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April 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:40:25

699 Call In Show April 8 2007

War crimes and appeasing girlfriends

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	Thank you everyone so much for joining.
	Had a couple of weeks off, tanned, rested, refreshed, relaxed, virtually comatose for a week or two.
	It has been quite an amount of intellectual energy, time, and to some degree money getting this show up and running to the degree that it has.
	And thanks to fabulous listeners like yourself, we hit, almost hit, a significant milestone in March.
	And I think that if I had been podcasting in the last week of March, Then we would have.
	But we had almost a quarter of a million video and audio views of Free Domain Radio.
	A quarter of a million!
	I think that is just too cool for words.
	And I'm pretty convinced now that across the planet there's simply no time that I shut up.
	I am... The big channy forehead is like Pac-Man rolling around the memes of the world, chewing them up and spitting them out.
	And basically... I'm never silent.
	I never shut up. And that seems actually quite appropriate.
	It takes a load off my mind. So we had 220,000 MP3 downloads from the three sort of sites, Mississauga Therapy, Freedom Aid Radio shows, which are the two sort of storage file server sites.
	And the most modern, the most recent podcasts go on freedomainradio.com because the other ones have limits on the number of hits.
	So sorry for those who tried to pick up podcasts in...
	In March, the free-domain radio shows, which I bought because I needed a server with lots of storage space, is limited to the number of people who can hit it, which free-domain radio is not.
	So that's just being used for file storage.
	I'll put the more modern ones. The most recent podcasts on free-domain radio, it doesn't matter to you, right?
	The feeds are all the same. Thanks to Bill, our fabulous tech whiz, but we should be stable now for a little while.
	I would imagine that if we continue to grow, then it shouldn't be more than six to eight months from now that I'll just need to upgrade to another kind of server, which will be...
	Fun. I guess I'm such a geek.
	That's fun for me. Anyway, so thank you so much for joining us.
	It's been a pretty stellar month, and thanks to everyone who's sending the word out there and getting the word about this conversation out.
	I think that's a useful thing to do.
	I certainly appreciate it, and I'm glad that what we're doing here is connecting with a good number of people.
	So thank you so much for all of that.
	Now, I was... What was I watching this?
	We watched a little bit of TV when we were in the Dominican because sometimes I need to take my ex-blonde white tomato head out of the sun.
	So we were watching a little bit of TV and...
	Oh, it's CNN! I was watching CNN. And because, you know, when you're on a vacation, it's very important to track what's happening to a dozen or so U.S. U.K. sailors.
	And... On comes Barack Obama being interviewed by, I think it was, what's his name?
	Coyote Blitzhead.
	Wolf. Wolf Blitzer. Mr.
	Blitzer was asking Mr.
	Obama about his position on the war in Iraq.
	Now, Obama's been the one who says, he said, I guess, as of November 20th, 2006, he said that U.S. troops should start leaving Iraq in 2007, arguing that the threat of an American pull out is the best leverage Washington has left in the conflict.
	As he said, the time for waiting in Iraq is over.
	It is time to change our policy.
	And he said it is time to give Iraqis their country back and it is time to refocus America's efforts on the wider struggle yet to be won.
	So he's becoming out as quite critical.
	of the war in Iraq as it's been sort of the invasion and as it's been handled since and has a different plan.
	And I think that is very interesting.
	Now, if you really want a taste of where the debates, the boundary debates in democracy are, I would suggest just turning this over in your mind and you can let me know if you think it's reasonable or not.
	I certainly would be eager to hear back.
	This is a conversation. I'll just do a short intro and then we'll listen to the great listeners' questions.
	If you want to know how small the cage is, how small the intellectual hunting grounds are in the realm of these kinds of democratic debates, try this on for size.
	This would be the most logical question to me.
	I mean, and this is why I'll never get a chance to speak to Mr.
	Obama, because nobody who would ask this question would ever be allowed within a thousand miles of him.
	If Barack Obama were to sit down with me and say, I am against the war in Iraq, And he would say, I've been proud to be against the war in Iraq from the beginning.
	When I was in the Senate, I voted against it, blah, blah, blah.
	I would say, fantastic. Well, you and I have a like minds, brother.
	So therefore, if you think that the war in Iraq is wrong, then it's got to be morally wrong.
	It's got to be morally wrong.
	It's not like, gee, I meant to buy oranges and I bought mangoes.
	It's not just an error.
	It's not like I wrote down that 2 plus 2 is 5.
	If the war in Iraq is not just erroneous, but wrong, it's got to be morally wrong.
	That would seem to be a logical thing.
	So he'd have to say yes. Either he'd have to say no, it's not that the war in Iraq is morally wrong, it was just an error.
	You know, like a mistake.
	Like a typo. No moral consequence whatsoever.
	Well then, of course, he would be revealed as a shallow fool.
	When, of course, we'd want to reveal him as a shallow fool in many other ways.
	But he would have to say that the war in Iraq is morally wrong.
	Now, if he says that the war in Iraq is morally wrong, then the person who is responsible for ordering the war in Iraq is a war criminal.
	I mean, not to mince any words, right?
	If the war is wrong, then the person who called for, authorized, and started the war is a war criminal.
	If the war is wrong, then surely the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers It's a moral crime, and it's a moral crime of the First Order.
	It's not a moral crime like, I don't know, poisoning the well water in a small town and only killing 5,000 people.
	It's not a moral crime like the Reverend Jimmy Jones getting a bunch of culties to drink laced Kool-Aid and lay down and die.
	It's not a moral crime like cutting your own balls off to go join a comet.
	It's not a moral crime, say, just like pedophile, which of course we should all be morally opposed to and we should have sanctions and so on for these sorts of things.
	This is a moral crime which involves the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of a social infrastructure.
	Quarter of a million Iraqis fleeing every month, the country.
	The country is emptying out like dirty bathwater.
	The smashing of an entire society, the destabilization of a highly volatile geopolitical region.
	This is just not your everyday thing.
	Some of the people who were involved in Watergate, which was a third-rate burglary attempt, which was Conducted by people with no prior criminal records.
	A little break-in, steal some tapes, no biggie, right?
	Nobody died. Nobody died.
	Some of the people, Haldeman and Liddy and so on, some of the people who were lower down, who were involved in that, got 20-year sentences in jail.
	For a crime which involved a break-in without physical damage, the theft of property worth almost nothing, no injuries, no deaths, nothing like that.
	These people got 20 years in prison.
	Because you see, in Washington, that's considered a crime.
	Ordering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the outright rank murders of hundreds of thousands of people, Surely that is a more grievous crime than, say, a third-rate burglary attempt to grab some secrets of political hamina jamina, who cares, right? So if it's a moral crime, then Bush is, by definition, a war criminal.
	And, of course, America is, in the case of Iraq, as has been the case with at least a dozen other regime changes since Hawaii, through the Philippines, through Guatemala, through...
	Through Serbia and Croatia, and the Bosnian situation, and through many, many of the other ones, which I've detailed in other podcasts, Granada and things like that.
	The regime changes that the U.S. has been involved in many, many times all fall under, though none to quite as great a degree, as...
	The Iraq War and, of course, the much more deadly Vietnam War, which caused the deaths of between two and three million Asians.
	We don't even know. Nobody knows.
	They can round it off to about a million, but they have no idea.
	It's the international crime of aggression, which is the unprovoked attack of another country for no defensive reason.
	It's the worst war crime that there is.
	It's the worst war crime that there is.
	It's worse than genocide.
	Because it is that which makes genocide possible.
	So, when it comes to talking to Barack Obama, who is strutting around and puffing out his chest about how he's against the war, the simple question is, so the war is morally wrong?
	Yes. If the war is morally wrong, then the person who ordered the war is guilty of a war crime.
	Because what the hell would it mean to say that something is morally wrong?
	But there's no crime involved.
	Murder, morally wrong.
	Should a murderer be punished? No.
	Rape is wrong. Oh, really?
