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Aug. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:51:19

360 Call-In Show Aug 6 2006

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	I'm still working on the tangent cleaner script.
	Yeah, no, and the interesting thing is actually often that's just called nulling all the sound.
	So if you take the podcast and just take all of the tangents out, all you have to do is zero out the sound as a whole, and I think you're pretty much done.
	Probably. But I'm quite excited with the new chore casting.
	I think that's going to be kind of cool.
	That was what I was doing today.
	I was cleaning the bathrooms.
	And it's all part of my community service for criticizing the U.S. government.
	And it's army barracks with a toothbrush, so it's a little unpleasant.
	But it's cool.
	And what I think I'm going to buy is I'm going to go out and buy with some of the fabulous donation money I'm going to go out and buy one of these digital voice recorders with a microphone input so I can do podcasts.
	I'm finding it hard to keep up the same volume of podcasting, and it's not because my thoughts are running dry.
	I'm like a puffer fish, like I eject or I explode, right?
	So... Or you could say post-Mexican food.
	Let's stay with the pufferfish thing.
	I think that's a little bit more of a pleasant metaphor.
	But I do think that that would be kind of cool and give me some chances to be able to do podcasts when I'm doing sort of, you know, other kinds of things.
	And, of course, the acoustics are slightly better.
	As we all know from singing in the shower, the acoustics are slightly better, which is a good thing.
	I'm just going to add a few more people to the chat.
	Here. I'm just doing all of the...
	I'm getting the hang of this funky stuff all around, so let me just keep doing that.
	So we've had some people join.
	Hello, everybody.
	Welcome aboard. We have some new people and some not-so-new people.
	This isn't to say that Greg and I are old, but we are.
	Old enough. Old enough, that's right.
	I like to say things that are ambiguous like that.
	And, of course, a huge, huge thanks to two of the most glorious board members in the history of boards.
	Boy, that started off so well, didn't it?
	But Greg and William, who have spent some significant time upgrading the Freedom Aid Radio board to something that's so snazzy and so exciting that I'm thinking of renting it out as a porn site.
	So thanks so much to you guys.
	It looks fantastic if you come by freedomaidradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D.
	You can see it's great.
	We got tags. Now, I thought there was a spell check somewhere in there.
	Is that the case, or am I just on drugs around there?
	A spell check in the tags?
	No, I thought that was a spell check. Oh, no, no, in the editor, right?
	I think that's actually...
	Are you using IE? No, I'm using Mozilla.
	Firefox. Oh, you're using Firefox?
	Okay. Okay. I wonder though, because I noticed the same thing myself and I wasn't sure if they were, we'd have to ask Bill if they were hooking into some component in the browser to do that or whether it's actually being served up from the software itself.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Right. Very interesting.
	But yeah, it works pretty good. Oh, it's great.
	It's great. It looks fantastic.
	I like the tags thing.
	It's basically you get to take all of your posts and add tags to them.
	And so far we've got Cult Leader, I think is the most popular tag.
	RambleFest9000 is another very popular tag.
	Does he ever take a breath?
	I think is the third most.
	And identify the accent, no luck, I think is the last one.
	So it's been very useful in terms of helping people to organize things from that standpoint.
	So that's good.
	I'm still trying to get used to the tags myself.
	Now, this is a very good thing.
	We won't spend the whole show talking about this, just in case you're not interested.
	What do those bars underneath people's pictures mean?
	They're rankings based on the number of posts that you have on the board.
	Oh, so it's not donations and health status, right?
	Damn. Okay.
	Because I was wondering why mine was so low.
	Okay. Well, that makes sense. Alright, so we might as well start.
	I'm sure people will continue to join us as we kick on forward.
	So I'm going to start off with a topic and then we will have an embarrassing silence followed by everybody else's topic that they really want to talk about.
	So we might as well follow the same format as we have had before.
	I'm going to also go through the practice of muting people because I'm a petty dictator.
	And also, because that way we can avoid feedback, if you do want to say something, there's a chat that's running that Addie's in charge of, and you can join that as well.
	So I'll start off with a topic that has come up on the boards, and I'm sure it's something that Christina will have a chance to add to as well.
	And I wrote an article recently, I haven't had a chance to revise it yet, around this misconception that people have.
	I'm not going to read the article, but this misconception that people have around at least my perception of The right for self-defense, which is that I don't find the right to self-defense to be very helpful, because the only times that I've ever was really physically aggressed against were situations wherein I had no capacity to defend myself, So it was parents or a much larger and more violent older brother and school when I sort of got caned and so on.
	So there was no real possibility for me to fight back.
	Of course, when it comes to paying my taxes or if I got drafted, God forbid, if they wanted a really fruity first lieutenant, then it would be a real problem because I wouldn't have a chance to change it.
	So when they raise my income tax, it's not like self-defense is really going to matter.
	So I think self-defense is a very hot topic in libertarianism.
	I think it's dangerous because it seems to be that you can never really effectively use it, or at least very rarely, and also that it does tend to, for a lot of people, be a justification for the state, i.e.
	everybody has the right to self-defense.
	Some people can't defend themselves.
	I can, interestingly enough, because I take yoga.
	So what I can do is curl myself into a ball, suck my thumb, and bleat like a Japanese schoolgirl, which usually makes my attackers so sickened that they wander off, which works.
	So I just find that it's a bit of a red herring, and it gets people all knotted up about is it violence, what degree of violence is responsible, and so on, or is acceptable, and so on.
	So I've written an article just to sort of clarify my views on it, and then we had a poster who came up with the following response.
	It's a pretty short post, but I think that it's interesting.
	To hear about it and to get a sense of what I'd like to talk about as far as this goes.
	So I'm sort of saying, well, you know, it doesn't really help.
	The right to self-defense is mostly, you know, you have a right to it, sort of, you know, but it doesn't really...
	Doesn't really add up to much in the real world.
	So here this person says, I myself have had to physically fight quite a few times throughout my life to defend myself.
	In one egregious example, this gentleman writes, I was attacked on the street for no reason by an asshole when I had a broken arm in a sling.
	In another example, four guys on foot knocked me off my bicycle on a trail and began to attack me.
	They all backed off when I fought back, and they discovered I was not the compliant victim they'd thought I'd be.
	Just four months ago, I was physically assaulted at a bar with no provocation.
	Oh, sorry, this is Christina.
	I also met many of my female girlfriends in a mud wrestling contest.
	Oh wait, no, that's a dream. Well, we'll come back to that later.
	So this guy goes on to say, I have a friend who shot and killed a man who physically attacked him in an episode of Road Rage.
	Because it was self-defense, he was not charged with a crime.
	Also a guy I knew who used to live in my apartment building, had his apartment broken into, inner building.
	While he was there, he saved his own life through violent physical resistance.
	Be assured that anyone who breaks into my apartment while I'm there will get some warm Texas-style hospitality.
	Did you know this guy was from Texas?
	I kind of did. However, Steph, all this is sincerely to your basic point, that self-defense is not a logical justification for government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, so he says, for that reason, I suggest you leave out the comments about self-defense being rare or an anomalous situation.
	Regular Joes like me do have to get violent sometimes, but that has nothing to do with your points, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Now, the question, I guess, that I would...
	Like to pose to people in general.
	And this is where I thought that Christina might have something to add as well, based on her recent history with the Hells Angels.
	What's that? You know, I wouldn't even know which bar to go to to get into a fistfight.
	I would have absolutely no idea how to get into a fistfight.
	I guess the last time somebody outside my family physically aggressed against me was earlier today.
	That's why I ended up cleaning the bathrooms.
	But... I just, I wouldn't even know where to start.
	I guess I was last, I was like 13 or 14 years old and I was bullied in the woods by a couple of guys, got punched in the stomach, didn't fight back, nothing ever came of it again.
	Well, I fought back verbally because I'm British, which means that I have a self-destructive streak in that sense, right?
	Why didn't you all pick on someone your own size?
	I said to guys at least twice my size.
	You know, of course, like that's not going to cause any problems, right?
	So, I guess the question that I have is, am I totally out to lunch as far as this goes, or do you think that it's somewhat valid to have some questions about people who get into these kinds of physical altercations and say that there may be other alternatives to this kind of stuff, and that...
	The fact that you keep getting into fistfights might be, to some degree, an indication of your own personality and not necessarily that violence is endemic in our society.
	Because Christine has never been in a fight.
	I grew up in a rough neighborhood.
	I went to rough schools.
	I've never been in a fight. And nobody I know has ever been in a fight except maybe one guy who was a bouncer.
	So again, there's a whole other question around that.
	But I just wonder what people think of this.
	Am I just totally sheltered and bourgeoisie?
	or is there all of this violence out there that has somehow escaped me and everyone else that I know and that people have no sort of responsibility in the matter of having violence in their lives.
	So I'll unmute everyone if you'd like to sort of give me a response back.
	I want to make sure that I'm making sense here.
	Well, I think that...
	I think you kind of answered your own question in the post on the board in that I think that the willingness to show force or to show that you're willing to use self-defense is usually more than enough to scare off most bullies.
	They have a radar that zooms in on people that they perceive as weak or insecure or helpless.
	Like in my own case, for a long time I was I was never really in a, like, a mono-a-mono fist fight, but I would always get, like, kicked in the back or books knocked out of my hand or head-banged against the lockers, that kind of stuff, you know, because I always tried to stay away from people.
	But the minute that I actually demonstrated to those same people that if you try these things, you're not going to be as successful as you used to be, then they would back off.
	So... Self-defense as a principle or a practice is necessarily a bad thing, but I think that we may have a little bit of a confusion over what the words self-defense really mean.
	Do you think, and do you mind just turning your microphone down just a little bit?
	It's a little loud. Do you think that you found, or in your history, did you find that it was a confident attitude that changed the bullying, or was it fighting back in a physical or violent manner?
	Violently fighting back, I don't know if I would call it that.
	It was more like, how's that with the mic, by the way?
	Oh, much better, much better.
	Thank you. Okay.
	It wasn't really so much fighting back as it was putting up the appearance that you're willing to fight back.
	Right, so it's sort of like a sham thing, like how animals have, like the cats hiss and they push their fur up to look bigger than they do, and I do the same thing, although my fur goes a little bit more sideways than up, except my armpits.
	Oh dear, Christina snorted some coffee on her top.
	Did you enjoy that one, sweetie? But I wonder, I mean, that's what I sort of found, that when I was a little less sort of the shrinking violet and a little bit more sort of assertive and cocky, so to speak, that I found that violence sort of didn't come to me, which doesn't explain why violence does seem to come, as in this person's post, and I've received a number of emails on this topic, where people say, I got an email from a woman I can't remember, some foreign country who was saying, are you crazy?
	You think that there's no such thing as violence and people come in and they steal from me all the time.
	I work at a restaurant and they steal tips and this and that and the other.
	And so my answer to her, of course, was, well, I'm not saying that violence doesn't exist.
