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Dec. 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:13:42

549 Call In Show Dec 10 2006

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	Thank you so much, everyone, for joining.
	Sunday, this is December the 10th, 2006.
	Only 12 shopping days left and 13 shopping days left until Christmas.
	So be sure to purchase your good cheer and presents and goodies for everyone in your life.
	So we're going to have a brief chat, which is just a topic that came off the board today.
	And then I'll open it up wide to anybody who wants to chat about anything.
	But I wanted to start to talk just a little bit about this question of enemies.
	Now, of course, I've talked about this in the podcast around your dark side and making sure that you don't project your own semi-nefarious impulses onto other people and then call them bad.
	But there's a gentleman who's been posting some rather wild things.
	At least they're wild to me. Maybe they're not to other people.
	But there's a gentleman who's been posting some rather wild things on the board, which is around how it's a darn good that we're keeping these terrorists in Guantanamo, and it's really just terrible how awful these Muslims are, and it's really just terrible how evil they are, and how much they want to kill us, and how we've got to enslave them, and we've got to control them, and we've got to imprison them, and so on.
	And I just wanted to do a couple of minutes on my thoughts about that, and we can open it up then to either topics that you're interested in with regards to that or any other topics, but I just thought I'd have a little go at the topic myself.
	Now, I have not done A podcast on Islam yet.
	I've sort of touched on it briefly at various points.
	And Islam is a nutty, crazy, corrupt, nasty, fundamentalist religious ideology.
	No question. I mean, there's no way that a rational philosopher and an atheist is going to be able to miss that basic fact about Islam.
	It's profoundly irrational and anti-freedom, anti-independence.
	There's no particular Arabic word for secular.
	There is a great deal of sexual strangeness and fetishism and so on, particularly around the endless capacity of women to betray those who don't control them and that women are always responsible for sexual problems or sexual attacks and so on.
	So there's an enormous mess about Islam.
	They don't recognize the separation between spiritual and secular, and they've lost their sort of rational history, which they had far in excess of the European nations up until they sort of went stagnant around the 16th or 17th century at the same time as,
	ironically enough, the rediscovery of Aristotelian philosophy that began to propel things like the Renaissance, also the rediscovery of Roman law, a lot of this was Kept by Arabic scholars during the Dark Ages in the West when Christianity was at the height of its powers in terms of its relationship to the state.
	So it's kind of ironic, of course, and quite sad that the West went through this process of rediscovering the Greek philosophers who were, in every sense of the word, relative to the Dark Ages and relative to modern Islam, were secular philosophers.
	I mean, of course, Socrates had some sort of lip service of piety to the gods and so on, but they were secular in a way that's kind of hard for us to understand now because we've had such a Quite a considerable history of quite strong religion,
	right, since then, because they were polytheistic, and polytheistic always has a secular basis, because polytheism doesn't have just one God, and sort of one good God and one evil God, although, of course, the Christians have the three in one God, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, all in one God.
	Good luck with that, Gordian knot, but it's kind of ironic that The Arabs invented the zero, far in advance of the West in terms of mathematics and science, and kept all of the secular philosophers from the Greek era and the Roman era and the Roman laws,
	which were essential to the founding of a city, that they hung on to all of these things, and then the West gratefully received them, and the Catholic Church gratefully received them, and this began to spark some quite considerable thinking, and of course, Aristotle was such a popular philosopher in the sort of Quattrocento going into the Renaissance that he was simply referred to as the philosopher.
	It wasn't even like Aristotle the philosopher.
	It wasn't even one of many philosophers.
	He was just the philosopher.
	That's really all. It was a huge craze, right?
	He was the The Britney Spears of his time in ways that probably metaphorically don't work in any way, shape, or form.
	But I think that you... Reason, baby, one more time.
	Hit it, baby! No, I'm kidding. I won't get into that.
	Yuck. Greg, look, Aristotle isn't that bad.
	You don't need to say yuck. I mean, I know you're there for Britney, but Aristotle really isn't that bad.
	You should give him a chance, you know?
	So it is kind of ironic that when the West was self-destructing on an orgy of fundamentalist Christianity, the Arabic world was hanging on to the rational philosophy and keeping the science of mathematics and certain aspects of science alive.
	And then, of course, the West took the Aristotelian philosophies back.
	That triggered the Renaissance, which triggered the Enlightenment, and I apologize for going so fast, but I want to take up everyone's day with some history, but...
	Of course, what happened is that the Arabic world was, you know, fairly largely self-contained and insular, as these kinds of societies tend to be.
	And then when oil became something that was of value to the West, right?
	I mean, oil was just considered up until the early 20th century, or late 19th century, oil was considered a filthy and useless byproduct of other industrial processes.
	And the Arabic world sitting on a bunch of oil was sort of pointless.
	It didn't really mean anything to anyone.
	It was just a bunch of junk under the ground.
	Ever since, of course, the Arabic world has been seen to be sitting on a gold mine, there's been a constant tug of war about resource control and, of course, the West with its superior technology.
	This is what always happens, and it's really quite depressing, if you don't mind me jumping into something that's a little depressing.
	Freedom breeds economic success, breeds excess capital.
	Excess capital gets taxed by the government, which uses it for foreign conquest.
	So freedom leads to domination, dictatorship, and horrendous and murderous foreign policies.
	Freedom at home leads to dictatorship overseas.
	Dictatorship overseas leads to dictatorship at home.
	It's the awful boomerang of freedom that you get an enormous amount of economic wealth generated from freedom.
	The government's feast on it grow, feed armies that initially invade overseas, which provoke hostility towards the domestic front, which then causes rights to fall away like leaves in autumn on the domestic front.
	So it is quite a chilling boomerang that happens when you get free.
	It is, of course, our hope and goal here that one day The world can be free without the profits of freedom and the excess capital generated by freedom without that ending up feeding the warmongers and the lords of war who then use it to destroy the freedom of others, corrupt the domestic population, corrupt the military, corrupt the police, and so on and so on.
	So basically the 20th century has been an enormous tug of war back and forward between imperialist powers on the West going into the Arab world and installing governments and tearing down governments.
	And I think one of the most, one of the early and successful coups from the CIA was in the early 50s in Iran when they installed the Shah.
	There has just been an enormous amount of meddling.
	The Western countries supported the creation of the oil fields in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq and the creation of canals and so on.
	And then the Arab governments took these over.
	And this, of course, once the Arab governments realized that the European and American powers were exhausted from the Second World War, they immediately nationalized all of the All of the oil companies that were owned by the mercantilist, not free market, but mercantilist British companies and French companies and German companies.
	And so basically what happened was you gave an enormous amount of power by creating these oil wells and oil concerns, the demand for oil, you gave an enormous amount of power to the ruling classes in the Muslim world.
	And so as the power of the ruling classes in the Muslim world grew, so did the radicalism and the fundamentalism and so on, right?
	So the Muslim world feared this collusion with the sort of average Muslim or the imams feared this collusion of the leaders with the West and began to radicalize further and further and further.
	The roots of violence, I mean, go really deep, right?
	They go really deep. And you can get a sense of this, of course, when you see that the Muslims can get inflamed by the Pope quoting some guy from the 13th century.
	It's that recent to them, right?
	I mean, it is that immediate to them.
	This is a place with a long and ugly history.
	And of course, there's no question that the sort of theology of Islam is as nasty and brutal as the fundamentalist philosophies behind Judaism and Christianity.
	We like to say, well, Islam is the bad religion and our religion is the good religion, and that's all complete nonsense.
	In their fundamentals, of course, the Old Testament is the common root for Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
	And Christians have this belief, then, that a new covenant was put in by Jesus Christ, which made things a whole lot nicer, which is all complete nonsense as well, of course.
	There's a couple of nice things that Jesus said in amongst a whole bunch of other things that Jesus said that were not so nice and were actually pretty genocidal.
	So people really do like to sort of split this stuff up and say, well, there's a bad religion, and that is...
	A sort of fundamental misapprehension of the nature of religion, right?
	If you say there's a bad religion, it's like saying there's a bad murderer, right?
	By very implication, then, you say there's a good murderer.
	So if you split Islam into bad religion and Christianity and Judaism into good religion, then you're not doing anything to arrest the general escalation of violence in these kinds of mystical and superstitious realms, right?
	Somebody on a libertarian board that I occasionally, or a libertarian email list that I'm on, was talking about how, you know, we need to return to Christian values to save our social values and restore the family and blah, blah, blah.
	And it's like, I just wrote back and I said, I do not think that human beings will ever become free through superstition, right?
	And it's hard for us to understand that Christianity is just another form of superstition because we see lots of other good things about it.
	You know, it's got nice songs and the stained glass is pretty and, you know, it's part of our general cultural references, but...
	It's nonsense, right?
	I mean, Christianity is exactly, Islam is exactly what Christianity was three or four hundred years ago.
	And for us to say that the Muslims are just bad and we are good is a complete misnomer.
	If you and I were brought up in the Muslim world, it is almost absolutely for sure that we would end up believing all the nonsense that the Muslims believe.
	And it is that fundamental lack of empathy for what goes on with these poor people who are trapped over in these horrible dictatorships and raised by these crazy priests and child abuse in these kinds of religious contexts is Rampant, as we know from certain aspects of the Catholic Church.
	There are 5,000 priests involved in child abuse, and those are just the ones who've been caught.
	So if we don't have any empathy for the people on the other side of the world who are slaves groaning under the worst kinds of dictatorships, which are theological dictatorships and mystical dictatorships, whether it's this mysticism of communism in the realm of class or mysticism of religion in the realm of gods, whether it's this mysticism of communism in the realm of class or mysticism of religion in the realm of gods, people who suffer and groan under these horrible dictatorships, if we can't find empathy for them, which doesn't mean approving of what they believe in and it doesn't
	But if we think that they're just bad guys and we're good guys, all we're doing is we're throwing more gasoline on the fires of history, more violence into the realm of the world, more conflict, more hatred, more hostility into the world, that we do need to find a way, as I've used this metaphor in a podcast, that we are that we do need to find a way, as I've used this metaphor in a podcast, that we are livestock of the state to a large degree and we have a certain amount of freedom over here in the West, which we can
	But there's a much more brutal farmer over there who's treating his cows much more harshly, and so his cows are sick, and some of them get rabid, and some of them are, you know...
	And some of them, you know, attack their own young.
	And we go and we say, well, those cows are really bad and we're really good.
	Well, the key thing to look at is the difference in their environment.
	If the difference is in the environment, in other words, if most Muslims end up being Muslims because they were raised in a Muslim society, then we have no virtue.
	We cannot claim fundamental virtue for the rationality that we possess.
	Because it's simply an accident of having not been born in a Muslim society.
	And if we then say, well, no, we're virtuous and our more correct or more rational or more humanistic kind of thinking is the result...
	Of our just being better, then we have to find some fundamental biological difference between ourselves and other people in the world, like the Muslims or whoever.
	So I think that we definitely want to hate, you know, the Christian thing, right?
	Hate the sin, not the sinner, right?
	We hate the irrationality, and we should work very hard to continue to expose and undermine the irrationality of these ridiculous, superstitious belief systems, while at the same time recognizing that we can have far more effect On the irrational superstitions here at home rather than projecting all of our fear and hatred of superstition and all of the destructive things that come with superstition onto people halfway across the world that we can have very little effect on.
	So I just wanted to talk about that sort of briefly that I'm not saying let's have sympathy for terrorists.
	I mean, I hope that nobody thinks that I'm going anywhere like that.
	But we, sort of the collective we as a culture, our governments have done some pretty horrible things over there.
	Half a million Iraqi children killed by our governments in the 1990s, and then all we do is have no understanding or idea of why there's hostility towards us.
	And we just make up all of these silly reasons and call them evil, which is fundamentally enormously irresponsible, and I would say it's really adding to the hatred, hostility, and violence in the world.
	So... So that's the end of the introductory statement.
	Thank you so much for your patience as I sort of work through this sort of stuff.
	I'm certainly happy to entertain questions or objections if people have them.
	If people want to switch topics, that's fine with me as well.
	This is just the one that kind of floated up for me today, but feel free to click on the hand of the mic if you have questions.
	Okay, good. Well, that's just fine.
	No problem. So what I'd like to talk about then, and I'm certainly...
	Oh, let me know if anybody starts raising their hand or issuing fatwas.
	Just let me know. And there's one other topic that I had that I wanted to talk about.
	This came through my email.
	I haven't verified it, but it seems to be consistent with information that I've heard before.
	So I wanted to talk about this, and then if people want to move on to other topics, that's fine with me as well.
	But let's chat a little bit about the land of prisons.
	This is from James Vecini at Reuters.
	I haven't verified this.
	It seemed to come across the wire yesterday, but...
	It doesn't seem to be far off from other stats that I've seen, so I'll just sort of read bits of it and then we can talk a little bit about what this might mean.
	U.S. imprisons more people than any other nation.
	Washington, December the 9th.
	Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders, and high crime rates have contributed to the United States, having the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal justice experts.
	A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30th showed that a record seven million people, or one in every 32 American adults, We're behind bars on probation or on parole at the end of last year.
	Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.
	According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country.
	China, note China has four times the USA population, so making the USA figure comparable to China's, we need to multiply it by four or 8.8 million prisoners compared to China's 1.5 million prisoners.
	So our USA incarceration is nearly 600% higher than China, a repressive communist country.
	China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000.
	See, because this is how America has won the battle against dictatorships and communism, which was fighting throughout World War I and World War II, is it now has an incarceration rate 600% higher than China.
	The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people is the highest, followed by 611 in Russia, 547 for St.
	Kitts and Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrialized nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.