	Well, what punishment should a rapist occur?
	Oh, nothing. You should just say that you have a different policy on rape.
	There's no punishment. No punishment.
	And this is what amazes me when people say that they don't want to risk anarchism because they're concerned that they may end up with people being outside the law.
	My God. My God.
	So when you are looking at, and of course this cavalcade is only just beginning of endless media attention on the policies and the The approaches to various options, the standpoints of all of these politicos who are all charging to grab the gun to take your money, all of these political candidates, these presidential hopefuls.
	Just get a sense, if you like.
	It's an interesting thing to play around with.
	Just get a sense of how wide is the debate allowed to be?
	How wide is the debate allowed to be?
	How many tough questions are asked?
	How many tough questions are asked?
	If Barack Obama were talking to me and had trouble with the whole war crimes thing, then I would simply take the other approach.
	Again, this is not brain surgery.
	I claim no intellectual triumph for this.
	It's just so obvious it's ridiculous.
	I'd say, well, if he was having trouble and humming and hawing, I'd say, well, do you think that 9-11 was wrong?
	And obviously he would have to say, well, yes, 9-11 was wrong.
	I'd say, well, why was 9-11 wrong?
	Well, because it was an unprovoked attack on American soil.
	An unprovoked attack on American soil.
	Because, you see, American soil is much more virtuous than Iraqi sand.
	Soil... It has a moral glow about it, that all the angels in heaven should descend to beat their wings to defend it.
	Mere sand, with Muslims standing on it, totally meaningless.
	Sand, morally neutral.
	Soil, morally virtuous.
	The sod, the golden, excellent, ethical sod, that is totally different.
	So if he were to say, yes, 9-11 was wrong because it was an unprovoked attack on America, even if we accept that 9-11 was an unprovoked attack on America, which I don't believe, but let's say that we can accept that.
	3,500 people died out of a population of about, what, 300 million?
	0.0001%, something like that.
	Terrible, absolute crime, no question, no question.
	Iraq's have lost a couple hundred thousand out of a population of about 30 million.
	Thousands of times the per capita headcount deaths.
	And the entire infrastructure has been destroyed.
	If 9-11 was wrong, and we should go and get Osama bin Laden, if we accept that he did it and we can get into that debate another time, which is never...
	Because there's no proof. Can't figure anything out.
	Let's just take the official story.
	Osama bin Laden must be hunted down and killed.
	We can put a bounty on his head of five million dollars.
	Alive or dead. We want him alive or dead.
	Enemy number one. Because you see Osama bin Laden masterminded, though did not participate in, but funded and masterminded.
	An unprovoked attack on America.
	So he's an evil enemy guy, right?
	Dough-eyed, sleepy-headed, looking turbaned evil guy.
	Unprovoked attack on American soil.
	Now, since Senator Obama believes that the war in Iraq is wrong, it must be wrong because it was unjustified, and he has said as much.
	An unjustified attack on Iraqi soil, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people Triggers or justifies no punishment whatsoever.
	No punishment for George Bush and Cheney and all of this other ribald gang of sociopaths.
	No punishment. No, they should get the pension.
	They should get a presidential pension.
	We should name some libraries after them.
	They'll probably get a couple of high schools.
	and what the hell?
	Let's take one side of Abraham Lincoln's nose on Mount Rushmore and carve in George Bush's tittering idiot evil face.
	Heh heh.
	This is not brain surgery.
	If 9-11 is wrong, it's an unprovoked attack, then certainly thousands of times more deaths caused by an unprovoked attack on Iraq.
	Oh, and Iran, let's not even get started.
	Iran, oh my heavens, if they go for Iran, it would just be nuts.
	Absolutely, it would be, I mean, World War III. And they say, well, Iran has no right to respond to this.
	And how would America feel if Iraq had invaded Mexico?
	And we're slaughtering Americans in Mexico and had hundreds and hundreds of thousands, half a million troops stationed in Mexico.
	How would America react?
	Do you see the madness?
	This is not that complicated, people.
	This is not that hard. And I'm not saying that you don't get it.
	Of course you do. But...
	In the 10 seconds it takes to ask these questions, maybe 20 seconds, and maybe two minutes after you get through their bullshit of playing dumb, well, I don't think that the two are equatable at all.
	Well, tell me how, tell me why.
	It might take a long time, because they'd be flinging up a whole load of bullshit.
	But if 9-11 is wrong, and the perpetrators of 9-11 should be punished, whoever they are, how much more wrong is Iraq?
	Who is the terrorist? This is something that is very, very common.
	Terrorism is simply defined as the attacks of others.
	Our attacks are always self-defense.
	And this is all the way. Hitler, Genghis Khan, Cain and Abel.
	He provoked me.
	He looked at me funny.
	When we do it, it's self-defense.
	When they do it, it's terrorism.
	Our guys are soldiers.
	Their guys are insurgents.
	We are freedom fighters, they are terrorists.
	And the amazing thing is, that is exactly how it looks on the other side.
	We are the terrorists and they are the freedom fighters.
	And let me tell you one last thing I think that's important to know before I turn it back to other people to lighten the show up a little.
	The feeling of vengeance that Americans had versus over 9-11...
	To the degree that I'm playing beach volleyball, the score is 9-11 and there are mutters from the New Yorkers.
	Bad score. Let's change this.
	The degree of vengeance and the degree of hostility and the focus and attention to the war on terror that is generated out of 3,500 New Yorkers being murdered by criminals.
	No problem.
	No question with that. Do we really think that we can subdue another region by killing people?
	The answer to that is very simple.
	Can we pacify the Middle East by killing people?
	Can we bring people to their knees in a peaceful manner and break the spirit of their martial inclinations by killing them?
	Well, what happened when Americans got killed?
	Did America say, well, clearly we need to bring our troops out of Saudi Arabia.
	Clearly we need to stop funding all of these medieval theocratic dictatorships throughout the Middle East.
	Clearly we need to Face up to the environmentalists and allow the drilling for oil in America.
	Clearly, we need to relax certain crazy restrictions on building refineries because no new refinery has been built for a generation in America because it's just too convoluted and crazy to do it.
	Too many regulations.
	We have seen the error of our ways.
	9-11, planes flying into buildings, has allowed us to see the error of our ways, and we have decided to reform ourselves and to change our ideology to match that of our attackers.
	Not only are we going to take our troops around, but we're really going to seriously be looking into this whole Muslim thing and making Islam the official religion of the United States.
	Because they've really made a point.
	They've really reasoned with us and allowed us to change our minds in a very positive and proactive manner by flying planes into buildings and killing thousands of people.
	What on earth, what mad subjectivity would allow any human being to think that the reactions of the Muslims to hundreds of thousands of their people being murdered is going to be a damn bit different than the reactions of Americans to a couple of thousand?
	Where does this end?
	It ends in escalation and escalation and escalation and escalation.
	But this is all the government does.
	The government is a knee-jerk bazooka.
	Got a problem? Leave a crater.
	Need some money? Point guns at taxpayers.
	The government is nothing but a knee-jerk bazooka.
	Got a problem? Make a crater.
	And that's why governments are so dangerous.
	That's why human beings have to outgrow governments.
	Because, got a problem, leave a crater, is an echo.
	And an escalating echo.
	We got a problem with them, we crater them.
	They got a problem with us, they crater us.
	We crater them bigger, they crater us bigger.
	And with the weapons that are available now, of course, human beings simply can't survive governments anymore.
	So that's the end of my intro. Thank you so much for listening.
	I would be more than happy to take questions, comments, issues, problems, criticisms, suggestions from the fabulous listeners.
	Make it a two-way street, my brothers and sisters.
	And my wife will be kind enough to check and see if there are any questions or if I did in fact put everyone to sleep.
	But what about the roads?
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	What about the roads? I didn't dig into it, but I did see one topic on the board, which was, but why would private schools be any better?
	And of course, this is the argument from effect, which I have argued against Lowe from the very beginning, that whenever you say to people we...
