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Dec. 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:16
542 Bomb. James Bomb
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Good evening, everybody. How are you doing?
It's Steph. I hope you're doing well.
It's 6 o'clock on December the 4th, 2006.
A shockingly long workday.
I'm putting some extra hours in.
I have a rather large marketing plan to develop, and I've never developed anything quite this comprehensive before with such a large budget.
So it's a little bit of the midnight oil for old StephBot.
So I wanted to chat today.
I saw a post on the board at lunch today, and it was about Casino Royale, the new Bond film, and how Bond was portrayed as a sadistic, cold-blooded and how Bond was portrayed as a sadistic, cold-blooded killer on the one hand, or at least this was sort of one opinion.
And on the other hand, Bond was a hard-nosed Avenger of Justice who was only killing people who were doing bad things.
And yes, he's a little cold, but what you expect from a righteous hitman and so on.
And this is quite an interesting dichotomy and something which I think can only really come out of looking at the problem of criminality and the problem of detection and of proof and disproof with the media in mind and not sort of with reality in mind.
There was a movie called Twelve Angry Men or something like that.
Which was about people who thought that a guy was guilty and came to the absolute and total conclusion that he was guilty.
It was Henry Fonda, I think it was.
And they then, through a process of elimination, and because there's one guy who is really...
Henry Fonda plays a guy who's really hanging in there and trying to show people that what they think is the case is not necessarily the case, and so on.
That he ends up convincing them and turning it around, and they end up saving...
This guy from going to jail or going to the electric chair or something.
And I won't sort of give any more of it away, but it's definitely worth having a look at if you get a chance.
Because what you don't see a whole lot of, you do see it in some of the legal courtroom dramas, but what you don't see it in the sort of bang-em-up dramas, in the blood-and-guts dramas, you don't really see this whole issue that nobody knows.
That nobody knows. And, of course, there's forensic stuff that is just completely non-realistic.
What was it? I read somewhere there was a show, I think it was Medium or something recently, where they were able to recreate a conversation because of vibrations in a clay pot.
You might as well go to Alias for your spyware or the bat belt for your utilities.
But this idea that there's knowledge about crime, knowledge about evil, that is disseminatable from an authority to the people who go out and pull the triggers, and that those in authority would never use those who pull the triggers unwisely or unjustly, or for their own aggrandizement and so on, is completely ridiculous, right?
And the only place you can get this idea from is from the media.
So I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about that because I think it is an interesting and important thing to understand just how much our perceptions of these kinds of things are shaped by the media.
And I've talked about this briefly before, but I'll do new references.
How's that? We'll call it a new topic.
Now, the fundamental and central question that occurs in movies, right, is that you see the bad guy doing bad things, and then the good guy comes crashing in through the window, and he engages in a terrific and nonsensical battle with the bad guy, and then kills him in some gruesome manner, usually in self-defense, and usually he disables him, says he's going to call the cops, and then the bad guy pulls out a gun, and then they blow the bad guy away, and so on, right?
And the bad guy's obviously just Mad and suicidal and so on.
This, of course, is always quite fascinating, and you see very often that the bad guy is seen by the good guy doing the bad thing, or you see the bad guy doing the bad thing, and then he's captured on film, or he's seen, or he's known of somehow, and then this information is without error, and without any conceivable lack of clarity, is then transferred over to the good guy who goes and kills him, like the hitman, the Bond, the 00, whoever.
And this, of course, is complete nonsense.
And I'll just sort of point out some of the obvious fallacies of all of this.
And you may, just before I forget, you may want to check out, in fact, I would strongly suggest checking out the movie Memento, M-E-M-E-N-T-O, which I think speaks to this a whole lot more, believably, than other sorts of dramas and so on.
So... The way that we are trained to sympathize with the use of violence, it's the sort of the Charles Bronson slash death wish slash God, I just dated myself terribly, didn't I, kind of approach where you have a crusty, noble, good guy, and then some unbelievably hellacious thing occurs to his family, right?
This is the black guy in Lethal Weapon and so on.
Some of his You know, family is wiped out in some murderous thing.
And you see the bad guys, right?
You see the bad guys who do it.