	Groups advocating reform of U.S. sentencing laws seized on the latest U.S. present population, figures showing admissions of inmates have been rising even faster than the numbers of prisoners who have been released.
	The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.
	We rank it first in the world locking up our fellow...
	Sorry, we rank first in the world locking up our fellow citizens, said Ethan Needleman of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports alternative to the war on drugs.
	We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of Western Europe, where the much larger population incarcerates for all offenses.
	We send more people to prison for more different offenses for longer periods of time than anyone else.
	Drug offenders account for about 2 million of the 7 million in prison, on probation or parole, King said, adding that other countries often stress treatment instead of incarceration.
	Commenting on what the prison figures show about U.S. society, King said various social programs, including those dealing with education, poverty, urban development, health care, and child care, have failed.
	Now this will, of course, come to a shock to we market anarchists.
	There are a number of social programs we have failed to deliver.
	There are systemic failures going on.
	A lot of these people then end up in the criminal justice system.
	Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the highest prison numbers represented a proper response to the crime problem in the United States.
	Locking up more criminals has contributed to lower crime rates, he said.
	The hand wringing over the incarceration rate is missing the mark, he said.
	Scheidegger said the high prison population reflected cultural differences with the United States having far higher crime rates than European nations or Japan.
	We have more crime.
	More crime gets you more prisoners.
	Julie Stewart, president of the group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, cited the Justice Department report and said drug offenders are clogging the U.S. justice system.
	Why are so many people in prison blamed mandatory sentencing laws and the record number of nonviolent drug offenders subjected to them?
	So that is really quite a fascinating topic.
	We did have a gentleman who has asked to say something, which, of course, I'm more than happy.
	Let me just see if I can find him.
	He had a...
	Yes, there is a chat.
	Sorry, if somebody can add Jared to the chat, that would be excellent.
	Let me just see if there was somebody else who had somebody else.
	Let me just see if I can find them.
	There are also people that are... Oh, yeah.
	So, okay. If you're still online, I'm just going to see if I can get flashgot86 if he's still around.
	It says that he's offline, but I don't want to miss him if he's got something to say.
	Can you see a flashgot over there?
	No. He has gone.
	Well, I guess he was waiting for me to end my speech.
	Not always the wisest thing.
	Now, of course, this is really quite a horrifying statistic when you think about it, right?
	One out of 32 people currently in prison.
	It's really quite astounding, right?
	So if you had a class... If you had a class of 3,200 people in your high school, which was not far off from where I was, then 100 of those people are currently in prison, and there's larger proportions of those who are on parole and so on.
	This is, of course, a significant amount of terrorizing of the domestic population.
	There's no question of that. There's no question of that.
	That when somebody goes into prison, it is very hard for them to get their life back into any kind of substantial order.
	I can imagine that it's almost impossible to get back into the middle class.
	After people end up going through the prison system, having that black mark on their resume.
	And also, of course, as we know, the problem with heterosexual rape in prisons is enormous.
	The problem of violence and terrorization is enormous.
	The additional trauma that comes from locking people up together who have gone through significant traumas themselves Of course, large numbers of these people come from single families and numbers of criminals.
	Single family, of course, have largely increased as a result of failed government programs like the welfare state and so on.
	And so we have just a desperately terrible situation.
	And this is really quite amazing.
	You know, again, there's this There's this empathy, I think, that we just kind of need to develop.
	It's like I'm almost asking people, in a sense, to sort of grow a third eye or grow a third arm.
	And yes, that's really cool when it comes to juggling, but also, if we can sort of grow our heart to larger dimensions, to feel empathy...
	For the people who are living in an absolute human hell within the prison systems.
	And Amnesty International has come down very hard on the U.S. prison system for its brutality, its overcrowding, its violence, its corruption.
	You know, I don't think that prison break is entirely fictional based on sort of reports that I've read and seen.
	And if we can then have also empathy for the people who, gosh, you know, I mean...
	If I had been born, to take a totally cliched example, and I apologize for the insensitivity of this, but if I had been born in a ghetto to a single mom with drug dealers all around, with being unable to get a job, with shivs and guns in my school...
	Where would I have ended up?
	Well, you know, statistically, the odds would have been enormous that I would not have ended up in a very good place.
	And that's the kind of empathy that we need to have.
	This is the kind of empathy that we need to have.
	If we continue in our minds to subdivide the world into good and bad, and when we see the disparities In people's lives, right, when enormous minorities and groups of poor people are ending up in prisons for good chunks of their lives and are threatened with continual incarceration and all of the attendant horrors that go with that, if we don't empathize with their circumstances, then all that we will continue to do is to continue to blame individuals for systemic problems.
	And I'm not saying that there's no personal responsibility.
	I'm not saying that there's no such thing as free will.
	I certainly believe that there is.
	But, you know, there's free will and then there's a circumstance, right?
	There's free will and there's circumstances.
	There's nature and there's nurture.
	And these two aspects of human motivation and where people end up in life are incredibly complex and incredibly interrelated.
	And if we don't have compassion for those who are trapped in these nightmarish environments, Then we really are not going to add one frickin' atom to the freedom of this world.
	If we continue to blame the Muslims for being Muslims and the people in jail for being in jail, despite the fact that the statistics are very clear about the factors that lead you to be a Muslim, i.e., you grow up in a Muslim country, and the factors are entirely clear about why people end up in prison, That they grow single parents, single families, poor, a public housing neighborhood.
	There's lots of things that make very high predictors, right?
	And you can't claim universal and infinite free will if these statistics are so associated with particular kinds of outcomes in people's lives.
	So it's very much like There's a...
	This is sort of my metaphor.
	This is not an argument.
	This is a metaphor. So you can do with it what you will.
	See if it makes any sense to you.
	It's like there are a whole bunch of different kinds of fish in a lake.
	A whole bunch of different kinds of fish in a lake.
	And some fish are more sensitive for various reasons we don't have to bother about.
	Some fish are more sensitive to changes in temperature and other fish are more adaptable to changes in temperature.
	And the whole lake starts heating up.
	The whole lake starts heating up.
	And some of the weakest fish die, right?
	And then the strongest fish look at the weakest fish and say, well, that's pretty weak.
	What a bunch of weenies. They should have been tough like us, right?
	And then the lake gets a little bit hotter, and then some of the kelp die.
	And like, well, those kelp are always kind of sickly, stupid kelp.
	They should have worked out. Weaklings.
	And then the lake gets a little hotter, and another kind of species of fish die.
	And people are like, oh...
	This is bad. Other fish must be poisoning us.
	Get angry at the fish in other lakes or whatever.
	But you can sort of see the progress that's going to happen, right?
	And there's that old statement that was spoken about in the Nazi times, right?
	I think Reinhold Niebuhr, who said that, you know, they came for the gypsies and I did nothing.
	They came for the homosexuals and I did nothing.
	They came for the trade unionists.
	I did nothing. They came for the communists.
	I did nothing. By the time they came for me, there was no one left to help me.
	And this, of course, I'm not trying to equate the two situations, but I am going to say that when we read statistics like 2.2 million locked up in the rape rooms of U.S. prisons, yeah, there are some bad guys in there who need to be separated from society, but boy, I'll tell you, the vast majority of people in there, that's a whole boatload of bad luck in the vast majority of people in there, that's a whole boatload of bad luck in their lives, and a rational society would never find that as a viable solution
	If people come from bad backgrounds, abusive backgrounds, make bad choices, don't get me wrong.
	People come from bad backgrounds, abusive backgrounds, and you lock them up in rape rooms where there's constant violence and threats.
	You are only adding fuel to the fire, right?
	Once you start putting people in that environment, you are guaranteeing that they are going to fail when they get out.
	You are absolutely re-traumatizing them, re-provoking all of their defenses that come out of a brutal and violent childhood.
	You are absolutely generating future customers for your prison systems.
	And, of course, it's the government. So we recognize that the government is not interested in helping people.
	The government is interested in finding ways to justify its increases in money.
	We know that the government is not interested in getting rid of poor people because poverty was a problem being very, very well solved.
	Before the government got involved in the welfare program from the mid-50s onwards, sorry, from the early 50s onwards, poverty was decreasing by a rate of one percentage point a year.
	The free market, the rising tide was lifting all boats.
	The free market was dealing perfectly well with the problem of poverty.
	But of course, if the world turned perfect tomorrow, the government would have to invent crime and poverty, right?
	Because if everybody was nice tomorrow, the government would have to start importing bad people.
	Oh wait, that's what they're doing through their foreign policy.
	So this is something that we have to really understand.
	When more and more people end up in jail, It's because we're in a lake and the temperature's getting warmer and warmer for all of us and we can either figure out what underground pipeline that we can stuff up is heating up the lake or we can just blame the weak fish for dying and call them bad and call them malevolent and call them losers and this and that.
	So we can't have any more compassion.
	It was Dostoevsky who said that you can judge this civilization by how it treats its prisoners.
	And he knew this, of course, as a prisoner in Tsarist Russia.
	He was arrested for socialist activities or revolutionary activities when he was younger.
	Was locked in a jail cell for seven months in solitary confinement so perfectly complete that not only was no light led into his prison, but the guards walked up and down the hallway in felt boots so he couldn't even hear anything.
	dragged out, put in front of a firing squad.
	They were about to pull the trigger and then his sentence, it turned out to just be a lesson that was being put upon them.
	His sentence was commuted to ten years in Siberia.
	He wrote a terrifying book called Memoirs from the House of the Dead about his time in Siberia.
	So he knows something.
	And of course, if you read Solzhenitsyn's books about the Gula Gapigalanga book, he was a very, very, very, very, very Books about... They can only dream in Stalin's time about how wonderful Dostoevsky had it in his own Tsarist prison.
	So we do need to have empathy for those who are being swallowed up into this ever-increasing moor of government power.
	And if we don't, then we certainly can't expect those who come after us to have empathy for us.
	We may all be privileged, and I'm sure the people who are listening to this are all Not afraid, as neither am I, of being arrested or being incarcerated or these kinds of things.
	But if we cannot find it in our hearts to have compassion for those who are currently being brutalized by this kind of power, it's going to be very, very hard for us to turn this particular trend around and try and find a way for less state to occur instead of more state.
	So that was my second topic.
	Look at that. I've done two in 35 minutes.
	See how wonderful it is when I'm not interrupted?
	Just kidding. I like the interruptions.
	So, we have a question from N.Graphic.
	You are more than welcome to speak, sir.
	Mute. Hello, go ahead.
	Yeah, I would just like to say something on that last comment, and that governments should be afraid of their people rather than people be afraid of their governments.
	That was... Well, I think that's perfectly right.
	This is, at least I myself, anarcho-capitalist or market anarchist, which means that I don't think that you can ever have a situation where governments are afraid of their people because governments, through the power of taxation, can pay For lots of soldiers and lots of policemen, right? So I think that the only solution is a balance of power where there's no centralized use of force.
	Certainly governments that have the power of deduction at source income tax have nothing to fear from their people, right?
	I mean, everyone's got to live, and if every time you go out to earn a dollar or a pound, 50 cents or 50 pence goes to the government, the government has nothing to be afraid of.
	And certainly the government has broken free of any kind of restraint from the sides of the people over the last hundred years or so.
	And it certainly is heading in the wrong direction that way.
	Please, go ahead. Yeah, and just another point on that, in that there comes a time when, should the government become oppressing, that the people eventually would probably have enough and some sort of revolution would occur, either socialist, nationalist or anarchist, as you were just saying just then.
	But I think there comes a time when the government, it may not be afraid of its people, but the people will overrule it eventually.
	You'd hope so, anyway.
	Yeah, I certainly agree with you.
	I think that you're right. Otherwise, I'd sort of be digging my own grave here.
	But I certainly do think that the governments do self-destruct because the people in the governments just want to make as much money as possible.
	And when the government debt gets too large, they just start grabbing everything as they did in the Soviet Union.
	And very quickly, the government collapses socially and flurries fiscally.
	What happens after that has a lot to do, or I think has just about everything to do, with the kinds of ideas that are floating around, right?
	So if you look at sort of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s, when the government ran out of money after this hyperinflation and the war debts that the Allies put onto them with the aid of the United States coming into the war, the...
	The government collapsed and the generally accepted solution to all problems in Germany was more government, right?
	So the worse the problem, the more you should have the government.
	And this, of course, is we're sort of, I think, teetering on the brink where we are as a culture.
	People are becoming skeptical of government solutions, but still there's this knee-jerk reaction of like, oh, there's a problem?
	Let's have a law. Oh, there's a problem?
	Let's say, oh, terrorism is hitting us despite the fact that we have a Department of Defense and FBI and the CIA and foreign policy and this and that.
	Let's have another government department.
	Let's now have a Department of Homeland Security and everything's solved, right?
	So this idea that whenever there's a problem, we need more government.
	Government then creates more problems, which requires more government.
	government, you get this ever escalation until you get a kind of collapse, which is what happened to the Soviet Union, of course.
	You don't even need to look at that.
	I'm sorry, let me just finish my point and then I'll turn it around.
	Oh, yeah, sorry.
	But what's absolutely key is for us to keep talking to the degree with which people will be willing to listen to us and say that the problem is the use of force that the government Violence doesn't solve problems.
	Government solutions always involve violence.
	And therefore, when the crash hits, people will say, well, the problem was government, not a lack of government.
	And then I think we can go in the right direction.
	Sorry, go ahead. You don't need to look in the past terribly far to the likes of the Soviet Union or Imperial Germany.
	Certainly I can speak from my point of view in Scotland.
	There's certainly been a lot of questions asked of the government of Scottish soldiers being used as cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	And its oil and all its other resources being plundered for every penny that it's worth.
