Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect "war porn" media sensationalism, contrasting Trump's restraint in Iran with historical indifference to foreign casualties. They analyze Aiden Castile's critique of tactical libertarianism, arguing that calls to ban pornography often serve as a ruling-class tool to pacify young men while ignoring broader state overreach. The debate escalates regarding the limits of government regulation versus individual responsibility, concluding that true liberty requires resisting authoritarian impulses disguised as moral protection. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Religious Feeling at the Show00:04:58
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All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Happy New Year.
Welcome to 2020.
A brand new year, but the same old part of the problem.
Of course, I am the most consistent motherfucker you know, Dave Smith, and I'm joined by the king of the cocks, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, buddy?
I'm excited for 2020.
2020, the year.
We're calling it 20-month.
Yeah, that's right.
The year of the money.
Yeah.
Is that what 2020 is?
For us, yeah, man.
We're going to get out on the road and print some bills.
That's right.
But not some rooms.
Print bills.
Like, they'll, you know, we don't actually have the power.
That would be counterfeiting.
But they were counterfeited by some Jews at the Federal Reserve.
And we will take as many of them as we can get our grubby little hands on.
Did you have a good new year?
I did.
I went to a concert.
I had a good time.
Oh, who'd you see?
Saw these guys called the New Master Sounds.
The New Master Sounds.
Yeah, they're like, if you're listening to some elevator music, but the elevator music was on acid.
So it was great, man.
Like, funky.
They're a funky band.
Play some tunes.
That's not jammed out.
Well, sounds fun, buddy.
I'm glad you had fun.
You were there through the countdown and everything.
I was there for the whole time.
They do it on stage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then they gloss over it real quick.
So if you're alone, you don't have to dwell on it.
Yeah, okay.
Well, that's pretty good.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
You know, they go into it hard and then they go right back into a jam.
Very nice.
Well, I had a lot of fun out in LA.
We did Skanks Live at the comedy store there and a stand-up show at New Year's.
And just a lot of fun.
It was great to see some people, fans of the show, out there in LA and always have a lot of fun out there.
I love the comedy store.
It's like my favorite club in the country.
Just like they do something that nobody else quite gets right.
And the shows are always great.
And last night, or two nights ago rather, was no exception.
It's a lot of fun.
Had a great new year.
I brought the wife out there with me.
We got, you know, got to get away for a little bit.
Short trip, but had a lot of fun.
I always love LA, man.
LA is so much fun to dip your toes into and then leave.
But I don't think I'd ever want to live there.
But it's great.
It's great when you do it the way I do it.
Just go in, have some really good shows.
You feel good.
You see some nice weather.
You know, kind of see the, it's a cool city.
But there is something weird about that fucking town.
Like it's got a vibe to it that you feel right away.
It's almost like religious feeling.
Like you're like, I think the devil lives here, but I like it.
It's fun for a little bit, but I don't think I'd want to stay.
I think it would ruin me.
Like, there's just something, it's a very, I don't know.
It's like everyone feels like they really put a lot of time into their look.
Like, just walking down the street, everyone, you feel this way.
Like, if you just see someone jog by you and you're like, I think that chick.
You feel extra ugly.
Well, yeah.
But it also, it just like kind of, you're like, I think that chick spent three hours working on her jogging outfit.
Like you see some chick in New York jogging.
It's like she's just trying to get a jog in.
Some like fucking, you see some chick in LA jogging.
You're like, I'm pretty sure she's going out for a movie and playing the part of jogger.
And she's like doing, you know what I mean?
Like she's working on her character or something like that.
Do you see fucking women in like their 50s that still dress like they're 20 in LA?
That's like a big thing.
It's weird.
Republicans Called Racist in Elections00:12:08
I don't know.
Hang on.
Hang on as long as you can, ma'am.
I don't know.
It's a cool, it's a cool thing.
Put out the floodiest vibes, those 50-year-olds who dress like the 20s.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they don't give a fuck.
They got nothing to lose.
I'm all for it.
They're fucking, yeah, they're fucking way down for whatever Rob Bernstein wants to do.
But anyway, I do always have fun out there.
And of course, it's always great to meet some of the fans and do some stand-up.
So anyway, yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Good time.
Good time had by all.
And good to be back.
Good to be back.
This is the fucking thing about being a father is you're like, or being a parent, I should say.
But it's always kind of like you're like, I just want like a day or two to just be able to relax.
And you know what I mean?
And then if you leave, like our baby stayed, spent New Year's with her grandmother.
And then the whole time I'm there, I'm just like, oh, I miss my daughter.
And I was happy to come back.
But anyway, it was a lot of fun.
Happy New Year.
Hope everybody had a good new year.
Hope you spent some time with some people you loved.
And now, you know, I had a good chance to recharge your batteries and get ready for the shit show that 2020 will surely be.
I do have a feeling this is going to be a fucking big year for the country, one way or the other.
It's going to be, you know, a lot of crazy shit happened in 2019.
And I think 2020 will put that one to shame.
It's, you know, I know I've said it before when you look forward into the year 2020, but this is going to be a year where there's going to be a presidential election.
Typically speaking, historically in America, that's the year when everyone really focuses on national politics.
And then the other years, they kind of don't, you know, get into it as much.
It's a weird thing, right, with our system of government where there's usually, typically, there's substantially less people vote for midterm elections as they do in the presidential elections.
So much fewer people vote in the off years, which is strange in a way because you'd think that those elections you actually have much more of a say in, you know, if they're just a statewide election, you actually have much more of an influence in, but people don't like that one.
They like the one.
People want a ticket to the big show.
That's right.
It's the big show, even though you have way less of any influence.
Not that you have that much in a statewide election, but you have virtually no influence in a presidential election.
But people are more drawn to go out to that one because it's the big show.
It's the center.
And so that's typically how it goes.
However, it feels like since Donald Trump's been in, there was never really that, oh, we give a shit during the presidential election year and then we retreat.
It's always just been people, you know, engaged, which is terrible when citizens are engaged in the political process.
Nothing good can ever come of that.
And that showed in the 2018 midterm elections were like the highest voter turnout for a midterm election.
So I have a feeling 2020, people are going to be super focused on this.
And I mean, look, let's get real.
There's only so many options of what can happen and none of them are not going to further divide and polarize the country.
Like, how many options are there?
It's like, okay, Trump could get re-elected, which seems fairly likely right now.
If Donald Trump gets re-elected, man, you think these fucking, like, these left-wingers, you think their heads exploded in 2016?
Wait till he fucking, wait till if Donald Trump not only gets elected president, you know, and they're freaking out and the Trump derangement syndrome and, you know, Russian propaganda is everywhere and the racists are everywhere and all this shit.
Well, then it was, yeah, but Mueller's going to drag him away in handcuffs and that'll get it.
So if Trump not only gets elected in 2016, survives the Mueller investigation, survives impeachment, and then is re-elected by the country, you're going to hear the popping of left-wing heads exploding all throughout this land.
It's going to be a fucking shit show.
There's not, we've already, it's not like they're going to go, you know, let me reevaluate my stance on things and maybe I got something wrong here.
That's not what you're going to see.
We would have seen that already if that was ever going to happen.
It's just going to be craziness.
The other thing that could happen is Donald Trump could lose the election.
He could survive impeachment and lose the election, in which case, Trump supporters are, I think, going to be like, well, that was it.
That was our last, you know, shot to have any influence over this.
And I think you're going to see those people alienated and removed from the system even more so than they already were, like under Barack Obama.
As much as there might have been this America that felt like none of the institutions, Hollywood, the media, none of them represented them.
I think it's going to be drastically more than that was.
And the other option, of course, is that Donald Trump gets impeached, which seems pretty unlikely right now, but it is plausible.
I never put the idea completely out of the realm of possibility that the Republicans will stab Donald Trump in the back and turn on them.
I mean, I know a lot of them are kind of dying to.
Like, you know, Mitt Romney is just looking for any excuse to fucking vote to impeach Donald Trump.
But I don't trust McConnell or any of those other guys.
I mean, something shady could happen there.
Who would jump up to run?
I guess Pence would probably run.
Maybe Pence, maybe somebody else.
I really don't know.
I don't know who it would be, but whoever it would be would probably just get destroyed in the general election.
Yeah, I don't think anybody but Trump was going to go beat Hillary Clinton in that election.
I don't think, you know, I think Rubio or Ted Cruz or someone like that would have gotten killed.
It took someone like Trump who was willing to fight in many ways on their own level.
You know what I mean?
And that's the thing about Donald Trump where so many, it's really funny because so many people in the establishment press, they criticize Donald Trump and with some degree of fairness and accuracy for just being a bully and being like kind of trashy and be like, oh, he'll call people names and he'll do all this insulting stuff.
And, you know, certainly if you're just looking at Donald Trump, you could say, I kind of get that.
I kind of get where maybe you don't want a president of the United States, even when it's really funny.
Like maybe you don't want a president who just, you know, insults people and it's kind of immature and all that shit.
And there is a point to that.
But the thing is, the reason, part of the reason why people rallied behind Donald Trump so much, and part of the reason why Donald Trump as a politician was so effective, and even as the president is so effective, is that we're not existing in a vacuum and we're not existing in a culture of chivalry.
And then all of a sudden, Donald Trump started insulting everybody.
By the way, try inserting a Donald Trump character into the 50s and he never would have gotten any support from conservatives.
They'd have been like, this is like un you know, like, this is not how a gentleman behaves.
But the world we live in is that if you are a Republican, especially around presidential election time, even if you're a Republican who's basically going to govern exactly the same as a Democrat, even if you're Mitt Romney, they're going to call you racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, you know, fucking xenophobic.
You know, basically, Mitt Romney was turned into like, you know, this guy is a fucking hates women.
Remember, there's a war on women.
He's racist.
And oh, by the way, I think he abuses puppies.
Like, this was literally how they ran against Mitt Romney.
I'm not even exaggerating.
Those were the actual claims.
And in that context, if people are going to come at you with these horrific smears, you kind of have to fight back by insulting them.
And Donald Trump was weirdly able to nullify that by being like, okay, yeah, sure, that you're going to call me all those things.
Well, guess what, Hillary?
Your husband's a rapist and you're a fucking corrupt and you're a liar and you're a nasty woman or whatever the fucking insults he would hurl at them are.
And I think to a lot of people.
And I can smell your vagina from here.