And then you sort of follow the bad guys throughout the whole process of the movie, right?
So there's no doubt whatsoever.
You have down to the, you know, crag on every bad guy's face, the sneer, the scar, the, you know, the shaven head, the smoking, whatever he's got that's his mark of being a bad guy.
You see this all the way through the movie, and then it's just a game of cat and mouse, and the bad guy's trying to get away from the good guy and trying to misdirect and so on, and the good guy's closing in, and there's never any doubt about whether or not the good guy is justly blowing away the bad guy at the end, right? But, of course, this is all complete nonsense when it comes to sort of real-world law enforcement and war as well, right?
I mean, not to forget our good old friends, the Project for a New American Century, who were very keen on having everyone believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, went and blew a couple of hundred thousand people away, caused a hundred thousand a month to flee, and lo and behold,
they got it all wrong. Because in the movies, you would see Saddam Hussein on the phone ordering the enriched uranium and yellow cake, and you would see him, you know, he would stride from his office through a secret door, and then there'd be one of those massive moonraker kinds of evil factories,
which was so well parodied at one point in The Simpsons, where, you know, everyone is in sort of silver catsuits or jumpsuits, and they're all putting together rockets and all this kind of stuff.
So you would see that, and then there wouldn't be any doubt, but of course you don't get that.
There's the fog of war, as it's generally called, or just basically the fact that nobody has a clue.
So in this sort of Charles, we'll call him Chuck, the Charles Bronson scenario, right?
So Chuck comes home and his family's been blown away, and he has no idea what's going on.
He has no idea what's going on. I remember reading a book, and maybe someone can remind me what it is.
This I read like 20 years ago.
Where some guy, I think it was a military guy, his wife and kids were killed and he said it was four hippies who came through and they thought it was him but they couldn't prove it and this and that and the other.
And nobody knows, right?
There's no recreation, there's no time machine, there's no camera that captures these bad things actually occurring.
So Chuck comes home and his family's been blown away, right?
So what happens?
Well, he has this mad desire for vengeance, right?
So he hires a PI, and maybe the PI finds someone, and maybe he doesn't, right?
The PO goes and asks, hey, did you know anyone who blew away Chuck's family?
And the local scum guy is going to say, hey, you know, I really disliked Bobby the Knife for quite some time, so I'm going to tell this guy that Bobby the Knife blew away Chuck's family.
That way Chuck or this PI or someone is going to go and kill Bobby the Knife.
And so basically, the guy who's willing to just kill based on information always gets the wrong information.
He then becomes a loaded gun that you can point without risk of criminal prosecution or with almost no risk of criminal prosecution at your enemy, right?
This is what happens.
So when you start to dig in and try and find out who did what, right, there's sort of two things that occur.
one is there's either some sort of incursion into the underworld, waving around a badge to try and frighten people through threatening them that they've broken some obscure regulation to try and frighten them into complying or giving up with whoever they say is the issue, or whoever they say was the perpetrator. waving around a badge to try and frighten people through Well, of course, all they're going to say is, hey, who do I know who doesn't have an alibi?
I'll just say that guy to get the cops off my back.
And, you know, this hearsay, right, it's not evidence, right?
I've heard that it was so-and-so.
I mean, this is all nonsense, right?
So you're just going to get the people off your back.
This occurs all the time in criminal trials, particularly those involving drugs, right?
Because what happens is they catch some low-ranking runner or someone in the drug ring.
And they put the squeeze on him, right?
So they say, you know, we can throw you in jail for 20 years, but we'll reduce it to two years probation if you give us a list of five people who are more senior in the organization.
This is a complete shakedown.
Now, what is this guy going to do?
He's going to do what any sane human being is going to do.
He's going to say, well, you know, sucks to be them.
I'm just going to hand over the names of people that I know.
And who, you know, maybe I've seen them, maybe they're part of the drug deal, maybe they're not.
I don't know, but I'm sure as hell not going to jail for 20 years.
If I can get offered two years probation, that's what I'm going to do.
So then this poor schmuck just hands over the names of five people, cuts a deal with the DA or whoever, and then the police go storm the houses of these five people and continue doing the same thing until pretty much everyone except you and I end up in jail.
