Ep. 150 - Primitives Protected Their Border. Why Can't We?
The people who say the Sentinelese did nothing wrong when they brutally murdered a man for stepping onto their island are the same ones who complain that our government is evil for using non-lethal means against people who illegally invade our country. Isn't this inconsistent? And isn't it racist to expect so little of primitive tribes while expecting so much of white western nations?
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the left defends primitive tribesmen who kill intruders, but then says that we can't use any physical means to defend our country against intruders.
How is that consistent?
Also, a scientist has created a genetically modified baby.
Is that ethical?
And finally, is it a waste of money to explore Mars?
Hint, the answer is no.
We'll talk about all that coming up on the Matt Wall Show.
So I had a thought.
I do have those on occasion.
It doesn't happen very often, but I do have them.
We've been talking over the last few days about this story of the Sentinelese in India.
They're the Stone Age tribe on an island off the coast of India, uncontacted, which means the government, the Indian government, has set up a force field around them and made it illegal for anyone to go and let them know that the rest of human civilization exists.
Um, so as you heard, they murdered a missionary who tried to come and speak to them last week.
Uh, they, they shot him full of arrows, then put a rope around his neck and dragged him until he died.
Now the government is trying to recover the body of this, uh, poor guy, but the tribesmen won't let, won't let anyone get close to the island to just get the guy's body back.
And the thing is, The missionary is not the first person that these people have murdered.
They also killed two fishermen in 2006 who accidentally drifted close to the island.
Now, these men had no intention of invading the island.
They weren't trying to do anything.
They just drifted close to the island and they were shot full of arrows and murdered.
I have to depart from what is apparently the majority opinion about these cases.
I actually don't think it's okay for anyone to commit murder, even if you're in a primitive tribe.
I'm not in favor of murder.
For anyone.
I don't think anyone should be able to do it.
I don't care if you live in a tribe, if you live in a city.
I think murder is wrong for everybody.
That's just me.
They are killing innocent people.
Now, if you want to say, well, the missionary, he knew what he was getting into.
I still don't think it's okay to kill them.
I mean, I don't think that's okay.
But what about the fishermen?
They just drifted close to the island.
So they can be murdered too?
Again, call me crazy.
I just, I don't think it's cool.
I'm not okay with murder.
I just, personally.
But that's not my point.
What's interesting is the timing of this story.
The timing of this story highlights a really curious contrast, and I want to call attention to it.
Because as this drama has unfolded in India with this tribe, you have also the migrant caravan down on the southern border, And you have our government using physical means, though non-lethal, but using physical means to repel people who are trying to invade our country illegally.
Now, here's where the interesting contrast comes into play.
Because the people who say it's perfectly justified for this tribe to kill anyone who comes to their island at all, Those people, they are the same ones in many cases who say that it's some kind of great evil if we physically prevent illegal immigrants from coming to our country.
Now, I want you to really think about that.
The Sentinelese can shoot you full of arrows, put a rope around your neck, murder you, if you so much as drift close to their island.
But we're not allowed to take any physical measures whatsoever to deal with the people who come illegally to our country?
That's the position that a large number of people have taken.
And it just makes no sense.
The response to this point usually goes something like this.
Someone will say, well, they're a primitive tribe and they don't know any better.
Are you saying that we should be held to the same standard as a primitive tribe?
Shouldn't we be held to a higher standard?
Well, first of all, no, I'm not saying that we should be That we should hold ourselves to that standard because they murder people who come close to them.
I'm not saying that we should kill illegal immigrants.
I'm not advocating that.
I don't think anyone is advocating that.
And I'm especially not saying that we should kill people who come to our country just to visit, which is what the Sentinelese do.
So, no, I'm not talking about the same standard.
This is the bigotry of low expectations on steroids.
You are setting the bar extremely high for us.
Okay, you're saying that we should be so peaceful and so enlightened and so progressive and so welcoming that we can't even use any physical means at all, even non-lethal means, to deal with whole hordes of people who are trying to bum-rush our border.
So that's what you're saying for us.
But then you're putting the bar so low for these tribesmen.
You're putting the bar so low that it's under the earth.
You're burying the bar under the earth.
And you're saying, well, for them, they can murder whoever they want.
It just seems like this is the height of racism.
That's what the bigotry of low expectations is.
And usually the bigotry of low expectations, usually it is a form of bigotry normally found among liberal white people.
Where in an attempt to be enlightened, in an attempt to be progressive and multicultural, they'll say, they'll say, well, yeah, you know, we hold ourselves to a certain standard, but, you know, pointing off to some other race or culture, well, we can't expect them to act the same way because, you know, we can't expect that of them.
That's racism.