	We need to, or it's better if we have no government, we need to have a society without a government, and people, oh, how did the kids get educated, and what about the poor, and what about the roads?
	It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter if private schools are better or worse than public schools.
	Of course they'll be better. Of course they'll be better.
	But who cares? You can't prove it.
	You're asking for ex post facto empirical evidence when we were designing a society of the future.
	It's not going to happen. I can't prove it.
	It's just a roadblock, so to speak.
	The question of roads, things like that, it's just a roadblock.
	It's just a way for people to back out of the question.
	And of course the reason they back out of the question is because of their own parents, not to do with any future society that may be designed.
	So if somebody says to you, and maybe they have or they will, what about the roads?
	What about the poor? I don't care.
	Oh, what do you mean you don't care?
	You're hotless bastard! Well, let's deal with moral evils that we know about rather than the ones that we don't know about.
	Right? If a shark is chewing on your leg, you don't hop into the emergency room and say, I think I might need a colonoscopy because I'm 41 and I want to check my bowels.
	Right? You say, you know, if you guys could do something about this shark on my leg, that'd be really fucking great.
	Because, you know, it pinches a little.
	A little tug. A little sting.
	And when people say, well, would public schools be better than private schools?
	Would private schools be better than public schools?
	You know what would be better? Not shooting people for the sake of education.
	Not pointing guns at people for the sake of education.
	Not ripping children from their parents and throwing them into mental gulags and shooting people who disagree.
	That would be a step in the right direction.
	I could give a flying rat's ass what occurs after that.
	Oh, but if we end slavery, how are all the slaves going to get jobs?
	You know, let's just end slavery and let the slaves take care of it, let the ex-slaves take care of it.
	Let's at least agree that slavery is wrong.
	Let's at least agree that pointing guns at people, ripping their children and putting them in these brain-mincing gulags of propaganda, that the shooting of people for the sake of education is wrong, that the shooting of people for the sake of welfare is wrong.
	Let's at least start there.
	If you think that private roads are going to be a big problem, answer me this.
	How is shooting people to fund roads right?
	And that's what everybody wants to keep avoiding in the same way that Barack Obama is going to have 8 million interviews between now and 2008 and not one person is going to explore even the most elemental and basic moral questions about his opposition to the war and what should occur to the person who starts the unjust war which results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
	I actually am a solar-powered rage machine.
	I realized that on holiday. So I've stored it up, baby.
	I'm photosynthesizing. Let me just find Mr.
	G. All right.
	Can you hear me? Sure can.
	How are you doing? Oh, pretty good.
	Yourself? I didn't mind.
	Yeah, he's not a little fired up.
	Well, you know, you know when you haven't dated for a while?
	Anyway, we can come back to that.
	Come back to that later. And, you know, you go on a blind date and there's a leg exposed or she's tying her shoe.
	Anyway, we don't have to come back to all of that.
	But I think you haven't podcasted in a while, baby.
	I'm not touching that subject.
	You mentioned earlier about how much more horrible it is to see thousands or millions of people die than a few hundred in a small town.
	If murder is a crime, And a moral outrage, then why should it make a difference whether one person dies or a million people die?
	The same degree of moral outrage should be there if it's a crime once, it's a crime a million times, morally that is.
	Well, sure, but a million deaths is worse than one death, I would say.
	I mean, if you're in a town of a million people and you get to vote on whether one person in that town dies or everyone in that town dies, including you, you're probably not going to be indifferent to the difference in numbers, right?
	Yeah, but isn't that kind of a lifeboat scenario that you're setting up there?
	I mean, if I had to choose between one death and a million deaths, I'd choose no deaths.
	Well, sure, I agree with that.
	And again, I agree with you that no deaths is always preferable.
	But what I am saying is that if the response of the United States to the attack on 9-11 was valid, then surely when many more deaths are involved, it should be equal to and likely greater.
	That's all I'm saying.
	If it's wrong for 3,500 people out of 300 million people to get killed, which of course it is, then hundreds of thousands out of 30 million is worse.
	It doesn't mean it's more black, so to speak.
	It's not like each death accumulates to make the next death darker or worse or anything like that.
	It just makes the next death.
	Well, yeah, but I mean, I certainly...
	Sorry, go ahead. It's just another repetition of the same moral outrage.
	For sure, for sure, but there are more people dead.
	There are more people dead.
	A guy who kills one person is evil, right?
	A guy who kills... Twenty people is worse.
	I mean, more evil. I mean, in the same way, and I agree with you, but it's like saying theft is wrong, and therefore there's no difference between stealing a piece of bubblegum and stealing someone's kidney.
	Why would there be?
	Well, because there are differences of degree in terms of restitution, right?
	We're not talking about how you deal with it after the fact.
	We're talking about the moral...
	The moral status of the crime.
	Right, and I would say that genocide is worse than murder.
	Because if murder is bad, then more murder is worse.
	Well, then say, let's say, you know, they killed 3,500 in that...
	In the 9-11 disaster, let's say we go over there and we kill 3,000, would that have been acceptable then?
	Sorry, if...
	Well, no, because, I mean, for me, the sort of escalation issue wouldn't...
	The escalation and retribution is not valid, is not valid, right?
	I mean, because nobody...
	I mean, again, assuming that the 9-11 story, the official story is true, I mean, Osama bin Laden was very clear about what he was trying to do, get the U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia.
	Right, which is exactly the same as what the American revolutionaries wanted to do with the British troops in North America, or in America, right?
	So it's kind of hard to, I mean, okay, I mean, the Muslim theocracies, evil dictatorships, I mean, the burqas, I mean, no question, beheadings, cut the hands off thieves, it's barbaric, dictatorial.
	Sure. Right, which means, of course, that we shouldn't be giving arms, $200 billion worth of arms to the House of Saud, right?
	If it's barbaric, don't arm them.
	That's, you know, one of these basic moral things that, again, is never going to come up.
	And so the answer is, we don't kill anybody.
	Well, sure, I would say.
	Well, no, this is what I would say.
	I mean, again, if I was sort of, you know, Lord of Creation during 9-11, I'd say, okay, let's stop taxing people and whoever is really interested in sending $5,000 of their own money over to maintain the troops in Saudi Arabia, let's let them fund it privately if they want.
	And then nobody's making a decision to pull the troops.
	There's an interesting thing I read about when I was on vacation around slavery.
	I had this debate with a guy about slavery before I left.
	And he said, well, you know, without a government, you're just going to have slavery.
	And I said, well, that's very interesting because it is actually the case that slavery is only possible with a government when you externalize the costs of bringing your slaves back to the general taxpayer.
	Then it becomes economically viable to have slaves.
	I said, you know, it's interesting, in Brazil, ended slavery.
	And do you know how Brazil ended slavery?
	Of course, he didn't know, and why should he, right?
	But Brazil ended slavery just by saying, well, we're not going to go and catch the slaves anymore.
	That's all that happened, right?
	The legal apparatus around it all.
	If you want to keep slaves, keep slaves.
	But if they run away, it's up to you to go and catch them.
	And of course, within two days, there's no such thing as slavery.
	Because it's not economically viable to own slaves in the absence of a government.
	But even in a situation where, let's say, 9-11 happens, there is no...
	There's no taxation. We're not paying for a military, whatever.
	Somebody actually does fund the private army to go over there and wreak havoc, and then those folks over there turn around and come back in retaliation to that, then even in the private situation, though, aren't you sort of seeing that those private actions can have fallout on people who weren't even involved in the first place?
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	And if a boat you're on is about to explode and you jump in the water, you might get eaten by a shark, but you're still going to jump off the boat, right?
	I mean, the way that it works right now with the government funding and the escalation is it always ends up in more and more bloodshed, right, until everybody exhausts themselves financially.
	I mean, that was the Muhajidin.
	That was the Taliban fighters versus the Soviet Empire, right?
	That would be the case in private squabbles as well.