	Of course, you can't be a pacifist without recognizing that violence exists.
	It's like studying to be a doctor when you don't believe in ill health.
	But what is the case is that the state certainly doesn't help you when it comes to these kinds of things.
	And I just wonder the degree to which people end up in these kinds of fights.
	It's almost like I'm trying to picture how you would end up getting into a fight.
	You would have to have a pretty quick temper.
	You'd have to be around other people who had a pretty quick temper.
	You'd have to not back down.
	Like, how do you end up in a situation where somebody gets a gun out of their car and attacks you In the case of road rage, is it a totally random thing, like you're just driving along doing your own thing?
	Or are you racing with someone?
	Does it escalate because they cut you off and then you screech forward and cut them off and then it escalates from there?
	I don't know, but I just...
	The idea of completely random violence just sort of descending into your life out of nowhere on a repetitive basis, I'm just not sure that I really believe in it in a way that I wouldn't first of all start to say to people, well, what...
	What are you doing to bring this violence into your life?
	Because there are lots of people who don't, even if they live in bad neighborhoods or even if they live around difficult people, who don't end up with this kind of violence.
	Yeah, I would agree. I mean, my own experience with violent clients or clients that I see who have problems with anger or who have been involved in violent situations, you know, frequently I hear from them that, oh, I didn't do anything.
	I don't know why this keeps happening to me.
	And basically, they're not aware of their own behavior in these situations.
	What is it about the individual's behavior that provokes or that initiates a response from other people?
	And that's important. I'm not saying that it's your own fault.
	But there's something about your behavior that might be part of this interaction or this dynamic that would bring about the violent behavior from others.
	Yeah, when violence breaks out into the open, at least in my opinion, it is quite a sequence of events that results in violence.
	It doesn't just sort of immediately pop up and escalate into a situation of violence out of nowhere.
	I think that it is something that generally comes about as the result of a particular kind of escalation.
	Rather than just out of nowhere.
	And I found this to be true with the violence that I grew up with in my family.
	It wasn't really usually out of nowhere completely.
	There were usually signs that it was escalating and so on.
	And so for children, absolutely.
	The children are never responsible for the violence that's done unto them.
	But I just wonder, yeah, there are lots of crazy people around, but why are they attacking you and not somebody else?
	That's sort of a question that I have.
	So, Greg, you never got involved in a fistfight with anyone else.
	This is at least until the determinists came on board, right?
	Right. Actually, a slight correction, I did get into one fistfight in my life when I was in eighth grade, I think, and I got a tooth knocked out.
	Wow. So it wasn't exactly very successful, but...
	But how did the girl do?
	Just kidding. Yeah, thanks.
	But that was sort of the incident that taught everyone around me to kind of back off and not treat me like, you know, a welcome mat.
	Right, and certainly I would imagine, sorry to interrupt, but I would imagine that none of the other girls in the troupe tried to sell you cookies after that either, right?
	Right, they were completely frightened of me.
	It's very important to assert your territory, absolutely.
	I have the same thing with my nieces, for sure, except that together they can totally take me, so it's a little different.
	So let's throw this out to other people.
	Fistfights in your life as an adult, how did they come about?
	Were there any ways of avoiding them?
	I'll throw this right out, and we'll see what people have had.
	Silence is loud.
	For me, I think self-defense is...
	Best for prevention and for best reacting to situations.
	And have you ever been in a fist fight?
	I've come close to it when I was, you know, in school and everything, but I think through talking with other people, I kind of learned how to defend myself by knowing when things are about to escalate and how to get out of them.
	I think that's part of self-defense, too, rather than just waiting until you get into a fistfight and how to best kick the crap out of them.
	Right. Certainly prevention is the better part of cure as far as violence goes, right?
	Right. Right, right.
	Okay. So I grab two beer steins and say, you wouldn't hit a man with glasses, would you?
	I mean, that's sort of my approach. But, I mean, everyone has their own approach.
	So you've never actually been in a fistfight.
	Were you exposed to any sort of violence from a familial situation when you were a child?
	Not necessarily. I've been around some people that, you know, have made me uncomfortable and I've had to do what I can to get away from them.
	Interesting. Okay, so you have never experienced violence then in your life in a sort of direct fist-in-the-face kind of way?
	That's correct. And spanking?
	I'm asking, not offering, just in case you...
	No, not so much.
	Okay, okay, that's good.
	That's good. So we have one person who so far seems to, it's a possibility that one of the ways in which self-defense can be more effectively maintained is to get out of the situation before it escalates into sheer violence.
	Charlie, are you microphoned or are you typing boy today?
	No mic. Okay, so Charlie says, first of all, he's very, very excited to have joined a fistfight debate, and I'm wondering if the guy who likes Fight Club from the board, if not necessarily my review of it, is...
	So what I'm going to do is, given that Charlie doesn't have a mic, is I'm going to start taunting him until he types aggression.
	So, oh, that wasn't you.
	Okay, so Charlie says that his fights have strangely always escalated once I've shown that I'm not afraid of fighting with the person.
	So, that's very interesting.
	So, if he says, okay, let's rumble, or something that doesn't sound as ridiculous with a British accent, then that does escalate.
	Now, one of the things that is important, I think, to understand about violence or fistfighting is that there is a particular type of personality that wants to fight, right?
	And it's not about domination, and it's not about control or humiliation of others.
	It's about a kind of self-hatred.
	I'm just reading a book at the moment on borderline personality disorder, which I've always found to be quite fascinating.
	And in it, and this is a little bit more true of the men than of the women, although it does occur for the women as well, there is a strong desire for self-injury.
	And what happens then...
	These people will go to bars, these men will go to bars, and they will pick fights with men who are bigger than they are, and they are doing that with the express intention of getting beaten up.
	So I think Charlie's comment that sometimes his fights get into that particular situation when...
	If somebody actually does seem to want to fight and then he indicates his willingness to fight, then it escalates, then I think it's fair to say that if somebody's trying to bully you, then a show of strength is helpful.
	But if somebody is masochistic and is trying to get themselves beaten up, a minor variation of the suicide by cop routine, then to indicate a willingness to fight is going to guarantee that you're going to end up in a fight, right?
	Because then you end up in this can't back down kind of thing.
	And the example that's given in the book is also related to with a woman who's with an abusive man who, when he's drunk, is physically violent, so because her desire is to punish herself for perceived wrongs that she's done in the past, then she will get her husband drunk, and then when he's raging drunk, she will start to taunt him and pick fights with him until he beats her up.
	So in these kinds of situations, it is a very complex interaction that results in the physical violence, and it's not just the case of somebody who wants your wallet or wants to bully you or wants your lunch money, that in those kinds of situations, you are going to end up in a sort of circumstance where a willingness to fight is absolutely going to result if one or the other person doesn't back down.
	down is going to result in a kind of physical violence that's going to be very hard to avoid.
	You said yourself we teach people how to treat us.
	Thank you.
	I think there's some truth in that.
	I guess the time also that I had problems with physical violence, I mean this sounds so ridiculous, but nonetheless it was very frightening at the time, was when I was in grade 7, I think it was, when I was at the bowling alley playing a defender.
	Which was a game, I guess, that was quite a lot of fun.
	It was like being attacked by a swarm of killer bees while enclosed in one of those giant inflatable clown funhouses.
	But a fun game, and a guy wanted to play the game, and I was doing very well, and he unplugged the machine and then plugged it in.
	So I called him a jerk or an asshole, I can't remember what, and I stalked away with all of the rampant courage of a 13-year-old.
	I guess he complained about me to his older brother who was a real violent guy or seemed to be a real violent guy who then threatened.
	He was going to beat me up and he was going to kill me and all this kind of stuff.
	And then once when I was walking up the stairs, he punched me in the shoulder as he was going down.
	And interestingly enough, many years later, I met him at a social event and he seemed like a perfectly nice fellow.
	But I guess at that time he wasn't.
	And in that situation, I simply said that wasn't the case.
	I refused to meet with him when he wanted to fight.
	I took alternate exits out of school, and then the whole thing just evaporated into nothing.
	And fortunately, I didn't end up in that particular kind of fight.
	Now, a friend of mine at the time who did end up with the same kind of situation where somebody wanted to have a fight with him, he did end up going out front, and of course the whole school was out there chanting and cheering in this Lord of the Flies kind of manner as these two went at it.
	And of course, you know that they're playing a kind of theater, right?
	It's everybody else's perception that is causing them to have the fight rather than their own innate desires to beat someone up.
	But this person was also quite self-destructive and ended up in a motorcycle accident where he was killed, which of course is not also accidental when you look at it in the general context of things.
	He was really speeding on icy roads and so on.
	So even people who are into self-hatred or self-loathing to the point of things like self-mutilation They don't necessarily kill themselves outwardly, but they do engage in escalating and risky behaviors of which fighting can be one, and therefore showing a willingness to fight with these kinds of people is definitely going to get you into some pretty considerable trouble.
	But I think also that that works in reverse as well, that the, you know, Training people how to treat you question I think works in reverse from what you were saying as well.
	If you project a more docile or more submissive attitude or behavior, those kinds of people who are looking for fights but don't really want to get hurt, they're going to be attracted to you like bees on honey.
	Right. You mean because they can bully you without fear of retribution?
	Oh, precisely. Right, right.
	Well, of course, I mean, certainly with my case, though, what's happened is they've gotten away with it for 20 years or 25 years, but now I'm saying mean things about them in a podcast.
	So you take your chances when you mess with an intellectual.
	That's all I'm trying to get at here.
	But no, you're quite right.
	It is a complicated thing, and there are times where a show of a willingness to retaliate is going to de-escalate a violent situation, and there are other times where a show of willingness to engage in violence is going to heavily escalate a violent situation.
	So it's quite a complicated thing, but in general, I would say that whatever you can do to not get into these situations to begin with, I would definitely agree with.
	Now, Charlie says that the fights that I had at school were with the bullies, and somebody asked him what were the reasons for some of the fights.
	And Charlie said, well, one of the guys stabbed me in the back of the head with a pencil.
	That's one where I didn't back down.
	Actually, probably sort of snapped forward.
	But anyway, and he said, hmm, that's kind of random.
	And Charlie said, no, not quite random.
	Unfortunately, the guy hated me for some reason.
	And Charlie, what I would guess is that you maybe had the same passive-aggressive thing that you have now, wherein you are joining chats without a microphone and causing me to crane my head forward and look at your writings.
	So it's probably something like that, but we can certainly work on that if and when you ever get a mic.
	Send me your address. I'll send you a mic because I know you've got a lot to contribute.
	Okay, well, if anybody else wants to talk more about that, I'm certainly happy to chat with it.
	Oh, we've had somebody joining us.
	Who's got Echo?
	Okay, so if you're joining, please don't have your microphone.
	And please make sure that your microphone is not next to your speakers.