And this is sort of how this is kind of done, right?
I mean, are they going to find any possible violations on the people whose doors they break down?
Well, of course, right? Can they get a search warrant?
Well, of course, right? These people have been fingered by somebody in the drug game, right?
So... This kind of stuff, no complainants, putting the squeeze on people, threatening them with insane sentences if they don't cooperate.
And if they do cooperate, then just, you know, giving them some reduced sentence and then going and putting the squeeze on other people.
This is how cops keep their numbers up, right?
This is how cops get their quota.
And it's a whole lot easier than doing, you know, difficult police investigations.
Just grab some guy and put the squeeze on him.
With trumped-up charges.
This is sort of the same thing that occurred at these sort of Stalin-esque show trials, these kangaroo quads.
You just find someone who's willing to squeal, and then you take that as gospel, and you then threaten more people.
And this is how you get crime solved, right?
It's sort of in the modern, insane era of abusive law enforcement.
You just threaten people with insane sentences, and then you say, cop a plea bargain, right?
I mean, that's the only way to work.
You can take 20 years, maybe, and we've got three police officers to testify against you, and we've got witnesses, and we've got evidence, and this and that.
So we're going to convict you for sure, and you get 20 years, or you get two years probation if you plead guilty.
Lo and behold, the poor schmuck ends up having to plead guilty, and he's not guilty.
He probably isn't. Maybe he is, but he's certainly not going to risk a trial.
Because a trial is a railroad which he doesn't know much about, and of course his own defense, assuming it's a state-appointed defender, the state-appointed defense, what is he going to prefer?
Is he going to prefer a long, complicated, difficult trial where he's going to have to do a whole lot of work when he's already overburdened, or is he going to advise his client to cop a plea And then, sorry, plea bargain or to admit to a lesser sentence and then he can move on with his day.
Well, it's not too hard to figure out what happens at this kind of law enforcement, right?
You get enormous numbers of low sentence or no sentence stuff handed out.
You get lots of convictions and everybody thinks that the streets are being cleaned up and it's not the case at all.
All that happens in general is that people end up getting rendered unfit for employment.
And so, again, that just sort of adds more problems.
You have to report that, I think, if you have some particular kinds of cases on your rap sheet and you go for a job or whatever.
Now, the other thing, of course, that occurs is that, you know, there's a lot of people who operate sort of without any real papers or if the papers are forged or whatever in this sort of underworld.
And so if I say, I'm Chuck, and I say, who blew away my family?
And they just say, you know, it's this guy.
I have no way of knowing if he did or didn't.
I'm just relying on the interests of those who, you know, I'm either going to pay them, right, in which case they're going to just give me up a name to get the money, or I'm not going to pay them, in which case, why would they have any interest in destabilizing situations by having me run around with a gun?
Well, the only reason they would do it is to get rid of some competitor or something like that, so...
In the same way, of course, if you are a secret agent, it just gets even more ridiculous.
I remember reading some...
Spycatcher, I think was the name of the book.
I only read about half of it because it got too silly and repetitive for words.
But the amount of nonsense that they went through getting absolutely nowhere in order to try and garner intelligence by borrowing under the Soviet embassy in London and trying to do this and that and the other.
I mean, it's all the purest nonsense.
It's completely ridiculous. It's completely ridiculous stuff.
And the information that they get, right?
So let's say you did manage to sort of drill under the Soviet embassy.
And find out things that they were saying.
Well, of course, the real question with intelligence is, do they know that we're listening, right?
This is a sort of mad thing, right?
Do they know that we're listening?
So you burrow under the Soviet embassy in the Cold War and you stick your microphone up the sewage grate or something like that or up the urinal.
And then you start listening like crazy, right?
And... Of course, 99 times out of 100, nothing is going on.
Well, I shouldn't say that, but he said a lot of times nothing's going on, or they would just wall over.
Or what they would do is they would realize that they were being listened to, and they would start to feed false information, right?
I mean, the Russians. Again, it's all perfectly predictable and there's just no way that you can figure this kind of stuff out with any degree of accuracy.
Intelligence is just a fool's game, right, from that standpoint.