	And come 2007, I think that the people will speak in the referendum and hopefully we'll get our independence back.
	Oh, so yeah, tell me a little bit about what's going on there.
	And partly because I sure love hearing me a good bro.
	I actually spent some time in Scotland when I was younger.
	But what is going on with this independence stuff over in Scotland?
	Well, in the last year, I must excuse me if my statistics are wrong, but apparently 45% of Scots now support Scottish independence, followed by 35% of English want Scotland to be independent, which It says a lot of things.
	There's always sort of violence between the two countries.
	Hopefully we can do it through peaceful means by voting, and that's what the 2007 May elections will prove, hopefully, rather than going down the albeit more romantic armed revolution and everything like that.
	But it's going to happen one day, so...
	I suppose England better start getting used to the idea.
	Yeah, but if you guys do end up going down that road, you might want to do it while they're still tied up in Iraq, right?
	Oh yeah, I mean, the Easter Rising in Ireland claimed its independence.
	Britain was fighting in the First World War, which sort of stretches the troops rather thin.
	So I think, you never know, either North Korea or Iran, if that comes up next on the thing, I think that should definitely be the turning point.
	Well, it certainly would be a...
	I can't imagine that England would retake Scotland in military.
	I mean, in order for violence to work, people have to not really get the humanity of the people who violence is being used against, right?
	That's sort of what I'm arguing here.
	So it's okay to go and...
	Who knows Iraqis, right?
	There's like, you know, towel heads and whatever, right?
	These are awful terms that are associated with them.
	You can't have any sort of base empathy for the humanity of the people that you're using violence against.
	So the people who are in prison are considered to be just bad guys.
	And the terrorists are just insane bad guys and Muslims.
	But I think that if the UK went across the border into Scotland, you know, we've all seen train spotting.
	We're down with the brogue. We know what's going on.
	We have some empathy. So the brutality, we can picture it from the other side.
	And brutality usually only works if you can't picture it from the other side, or at least there's a good excuse not to.
	Yeah, just one final point, I promise.
	One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, so I'll leave you with that.
	Amen. Absolutely. You've just got to go back to, what was it, George II or III, the guy who was in charge of the colonist uprising in the United States, right?
	I mean, they were rebelling against a government that was imposing a 2% tax, and now the U.S. government, which replaced the British government, is taxing at 50% or 60%, and that doesn't even count the deficit and the debt.
	So it is just amazing that there would be any kind of objections from the American government for people having a tax revolt or something like that.
	So let me just see if there's anybody else who has questions, issues, or comments.
	Feel free to bring them up.
	Now's the time. Just click on Request Mike, or you can mention it in the chat window and speak to like-minded freedom fighters of the rational and peaceful persuasion, for those of our friends who are listening from the state.
	Is he back? Flash Gotti?
	He says I wanted a dog.
	Oh, Greg's flashing? No, he's not flashing on my screen, so it doesn't...
	Thanks, honey.
	Let me just find him on our list.
	He's got quite a few people in today.
	Hello, everybody. It's Stefan Mollede from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.
	Let me just go down and find the name of the gentleman who wants to chat now.
	It was so much easier when we first started this and there was like nobody in here.
	Ah, here he is. Okay. One sec, Greg.
	If you'd like to warm up your vocal cords, you're up.
	Okay. Can you hear me?
	Yes, yes, please go ahead.
	Okay. I just had one quick comment, and I kind of dropped this in the chat too.
	Fighting for independence isn't the same thing as fighting for freedom.
	Just because you've freed yourself from the British government doesn't mean you're free.
	You take the American example, for instance, which you mentioned yourself.
	Sure, we threw off towards the third.
	But what we now think is freedom is one in 32 Americans in prison, right?
	There's a big gap between independence from one form of authority and freedom.
	I certainly agree with you.
	I agree with you, obviously, that substituting one master for another is not particularly helpful, but I will say that I would certainly be at a very utilitarian and practical level more in favor of a multiplicity of states without a centralized federal.
	Like, if a bunch of U.S. states decided to secede And this, of course, was the whole idea behind the original U.S. Constitution, to have a very weak federal government and a very strong states' rights government, the reason being that the Founding Fathers had the goal or the idea that competition between the states for citizens would keep freedom to a maximum, right? So, of course, they kind of missed the whole thing with the slavery, but, you know, they're not perfect.
	But... What I would say is that if there's a multiplicity of competing governments, competing for resources, competing for – especially where there's no language barrier, which is a little different from the EEC – But where you have, if like 50 or 15 or 5 U.S. states seceded from the federal system, you would see a greater competition for freedom.
	This is why secession is not allowed, right?
	This is why any state that tries to secede from the Union is going to have, as Lincoln pointed out, quite a degree of difficulty in doing so.
	But I would certainly say that if Scotland seceded from the United Kingdom, they would be removing one layer and there would be a competition, although it's not quite a foreign language, it's not that far, there would be some competition which the governments would then have to give people some more freedom in order to woo people to come and live there.
	I guess especially if it's Scotland, which is a little on the rainy side and cold and chilly and briny and incomprehensible.
	But does that sort of make any sense?
	Well, in part it does.
	Yay! I got a part!
	If there had never been any federal government, if, for example, we were still operating under the Articles of Confederation, I might be inclined to agree with you that this whole notion of competing states is the best...
	It's the best you can have, but that's not really what we had after the Constitution was enacted.
	That whole parity of power amongst all the various states wasn't really parity in the purest sense there either, but still, once there was an overarching authority on top of all of that, any Any pretense toward competition between the states, I think, is a bogus notion.
	Yes, I certainly agree.
	But, yeah, no, I certainly do agree.
	I certainly do agree. I mean, I would not feel bad if Scotland were to achieve independence from the UK, but I also wouldn't say that this is Libertopia.
	Right. So when we talk about fighting for freedom, I think it's important to make sure that we clarify that that may be one incremental step way down at the bottom of the ladder, but let's not pop the champagne corks quite yet.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	That was all I had in mind.
	Oh, okay.
	I don't think anybody else has got their hand raised at the moment.
	Oh, okay. I'm sorry.
	We do have one gentleman who wishes to have a chit-chat.
	Dr. 825.
	Go ahead. Hello?
	Sorry, let me just...
	I'm just going to try... Can you try now?
	All right, Dr.
	62825, if you'd like to try again.
	Oh, but there was no technology.
	Perhaps his mic is not working.
	Perhaps he has less...
	All right, so if anybody else has any questions or comments, I have nothing but topics up my sleeve, so I'm certainly happy to keep chatting, but I don't want to keep anybody else out of the conversation because I get to talk all week on my podcast, so I definitely do want this to be a little bit more interactive, so don't make me come over there and turn your mic on.
	I will. You know, I have this eerie eel-like ability to slither through wires as a TCP IP packet, so I will show up.
	It'll be like that, what's that, Visa ad?
	Like, hey, can you check this guy out?
	And he pops his head out of the screen.
	Don't make me do that, because that's hard on the forehead.
	So, if you have any questions or issues or comments, feel free to raise your hand or to say so in the chat window.
	My wife is monitoring it like a hawk to see if there's anyone...
	Have you been doing this? Yes, she is, in fact, monitoring like a hawk.
	If you don't have a microphone, you can chat in the chat window, and I am certainly happy to...
	I'm certainly happy to entertain more responses, but if people don't have anything to say...
	Oh, do you speak Italian, sweetie?
	Somebody has said...
	I think that means butter me, doesn't it?
	Is it baby oil, butter?
	I just assume with Italians it's something sensual.
	Something oily and sensual, I was going to say.
	Oily could be more correct. All right.
	So as we wait for Greg to complete his thoughts, or to complete his sentence, perhaps I should say, I'm just going to check and see if there's anyone else coming in.
	I don't want to jump over other topics if there's somebody who is coming in.
	Very briefly.
	Please let me talk. There are also people that want to add something.
	I think they do not speak English, somebody says.
	Well, that certainly could be the case.
	Is something coming up there?
	Alright, Mr.
	G, I'll let you make the case because we're still waiting for people to respond, so go ahead.
	Okay, that's on the first topic, the level of imprisonment you were talking about there.
	One thing I was kind of curious was if they included any kind of statistics, and it seems there was a mention of, I guess, drug crimes, but the point I'm getting at is that the elevated prison population On the one hand,
	it could be seen as something indicatively wrong with American culture as something that has violent underpinnings.
	Or it could be seen as, depending on the crimes for which these people are in prison, it could be seen as an indication of the fact that our government has become overly oppressive.
	And without any detailed statistics, it's kind of hard to tell which is which.
	I mean, unless you infer from the fact that we have an oppressive government that, you know, That in itself is indicative of a sick culture.
	Right. So is the government a mirror of the culture, or is the culture a mirror of the government?
	Is that sort of your...
	Innocent, yeah.
	Innocent, yeah. And I'm sorry to be succinct.
	Everybody knows that really is against our philosophy.
	Just before we go to that, though, I just wanted to say that Marco says, yeah, Afro-power.
	And I just wanted to put that out to my home fellows out there in the hood that Marco, I certainly appreciate that.
	I'm definitely down for Afro Power.
	Good thing I don't have my webcam on or I'd be doing some breakdown moves.
	But if you can see the picture of me, there are two major reasons why Afro Power wouldn't apply to me.
	I'm sure I don't have to.
	Say what they are. So, Greg, would you like to continue or should I pick up the thread?
	Did I manage to blow away your train of thought completely?
	You pretty much derailed me again.
	Yay! Look, I certainly...
	I think it's a complex question, but fundamentally I don't think that we can...
	There's a culture that's chosen, right?
	And then there's a culture that's imposed.
	Those are sort of two kinds of situations, right?
	So... If you, and sort of back to the beginning of the show today, when we were talking about the Muslims, right?
	So you're raised in some, you know, crazy Muslim culture, or just Muslim culture, I think we don't have to be overly redundant, but, and you're sort of, you know, you're rocking back and forth, and you're beating your head against the book, and you're chanting, and you're moaning, and you're supposed to be having all these ecstatic visions, and you're beaten if you don't.
	Learn how to recite some dead language, which also happens, of course, in the Jewish faith as well, and certain aspects of it.
	And, you know, there's an enormous amount of hysteria, and everyone's having visions like you saw Borat, right?
	So it's like everybody is shocked and appalled that this guy wants the tears of a gypsy to break a curse.
	And we laugh because, haha, that's just so crazy and superstitious.
	But then, of course, he goes to this Pentecostal revival, and I guess to a lot of people, that doesn't seem quite so crazy.
	Though, of course, that's the whole point of satire, right?
	Get you to laugh at something outside of your culture and then show you front and center how it occurs within your culture and get you to...
	That's why people from... That's the outsider coming into your culture is an old technique or staple from that.
	But sorry, you wanted to talk about the wrestling scene?
	I was just going to say, that scene in Borat was incredibly creepy.
	It reminded me a lot of what was in Jesus Camp videos.
	You know that that's out there somewhere, but you don't think that that's such a large part of your own culture.
	Until you see it front and center, you know.
	Yeah, no, it's enormous, particularly in the States.
	And where, of course, we up here in Canada will laugh about the United States, and it's so religious, but we have this addiction to government-run health care, which is a complete and total disaster and gets lots of people killed, right?
	So, you know, again, it's just so easy to laugh at other people and so hard to look in the mirror, right?
	We all love to project our dark side onto other people, right?
	So we all like to say, oh, those religious people are crazy, and they're like...
	But as we've seen from recent debates on the Free Domain Radio board, even those who claim to be philosophical and rational do have a certain amount of challenge with that at times, right?
	It's always easy to be angry at the state and it's very hard to look at our own capacity to be corrupt, right?
	Our own capacity, as we saw with the prostitution debate that occurred on the boards and in the podcasts over the last week or two, right?
	Where people get, they're all riled up about freedom and then you point out something which is maybe their own capacity to corrupt, to be corrupt and to corrupt others.
	And suddenly it's like, oh, you bastard!
	Let's get angry at the government again.
	Let's not look at me! Right?
	So there is definitely that aspect where our own craziness does escalate state power, but our own craziness is not innate to our nature because the government has us.
	In sort of two ways when we're children, two very broad ways.
	The obvious one, of course, as you know, is public education, which is the 14 years that you spend being drawn on about the virtue of the state, and your parents send you, right?
	So it's a very difficult thing to say.
	That's kind of like indoctrination, and my parents are kind of culty when it comes to the state.
	I mean, people have a tough time, but that's a pretty emotional thing to...
	And people kind of get, as you get in these sort of Christian camp things or these Christian environments, people kind of get, they say like, okay, if I'm going to step out of this box, where the hell do I go?
	Like, I'm raised here, like, oh, we don't fold the flag and have it touch the floor and we love George Bush or we love John Kerry and we're pro the troops and we love Jesus and we love God and this is the whole world that you live in.
	If you say, huh, I'm going to rub a couple of brain cells together, compare this against objective reality, maybe use a little bit of reason in the scientific method, I'm going to step outside of this cage, well, to most people in their minds, it's a cage hanging in space.
	With an infinite drop outside the bars, right?
	So they say, oh, I'm going to open.
	Hey, there's a door here. That's cool.
	I can open this door and go through.
	Ah! You know, they fall forever.
	At least that's their fear, right?
	I mean, so to step outside your own culture is very hard.
	And so the government obviously has government schools and so on.
	And of course, it has a lot of influence over the media, right?
	You've got the FCC threatening fines and threatening to review everybody's lineup if they do the wrong thing.
	As we've talked about before on the show, the media needs constant feeds from government for information because it's a whole lot easier to read a government press release than to go out and actually do investigative journalism, right?