Yeah, exactly.
I smell it.
Which we all can smell that thing through the TV.
But I think to a lot of Republicans, that was kind of like a breath of fresh air.
And if you ask a lot of Trump supporters, you'll get this over and over again.
They will tell you, if you actually ask them, that one of the things they love is that he's a fighter.
Like they're like, we want to fight back finally.
We're sick of this.
And you got to be somewhat sympathetic.
I mean, I'm not a Republican and I've never been one.
But if you, you know, if you're constantly like nobody in any aspect of America, except like the deepest red states, you know what I mean?
If you're in any other area in life and you have any right-wing leanings, you're immediately called the boring list of adjectives.
You know, it's like the, oh, you're being racist, misogynistic, homophobic, like all these same things, like over and over.
It's just the immediate go-to.
It's what you, the first thing you get called.
And after a while, instead of just being defensive and being like, no, I'm not a racist.
No, I'm not a sexist.
Eventually you kind of want to be like, well, you're a fucking piece of shit.
I don't know.
Let's like go on the offensive.
Let's attack you back.
And that's what Trump did and continues to do.
And it's one of the things they like about him.
So no, I don't think, I just don't think anybody else had it in them to go that way.
And nobody else, nobody else in politics would have made it an issue that like Bill Clinton being accused of rape multiple times almost never came up my entire life, except from like Alex Jones and like the, you know, internet right-wingers who would bring it up.
But it was never like something that was discussed on, you know, in polite society.
It was just those crazy right-wingers who were allowed to talk about that.
And Trump was the one who made it a thing.
And I wonder, I mean, I don't fucking know, but there have to be a whole lot of people who never heard of that or at least heard of it, but heard of it in like some vague way.
You know how there are those like things like, like I remember before Hannibal called out Bill Cox.
That's the Sex Epstein thing.
I'd always heard about it, but never like in a formal way.
And even for me personally, with Cosby, I remember when Hannibal brought that up and he was like, oh, Cosby, you know, all these women have accused Cosby of rape.
And I was kind of like, I remember my reaction being like, yeah, I thought there was something there.
But I didn't know.
I don't even remember what the rumors were.
Were the rumors?
But I thought the rumors might have been that he cheated on his wife a lot.
You know what I mean?
Like, I didn't actually realize that she liked watching.
It turns out he wasn't cheating at all.
He was following the Cosby rules.
But that, you know what I mean?
And then you look into it and you're like, oh, shit, there's like this whole fucking world.
Trump was just willing to do that.
It's like, not only am I going to say I'm bringing these bitches to the debate with me.
Sit right there and fucking watch Hillary Clinton.
So anyway, the point I was making was 2020 is going to be a wacky year.
It's going to be, I think, something like 2016 was.
And much like 2016, I just think it's going to drive the country further and further apart, really just dividing the country.
And what's crazy is that we're already so goddamn divided.
And I just don't see any way.
Possibly, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'm missing something.
That's happened before.
Not often, but a few times.
And maybe something brings everyone back together, but I don't see it.
I just don't see it happening.
I'm not good at division.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, you're not great at addition either.
So it's either way.
CIA Fights Assad Alone00:15:42
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So first podcast of the year.
First topic of the year would have to be the recent developments, which is really more of the same chaotic violence in Iraq over the last few days.
And the latest is that I guess several hundred military personnel have been sent to Kuwait.
And there's a few thousand more who have been told to prepare to pack up and head into Iraq.
The Hokey Pokey baby.
Yeah, there we go.
Take your troops out.
Take your troops out.
And then you spend more than you need to bring them back again.
Yeah, they're actually making active duty members when they come home do the hokey pokey and turn themselves around, which seems just pointless and somewhat degrading.
But they're, yeah, this is the crazy game.
Has Kuwait ever thought about moving?
They're like, we keep getting suckered into this whole Iraq thing.
Kuwait is there, they're living in a rough neighborhood, that's for sure.
But, you know, they love it and they've been there their whole lives and they're pretty attached to it.
And America always seems to come have their back when the shit really hits the fan.
Do you think there's anyone sitting at the Pentagon right now like, hey, can we rearm ISIS?
What happened to those ISIS guys?
They were fighting these Iran guys.
Well, they're still, I mean, they're still essentially fighting on the side of al-Qaeda in Yemen.
So that's for sure.
I mean, you know, we took the side of al-Qaeda slash ISIS, but, you know, the radical Sunnis in Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen.
Libya, we pretty much gave the place to them.
Syria, we pretty much gave the place to them until Russia came in and started fucking their shit up.
And then Trump got elected president and he did.
And one of the best things that Donald Trump has done is that, and by the way, I don't think that this is completely unrelated to the Mueller investigation and the CIA impeachment, is that one of the first moves Donald Trump made,
which made me somewhat optimistic, like he might be serious here, was when he first came in, he did pretty quickly end the CIA program of arming the anti-Assad rebels, which basically was like, you know, the program was pretty much, you know, anybody,
this is what originated as Operation Timber Sycamore, what basically was anybody who picks up a gun who's fighting against Assad, we're fucking supporting you, you know, the free Syrian army, which consisted of like 1,500 different militias, and the most badass one of them turned out to be fucking what became ISIS.
And Donald Trump ended that program.
And very shortly after the caliphate started really fucking getting destroyed, they started losing like basically all of the fucking land they were holding.
And, you know, I don't know exactly how related those two things are, but the timing seemed very related that like as soon as the CIA wasn't fucking basically, you know, on their side anymore, and they had to fight Assad and Russia and Iran all by themselves, and they were just getting fucked up.
And now they've pretty much lost all of their land.
But of course, then it becomes a thing like the war on terror, where now you're at war with an idea.
And they'll be like, well, the idea isn't gone.
That's kind of their claim for why, that's one of the claims for why we still have to be there.
But, you know, it'd be like, well, you know, yeah, ISIS doesn't hold any land anymore, but there's still people who claim to be loyal to them.
So we got to go back there until no one claims to be loyal to them or something.
Of course, all these ideas, it's interesting, and this is the way the Warhawks work, is that even after every rationale for war gets proven wrong, they just move on to the other one and it doesn't even fuck with them for a second.
So that fucking, you know, the OPCW, you know, whistleblower or whatever can come out and be like, oh, it looks like Assad never really gassed his people.
All that evidence was pretty much fabricated.
And it's like, yeah, yeah, but we're not talking about that.
We have to protect the Kurds.
And, you know, why is it that you haven't heard that much in the last couple of weeks about protecting the Kurds?
Oh, because the Kurds are fine.
The Kurds are fine.
All those predictions of the poor Kurds.
Well, they ended up making a deal with Assad, and they're pretty much protected.
And Turkey hasn't fucking invaded and started slaughtering Kurds.
Turns out that didn't end up happening.
All the experts with their predictions were wrong about that.
So what is the answer now?
Oh, well, Iran is attacking our fucking embassy in Iraq, and therefore we need to bomb Syria.
So it's all, it all comes back.
Anyway, what happened most recently, and it's still, you know, as these things are, it's very hazy in the first few days.
And as probably I would imagine just about everyone who listens to this show knows, you really cannot trust any of the mainstream reporting on this stuff.
And it's not like they get some details wrong.
I mean, they just lie about the story.
They get all of their information wrong.
And as you know, it's just, you know, this has always been true, but it's so much more evident and transparent now than ever before, is that there is no difference between the national security apparatus, the deep state, and the corporate press.
They're just the same.
They're just a mouthpiece for the CIA talking points.
And it's not even like I'm exaggerating.
They'll be like, okay, now to give our point of view, former head of the CIA, John Brennan, tell us what's happening here.
And that's it.
And that's who you get the information from.
So what happened more or less was that the U.S. went on a bombing campaign, bombed a bunch of militia targets in Iraq and Syria.
It seems like in response to this, there were mass protests, which by the way is happening all the time in Iraq.
There are these huge protests.
And then this militia group attacked the U.S. embassy.
You know, all the typical Warhawks are claiming that this was Iran who attacked them, even though it's not Iran.
It's a Shiite militia group in Iraq, but that's Iran.
Now, so let's just pretend in an alternate imaginary universe, if you had a press corps that was actually, you know, doing like, let's say, the job of journalists, they would go, you know, maybe, maybe a follow-up question would be, oh, well, what evidence do we have to tie Iran to these attacks?
Like, what direct evidence do you have that suggests Iran was behind these attacks?
But that world doesn't exist.
So the world we live in is the deep state fucking war hawks go, Iran did this.
And then the entire corporate press goes, Iran did this.
There you go.
And it's just literally just runs as a headline like a factual statement.
Iran attacks, you know, the U.S. embassy in Iraq.
I would just figure Iran has no incentive to poke at the bear, that if they wanted to do something, it would be more decisive and it would be like cross the Middle East.
So when they keep saying, like, I guess that Iran supports terrorists in the region or like they're just trying to make moves in the region, that's like kind of the way they try and point, paint the picture is like, they're in all these different areas.
They're supporting these terrorist groups and they're always testing the waters to see how much they can get away with in terms of really running the region.
But I don't think people really work that way.
I think like they'll like if they wanted to take over Iraq, they take over Iraq.
Well, think about it too.
Think about it this way.
And I'm going to, this is a really sloppy example.
It's just the one that came to my head.
So if you wanted to say, let's say like Lewis's podcast, the real ass podcast and part of the problem, right?
Where like if you wanted to say, here's how they're connected, you could certainly find connections between the two of them, right?
You could be like, well, Lewis and Dave talked on the phone earlier today and they've worked together before and here's money that goes back and forth and they're all under the same umbrella, you know, company and like things like you could find connections.
But if Lewis says something on his podcast and then you went, Dave Smith said this on his podcast, it would be like, well, no, that's not really true.
I don't actually have any control over what they do on their show or what they say or what they, you know what I mean?
So the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah, I think is somewhat like that.
Like there are connections.
You know what I mean?
No question about it.
Iran has funded Hezbollah in the past.
I don't know about this Hezbollah group in Iraq, but I know like Hezbollah in fucking Lebanon or something.
Like they've definitely like funded them before.
But the idea that if Hezbollah attacks someone, that is Iran attacking them is actually, that's a little bit murky and probably not true.
So look, there's no question that Iran has a lot of influence over the Shiite population of Iraq.