	You have to use headphones because otherwise when I talk, it comes out of your speakers back into your microphone, into a near-infinite feedback loop that is only matched by your average free domain radio podcast.
	So if you could just check on that, I'm going to leave everybody muted just for now.
	There is a chat which you can join.
	And ooh, Charlie says, ooh, big man with a microphone.
	Well, that's good.
	See, as I think I mentioned when I talked about the Marine, you have no idea how brave I can be in cyberspace.
	So, absolutely.
	You know what I can suggest?
	Type a little harder, and maybe that will get it out of your system.
	Quite right. See?
	See, this is why people started attacking him.
	If only I had a virtual pencil icon, then I would probably put it into the back of your smiley face.
	No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so I'm going to please just check your settings.
	If you would like to chat, feel free to do so.
	If you would like to talk about your fistfights, please feel free to do so.
	And I'm going to unmute everyone, so if you would like to bring up another topic, if you could not do the free will versus determinism thing, that would be excellent, just because we have closed that debate off for the time being, as both parties go back into their respective corners to whip themselves back into a froth of self-righteousness.
	And we will be returning to that, I'm sure, shortly, but I'm going to take one more weekend off from it, because...
	Well, we're not getting paid for this, so it should be as much fun as possible.
	So, whatever topic you would like to bring up, please feel free to do so.
	The Israel thing is pretty amazing, huh?
	The Israel thing is, in fact, pretty amazing, huh?
	I'm going to take that as a topic, because there was a lot of silence.
	And we are living in 2006, but, in fact, it is close to 1006 years.
	And, of course, there is an enormous amount.
	For those who are listening, 100 years in the future, this is Middle East conflict number 6,222,423.
	And the situation is that we have the Hezbollah in Lebanon kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and Israel sent a whole bunch of...
	In order to get...
	I think the demand was that Israel free some soldiers that the Hezbollahs think that Israel kidnapped them.
	Then Israel began firing rockets directly into Egypt.
	into Beirut and destroyed like 64 bridges, have displaced I think three quarters of a million people and have killed hundreds and have also struck a UN post and hit children and so on.
	And, of course, just in case you feel too great a sympathy for the people in Lebanon, then the people in Lebanon are firing rockets back directly, raining rockets down into Israel and so on.
	And all of this is absolutely inevitable.
	And it is quite common in these kinds of circumstances that people think that doomsday is coming and that it's out of our control and it's an endless situation, an endless problem.
	Of course it's not. I mean, this is just the inevitable result of collective fantasies like states and religions and cultures and so on.
	When you have irrational preferences, you automatically create enemies because you have irrational absolutes that can never be proven, that are both perfect and true, and yet completely unvalidated in reality.
	So you have to make up for your doubt with hysterical over-certainty, followed by aggression at anyone who dares to question you.
	And of course, there's nothing that coheres a group like external enemies, and so constantly...
	Well, the fact that Israel exists and sits right in the middle of all the Arab states that for the last thousand years have wanted to destroy it is not accidental either, and so...
	Everybody likes to pick sides, but to me it's like saying which sports team is more moral than the other sports team doesn't really matter to me.
	It's a Nick versus Jessica conundrum.
	It doesn't really matter. Who really cares?
	But the point of the matter is that this is the inevitable result that you get when you put the hyper-explosive of nationalism and religion and racism into a big vat, I guess because it's the Middle East, bake it to about 6 million degrees and then throw in some religious fundamentalism, ethnic hatreds and advanced weaponry, then you're going to get this kind of stuff.
	As one soldier once mentioned, Killing somebody up close is a real drag, but killing somebody from a distance is kind of cool and kind of exciting.
	And this, of course, is what people found out about in war, in World War I. I remember when I was doing research for my last novel, the novel before my last novel called Almost, I was reading that one guy's letter home from the front in World War I was something like this.
	He said, you know, I kind of went to war thinking it was going to be a glorious adventure, that I'd be riding up a hill with a sword to charge someone, and there would be stimulating, exciting, skillful fights, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the crap that gets handed down through the generations about what war really is.
	But he said that what he actually found out was that war is huddling with rats in muddy water when some idiot 20 miles away pushes a button and blows you up.
	And, of course, that is the case, that as war has become more deadly, it has also become far more removed, right?
	So you can push a button, launch a bunch of what looks like fireworks, and then, you know, 200 miles away, people get blown into nothing.
	And that very fact that war is no longer you strangling another guy in a ditch, you stabbing another guy in a ditch, or if you've seen, I think it was Braveheart, where you see these showers of arrows falling down upon these hapless peasants who are trying to hide underneath shields and they get...
	Stuck with arrows in the legs, and of course, it's the Middle Ages, so one little neck is sure infection and death by gangrene.
	The war has become so incredibly removed from people's day-to-day experiences, right?
	I mean, nobody knows what's going on in Iraq, and nobody has seen the videos, really, of what's going on in Abu Ghraib.
	And in the Middle East, you can push a button and blow people up 200 miles away.
	You never see the bodies.
	You never see the people. You never see the screams.
	You never see the limbs blown up in the air.
	And this is just another reason why we can no longer afford statism.
	We can no longer afford religion.
	It's not just the destructive nature of the weapons.
	It's the fact that they're so far removed from people's direct perceptual experience that makes that level of violence so much more palatable and so much more unending.
	So I certainly think that it's a fascinating topic and a very, very instructive topic on what happens when you bake irrationality with weapons and you don't have a separation of church and state.
	So if you would like to add anything to that, now's the time.
	Everybody's unmuted.
	Well, it seems to me that the situation is a lot like the fist fighting we were talking about earlier with an act of violence followed by an act of retribution followed by another act of violence constantly escalating.
	right? And modern warfare is the ultimate bully scenario.
	I can beat the hell out of you without ever having to worry about getting myself hurt.
	For sure, political leaders don't face the same dangers that Napoleon used to ride at the head of his armies, which is one of the miraculous things about him, and even Churchill in the Boer War went out and shot guys directly, and actually quite memorably said, it's amazing how easy it is to kill a man, which is a little scary, right?
	For sure, there is this issue of dissociation and removal from the direct consequences of violence.
	And the other thing that's the case, too, is that it really is, I think, quite a powerful thing for a group to have people die for the cause.
	It does sort of render the debate too explosive to be rational.
	So I know that some friends of ours, this Jewish woman who was not so much with the Judaism when she was a single woman and she dated some non-Jewish boyfriends and so on, but then she ended up marrying a Jewish fellow and they were both sort of instructed in no uncertain terms about what it meant to be Jewish and why they should have children and basically one of the arguments were that if you don't have children and you're Jewish, you're continuing the work of the Holocaust, right?
	I mean... And stuff like that, once you've had a whole bunch of people get killed for a cause, it gets very hard to be just and objective about the cause.
	I remember reading a play many years ago which was about Lenin's time.
	He was actually incarcerated in Canada for some time before the Revolution of 1917, and he has a debate with somebody whose brother is in the war.
	At the front, and he says, but if the war is for nothing, then my brother died for nothing, because his brother got killed.
	And he said, well, the war is for nothing, regardless of whether your brother gets killed or not.
	It's just an additional tragedy if your brother gets killed.
	But of course, this is what makes debate about war so explosive, is that you never know whether you're talking to somebody who buried their son or daughter last week.
	And so once you can get people killed, this is why violence occurs around cults, right?
	like Muslim and Islam and Judaism.
	Because once you can get people killed for the belief, then that belief becomes something that's very hard to debate because people then say, well, my son or my daughter died for this.
	Are you telling me it's for nothing?
	And, of course, my response would be, well, it was for worse than nothing because quite often they've killed other people, especially if they're in the military, which is, of course, nothing you really hear about, right?
	I mean, you hear about, oh, my heavens, this Marine got killed, blah, blah, blah, and that's the worst thing in the world, and it's nothing but a tragedy, and let's play taps and lower the coffin into the ground with this American flag draped around it.
	But of course, you don't hear about the 20 Iraqis that he killed in his house-to-house search, or whoever he killed, or whoever he got We're good to go.
	It's actually kind of interesting.
	I've had a number of arguments like this with the brother who's been to Afghanistan.
	And it's a little frightening, actually, how sophisticated and nuanced his opinion on this is.
	He sort of compartmentalized all the politics separate from From the actual act of the battle.
	And so he gets very upset when he hears people in the news media calling soldiers deaths in vain and that sort of thing.
	But he'll also agree with me that the politics that led up to the war in Iraq are completely bogus.
	It's like he's got this disconnect in his head that won't let him carry the implications to their final conclusion.
	Right. I mean, this is what you hear.
	This is this incredible, mind-bending doublespeak that you hear from people, which is to say, I don't support the war, but I support the troops.
	As if there's some abstract thing called war that's like some death god striding the sun-baked desert that has nothing to do with the fact that there are young men and women over there in costumes killing each other.
	I mean, that just to me is amazing.
	I support the troops, but I don't support the war.
	But of course, there is no war without troops.
	And if the people aren't over there killing, there's no such thing as the war, so it's completely deranged.
	And of course, it arises from a religious kind of thinking, that you can have a different relationship to an abstract than you can to any instance of that abstract.
	It's like saying, I love trees, but I hate forests.
	I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
	And it has to do with the extrapolation of concepts beyond their derivation from instances and then having emotional relationships with those.
	which of course is fundamentally predicated on things like countries existing and gods existing and races and religions and all these sorts of things existing which you can have emotional relationships with which is all nonsense and fantasy and always results in violence because it's fundamentally false, right?
	False plus certain plus weapons always equals murder.
	And that's the definition of what's going on in the Middle East.
	And the other thing that I find fascinating is that everybody's talking.
	I mean, everybody can so clearly see the facts of the matter when it comes to other people, right?
	So everybody says, well, the Muslims are just engaging in this propaganda war through Al Jazeera, and all they're doing is they're showing the Muslim dead and none of the Israeli dead, right?
	And, of course, the Muslims are saying about the Israelis that all they focus on is the Israeli dead.
	When we do it, it's an attempt to bring an honest perspective, and when they do it, it's nothing but propaganda.
	So people can see very clearly what's going on.
	They just can only ascribe the motives and all of it to their enemies.
	So everybody's able to perfectly think through the issues.
	They just can't make those issues reciprocal, and that's another reason why this stuff goes on and on and on.
	Right. In his mind, soldiers don't die in vain because they're defending freedom.
	They don't die in vain because they're defending each other.
	Right, right. And Charlie has pointed out here where he says, I thought it was funny that some CNN analysts were condemning Iran and Syria for arming Hezbollah while saying nothing about the U.S. and little brother Israel, right?
	So, of course, Israel is pretty much a stepchild of the United States foreign policy, and particularly its funding and arms sales and so on.
	So, yeah, of course, absolutely.
	But what people always say, and Nils, I'll get your comment in just a sec, but what people always say with these kinds of situations is, well...
	Because Iran and Syria were arming Hezbollah, we had to arm Israel.