That is horrible racism.
And in the case of these primitive tribe people, you're basically treating them like animals.
You may as well compare them to a bear mauling a camper in the forest somewhere.
Well, they don't know any better.
This is just what they do.
They don't know any better.
Again, that is incredibly racist.
In an effort to have these enlightened attitudes towards these people, you are dehumanizing them.
You are holding them to no standard whatsoever.
You're saying that even don't murder is too high of a bar for them to get over.
And I find that extremely racist.
And what is this assumption?
I know people have said, well, they don't, you know, they, someone's coming to their island and they don't know why the person's coming.
So what else are they supposed to do?
Well, For anyone else on earth, we would say, yeah, look, if someone comes to your property or, you know, comes to your house, and that might make you a little bit wary, but you can't just kill them right away, especially if they don't appear to be threatening, if they don't have a weapon or anything.
Killing them shouldn't be the first thing you do.
If they're walking up your, if you see somebody walking up your, you know, the path to your front door, you can't just murder them right away.
And we expect everyone to kind of know that because we expect everyone to value human life and to understand that human life is valuable.
And so you can't just go around killing people the drop of a hat.
Here's the thing.
We expect everyone to intuitively, not just because they've been told by the government, we expect everyone to intuitively know that you can't just go around killing people.
Yet for this primitive tribe, what we're saying is, no, well, they have no knowledge of that.
Well, how do you know they have no knowledge of that?
They're human beings.
How do you know that they have no concept of that it's wrong to just go kill people?
And to make that assumption is so racist.
Because I am not racist, I hold these people to the same standard I would hold anyone else to.
And so if someone drifts close to your island, you shouldn't kill them.
It's not okay to kill them.
It's just not.
But what's the principle here, okay?
If we're not being racist, and yet we're still basically defending the way the North Sentinelese deal with so-called intruders, If we're not being racist, then there has to be some principle.
And the principle that I hear from people is, well, they have a right to defend their country.
Even though the island is not their country, it actually belongs to India.
But in any case, they have a right to defend their land and their home.
And it's illegal to go there anyway.
So, you know, that's the principle.
These are broad statements.
These are statements of principle.
A right to defend their home against invaders.
That's a principle.
So if that's the principle, why shouldn't we fall under the same principle?
Why should we be exempt?
If they have a right to defend their home against invaders, why don't we?
And I'm not saying that we defend it by using lethal force.
I'm not saying that at all.
But if they can use lethal force, can't we use non-lethal force at least?
So when you say they have a right to defend their home, I agree.
I don't think, I don't agree with the murdering, personally.
I may be the only person in the country who apparently feels this way, but I don't agree with the murdering part.
But I agree in principle with defending your home and your country.
And guess what?
We have the same right.
So, it just, I, if you're going to defend the way that these tribesmen Deal with anyone who even comes close to appearing that they might invade or intrude or whatever.
If you're going to defend that, yet tell us, yet tell the American government that we're wrong
for defending our borders, I cannot think of any explanation for that dichotomy other than racism
on your part. If it's not racism, then there should be certain basic principles that we all,
you know, that apply to all of us.
And if the principle is you can defend your home, defend your country, well, then you shouldn't have any problem with the way that the government is defending our home and our country down on the southern border.
All right.
I wanted to make mention of this story.
Reading from the report in the Daily Wire, according to a Stanford-educated Chinese researcher, the first ever genetically edited babies, twin girls, whom he altered to be more resistant to HIV infection, were born this month in action that is being condemned as unethical by some of his fellow scientists.
In an Associated Press report published Monday, the scientist said that he helped design the world's first genetically altered babies who were born this month.
I'm trying to get to the... Okay, so the AP provides some more details on the process.
The gene editing occurred during IVF, or lab dish fertilization.
First, sperm was washed, quote-unquote, to separate it from semen, the fluid where HIV can lurk.
A single sperm was placed into a single egg to create an embryo.
Then the gene editing tool was added.
When the embryos were three to five days old, a few cells were removed and checked for editing.
Couples could choose whether to use edited or unedited embryos for pregnancy attempts.
In all, 16 of 22 embryos were edited and 11 embryos were used in six implant attempts before the twin pregnancy was achieved.
All right.
Hopefully you followed all that and you understand how that works, because I totally understand it, of course.
So there's a lot of unknown about this and many scientists have pointed out that we don't really know the long-term effects.
We don't know what effect this might have on the kids.
We don't even know if this attempt will be successful in terms of preventing HIV.
So there's a lot that's unknown.
This was essentially, well not essentially, this was human experimentation.
This scientist was experimenting on these human embryos, and so these twin babies are like guinea pigs, basically.