But if you're just going to call the Shiites in Iraq Iran, then by that logic, we fought a war for Iran and gave the government to Iran.
I mean, that's what the war in 2003 was.
We went in and overthrew Saddam Hussein's Sunni Baath Party and gave the government to the Shiites.
So Iran, right?
Because I get, because the new rules are any Iraqi Shiite with a gun is Iran.
So we gave Iran the government.
So then if you're going to sit here and bitch about how there's this Iranian influence in the region, it's like, okay, well, you fought a war for them.
So, you know, what are we doing here?
Like, what is this?
Now we have to go fight a war against Iran.
And of course, I mean, if you just look at...
Like, even if you look at things through that lens, you'd have to be like, well, the war in Iraq was the hugest mistake ever.
And such a big mistake that you should disqualify yourself from having a say in what we do now if you're advocating we go fight because these guys are Iran.
It's like a self-defeating argument.
What even was the attack on the embassy?
Just some toilet paper at it?
Yeah.
Toilet paper, they had some silly string and they fucking...
I don't know exactly what they were doing.
I mean, it was the embassy was definitely damaged and they sent in the U.S. sent in like air backup and started fucking tear gassing people and shooting at some people and they basically they saved it.
But they had to disperse a crowd that otherwise would have gotten in.
I don't know if they would have gotten in or not.
I mean, it's a fucking serious ass embassy.
But it's, you know, it's just, look, I don't know the actual details of it.
And I think it'll probably be a couple weeks before we get really good reporting on that from the, you know, from the fake news online who actually does their fucking job.
But so basically one in all this chaos, there was one American private contractor who died.
So now the thing that gets so tricky about this, go ahead.
When they say private contractor, they mean like a dude who's out there building buildings or like someone who's secretly torturing people for the CIA.
Closer to the second.
Closer to the second.
What it means more or less is a private military member.
That's what it is, is that they outsource a whole lot of this military activity now to private companies.
Most of them are like ex-military guys who go over and join these private companies.
They go over there and fight the wars now.
And they do it with much less oversight than the government military does, but with basically the same effect.
And oftentimes when troops are pulled out, they send these contractors in.
So they'll be like, oh, we brought a thousand troops home.
But really, they sent in another thousand private contractors.
So no, they're not building shit.
They're killing shit.
But it's just like, I remember one time on a Fox News panel.
I think I've told this story here before.
Forgive me.
2020 is going to be a lot like past years.
I retell stories.
But I was arguing on a Fox News panel, or I was on a Kennedy panel.
You know, it was right after some attack.
I forget which one it was, but arguing, you know, against how crazy all these wars are.
And I said something about how Assad, you know, say what you will about Gaddafi and Assad and Saddam Hussein, but they all fought terrorists.
And we overthrew, you know, two of them and are working on the third.
And now terrorists are rising up in this region.
And I think there's a connection there.
And maybe this war on terror has been counterproductive.
You know, which is pretty tame for a point I'm trying to make, you know, but that's more or less just the point I was saying.
And then it was during a commercial break and I was on with one of these military guys.
And he said to me during the commercial break, he goes, you know, I get the point that you're making, but Assad has, you know, attacked Americans before.
And I was like, when has Assad attacked Americans?
They go, well, he was funding people who went and attacked Americans during the war in Iraq.
And I was like, oh, okay.
So like after we invaded their next door neighbors.
I remember he just had this look on his face that was like so horrified that I would say it that way.
And look, I understand he's an American military guy.
In his mind, he's like, dude, you're fucking attacking American, you know, soldiers.
Look, I get, I get where he's coming from, but I just don't know how, and I really do.
I mean, like, there's a lot of good people in the military, and I feel bad when anything bad happens to any of them.
Any of them get killed or shot or maimed or any of this stuff, and they got families at home and all this stuff.
But if you're really thinking it through, and like if you try to just be fair at all and neutral to all the parties involved, it's like if you invade a fucking country in an aggressive war off bullshit, like a country that never threatened you before, and you invade and occupy and kill a whole bunch of people there, and someone starts shooting back at you, it's like now that's a justification for why we need to go to war against those guys, or is that just kind of more of the lesson of like, yeah,
this is why we shouldn't invade these countries to begin with?
I don't know.
I don't think if an outside group invaded America, anyone here would have too many hesitations to start shooting at those people because that's kind of what you do.
It's like on a smaller level, like feeling really bad for, you know, like a home invader who gets shot breaking into a home.
Like, I'm not saying you don't feel bad for him at all, but you kind of understand why it happened, you know?
Provoking Countries to Conflict00:13:44
Even if he was propagandized and duped into breaking into that home, you still go, yeah, but you broke into this guy's home.
I get it.
And then we go and we fucking, you know, and this is what Ron Paul used to point out all the time back in the day.
I remember he used to say this a lot, especially in 2008 when Obama was running on, you know, pulling troops out of Iraq in like within the first year or whatever his timeframe was that he had.
And he was like, we're not going anywhere in Iraq.
This is what Ron Paul used to say in 2008.
He's like, Obama's not pulling anyone out of Iraq.
He goes, they just built an embassy the size of the Vatican, which is the embassy that they're talking about, right?
It's the size of the Vatican.
It's this fucking monster that they just built in the middle of this fucking country.
So already, if you're kind of like, yeah, this is, it's not just an embassy.
This is like a symbol of American occupation and American dominance of this region.
And what does it go to show for you, right?
That it's the Shiites who are attacking it.
It's the Shiites, the guys who we put in power after deposing Saddam Hussein, who was oppressing them.
Even they fucking hate us and want us out of there.
So is it like a lot of military personnel at the embassy?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a fucking fort, you know?
Yeah, a ton of military personnel, probably diplomats and stuff like that as well, but like a ton of military.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We shut down all the military bases we had out there.
No, we still have several.
Yeah.
We still have several.
Some of them might be under control of the Iraqi government, which is kind of our puppet government, but there's still several.
And so, you know, it's like it's just hard to really go, okay, so now we build this embassy the size of the Vatican in a country that doesn't want us there, that where our country doesn't want to be, which is why everyone who fucking runs for president has to pretend they want to pull out and acknowledge that we never should have fought this war to begin with.
Even the ones who supported it, even the ones who voted for it.
Like even Joe Biden has to apologize for having voted for the war in Iraq.
And Bernie Sanders gets to hit him with that whenever he wants to.
Well, I voted against the war in Iraq and you voted for it.
He goes, yes, I shouldn't have voted for that.
I'm sorry I was wrong.
George W. Bush was wrong.
You know, Trump hit Hillary Clinton with that all the time.
Obama hit John McCain with that.
Obama hit Hillary Clinton with that.
So we don't want to be there.
They don't want us there.
But we have this fucking embassy there.
And now if the embassy is attacked, it means what?
We have to go on a bombing campaign again.
We have to go back into that war again.
So this is the part.
So you leave a few troops behind.
But if anything happens to them, and now it's not even if anything happens to the troops, but if anything happens to a fucking private contractor who's over there, now we got to go and fucking go back to war there.
We got to go on a bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.
Like, come on.
Just how ridiculous is all of this?
And it's so reckless.
And again, it's like, you know, these things keep happening.
They keep like always going, oh, Iran did this or Iran did that.
And just like the stuff in Syria, which is really all about Iran as well.
But all the stuff in Syria, it's like they fucking, as soon as, you know, like they make these claims.
The evidence finally comes out that shows that it's not accurate, and then they move on to the next one.
So it's like, it doesn't matter.
It's always the next thing, always the next thing.
But in the meantime, it's just dangerous.
You're just provoking a fucking country to get into a conflict that maybe could lead to something.
And maybe eventually they do something that's big enough that we do have to have a military response to it.
And the truth is this, right?
The truth is, and this is just, I mean, I think just about everybody, like everybody who knows what they're talking about, like military personnel and people who really study this shit, I think just about all of them know that almost everyone believes that a war with Iraq would be far, far deadlier and bloodier than the war in Iraq was.
A war with Iran would be far more deadly.
It would be much tougher than the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
This really would be something that would be closer to a Vietnam where you're seeing tens of thousands of Americans getting killed and probably countless numbers of Iranian casualties.
And it would cost enormous amounts of money.
It would be very, very difficult.
And Iran is a country that poses absolutely no threat to this nation.
No threat whatsoever.
They just don't.
So what the fuck are we doing here?
What are we doing?
I mean, okay, if our fucking, if the walls at our fucking embassy got banged up a little bit, like, all right, that sucks.
It's tragic that there's this one private contractor who died.
But the answer to all this shit is obviously that we shouldn't be there.
And it does make you wonder when these things start to come up around an election year, you know?
Because there's always that old thing that you start a war in order to guarantee yourself re-election because Americans are hesitant, at least at some times, to vote the commander-in-chief out when he's in the middle of conducting a war.
I hope Trump isn't counting on that because I really don't think, I think this is a unique time in terms of America with war.
You know, we're in the middle of the longest wars in American history and the country is pretty goddamn over them.
And I think Trump's base really doesn't want to see any more of these wars.
And I think it would hurt him.
That's my guess.
I think it would really hurt him if he got into one of these.
But, you know, who knows?
We'll see what happens.
I mean, to Trump's credit, he has managed to not get sucked into any of these new wars so far.
You know, he's fallen somewhere in the middle of talking about ending wars, not really ending any of them, but not starting any new ones.
And he'll talk about new ones sometimes, but never really does it.
But he also puts a lot of really bad people around him.
So it's, you know, it's something you got to keep your eye on.
Let's fucking hope he stays out of this.
It's really crazy, though, the absolute, like, insane recklessness that the mainstream media talks about these things.
I mean, I don't know if you saw that there was like, like, Kim Jong-un said something about a Christmas Day surprise or Christmas Day present for America.
And so the fucking, all the mainstream media is just going nuts about this.
Like, Christmas Day surprise.
Will North Korea attack?
What would Trump do?
What would the military response do?
It's this whole like, it's like sick.
It's like this fucking like, like.
Like war porn or something that they all get off on like talking about all these things and then it just comes and goes and they just never address it.
It's just like, oh, okay, let's move on to the next thing.
All of us knew fucking North Korea is not going to attack us on Christmas.
Like, what are you talking about?
This is absurd.
Of course, of course this isn't going to happen.
But you guys don't even think like maybe we shouldn't like play around with these fucking tensions.
Maybe we shouldn't like escalate this thing.