	This sort of reaction, people don't even think about it.
	It's as automatic as breathing, this inevitable justification for your position, followed by a condemnation of other people's positions.
	There's no way to get around it.
	This is unreformed. Human nature without introspection and self-knowledge just gravitates towards this one like a rock falls down a well.
	It's completely inevitable. But, of course, the very creation of Israel was something that was heavily backed by the United States for reasons which we won't go into here.
	And the United States has been funding it for many, many years.
	And also, of course, the United States funded...
	And armed Iraq, right?
	Because it wanted to have Iraq and Iran kill as many of the opposite members as possible during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men were murdered by each other because the United States was arming.
	So, I mean, the fact is, of course, there's another reason why you can't have governments, because all governments do is arm other governments and cause these kinds of endless conflicts.
	So, sorry, Nils, I've unmuted you if you'd like to add something else.
	Can you hear me? You're dropping a lot of packets.
	Can you try again? I'm sorry, no, I'm barely getting you.
	I'll just unmute everyone and see if it's just me or if other people are getting this as well.
	Am I the only one who can't hear Niels very well?
	No, he's awful.
	Niels, are you on the submarine again or is that just something else?
	It could be also that Niels is making himself a tasty snack of popcorn in the microwave.
	I've certainly found that when you...
	Or it could be that he's in a Syrian prison.
	Let's hope not. But it could be...
	I've also noticed that with wireless networks, if you microwave, you get your tasty popcorn, but not so much your IP packets.
	And I didn't actually hear a helicopter, but I did hear something pretty bad.
	The other thing, of course, that's fascinating about this idea of Israel is the chosen people, the chosen of God.
	And this is similar to Paul's father on the board, who is a Calvinist.
	And, of course, Calvinism believes that they're chosen of God by birth, right?
	They're just chosen of God by birth.
	And this is the general thing that you get into with these kinds of long-lasting cults, right?
	I mean, you have to look and you have to admire, I think, these religions, just from a meme longevity standpoint, that they have managed to do these incredible things around maintaining their existence for many, many years, or thousands of years.
	And the way that they do that, of course, is by being perfectly adaptable to everything except a diminishment in their authority over the individual.
	Right, so of course one of the things that occurs a little bit more with Judaism than with other philosophies is that you say, well, Judaism is a race, right?
	So if you're born a Jew, then you're a Jew.
	Okay, so it's a race. Well, then it can't have anything to do with morality, right?
	Because if you're a race...
	You can't really say that my race is better just based on being a particular race because that's racism, right?
	Equating, say, blacks with evil and whites with good would be considered pure racism and therefore saying that Jewish is good because you're born Jewish, that would be pure racism.
	So they like it to be a race so that they can guilt people into having children and they can also get their hands on the children and put them into the synagogues very early.
	So that they can condition them and program them to continue to be cult members until the day they die.
	So they definitely want to call it a race, right?
	That way they can get their hands on the children.
	But they can't claim that it's only a race because then...
	It's racism. So then they say, okay, well, it's a belief system, right?
	So it's a belief system like I believe that my Christmas tree is alive and talking to me and that makes me a Jew or something like that.
	But then, of course, the question is, well, if the belief that your Christmas tree is alive and talking to you makes you a Jew, then anybody who believes that their Christmas tree is alive and talking to them then becomes a Jew, right?
	So then it's not a can't be called the chosen people and you also can't get a hang, you can't get a hold of the children who are, you know, too early to, too young to verbalize that kind of stuff.
	So then you have to say, well, it's more than a race.
	It's a belief system, right?
	And then you say, okay, well, then this belief system could be adopted by anybody, and therefore it's sort of a description like if you're into the scientific method or you believe in the scientific method...
	Then you're called a rationalist or a scientist or something like that.
	It's not got any particular moral content, right?
	Because anyone could believe it and it's not exclusionary anymore.
	And then they say, well, no, you see, it's about culture and history, right?
	It's about culture and history, so it's not a race, it's not a belief system, it's culture and history.
	And so they'll then go with all of that.
	But of course, culture and history have no particular moral content either, so if you question that, they'll go back to the belief, and then to get their hands on the kids and to make you breathe, they'll go back to the kids thing.
	And this is true of all cults that are long-lasting, a little bit more true of Judaism than other philosophies, but of course other philosophies have their own crazy stuff.
	But I think that is a particularly instructive example of how powerful cults can be And everything that you need to do, you just need to make it adaptable to everybody's particular prejudices.
	And whatever you need to say to keep people in the cult, you can say, and this of course is why a religious text is so self-contradictory and nobody has any problem with it.
	It's like, oh, you're a nice guy?
	Well, let me point you to these sections of the New Testament.
	Oh, you're a thunder and brimstone kind of guy.
	You, like, would rather worship Zeus because you find the Christian God is a bit of a pansy.
	Well, let me turn you to some of these Old Testament things.
	It's like, oh, you're into kindness and forgiveness?
	Well, here's some stuff around Jesus.
	Oh, you want to put unbelievers to death?
	Well, here's some stuff from the Old Testament or even parts of some other stuff that Jesus said.
	So that's the wonderful thing is that most religious texts and most culty kind of stuff, and this is true of modern laws as well, is a kind of disco ball mirror which can reflect you entirely in Just based on your own particular prejudices.
	So it can be all things to all people.
	And that, of course, is a big disco ball rolling off a cliff.
	That's the metaphor for the modern world.
	There's my metaphor of the day.
	Topics are open.
	So what were we talking about again?
	We were talking about fistfighting in the Middle East.
	And what hot work that would be.
	Well, I think a lot of the fistfighting would stop if there were no backers for the fight.
	Sure. Yes, absolutely.
	I think that's quite true. Can you talk a little bit more about that, or do you want me to?
	Well, I mean, Iran and Syria on the one side, and the United States and other Western interests on the other side, basically having seconds fight their battles for them.
	That's the way I see it.
	The United States using Israel as a sort of wedge against Iran.
	At least that's the way it's been since the mid-70s.
	So when I hear guys like George Bush saying, you know, that Iran, they're not too good.
	We should... We should go attack them.
	I'm thinking to myself, well, it took you guys 35 years to admit it, but at least now you're doing that much.
	Well, and of course the idea that is particularly the case with the neocons who have influence over the White House at the moment is that if we get enough of them to kill each other off, then we'll somehow win the battle, right?
	And of course this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the reciprocal nature of human emotion.
	Because imagining that war within the Middle East or violence within the Middle East...
	It's going to get people to be less Muslim is like saying that people are going to give up on their perception of American freedom because of 9-11, right?
	9-11, in the way that most people understand it, right, that they're attacked by Arabs because we're free and virtuous, well, that didn't make people say, hey, you know what?
	Let's stop being free and virtuous and we will conform then to what the crazy bin Laden Muslim extremists want, right?
	That's not at all what happened.
	What happened was, of course...
	People said, well, they've attacked us.
	This has only hardened and strengthened our resolve to fight on to the death for our freedom and our way of life and our culture and our heritage and our God and our country and blah blah blah.
	And this is exactly what happens with the Muslims, right?
	The more that we cause death, murder, destruction, starvation, sickness, and so on within the Muslim world, the more we harden them into a kind of extremist situation.
	Exactly the same thing happened with 9-11 over in America.
	Exactly the same thing is happening in the Muslim world with us getting involved in the Muslim world.
	Exactly what we feel about our countrymen getting killed is exactly what they feel.
	We are all the same, and people have a very tough time understanding that.
	They think, well, every time I get attacked, my resolve gets stronger.
	So I'm going to go and attack these other people in the hopes of breaking their resolve.
	It's like, dude, look in the mirror.
	Put a turban on. Use your imagination.
	It's not that hard to get across.
	Now, Niels, because he's unable to broadcast from his CIA submarine, has decided to type it, and so a deep male voice says...
	Do you think he's trying to say something about my voice here, Sweeney?
	Okay. It's pretty astounding the beliefs people need to accept to get them to go as far as they do, where they let children sign rockets and they celebrate deaths on the other side, even in the world we live in today.
	We're the mixing of races and international trade and all nationalities living everywhere.
	You need them to believe that the people on the other side of the border are a collective and their actions are connected, i.e.
	the soldiers and the civilians.
	They also need to feel that they are being attacked.
	And with almost all American wars, the army was sent out to Iraq, Vietnam, Japan, etc.
	Almost all video images you see of soldiers being killed is where they're in some kind of foreign adventure.
	I certainly would agree with that.
	And I wish I could go a little bit higher.
	Oh, sorry. Niels has just pinged me with a picture of a smiley face getting angry and then its head exploding.
	And you know what? I think if I'd been able to go a little bit higher, people's head would have actually exploded.
	But, you know, I haven't warmed up.
	I haven't done my scales.
	So I can't sing the kind of high seas that I would normally aim at in these kinds of situations.
	So, yes, no, absolutely.
	The way that you get children involved with them signing the rockets, as Neil points out, you celebrate the deaths on the other side.
	It really is quite amazing how people see karaoke.
	Later, Steph. Karaoke always, Eddie.
	Always.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	The amazing lack of empathy that people have with human beings on the other side.
	This is something quite astounding, and I'll spend a minute or two on this before opening it back up.
	And I'm only doing this because people don't have a lot to say right now.
	So if you do want to interrupt me, never.
	No, if you do want to interrupt it, then I would be more than happy to let you take the helm.
	But what people don't understand, this is the most maddening thing about war.
	And I take a little bit of the Marxist analysis from this standpoint because I think that it's actually quite accurate.
	I mean, I give up with Marxism on economics and human rights, of course, but in their analysis of war, they can be quite good.
	So you have all of these poor bastards in one country, country A, let's just say Iran-Iraq.
	You have all these poor bastards in Iran who will call the proletariat, and you have all these poor bastards over in Iraq.
	And then you have these bourgeois leaders who are inciting hatred between one set of proletariat and the other set of proletariat, sort of hapless state-run sheep.
	And, of course, the proletariat on either side of the border have far more in common with each other than they do with any of their leaders.
	And so if they really were to hate people who were totally different, they should turn that hatred against their own leaders, right?
	Because, you know, if there are two shepherds with two sets of sheep, and they're trying to get their sheep to attack each other, well, the sheep should recognize they're far more in common with each other than they do with the shepherds.
	So if it's sort of a difference that makes you hate people, Then you should be much more angry at your own leaders than you would ever be at other sheep that you're fighting against.
	And of course, this is the case if you think back in World War I. You think of these poor bastards on the English and German side and other countries too, French and Belgium and so on.
	They're stuck in these stupid trenches.
	They have far more in common with each other than they do with people like Winston Churchill who were sort of titularly in charge.
	He was in charge of the Navy at that point.
	But the leaders, of course, the leaders have far more in common with each other and the sheep, the sheeple as they're sometimes called, have far more in common with each other.