	It would just be a lot more localized because there wouldn't be the accumulation of money and power to keep it going constantly.
	Well, how much do you think it would cost to train an army and equip them with high-tech weapons and to send them over to try and do X, Y, and Z? Just roughly.
	Give me a ballpark figure.
	I... I have no idea, but I would guess that if you're doing it privately, probably a fraction of what it costs the government to do it.
	Yeah, let's say instead of hundreds of billions, it's hundreds of millions.
	Right. So who's going to do that?
	Like everybody who has somebody who died on 9-11 coughs up a thousand bucks or something?
	I don't see that happening now with the existence of a state.
	No, but without a state.
	But I also don't see too many people jumping up and down to privately paved roads in the country right now with the existence of a state either.
	Well, but there's a difference because when you invest in privatizing a road, you get a return on your investment, right?
	Remember, in a free market, capital will always accumulate to those who can get the greatest return on that capital, right?
	That's why Bill Gates has even more money than me.
	So the only incentive that humans have is financial return?
	No, no. What I'm saying is that over the long run, if I take $300 million, cash it out and create a huge bonfire and burn it all up, then obviously I'm going to devolve in the economic hierarchy.
	Whereas if I take that money and invest it in some...
	Philosophical radio show or something like that, then clearly that would be the smartest financial decision that any human being could ever make, ever, ever.
	But capital will accumulate to those who can create the greatest return.
	War is a complete consumption of capital.
	And you're right, of course. People do that all the time.
	Children consume capital. I mean, $100,000, $150,000 just to bring them to college age, right?
	Plus all of the time and labor and sleeplessness and so on.
	So, of course, people will make decisions that will consume capital in order to give them greater pleasure and the pleasure of having children and watching them grow and so on.
	People will readily sacrifice money for that, right?
	I mean, I sacrificed, because I'm working another two months at this job, So we took some of that money to go on vacation.
	So I sacrificed capital for a slightly volcanic tan.
	So people all the time will make decisions that involve the minimization of capital.
	But the real question is, how do you accumulate a couple of hundred million dollars of capital just to destroy it?
	I mean, who would invest in that?
	How would that accumulate? And yeah, you could get some private nutjob who goes off the deep end and has inherited a couple of hundred million dollars from his, I don't know, maybe Anna Nicole Smith's baby grows up to be some warlord in the jungle or something, right? The trend is always against people who just wantonly destroy capital accumulating any capital, so that I think would undermine the case for spending on war.
	There was a significant amount of support he was getting from the US government, but Ross Perot is a perfect example of that.
	He's privately funded all sorts of ventures into Central and South America and even in the Middle East.
	Ventures like what?
	I'm trying to remember.
	There was a case specifically I'm thinking of where he, in the Middle East, where he funded his own rescue operation or something like that.
	Right. Was he rescuing one of his executives who'd been kidnapped or something like that?
	Yeah, God, it's been so long.
	No, I think I vaguely remember this, that one of his execs got kidnapped.
	But you see, that is an investment.
	And I know that that sounds kind of weird, if what we remember, and of course, if anyone else remembers, let us know if they remember better.
	But let's say that, you know, one of Ross Perot's executives gets kidnapped, and he spends 10 million bucks to go get this person rescued.
	Well, that's a huge investment, right?
	How good are you going to feel about working for a guy who's like, well, we can get another one.
	We can get another executive.
	Versus getting all of this kind of rah-rah patriotism within the company, EDS I think was the name, or EDI was the name of his company, getting all of that rah-rah stuff, I mean, that's an investment in loyalty, right?
	Whereas if you just let this guy rot in the jungle and say, oh, go hire a couple of temps, we'll stack them up and make them one executive, that's not going to be particularly good for that.
	Right, but I mean... Any sane man could easily justify leaving him behind.
	Well, I don't think so.
	I think someone like that would be fired by the board, right?
	Because the appearance of a corporate citizen and the loyalty of employees and so on.
	Someone has just mentioned, they've just put this in, so I'll just read this out.
	Just prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the government of Iran imprisoned two of his employees in a contract dispute.
	Perot organized and sponsored a successful rescue.
	The rescue team was led by retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Arthur D. Bull Simons.
	It's almost Bull, you know? It's never like...
	Paoni. Pansy. Hummingbird.
	When the team couldn't find a way to extract their two prisoners, they decided to wait for a mob of pro-Ayatollah revolutionaries to storm the jail and free all 10,000 inmates, many of whom were political prisoners.
	The two prisoners then connected with the rescue team, and the team spirited the matter for Iran via a risky border crossing into Turkey.
	The exploit was recounted in a book On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follet, which became a bestseller, and I think a book, a movie as well.
	Well, I mean, if you look at, I mean, this is state versus state stuff, which wouldn't really apply.
	Osama bin Laden is not a representative, a direct representative of any state that I'm sure he gets money from.
	His family, which of course gets money from the Bush family.
	Anyway, it's all too convoluted for words.
	Well, neither was Perot. No, no, but I'm talking about him going to...
	The capturing of his two employees was a state-run situation, which of course will occur when you have a free society in the midst of a state...
	a bunch of state societies.
	But one of the things that Ross Perot is operating within is that the taxpayers...
	Have already paid for all of the training of everyone that he's hired to do this.
	And I actually did read this book many years ago, so it's sort of vaguely drift back to me as well.
	So Ross Perot doesn't have to pay for the experience of this guy who's retired.
	So this guy, I think he was in his 50s, the guy who ran this.
	So he's had 40 years.
	Of being trained at the consumption to the taxpayers of God knows how many tens of millions of dollars to keep this guy winging around, keep him armed, get him all trained on the latest gizmos, have those gizmos around, and so on.
	That's a very different situation than if you have to keep a private army floating around.
	In a free society, you can't just summon up an army, because the army is only there because we have a state society.
	So these people only have all of this training and all this experience and all this expertise because there is a state already.
	It's going to be a very different proposition if you have to keep 1,000 guys floating around for 40 years.
	How much is that going to cost you and what's the return on your investment?
	Versus what I would say is a couple of nukes.
	I mean, what do I know about military strategy?
	But I think that it would be very hard to keep that kind of thing sustainable in a free society because a standing army, which of course was never supposed to happen in the U.S. and only came in after World War II, but a standing army is just unbelievably expensive.
	And you have to have the standing army in order to have an efficient military that's going on.
	And so I just don't really believe that it would be very possible for people to keep that expense going.
	I mean, the capital would get consumed so rapidly.
	Militaries are horrendously expensive, only possible with taxpayers.
	The capital would get expended so rapidly that people would just back out very quickly.
	Right.
	I agree with you there that...
	That it would evaporate rather quickly because the means just isn't available, but it doesn't preclude the possibility that somebody might do that.
	Oh sure, absolutely. Yeah, for sure.
	It's just going to be a lot more isolated And a lot more minimized than it would ever be in a world full of states.
	Right. There is, of course, the DRO model, which I think would work very actively against this kind of thing, right?
	So if I, I don't know, I win the billion dollar lottery and I start amassing an army to go and invade Mexico, which has nuclear weapons, right?
	Well, the first thing that the DROs are going to do is say, you know what, I don't think that we really want nukes falling on any of the property that we're insuring for people, because that's pretty much going to destroy our financial viability.
	So the moment that we sniff somebody assembling a private army, we're going to leap into action and we're going to stop them, right?
	Because it's very easy to do, right?
	I mean, they just call the bank and say, this guy's using the money in the bank account to build a private army.
	And the bank then calls you and says, you know, on page 35 of that fine print thing that, you know, we said that you can't use the money in our bank to create a private army.
	And so they would just simply stop enforcing contracts.
	They would kick this guy out of the financial system.
	I mean, remember, there's a huge network of insurance companies here, or DROs, or whatever we want to call them, that are incredibly invested in the protection of property.
	So if somebody starts doing that kind of crap, I mean, it's funny because everyone thinks, oh, the DROs are going to have armies and so on.