But they almost fall right, you know, it's like people talk about like more or less what's happening is Kim Jong-un is a fucking blowhard who's fucking talking shit.
You know what I mean?
And trying to like sound impressive to his own people.
And then we do the same fucking thing.
Our press does the exact same thing.
Well, here's what the military would do.
And then they get these like generals on.
I saw this on Fox News and fucking, they get these generals on to like fucking come wag their dick around.
Well, here's what we'd do.
If they came and gave us a surprise, we'd fucking blow their ass right out of the water.
And you're like, what are you doing, man?
This is insane.
You're like, you're two countries with nukes and you're talking shit to each other.
It's like, stop.
Settle down.
Have some diplomats talk.
Where the fuck do we have all of these diplomats?
I wish we could see itemized cost on some of these things, like what it's going to cost for them to redeploy all these troops into Iraq.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That would be interesting to see.
Anyway, it's there's there's been a lot of these little like drip drip drip fucking tensions with Iran.
But in the meantime, what is happening, maybe it isn't kind of like leading to this next big war with Iran.
But what it does, what all of these things do seem to do effectively is stop Trump from pulling troops out.
So it may not be like, it's a mini surge.
That's what they called it on antiwar.com earlier today, a mini surge into Iraq, right?
We're only talking about a few thousand more troops going in, but it sure as fuck ain't pulling the troops out.
It also keeps up the illusion that like we need to be imperialists or that we need a strong army and we have to be in the Middle East, which I don't agree with any of that.
Right.
And it's pretty obvious that it's just like you can, you know, it's always anything that can pull us into a war gets reported on very heavily.
And anything that would be evidence that we should leave gets underreported.
And of course, if that, you know, like that's even when it's like something like this, which is kind of like, in my opinion, like evidence that we shouldn't have this embassy there, we shouldn't be in this part of the region.
It never gets spun in that direction.
But for example, you look at, just look at the amount of coverage that the Kurds are about to get slaughtered got versus the amount of coverage that, oh, we were wrong.
And the Kurds didn't get slaughtered.
That gets next to nothing.
And nobody ever comes out and goes, oh, so if, so the fact that we thought the Kurds were all going to get slaughtered was reason why we have to stay, then wouldn't the fact that we got that wrong be reason that getting out was a good idea?
We should do an episode on the prosperity of the Kurds.
I don't know how prosperous they are, but it certainly wasn't what a lot of people were predicting it would turn into.
And, you know, of course, all that shit just gets fucking buried.
But also, you know, like another point that we've made a million times, but it's worth repeating, is that, you know, if we pull out and one fucking person dies as a result of that, that will get all the press in the world.
But if we invade a place and hundreds of thousands of people died, that gets like pretty, you know, buried.
I mean, how often does it really, in, you know, like shows like this, we say it ad nauseum.
So it's like you're almost used to hearing it all the time.
But how often in like a mainstream newspaper or in like, you know, corporate, you know, TV media or anything like that, do they really go over how many people have been killed as a result of these wars?
You'd think that'd be something that should be discussed a lot.
That should be a really major part of what it was so weird when Donald Trump, when that drone got shot down in Iran last year.
And the details of that, I don't think we ever really got to the bottom of.
But that drone got shot down and all the generals were telling Donald Trump we're going to hit all these targets.
And he said he asked him how many people would die.
I forget the exact number.
It was like a couple hundred people they thought would die.
And then they were like, you know, it could escalate and it could be more than that.
And he was like, yeah, I'm not going to do this.
That doesn't seem proportional.
Like nobody died on our side.
So why would we go kill all of these innocent people?
That doesn't seem right.
And for Trump, as, you know, as much of a maniac as he is, he's like, what other president, I've never heard another president talk that way.
I've never heard one of them talk that way.
And that should be, for any like non-murderous, horrific human being, that should just be the first obvious thought.
Like, whoa, we're going to kill a lot of people?
I mean, why would, do we absolutely have to?
What's the other option?
Oh, just don't?
And everything's fine?
Well, okay, so let's just don't.
Like, why, why do this?
And it's just crazy that that never even gets brought up.
And nobody even really, you know, I shouldn't say nobody outside of a few voices.
No, Tucker Carlson, to give him credit, he was one of them.
But not too many voices really praised Trump for doing that.
Like, thank you.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
Were you just going to go kill a whole bunch of people?
I mean, it's so funny because in any other situation, that would be like the most obvious first thing that you'd think of.
But foreign policy is like an exception somehow.
But even just like in local, even with issues of the state, like domestically, even local police issues or something like that, you know?
If you were like, oh, well, you know, there's some fucking killer, let's say, in, you know, an inner city somewhere and he attacked this guy and we can go get him.
But like, you know, we will kill like 15 other people in the process.
You'd be like, whoa, whoa, no, that's not acceptable.
You can just kill a bunch of innocent people because then you're just as bad as the killer.
But if it's them over there, it's just like, whatever.
And, you know, of course, it's just so ironic that there's so much talk of like, you know, racism and all this stuff here.
But somehow when it comes to the foreign policy, you know, I don't know if racism is exactly the term, but it's certainly like that other group just doesn't fucking matter.
Like their lives are just completely dispensable.
Like whatever.
Do what you got to do.
And got to be strong and tough and a full-throated response to, you know, like it's, it's fucking sick.
The whole thing is just sick.
And anyway, Hope Trump stays out of the war.
So leave it at that, I suppose.
Real Sex vs Porn Simulation00:10:39
All right.
I did want to talk about there was an article that somebody, a fellow in the part of the problem inner circle, which you can become a member to if you go on over to gasdigitalnetwork.com and become a supporting listener.
Use promo code P-O-T-P for a monthly discount.
And then you just got a request to be in the Facebook group on the forums there.
And then you request it on Facebook and you'll get in, you know, a couple weeks at most.
But anyway, so a fellow named Paul in the group shared this article.
And there's been, It was an article about libertarianism and porn.
And this was something that was like, I believe it was trending a few weeks ago and became like kind of a big discussion between some right-wing people who were favoring banning porn and then a whole bunch of, you know, left-leaning people and libertarians and other folks who were saying that's a very bad idea and would be authoritarian and things like that.
But I actually did think this was somewhat of an interesting conversation.
And I see the merit on both sides, to be completely honest.
And there was this article, I think, you know, we'll go through it, but it's kind of critical of libertarianism and advocating that we ban porn.
So we'll read that in a second.
So I thought this would be an interesting topic for the show.
I will say, well, let me maybe start with this, okay?
Because this was on my mind when I read the article.
I remember, just give you a little bit of my take on porn or my history with porn.
Usually porn and history and sentence, usually referring to a search history, but I'm not going to give you that.
I'll spare you those details.
So I remember back, I think this might have been a decade ago, maybe even a little bit more.
It might have been like 2009 or something like that.
But I remember I read one of Glenn Beck's books.
And I read it because Nate Bargettzi, a friend of mine and a fantastic comedian, Nate Bargettze, he had a copy of this book.
And he was like, dude, you should read this book.
I thought it was really great.
Glenn Beck's.
That guy's great.
Nate, I love Nate.
He's one of my favorite people in the world.
And he is, he, maybe now, he's a Trump supporter now, I believe.
Or I don't actually know.
I don't want to say that and ruin his career.
Maybe he's not.
Let Nate just go.
He hates Trump.
He's never even thought about Trump.
But he was a kind of like, you know, he's from Tennessee, Southern Christian guy.
I was a pretty like kind of typical Fox News, you know, Republican type of guy.
And he, he, you know, was like, oh, you should read this book.
And I was like hanging out at his place a lot.
And I think I started reading it there and I ended up taking it home and reading it.
And I was kind of like, oh, this Glenn Beck book's going to be fucking stupid.
Like, I don't really care what, you know, to me, I was like, I was already reading a lot of like, you know, libertarian shit.
And I was like, I'm way beyond the fucking Glenn Beck shit.
Like, I don't.
But I ended up reading it.
And there was this one thing that he said about porn in the book.
And no one was really talking about it.
Or at least I wasn't reading anything about that at the time.
But he said this thing.
And that, you know, I'm going over a decade ago, so I might be slightly misquoting or misremembering it.
But this was the essence of what he said was he was like, he was like, you shouldn't watch porn.
You should stop watching porn if you do.
And he wasn't even making the argument really for how it affects you.
He was just like, he was basically like, look, a lot of what he would talk about in the book was how he used to be a drunk and he got his life together.
And he was like, look, I'm not judging anyone who watches porn.
Like, I used to be a drunk.
I would find myself, you know, behind the computer for hours and I would end up at porn.
And I would, you know, I'm not like judging you for doing it.
But the truth is this.
And this was the argument that he made.
And he was like, basically, most, you know, most men, you kind of have your like, your higher impulses and your lower impulses.
So we all have like our low kind of animalistic impulses.
Like, you know, you just want to fuck, you want to see naked chicks.
You want, you know, like, you just want to come, like all that shit.
But then you also have like your higher, more noble impulses.
Like you want to protect the women in your life.
You would, you would like, you know, you would fucking, you know, take a bullet for your fucking wife or your girlfriend or your sister or your mother or your daughter.
You know, there's like these women that you want to protect.
And he was like, look, what you're watching when you watch porn is somebody's mother, somebody's sister, somebody's daughter.
And really, you're kind of watching them in a shitty situation.
Most of them had shitty lives.
Many of them were abused as children and are kind of like recreating this childhood, you know, abuse cycle, but in a system where they control it.
And, you know, there's like, there's some strong psychological, you know, research to back that up.
And he was like, you just shouldn't do it.
You just shouldn't watch it.
And I did not stop watching porn at that time in my life, but that did always stay in the back of my mind and kind of gnaw at me and go, you know, he had a fucking point.
Like, I had to admit, he had a point there that was something, you know, it didn't convince me, didn't change my worldview, but it did like just, there's a little bit of a thorn in my in my heel.
Like, yeah, yeah, that there was fucking something to that.
And more recently in my life, I did, I drastically cut down and then I just stopped watching porn.
And I think it was a really good move for me.
It's just, I think life is just better without it.
I think it makes me a better husband.
I think it makes my sex life with my wife better.
I just think it's better to not watch porn.
It encourages you more to fucking be productive and not kind of waste your like male energy off in that space in this fantasy land.
I think there's just negative effects of it.