	But all that the leaders do is whip up hatred from one set of sheep to another and nobody ever gets mad at their own authority figures and that, of course, comes right back to the family.
	Thank you.
	Thank you. Thank you.
	Otherwise, I'll just make it up and turn you into an Egyptian mummy if I have to to make the dream fit my theory.
	But if you would like to post more, that'd be fantastic, but I'll post another dream analysis this afternoon because I think that they're quite fascinating to work with.
	So yeah, it really has always bothered me the way that you see these kids who have far more in common with the kids that the rockets are aimed at signing these rockets to go and have all this hatred against other people when it's their own leaders that they should be the most angry at.
	It's wide open, babies. Speak, speak.
	So I wonder what would have happened if in 1914 they just decided not to shoot at all anymore, not just on Christmas Eve.
	Well, that's quite interesting, and of course that is to some degree what happened in World War II and what happened in Vietnam, right?
	So one of the histories of military psychology is that they realized that only about one in ten or one in five soldiers ever fired their gun in combat.
	Most people would just throw themselves to the ground or huddle and hide, and they'd find that people didn't shoot.
	So what they did was they began a process of much more rigorous dehumanizing within the army to train people to be more comfortable with shooting and murdering their fellow human beings on the orders of those in charge.
	So it's kind of tough to turn people into paid killers and hitmen, and so they managed to do this through a fairly conscious and significant process of dehumanizing people in terms of brutalizing them.
	You know, the stuff that you see in Full Metal Jacket, the intense brutalization that goes on with new recruits.
	Now, they're swinging back a little bit from that, but not because they find that it doesn't work, but rather because they're simply unable to get too many people to go into a futile war.
	But what also happened was that in Vietnam, one of the major reasons that the Vietnam War ended was because the army was completely falling apart.
	I mean, if they didn't pull it out when they were doing it, the whole thing, I mean, everybody was stoned, and also you had a fair number of people who, recognizing that they were spending copious lives taking and retaking the same hills, the next time they were ordered to do it, they would simply shoot their officers, right? I mean, fragging of officers was pretty common in Vietnam towards the end.
	So one of the reasons that they ended up ditching Vietnam as a whole concept was because simply the army was going to disintegrate if they did not get the soldiers out of there.
	So the dehumanization that they went into in order to get people to use more force against their fellow men also turned a little bit against them insofar as it ended up with people fragging their own officers and recognizing that they had a lot more in common with each other than they did with the sort of formal army hierarchy.
	And in 1914 didn't the officers also have to threaten the soldiers in the trenches to get them to re-engage?
	Oh, absolutely. This thing where in 1914, everybody joined this war, of course.
	I mean, everybody knows. If they've listened to the podcast, I'll just touch on it briefly.
	My theory that World War I is impossible without at least one generation of people in public schools, right?
	So you didn't have wars from 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, apart from a few ones like the sort of...
	Thank you.
	Western European wars, pretty much for the first time in recorded history from 1815 to 1914.
	And one of the reasons for that was that you had, of course, separation of church and state, diminishment of the power of the aristocracy, the growth of the middle classes who don't benefit from war, and you didn't have a military-industrial complex.
	But what you did get then was the establishment in most Western democracies of public schools within the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, and then lo and behold, one generation later, you get a whole bunch of people willing to run off to war because they've got all of this propaganda stuffed into their heads from day one about the virtue of the state.
	So everybody wanted to go to war.
	I mean, everybody relatively wanted to go to war with the exception of socialists like Eugene Debs, who ended up spending 10 years in prison.
	The amount of brutalization that occurred to the intelligentsia who were against the war is pretty significant and quite a fascinating history.
	But most of the intelligentsia, having gone through the state school system, were very pro-war.
	Everybody thought, they all rushed to volunteer because they were afraid it was going to be over by Christmas and so on.
	And so then they, at Christmas 1914, and to a smaller degree in 1915, they all got together and had drinks in no man's land, toasted each other, sang Christmas carols and songs and so on.
	And, of course, yeah, they absolutely had to threaten them all with court-martial and shooting them if they ever did that again, because, of course, you simply can't have a humanization of your enemy.
	Once you humanize your, quote, enemy, then you realize that by killing somebody else, you're actually shooting your own soul dead.
	And people then have much less of a stomach for violence if they view their opponents as human beings like themselves.
	So, oh, this is something you absolutely have to...
	And the media propels this enormously, right?
	The media propels this enormously.
	Every time you see a cop show, there's like a virtuous cop and an evil bad guy.
	And the evil bad guy is completely inhumane and some sort of James, what's this guy's, I can't remember his name, James Woods type villain who's completely relentless and, you know, even when the villain gets shot, he then tries with his last gasp to shoot the cop again who then has to shoot him.
	It's completely relentless when it comes to his evil.
	It can never be turned aside.
	It can never be stopped. You see this kind of stuff.
	I've been watching a couple of Star Treks lately just for funsies.
	You see this on the Voyager stuff where the bad guys are completely relentless and you have to keep shooting them and keep shooting them.
	They don't have any vulnerability or humanity like you do.
	You've just got to keep attacking them until they're pretty much blown into atoms, and then you're safe, right?
	This is the sort of fantasy, which is a similar fantasy that you see in...
	I just read a book called Deception Point by Dan Brown, wherein...
	I won't get into the plot, but it's the same thing you see.
	It's the King Lear motif. You have a bad second in command and a virtuous...
	So the president is good, but the vice president is bad.
	And you see this a little bit with the current administration, particularly with...
	Do with John Stewart's analysis of it, so to speak, right?
	That Cheney emerges from his lair as an evil guy with red eyes, and Bush is just kind of this innocuous, goofy guy.
	And, of course, it's not really the case at all, and it's just people's way of preserving their religious faith, right?
	Because people think that the more power you get, the more corrupt things get.
	But at the very top, like God, has all the power in the world, but is perfectly non-corrupt and perfectly moral.
	So this is how people retain this illusion that people at the top of a power pyramid can remain less corrupt than those below them and so on.
	No, they absolutely had to force these people not to fraternize with the enemy because, boy, if you start to do that, the whole thing comes crumbling down.
	Some of the things you say kind of reminds me of the comic books I used to read when I was growing up, where you have this morality where you know who the bad guys are.
	You know, they're the guys that weren't all the black.
	You know who the good guys are.
	And you have to kill the bad guys in order to stop the evil.
	And that's the only way to resolve disputes.
	Right. No, I had the same...
	Where did you grow up, if you don't mind me asking?
	Oh, I'm sorry? Where did you grow up?
	Oh, like which location?
	Yeah, where geographically?
	Yeah, I grew up in Texas in the 1980s.
	Right, right, okay. So, of course, Texas has a pretty martial culture from that standpoint, and they're pretty proud of their self-defense, and that's, as the guy on the board said, warm Texas hospitality is blowing a hole in anyone who tries to do a home invasion.
	That's sort of the idea, right?
	Yeah, down here we...
	I think I remember reading some psychology thing that said that down here in the south, in the southern part of the states, you kind of have a culture of honor, which is the reason why it tends to be a little more violent down here because, you know, people perceive that some other might violate our honors or more violent.
	Right, and that's honor in the sort of military sense, right, of defending your honor and defending the honor of the helpless, but it's very much around the military sense, right, of never backing down before a potential fight and slights to your honor being just cause for a violent retribution and so on?
	Right, that's correct, yeah.
	Well, of course, and the South has a very strong military culture, and Coulter has a very good article on this.
	And the South contributes a disproportionate number of the military, of military members, both in terms of the leadership and in terms of the rank and file.
	But the South has a very strong martial history.
	Is that right? Is that fairly well understood, or is that just her particular approach?
	I think that sounds correct.
	It might even stem from the War of Northern Aggression, I think.
	I mean, I could be wrong there, but...
	Right, and that's the war. I know that I've been corrected quite sharply, and I think quite rightly too, by a number of southerners who've said that to call it a civil war is a misnomer because it was an attempt to exercise the right of secession, which was guaranteed, right?
	So it was not a civil war, but more like a husband trying to get a wife back who's decided to divorce him, right?
	It's not a marital dispute at that point, right?
	Right. Okay, no, that's very interesting.
	I certainly read the same kind of crazy militaristic comics.
	I remember one that really stuck with me, wherein one guy gets drafted into the military in the Second World War.
	And let's just call him Bob, right?
	Bob, Bob the British draftee from World War II. And he's given these boots to wear.
	They're these big ugly hobnail boots.
	And he finds them really hot and really unpleasant.
	So he says to his commanding officer, I'm not going to wear these shoes because they don't make any sense.
	They're too hot. They're uncomfortable.
	So I'm going to buy a pair of stout walking shoes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	So his commanding officer says, fine, you go get your stout walking shoes and then I have a lesson for you.
	So he goes off to buy his stout walking shoes.
	And then he is told to march for like 18 hours straight with new shoes on, right?
	March round and round. Every time his feet are bleeding and every time he tries to stop, he says, you damn well one of these shoes, you get up and keep walking.
	And of course then his feet are completely mangled and all this and that and the other.
	And then he says, so you see, we have these rules for a reason.
	They don't come out of nowhere, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	So he gives him a rule book of army rules and regulations.
	And then this guy carries his rulebook in his breast pocket during the war, and then, of course, he's in Italy or somewhere, and a sniper takes a bead on him and shoots him, and then the bullet is blocked by the rulebook that was given to him in basic training, and so the rules make sense, and the rules save your life, and if you follow the rules, you will be saved, and everything has a reason.
	Even if you don't understand it, you just have to obey, obey, obey.
	And of course, as a kid, and I put this into my last novel, as a kid it was always kind of confusing to me even then.
	It's like, oh, okay, so if the bullet had been blown by the wind one inch to the left, rules then wouldn't make any sense?
	It wouldn't be something that you need to obey?
	So it just didn't make any real sense to me from that standpoint.
	But you did get these constant, constant, constant messages when you were kids.
	I don't know what it's like these days.
	Maybe if there are any parents on the call, you could tell us a little bit more I don't know.
	Is any of the same stuff kind of going on these days?
	Sorry, I don't watch a whole bunch of children's stuff, but what's going on these days?
	Stefan? This is medical.
	I was just thinking about the subject matter of comics, but also I watch a bit of science fiction.
	Sorry, can you tell me who's talking?
	This is medical. I was just thinking, I may be a little suspicious of the recent television programming, but everything from Eureka on the Sci-Fi channel to SG-1 and a few others are very militaristic in their bent,
	meaning that the government is omnipotent, knows there's evil out there, is combating it for you, will do anything to stop it because it's pure evil and it's going to destroy us if they weren't there to protect us, and they're doing all this secretly behind the scenes.
	Right, and any time there's a leak, it puts people in incredible danger, and the general population doesn't know and shouldn't know, and they don't even...
	We prevent all of these disasters that could be occurring, and we don't get any credit, but we're like the Lone Rangers who don't need credit because we're so dedicated to virtue and truth and defending the ignorant population.