I mean, there's good intelligence and bad intelligence.
I mean, it's all nonsense because you're out there spreading money, dealing with untrustworthy people, Without being above the board, there's no court.
The accused don't get a chance to face their accusers down in court and cross-examine them and establish credibility.
And there's no sort of open, above-board and transparent process for sifting out Vengeance from being bribed for other nefarious motivations to just lying for the hell of it.
And so that's sort of one thing.
Chuck goes into the underworld with his badge or stolen badge or with his PI friend and starts following the maze of the underworld connections to get what he wants and has to make unholy trades with people and so on.
And then he finds one of the henchmen, right?
So at the beginning of the movie, you see the bad guy who killed Chuck's family.
And then he finds a henchman, right?
And the henchman is always played by one of these weasel-faced actors, you know, one of the Tim Roth type of actors or the guy from Fargo.
I can't remember his name. But he always has one of these kinds of actors, and it's always like, you know, screw you, copper, I'm not telling you nothing!
It's always this insane defiance, you know, and spitting on people, and I'll take my secret to the grave, just to make them perfectly hateful, right?
I mean, what this kind of propagandistic nonsense is trying to do is to whip you up into a murder frenzy, right?
I mean, it's exactly the same as the Ku Klux Klan member we were chatting about the other day, A couple of days ago.
More than a few days ago. Who's inciting the rioters to string you up as a black man or whatever.
And so it's just propagandistic nonsense that's designed to get you all hopped up on bloodlust and by portraying people as so evil in this Goldstein kind of way from 1984.
I think it's Goldstein. Emmanuel Goldstein.
That is anti-Semitic or anti-black or anti-foreigner or anti-Mexican or, you know, whatever.
They get you whipped into a frenzy, right?
And there's lots of great phraseologies and caricatures that you can use to whip yourself into a bloodlust.
And so then Chuck is standing over the henchman of the guy who killed his, and the henchman's tied down, and there's a swinging light bulb, and the henchman is being roughed up, and he's spitting, and he's not saying anything, and he's sneering, and he's making all this nonsense.
Stuff that never happens under torture.
I mean, stuff that never. In torture, people just wet themselves and give in, right?
They just wet themselves and give in.
That's just a universal...
I mean, some people will hold out a little bit longer, but, you know, when it comes to the endless pain and the threat of being killed, people don't really last very long and just read a little bit of the Gulag Apicalago for this kind of stuff.
But, you know, the good guy is always driven to desperate measures by the bad guy and the bad guy spitting at him.
And, you know, when he says, lean in and I'll tell you who killed your family, right?
And then the guy leans in and he says, fuck you, come up.
It's always this kind of nonsense, right?
I mean, this is not how people act under torture, right?
I don't think there was a whole lot of that kind of stuff going on in Abu Ghraib.
That's just a way of raising your bloodlust, right?
It's a way of implanting the seeds of evil in your heart by getting you to want people dead and to cheer on those who are slaughtering them.
And so then the great question arises, you know, do we torture or do we not torture, right?
And this, of course, is Alan Dershowitz's ticking bomb nonsense, right?
That if there's a ticking bomb somewhere in the world and you've got somebody who knows where it is, are you allowed to torture them and so on?
And it's all pure nonsense, of course, because you don't know that they know where it is.
You have absolutely no knowledge that is direct of what goes on in another human being's mind.
And so all that's happened is somebody has told you that this guy knows where the bomb is, right?
So, of course, it is the willingness to torture in sort of, quote, extremities that has probably led to this bomb being planted in retaliation for a prior torture in the first place.
But this ticking bomb, it's just a nonsense kind of Israeli defense, right?
Like, well, in a ticking bomb, do we get to torture?
Yes! Ah, let's torture away then!
Thus ensuring a world full of ticking bombs and useless torture.
Because torture is not quality information, right?
Your sodium pentothal plus a lie detector test maybe will get you somewhere, but you're still not going to have any kind of conclusive results, right?
There is no conclusive results, even in the sort of situation of cross-examination and evidence and so on.
It's going to all be falsified and so on.
So this question of do I torture or do I not torture and this kind of stuff goes on where you start cutting off fingers or you start burning with cigarettes or you start lopping off ears and this kind of stuff.
