar view like there's a one view of how a family can operate and I think that when you talk about mass incarceration when you talk about all the different social like phenomena that black people have to put through war on drugs and everything black people are not over incarcerated relative to the crime that was committed by that demographic and It's not.
I know there's a myth that it is, but it isn't.
Black people are roughly nine and a half times as likely as white people to be incarcerated in the United States, which is a shocking number.
This is according to, just in the wake of George Floyd, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Incarceration, or whatever it's called, published these statistics.
About nine and a half.
But black people commit crimes, general crime, at roughly 9 times the rate of white people.
And serious crimes at roughly 10 times the rate.
9 times?
Yeah.
And murder at roughly 50 times the rate.
And robbery at roughly 107 times the rate.
And you saying murder at 50 times the rate gave me everything I need to know about how you're lying about those statistics.
I'm not.
It's from Minnesota.
You just took as a 1350.
saying that black people commit 50% of murders and everything.
That doesn't mean they commit murder at a rate 50 times higher.
No, I'm saying per capita black people commit murder at a...
I'm not saying that the majority of black people commit murder.
I'm saying that...
Per capita black people.
Black people are 50 times more likely than white people to commit murder.
I'm not gonna lie.
I don't think that you're honestly representing those statistics.
It's from the Minnesota government.
The statistics have come out just recently in the last couple of years.
Furthermore, you can see that when it comes to likelihood of being arrested for a crime, white people are 70% more likely to be arrested for any crime than black people.
And white people are 60% more likely to be... You said this comes from where?
From the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal... I forget the...
I forget the last part, but whatever their justice statistics department is, it comes from them.
And white people are 60% more likely to be arrested for serious crimes.
There's one exception.
More likely, or do they make up 60% and 70% of the arrests?
No, more likely per capita.
They're more likely.
There's one exception, which is weapons crimes, where black people are more likely to be arrested than white people.
But yeah, it's just a myth though, the notion that black people are unjustly hunted down by the police or something.
It's just completely made up.
I think that when you're talking about, first of all, that's not even taking into account over-policing.
I think we have a crime problem in the country, which means we probably have under-policing.
We have a crime problem?
Have we always had a crime problem?
Well, crime has spiked.
It was really bad in the early 90s, then it decreased because of pro-police policies, and then it's increased again.
That's crazy, because the decrease that happened in the early 90s started decreasing before even all the crazy mass incarceration policies ended up going into effect.
There's a decrease that There's a lot of social factors that contributed to why crime spiked in the 90s, but the decrease started before any actual policy even became implemented.
And then we started locking up people.
Hell of a coincidence.
We started locking up people at a higher rate as opposed to the crimes that they were being committed.
And we were locking them up for much longer in comparison to other countries.
And the crime rate remained quite low.
Crimes for stuff like burglary and everything were served at I think 60% longer.
Good.
I like locking up burglars.
I feel a lot safer when I do that.
It does, because it keeps the criminals in jail, and then they don't burglarize my house.
I think that that's a very simplistic way of looking at criminal justice because it does keep... I have a simple view of criminal justice.
We should lock up the bad guys and protect the good guys.
What is a bad guy?
The people who commit crimes.
And we should lock them up after they have due process.
It's a violation of the law.
Is it always just to lock someone up?
Well, an unjust law is no law at all, which is why... It's a species of violence.
So, do you know what jury notification is?
I do know what jury nullification is.
The concept of when a jury will have reason to believe that someone's guilty, they will acquit them anyway.
Because a lot of times they believe that an unjust law is bad.
But I think laws against burglary are perfectly just.
Yeah, but something like marijuana is something that juries tend to nullify on because of the disproportionate impact.
Virtually no one is in prison in the United States for simple possession of marijuana.
Sometimes they take plea deals, but it's exceedingly rare for that to happen.
When you talk about simple possession, it's dependent on the amount of marijuana, because a lot of times it can be simple possession, but if you're caught with the amount of marijuana, they assume that you're a distributor also.
Yeah, I guess if you've got a big brick of marijuana, you might just be a big glutton for pot, but it's usually plea deals for people who are actually peddling stuff.
- I don't think when you talk about keep the bad people away, that's like a fourth grade level understanding.
'Cause like, yeah, you can keep them away, but again, then what happens when they have to come back into society? - Yeah, you have to reintegrate them after they've paid their debt to society.
- Yeah, but again, then that completely depends on what we consider to be bad.
'Cause if we're locking someone up a disproportionate amount of time-- - Burglary, murder, you know, petty theft, assault. - Is that what it is, really?
Because I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people who are in jail are awaiting trial and the vast majority of people who are in jail, I'm pretty sure there's more people in jail than in prison.
Most of them are waiting for trial, and a lot of them are not intense felony convictions.
A lot of the times it's victimless crime or it can be like...
There's no such thing as a victimless crime.
Over 60% of...