	But the DROs are worried about individual citizens getting armies together, and particularly the kind of idiots who go around poking their sticks into hornet's nests, provoking reactions like 9-11, right?
	I mean, I'm not saying that would be particularly possible without a government.
	Most individuals could find a lot better use for $200 billion than sending a bunch of missiles and planes and tanks and so on over to the Saudis.
	But the protection of property and the investment that the DROs have in making sure that nobody gets pissed off enough at the society that they want to attack them is, I think, going to make sure that if anybody starts buying up all these weapons, they're just going to kick them out of the economic transactions.
	That makes sense.
	I just wanted to clarify on the The moral question there is all, you know, I don't know.
	It's just something that bugs me.
	I don't know why. No, it's good.
	And look, I mean, I'm glad to be back into the most chilling words that I can hear is Greg saying, but earlier you said, right, that's always particularly nerve-wracking for me.
	So it's good to know that I can come back and after only half an hour make some sense.
	That's good. To me, that's a huge advantage.
	Somebody has mentioned, better use Pearl Harbor instead of 9-11 for this kind of argument.
	I absolutely agree.
	I think Pearl Harbor is a better argument for that.
	Of course, Pearl Harbor is very different insofar as the U.S. was blockading Japan, and as far as I remember, the blockading of the U.S. by the fabulous Iraqi Desert Navy was relatively minimal.
	So it could be said that the Japanese were acting in a much greater degree of self-defense, infinitely greater degree of self-defense than the Americans were, of course, with this sort of stuff.
	All right.
	Well, if you have questions or issues or comments or so on.
	Oh, we have somebody waiting, right?
	Okay.
	Let me find you.
	I will find you.
	Okay, let me just do the unmute, and Skippy, the bush kangaroo, is looking to chat.
	Mr. Skip.
	Hello.
	Is he gone? I'm sorry. I think I might have just yanked you back and forth.
	Sorry. Alright. Try it again.
	Hello? Hello. Yes, I can hear you now.
	Can you hear me? I sure can.
	Okay. I still have some questions about animal rights.
	You told last time...
	The difference of universally preferable behavior as a concept, opposed to behavior that you observe.
	Yes.
	But then you said animals exploit other animals, and you explained that as being universally preferable behavior.
	I'm sorry, let me just interrupt you, and I don't mean to interrupt you at the very beginning.
	Universally preferable behavior, for me, does require rational consciousness.
	And, of course, I'm aware that chimpanzees and dolphins exhibit some aspects of rational consciousness, but not, of course, to the same degree that human beings do.
	So the universally preferable behavior, for me, requires rational consciousness Dare I say it, free will of some kind or another, just to tweak the Dutch.
	Social contracts and so on.
	So I would say that it's observable that animals exploit other animals.
	I would say that it is chosen behavior from an evolutionary standpoint for animals to exploit other animals because those animals which do so most successfully will pass their genes on to the next generation.
	But I would not say that it's universally preferable behavior in the way that morality is for human beings.
	But then when you have, so you have animals which cannot have social contracts, for example?
	Yes. Because they cannot form a concept in their consciousness.
	Well, when you have cats, for example, They can have, in my opinion, a kind of social contract with humans because you can have cats and they can walk in and out and do whatever they like and there is no force involved.
	Yes. So that is a kind of mutual beneficial For sure.
	So you treat the cat well and the cat treats you well.
	Well, that doesn't always happen, of course.
	I mean, you can get mean cats, but for me, this sort of symbiotic relationship or the mutually beneficial relationship, which you see all the time in the animal kingdom.
	I mean, we all like the drama of the lion bringing down the gazelle, but the reality, of course, is that nature is far more about cooperation than it is about competition.
	So there's that whatever the bird is that sits on the back of the hippos and picks off the ticks, which I've actually tried to domesticate for myself to reduce on showering, but haven't had any luck so far.
	So far! Fingers crossed.
	But that kind of relationship doesn't involve any force.
	It's mutually beneficial, but it's simply something that's evolved to the benefit of both parties.
	I would not say that that is the same thing as you and I engaging in an eBay contract.
	Well, because we can explain to each other what we want.
	Yeah, and we can haggle and we have many more choices and so on, right?
	I mean, if I have five bucks and you've got something on eBay, I can do just about anything with that five bucks, but these animals with these symbiotic relationships pretty much just do the same thing over and over.
	Well, I think you can, not by means of language directly, But through other kinds of interaction develop a kind of behavior in animals which you could induce in the same way verbally to humans.
	Well, I certainly would agree with you that...
	...language to interact with the animals, but you can use other means to interact with them.
	You mean like stroking and positive reinforcement and training and so on?
	Well, for sure. I mean, there's no question of that.
	And I would say that where a more positive and mutually beneficial form of interaction between humans and animals is possible...
	Then we tend to have different standards, right?
	So, of course, you know, there's the old jokes about Chinatown where you order meat and it could come from a cat or it could come from a horse.
	And for most Western cultures, that seems heinous, right?
	It's like, you killed a cat and made a stew?
	That's just unbelievable, right?
	You might as well strangle a kitten right here in front of me.
	But why would a kitten's life be any more valuable than a cow's life, right?
	We get a hamburger and we don't think anything of it.
	And of course, if there was a coat made out of cat fur, people would go nuts.
	But a coat made out of leather or mink...
	Right, so I think that where a more mutually beneficial relationship is possible, we tend to have different standards of interaction.
	So for instance, I can shoot a tiger that is about to eat me.
	But if my cat scratches me and I pull out a sawn-off shotgun and blow Kitty away, I think that people may feel that that's a bit of an overreaction because there is a possibility of a far more beneficial interaction.
	On the other hand, I was just reading the other day about a woman who was...
	A long-time volunteer caregiver at a zoo to, I think it was leopards or something like that, and she'd held this leopard from day one and so on.
	And was it cougars?
	Cougars? Something like, some big cat.
	And one day, the old primitive base-of-the-brain instincts took over the cougars, and they just killed her, right?
	Like three swipes, one chomp, her neck was out, she bled to death.
	That doesn't tend to happen a whole lot with your average house cat, unless they're eating a fair amount of steroids, or are possessed, which of course is another issue.
	So where there are more beneficial and stable and peaceful interactions that are possible, we tend to believe that these are much better.
	And Paul Reister makes a joke about this with regards to, you know, everybody gets really upset.
	About the dolphins that are caught in the tuna nets and die.
	And nobody gives a shit about the 10,000 tuna that are being poured on the boat and dying.
	Because we can consider to have a more interactive relationship with dolphins and they have those cute little squeaky smiley faces and don't tend to eat people as much.
	You know, we don't kill as many dolphins, but, you know, a million sharks a year have their fins cut off for soup but thrown back into the sea to drown.
	And nobody gives a shit because, well, sharks are bad, you see, because we can't have a positive, tasty interaction with them.
	Well, tasty, I guess we could, but not so much for us.
	And so I agree with you that there are certain kinds of implicit differences in terms of ethics where we can have a more beneficial interaction with animals, but where we can't, I think it does tend to be a bit less gentle that way.
	Well, okay. Then you exploit the animals.
	But is the reason for that that you could not have a social contact with them?
	Well, I would say so, yeah.
	I mean, again, I'm no expert on animal rights, so I'm very much out on a limb here.
	And for me, it's like...
	I would very much like to see...
	Let me put it in another way, because I can't really do this topic very much justice, because it's very similar also to the abortion debate, right?
	But let me throw something past you and see what you think.
	I think that the amount of exploitation of animals, and let's just talk meat animals, right?
	Like the... The cows and the calves and whatever else.
	Sorry? Pigs?
	Yeah, whatever else we eat. The costs of producing meat should be 8 to 10 times to 15 times higher than the costs of producing vegetables and grains.
	They need more land.
	They take a lot longer.
	They're obviously more gruesome to harvest.
	They spoil more quickly and so on.
	So they require much more energy and much more land space.