	So that's why the media has largely, particularly newspapers, as I pointed out in the show before.
	You read through a newspaper, like 95% of it is just crap that comes handed out from the government.
	I mean, we laugh at Pravda as a government arm of media information from the, I guess, the Soviet period, but we're not that far off ourselves.
	I mean, you can't say boo about anything true, and you have to keep your government sources alive, so...
	So we're kind of, and this is not even to mention the stuff like the welfare state and the war on drugs which corrupts entire communities and all of the horrors that's part of all that whole situation.
	So we kind of are living in a kind of government environment overall.
	And that's what children are born into.
	And that's all that they see.
	And as you and I know, and as other people know who are going through this process, if you do start to think for yourself, God forbid, Then your family and your friends, a lot of them who claim to love you like family and like friends are supposed to, is like, oh, I'm sorry, that was only while you were chanting along with the rest of us.
	That's only, I mean, if you take the red pill, sorry, we can't be friends or family anymore.
	So if you actually do start to sort of ask questions, People know, kind of in their gut, that it's like if you really start to ask questions, it's not that you get to step out of the cage, you get thrown out of the cage, right?
	I mean, you don't have anything to do with you anymore, right?
	So that is a real challenge for people.
	There's a huge cost to it.
	There's not a whole lot of benefit other than, you know, there's integrity and there's general peace of mind and happiness, but that comes after the storm and stress of getting your personal relationships sorted out when you become philosophical and rational.
	So I think that it's much more around the state is creating the culture at the moment, right, rather than the culture is creating the state.
	I think there was a moment of temptation way back, right, and I'll just talk about this very briefly, then you can tell me what you think, but way back when, you know, the big disaster was the government schools, right, in the 1870s.
	And that was specifically put in because people were afraid of immigration, they were afraid of the Germans, they were afraid of the Catholics, and they wanted to impose a more uniform waspy culture on...
	And of course, if you look at the presidential elections, they failed in that.
	So I think at that moment, there was a real sense of temptation.
	People knew history. Sorry, they had freedom.
	They knew freedom. They knew that 98% of kids were getting perfectly well-educated.
	They knew that there was no need for government schools.
	I think at that point, there was like the culture.
	People were kind of lazy. They missed the ball, and then we got governments in.
	But it always happens, so it's hard to blame people individually.
	Government always grows. But now I think that it's this use of force and the reallocation of resources at the point of a gun that is the nature of government is so fundamental and is so embedded in everybody's way of life that, I mean, we all know this from the debates to say if you want to live a purist libertarian lifestyle and not have anything to do with the government, you kind of got to seal yourself in a biodome somewhere around the Arctic, right, and eat your own toenails to survive.
	Right? So we kind of know how hard it is to disembed ourselves from a sort of state-run society.
	And that's why, for me, it's like, forget it.
	Who cares? I'll just, you know, use the, oh, the government invented the Internet.
	Great! Let's have a radio station about freedom based on that.
	So I think that right now the government has way more control over the culture and is the prime mover of the culture.
	And again, it's not like people in the government are waking up rubbing their Fu Manchu mustaches and, you know, going, you know, how can we affect the culture?
	And it's just... Human beings have a very strongly developed instinct for power and subjugation, which is why governments are so dangerous.
	But I think that's running things a lot more than culture is.
	But tell me what you think. So here's a weird thought then.
	Maybe the statistic...
	In one way, you could look at that statistic in an optimistic sense.
	Because if...
	If the coercion were really working, then we would have one of the lowest prison populations in the world.
	If it were really effective, you wouldn't have to put a bunch of people in prison.
	Well, yes, I agree with you, but also not.
	The part that I agree with you is, yeah, ideally you want people to whip themselves, right?
	Ideally you don't want to even have to put up a fence around your cattle.
	You want them to be so frightened that they huddle in the middle of a field and submit to whatever you want, right?
	You shouldn't even have to drag them away to the abattoir and go up and shoot them right there and nobody tries to run...
	Absolutely. But of course, that's impossible, right?
	I mean, because the more force and pressure you apply in human beings, the more resentment you build up, right?
	That's inevitable. Human beings fundamentally don't like to be ordered around.
	I mean, unless you get married.
	But human beings fundamentally don't like to be ordered around, right?
	So that's why you have to create all this bullshit to get people to kind of say, oh, I'm not obeying this guy in a funny hat.
	I'm obeying God. It's like, oh, I'm not obeying this idiot policeman who, with a grade 12 education, I'm obeying the state or the laws or all this kind of...
	So people, patriotism and so on.
	People, that's why you have to have something called an army.
	So that you can differentiate it in people's minds in some bullshit way from a group of hitmen, right?
	I mean, a group of sociopathic murderers who will go and kill anyone you point at.
	Well, that's a bit obvious, right?
	So you have to kind of invent all this stuff like the army and then you've got to have square-jawed, handsome actors play marines with, you know, trembling, jaw-trembling, dewey-eyed nobility and heroism and so on and all this kind of nonsense.
	Just so that you can give people a reason to lie to themselves, right?
	That's why all this pageantry is for.
	But remember, of course, that the government is not one big blob, right?
	It's a bunch of competing agencies, right?
	There's only a certain amount of taxpayer dollars to go around.
	So the prison system always needs more prisoners, right?
	There's a story, and so it's always going to be inventing crimes, and it's always going to be saying things are disastrous, because otherwise, that damn money goes to the Department of Defense, or it goes to the Department of Homeland Security, or it goes to the Department of Education.
	Not to the students or anything, but, you know, to the bureaucrats.
	So, the government is a constant, like, think of it like the taxpayer is, that's a bad metaphor, but it's kind of like, you know, those...
	Those baby eagles, their mouths wide open, they're all screaming for the allocations of resources.
	And they do that by creating endless amounts of panic and fear.
	There's a story I was reading up here in Canada that...
	A woman's daughter, five years old, diabetic, right?
	And so she takes her kid to public school, as she's expected to do, and it's ordered to do.
	And they're going to bring you, sort of serve up your kid to the brain mince factory.
	And they say, oh, sorry, we can't take your daughter because she has diabetes.
	So she's special needs and there's no funding.
	So we can't take your kid, right?
	Now, is there funding?
	Well, of course there's funding. I mean, there's...
	If people could get quality education in the 19th century, when people were paying privately, when incomes were about 150th what they are now, And given that there's been no educational system in history that has ever had more money than government-run educational systems in the present, is there money for special?
	Of course there is. Of course there is.
	But there's just no money available because it's all going to the bureaucrats and it's all going to the special interest groups and it's all going to jaunts to Hawaii to study how the pelicans educate their young and all this kind of stuff.
	So, of course, they're just going to take money away from the front lines so then they can go back and they can say...
	And so the parents write to their MPs and the MPs bubble it up to the ministers and everyone's all, my God, we've got to have special needs programs.
	We need more money. I mean, all they do is they hold the children hostage constantly.
	So I don't think that each of these individual agencies, they always have an incentive to cause more problems.
	But yeah, you're right as a whole, if people were perfectly obedient...
	But it really is like you're taking a balloon and you're crushing it in your hand.
	At some point it pops, right?
	And the people don't care who are making money right now because they've made enough, usually, to live for the rest of their lives on the amount of money that sloshes around in the government.
	Yeah, there's always a reaction, right?
	Violence always creates a reaction, which is why 9-11 happened, right?
	Violence that you do overseas will come back.
	I mean, you just don't get to go around shooting people, right?
	He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, you know?
	You know me, I love it with the scripture, so go ahead.
	Well, that's exactly why, you know, this whole idea of let's go, you know, drop nukes on Iran or whatever, couldn't possibly work either.
	No, and I think that, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that the war won't last.
	There's not going to be any more invasions.
	There's no money, right?
	Like, literally there's no money.
	The Fed has stopped printing how much money it's printing.
	It's not telling anyone how much money it's printing.
	The black market and the gray market are all shifting to euros.
	The Chinese are starting to sell their U.S. dollar holdings, which means that The Fed's going to have to increase the interest rate in order to get people to want to buy U.S. Treasuries, which is going to raise the interest rates, destroy the real estate boom market, and of course Americans save only 1% of their income and are horrendously in debt, like 80% of their annual income before taxes.
	So there's no money.
	I made this prediction, and I'll just pat myself on the forehead.
	Wait, there's going to be a huge slapping sound just for a moment.
	There we go. I'll just slap myself on the forehead for a moment because, or pat myself, because I said, you know, the war's going to end when they run out of money.
	And so now, of course, they've got this committee that's out there and they knew what these guys were going to come back with and so on.
	But people are mistaking this for, oh, the will of the people is asserting itself and so on.
	It's all nonsense, right? I mean, if they went to the war against the will of the entire world's population, then there's no way.
	I mean, what the hell did the will of the people care?
	What's happening is the running out of money, right?
	And it's the same thing that happened with Vietnam, right?
	You go off the gold standard and suddenly it's like, hey, let's not have a war anymore because we've got no money left, right?
	So the purpose of the war had nothing to do with, of course, freeing Iraq, but rather the transfer of, you know, $500 billion from the treasury to private people of one kind or another, right?
	Using the soldiers as excuses.
	So, I mean, that's always the purpose of war is the transfer of money.
	So, So, yeah, I don't think there's not going to be any more invasions for a while.
	I think right now people are just pillaging the treasury knowing that the gig is not too far from being up.
	But that's another conversation.
	Right. At some point in time, it doesn't matter how fast to run the print presses.
	People just know it's valueless.
	Yes, for sure, for sure.
	And the American economy is so overextended.
	And it doesn't mean that it's going to be a disaster in the long run, because the people in the capital machinery are all still there.
	There's going to be a reallocation of resources.
	But what's going to happen is there's going to be this great, massive tearing off of government programs, right?
	And of course, they're going to get rid of all of the services to the people on the front line.
	The people who are actually supposed to be receiving the services, they'll get rid of all of those.
	But they can't really raise taxes, and they can't print more money, and they can't raise interest rates to get money hoovered in from overseas through treasury bonds.
	So they really are in a bit of a corner, and that's pretty clear.
	It's just that you and I don't know what's going on.
	We can't see through those 12 walls, right?
	But there's lots of people in the inside who perfectly know exactly what the time frame is.
	All right. Now, I'm just going to put the call out there.
	I'm certainly happy to keep chatting. We did have a question from Charlie on the chat, but if anybody has any questions, there's a request microphone or you can chat in the window.
	If you wanted to ask any other questions or have any sort of comments or issues or corrections of Greg, not me, then I'm certainly happy to hear them.
	Did you have Charlie's question there?
	Charlie asks, or Charlie states, I have a question about the art thing.
	In the absence of the major irrationalities of the world, what does everybody, stuff included, think art or the media will look like when people no longer need it to justify their prejudices and so on?
	Well, I think we're going to have a few less Mel Gibson films.
	I think that's pretty much for sure, right?
	Because what is going to happen is, I would say, art is still going to have an enormous amount of stuff to work with because there are always frontiers of new technology wherein there is ethical questions that arise.
	Right, so let's say that we live in Libertopia, there's no government, and there is a DRO model or something that works well.
	What are artists going to do?
	Well, of course, they're going to keep alive the fear of governments, right?
	I mean, this goes on for a remarkably long time.
	I have a friend who I grew up with whose mother used to tell him that if he didn't go to bed, old Boney was going to get him, and it turned out that Boney was Napoleon Bonaparte.
	This is 150 years later.
	160 years later that they're still using.
	I still remember calling kids who were overweight.
	I didn't ever use it, but I remember kids being called when they were overweight, Fatty Arbuckle.
	And I only found this out much later, that this was a sort of disgraced comedian from the 1920s.
	This was in the 1970s, right?
	So... The fear of governments will be in art for at least 500 years, you know, to go out on a ridiculous limb, right?
	We still have movies about slavery.
	I remember watching Roots when I was a kid with Kunta Kinte, right?
	The guy who ended up being on Star Trek.
	LeVar Burton. But, you know, 150 years after slavery, you began to have lots of media about slavery.
	So there is still an enormous amount, of course, however the government ends is going to be quite a heroic drama, mostly of the intellect and very little of anything else.
	But, you know, maybe there'll be the Free Domain Radio movie.
	LAUGHTER Down the road, you know, with an enormous pink egg as me.
	Anyway, there'll be lots of stuff to talk about in terms of history, keeping people away from the boogeymen of the stage.
	You have to teach kids new stuff.
	There's lots of art around that.
	And there's going to be new technologies that are going to need to be examined from an ethical standpoint.
	There's going to be lots of debate about optimization.
	There's cloning and all this kind of stuff, sentient robots and stuff.
	There's going to be lots of art around that kind of stuff, but there'll be a whole lot less propaganda, I think.
	I wonder how long the Free Domain Radio movie would be.
	Well, let's just put it this way.
	I don't know, but definitely you've got to watch for the key turning in the lock when you go in, from the outside, right?
	So I've got to think there'll be oxygen masks, there'll be regular massages, there'll be bags that you can scream into.
	It'll be a miniseries, 12 DVDs, and you know those 12 DVDs are all going to have 40 kilohertz MP3s on them, so it'll be quite lengthy, I think.
	No, you never know, right?
	You never know. I mean, this is part of what we're doing here is we're engaging in a conversation that's going to last forever.
	I mean, I'm pretty conscious of that.
	You know, whether that's right or wrong, I don't know, but I sort of get a strong feeling that...
	Wait, is there more? And it's still a shot of Steph's forehead.
	Do you know, I was on a business meeting once and I did a wonderful simulation of a Mars landing by leaning into a red light with my forehead.