Yes, it is like marijuana possession.
No, that creates all sorts of victims.
How?
Because you're peddling drugs on society, which...
How do you know that they're peddling drugs?
And if they are peddling drugs, there's a difference between a recreational one that is used that doesn't necessarily cause any harm or one that's laced.
If you're lacing it, then yeah, you should go to jail.
It's pretty bad, yeah.
But...
Yeah, I think marijuana just causes harm.
I think drugs generally are bad.
That's why we have laws against them.
But over 60% of inmates in state prisons are there for violent crimes, for serious crimes.
They're not there for dime bags.
In state prison.
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to... But the vast majority of prisoners are in state prisons, not federal prisons.
Yeah, the vast majority of, like, when it comes to drug, it's not, like, drug crimes make up, like, a minority of prison convictions.
Yes, but I'm saying when it comes to how these people end up in circumstances that they do, what courses in their lives.
I know a lot of people, like, if you kill your rapist, you end up, you still get charged for that or whatever.
Maybe.
You do.
You do.
Maybe.
It depends on the circumstances.
There's plenty of women who...
And I'm actually reading stories about them right now.
Vigilantism is still illicit, necessarily.
On top of that, there are mental health things that go into one's propensity to commit crime and everything, so it's like just saying the bad people go away and doing nothing about what we consider bad.
I agree.
It's just a very draconian thing, and if you think that, well, lock up people good, well, I mean, you talk about the breakdown of the black family when we went with- Breakdown of the family, broadly, but especially- When we look at the lock up the bad people after you all but ensured that they'd be committing a disproportionate amount of crime by- We're not locking up family, man.
We're not locking up.
According to Michael Knowles, we're not locking up.
According to statistics, we're not.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, because black fathers are, I think, four to five times more likely, even when unmarried, to play with, to clothe, bathe, and be there for their children as compared to white and Hispanic fathers.
But we still have the myth of black fatherlessness.
What does that mean?
That means we still have the myth of black fatherlessness, right?
Yeah.
Well, I don't know about the myth.
I mean, three quarters of black children are born out of wedlock.
Three quarters of black children almost are born out of wedlock in the United States.
Yeah, and even then, why is that a bad thing?
Well, for one reason, it's a great predictor of bad outcomes down the road.
No.
Single parenthood is.
Out of wedlock is not.
Out of wedlock just means that the parents are not married.
And that's the statistic I was telling you about.
Despite not being married, black fathers are still more likely than any other demographic to be there and raise their children.
But we still have this myth in our brains that black people are... Why don't they get married?
Why don't they get married?
There's many reasons for not getting married.
A lot of times it can be expenses.
You can go down to the court.
That doesn't necessarily change anything.
It's not expensive to get married.
Yeah, even then, it still doesn't really change anything.
Black families that do have married parents still have way less income and way less upward mobility than white parents who are married anyway.
Yeah, but you're not distinguishing between married couples and unmarried couples.
Yeah, no, I'm saying— Yeah, uniting two incomes together can be a good thing, but I'm saying you don't necessarily— Marriage is about more than income.
Wouldn't you agree?
For me, like, in a value sense, yeah, I'd say I'd prefer to get married, but that doesn't mean that people who aren't getting married are somehow wrong or immoral.
Well, statistically, their kids are more likely to end up in prison, more likely to end up on drugs, and more likely to not make a lot of money.
That's single parenthood.
That's defined in law as being out of wedlock.
That's what single parenthood is.
No, it's not.
Well, yeah, they don't take into account couples that are still together but just not married.
Those stats are from people who have sole custody.
It's either a single mother or a single father.
Being raised by one parent is going to drastically increase your outcomes, but getting married does not magically make that go away.
If they were raising you already, they just weren't married.
It does.
That statistic refers to out of wedlock, not purely to mothers who never see the fathers of their children.
- It refers to single parents.
There is no statistic that out of wedlock, as in the parents are still there.
'Cause when it says out of wedlock, it could be-- - Oh, so you're saying there's no way to measure the parents who were still there.
So you're saying there is no statistic for the point that you're trying to prove.
- No. - Right, I agree.
- What do you mean? - You're saying there's no statistic for couples who are together-- - No, because the statistics that do include the parents that are still together, just not married, show how likely black fathers are to be with their dads, show their likelihood of positive outcome.
The marriage certificate isn't getting them such better socioeconomic outcomes, because it doesn't matter whether or not you are legally unioned as one income, or like two separate incomes in one household, if you guys are both working and bringing in income for your children, you just don't have a marriage certificate.
I'm a little skeptical because I haven't seen those studies, but perhaps you'll send them over to me.
I can send them.
I look forward to that.
In any case, we've gone about an hour over.
Yeah.
But I've enjoyed it very much, JJ.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Did I convince you of anything?
No, I don't think so.
I think the framing and the stuff was a little bit wonky.