	It takes 8 to 10 times more grazing land to produce a pound of beef than it does to produce a pound of wheat or flour or whatever.
	And so the question is, how is this sustainable economically?
	Well, of course, the reason that it's sustainable economically is because of our good old friend government subsidies.
	Governments subsidize the killing of animals enormously, right?
	And I would be very interested in the future of free society without a government to see just how many people would eat animals if the real cost...
	Of keeping those animals, feeding them, killing them, shaving them, cutting them up, transporting them, freezing them, bringing them home, freezing them some more, cooking them all, and so on.
	If a salad costs you a buck and a steak costs you fifteen bucks, And, you know, the protein delivery mechanisms for male weightlifters or whatever could be figured out.
	I don't know, like bikinis made of peanut butter or something.
	But I think it would be very interesting to see, and I know it would be enormously different than it is right now, it would be very interesting to see what would happen to human beings' consumption of animals and exploitation of animals if it was not subsidized by the government.
	And I think it would be enormously different and would be a very, very rare delicacy to have, you know, a big chunk of steak.
	Well, I could agree with that.
	I have animals myself, and I eat meat too, but it would never be of my own animals.
	Right, right. And my wife is a vegetarian.
	She's tried to ask me to be a vegetarian.
	When you know your own animals, you would only kill them to eat them as a necessity.
	It would not taste very well.
	Right, right. And of course, I've often thought this as you walk past the aisle of the grocery store.
	I mean, of course, this is part of the service that you're paying for.
	I mean, if I had to go out and strangle a chicken, I'd probably have a veggie burger.
	Because I can strangle an ear of corn because it doesn't pack as much.
	But strangling a chicken...
	We were watching The Simple Life.
	A couple of years ago, and Paris Hilton was on this farm where this old bitty was killing the chicken, strangling the chicken, plucking the chicken, cutting it all up.
	I mean, that's really disgusting.
	It's really hard to watch.
	And a slaughterhouse, of course, I can imagine would be just like a completely psychotic place to go.
	I think that this stuff should be minimized, and the best way to minimize it is to get rid of the government, because the subsidies that go into this kind of stuff is just ridiculous.
	And the The senseless exploitation, right, of animals, where animals are raised and killed and then all of the stuff is thrown out just to qualify for government subsidies, that to me is completely horrendous.
	I mean, that's a complete want and destruction of life that I think has significant effects to the ethics of the culture over time.
	So I think that we're probably on the same page about that, that if the real costs of animal exploitation were passed along to the consumer, it would dip enormously.
	Well, I could agree with that.
	But then... I want to go more back to the basics of morality.
	So, when you exploit or eat animals because they lack the ability for a social conflict concept, then when you say that you could have a mentally handicapped, not being able to do the same thing, and then you could say, well, we could kill him and eat him.
	Sure. Well, you could also say the same thing about babies.
	You can't have a social contract with babies, and sometimes it would seem not even with husbands.
	So I do agree with you that there are gray areas, and I'm fairly sure that harvesting the mentally challenged farm for burgers would not go down well with any decent or moral society.
	But at the same time, you can have...
	Sorry, let me just say one thing just very briefly, and I'll turn it back to you.
	I think that the key thing is recognizing that there are deviations.
	That there's a norm and there's a deviation.
	And morality can only deal with the norm.
	It can't deal with every conceivable variation.
	But I think that what we can say is that the norm for a human being is to be capable Of entering into a social contract.
	And yes, there are people in comas and there are people who are retarded and so on.
	People raised by wolves.
	And they're very much the exception.
	You can't make the rules for every exception.
	Then you end up with no consistency whatsoever, which is not valid with regards to reality where there is consistency.
	Now, some dogs will get rabies and attack human beings, but that doesn't mean that you go out and shoot all the dogs, right?
	Because you recognize that there's a norm, which is that dogs generally don't attack and kill human beings.
	But if a dog is sick or gets a fever or has a brain parasite or something, then on occasion, a dog will be incapable of fulfilling that, quote, contract, and then you can destroy the dog.
	And I'm not saying destroy the mentally challenged.
	I'm not sort of talking about that.
	But the norm, you have to sort of design, I think, morality for the norm.
	And the norm is that human beings are capable of entering into social contracts.
	And where there is an exception, we can't throw that principle away.
	Because there's no clear line in the sand that says...
	Well, a guy with an IQ of 71 can enter into a social contract and he gets to live, but the guy with an IQ of 70 can't, or 70.9 can't, and therefore we can turn him into a coat and a good meal.
	You can't draw that line in any rational way, so you have to take the bulk of humanity's capacity and extend it to all human beings, I would say.
	That would sort of be my argument, in the same way that you don't shoot all the dogs if one of them attacks a human being, but you recognize there's a deviation from a norm.
	Well... I think that I take another approach to morality towards animals I think you should look to their emotional and mental capabilities so when you know that animals have a rich life in that sense That they can suffer a lot.
	So when you have an amoeba, it has no nervous system at all.
	There are no neurons in an amoeba.
	So if you kill an amoeba, well, you can't say too much about that.
	But when you kill or maim a monkey, for instance, that monkey will suffer a lot from death.
	And I think that throughout the animal kingdom there are differences in death.
	So I think you'd better, at least to my opinion, take that approach to observe the nervous system and the behavior of animals and take that as an approach to more relative towards animals.
	Well, I certainly would be interested in that approach, and I think there is some valid.
	Of course, if you inflict cruelty where cruelty is not needed, physical pain, then it's sort of like saying that I'm not going to give anybody anesthetic for an operation on principle or whatever.
	I give them pain. Sorry, just interrupt for a second.
	We spent a fair amount of time on this topic the last time that we talked, and I don't want to spend the whole show on this.
	If you'd like to send me an email with any links or sites, I haven't read much up at all on animal rights or this sort of stuff, but I certainly would be happy to look further into it.
	If you go to freedomainradio.com, you can see a form mail there.
	You can send me an email.
	I'd be happy to look at some sites, and we can pick up this topic another time.
	But I've just noticed that we're driving people off the show.
	And that's probably because they heard some of these arguments the last time that we talked.
	So if you send me some information, I will look at it a little bit more, and then we can talk about it another time.
	Okay.
	Well, thank you so much for calling in.
	I really appreciate that. And do give me some juicy stuff to start with.
	And it certainly is a challenging topic and area because there are lots of gray areas that occur in this kind of stuff as well.
	So the mic set is open if you have any sort of questions or issues or comments.
	If you'd like to click on Request Mic, then I'll see if I can find him and he can have a chat with you.
	Anyone coming up? Nobody is coming on.
	No problem. We can have an early show ending today, not the end of the world.
	Oh, Nate.
	After Greg, he's also tough.
	All right.
	Let's do our Mr.
	N Magic Mojo.
	Hey. How's it going?
	Oh, did I meet you?
	I didn't want to drastically change the subject, so I kind of waited for somebody else to come in before I drastically changed the entire path of the show.
	Change away. What's that noise?
	Look over your shoulder.
	See if there are any flashing lights and men in blue.
	I have no idea what that noise was.
	Was it your conscience?
	Well, anyways, back to my question.
	I've been taken by aliens.
	Cross your legs, man!
	I'm sorry, go ahead. I have a relationship situation.
	I usually tend to direct the show towards this direction, so I apologize to some of the people that stick with state issues.
	But there's a situation where like your two podcasts about why must the rational always yield to the mad type of situation and I went out to Austin with my girlfriend this weekend so we had a great time and we came back the next day in order to attend some surprise birthday party for her grandmother.
	So we went there, and there were a couple of situations where that continues to kind of happen.
	So my girlfriend will say, you know, the grandmother asks questions like, oh, did you all have to interrupt your trip to come back?
	You know, because we had been in Austin.
	And the fact is, we really didn't.
	We just were, we leisurely took our time and came on home.
	That was in the plan. So my girlfriend says, oh, Yeah, we rushed right home.
	And I could tell she wasn't saying...
	I thought she was kind of being sarcastic, but then she goes...