And then at some point the evil guy breaks down and this all brings an ecstatic rush of savage homosexual glee to the viewers of this kind of stuff because it's like, aha, now we finally have the truth!
About who killed Chuck's family and we're going to go and kill the guy who killed Chuck's family and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you sort of notice that this is never just like a robbery gone wrong.
Like it's always a drug dealer or it's always, it turns out to be some vast political conspiracy or something like that.
It's never just sort of a simple crime, like an accident, right?
Like a guy was just robbing the place and The kids happened to stumble upon him and he killed them and then the mom started screaming and dialing and he killed her.
Never sort of a panicked robbery gone wrong, right?
There's always some evil overlord kind of thing going on where there's massive drug dealers and so on, right?
I mean, that's always the case. A, you have to...
You have to raise the stakes and B, you kind of have to provide a criminal who is, you know, just so completely, totally and loathsomely evil that we cheer on his murder, right?
Despite the fact that Chuck, in reality, has no idea who killed his family, right?
Because if he did... Assuming that this is in a status kind of film, as they always are.
If he did, he'd just go to the cops with all the evidence and the videotapes and say, you deal with it, and there probably would be some amount of dealing with it unless they got bought off or something.
Or, you know, the guy goes to the cops, and the cops say, well, we don't have enough to go on, and they don't lift a finger, so then he's driven to take the law into his own hands, as if the cops aren't taking the law into their own hands, as if there's such a thing as the law these days.
But anyway... So that question of, do I torture, do I not torture, ends up always in the affirmative, right?
Always in the affirmative, right?
They never torture someone and find out that he's just some poor schmo that some idiot told them to go and told him, knew everything about the murder of Chuck's family.
That's never the case, right?
It never happens that way. Because that's really the reality of the situation, right?
I mean, if you look at something like Abu Ghraib, well, they drag all of these poor Iraqis off the streets.
These Iraqis know nothing, like 95% of them never knew anything.
They just get tortured and they start giving up names and they think they're achieving something because they go and get the new guys whose names the tortured guy gave up and they start torturing them.
And then it's like, wow, you know, everyone is Al-Qaeda.
Everyone is an insurgent.
And what happens, of course, is that the cause and effect gets a little bit lost on the people who are torturing, right?
Because it's the ticking bomb thing, right?
And once you accept torture, then you guarantee a future of endless ticking bombs and escalating torture, followed by more ticking bombs, followed by more torture, followed by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
There's no question of that, right?
And also, people don't really understand, as we saw recently on the board, certain aspects of the passive-aggressive personality that People will get you to lash out in a violent manner by provoking you, and then your true nature, in some ways, if it's evil to begin with, is going to be pretty openly revealed.
So if you engage rather than disengage, and start screaming matches with other people, then obviously the moral distinction between the good guy and the bad guy gets blurred.
America kills a whole bunch of Muslims, and then the Muslims kill a whole bunch of Americans, and then the Americans kill a whole bunch of Muslims, and next round will go to the Muslims, and it just keeps escalating and increasing, right?
And that's the inevitable escalation of violence.
It's the same principle that occurs with the state.
Violence increases or decreases.
It is praised and excused or attacked and eliminated.
It is never stable.
It never stays where it was last week or last night or yesterday or the day before.
Oh, let me just continue going through another couple of day scenarios in case you don't get the idea of the past as a whole.
I do apologize. Oh, I'm so sorry.
So then, Chuck finishes off the guy he's torturing.
This is always done in a very convenient way that absolves Chuck of all responsibility for killing the bad guy who he's torturing.
Because everybody kind of recognizes that If Chuck leaves the tortured guy alive, then the tortured guy now is going to come and kill Chuck, right?
Based on the very same principle that Chuck is using to go and avenge his family, vengeance for harm done, and of course everyone recognizes that Chuck is not going to be in a good situation if he lets the tortured guy live.
So what happens is the tortured guy grabs a gun or the tortured guy, you know, I don't know, bleeds incorrectly on his linens or something or impolitely on his linens and Chuck then, you know, or tries to make a break, get away or tries to bite his ear off or something and Chuck has to kill him, right? And there's a pleasant kind of closure, right?
