| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Depressing State of Affairs
00:04:33
|
||
| Hey guys, we're doing a little Q&A here. | ||
| You guys submitted your questions on Aura.tv and on Twitter, and here we go. | ||
| Solomon Hatcher asks, what did you think of President Obama's Oval Office address regarding the San Bernardino shooting and the American response to ISIS? | ||
| I thought his speech was actually, it was kind of depressing. | ||
| It struck me as very depressing, and he seemed kind of exhausted and sad. | ||
| I don't know that we really have a plan yet. | ||
| I hope that we do, but we're in this very weird place right now. | ||
| If you watch my direct message from last week, you'll see my thoughts. | ||
| We're in this weird place where everyone's sort of afraid, but not sure what to do. | ||
| And I just hope that that doesn't lead us all to splintering against each other | ||
| and letting the bad voices take hold. | ||
| So as for our response, it doesn't seem like we really have a response. | ||
| I was happy that he said that he'd like to get congressional authorization. | ||
| It would be nice if we had that for wars these days. | ||
| @seriousriri on Twitter asks, "Do you celebrate Hanukkah? | ||
| "Why or why not? | ||
| "I always feel atheists should ask themselves these things." | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't believe that there's some magic sky God | ||
| who's watching me and doing these things. | ||
| But as I've said before, I'm Jewish the way an Italian person's Italian | ||
| or the way a Greek person's Greek. | ||
| So yeah, these are just some traditions basically for me. | ||
| So yeah, I lit some candles, gave some gifts, got some good stuff. | ||
| All right, atron7 said, you keep talking about regressives, but you never take on the fact that POTUS, President of the United States, and John Kerry are extreme regressives. | ||
| What is your take on this, and what would you say to people saying Obama allowed a great deal of U.S. | ||
| foreign policy to regress? | ||
| You know, the John Kerry one's interesting, because if you heard a couple weeks ago, he sort of excused the Charlie Hebdo shooting, saying that, well, they sort of had a reason to kind of do that. | ||
| That's as regressive as you can possibly get. | ||
| It sort of slid under the radar with the media. | ||
| As far as Obama... | ||
| You know, look, we do play in all these identity politics things, and I think he does add to that. | ||
| Being the president is not easy. | ||
| But I don't think he's a regressive in the worst sense of it. | ||
| But yeah, I think in general our politicians can and should try to do better. | ||
| At Steven G Hubbard asked, what do you think of Sam Harris' idea that we shouldn't label ourselves atheists because it gives theocrats something to fight against? | ||
| Is atheist an important part of your self-identity? | ||
| You know, I never even identified as an atheist or even said it. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that the first time I actually ever said it was on this show when I was talking to Milo Yiannopoulos. | ||
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| I base my thoughts and my feelings on what's going on in my brain and that's pretty much it. | ||
| So, you know, atheists, there's no doctrine. | ||
| This is the irony of all these people, especially the regressives, that keep taking the atheists and saying, "They're new atheists." | ||
| New atheists are just atheists who are speaking up. | ||
| There's no doctrine that would link atheists together other than they generally don't believe in God | ||
| or are waiting for some evidence for it. | ||
| So I don't think it's that important to label it. | ||
| And I think the reason they're trying to label it so much is 'cause they're trying to pin a lot of problems on us. | ||
| @TK421 asked, "Who influenced you the most politically? | ||
| Who, if anybody, inspired your liberalism? | ||
| You know, I come from the comedy world, so I'd say Bill Maher, George Carlin probably more than anybody else. | ||
| And the interesting thing about George is that he really, people didn't know about his politics per se, | ||
| except that he just thought that the whole system was warped and corrupt, which I completely believe. | ||
| I try to talk about things within the system so that we can hopefully make them better. | ||
| But I would say those two on the comedy side of things were my two biggest influences. | ||
| @GavWoodworth, "On a weekly basis, how many times do you get called a racist bigot, | ||
| et cetera, for your apostasy?" | ||
| You know, fortunately, because I think we've built something really good here, | ||
| I get a pretty long leash, even on social media, that I don't get called that stuff that often. | ||
| However, since we've started doing this show... | ||
| And I'm talking about this stuff more. | ||
| I have lost several friends. | ||
| Several at this point. | ||
| A couple weeks ago it was probably two. | ||
| Now I've lost a couple more. | ||
| I've had people that I know, the people that know me really well call me bigot and all kinds of awful things. | ||
|
Real World vs. Nonsense
00:01:09
|
||
| I've seen some of the tactics that I always talk about being used on other people now being used on me. | ||
| So it just sort of sucks. | ||
| But if anything it makes me double down more and, you know, want to do the right thing more. | ||
| So they're not gonna beat me. | ||
| I mean, I would basically say that because I'm a free speech absolutist, you could say anything. | ||
| between completely uncensored discourse and completely censored speech? | ||
| How can we judge how sensitive we should be without lobotomizing our ideas? | ||
| I mean, I would basically say that because I'm a free speech absolutist, | ||
| you could say anything. You can absolutely say anything. | ||
| Yeah, you should not instigate people into violence and should not be pushing violence and pushing people to | ||
| want to do violent acts. | ||
| But beyond that, say whatever you want and then have the battle of ideas. | ||
| That's what we need to have more of here instead of just running to safe spaces and having trigger warnings and all of that nonsense. | ||
| Because guess what? | ||
| These kids that are in college now that they're doing that, they're going to get into the real world and that shit doesn't exist in the real world. | ||
| And then we're going to have a whole generation of people that are going to come up at the same time believing in that stuff and it's pure nonsense. | ||
| And finally, at Corpsemen, what's your favorite gay sex position? | ||
| That would be the reverse Wookiee. | ||