And I have said many, many times before, and this is something I think somewhat interesting about my age that I think people who are around my age can maybe relate to is I think I must be just about the absolute last year of people who I had sex before internet porn was a thing.
So it was just like, I remember when I went to college, it was like, oh, you can get videos on web browsers now.
So like, it was like videos are there, but it was a very new kind of thing.
And back home, I mean, when I was in high school, I'd never would have had porn on the internet.
I mean, I was still in dial-up days.
It was still like, I had to like ask my mother and stepfather if I could use the phone for a half hour to go get on the phone.
So the idea of like downloading a video.
Now, I may have downloaded like pictures or something like that, but that was never really even, you know, it was still in the you get a dirty magazine days of porn.
So not to say if you're considering that porn too, I mean, yeah, there were like, there were like naughty magazines, but it was before the age of like fucking, you know, hardcore porn being right at your fingertips.
And I am thankful that I grew up that way versus after word.
I think it's better.
There's something better about having sex in a true, like having that true ignorant first sexual experience.
Like you haven't watched this done a million times before.
It's actually you and another human being figuring this out together.
There's something to me that's kind of like it's a good experience that you're kind of robbed of if you just watch porn all the time and you're like simulating this like not real like sexual encounter.
You know what I mean?
Like if you think about what porn actually is, it's very phony.
Like it's not, it doesn't really like represent real sex.
And then people are trying to act like that.
And I just overall, I think there's a lot of negative like impacts from all of it.
Rob, way on board with porn.
No, I haven't been watching porn lately.
I think I'm better for it, but I'm not going to preach to anyone.
I've watched a lot of porn.
No, I'm not.
By the way, I'm not trying to preach to anyone either.
I'm literally just giving you my feelings on the matter.
I'm also a compulsive fellow, so who knows?
Maybe I'll be back to porn in a week.
Yeah, but you've talked about before.
Me and you had talked about just like abstaining from jerking off in general and how it is, you know, it has a really profound impact on you.
And it's something you realize that, you know, like there was some wisdom to the old order of like, hey, don't do that.
Just don't jerk off.
I don't really think God's going to like judge you for jerking off or something like that.
But there might be some benefits to nothing.
I've been recently been able to tap into my better temperance and have been abstaining from jerking off in porn.
But, you know, that's just my current vibe.
Yeah.
And I feel better for it.
Yeah.
No, it's something you might want to think about.
Maybe, maybe not.
I mean, do what, you know, I don't know what the answer for how everyone should live is, but I will say that there's something pretty disturbing about the fact that basically the way the world is now is that teenagers from pretty young ages, I mean, I think, you know, I don't know, but like around 13, 14, my guess is it's pretty hard to keep kids away from something that's out there online.
And it's pretty disturbing.
And not just porn, but just the fact that kind of like live leaks, videos type thing, like just the fact that you can see the most crazy, horrific shit all around.
I think it's definitely bad for, you know, like I think about it like this.
Like I have a daughter.
She's only a year old now.
So who the fuck knows what the world's going to look like by the time she's a teenager?
But even if I do my job and exercise all of the responsibility in the world and I have parental controls on my internet and I, you know, I don't let her go over to anybody's house who I don't also know has parental controls on their internet.
She's still growing up in a world with a whole bunch of dudes who at that age have seen hardcore porn.
Big Tech Kicks Dissidents Out00:07:11
And that isn't great.
Like, I really don't like that.
So if there is an answer to it, I'm kind of open to what that answer might be.
But it's definitely not great.
I don't know.
That is, you know, anyway, so those are more or less just my thoughts going into it, which I would say before we even read the article.
But let's go into it.
So the article is, hold on, actually, let me pull it up on a web browser rather than through Facebook.
Okay, so the article is at the Americanson.com and it is posted by Aiden Castile on December 23rd of 2019.
And the title is Tactical Libertarianism and the Porn Question.
All right.
So let's jump in.
Measured by organic support, libertarian philosophy appeals to almost no one.
It nevertheless exerts an outsized influence in politics because it is a useful weapon for a hypocritical ruling class that wields it selectively and in bad faith.
Okay, so that's the first paragraph of the article.
I would say that, you know, measured by organic support, libertarian philosophy appeals to almost no one.
Depends on what you mean by almost no one.
I mean, there certainly are a lot of people who are very interested in libertarian philosophy.
I mean, the truth is, like, it depends how broadly you mean almost no one.
If you're saying almost no one, meaning there's 300, you know, plus million people in the country and not all of them are interested in libertarian philosophy or not like a huge percentage, not 20 or 30 or 40% of them are, sure, that's true.
But then again, that same statement could just be made for philosophy, not just libertarian philosophy, but pretty much any philosophy.
Most people aren't reading books on philosophy.
That's the truth.
And I don't really judge people for that.
I mean, buildings got to get built fucking, you know, food's got to be fucking grown or slaughtered or whatever.
But that's, so I don't know.
I mean, the truth is like.
The.
You know, the Ron Paul campaigns were all about libertarian philosophy.
They seem to have had a good amount of organic support.
The Mises Institute has a good amount of organic support.
This show's got some organic support, I think there's.
Look, if you just add up, like the big libertarian podcasts, the the good ones, you've got, you know few hundred thousand people who are very into that organic support.
I don't really, you know, I'm not a big fan of the Gary Johnson Bill Weld ticket, but they did get a few million votes.
I don't know what percentage of them were organic support for libertarian philosophy.
Probably not that big.
I wish it had been bigger um, but I don't know.
I just don't know if I'd say that's a fair statement.
It's kind of vague and it depends on what you know.
When you say almost no one well, it's not almost no one and you know anyway.
Whatever it never exists, it nevertheless exerts an outsized influence in politics because it's a useful weapon for hypocritical ruling class that wield it selectively and in bad faith.
Well, I certainly agree that they wield it selectively and in bad faith.
There's there's no question about that.
What's not true is that it doesn't exert an outsized influence.
It just doesn't.
Um, the philosophy does not actually have any influence, or next to no influence.
Um they, they might, you know, wield it around it at random issues, just because you know, like they might use libertarian language when talking about abortion or something like that, but it, you know, it's not as if the libertarian philosophy actually has any influence amongst the ruling class.
That's just not true.
If that was true uh, we wouldn't have a fucking, you know, a federal budget that's probably going to reach five trillion dollars in in the next couple years.
Um okay uh, whenever someone questions the tech company's right to censor right-wing opinion, for instance, Liberals suddenly turn into Murray Rothbard, proclaiming that a private company can do whatever it wants with its own property.
It does not bother these people that this same argument was sharpened most effectively through white resistance to the Civil Rights Act in defense of business owners' right to exclude blacks from their property.
Unlike libertarian autists, the liberals who invoke these principles don't really believe them and feel no need to apply them consistently.
They are simply weapons to use against their enemies, free to be discarded whenever new weapon, new weapons may be found that work better and, of course, libertarian arguments that would seriously challenge the ruling class, not only in opposition to the Civil Rights Act, but even on a more uh, innocuous issues like cosmopolitan states' rights, a peaceful foreign policy and an end to business subsidies do not get the same treatment.
They are totally ignored, ridiculed or driven into conservative ghettos like Breitbart.
Um okay, so that is uh yeah, more or less true.
I don't really disagree with any of that.
I remember years and years ago, this might be back in like 2012 or something like that, when Ann Coulter called libertarians a bunch of pussies.
And she said, you libertarians always love to go off on the war on drugs just to suck up to the left, just to kind of be like, hey, we're a little bit like you too.
He's like, well, how about the right to discriminate?
How about freedom of association?
You never seem to want to talk about that.
And at the time, I remember thinking like that was a little, you know, it was a little fucked up, but a little bit true.
And I just, the next day, I did a podcast all about the right to discriminate and why we should be for that and why freedom of association was important and all of that stuff.
So that's never been my brand of libertarianism.
And to me at the time, I think it was still kind of in the Ron Paul days.
And I was like, well, Ron Paul's always talking about the right, freedom of association and all that stuff.
And he had the balls to stand up and say, I wasn't for the Civil Rights Act because it violated the freedom of association.
So, you know, but I will say over the last few years, I have seen more and more libertarians like that who would be scared of that.
And ultimately, Gary Johnson did back away from that in the 2016 campaign.
So there is some truth to that.
And there certainly is truth to the fact that people will use, the ruling class uses libertarian arguments when convenient, but has no problem being completely inconsistent about them whatsoever.
So absolutely.
And the big tech issue is a great example of this, where you'll see left-leaning people saying, well, it's a private business, so they have a right to kick people out if they want to.
And you're like, well, I mean, you're literally trying to ruin some baker for not wanting to bake a cake for a gay wedding.
And I don't know, you guys are also supposedly against monopolies.
Well, that one bake shop hasn't cornered the market in bake shops.
They can easily go to some other bakery.
And yet fucking Twitter and Facebook and Google, who are, you know, much closer to exercising monopolistic control, are kicking off people for having dissident opinions.
And then all of a sudden you believe in a business's right to discriminate.
Government Endorses Risky Habits00:14:50
So no question, their hypocrisy is real.
Of course, that doesn't in any way grapple with the philosophy of libertarianism.
That's just saying that these people aren't applying it consistently because they're not libertarians, obviously.
Okay, the now familiar dialect of tactical libertarianism has re-emerged once again in the debate over banning porn, which rages on right-wing Twitter.
In any healthy society, there should really be no debate that the type of hardcore pornography found online should be banned.
Everyone knows it is disgusting.
None but the most deranged leftists and cumbrains try to defend it as valuable in itself.
Who, after all, could seriously defend the merits of a film showing close-up anal penetration or 15 furries masturbating?
Everyone knows that it's addictive, that it drives an alienating wedge between the sexes, creating false expectations on the nature of sex and incentivizing young men to spend their most viral years masturbating at home instead of interacting with women on healthy terms in the real world.
Its long-term effects can be summarized from the fact that even as all aspects of society have been entirely sexualized, more and more men in their 20s are suffering erectile dysfunction.
Lastly, the pornography industry is notoriously cruel and exploitive to its own workers, even to the point of child sex trafficking.
Okay, so there's a...
Saying everyone knows it and everyone agrees in these articles is like, to me, very lazy writing and ineffective arguments.
I mean, like, or they're not even arguments.
It's just false statements.
Everyone doesn't know it and everyone doesn't agree with you.