Because what's happened is you've got some scuzzy guy to begin with Steve Buscemi.
That's who I was thinking. He's a scuzzy-looking guy to begin with.
He's a very good actor, by the way.
He's a scuzzy-looking guy to begin with.
Then he gets all covered in blood and mucus, and it's all kind of disgusting.
And then, you know, he's shot because he does something fundamentally horrible and evil at the end of being tortured.
And then everyone is kind of relieved that this messy, ugly, broken-up, bloody, tooth-hanging-out kind of mess of a human being is killed, right?
There's a relief in that. And again, that's part of the dehumanization of the...
Of the whole process. And so then it turns out that the guy was telling the truth and Chuck confronts the bad guy.
There's another big fight and the bad guy is still full of spitting defiance and so on, right?
And it's all kind of funny, right?
And then the...
My name is Inigo Montoya.
You killed my father. Prepare to die.
It's that same kind of thing.
And then, of course, he staggers out into the light, and he's bloody, and he's bruised, and he's done that.
Bruce Willis... Nobody does beat up quite like Bruce Willis did when he was younger.
I mean, that really wasn't... It was an art form of progressive decreptitude.
But then he sort of staggers out into the light, and he's weary, and he's got that sort of Marlon Brando at the end of onto the waterfront, kind of beaten up, bloody but unbowed kind of thing, and everything is supposed to have been set right, and that, of course, is... The idea behind these kinds of death cult vengeance flicks, right?
You provoke hatred.
You know that what the man is doing is just and you know that he's not being manipulated in his pursuit of the people who killed his family.
You know that he's closing in.
You know that everything that he's doing is accurate and true and virtuous and valid and validated based on the fact that you actually saw the murderers murder the family and this and that and the other.
And they're all You know, irredeemably scuzzy and evil and bad and so on, right?
None of them come from really horribly abusive backgrounds.
None of them panicked and did stupid things.
And again, I'm not saying there's no evil in the world, but, you know, it's usually a little bit more shaded and nuanced than it's generally portrayed.
What was it, the Lethal Weapon 3, I think, or 2, the guy was South African, so that made it even better, right?
That was like, oh my god, and he might be into apartheid.
And so that just closed the loop, right?
There's a great line in Air Force One.
Gary Oldman says to Harrison Ford, I should get out more and not watch as many movies.
No, he doesn't say that, although he should.
No, that was me. He says, Harrison Ford says to, I think it's Gary Oldman, you are a terrorist, because I think he's an Eastern European terrorist.
And Gary Oldman says, this is of course long before the Iraq war, Gary Oldman says, I'm a terrorist, you go to war for the sake of a few pennies on a barrel of oil.
And you call me a terrorist, right?
And you kind of just wish that, and you get these kinds of things.
There was a... Gosh, a movie with George C. Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne plays the devil and has this great speech about how every time anything good happens, the Lord is praised.
Anytime anything bad has happened, he shifts the blame to me or claims that he works in mysterious ways.
It's perfect. It's a perfect situation.
And you get these kinds of rational...
Like, you can speak the truth in some ways as long as you put it in an evil enough character, right?
So, you know, the Gary Oldman character speaks the truth about the American president and his relationship to terrorism, and then, of course, he, I don't know, goes and stabs a kid or something.
I can't remember what he does, but then he's like, ah, I'm evil, so you don't have to take what I'm saying seriously, so...
You just don't get to see those alternate viewpoints.
You don't get to see your own dark side through the eyes of others.
Your dark side is entirely projected onto these other people and then you kill them thinking that you're doing something to manage or control your dark side when that's not what you're doing at all, of course.
All that you're doing in the real world is you are turning yourself evil.
And again, don't get me wrong.
It's not self-defense. I'm just talking about these kinds of movies or these kinds of approaches.
So nobody has a clue who commits crimes.
That's the most fundamental thing to understand.
Nobody has a clue who commits crimes.
And you can never establish for certainty, I mean almost never, I mean functionally never, establish for certainty who committed a crime and so on.
And so it's a complicated, difficult, challenging business.
And some courtroom dramas get this quite well.
