Dave Rubin addresses Solomon Hatcher's critique of President Obama's San Bernardino speech as depressing and lacking a clear plan, while clarifying his cultural Jewish identity without belief in a magic sky God. He discusses the rise of identity politics involving John Kerry, notes his own avoidance of the atheist label to prevent conflict, and cites comedians Bill Maher and George Carlin as key political influences. Rubin admits to recently losing friends who labeled him a bigot yet maintains his stance as a free speech absolutist committed to battling ideas rather than enforcing safe spaces, concluding with an unexpected personal anecdote about his favorite gay sex position being the reverse Wookiee. [Automatically generated summary]
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.