	Is that sort of the general gist?
	Yes, and it seems to be more and more shows are coming out with exactly that bent, and it's kind of...
	I didn't know whether it was just me...
	I was being a little paranoid, but I guess I'm not.
	But having been in connection with governments before, I tend to be a little more paranoid because these ideas are believed on the inside even though there's no reason to believe them.
	People want to feel as if they are justified in the things that they do for these kinds of reasons even though they really don't exist inside the government.
	Right, right. Can you tell me a little bit more about the kind of reasons that you see being communicated in popular culture?
	Yes, I think especially in the high-tech mediums, I'm at a hackers conference right now and they have the federal government here sort of giving talks as sort of a hostile guest at this conference.
	It's one for It's DEFCON, it's for hackers, crackers, phone freaks, sort of technologically out on the edge people.
	And they had the government on a panel filtering questions and giving opinions and sort of trying to reassure the general populist that's here that they're really on our side.
	Right. Right, yeah, the phone rangers, right?
	Yeah, no, absolutely. You can also see this, I think, quite well in a show that I've watched quite a bit of with Christina, which is a fun show, but you wouldn't want to get any sort of moral or political reasonings out of it, which is a show called Alias.
	Which is a fun show, but the general story, and this is the case with just about all of this government stuff, or pro-government stuff, the general story is always the same.
	There's some radical emergency that is so imminent, and of course it's part of just general stuff to do with high attention on any kind of drama show, but something emerges which is so imminent and so disastrous that there's no possibility whatsoever of going through the, quote, proper channels, right?
	So... So, of course, they have to go into black ops with sort of midnight black helicopters flying under the radar, and they never seem to have to have passports or go through customs or anything, so they basically just fly around the world killing people, and they would love to go through the regular channels, but the regular channels are inefficient and slow things down and have security leaks, and they need to act decisively in order to deal with the threat right away.
	And reporters are always the enemy, and there are always leaks from those who are not inside this tight little group of insiders and all this kind of stuff.
	And, of course, if you're not aware of what you're seeing, then you end up with all of this impression that any kind of civilian control over basically murder-at-will kind of black ops groups is inefficient and is going to get a lot of people killed.
	And, of course, this is exactly the last message what you'd ever want to get.
	And, of course, some people have this particular...
	Love for the show 24 as well.
	Somebody says, I love 24.
	I'm horrified by everything the characters do, but I can't turn away.
	And of course, there's no problem with that.
	Of course, it's just entertainment.
	But it is, of course, important to understand what is being said in a repetitive way.
	And it's not because there's any kind of conspiracy.
	It's just kind of inevitable.
	If you did do a show wherein people made a horrible error, let's just say, right, there's this war going on in Iraq, this invasion of Iraq.
	And if you did a show wherein somebody went and invaded another country and did so completely under erroneous or false pretenses, got a whole bunch of people killed, and it turned out to be exactly the wrong thing, then, of course, you couldn't maintain the likability of the protagonist for the viewers, which is pretty important.
	And, of course, Jennifer Garner is pretty enough to never do anything evil, as we all know.
	And the other thing, of course, is that people would immediately attack you because everybody who's into propaganda is very sensitive to counter-propaganda or the opposite opinion, also known as the truth.
	But you would immediately be attacked as trying to smuggle a subterranean anti-war message into a show designed for general consumption.
	So immediately, like it would be painted in fire in the sky, the obviousness of any counter-propaganda, and it would be viewed as the most unfeeling, cold, unpatriotic attack on values, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And of course, all of the rest of the general constant noise, which is pro-state propaganda, continues unabated.
	But at the moment you try and throw something else into the mix or try to counter the general message, everybody gets up in arms and calls you a propagandist without recognizing that everything that is currently going on is also propaganda, right?
	And counter-propaganda, which offends people, merely is an evidence for continual pro-propaganda.
	I was going to say that's the one thing I had noticed that it's purely one way, especially in all of the cop shows.
	I can name all of them where you have the evil police officer who sometimes molds into someone with a heart of gold, as if you can always trust their motives, even when they seem evil on the outside.
	Right. No, that's quite right.
	And the other thing that's very true around cop shows, which we don't have to go into here, but one of the things that always occurs in cop shows is that you generally will see the crime being committed at the beginning.
	So you, as the audience member, knows who's guilty of the crime.
	And what then occurs is that the police...
	We have to...
	They then sort of close in on this person, which you know that they're the bad guy, and they start to close in on this person, and they never sort of get the wrong guy.
	It's always like they get the right guy.
	And the way that they get the right guy is very rarely through specific logic and evidence.
	The way that the cops get the right guy in cop shows is through bullying people with laws, right?
	So you must have seen this about a bajillion times on every cop show you've ever watched where they go to some sort of sleazy nightclub owner and says, do you know where Johnny is?
	And the sleazy nightclub owner says, no, I never heard of Johnny.
	I don't know anybody named John, any Johnny.
	I'm not even carbon-based life form.
	And then they say, oh, yeah?
	Well, all of your liquor license is up to date.
	Do you have permits for X, Y, and Z?
	And is that lap dancing that I see?
	That's not even legal.
	And then they say, oh, OK.
	Yeah, Johnny, he's out back.
	So the cops are always using these ghastly little claustrophobic laws around licensing and liquor licenses and lap dancing licenses and fire permits and safety inspections.
	They're always using these laws.
	To threaten people into revealing information, right?
	You don't even notice it unless you're looking for it.
	It's just so common. And of course, the reason they have to do that is there's some sort of thing that's happening that's so imminent, like the killer's going to strike again, so they can't go through the proper channels.
	Or then they get somebody who's absolutely guilty.
	They get them into an interrogation room, and then they say, look, you have a choice.
	We're either going to charge you with manslaughter, and we're going to make it stick, and your compatriot has already confessed in the other room, Or if you say yes, we'll get you manslaughter and then you'll get out in five years.
	But if you continue to resist us, then you are going to get first degree murder.
	We're going to put you away for life or electrocute you.
	So it's up to you. Five years or life.
	And of course, that's a completely horrifying thing.
	If you don't know that the person's already guilty, because they could just be grabbing anyone and people would then just say, holy crap, okay, I guess I'll take the gamble of five years for sure rather than life or death or being put in an electric chair.
	And of course, this is how a lot of police crimes are sort of quote solved, right?
	They just grab someone. and threaten them with a lesser sentence that they believe they can pull off while at the same time threatening them with a much more harsh sentence which has a lesser chance but a greater set of punishments associated with it and that's how an enormous amount of crimes are sort of quote solved is how an enormous number of innocent people end up going to jail so this kind of stuff you just see in a constant basis and it really gives people an unbelievably inflated sense of how effective police and the CIA are I mean you think of things like the Washington sniper stuff We're good to go.
	That the Soviet Union was about to fall in the late 80s.
	No idea whatsoever.
	Not even a single solitary shred of a clue.
	After having God knows how many moles in the Kremlin and spending God knows how many billions of dollars on black ops and penetration and undercover and decrypting and de-analyzing and following wire.
	They had no clue whatsoever that this thing was about to collapse.
	That's not a number one. And number two is, well, 9-11.
	It's just amazing how people just don't look at the facts, they just look at the media, right?
	And they draw their conclusions from there.
	Tell us about your job, Steph.
	Oh, no, you don't want to hear about my job.
	I can't imagine anything less interesting.
	But if you do want to, if everybody wants to hear about my job, you're certainly welcome to hear about it.
	But let's just see if anybody else wants to add anything to the media bandwagon before we go on.
	The media sucks, enough said.
	MediaSucks and I've said, okay, well, very briefly, my job is I've taken a job as a director in another software company.
	I'm getting a 60% pay hike and ownership, which is not what I have right now.
	I'm very, very excited.
	I start in a couple of weeks.
	My current position, they're making me do my two weeks of separation, which I think is not so...
	It's necessary, but legally I have to provide it, so I'll be sort of, quote, working from home a little bit here.
	So yes, no, it's been quite a thrill, and boy, it actually took a long time.
	I sort of thought, I mean, just by the by, I don't know if you guys experienced this too, I kind of had the idea that...
	As you got older and more experienced and better skills and all this kind of stuff, that new jobs were going to get kind of easier to find.
	But it's really not the case, at least not according to what I found.
	I found that actually because I've become more specialized and looking for rarer kinds of jobs and higher level kinds of jobs… It doesn't actually particularly become a wider playing field when you're looking for jobs.
	It still seems about as hard to find a good new job that works.
	It's about as hard now as it was when I was like 25 or something like that.
	And how long is the commute?
	The commute, which of course I know you're only asking about relative to the podcasting, the commute is a little bit longer.
	So we should be able to get some nice tasty two-a-day, 40-minute podcasts in.
	So, Gerard says, I'll give you a job.
	Zip. So, yes.
	What's your average speed?
	Well, it depends. Of course, on the private roads, it's 120.
	That's not miles an hour.
	That's parsecs per second.
	And on the public roads, it's about minus 4, it would seem.
	So... Yes, the show length, though, should be increasing slightly, but I will also try and work at home sort of one day a week.
	So I don't think that the total amount of minutes, and I know it's been very tough for those who have become completely addicted to the random emanations of the big chatty forehead, that it has been rather tough.
	The only thing that I can say is that it's been even tougher for Christina because I've been podcasting less.
	I've been explaining my thoughts to her more.
	So, of course, she's been very, very keen for me to get back and do more podcasting, but...
	Anyway. Yes, and as far as, sorry, how many listeners do you think you have right now?
	Right now? Like right this very second?
	Well, I don't know, actually, how many listeners I have in terms of separate.
	I would say that at last count, we had about 70,000 show downloads per month.
	Now, of course, that's probably dropped a few with the high fives.
	Quite right. Yeah.
	But I would say that there's no way for me to know right now how many listeners we have currently because, of course, it's constantly changing.
	I will tell you this, though, that on average we get about 300 people listening to Podcast Zero a month.
	Now, I know that Podcast Zero is some gripping crap, but it is not – It's not people going back and re-listening to it.
	So I think that about 300 people will listen to Podcast Zero.
	About 250 people new a month will listen to Podcast One, which is the Stateless Society.
	And then after that, generally, I think they keep up pretty well.
	But then people start kind of dipping around.
	I guess for some reason they seem to be troubled by 360-odd podcasts and feel that if they're going to try and catch up, It's like taking a strong sprint to catch up with the setting sun, so maybe they feel that it's not going to be that possible.
	That's not the end of the world. So they do start dipping around a little bit, and of course at some point I'm going to have to bite the bullet and organize them into some sort of study plan or whatever, and we'll sort of get around to that when...
	Hell freeze is over or I do it full-time.
	So I would say that...
	And of course, the people who have caught up, right?
	It's a constant 70,000 downloads a month.
	The people who have caught up are not downloading hundreds of shows a month because there aren't hundreds of new shows a month, right?