And if they did, there'd be no point in writing this article.
Lots of people disagree with you.
And the other thing about it is that, you know, to say there's no value in it, you may feel that way.
I may feel that way also, but lots of people seem to be watching it.
So they're finding some value in it.
Although I would agree that perhaps it also has some pretty profoundly damaging effects.
So I don't know.
It doesn't to just assert that in any healthy society there should be no debate about this.
Well, that I disagree with.
I think in any healthy society, anything, if you're going to make something illegal, if you're going to have a punishment against something, there should be a debate about it.
So I would, so I'm already disproving your point that everybody knows there shouldn't be a debate about this.
I mean, it's not even just that there's a debate about whether the effects are damaging.
Of course, as you could probably guess, as any libertarian would point out, and it should be pointed out.
If you're going to make something illegal, well, it's not just simply that you're going to say it's illegal.
You're going to make a punishment for somebody who produces it.
And that punishment doesn't mean much unless you're actually going to enforce it.
So what are you planning to do to people?
And if you're planning on doing something very serious, like fucking locking people up for it, then yeah, that should be debated.
It should always be debated before you just go and start locking human beings up.
That's my take just on the debate question.
I also think damaging is relative in the same way they'll give cigarettes to addicts because they're better off smoking cigarettes.
And obviously cigarettes aren't good for you.
They're not good for your health.
They're going to take years off your life.
They're bad for your lungs.
But for certain individuals, when the other option is that they're running for heroin, they give them cigarettes because they go, hey, this is, I think I'm not advocating anyone watch porn.
I'm not telling you, whatever.
It's really, I'm not here to judge.
But in terms of the vices that exist in the world, I don't know how you rank porn in terms of how harmful it is.
I haven't read all that much about, firstly, if you Google it, it's not that clear-cut.
Also, if you Google it, probably a lot of porn is going to come up.
I personally think I'm better off not watching porn.
I also have not read a lot of scientific evidence to suggest that it is bad for your brain.
Now, I personally conduct my life and feel that it's bad for me, but I haven't, I'm telling you, I'm a guy who reads and researches things, and I have not found an overwhelming amount of scientific literature that says that it's bad for your brain.
Well, I certainly would, I would be open to the possibility that it is.
And if I did read, if I did read scientific literature that demonstrated that, wouldn't shock me.
Listen, I'd be shocked if in 20 years from now, some compelling things didn't come out that told us that, hey, here's what it did to you.
I'm going to be surprised if we don't see that.
But I think I put myself in this category.
Some people are compulsive idiots.
And like, if you took porn away from 20-year-olds, you might find, hey, there are more 20-year-olds with STDs.
So there's more incident, like, I don't know what the fuck people are going to do.
Or maybe alcoholism runs rampant or people turn out being a hell of a lot fatter because, you know, they got nothing to do with their time.
So anymore McDonald's.
Like the world is full of compulsive idiots.
And also, I bet like porn is a decent vice for some people.
You break up or your wife dies.
Maybe people find it for you get sober and you're staying home more and you don't have to like you get fired.
What are people going to do when they get fired from work?
I'm not really advocating.
Well, listen, I don't know if I'm not saying I'm pro-porn.
I'm just saying like to look at damaging as an isolated thing and go, oh, if we remove porn, people are going to go suddenly be remarkably productive.
Yes.
Well, it does.
If you're saying this is so damaging that we need to make it illegal, we need to ban it.
It is reasonable to ask, well, how are you measuring that it's damaging?
And what is the threshold for why you would ban something?
You know, like what exactly, how do you come up with this?
I mean, there's lots of things that are damaging to our society.
And I don't know if we want to just go around banning everything because somebody says everyone knows this.
That's not actually demonstrating in any scientific matter that it is.
Again, I'm open to the idea that it is damaging.
My guess is that it is.
I'm not saying it's not.
But look, okay, before, let me just respond to the thing at the end first.
The fact that they're really exploitive or shitty to their own workers, again, I agree in the example of porn.
The problem is if you just start banning something where someone's, quote, exploiting their workers, you obviously see the slippery slope that this can lead to.
Everybody claims that workers are exploited all over the place, and you can shut down a whole lot of industries based on that idea.
And the other argument is that even to the point of child sex trafficking.
So if there is child sex trafficking happening in porn, I'm sorry, that is not a justification to shut down an entire industry.
Again, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that porn is damaging.
I'm even somewhat sympathetic to wanting it gone.
But just logically speaking, I know, sorry, libertarian autists here, we're concerned with like morality and consistency.
I know that can be, can be annoying sometimes.
But if you have a bar where some children are getting in and getting served, that's not a justification to shut down every bar across America because there was a bar that served some children.
That might be a justification to sue that bar.
It might be a justification to even shut down that bar.
But it's not a justification to shut down bars because we know of incidents where children have been used.
Okay, so where children have been trafficked or children have been served alcohol.
So that just doesn't logically follow that you shut down a whole industry because there have been crimes committed here or there.
The other thing, right?
And this is the problem.
Also, that's currently illegal and nobody's advocating for that.
So you can't really group it in with the porn thing.
You're kind of conflating issues.
Right.
No, I agree with you.
It's kind of like a bar serving underage kids.
We already have laws against that and it's not a justification to ban the whole fucking industry.
The other thing that libertarians get that I really think that this kind of knee-jerk reactionary response doesn't seem to take into account in my opinion, in my estimation, is that if you're proposing a new law or a new authority, a new banning, you know, state banning of something, a new prohibition,
you have to think about the power that you're giving the state and how that could potentially be used.
Okay.
And this is what I, I'm sorry, this drives me crazy about the reactionary, the alt-right, the nationalist right, whatever you want to call them.
A lot of times they get annoyed that I call them the wrong thing.
I'm not saying it in a fucking like pejorative way.
I'm just whatever you want to call this movement, right?
One of the things that they never seem to think through, which is crazy to me.
I mean, it's like what I was saying recently where, you know, there's a like Nick Fuentes was saying, I'm not really concerned about, you know, the argument of statism versus liberty.
I'm concerned about order versus chaos.
And it's like, dude, you are people like you.
I mean, if fucking Hillary Clinton won, or let's say, you know, Joe Biden wins, or Kamala Harris had become president, you're one person like that becoming president before it being very plausible that you start getting locked up for hate speech.
Literally in Canada right now, in the UK right now, in Germany right now, people like you would be thrown in jail for hate speech.
And you don't see the concern about liberty versus tyranny.
Like you don't see that as an issue.
It's like, okay, you might be doing this at your own risk.
This might come back to get you.
Now, the idea that you're going to say, well, I want a government authority to do X.
I want to give the power to the government to do this good thing.
It's very short-sighted and ignorant to not think through what bad they could also do with that authority.
All right?
That is central to the libertarian argument.
And the liberals say.
Well, look, but it's not just porn cops because think about the precedent that you're setting, right?
You're saying that there is this thing online that is damaging, and therefore I think the government should be allowed to censor it.
And if we got to lock people in cages for it, then we lock people in cages for it.
Like, okay, fine.
But, you know, a whole lot more people than think porn is really damaging think hate speech is really damaging.
They think the alt-right is really damaging.
And if the government, you're going to bring them involved to have the authority to censor things.
I know it's already pretty bad with the tech censorship, but believe me, it can get a lot worse if a state's involved and they can shut down with force and imprison anyone who they decide is bad or wrong.
And by the way, you might be able to produce a whole bunch of scientific literature that demonstrates that porn is bad.
But the same way they just got fucking 20 academics to go testify why Donald Trump should be impeached, what, you think they can't find any academics who are going to tell you that hate speech is really bad?
You think they can't find some academics who will go up there and talk about that, you know, they have New York Times front page articles about, oh, all these people who are like, you know, they're drawn into the alt-right by YouTube videos and stuff.
I mean, they're waiting for any excuse.
So just be careful, I would say, to these right-wing dissidents.
Be careful that you're not building your own casket.
Yeah, the other, if the government were to regulate porn, I think you also have an issue that it then seems like they're endorsing other things by virtue of not having made them illegal.
So like when they step in and go, hey, we're going to regulate blank activities such as your sexual relationships, or which in this case is including porn.
So then all of a sudden, I don't know.
It's like, so is it a stamp of approval then by government on premarital sex?
And then, well, do they now have to regulate that?
Or what activities will ramp up because people aren't like now, I don't know, as a theoretical, you might have like Tinder squared where since porn's illegal, people are really getting out there and fucking.
And everyone's like, well, this is okay within society because government's regulating the way, like they got rid of porn because everyone was like, hey, porn is spiritually corrosive, so we're not doing it.
But they didn't get rid of Tinder X.
So I guess like, you know, I can go to Orgies every weekend.
Yeah, maybe.
I mean, it's hard to know exactly what the consequences of some of these actions would be.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know that, you know, look, I just think, truthfully, it's a very difficult thing to stomp out.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done.
Like, maybe it could, and maybe they could do it in a way where there isn't a black market that arises in porn.
Or maybe the black market would just still be much smaller than it just being all over the place on, you know, everyone easy to find.
I think it's tough, given the technological, you know, advancements that we've had.
You end up with more circle jerks.
That's what happened.
I remember when you were going to end up circle jerking.
I don't want to be back in some circle jerks living in underground times where you can't get easy access to porn, Davey Smith.
Well, listen, no one wants to go back to those times.
But I will say that I think that, you know, the technological advancements and what's happened, you know, with the internet being in everybody's pocket is part of the reason why it's going to be very hard to stop people from sharing, you know, what people want to.
Clearly, there's tremendous demand for this stuff.
So it's going to be tough to eliminate that.
But, you know, the internet is also part of the, you know, it's like the only tool that people like this online publication have.
Like, no mainstream publication is going to is going to run this article.
So, you know, it's like, you know, there's good and bad that comes along with it.
I mean, from these guys' perspective.
All right, anyway, let's get back into the article.
The libertarian's role is to effectively frustrate the normal human desire to ban such awful things by reframing the debate to a narrow argument over procedure.
Anytime that someone proposes against this clear moral, anytime.
Anytime that someone proposes against this clear moral and public health menace, in swoops the libertarian to somberly inform us that doing so is simply impossible.
That would be tyranny and violate our most cherished values, don't you see?
But it's actually not procedural as much as it's a value argument that I don't think government has any right to tell you whether or not you can or can't consume.