	And then the grandmother smiles, and so my girlfriend says, oh, well, she likes it when we say something like that, you know, just to make her feel good.
	So it's just kind of strange.
	And then the same situation happens for when...
	Last night, I stayed the night over there and she lives with her sister and niece and the situation is that her sister is separated or divorced from the niece's father.
	So the father is kind of this hardcore, I don't know what brand of Christian, but just big on Christianity and the fact that I spend the night over there, he doesn't want his little girl Seeing the fact that I spend the night with her aunt when they're all living there,
	you know. So I stay over there anyways, you know, and I didn't think, you know, that this would be a big deal for me and her, but they decide, you know, to say, okay, well, go ahead and get up soon and just take a shower and we'll just say you came over to use our shower because my water's been off.
	And the fact is, my water's been off.
	So I'm like, well, you don't really have to tell him anything.
	It's really our business, you know.
	And you don't have to go and lie just to make him feel better about his irrational religious anti-sex thing, you know, sex before marriage and all that.
	And so I'm kind of upset because I talked to her about it and she said, oh yes, I know it's irrational.
	And it's funny because I mentioned the two podcasts we listened to on the way home from Austin.
	I let her listen to the freedom and relationships, the first two, the romantic one about the long list of nagging things you wrote about your girlfriend.
	And she loved that one.
	She thought, oh, I've done that before.
	I think of all these things.
	Wait, what was her name again? Andy Bubbles, is it?
	No, no, no, no. Vixen?
	Right. Well, and that's just the situation, and it's almost like he's kind of trying to jump into our relationship and control it because of his irrational feelings about me being around or near the niece when we're not even in the same room where You know, just in the same apartment because everybody's in the same apartment and they share custody.
	So I just think it's just a strange situation where he's being controlling and they're making excuses for him like, oh, he's just upset about the separation and the divorce because it wasn't his decision and so we've got to make him feel better by doing everything he says and it's kind of strange.
	Well, have you tried saying that you don't want your girlfriend being around a divorcee?
	Because, of course, I mean, until death do us part, right?
	I mean, what God has joined together, let no man put asunder, right?
	So he's, I mean, this is the funny thing about Christians, right?
	I mean, it's almost always used for dominating and bullying other people.
	It's like the rules are not for the Christians any more than the rules about, say, war crimes are for political leaders.
	The rules are there to dominate and bully other people, because he should never have gotten divorced.
	If he was a Christian, now he is going to go to hell and so on.
	I think he may be a little bit off the moral high horse when it comes to instructing other people.
	Having sex, whether or not you are, doesn't matter, but staying in the same room with somebody versus destroying a marriage where there are children involved.
	Even if we say that the sex thing is bad, which it's not, Sex is not bad.
	You can only be bad at it.
	But even if we say that it is wrong, how wrong is it relative to destroying a family where there are children?
	So yes, without a doubt, this guy's a hypocrite.
	He's a Christian, so we know that this is an irrational person to begin with.
	What you do have, I think, as a principle in your girlfriend's family is that they make the peace, right?
	They keep the peace. They keep conflict at bay by making what they would call reasonable compromises and what you would call That's exactly it.
	Right, right. Now, I'm just going to spin out a couple of thoughts and just let me know if any of them land with any particular utility.
	I think that, just based on my experience with Christina, if you want her to not compromise in the long run, if you want her to really stand up for what is virtuous and good and true and go through all of this really painful stuff that's going to occur, then I think that's something that happens when you get married.
	I think that you have to really put a commitment in there in order to be able to, with some degree of strength, say that this is not what we're about as a couple.
	Now, of course, it's a bit of a chicken and an egg thing, right?
	Because you don't want to get married and then find out that she's really into these cowardly compromises and then watch your children get bullied by all the people in her family based on this.
	So I think that there's stuff that happens after you get married, just in sort of my experience.
	That you have a lot more leverage with each other if you're good people with the same values.
	And women...
	Christina, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a certain amount of trust that goes into a marriage.
	I think more so for a woman, right?
	That you get married and she'll listen to you more than if you're just dating, right?
	Because there's a real honest-to-goodness commitment and so on.
	So again, I'm not saying that you sort of jump in, and I'm not even saying you're ready for that, but what life looks like after you get married is not exactly the same as it looked like before you get married.
	There's a lot more credibility, and you know that you're both in it to work it out, right?
	So you get a lot more traction with your opinions.
	Not a lot more. I shouldn't say that.
	That's not fair to Christina before we got married.
	But you know you have to work it out, right?
	So you can spend all that time, and stuff that you would avoid when you're just dating, you dig in and you deal with, right?
	I mean, that's because you know you're in it for the long haul, right?
	So that's sort of one aspect down the road, that you don't have to have perfect integrity, which none of us have, right?
	You don't have to have perfect integrity from anyone before you get married, and you can recognize that marriage is a process, right?
	You're not both perfect and then you get married and then everything's hunky-dory.
	You reach a tipping point where there's so many more good things than bad things that you then have enough of a foundation to spend a joyful life working on these issues, a joyful life together, part of which is continuing this process of becoming better and more consistent and more virtuous, people with more integrity and so on.
	Things don't have to be perfect before you make a real commitment.
	And you have to sort of follow your gut as far as that goes.
	So that's the one thing I would say.
	The second thing that I would say, and then I'll pass it over to Christina, is that you need to be curious about this, right?
	To explore it on principle.
	To say, well... I don't feel the same compulsion or whatever it is, however you want to put it, maybe nicer than that.
	I don't feel the same drive to smooth things over in my life.
	But I can certainly see the value in it.
	And there are times where it can be valuable to smooth things over and let a few things go.
	You don't have to fight every battle because it's kind of exhausting.
	Let a few things go and have some fun.
	But to ask her, you know, what's your experience?
	When did this first start?
	Is this something that's always been part of your family?
	Who taught you that this was essential?
	What happened when you were a kid, and as we all did when we were kids, did or said things that were true but made people uncomfortable, right?
	It's the old joke or the old stereotype of the kid going up to the fat person and saying, why are you so fat?
	And the mom's like, don't use that, don't say that, it's rude, that's this, all this kind of stuff.
	This is where children learn this fear of honesty and openness and learn to smooth things over and to lie and to cover things up and so on.
	And some of it's not too bad.
	I mean, there's a little bit of white lies, you know, that when I ask Christina, how's my hair?
	And she says, Thick and lustrous.
	You know, there are certain things that you need to do.
	Otherwise, you know, you cry.
	So I would say that to be curious and just ask her about her experience.
	Ask her about this history. Just say, I've kind of noticed something with your family that you do a little bit of a dance.
	You do a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of white lies, a little bit of...
	You know, what's the history of that?
	And what do you think of it?
	Do you think it's good? Do you think it's bad?
	I mean, everybody's going to say that if you lie to everyone, to please everyone, that that's bad, right?
	If you just become this empty shadow of everybody else's moods and you have no opinions of your own, that's bad, right?
	At the same time, I can certainly see that it would be a very difficult life To say to people the blunt truth all the time.
	That's not a life that I choose.
	I'd rather be a little bit more target-y.
	Diplomatic or target-y.
	Yeah, absolutely. Somewhere in the middle.
	It's a bit of an Aristotelian mean, I think.
	I would go more towards the integrity side.
	I remember Harry Brown had some story about how someone gave him a piece of cake that he didn't like and he had resolved to tell no lies.
	She said, how was the cake?
	He went into this big problem and so on.
	To me, that's I don't worry about things that much.
	I deal with the big things and not so much worry about the little things.
	I've got still big things to chew through.
	I would say to just be curious and to ask her what her experience is like and say, does it ever occur for you that you feel you're going too far into being conciliatory and you don't actually have The freedom to express an opinion if you disagree with someone, or is it something you do out of fear or desire to make things comfortable?
	Just ask her about what her experience of it is, and I think that's usually a good way to figure out where the line is for her and to help her to start to think about this kind of stuff.