	I guess there's maybe 30 new shows a month.
	So given that we have 70,000 downloads a month, I've got to think that we're up to a couple of thousand listeners overall.
	And we're getting a couple of hundred new ones every month.
	And so I think we have, of course, 182 members on the board right now.
	We lost some when we moved over, I guess, people who'd been in and then not in so much anymore.
	So I think it's a couple of thousand who are listening.
	I've actually got a call into a PR firm as well because I think we have a very interesting story to tell as a podcasting community so that I can start to get this more publicized in the media because I think there's sort of two aspects of the podcast that are interesting or could be a good spin from a media standpoint.
	The first is the sheer indefatigable quantity of the show, right?
	I mean, without a doubt.
	I think this is the most prolific podcast show in that there's 10 to 12 hours a week of podcasts, and that's really quite remarkable and, of course, an incredibly active and growing board.
	So I think that we have a strong case to make as the most prolific podcast community in the known world, and that's sort of one aspect that I think is just kind of interesting.
	And the second aspect is that it really is, I think, about the most highly educated show that's out there and of course this is something to do with me but also quite a lot to do with the general intelligence of everybody who listens to the show which is with the exception of anybody who disagrees with me in any way shape or form the intelligence is very high of the people who listen to the show so that I think is very unusual again that we are throwing terms around like metaphysics and epistemology and we're talking about religious and political and philosophical issues So I think that the intellectual quality of the show is very high,
	and I also think that the quantity of the show is exorbitant to the point of overwhelming.
	So I think from that standpoint, there's actually some very interesting things for people to write about.
	In that it's almost like a post-grad on steroids, a post-grad program on steroids, or like somebody screaming philosophy at you when you're tied up with them in a burlap sack going over Niagara Falls, or something like that.
	And I think also that we do things like dream analysis and that I also read fiction and so on, and we do analysis of art and movies and we do Shakespeare and so on.
	So I think that there is going to be quite a level of interest once we start to get it out into the media.
	And so that's something that I'm working on it as well.
	So that's what...
	I think we can start to get some more listeners through that.
	But I'm certainly very pleased with the way it's been moving forward.
	So I will unmute.
	Steph, when are you going to put a video on YouTube?
	Well, you know, I think that's a very excellent question.
	The first thing that I'm working on, since, of course, it's going to be full frontal nudity, the first thing that I'm doing...
	It's working on my tan and, of course, a fair amount of flesh-colored prosthetics.
	So two or three is sort of what I'm working on.
	So that's fairly important.
	Once I get a tan so that I don't look like a glow boy Michelin man, I think that's going to be the first thing.
	And make sure you wear your Santa hat and nothing else.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	And with the prosthetics, I won't even have to wear it on my head.
	So... That could work out beautifully.
	I am getting round to it.
	I have my webcam.
	I still haven't had it hooked up for a while.
	I'll get round to it. And free domain, quote, freaking your mind hole.
	Absolutely. So make sure you wear socks too.
	Absolutely. Because I can do, with the prosthetics that I'm working on, what I call the tripod, I'll be able to get two socks and the Santa hat around my midriff.
	So... We will absolutely be working on that.
	So, of course, finding a cameraman who won't go blind with that is going to be tricky as well.
	So that's just something we'll get around to.
	I hope next weekend I'll get a chance to do the recording that I want to.
	With that fine introduction, I've opened the mics.
	Anybody who wants to add anything else?
	Has anyone had a chance to have a look at the PowerPoints that are up on the main site or have been posted, which I'm trying to do some sort of descriptions?
	Oh, will Christina be on it?
	I think Christina's going to plan to be not just out of town, but off planet at that point as well.
	Oh dear, oh dear. The quality, you know, it's always such high quality until I just take that one wrong turn and suddenly we lose the family rating on iTunes.
	It's just such a shame. The PowerPoints is coming along well.
	Yeah, I'm going to try.
	I'm going to sort of start with a couple of PowerPoints, just because they're so much easier to do.
	The challenge that I have is at the moment, it's sort of stupid and technical.
	If anyone knows the answer, that'd be great.
	When I put the webcam on, it takes over the sound, and then I've got the webcam sound microphone, which sucks.
	So I actually probably will end up buying some sort of video camera to do it a little bit better and so on.
	Now, has anyone had a chance to play around?
	I guess some people have had a chance to play around with the new board.
	Is there any sort of general feedback people would like to sort of give around that?
	Who's that?
	Can you just repeat that again?
	You're just a little bit quiet. All right, let me just find you here on the...
	Okay, let me just mute everyone except you, and if you'd just like to speak up a little bit, that would be great.
	It saves me from doing having a volume normalizing a little later.
	Go ahead. Right.
	I just wanted to play with a...
	Basically, I haven't seen your boards.
	It's the first time I've heard of your show, or your radio show, and...
	I don't have a link to your boards affair.
	Hello? I'm sorry, was that a question?
	I thought you were just commenting. Can you just repeat that?
	My apologies. Oh, this is like the first time I've heard of your show, and I just don't have the links to the boards.
	Oh, sure. It's freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D. All right.
	Could you type that to me?
	It's actually... Are you in the chat at all?
	It was just put in the chat window?
	Oh, um...
	Are you on the chat? I don't think you are.
	I'm not actually on the chat, though.
	Oh, shocking. Okay.
	Now, I don't know if I can actually send something to you.
	But just do a search for...
	Well, do you have a browser right now open?
	Of course you do, right? You're on the Skype chat, so...
	Just open up your browser...
	And just type in www, of course, Free Domain Radio, D-O-M-A-I-N Radio.
	Okay. Freedom...
	Yeah, Freedom A-I-N Radio.
	I-M-A Radio?
	It's Freedom, F-R-E-E-D-O-M-A-I-N-R-A-D-I-O dot com.
	A-I-N... Radio.com.
	Okay. And it's called Free Domain Radio because Donation Domain Radio just seemed too hard to type.
	Right. And of course, freedom is the main thing.
	Free domain. Or as somebody has said here, Freedom Ein.
	Freedom Ein Rand. Very good.
	Oh, can you just tell me while you're pursuing that, hunting that down, could you just tell me how you came about finding the little corner of intellectual fever we call Freedom Ein Radio?
	Actually, I was just seeking out Skypecast.
	Oh, so you just came across an upcoming one and you saw this one?
	Yeah. Cool.
	And how are we working for you so far?
	Okay. Pretty good.
	I just usually like to listen to people, Chad, and usually like to listen to the radio type.
	Right, right. Well, listen, if you're looking for...
	I think we've got some pretty good intellectual content, so give it a shot.
	And, of course, the boards are very exciting as well.
	Make him listen to the podcast, Steph.
	Oh yeah, sorry, there's a couple of podcasts up there as well.
	Don't try and think of it as your next couple of months going down the sinkhole, but be warned.
	There's a few, I guess you could say.
	Don't worry. I encourage that to myself anyway.
	Absolutely. Well, keep me posted about how you're enjoying them.
	I certainly love to get new perspectives.
	Yeah. And if you don't go in sequence, I'll find out about it and come to your house.
	Okay, fine.
	So it's freedom, A and I? It's freedom.
	Think of this. Think of freedom and then the word main.
	M-A-I-N. Oh, okay.
	So freedomainradiooneword.com.
	All right. I think I know what I did wrong.
	All right. If you come to the sites with the goats and the baby oil, that's not exactly related.
	It's just sort of a side business.
	I'll keep that in mind. I can't seem to get to it.
	Okay, just tell me what your...
	I'm sorry for everyone else, but just in case anybody else has had trouble getting to this, can you just tell me what you typed into your URL window?
	www.freedomf...
	R-E-E-D-O-M D-O-M I guess I can't spell freedom.
	Well, you know, definitely the podcast is something you should listen to then, for sure.
	Did you go to a public school by chance?
	Yeah, I did. Oh, yeah, see, there's another thing, too.
	Well, I'm never a good speller, either.
	Okay, do you know the word domain, like territory, D-O-M-A-I-N? Yeah.
	Okay, just put the word free in front of it.
	Free domain. F-R-E-E-D-O-M-A-I-N. Okay.
	So free domain. Then just keep going with the word radio, which I'm sure you can get even with public school education, and.com.
	All right. And listen, I went to public school too, so this is no diss to you.
	Okay, so what country are you from anyway?
	Canada. Do you know, next, if you can't find it, I'm going to suggest that you search for my name, but I've got a silent X at the end and we'll be here until midnight.
	Now, can somebody, this is Wolf Sender, whoever, I can't remember who's running the chat.
	If you can add Wolf Sender to it and then give him the link, that would probably make a good deal more sense.
	Alright, thank you. I actually found it.
	Oh, you did? Fantastic. Okay, good.
	So, sorry about the forehead. I hope you're wearing sunglasses.
	Oh, yeah.
	So, yeah, there's a...
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, you look rather funny.
	I look rather what? Shiny.
	Rather shiny, absolutely.
	I like to think of it as my brain requires so much protein, I actually have eaten my hair.
	I see. Okay.
	Okay, Addy sent you as a buddy, so if you just approve the buddy request in Skype, then you will get to it.
	But you've got it anyway. So there's a message board thing there.
	You can get to the message board there, and I'm sure you'll have a good time.
	So thanks so much for hanging in there to find out the right thing.
	Okay. So that's where we are.
	Okay. Thank you for bearing with me.
	No, my pleasure. My pleasure.
	I hope you enjoy them. Keep us posted.
	Okay. I'm just going to see if we can find our falsetto singer again.
	Nice. Nice.
	You know, I'm just firing up the bong here, sitting in the velvet beanbag.
	Someone's playing the guitar.
	Absolutely. Absolutely. Alright, so we have now that we're within the last 20 minutes of the end of the show, we've had a large number of new people join.
	I assume that that's because the government way of dividing up the world into time segments is confusing.
	Adi says, can I speak?
	And absolutely, I would say that I've heard you do it before, so I'm sure that you can.
	Would you like to speak now? Just kidding.
	Yeah. Go ahead. Do you hear me?
	Yes. Could you turn your mic down just a little bit?
	Alright, is this better?
	A little bit more? I'm going to keep doing this until we come here.
	I'm going to mute him again. Okay, go ahead.
	So I remember listening to your presentation and watching it a little bit.
	There were a few problems that I have with it.
	I hope it's not just me.
	Sure, go ahead. You essentially say that trees exist, but a forest does not exist.
	People exist, but a crowd does not exist.
	I think we should maybe use a different concept here.
	Not necessarily existence, but being, as in being.
	So we can say that...
	A man is a being, right?
	You are a being, but a group of people are not beings, a group that describes a few individuals, right?
	So, groups don't act, but only individuals act, right?
	Right. So, yeah.
	So, there's some confusion here when you say that a forest does not exist, for instance.
	Let me just fast forward.
	No, I do understand what you're saying, and maybe you're right.