If they could do it with a perfect procedure, I'd still say it's not the role of government to be inside of your house and telling you whether you can or can't watch porn.
Personal Responsibility Over State Control00:11:33
Yeah, I'm sorry.
We're the annoying ones who swoop in with these issues of morality and what your limiting principle would be and why it's okay for government to ban this, but not 16 other things that are damaging and what the potential threat of government could be.
And yes, we are concerned with tyranny.
It's been kind of an issue throughout human history.
So we're going to bring it up every now and then.
Again, this is just not an argument.
It's just, you know, kind of dismissive.
So what do you mean?
You're going to send people to jail to jerk off without porn?
It's not like they're going to suddenly find women and figure out how to like, you know, better themselves and date.
Oh, maybe.
I mean, look, I'm not saying I don't know.
Maybe it would.
Like, maybe there is a scenario where it's Jack is just rubbing your dick up against the wall.
I just don't know that, you know, it's always, and this is like the argument that does to me sound very similar to the kind of socialist argument where they're like, oh, you know, that wasn't real socialism or every time that socialism goes terribly wrong.
We did it that you just.
But there is truth to it, right?
You could have an all-powerful government that runs the means of production and is just really good and distributes everything the right way.
But why does it fail every time?
Why does it lead to like authoritarian dictatorship every time?
Why does it lead to genocide and starvation and all these terrible things?
Well, it's because when you create that much power, it corrupts.
And the more powerful you make the central state, the more corrupt it ends up being.
So that is something.
Yeah, sorry, libertarians are going to have that concern.
If you have an argument against it, you know, I'm all ears, but I don't think that is.
Okay, let me get back to the article.
Often this is accompanied by a pseudo-masculine posturing.
If you want government action, the libertarian adult in the room tells us, that's really just a sign of your inadequacy, that you can't control your own urges to protect your own children without help from big daddy government.
Well, I don't know.
That seems to just be accurately describing your position here, that you want help from the government.
Yeah.
Look, this is what I find bizarre about this stuff, right?
Is that you will so many people on the alt-right complain about the degeneracy in our culture.
And like, okay, fair enough.
There's a lot of it.
And some of it I find very disgusting.
The thing is that you can't complain about that and then at the same time be like, oh, you're going to pretend to be a man by saying handle it yourself.
Even if you don't agree, even if you agree with what this guy writes in the article, right?
Isn't there some element of your own personal responsibility?
I mean, if you want to fight against degeneracy, don't people need to have responsibility?
That is, by the way, the other side of the coin of rights.
And libertarians maybe spend too much time talking about individual rights and not enough time talking about the other side of that coin, which is individual responsibility.
So a libertarian might argue that you have a right to lead whatever lifestyle you want to lead, as long as you're not inflicting violence or aggressing against anybody else.
But the flip side to that is you have to take responsibility for your life.
And if your life is fucked up and you're broke, well, you can't go on government welfare and you can't get bailed out and you don't have any of this shit.
You don't have a daddy taking care of you.
Now, the truth is that that rights element that the state destroys is also true for the responsibility element.
They also completely destroy that.
So yeah, people do need to take a little bit of personal responsibility.
And I would say that if you're going to be arguing, even if you're going to argue that, well, oh, you're going to say we want big daddy government to come in.
It's like, okay, well, that is what you're saying.
But do you, is it at all on you to make sure that your kids aren't watching this shit?
Is it at all on you to just stop watching porn if you don't want to do that?
I mean, just, you know, sometimes it's not bad to take a look in the mirror.
Do you think the guy writing this has never watched porn?
Do you think most of the members of the alt-right don't watch porn at all?
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe some of them don't.
I bet some of them do.
Maybe you should start exercising a little personal responsibility.
I don't think that's the worst thing in the world.
And I don't think that's a pseudo-masculine posturing.
I think that is the essence of being a man.
It's like, yeah, I know.
Don't get me wrong.
I think the government has done a million things that make it harder for young people to buy homes, start families, all that shit.
But you know what?
Like, so many of these fucking guys on the alt-right and things like that are talking about like the white replacement rate or whatever the fucking, you know, the white people aren't having enough kids and all this shit and don't have kids.
It's like, so go fucking have kids, man.
Get married, have kids.
I mean, I know, I know it's harder now than it used to be, but it's not impossible.
And actually, I don't even know if it's harder than it used to be.
Certainly the state makes it harder than it would otherwise be.
But is it harder than, you know, when men were going off to fucking fight in World War II and women were running the factories?
Is it actually harder to raise a family now?
I don't know.
It can be done.
Like it was the episode with Gene Epstein when we were talking about it, that one family who like moved out from a city to a small town where the cost of living is crazy cheap so she could like homeschool the kids.
Like you, you can do this.
There are options.
So now, by the way, I'm not saying that you can overcome everything in your situation, but that should be an element of it.
Like personal responsibility should be something you focus on.
Okay.
Back to the article.
Of course, there is nothing masculine about letting the world degrade around you just because you think that you personally can survive it.
The purpose of life should not be to set up a series of hurdles that only the strong can pass.
People are flawed and sometimes need help.
If the government can shape the law to make their lives easier, then it should do so.
Why let a bad system persist just because the stronger citizens are able to overcome it?
Well, I don't want to let a bad system persist.
And yeah, I guess theoretically, if anyone can help somebody, helping is a good thing.
It's not so clear to me that any of this would be helping the situation.
And I don't think it would be helping you out.
That's a tough moral ethic to say that you're responsible for other people in that way and that we need government to come in.
Like, in other words, to me, it's like, who are you to make the judgment that spiritually speaking, porn is corrosive and that nobody should have it.
And so society now, I've made this decision for society.
Porn is bad.
And since I've selected that porn is bad, I feel that somebody should step in and take it away from everybody.
I just, I don't like any one individual gets to make these moral evaluations.
And you're deciding that everybody agrees with you.
And yet, I guess everybody just can't control themselves.
And that's why so many people are watching porn.
And therefore, we need this group of people to write the rules for us.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
That doesn't sound too masculine to me.
I'm also...
That does sound like a very childish mentality.
I'm not sure that you should feel like you have a responsibility to other people in that way.
And if you do, then there are free market means by which you can try and inspire people to live better lives.
And I feel like that's just a like if you're really interested here in the betterment of mankind.
So I think if you can find other people that share that goal and you can really create a movement by which you educate people to the wrongfulness of porn or create support groups that remove, that sounds like, hey, that sounds really positive to me and like it might bring some positive to the world.
But like what you're looking for here is like increased regulation through government.
Like that just, that's police state.
Like you're taking a negative route here.
Yeah.
No, I certainly agree.
All right.
All of this should be common sense.
Indeed, it would be common sense for most of American history.
It is libertarianism, by contrast, with its demands for total government inaction as a categorical imperative that is the outlier and demands some explanation.
Does anyone seriously believe that societies are duty bound to watch themselves decay just because of some abstract idea of liberty?
Okay.
You don't have to decay.
Well, listen.
Live your life, dude.
So of course, I don't agree that societies are bound to watch themselves decay because of some abstract principle.
No, I don't agree with that at all.
And that's why I think as I see it, I'm fighting back against the biggest driving force of that decay.
But no, to just say, again, just assert, well, this is common sense and everybody knows it.
And therefore, what demands some explanation is the libertarianism.
It's like, well, no, I mean, you're the one who's advocating that we make something criminal, that we start throwing people in cages for something.
So no, I think the onus is on you to explain why it is.
But either way, you're writing this article.
I'm responding to this article.
I think we're both explaining why we feel the way we feel.
I think we should have penis inspections where you can see how bruised a penis is and how much someone jerked off in a week.
Or maybe make everyone wear Fitbits all the time and you see if they're clocking a few more miles than they're walking, you know, see how fast they're moving the wrists.
I mean, why stop at porn?
Porn's not enough.
You got to see how much people are jerking off.
I mean, you know, they shouldn't even be allowed to do that, just in your imagination, spilling your seed in your home.
Yeah.
Look, but it's not like a completely bad comparison.
I mean, it's like, yeah, it's like maybe even without porn jerking off is bad for society.
But you could see where I also don't think it should be against the law.
Again, I do, I would accept that there's a difference.
I'm just probably also sleep eight hours a night.
I mean, I think science has proved that people don't function well if they don't get eight hours of sleep and that you actually are supposed to be like on a real sunlight sunset style.
Otherwise, depression sets in.
Maybe we should have mandatory bedtime.
We should have curfew cross-country.
Well, it is stuck in your bed.
Well, look, but what you're getting at is like, what is your limiting principle here?
Like, what is the principle that says that this should be banned by the government and why they shouldn't just ban anything that anyone deems is.
I'm going to say more than that.
Like, what's bad for you, porn might work for someone out there.
There's a person out there.
I would never tell you to eat glass.
And there's some guy who's probably in a circus right now making money eating glass.
We're fucking individuals.
What works for you does not necessarily work for people.
That's pretty good for those jackass guys.
I think they did a lot of that.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Don't kick yourself in the balls.
Johnny Knoxville made enough money off of that.
He should kick himself in the balls.
He should be on tour right now.
The Johnny Knoxville I'm kicking myself in the balls for.
All right, let's keep reading here.
The answer, of course, is no, they don't.
Outside of a few ideological clicks, no one really believes in libertarianism.
The people most loudly defending porn online today, people like gay 20-year-old atheist conservative Brad Palombo, should be considered less of an offering political opinions and more as the mouthpiece of the rich and well-connected ruling class, which benefits financially from the porn industry and more indirectly from general sexualization of culture with its corresponding atomization.
Can I say Brad might be home watching porn jerking off instead of being out there getting AIDS?
We've saved Brad.
If Palombo lost his job as a conservative mouthpiece, his donors would easily find another college student to ply with money, adopt their positions, and pay the same role.
Oh, he just answered your question.
These positions do not need to be rigorous or even intellectually defensible.
State Power Crushes Ideology00:10:24
They just have to lay out the party line that conservative libertarians and others on the right are required to take.
When Palombo actually believes this line of reasoning is also inconsequential, whether Palumbo actually believes this line of reasoning is also inconsequential, his handlers, for whom porn is a lucrative business and a great way to keep young men distracted and pacified, certainly don't believe it.
The whole show is a big put-on in the hopes that you, white men, will be stupid enough to believe it and that through a decontextualized focus on rules, fair play, and procedure, you will come to believe that, dang it all, it turns out we just can't address important social problems after all.