	I even imitated the Houston thing.
	And that job went well. Anyway...
	But I'll do it one day here.
	I've worked it out according to quite a good degree of detail, so you might enjoy that.
	It's eerie in terms, you really do feel like you're approaching the red planet.
	And if the light is right, I even have polar caps, like ice caps on my forehead, if you've got a good beam.
	But no, I mean, the conversation that we're having here is going to last forever in a very sort of compelling way and in a way that other conversations just don't.
	Nobody goes back, and I remember Greg, when he read my novel, almost, was not too happy about the lengthy debates that I included, which came from the British Parliament, right?
	He didn't think that was such a good idea.
	So those debates, which were about, you know, the beginning of the greatest war in history in terms of its murder rate, Those conversations die.
	I think these conversations, I don't know how long they're going to last for, but I think they might last for quite some time.
	I really do get a strong feeling about that, which is why I've been hiding all the personal evidence of any corruption in my private life so that I've been looking like the most moral man in history.
	So that, of course, has been a very key part of what it is that I've been doing.
	Nothing to hide. Anyway, so let's just see if there are other people who wish to have a chitty-chatty bang-bang with us.
	And we have a good chunk of people.
	Was there somebody who had... Yeah, yeah, no, no.
	It's a choice, right? I love that stuff, and you can never please everyone, but if that was the only tough part you have with the ending, I think that's okay.
	Christina's got her hand raised, but no.
	I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
	Now, about those chores we talked about.
	All right, I'm just going to wait. Skype regularly vanishes, everyone?
	I don't think they're figments of my imagination, because you hear them too, right, sweetie?
	Okay, good, because they regularly vanish from Skype and then reappear back in this window.
	And let's not even get into the programming, which always bugs me, where a programmer just says one people rather than one person, rather than going from singular to plural.
	I think programmers should always try and deal with it.
	So, yeah, so I do think that art is going to have still a great deal to deal with, but it just won't be all the propaganda that goes on from here to the end of time to do with war and to do with the virtue of the state and to do with how noble politicians and so on.
	So, tough in the sense of sleepy.
	People on DIG love talking about global warming.
	I wonder if our Black Panther friend has given us any more conversations.
	Did somebody end up adding Jared?
	Can you see him to the chat? He's in?
	Okay, good. Let me close this.
	I'm just going to keep rambling and chatting about nothing in particular until somebody raises their hand.
	Not that I'm out of topics, but I just want this to be a interactive.
	Interactive. Now, let's see.
	That's four o'clock, so this is probably from last week.
	I can wait all day, people.
	I can turn this car right around.
	He's gone away.
	Amen.
	See, people think that I get bothered by the silence.
	I don't actually mind too much, but here we go.
	Somebody is now just saying, stop bullying me, just talk.
	Can you try going ahead?
	This is M-A-T-I, I believe a birth date which indicates that you are nine years old.
	Can you hear?
	Matty 23-0-11-996-23-01-1996, so 23rd of January 1996.
	Give us a view from the post-kindergarten world.
	Can you hear me at all?
	I guess he must have just clicked.
	I have a question about the trolls.
	What is your personal breaking point for not engaging with people, Steph?
	I'm not going to answer that.
	Oh, I enjoyed it, even if nobody else did.
	That's a very good question.
	I have actually, Christina and I did a little bit of this today.
	Oh, is this Matty? Are you on?
	I hear somebody breathing.
	Or is that... Just me, my brain.
	Yeah, okay. Christina and I did a, we did an ask a therapist this morning.
	It was more involuntary because I tried to get something my own way.
	So I had to sit down and lecture to about ask a therapist, or as I like to call it, interrupt a therapist.
	But it is a very interesting question.
	I won't go over it in any great detail because we did have a bit of a chat about it this morning, and Christina and I chatted about it for over an hour last night.
	Because there have been a couple of things sort of cooking around the board that have gotten me sort of exasperated, and not because it's abusive, because those people don't last very long on the board, at least not if I catch them.
	But the thing that bothers me, I think, more than that, and there has been a dip in participation a little bit, and certainly new people joining over the last while, but this could be tide coming in, tide coming out.
	We don't know. But my sort of threshold for dealing with people is if...
	I don't mind if people are abrasive.
	I don't even mind if they're short.
	I don't even mind if they're rude.
	But I do mind if they're...
	I mean, to me, manipulation.
	Like, if they're just trying to manipulate me and bullshit me, and if they're sowing what we in the business world call FUD... F-U-D. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
	And sometimes that's the best sales strategy you can come up with if somebody else is heavily embedded into an account.
	But if somebody comes in and starts fear, uncertainty, and doubt, that really bothers me, right?
	So this TX Island girl who's in, who's a communist...
	There was a question about the problem of the commons, which was posted a couple of days ago, and people said, well, you know, the problem of the commons is because of government stuff, and then somebody brought up the bison, or maybe this guy's professor did, and said, well, the bison were all killed by the capitalists, and the government saved them by sticking them all in Yellowstone Park.
	And so then somebody said, oh, you know, we gave a whole bunch of references, and then somebody said, oh, you know, I'm finding it hard to find a way to pin this on the government, which was, I thought, a tongue-in-cheek, ha-ha-ha thing.
	And then there was a long lecture from TX Island Girl about how...
	How we really shouldn't try and fit the facts to our theories, but we should try and be empirical, and we should try and be scientific, and we should buy this and that and the other, right?
	And I thought, so I did some lookups, and she said also that the Indians used every piece of the bison that was available, and they didn't waste anything, but the capitalists wasted everything.
	You know, all the standard Rousseauian noble savage nonsense that you hear about how noble the Indians were before the evil white man came along and corrupted and killed everyone and so on.
	And so I posted some references which contradicted that whole theory, and I said, well, maybe you can post me your sources and we can compare notes, right?
	And I kind of knew damn well that she didn't have, that she was just coming in and giving us a pompous lecture about facts while having no facts of her own.
	That to me is where I just have no longer any interest.
	And she hasn't come back, and I did this a couple of, two days ago, I think.
	She hasn't come back with any responses.
	She's sort of fled the field, right?
	So when someone comes in and lectures me about facts or lectures people who I think are making good arguments about facts and basic obvious methodology, you know, like it's important to be logical and it's important to have references and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	If they come in and do that and then you say, oh, okay, well, let's hear your references, right?
	And then they run away. I'm sort of done with someone at that point, right?
	Because then they're just sort of pompous and annoying.
	And they're just sort of screwing with your head, right?
	Just coming in and giving you long lectures while having nothing of substance to offer themselves.
	That to me is kind of annoying, so I don't have a lot of patience with that kind of stuff.
	Condescension really bothers me.
	I mean, condescension really bothers me.
	I, you know, and there's no way to say this without sounding sort of pompous myself, for which I apologize in advance, but I like to think that I've got a few brain cells rolling around and I spent I've spent 25 years working on these issues.
	I think that that time has been spent doing something useful.
	I think that I've tried really hard to, after being a slave to other philosophers for like 20 years, I tried to start thinking for myself a couple of years ago because I felt I was ready.
	I was able to snatch the pebble from my own hand.
	And I don't think that it took me 25 years because I'm half retarded.
	I think it's just really hard to work out rational proofs for morality and so on without...
	History interfering with you, either personal or intellectual history.
	When other people have what seem like great arguments, it can take a while to feel confident enough to take on Ayn Rand and Aristotle.
	It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, right?
	They're pretty smart people. So, yeah, I kind of like to think that it didn't take me 25 years to come up with original stuff because I'm kind of retarded.
	I think it's because it's really hard.
	So what I have a really tough time with is when people come in and just sort of state the obvious and think that they're adding something to the debate, you know, that sort of really bothers me.
	When people just think, you've spent 25 years bending your brain, reading, you studied this, you went to school, you went to graduate school, you studied this stuff, you've worked on all these podcasts, you've done all these articles, you know, and then when people come in and say, you know, well, It's not that taxes are evil.
	It's the abuse of power that's evil.
	You know, you just got to kind of understand that.
	Or they say, you know, it's really important for you to have facts to back up your theories.
	Or it's really important that your approach be consistent.
	It's like, really?
	Wow! You know, I had never thought of that idea behind logic, evidence, and consistency.
	I had never thought of that for 25 years, right?
	When somebody new comes into a field, like a young, let's just say a young person comes into a field, they get all excited, right?
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	That's all very good stuff, right?
	But it is important, I think, you know, maybe to have some respect for people who spend 25 years hacking around with these issues and working very hard.
	They either spend 25, like either I spent 25 years doing this because I'm too stupid to do it and it's really easy, in which case, why would you debate with me, right?
	Or, I'm a smart guy who's worth debating with and I spent 25 years on these things, therefore maybe you should ask me some questions before just telling me that I'm wrong, especially if you have no evidence or rationality to back you up.
	That sort of side of things is kind of tough for me.
	I don't want to sound vain because I could still be totally wrong about everything, but so far I've been...
	I've fielded, Lord knows, how many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails and posts and thousands of posts and so on of people trying to hack at the basic ideas, and I think that they've stood firm, right?
	Nobody's been able to uproot the argument for morality.
	Nobody's been able to uproot the universal approach to the ethics of the state.
	Nobody's been able to come up with a better theory of ethics than the one we talk about universality and reciprocity and so on.
	Nobody's been able to uproot the arguments about religion or the state or the army and so on.
	So With a whole bunch of people hacking away at it, we've had 120,000 downloads last month, and there are certainly some very smart people who are listening to these podcasts, some very brilliant people, it's all out in the public domain.
	I've got like 80 articles on my blog, I've had 30 articles published on Lou Rockwell, thousands and thousands of readers, hundreds of thousands of podcasts, and it's got to be close to half a million by now.
	And I think that they've stood up pretty well overall, right?
	I mean, I think that we have not had any sort of major disproofs in the methodology or the idea.
	But still, people come wandering in and they say, well, this is all silly because you haven't thought of this basic thing.
	And it's like, you know, like if I get another email which says, well, sure, but if you get rid of government, there'll be nothing but civil war.
	That's just annoying to me because it's just, it's kind of disrespectful, right?
	I mean, it's like, Oh, gee, I'd never thought of that.
	How could I have ever thought of that?
	Like I was brought up on some alien planet, but there was no such thing as governments, and who would ever think that this might be a risk?
	So I would say that when people come sort of wandering in who think that they're great mathematicians because they can do 2 plus 2 is 4, and they come in where we're talking some pretty advanced calculus and say, your mathematical theories are stupid because they smell like poo and they look like blue, right? I mean, that's kind of annoying.
	That's why I did a bit of a podcast on humility, just saying, you know, I didn't sort of...
	I didn't sort of wander into Ayn Rand's philosophy or Aristotle's philosophy saying, well, this is stupid, you know, because she was like Russian and he was like gay.
	So, like, why would I bother, you know?
	I mean, I didn't do that. I just, you know, these ideas blow me away.
	I'm going to absorb them.
	I'm going to learn them. I'm going to deal with these thinkers who I'm going to invest time and energy into understanding their ideas.
	I'm going to treat them with some respect and I'm going to learn as much as possible.
	And then when I get to the edges of where I think their rationality breaks down, I'm going to try and extend it as best I can, or if there's something at the core that I see is inconsistent, I'm going to try and repair it as best I can.
	But, you know, it's just...
	I wish there was a little bit more respect for philosophy.
	I mean, for philosophers, right?
	And I know that it's not...
	I know that it's an emotional thing.
	I know that fundamentally it's an emotional thing, right?
	It's an emotional immaturity.
	It doesn't have anything to do with me, and it doesn't have anything to do with respect for philosophy as a whole.
	It's just that people like to dominate other people, and they do that by trying to provoke insecurity in them, right?
	So this is why I get the kind of emails like, oh, Steph, you're just so wrong about everything, I don't even know where to begin.
	You're just so chock full of errors that it's almost embarrassing to have to point out even one of them, right?
	And we've had a troll on the board who's come back under a different name who's doing this kind of stuff, and Tuttle had a great quote about that, which you might want to read on the board.
	It's about... How to avoid dogmatism or something like that.
	Where he's like, oh, Steph, every podcast, there's more errors than syllables.
	There's more errors than bad jokes.
	There's more errors than tangents.
	There's more errors than verbal tics.
	And I don't even know where to begin cataloging.
	But trust me, Steph's just so wrong, it's ridiculous.
	And then people say, and I think rightly so, well...
	That's great. If there's 550 podcasts, about a dozen errors per podcast, maybe you could pick one of these thousands and thousands of errors and let us know.
	And it's like, well, I don't have time for that.
	I had time to post a 15-sentence expostulation on how wrong Steph was, but I don't have time to actually post what his errors are.
	Just trust me, there's lots of errors, right?
	And that stuff is really annoying too, right?
	Because this is just obviously somebody who is an idiot.
	I don't know how to put it sort of in a nicer way, and I certainly don't like to talk to anyone in that manner, but this is just somebody who's...
	It's a whole lot easier to say that someone's wrong than it is to actually sort of prove that someone's wrong, right?
	And so I've been sort of working out, and I'm not going to get into this part because we've got a podcast on it, but...
	I've been sort of working out the right way to approach this, because part of me just gets really angry, and part of me wants to be sort of zen and superior, so I've been trying to work out a sort of third route, and so basically Christine is going to handle it also.
	So, let's see here...
	Oh, yeah, the avoiding dogmatism comments.
	I think this is just B.K. Holden who's come back, right?
	This is sort of internal matter, so apologies to those in the future who don't have access to the board 200 years from now who are listening to this.
	But, yeah, there's just some guy who came in and is causing a whole lot of trouble because he's, you know, kind of...