There's lots of complicated and conflicting motives.
Boston Legal does this quite well, some of James Spader's magnificent speeches, which he delivers beautifully.
You do get a sense of the complicated nature of these kinds of back and forths that occur when you're trying to figure out who's guilty.
So back to James Bond.
Well, he's just a programmed hitman, right?
So they say, oh, this guy is a bad guy, Mr.
Bond. And he's like, great, I'll go and, you know, shiv him in the side and then chase him through a construction site and then blow up him and all his friends.
And what does James Bond know?
Well, all he knows is that somebody told him.
This is a bad guy.
And how do they know that it's a bad guy?
Well, because somebody told them.
Somebody in the underworld, like somebody told them that he's a bad guy.
And how trustworthy is that source, and what motives did that source have, and what profit motive could there be, and what vengeance could that person be bringing about, and so on.
Well, who knows, right? There's just never any way to know.
This is another reason why things like the drug war and so on, and even to some degree things like public housing and welfare, completely corrupt law enforcement, right?
I mean, law enforcement is a difficult enough job to begin with.
That's why it should never be left to the government because it's got a lot of subtlety and it needs both restraint and decisiveness.
There's lots of complicated stuff to do with law enforcement.
The government should never have anything to do with it in any way, shape or form.
But when you throw in things like the drug war and public housing and welfare and asset forfeiture and seizures and all this kind of stuff, right?
It just becomes a complete mess.
Prostitution and gambling and the mafia and so on.
It's just a complete mess.
Everybody gets completely screwed up in it, right?
As they say in Prison Break, they say the...
The guards are just prisoners, but the only difference is that you've got a uniform on, right?
And there's another show, I'm not going to do a full thing on it, but it's just interesting to see, that this is another show wherein the government uses the justice, sort of quote, justice system, To get people killed that it once killed, right? It offloads the execution to others, right?
They're manufacturing evidence and so on.
And this is the same sort of thing that can occur, right?
You see this occurring in the House this season as well.
This isn't going to mean much in 100 years, but hey, we'll talk as contemporaries now.
But you see that House has offended a cop.
And so now this cop is just out to get him, right?
And, yeah, I mean, we won't sort of get into whether he should be taking that much Vicodin and driving or whatever, right?
But, of course, pain management is a very challenging topic these days for a lot of people.
So... The issue is that it's just so horribly open to abuse and so horribly open to people just throwing their weight around.
And, of course, everyone gets frightened of cops when the laws are ill-defined and when cops can just go on a vendetta.
I mean, any cop could search my car and put some cocaine in it and say he found it and testify to that, and his other cop friend would testify to it.
There's no complainant, right?
I mean, nobody's bringing charges forward.
I mean, if I go and stab a guy, he's going to press charges against me.
But the cops can absolutely manufacture their own crime In any way, shape, or form.
And they don't even have to plant anything.
My front headlight right now is not working.
They can give me a ticket for that.
They can ask to check my papers.
They can do whatever they want.
I mean, it's a pretty open-to-abuse kind of system.
And so when you're working with, you know, the vast majority of what cops deal with are non-crimes, like in any sort of rational society, that their sources of information are people that they bully in the underworld, who have their own motives and their own agendas and so on.
And that nobody has any clue who really commits crimes and that it really is an enormous fog of war or fog of investigation.
That intelligence, whatever you do to get it, what was it, Belco from Hill Street Blues, you know, is claimed to sort of go undercover.
that all of that stuff is pure nonsense because everyone that you deal with undercover is, you know, lying or cheating or stealing or doing some nonsense, right?
And of course, people don't have IDs, so you just show pictures around and they point to it.
It's, oh, he shaved his beard off and stuff like that.
And it's just a complete fog of nonsense.
And so I just sort of wanted to point that out, that when people were talking about James Bond and this, you know, odd shock that whether or not he's a just guy out there killing people who are going to be, you know, blowing up planes, I don't know, I haven't seen it, whatever happens, then it's just not whatever happens, then it's just not realistic because you never do know.
You never do know. And that's what makes it a little short of murder.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
I will talk to you soon. Oh, sorry about the board.
I mentioned that this morning that it went down on the weekend.
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