	The only problem is that the word being, I think, is going to be sort of possible to...
	Conscious being, maybe, yeah.
	Right, but it's going to be something that people are going to have a good deal of difficulty.
	I'm not sure that the word being is as objective or as clear as another possibility.
	I'm not saying that we don't need a rewrite, but if we do, I would say that being might not be something that clears things up for a lot of people because being to a Christian would involve the soul and being to an existentialist would involve something and being to somebody else would involve something else.
	So... Is there another, you could say, individual or something like that?
	Yeah, there's also this example.
	You can climb a tree, but you can't climb a forest.
	Yeah, maybe that means a little bit of...
	What's unclear about that?
	I'm sure you understand it, but what do you think other people would find unclear about that?
	I think it's specific to this example.
	You can cut down a forest for instance, but you have to cut down the trees one by one.
	You cannot cut down the concept forest.
	Right. You know, I was originally going to do cut down, but then people would say, I can cut down a forest, and that would sort of be kind of confusing as well.
	Alternatively, this concept idea, so the forest is a concept, right?
	Right. But I'd say that the tree is also a concept.
	Wouldn't you say that?
	I don't, well, yes and no.
	I mean, certainly a tree is an aggregation of cells and atoms, and the nature only cares about, you know, atoms and energy and space between them.
	And so there's no such thing as, quote, a tree.
	In nature, but a tree is a physically discrete entity that can be identified by the senses and aggregated according to direct perceptual data, which is not the case for a forest, right?
	Because a forest is a sort of mental, big, invisible mental net you throw over a whole bunch of trees to aggregate them.
	But the trees themselves do exist as atomic entities, although it is a concept to aggregate them all together.
	But a forest doesn't.
	And of course a tree includes the roots under the ground that you can't see and the seeds that are floating in the wind and the leaves that are falling down.
	And of course a tree is constantly growing and so on.
	So I agree with you that there's a certain amount of conceptual imprecision even associated in the word tree, but it does exist in a way that a forest does not.
	Yeah, the ontology needs to be established, although it's not quite simple, right?
	No, I think you're right, and I think that that introduction is something that I sort of went back and forth a number of times about whether to bring God up or whatever, because of course a lot of people who are anti-state are anti-religion as well, because human beings have a remarkable capacity for inconsistency, but I think that looking at the stuff that I might put on YouTube, I'm going to start with something just a little bit more simple.
	I'd like to start with some basic metaphysics and epistemology like validity of the senses and that kind of stuff and so then build up to those arguments that are a bit more rarefied later on so that there's less capacity for misunderstanding.
	Now, there's always capacity for misunderstanding in philosophy, just as there is in just about any kind of language, because you can continue to demand definitions down to the atomic level, at which point people just want to shoot themselves.
	So people are going to have to go with it to a certain degree.
	And of course, you're never going to convince anybody who's directly opposed to these kinds of ideas, because you can always say, well, that's just imprecise, or that doesn't work, or you've assumed this.
	But of course, all language is based on assumptions and is based on certain things which we have to take for granted.
	So I think that I'd like to make it a little bit easier for people to sort of climb this metaphorical tree, so to speak, and give them a few branches lower down.
	And I think that may be what you mean.
	I like in particular your take on this, so I can quote you.
	Who gave me a ticket yesterday?
	And it was just some guy.
	Who decided when to go to work?
	Just some guy. It's not a nation.
	It's always an individual or individuals acting.
	And you never see a nation acting, right?
	You always see individuals and you can always identify individuals.
	Right, and they're just some person like you, right?
	And I think what I've... What I found as well is that I used to use the term uniform, but uniform has a kind of ring to it or an emotional connotation to it for a lot of people, and I've actually found that costume is a better term for it because, of course, a soldier is just a guy.
	He's in costume. His uniform is too powerful, and the costume is much more accurate because it has a kind of theatricality to it.
	And, of course, the soldier is a theatrical agent, just a little bit more murderous than most.
	And, of course, I find that the word costume, which is kind of inflammatory, because, of course, it is a disrespectful term relative to the respect that's accorded to the term uniform.
	But I think that it is helpful to kind of jolt people into recognizing that it is just a kind of brutal theater.
	Niels, godlike voice says...
	Now, the great thing is that Niels did not specify male godlike voice.
	So, Christina, would you mind reading this as a female god or a goddess?
	God-like voice says, maybe an interesting aspect of the conceptualization of groups is that the groups get properties that the individuals lack, and not very maybe an interesting aspect of the conceptualization of groups is that Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Maybe it's impossible for you to be anything other than a goddess.
	Anyway, so maybe an interesting aspect of the conceptualization of groups is that the groups get properties that the individuals lack.
	Absolutely, totally and precisely.
	Concepts, of course, are only valid to the degree with which they are accurately derived from instances.
	And so, for instance, a group called the government has properties and rights.
	The individuals who inhabit this imaginary group called the government have properties and rights that no other human being has, like the right to raise taxes and start wars and all this kind of stuff.
	So, without a doubt, that is an example of how we consider aggregations to have...
	Sorry, somebody said, Jared said, I'm going to poke someone.
	And Greg says, hey, this ain't a porn site.
	Greg obviously has not stayed on the show past 6 o'clock where it's Spankfest Inferno 9000.
	But that's okay, Greg.
	You're definitely invited today.
	So we're unmuted.
	If anybody wants to consider maybe grabbing this back to the high road, feel free to go ahead.
	Oh, everybody's just checking their schedule to see if they're busy after 6, I think.
	The whole click of this concept can remind me of the classical argument.
	I think this is quoted from Lincoln saying, government can do for man what man cannot do for himself.
	Which is absurd when you break it down because, you know, these people call themselves government.
	If they step outside that label, I think I do, and I would certainly paraphrase that and agree with our good friend Lincoln, or at least his ghost, to say that government certainly can do for human beings what human beings cannot do for themselves.
	For instance, it's very difficult for me to rob myself It's also very difficult for me to throw myself in a rape room for possessing a bag of vegetables, pot or whatever.
	It's very hard for me to get voluntarily just on my own people angry enough to come over and bomb myself.
	It's very hard for me to run up debts for my children to pay.
	So the government is very, very...
	It's very hard for people to do for themselves what the government does to them.
	And that is...
	Precisely why we shouldn't have a government at all because none of these things are the things that we want.
	Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good way to turn it around.
	Of course, when the state is, quote, set, they, of course, need all the good things that you supposedly can't do for yourself.
	But, you know, the free market can anyway.
	Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.
	I hope other people are hearing that whispered voice.
	Otherwise, it's time to up my medication again.
	But that's quite true.
	I think individuals, like if you look at something like the Second World War, I think it would be very hard to firebomb yourself from 40,000 feet, right?
	It would be very hard to, if you were a Japanese citizen, it would be very hard to synthesize an atomic bomb and drop it on your own city, right?
	Because it would be hard to be in the plane and also down on the ground unless you're very tall, which Japanese people aren't.
	So... My mama says I'm special.
	You know, special is another one of these words that can be taken any number of ways.
	That's a very, very special child you have there.
	It means touched by God, which also means vaguely lunatic and dysfunctional.
	All right. Is there anyone else who wants to add anything before we tie up for the weekend?
	Apples? Tickle Me Steph.
	The Tickle Me Steph doll is coming out, actually.
	What happens is you just even think about tickling it, and it launches into a nine-hour podcast.
	So, of course, we're still trying to figure out the best way to...
	Greg! Greg, you had a topic.
	Is that past tense? Like, if we could rewind, you would insert it?
	Steph, can you say the cheese is in the bag?
	Sadly, no. Go ahead.
	Well, I'm guessing it's going to be kind of a lengthy discussion, so I'll probably wait until next week.
	Do you want to suggest it as food for thought for people to consider for next week?
	Yeah, sure. In your podcast on You Are Your Own Proof?
	Yes, the dangerous one.
	Yes. You brought up an instance where Christina had trouble speaking up in a large group, even though she felt like she should.
	Didn't out of fear?
	Yes. And you used that as an example to say that that was the right thing to do because you should obey your fear and that sort of thing.
	I just wanted to take issue with that whole idea.
	Now I'm afraid. No, you're absolutely right.
	It's an interesting question and I wasn't expecting to nail it in one podcast.
	So yes, absolutely, let's bring it up.
	It's a complicated topic.
	I was wary about podcasting on it because, of course, it could be perceived as licensed for megalomania, which I certainly don't need.
	I actually was licensed about two years ago.
	But yeah, let's definitely bring that up next week.
	I think that's an excellent, excellent question.
	The degree to which when you're in a social situation, And you want to talk about a value that you have around freedom or something like that.
	Greg, do you remember the number for that?
	We've just had somebody ask which podcast was that, 355 or something like that?
	356. My God, that's just chilling anyway.
	But no, the question is, to what degree do you follow through?
	If you're at a dinner party and somebody starts talking about how great the war is, and you feel really nervous about bringing it up as a topic, do you do it or not?
	And I think that Cowardly Steph says not so much.
	Not so Cowardly Greg might say so much.
	So let's definitely bring that up next week.
	I think that's definitely a topic for well-worthy of chatting about and will be quite involved.
	So let's definitely give that.
	You are your own proof generally is the idea that you should trust your instincts.
	You don't need to find external validation when your instincts are telling you or your gut level, your feelings are telling you something.
	In terms of relationships, I don't mean in terms of the speed of gravity or anything like that, but when it comes to interpersonal relationships, the only proof that you need is your own instincts, and that doesn't give you license to attack or be abusive to anyone, but it does mean that you already have a judgment that you need to understand, and layering one more judgments over and above the ones that you're feeling, which your feelings are communicating to you, It's usually counterproductive and ends up just with a kind of paralysis.
	So we are going to, I guess, soon have more podcasts than McDonald's has.
	Steph will soon have more podcasts than McDonald's has people served.
	Yes, but I don't think I'm going to get sued for fake podcasting because remember that guy who sued McDonald's thinking that there wasn't enough meat on the planet to make all the burgers?
	So for sure. Now I'm going to...
	All right. I am going to say, in a smooth and sexy voice, a phrase that has been requested by a listener, which I'm sure is going to be mixed together into some horrendously self-incriminating MP3. But, Jared, for you, baby, the cheese is in the bag.
	Alright, there you go. You can put that together in whatever rap monstrosity you're creating and post it on the boards.
	So, does anybody else have anything they want to add?
	Or should we shut ourselves down for the week and come back in next week?
	Good to go. Okay, well thanks everybody for listening.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	Thanks for those. Thanks for those who've donated.
	Feel free to sign up for those monthly $17 a month donations, which will help me get out of this working for a living grind and get me to actually do some research, which would be shocking and really much against the principles that we hold dear at Free Domain Radio.
	But thanks so much.
	I look forward to seeing you on the boards.
	And that's it.
	Okay, take care. All the best, everybody.
	Thanks. Bye. Bye.
	Bye. I hope that that's applause.

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