	A strange fellow. And yeah, so he comes in, and this is sort of part of the whole condescending thing, right?
	So he sort of comes in and says, oh, you little children, you little children who are following the big chatty forehead, who, whenever I say, I have a question, what you do is you point me to a podcast, and you can't think for yourselves, and you don't know truth from fiction, and you just follow Steph's opinions as if they're gospel, and it's a cult, and Oh, I mean, you get this.
	We get this kind of stuff. It comes in intermittent ways, perhaps with every full moon, I don't know, but we get this kind of nonsense, right, where people come in and they say, oh, well, you people are young and I am wise beyond your years and I have learned so much and I had a philosophy professor who said nobody under 40 should be allowed to take philosophy because you simply don't have the wisdom and I, from my high mountain of pure wisdom, I look down on you like little ants and blah, blah, blah.
	You get all this kind of stuff, right?
	And it's like, but that's great.
	You know, that's fucking great.
	Do you have an argument?
	Right? It's all great to have this attitude about how wise you are and how smart you are and how, you know, you're so right and, you know, everything that Steph says is just an opinion.
	But do you actually have an argument?
	Because that'd be kind of nice.
	Like, we try not to just have a whole bunch of attitude here.
	We actually try and talk about facts and reason, right?
	So, do you have an argument?
	You know, I'm not asking for the world here, right?
	I'm not asking for somebody to give me a 15,000-line proof of how it is that I'm wrong about everything.
	And I also don't ask people to read, like, 12 volumes of my moral theory.
	I've got moral theories that are, like, three pages long.
	I'm not asking people to, you know, subscribe to my PhD program in moral philosophy, spend 10 years, and then they get to criticize me.
	It's publicly available.
	It's a click away. It's two pages long.
	That's all I'm asking for. Have a look at that.
	So that kind of stuff is also just kind of annoying to me where people come in and it's just a whole bunch of attitude, right?
	Because, of course, what I was tempted to do in response to this, and this is not because anybody cares about this particular issue, it's just useful when you're debating with people as a whole because you run into this stuff, if you're a philosopher, you're going to run into this stuff quite a bit.
	But if somebody comes along and says, ah, you are just so young and you don't know anything about originality and all you can do is imitate other thinkers and just because Steph says something it's not true and you're a slave and it's a cult and blah, blah, whatever, then, you know, one thing you can say is like, wow, okay, you must be, first of all, it's kind of insulting.
	It's kind of insulting for people to say that, right?
	But another thing you can say, if you want to sort of play around a little bit, is you can say, wow, you know, so you're older, you've gone through this whole phase of being enslaved to somebody else's ideas, and now you've reached this nirvana of pure creativity, why don't you share with me your wonderful creativity, all the thoughts that you've come up with on your own that are not derived from some other thinker, right?
	And then if they can come up with 50 thoughts, fantastic, you know, listen to them, that would be great.
	Tell me about them, I'd love to listen to them.
	But what you're going to get is a whole bunch more pompous stuff about, you know, how wise and wonderful they are.
	It's just a bunch of self-description, right?
	It's like you're on eHarmony, right?
	Or some dating site.
	And some woman says, yeah, like I'm...
	I'm a supermodel.
	I model for Victoria's Secret.
	And every time I walk down the street, birds, they do fall from the sky from my sexiness.
	And clouds, they do gather above me.
	And construction workers, they do burst into flames.
	And that's how ultimately hearty sexy I am.
	And just so I don't disturb everyone too much, I'm not going to use my Valley Girl voice for this.
	But I could. Don't get me wrong.
	And then you say, well, that's great.
	Can I see a picture? Like, no, I don't, you know, I just, you know, I'm hot.
	You know, I'm sexy. I'm like 36, 24, 36.
	I'm like 5'2", a pure primo, ultra-hardiness.
	Great! You know, are there any pictures of you anywhere?
	Like, do you have any... No, I don't...
	At what point are you going to say, you know, if you could just stop telling me how attractive you are and show me how attractive you are, you probably have a little bit more credibility in my book, right?
	I mean, it's just one way that you can do it.
	I mean, if I... The last metaphor.
	We don't have anyone who's dying to talk your enemy.
	All right. I'm certainly happy to be interrupted, but the last metaphor that I'll use in this realm, which can be helpful for people who are in these kinds of debates...
	It's sort of like this, right?
	So let's say that I'm some Kung Fu teacher, right?
	And I certainly would say that I'm trying to get some ideas across in a conversation about philosophy, so let's just say I'm sort of a Kung Fu teacher, right?
	And let's say I'm pretty good at Kung Fu, right?
	And I would say that when it comes to philosophy, I've got a few tricks up my sleeve.
	And so I'm doing some pretty good Mr.
	Miyagi moves and so on, and then some other guy comes along who's...
	He stands in the corner sort of sneering, right?
	And he says, ah!
	He waits till I leave, right?
	He waits till I leave, and he certainly doesn't talk to me directly, which is, you know, an important thing, right?
	If somebody doesn't come in, and I always invite people who've got strong disputes with me to come and chat with me on these shows.
	They just don't tend to show up a hell of a lot.
	So they wait till the teacher leaves, and then they sort of slither over to the students, and they say, ah, he sucks at kung fu.
	This is crap kung fu.
	His kung fu is just junky.
	He doesn't know what he's talking about.
	He's making it all up.
	He doesn't have a clue. You guys are being ripped off.
	He's just coming in there causing problems, as we talked about with this borderline personality.
	And he's just coming in there showing fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
	He's flooding people. And so then, I think it's reasonable for...
	So then the teacher comes back, right, and the teacher hears this, and he says, oh, well, maybe you and I can spar for a little, and obviously I'd love to be your teacher.
	If you know a whole lot more than I do, that would be great.
	I'll then just teach people an introductory course, and then I'll learn everything from you.
	And then the guy says, no, I don't actually show off any of my sort of skills.
	Forget this. And it's like, oh, okay.
	Well, I'll tell you what. I'll leave, and then you teach the students all the stuff that you know, which gives you the right to say what a bad and ridiculous and foolish teacher I am.
	And then the guy says, well, I don't...
	I don't do that, but he's a bad teacher and I know a whole lot more.
	It's like, well, can you demonstrate that knowledge?
	Can you at least maybe flip a burger?
	Can you at least do that?
	Can you take down maybe my seven-year-old son?
	Can you show us one pose, anything that indicates that you have some knowledge of kung fu?
	And if he continues to resist, then, you know, toss him out, right?
	Because he's just, he's in there causing a lot of trouble because he's an insecure pathological jerk, and he's disrupting the class, he's showing, and he's just disrupting everybody's concentration, and people aren't learning, and they're not able to teach, and of course, I'm learning as much as I'm teaching in this process, so I want to continue to learn.
	So that's another, you just ask people for their examples, right?
	And so people are doing that with the trolls, and I think that's kind of useful, so...
	Oh, you were talking about a moral PhD earlier, so Charlie's question is, speaking of the moral PhD, I have an argument for morality question.
	Does it only say that things are immoral and not make any claim about something that is moral?
	That's a little confusing for me.
	No, it's not rehashing at all.
	It's another sort of question. The morality question is an essential question, and this is a lot about the debate from prostitution that has confused people.
	It's the original, of course, I'm not going to rehash the debate because there's Lord knows how many posts about it and podcasts, but the...
	The question started out as somebody who goes to a prostitute, is that indicative of low self-esteem?
	And what's happening is that people are having a very tough time, since I did the podcast on prostitution, or for other reasons that I don't know about, they're having a very tough time.
	Making the case that it got nothing to do with low self-esteem to go and visit the leftover pickings from pedophiles, right?
	Because of all of the prostitutes who are abused.
	So they're having a tough time saying that that's a high self-esteem activity.
	So what they're doing is they're making up another argument which says, oh, so you're saying that everyone who visits prostitutes is evil.
	Well, who are you to be such a dictator about ethics and this and that and the other, right?
	So, there's of course a very important reason as to why they're making up an argument that's never been put forward and then attacking that.
	It's because they don't like the fact that they attacked an original argument, which I think has been fairly well established.
	But it does raise an important question about the argument for morality will certainly say that, you know, rape and murder and theft and so on and certain kinds of contractual fraud are corrupt and evil, right?
	Bad things to do. The question then becomes, are there any sort of positive obligations, if I understand the question correctly?
	And I think I do. And let me know.
	Christina will let me know if it's not.
	But what is the nature of positive obligations?
	So some guy is bleeding by a ditch and you just drive past because you're late for your Baccarat game with Bond.
	So do you have sort of positive obligations to aid and to help people and so on?
	And I think that you don't.
	I mean, you certainly in no way, shape or form have any positive obligations Unless you yourself are the cause of it, right?
	Or if you're intervening, right?
	So this is some general moral theory we'll just go over very briefly.
	I don't have to dive in to save you if you're drowning.
	No matter if Phil Collins writes a song about me later, I still don't have to do it.
	But... If I push you in, then I'm sort of obligated.
	Now, the other way in which I may be obligated is if, you know, you fall into a lake and you, ah, I can't swim, I can't swim, and there's a whole bunch of people crowding around, and then I say, don't worry, I'm going to save him, and I, you know, I rip off my T-shirt and dive into the water, and then I just tread water right next to you.
	Well, nobody's come to help you because I've said I'm going in to help you, right?
	So I've prevented, in a sense, other people from coming to help you and so on, right?
	So I would say there's certain...
	But of course that doesn't happen, right?
	I mean, it's just a theoretical bit of nonsense that's important for a wrinkle in the debate.
	And I've talked about this in other sorts of areas, but people do want to help other people, right?
	I mean, people do want to help other people.
	How many of us... Assuming we can swim, if we see a child in a lake who's drowning, how many of us are going to walk on past?
	If we can swim, if we're not pathologically terrified of water, assuming that we have the ability to save that kid...
	Almost every human being in the entire world is going to jump in to say, it's not really an issue.
	I think that there are no positive obligations that can be enforced, and they don't need to be enforced.
	And of course, if it does turn out that there's a real shortage of people who want to help other people, then DROs will simply say, hey, if you saved this person's life, and it's verified, and you didn't start the problem, then I'm going to pay you 10 grand, because it's a hell of a lot cheaper for the DRO than paying out a life insurance.
	So... There's lots of ways in which negative obligations, like a sanction against doing something, falls into the realm of the argument for morality.
	The positive obligation aspect, who's going to enforce it, right?
	Who's going to enforce it, right?
	That's always the problem. If you've got a government, then you can say, well, you have positive obligations to pay your taxes, and if you don't, we'll shoot you or whatever.
	But in a free society, who is going to enforce the positive obligations, right?
	And under what moral authority would they be able to do that, right?
	So if you decide not to give money to charity, can I go and shoot you?
	Well, of course not, because that's the initiation of the use of force, and keeping your own property is an essential right of any free society or any decent society.
	So if you decide not to give to charity, that's your issue.
	I may frown at you, I may disapprove of you, I may put your name on my website as somebody who didn't donate, but I can't go and shoot you for that because then anyone could make up a charity, say that they wanted people to donate, and they would then be able to go and shoot anyone who didn't donate.
	So basically you'd be inventing organized crime much in the same way that the drug war does.
	So The thing that I would say most fundamentally about this, and I'll turn it back to questions you may have, is that any moral theory kind of has to pass the coma test, which means that you have to explain it long enough to put everyone into a coma.
	Have we achieved that yet? Is that a coma?
	Signals? No? Coma? Okay.
	Yeah, one sec. But the coma test is sort of important.
	I think it's fairly clear that a man in a coma can't be called evil.
	A man who's asleep can't be called evil.
	That wouldn't make any sense, right?
	Because A, there's no verification, and B, the person's not doing anything.
	So the problem with positive obligations is that they label people who are asleep or in a coma evil.
	And I'm not going to go into why that's illogical, because if you kind of don't get it, then you probably won't appreciate the argument either.
	But certainly a guy in a coma can't be evil.
	And a dead guy can't be evil, right?
	I mean, evil ends with life, and so does virtue.
	But... Positive obligations would then condemn the person who's in a coma as being evil.
	so I would say that is one of the central reasons that you can withdraw from those kinds of conversations Skype is maxing out my CPO at 100% both processors um Hey, are these both 286 processors or is one at 386?
	Just kidding. So, Mr.
	L had a question? I certainly will.
	Let me just find him in our plethora of welcome guests to our chat about philosophy.
	Thank you so much for joining us.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio at www.freedomainradio.com.
	I'm just looking for our good friend Lapafrax so we can get a voice from across the pond.
	He is near the top, you say?
	Let me find him for me.
	He's not near my top.
	Sorry, just as I go through the...
	Ah, yes.
	Third on mine. See, that's vastly different.
	Go ahead. Hello?
	Hello? Yes, go ahead.
	Well, earlier this week, our Prime Minister Blair basically made a speech saying that immigrants to Britain should basically assimilate to British culture.
	It just made me think about libertarian views about multiculturalism.
	Okay, the libertarian society wouldn't really be a government sort of promoting one culture over another.
	But, you know, is it really, you know, should a libertarian society really be multicultural?
	And really, well, basically, do you think there's any inherent good in multiculturalism?
	Well, it could be. Can you tell me more about what you mean by multiculturalism?
	Well, I think in this context, Nair was describing it as sort of different cultural cultures living side by side, but still adhering to the same sort of legal system.
	Right, so here in Canada there's been a petition from the Muslim Council that they be allowed to use Sharia law in the resolution of their own disputes within their own community and that's been rejected by the Canadian government.
	Is it that kind of thing where you have a multiplicity of legal systems and a multiplicity of belief systems and so on?