What is most galling about this whole charade is the enforced passivity.
It is built around the fundamental lie that we are not really the masters of our destiny and that we must be chained to our outmoded rules even at the expense of diminished quality of life out of some kind of principle.
Out of some kind of principles.
So this stuff just drives me crazy.
The idea that libertarianism is arguing or is somehow advancing the notion that you can't fight back against big social issues or that you can't be the masters of your own destiny.
I mean, the whole argument is that you ought to be the master of your own destiny.
And if you want to be in a group of people and be the masters of your own destiny yourself, go for it.
But that some other group of projected adult figures shouldn't get to decide your destiny for you.
And that's the world that we're living in today.
It's not that we don't think we can tackle big social problems.
It's that we are fighting against the biggest social problem and fighting for your ability to control your own destiny.
That's the reality of the situation.
Back to the article.
Ideological principles should serve people.
People were not made to serve ideology.
I thought that was an interesting sentence.
I'm going to read that one more time.
Ideological principles should serve people.
People were not made to serve ideology.
So you can see where, in one sense, that's very true, but in another sense, it's very dangerous.
So sure, you wouldn't want to just believe in ideological principles that would be very destructive.
So you're like, we're serving some abstract principle.
And meanwhile, we're like, you know, drowning or something like that.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're, I'm, I'm, um, whatever, you know, I'm outside some cabin in the woods and we're starving to death and the cabin's empty and there's food inside, but we won't break in and eat the food because we have this like abstract principle that we're not supposed to steal food.
So we're just going to sit here and starve.
And you'd be like, man, like you're serving an ideological principle to your own detriment, right?
So I kind of get the point of that.
But in another sense, if you say, well, ideological principles should serve people.
People were not made to serve ideology.
Well, what are ideological principles other than morality?
I mean, what you believe is right and wrong and then formed into a set of ideas.
So if you're going to say, so just replace that with morality, if you were like, well, morality isn't made, people aren't made to serve morality.
Morality should be serving us.
Isn't that a very good excuse to just do really horrible things whenever you decide it's in your best interest?
Right?
I mean, like, oh, well, I'm not, I'm not just here to serve ideological principles.
Well, if you don't have any ideological principles, you're going to find yourself in a really bad place.
So there definitely is now, of course, you can have competing, you know, like competing values.
And sure, in that situation, like I might think stealing is really bad, but you know, I might think starving to death is worse.
So maybe you break in there and you do something that you consider morally wrong.
But then, you know, after doing that, the onus is kind of on you to like, I don't know, try to give restitution to the person who you broke into or whatever, apologize to them.
It also wouldn't be an argument that breaking into people's homes should be legal.
It's just that there was one very extreme case where you would hope that you could argue to like, you know, the person or a court or whatever, like, hey, you know, I really had to break in.
I was going to die.
I hope you understand.
So, but I think it's pretty dangerous to just say, ah, screw, screw morality, screw ideological principles, whatever works.
All right.
If your ideology no longer addresses the important issues, then you should reject it.
The state can be whatever we want it to be.
Yes, that means we can use it to crush bad things and promote good things.
Libertarianism is useful to the ruling class because it tells the masses that we have to accept the situation we have now and can never use hard power to make it better.
Well, of course, saying things like the state can be whatever we want it to be.
That means we can use it to crush things and crush bad things and promote good things.
It's like, you know, I just always find this funny for a group of people who are in most polite areas of society considered pure evil to be like, we can have the state crush bad things.
It's like, all right, okay.
A lot of people consider you guys the bad things.
So that's quite a risky game.
And the state can't be whatever you want it to be.
The state is something.
And what the state is, is the central authority.
They are the group of people who have a legal monopoly on the initiation of violence.
And okay, yes, that certainly can be used to crush people.
And sure, you'd like to take that over and crush who you think is bad.
But you know what?
You're not really that close to taking it over.
So I'd be careful about that.
And the idea that libertarians insist that we have to accept the situation as we have now, it's like, that's just fucking, I don't know what to say.
That's just retarded.
None of us are trying to accept the situation we have now.
You know, that's just objectively false.
Not trying to accept the situation we have right now.
We want to change it pretty radically.
Back to the article.
That line of thought only became powerful if we let it.
Only becomes powerful if we let it.
The true right should just ignore libertarians and treat them with contempt and then go about fulfilling our obligations to society.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
All right.
Well, that kind of shows what you are right there.
All right.
While not known for their sense of humor, the liberal, you know, some exceptions to that.
The libertarian attempts to play the adult in the room is genuinely hilarious.
Murray Rothbard once suggested that while zoning laws are ipso facto a violation of libertarian principle, a homeowner need not worry because he could achieve the same result if he bought all his neighbors' homes.
Or consider Michael Malice claim that drug addicts, in fact, make highly rational decisions, though ones geared toward a very short timeframe.
I mean, I think that's just a true statement.
I don't know what to say.
Yes, Michael Malice is saying that they're making a rational decision.
They want to feel a certain way and the drug will make them feel that way.
It's just very short-sighted.
That's just, I think, I don't know how that's not accurate.
It is also libertarian dogma that blackmail should be legal and that public roads in the U.S. post office represent the gravest tyranny.
Okay.
Well, it's crazy that you didn't have any quotes to back that one up because that's just a bullshit assertion, a bullshit assertion.
No one's saying that public roads and the post office represent the gravest tyranny.
I mean, okay, you know, I don't know if this is a joke or not, but like, no, that's no one says that's the gravest tyranny.
Government censorship is a pretty grave tyranny, though.
But when it comes to defending child sexual exploitation, these same people suddenly morph into serious adults who take the very adult pro-exploitation side.
All right.
So now we've morphed into libertarians defending child sexual exploitation.
Okay, so let me just close on this because we're over time and I got to wrap up here.
Let me close on this with a couple quick thoughts.
Number one, defending child sexual exploitation.
I don't know how you managed to sneak that in.
If what your argument is, is that there's children in porn, no serious libertarian I know is defending child porn.
Child porn should absolutely be illegal.
There should be incredibly harsh penalties for anybody who makes it or is involved in it.
I don't know what to say about that.
If your argument is that children end up consuming porn, like that 15-year-olds end up watching porn online, okay, that is a very real problem.
And yes, I'm sorry to be the predictable libertarian on this, but part of that responsibility is on the parents.
And you do have to do what you can do to try to make sure your kids don't consume porn.
But then I would say this: isn't that an argument?
If you're going to call that child exploitation, isn't that then an argument that there should be nothing for adults?
Like, are you telling me that we're not allowed to have anything that's just for adults?
Because if you believe that that should be allowed, then you're defending children seeing it?
Or can it just not be online?
What about on television?
You know, can you have like violence in movies?
Or do we have to get rid of all of that too?
How about dirty stand-up comedy?
Are we allowed to do that?
Like, where do you draw the line?
If you're going to say that supporting something, something not being illegal, that's for adults, you can't do that because kids end up watching it anyway.
Well, that could be true for anything that's for adults.
Again, making alcohol not illegal.
There are some kids who end up drinking.
We tend to go, well, you know what?
It's kind of the responsibility of parents and the community to do what they can to stop kids from drinking.
But are the fact that some kids drink a justification to ban alcohol?
Nationalist Language Masks Facts00:03:17
I don't think so.
And the fact that some kids watch porn is not a justification to ban porn.
It may be a justification to start having a really serious conversation about how we can do a better job at making sure kids don't watch porn.
That I'm all for.
But look, let me just speak to the larger theme that runs throughout this article, and then we'll wrap up.
The idea that the ruling class uses libertarianism when advantageous is absolutely true.
There is no question about that.
I talk about it all the time on the show, how we call the Iraq war Operation Iraqi freedom, or they call the income tax voluntary compliance.
They wrap things in the language of liberty when convenient, when it makes it more marketable.
But you know, they also wrap things in the language of socialism when that makes it more convenient or more viable.
That doesn't, that in itself is not an argument against socialism.
I mean, truthfully speaking, fucking Bernie Sanders isn't even a socialist.
Bernie Sanders is never talking about the government owning the means of production.
Bernie Sanders is never talking about illegalizing corporations or enforcing only worker co-ops or anything like that.
He's just talking about Medicare for all.
I mean, so every conservative, every single conservative accepts Medicare and Medicaid.
So they believe in Medicare for old and Medicare for poor.
And Bernie Sanders believes everyone else too.
He's just a little bit more of a social democrat than the Republicans are, really.
But he uses the label socialist because that helps him sell that message to people.
They use labels all the time.
That doesn't disprove the ideology at all.
It's not even an argument.
Listen, and here's the problem you're going to face with that.
If you're going to say, well, the ruling class uses libertarian language when convenient, well, guess what else they use when convenient?
Nationalist language all the time.
I mean, George W. Bush talked about American exceptionalism.
Barack Obama used all of this nationalist language.
All of this, like, only in America is my story possible.
So, okay, so they just use nationalist language when convenient.
Does that disprove nationalism?
Does that prove to you that nationalism is completely flawed just because some fucking, you know, war hawk corporatist elite scumbags use the language when convenient and then don't follow it through to its national, its, you know, logical conclusion?
No, that doesn't mean that there aren't serious nationalists.
That's not an argument against Pat Buchanan to say that Obama's borrowed language from him or used some of the same language.
Just the same way, it's not an argument against Ron Paul that Obama's used some of his language.
This is just not an argument, and none of it really deals with libertarian philosophy.
There is, you know, I just say, man, to this dissident right again, just be careful with the power you're advocating the state to have, because it is the exact institution that's going to end up crushing you guys.
You know, you would think after fucking Charlottesville, as the fucking cops are leading you guys into this fucking crowd of Antifa, you would think, looking at fucking Canada and Britain and all these European countries where people are getting thrown in jail for hate speech, you'd be a little hesitant to, you know, fucking advocate for more government control.
Forcing Philosophy Never Works00:00:23
You know why?
Because they know that their philosophy will never work for everybody and the only way that they can possibly have it is by forcing it upon people.
And that's why they're pro-force.
And that's exactly, you know, fuck those people.
Watch the porn.
I'm going home to jerk off.
You convinced Robbie to get back and jerking off, you sons of bitches.
All right, that's our show for today.
Tomorrow, I got Pete Raymond coming back on the show.