And what's so worrisome is that it seems to open Pandora's box to lead to a kind of Gattaca situation where babies can be designed to suit the specifications of the parents.
Now, some people will look at this kind of stuff and they'll say, well, so what?
What's wrong with that?
Why not experiment and tinker and create babies that are perfected by science?
Well, I think there are a lot of ethical concerns here.
There's a lot wrong, but I'll point to just one thing.
This is the commodification of human life.
We are treating human life like a product, like an item, a thing to be possessed.
We're giving ourselves and we're giving science a certain level of control over human life that we shouldn't have.
Now, you and I, we were born naturally, right?
We were born as the sorts of people that God or nature, if you like, wanted or intended.
But with this kind of technology, if it continues to expand and you see where it's leading, people are going to be born as the sorts of people that other people wanted or intended them to be.
So this seems, among many other things, and we, you know, the fact that we don't know the long-term effects and all that kind of stuff, but that's bad enough, but this seems to remove agency.
It removes freedom from a person, kind of from the very get-go.
Take, I mean, even something like engineering a certain eye color or hair color for a child, which is an ability that science already has.
But even that, as innocuous as it seems, I think is wrong, is really wrong.
Because if you think about it, like, I have brown hair and I have brown eyes, right?
This is how I was naturally born.
No human being picked it out for me.
It's just, this is just me.
This is who I am.
This is just how it ended up.
I would not want to have brown hair because my parents wanted me to have brown hair.
Imagine that.
Imagine having some physical feature, any physical feature, that is only there because it's what your parents wanted.
For your whole life, you're going to have this physical feature.
You're going to look a certain way because it's what your parents preferred.
But why should your parents have any say over that at all?
You're a person.
You're a human being.
You're not a piece of furniture.
Why should your parents have it?
First of all, why would a parent have a preference on what eye color their child is?
So you see already the parents that engage in this kind of thing, they have entirely the wrong attitude about parenting.
They see their kids as accessories to their life.
The same way that they would see a piece of furniture or whatever.
Like you have a preference of what kind of color it is and all this sort of stuff.
But in any case, that's a human being.
Why should it be up to your parents?
Why should Why should I have a certain physical feature?
Because it's what my parents preferred, is the question.
And I think that's where this is heading.
And that's why it's wrong, among all the other problems.
But the further that we march with this technology, the more we get to a point where, you know, babies are just, as I said, they're just kind of accessories.
They're just, they are items that parents own and can even design to meet their own personal
specifications.
I find that pretty horrific, honestly.
Now before we wrap up, I wanted to talk about some positive scientific news.
Yesterday, hopefully you were following this, the Mars InSight spacecraft, unmanned obviously,
landed on Mars.
And this is pretty incredible.
Just imagine building something that can fly off this planet and travel whatever it is.
I think it's a hundred million miles or so.
Well, the distance from here to Mars fluctuates quite a bit.
So I'm not sure how far this thing traveled, but you know, a hundred million miles.
Imagine building something that can take off of our planet, travel 100 million miles to another planet, land itself, and then spend years roaming around the surface and studying it.
It's an absolutely remarkable scientific accomplishment.
And I just want to say this, yesterday I saw some people on Twitter and on social media complaining That, well, this is a huge waste of money.
You know, we're wasting money by going to Mars and all of that.
What a dreary and dull and pitiful outlook on life that you would consider that a waste of money.
We are exploring and discovering and studying and going into space.
That's what we should be doing.
Human beings, that's one of the things that makes us human, is this drive to explore and discover.
And humans have been doing that from the very beginning.
And all along, while you've had people who are Exploring and discovering and innovating.
You've also always had the dull kinds of people who sit off on the sidelines and fold their arms and say, oh, it's too expensive.
It's too this.
It's too that.
Well, it's a really good thing that those voices are never listened to, because if it were up to them, you know, we never would have achieved any of this.
So I absolutely think it's worth the money.
You know, not everything has to have an immediate practical benefit.
Yeah, it's not like you could say, well, what are we going to do with the information?
I don't know.
What do you mean, what are we going to do with the information that we get?
We're going to expand our knowledge.
We're going to know more things.
Isn't that enough?
To expand our knowledge and to know more about the solar system and the universe, isn't that enough?
I mean, do you need it?
Does every piece of knowledge that we gain, does it have to have some practical, utilitarian use in your everyday life?
And being a more knowledgeable and well-rounded person, isn't that a practical thing in and of itself?
So I think it's wonderful.
I'm a huge fan of this.
And from what I've read, NASA's plan is to get us to Mars, to get a human on Mars sometime in the 2030s.
And I fully support it.
I think it's worth every penny that we spend on it.
And I very rarely say that about things that the government does.