	Well, I wouldn't say legal systems as such, but I'll certainly say cultural attitudes.
	So, say, Muslims want to wear, or Muslim women want to wear Right, right.
	Well, I think that in a democracy, the real challenge is to ask why this is occurring, right?
	I mean, you have this sort of stuff going on in the States as well, where, for instance, whites, I think, are a minority in California now and stuff like that, and suddenly whites are getting all up in arms about the problem of being outvoted, right?
	It's a fundamental issue, it's the question of being outvoted by other cultures, right?
	Some of the Muslim clerics have said that their goal is the sort of Hitlerian approach, right?
	So Hitler said after this failed Beer Hall Putsch in the 20s, he said, well, that's it.
	I'm not going to try for a revolution.
	Why should I when I can take over the government through peaceful means through gathering enough votes?
	So one of the problems that's occurring, as we know and talked about before here in the Western world, is that, you know, whitey ain't breeding, right?
	I mean, fundamentally and very frankly, the white race is not breeding, or the Western sort of wasp race is not breeding, and the other races are breeding, right?
	I mean, this sort of fundamental demographic fact.
	There's nothing racist about it. It's just an observation of the birth rate in different cultures, right?
	And there's lots of reason for that, which we don't sort of have to get into, but they're definitely based on things like the state.
	But the question then becomes when other groups, right, when you've set up this structure that you have used to basically dominate other groups, both domestically and overseas, right, when sort of Whitey has set up this government that benefits Whitey, right, corporate welfare, this and that, and does not benefit minorities.
	And we know that welfare is sort of like a cheap drug that people get addicted to that gets really rancid really quickly.
	So they've set up this institution that is benefiting Whitey, and then there's a whole bunch of other cultures that are coming in who are saying, oh, great, voting, fantastic, right?
	So I remember when I was much younger, a friend of mine who's now a professor of economics was working on a campaign where his English teacher was trying to run for some office, some local office.
	And there was this Indian guy, like Indian from India kind of guy, and Of course, everyone who came to vote for this guy was, not everyone, but most of them were Indian.
	And they had, you know, literally they were getting old women out of cars by the boatload and getting them to sort of wobble up these steps and go, and of course these people probably didn't even speak English.
	They had no idea, right?
	They just go check next to this guy and he won the election, right?
	And, you know, to me it's like I could care less because I hate the whole system.
	But for a lot of people it's like, okay, well, we've been loosing this tiger.
	On all these other people.
	And now the tiger is coming when these other people call it.
	And that makes people kind of alarmed and kind of concerned, right?
	So given that some of the Muslims, I mean the Muslim is vastly, the Muslim countries or the Muslim race, not race, but the Muslim groups, vastly outbreeding the Western groups, right?
	So people are then going, well, now multiculturalism is a bad thing, right?
	Multiculturalism was a good thing for politicians when it got other people from other cultures to vote for them.
	But now there's a concern that the other cultures are becoming so dominant in society that they're going to take over the very political process that has been used to sort of keep them down and keep them oppressed and so on.
	And I think that's really the shift that's occurring.
	It's obviously, in a free society, it's no skin off your nose if some woman down the street wants to wear a burqa.
	You might look at it out of your window and say, well, that's kind of stupid.
	But, you know, what does it matter, right?
	And let's say that they open some store, some convenience store, and you think that the burger is so offensive that you don't go and shop there.
	Well, that's fine. If enough people agree with you, then the shop will go out of business or, you know, something else will change, right?
	So, I have been multiculturalism the more the merrier, right?
	Fantastic. You know, lots of races.
	I love different kinds of foods.
	Lots of races. Lots of cuisines.
	Lots of dance. Lots of fantastic, you know?
	But I think it's important to understand that The politicians are now able to find play in anti-multiculturalism because there's a general voter concern that other cultures are going to come in with enough votes, not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of voter turnout per demographic group.
	That there's going to be enough votes that they're going to get a hold of the political process, and this huge, ugly beast of power that has been sort of invented to benefit certain people is now going to turn against those who used to support it.
	So it's kind of like someone else is getting a hold of the robot army, and so now the robot army is bad, right?
	So that's sort of my thoughts on it, but tell me what you think.
	Okay, well, okay, yeah, I see your point.
	Also, well, okay, I've been chatting to some other libertarians on the internet.
	You're kidding me! Traitor!
	No, I'm kidding, go on. Yeah, and well some of them have been sort of like refuting the old sort of traditional open borders policy saying that well if you have too many people of sort of like a non-Western or background then it would No,
	actually, and I've got to tell you, it's got nothing to do with you, but I really get angry at libertarians who talk like this.
	I think that this is absolutely, totally, and fundamentally bigoted and stupid conversations that people have.
	And this is not you. I don't mean to get mad at you, but...
	Libertarians who talk about how we need to abandon something like open borders or whatever because, oh, it's just not going to work if other people come across.
	It's just a load of claptrap, and it just shows you how tough a time people have sticking to principles sometimes, right?
	There's no harm whatsoever in the absence of a state if everyone around is a different culture than you and me.
	Well, what the hell does it matter, right?
	Maybe we've got a language barrier.
	Maybe we need to learn that. But that's got nothing to do with the government.
	That's got nothing to do with laws.
	But what conceivable harm is it if I live in a street and some Mexican family moves in?
	Or some black family moves in?
	Or some upper crust British prudes come and move in?
	What the hell does it matter?
	I go home, I chat with my wife, and we do this or that.
	I go out and I do these shows.
	What conceivable difference would it have, right?
	The reason that people are concerned about immigration when they're libertarians is that they're concerned about being outvoted, right?
	But they're libertarians, so they should be against the powers of the government that people are voting for anyway.
	You're not going to be able to get rid of the problems of immigration by giving the government more power, because immigration is only a problem because the government exists and has power to begin with.
	I mean, there was almost no issue when it came to immigration as a whole in the 19th century in America when millions of people came over from Europe and Eastern Europe and other places.
	And all they had to do in Ellis Island was if they coughed up on someone, they had to spend a week or two in quarantine.
	That was about it, right?
	There was a woman, what's her name?
	Faith Popcorn. Who's some nonsense futurist or whatever, right?
	But she says that she was from, her great-grandfather was from Italy, and his name was Papagione or something like that, right?
	And so they came in and they said, hey, what's your name?
	The guy said, hey, what's your name? It's Papagione, right?
	Or something else like, I don't know what the hell that means.
	And the guy just wrote down popcorn.
	Because he couldn't write...
	This is how funny it was back then.
	No passports, no papers.
	Hey, what's your name? I'm going to write it down.
	In you go and do what you will, right?
	And that's how America used to work.
	That's when America had this incredible, right, give me your tired, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, right?
	That's when America had some sense of what it meant to be a free country.
	Now, there's all these landmines of state power that are set up that people didn't have, libertarians seem to, they don't like it when the whites have control of it, right?
	Which is currently, right? They say we should have a smaller government.
	But then it's like, oh, we can't have open borders because other people will change our culture.
	Well, bullshit. Some, and not you, right?
	But some Mexican family moves in down the street that's like saying now I have to eat enchiladas every night in my own house.
	What the hell does it matter what they cook?
	I go and cook whatever I want.
	That's freedom. There's no difference whatsoever.
	Unless the government gets to mandate what everybody eats, right?
	If the government gets to mandate what everybody eats and I don't like enchiladas, then of course I'm going to resist Mexicans coming in.
	But what the hell does that? I mean, it's only because of the government.
	It's not because of the Mexicans.
	You don't deal with the symptom and think you're dealing with the problem.
	And I get mad, not at you, but at libertarians who start caving on this whole immigration issue because they somehow think that if we give the government now additional powers, it's so hypocritical, fundamentally. It's so hypocritical.
	It's like, well, we don't like, and it's racist, fundamentally.
	We don't like the government because the government does a whole bunch of things that we don't want.
	Oh, but you see, with immigration, now we want the government to do something that we want, so we want to give it more powers.
	Well, go to hell, I say to those libertarians.
	You know, just don't even think that you have a clue what freedom means or consistency to principle means.
	So, sorry, this was a...
	This is not a rant against you.
	I just got to tell you that a free society has nothing to fear from people from other cultures coming in.
	It can only be enriched. And of course, if you don't like other cultures, then you can go and buy a house in a neighborhood populated by people like yourself.
	But it has nothing to do.
	With government power.
	And it's so sad to see how libertarians run away from the principles of minimizing government power when it comes to dealing with other cultures.
	It's small-minded, it's pig-headed, it's parochial, it's petty, and it makes alive the whole movement.
	It's like those people who support the Iraq War.
	So, anyway, sorry, that's not to do with you.
	That's just sort of... It really bothers me.
	And I wrote an article about this on Lou Rockwell that got me precisely zero.
	I normally get... 50 responses to every article that I put on.
	I got zero responses to an article that Wilt and I wrote about immigration.
	It's just something that people don't want to talk about.
	It's radioactive. Okay, that's it for now.
	Yeah, sorry, I hope I didn't hurt your ears.
	The libertarians bother me about this, right?
	It's like, state is bad.
	Oh, I want the state to do this, though, so it's good.
	All right, so we are coming up for two hours, which doesn't mean that we have to end.
	I am on the verge of being indefatigable, but I don't want to test everyone's patience.
	But if you have questions, issues, comments, problems, and so on, I am more than happy to let you have the mic, but you have to ask me.
	And actually, I prefer it if you beg.
	But you can just ask. That's all right.
	That's all right, too. So, we have...
	Oh, good heavens. Somebody asked to talk at 420.
	Oh, that's why I didn't go back to him.
	He went offline. That's right.
	All right. So, let's see if we have anybody who is dying to get me to yell again.
	Anyone else?
	Sorry, you there.
	I'm in college because I'm afraid of independence.
	Ah, excellent. Excellent.
	Well, that's good. Good.
	Right, right. Sorry you don't have a mic.
	I hope everything's going okay there, and thank you again for sharing that dream.
	It was wonderful. We've had some dreams posted recently, which I think would be interesting to analyze.
	I certainly get quite a kick out of analyzing the dreams, and it seems to be some of the more popular podcasts, so maybe I'll get some more to those.
	But that was a...
	Oh, not him. You're not the guy from the subway ad, are you?
	No? Okay. Yes, I am.
	Oh, he is the guy from Subway Guy.
	Okay, good. Well, welcome. I like Subway too.
	There's our commercials. I knew it wasn't going to be long until...
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, he posted the dream about the...
	Yeah, you posted the dream about going up the bus with your father up the mountain.
	It was a great dream. Still don't know what the hell the...
	I still don't know what the Big Bird thing was, but that's something which...
	If you can clear that up, that would be fantastic.
	Well, people won't know what the hell we're talking about if they've just joined.
	Tell me about the Big Bird.
	Oh, he's got a question? Oh, okay.
	Big Bird.
	What should I do? Well, that's a little open-ended, other than donate.
	Actually, no, if you're a student, you don't have to worry.
	You can just send me a kidney instead.
	Yeah, look, I mean, this is like uncle time, right?
	So I don't know. There's no need to do this stuff right away.
	I mean, this is nothing to do with philosophy.
	This is just sort of my personal opinion, if it's of any use to you.
	I took 18 months off after high school before I went to university or college, I guess you'd call it, in the States.
	I had no money, right?
	I mean, I've sort of been self-supporting since I was about 15, and I just had no money, right?
	So I couldn't go to university.
	And I also wanted a break from school.
	I was kind of sick of it. So I went and gold-panned and worked up north and staked claims and lived out of a tent for 18 months, or not all of it, but for good chunks of it.
	And So that, and then when I got to university, I really wanted to be there, right?
	Because I really sort of saw.
	There's no reason, of course, you've got a lot going on in your personal life, which we've talked about before, but there's no reason why you have to go plowing at a school.
	For heaven's sake, don't do it.
	If you're not enjoying it, right?
	I mean, there's enough stuff that you have to do in life that you don't have to make up stuff that you have to do as well.
	So I would definitely recommend that you not feel obligated or constrained to go to school because if I don't go to school and if I don't take these classes right now, I'm flipping burgers for the rest of my life, right?
	That's not the case at all. You can take time to go back to school a little bit later.
	The more important thing at the moment might be to get out from under the thumb of your dad in particular, but your parents as a whole.
	I would say that the independence that you're going to gain from not having Joe's psycho roommate and not being under the thumb of your dad who's yelling at you to save, what, 60 bucks instead of 40 bucks every week, I would say that the freedom that you're going to get out of getting under the thumb of your roommate and your parents, not in that order, is going to be worth a hell of a lot.
	And to save some money, to get out from under this kind of control situation, And to not worry.
	You will do the right thing at the right time.
	And your gut is telling you right now that being in this college at the moment is not the right time.
	It's not the right thing to do.
	I would say that if you're close to the end of a semester, it's worth finishing it off.
	I mean, I would say that, right?
	Because otherwise it's a sink, right?
	At least get some credits so that if you go to another school or come back to the school later that you'll have completed some aspect of it.
	I'm not saying a full year. But, you know, if you've got exams to take through to December, it would probably be worth taking those.
	But, you know, the freedom is key, right?
	Freedom is key. You cannot force yourself to go to school because you're terrified of flipping burgers for the rest of your life.
	That's not being free. Freedom is a very delicate condition that has a lot to do with having self-trust and knowing that you're going to do the right thing at the right time.
	But don't be in school because you're frightened of the consequences of not being in school.
	That's not being free. So you have to give yourself that liberty to make choices.
	And then if you choose to be at school, it's a choice.
	And then it's going to be a value to you.
	But if you're just there because you're frightened, then you're not free.
	And I also will say that you're probably not likely to be as successful as you will be if you're really motivated.
	I need to transfer because it's too expensive here, but transferring to a cheaper college means being closer to my family, a lot closer.
	Well, no, I'm not saying out of the frying pan and into the fire is the way to go, because you're still close to your family because you're dependent upon them for certain amounts of money for school.
	So that's not a good thing.
	You might want to think outside the box, right?
	I mean, this is sort of ridiculous.
	I mean, this is just ideas that pop into my head.
	These are things I was thinking about at the end of high school.
	You could join the Merchant Marines for a year.
	No, seriously, why not?
	Right? You could go and be a scuba instructor in Barbados for a year.
	You could... I mean, there's tons and tons of...
	There's as many professions as there are, you know, atoms in the world sometimes, it seems.
	So you don't have to sort of say, okay, well, my choice is I'm either going to be in school...
	Or I'm going to be flipping burgers because both of those at the moment kind of suck for you, right?
	But if you think outside the box and there's tons of websites which will hook you up with interesting jobs or tons of chat rooms and boards where interesting jobs get posted and talked about, you could go and teach English in Japan for a year.
	They're dying for people out there.
	Thailand or Vietnam or Cambodia, tons of requests for people to teach English.
	There's tons of things that you could do that would be a hell of a lot more fun than going to school when you don't want to or flipping burgers instead, right?
	So, yeah, if your sister teaches English in Japan...
	Yeah, you're a nasty sister. I think I remember that.
	But you could ask her to hook you up with the people she talked to to get that, right?
	Go do something fun.
	Like, you're young. Don't be locked in a prison at school right now if that's not where you want to be.
	And don't look at your only other alternative as living at home or...
	Of doing some minimum wage job.
	Like, you're young. Seize the day.
	Have fun. Go and do something wild and different and exciting and travel and expand your horizons and breathe free.
	You know, that's some amazing things to be able to do when you're young because it becomes a lot harder to do that stuff when you're older because you're not allowed.
	So, actually, no, Christine is always saying let's travel.
	But don't join the army.
	Don't join the army, whatever you do.
	Don't join the army.
	Go back and live with your parents before you join the army.
	You can get therapized out of parental contact.
	You're going to have a tough time surviving any deployment in the army psychologically and with your soul.
	Don't do that.
	But listen, just open your mind.
	And it's something that I wish people had told me more about when I was younger, right?
	Just think outside the box, right?
	I mean, there's a guy I know who quit his job at the age of 45 and is now sailing his boat in the Caribbean.
	And he fishes and he lives off that.
	And he does a little bit of consulting on the side for, you know, basic things.
	Yeah. He homeschooled his kids on the boat.
	There's so many things that you can do in life that are outside the box.
	Remember that thing that Frank Zappa said that somebody posted on the board that says, you can do anything with your life.
	And if you end up with some boring life because you believe the nonsense that everyone told you, well, that's a bit of a waste.
	There's lots of things that you can do, but this is the essence of freedom.
	It's just to recognize that you are in control of your own destiny and you don't have to do anything.
	You don't have to get out of bed in the morning.
	You don't have to do anything.
	You can step in front of a train tomorrow.
	You can become a pilot.
	You can do whatever you want.
	A lobster fisherman, as somebody posted.
	You can do anything that you want, but don't be constrained by the habits and the histories that you were just raised with.
	You can do anything with your life.
	And the more powerful and wonderful things that you can do with your life, the more you will free other people, right?
	We can free people with example as well, right?
	So if you do define some way, you know, this would be my suggestion, if you want to add a bit of shine and virtue to what it is that you're doing, let's say you end up going to teach English in Japan nowhere near your nasty sister, you know, I would say, you know, get five friends and tell them about it, right?
	So all this kind of stuff could be fantastic.
	I want to start a contract rating business.
	Yeah, hey, that would be pretty cool too.
	But yeah, hey, I got no issues with that.
	If you can pull that off, I think that would be fantastic.
	So, yeah, contract rating business would be fantastic.
	There's a business idea that I've had, the Mentometer, which is the way you rate people's virtue and trustworthiness using some various techniques on the web.
	It's sort of like eBay, but for business contracts and ethics and honesty.
	Those kinds of things. Yeah, I just, you know, right now, that's sort of not my focus because I've got a bunch of other things to do, but...
	That's good. I'm going to steal it.
	Yeah, hey, you know what? Steal away.
	Steal away. I'd rather see a good idea get implemented than not, right?
	So people can take my short story ideas as well from the art podcast right away.
	I'm not going to do it, so I'm not going to hold on to it tight.
	Okay, so let's see.
	We are cooking at around two hours and ten minutes, eight minutes.
	So if you have a question, issue, comment, problem, correction, mock of the accent on the forehead, please feel free to click on raise microphone or now...
	Sex 3333 girl, I'm sure she has something to say.
	Is that Greg? All right.
	So if you have any questions or issues, you can click on Request Microphone.
	I really appreciate the number of people who've come in to chat with us today.
	FreeDomainRadio.com. Also, YouTube.
	Y-O-U-T-U-B-E.com forward slash FreeDomainRadio if you want to see the forehead in motion.
	But there is the cheeses in the bag.
	I gave you the cheeses in the bag.
	Didn't you hear that? That's very nice.
	How do you know Greg's blowing you a kiss?
	So you're making that causal when it may not be.
	All right.
	Well, the fans are peeling off one by one because now Christina is leaving.
	I'm, of course, sorry that we didn't get a chance to be enlightened by a Jamaican friend lately.
	Hang on.
	Good night.
	As we dissolve into massive silliness towards the end of the show.
	Oh, it was so disciplined for so long.
	Actually, that's far more disciplined than I normally get in the show, so that's all very good.
	All right, so I'm going to just check through one more time.
	I'm certainly happy.
	Oh, I didn't? Oh, maybe I was in a different...
	I typed in goodnight when somebody said goodnight beautiful to Christina.
	So... Net neutrality.
	All right. We're going to be a little bit more before food.
	20 minutes? Half hour?
	Okay. All right.
	So, Mr.
	G, I'm going to de-silence thee from the throne of power.
	Go ahead. Oh.
	Skype has stopped responding.
	Try now. I heard a click.
	Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead.
	Oh, no, that wasn't my suggestion.
	I was just repeating what somebody else had dropped in there.
	Oh, so you don't know anything about net neutrality?
	Not a whole lot other than I'm not for it.
	Right, yeah, I mean, as far as I understand it, it's...
	Oh, sorry, I'm going to have to just go through a...
	Just unmute it, unmute everyone.
	As far as I know, it's this idea that you're going to get priority access through the internet and through the pipelines for certain groups, and then other people are going to be shunted to the sidelines so that they cannot have as much access or just download as fast and that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. That's sort of my understanding of it.
	And it's, you know, it's perfectly inevitable and it's perfectly natural.
	I mean, the Internet is an enormous conduit for thinking that's outside the mainstream, right?
	And certainly that's where we are, right?
	So there is no doubt that the government is going to try and do what it can to mess with the Internet, right?
	I mean, it's one of these accidental inventions that has been a thorn at the side, right?
	I mean, the fact that we're all communicating is because there's no major media outlet that would ever carry the kind of stuff that we talk about here, right?
	It's just completely inconceivable, right?
	I mean, and probably illegal.
	But we can talk about it, and there's tons and tons of other conversations.
	I would say that the vast majority of my libertarian education is achieved through the internet, because No, it's achieved through the internet simply because I can't get, you know, other than John Stossel once in a while, I can't get much from the mainstream media that has anything of interest to me.
	And once you've educated yourself about the nature of the media and the powers that be, it becomes a whole lot less compelling to go and look at the nonsense that they pump out through the media.
	So... I've no doubt that they're going to try a sort of soft censorship.
	That just seems to me completely inevitable.
	They simply don't have the resources to go and monitor everyone who talks about anything, right?
	It's just impossible. Google alerts don't quite capture it the way that you need to.
	And, of course, can you imagine if some poor homeland security agent was told to go and check out freedomainradio.com because we think that they might be people who are advocating the overthrow of the state there, and he's like, oh, really?
	550 podcasts?
	Are you kidding me?
	Do I really? Because you can't search it, right?
	It's not transcribed. And again, that's not a big plan.
	I don't think anyone's doing that. And it's like, okay, now he does an hour and a half, an hour and three quarters of podcasts a day, so you're going to need to stay on top of that.
	And it's like, but I can't take it.
	So this kind of stuff with podcasts and other ways, which can't really be monitored in the way that emails and text can be, And the YouTube videos and stuff like that, it's obviously unmanageable, right, when it comes from a communication standpoint.
	So, yeah, there's going to be a kind of soft censorship that they're going to try and achieve, and net neutrality, of course, it's completely partial.
	That's sort of my understanding of it.
	And, of course, it's technical, and nobody understands it.
	It's like the Fed. So, yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all that they're trying to do this kind of stuff.
	But... Yeah, this is somebody who's deaf.
	If you listen to them all, you might convert them, right?
	Maybe that's the other thing that might happen as well, right?
	The net neutrality people are more worried about, somebody says, AT&T or Verizon taking over rather than the government.
	They want the government to watch the companies.
	Yes, well, that's just people's...
	This is fantasy, and this is a podcast topic for this coming week, so I don't want to...
	I don't want to experience premature elaboration, so to speak, but people do have this bizarre fantasy that there are these wise, kind, virtuous shepherds out there that are almost like a totally different species from the rapacious evil capitalists, and we can trust the wise shepherds with all the guns, but we can't trust the capitalists who can't force us to do anything but have to appeal to what we want.
	And this is one of the reasons that I hammer so hard about the virtue of the state and the virtue of the cops and the virtue of the of the soldiers is that the really the only way forward is for people to give up this fantasy that there's a group of people out there who are just so wise and virtuous who can use power for everyone's benefits and then there are these other people out there who don't have any guns who can only advertise to you and appeal to your self-interest who are the real people you have to worry about if we can't get people to understand that everything they say about the capitalists is equally if not far more true We're never going to get anywhere,
	right? That's why I keep hammering about the state.
	That's why I keep hammering about God, because they're all interrelated.
	And fundamentally, that's why I keep hammering about the family, because we have to get to a state where we can only derive judgments of virtue based on what people actually do, not on the bullshit that they tell you.
	About themselves, right?
	But we have to get empirical, which is why the trolls aren't going to last, right?
	Because we have to get empirical.
	So a troll says, Steph's wrong and I'm right.
	It's like, great, let's hear the proof.
	I don't give proof. It's like, we'll get lost, right?
	A politician says, well, I'm all about virtue and this and that.
	It's like, let's see the proof because you use guns to get people to do what you want them to do and you don't appeal to people's self-interest but rather to their hatreds and fears and uncertainties and doubts.
	So we have to get empirical when it comes to ethics, most fundamentally, and just stop listening to people and start watching them.
	And so this net neutrality thing is like, oh, well, we're now afraid of capitalists, so Verizon is going to be a bad person to manage the Internet.
	But the government, you see, is completely above self-interest and control and never, you know, so the fact that the government is a legally enforced monopoly of whatever the hell it does is just so much better.
	But boy, those nasty capitalists who have to compete with each other and who can't force us to do a damn thing, those are the people we really have to worry about, right?
	Yes, like that movie of the independent carmaker, Tucker, it was.
	Not the best movie in the world, but certainly a very interesting, a great soundtrack by Joe Jackson, by the way, Shape in a Drape, great song.
	But, yeah, this stuff is quite common out there that people have this fantasy that the government is full of benevolent, wonderful people who are going to keep them safe from all the rapacious, evil capitalists and so on.
	And I actually remember, this was many years ago, I mentioned this in a podcast once, but I had a director who was directing me in a scene study of, I was playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
	And I was having trouble, you know, with certain emotional aspects of the role and the brutality.
	Yes, Stella! Absolutely.
	Only more of a high sort of girly shriek.
	And he was saying, well, you know, picture this.
	I said, picture that you've had everything taken away from you, and you're out on the streets, you've lost your wife, you've lost your house, you've lost your job, you've lost your money, and so on.
	And I stand to you, and I stand in front of you, and I point over to the guy down the street, and I say, it's his fault.
	This happened because of him.
	He said, what would you do?
	And I said, well, I'd get mad at you.
	This is sort of even way back when I was like, this is when I was like 20 or whatever, 22.
	And he said, well, why the hell would you get mad at me?
	It's like, well, if you're pointing at him, you're the one who did it, right?
	You know, that old thing about fighting, he who denied it, he who supplied it.
	And this is, of course, the people who are pointing out.
	All of the evils of capitalists are the ones who are performing all of the evil deeds that they...
	Yeah, he who smelt it dealt it.
	Absolutely true. Absolutely true.
	And the most important one that you have to watch when you're a kid when it comes to gas is silent but violent.
	If you can't hear it, it will in fact overwhelm you.
	So yeah, I mean, they're going to cash in on this kind of stuff, people's fear, and oh, the private corporations are going to take over the Internet.
	It's like, but the Internet is only useful because of private corporations, right?
	And so anyway, it's just funny, right?
	I mean, this is just the same nonsense.
	And as long as they can get you to hate the people who don't have the guns, who appeal to your self-interest, like the capitalists, then to that degree, the people don't even think through that.
	To that degree, they're responsible for their own enslavement, for sure.
	Politics is more fun when you convert it to font jokes.
	Well, that's very true, as long as we're on a Skype chat and not all in the same conference room, for sure, because then it really does sound like a Canadian brass tuba section.
	Well, I've actually thought that it would be a wonderful thing to do an anarcho-capitalist reality show, right, to follow somebody through the political process and so on.

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