	The purpose is to try and get people to think about stuff as much as possible, at least for me.
	I would say that if you came on too strongly and said, well, this behavior is just not acceptable, you have to make a decision about how you're going to be with me in front of this man and in front of your family who's sort of...
	I'm trying to appease him by making up lies about our relationship.
	I think that that would be very discomforting for her or for any woman or anyone, you know, if it were female to male, either way.
	And I think Steph's right.
	I think you need to bring it up sort of in a way that says, well, this is sort of how I feel about it and I feel really uncomfortable having to To say these things that aren't true, and I'm curious why you feel you have to do this, because I think ultimately, my guess here is, and again, huge assumption, my guess is that if she were to take the stand that you have, she would risk losing her family, and that's not where she's at.
	So this is something that she needs to grow into, not losing her family per se, but learning how to state her opinions and feel confident that she can have a voice within this realm.
	Now, I don't know her, obviously, and I don't know if she does feel the way her family feels about these things or if she agrees with you on this issue.
	And that would be something that I would suggest that you do, is just have a conversation with her about it.
	I recognize that it's going to be a conversation that's going to last for years.
	It's going to last for years and that you, I think, have to be willing to learn something from that conversation as well.
	Any time where you have a conversation that's totally one-way, people tend to get sort of...
	If you want to infect somebody with virtue, it's okay to cough at a distance.
	You don't necessarily have to approach them and plunge a needle into their eyeball or something.
	So it's willing to have a two-way conversation.
	Maybe there's things that you can learn about diplomacy and so on that would be useful for you that she could teach you, because otherwise it's a one-way street, which almost always turns people off that way.
	Well, I was going to say that I saw an example kind of of what they're trying to smooth over, which is when they go in there and tell him while I'm in the shower that I came over to take a shower, he gets upset immediately and says, well, don't lie. I know he never showers.
	I'm sorry. Right.
	They said, don't lie.
	What I'll do is just sue for custody and wreak all this havoc in the courts and try and get custody of the child so that we can raise her properly in an environment.
	Sorry, just interrupt. Because you're showering there and he thinks that you spent the night, he would then sue them for custody of the child?
	If I'm going to be sleeping over there, yeah.
	Wow, that's pretty heinous.
	Right, so this guy is a total asshole, right?
	He's a bully. That's exactly what it feels like.
	Right, right.
	So, obviously, if the image of you showering disturbs him this much, he may have other issues.
	If it makes him so uncomfortable to think of you soaping up your body, then there may be a whole other, what, this haggard guy, right?
	As far as that goes. But, you know, if you're going to rescue this family, and it sounds like if this guy is this much of a bully that they're going to need some rescuing, I mean, they're for the South, right?
	So they've got a little bit of the patriarchy thing going, a little bit more so than some of the other places in the world outside of Afghanistan.
	And so it's going to be a long and slow conversation, right?
	For them to wake up to the amount of bullying, the unpleasantness, the difficulty that this guy is threatening legal action because you're in the shower...
	And also recognize the degree to which they're actually being kind of nice to you by letting you do it, given the risk that this guy...
	And the reason that they're doing it is so that you will help them.
	The reason that they're letting you shower is so that you will help them.
	But they don't know that yet.
	So it's just very important to be delicate with this kind of stuff.
	And recognize that given the risk that this guy is hurling around, they're actually being quite generous, if that makes any sense.
	Because... I mean, if this guy's going to drag them to court, sue them for custody just because you're in the shower, the fact that you're showering there is because they want to be free of this asshole, but they don't know how to do it.
	And they're going to fight you on it.
	But that's what their true self is saying, shower, draw this guy out, and then Nate will come riding to the rescue in a gentle and gossamer-like white horse.
	While still soaping himself.
	So that would be the approach that I would take, that you've got a surgical strike operation going on here that they're begging you to do, but you're going to have to do very carefully.
	Very carefully, I think.
	Well, I pointed it out to my girlfriend, and she understood everything, and then, you know, came back with the...
	I don't know which argument policy this is, but...
	I mean, I'm not too...
	I don't want to discredit her argument at all because I can understand her empathetic nature in relation to Carson or the daughter.
	Sorry, I didn't want to name any names.
	And her basic argument was that he's upset because of the divorce, and he didn't want the divorce, and he didn't want the separation thing to happen or anything like that.
	And it was really the wife who initiated it and her sister, and I can see why, kind of.
	Right. And the challenge that if you want to take this mission on, and of course if you really care about this woman, I would suggest that it would be an excellent mission for you to take on.
	There's just a very, very little thing that you need to do, I would suggest.
	And again, very delicately and very cautiously and with lots of listening and willing to change your mind if they come up with good arguments.
	But what they're saying, right, and as I've said about a million times, people's lives are run by what they define as the good, right?
	So they're saying, well, this guy's hurting, so we're not going to confront him, we're not going to make his life more difficult, and this and that, right?
	But I think that if you can start to reorient them to something like this, this would be the fantasy speech that in my mind I would give to them would be something like this.
	I totally understand that you think you're doing the right thing, By not causing this guy stress when he's in the middle of a divorce.
	But let me give you a possible option.
	I'm not saying this is the case, but a possible option.
	Which is that the reason that this guy got divorced is because nobody confronted him on his bullying.
	So maybe you're not doing the right thing by avoiding confronting him.
	Maybe if you really care about this guy and want him to have a better life and want him to have better relationships and want him to be more loved and calmer and more accepting and more accepted, Then you have to redefine what is a good way to deal with this kind of problem away from, well, we're not going to cause him upset because he's already upset, and say, well, because we didn't confront him in the past, he ended up getting divorced, and we don't want that pattern to continue in his life.
	That's brilliant.
	Yeah, I'm done now.
	That's all I could store up over the last two weeks.
	I'm going to have to have another vacation.
	I say that it's a really interesting hypothesis, but I would also say...
	Hypothesis? Fact!
	Fact! But, frankly, I don't think...
	I mean, it would be fantastic to try it out.
	I seriously don't think that this guy's behavior is going to change.
	Oh, okay. So Steph's not saying that you would do it or that you should do it to change his behavior.
	But aren't you saying, you know, the fact that he's a bully...
	Hang on, I'm not done.
	Aren't you saying that...
	I had a dime for every time I heard that.
	I'd have a dime.
	Aren't you saying the fact that he's a bully is possibly...
	The fact that he's getting a divorce is possibly because he has been bullying And so to challenge him on that bullying so that he could have a better life.
	I heard you say those words.
	So isn't that, unless I'm assuming something here, aren't you just saying, hang on, are you just saying that you would do this or you would encourage Nate to encourage his girlfriend and her family to confront him on his bullying so that he could have a better life?
	I can't believe you're turning on me, too.
	You're all out to get me. No, and sorry, you're totally right.
	I mean, I was absolutely completely and totally unclear about that.
	So, I mean, I can totally see how you would get that.
	But let me see if I can put one slightly more layer of complication on this, but more towards Nate.
	What are they mocking at me?
	I can't read that. But you're laughing.
	Anyway, so, no, Nate, you can't make them confront this guy, right?
	And there's no conceivable way that you can make them confront this guy.
	Because you can't make anyone do anything.
	You can't force anyone to do anything.
	Assume you're not going to pack a gun and go over there and make them confront him.
	You can't gauge your success on whether or not people change their behavior based on what you say.
	It's never going to happen. The only thing that you can do is know what you want to say, practice it, and then try and be as concise and coherent as possible.
	Then it's out of your hands.
	You're the doctor who says if you smoke, you might get sick.
	You can't stop anybody from smoking, but you can at least get them to understand that.
	So my goal here would be to get your girlfriend to redefine what is meant by helping somebody or being good to somebody in a relationship.
	Not because you want her to change her relationship with this guy, but because you want that to be a standard with you.
	Yes. In your relationship and with your children if you have them and if you get married with you guys or whatever, you want to reorient what is meant by dealing with somebody in a positive and empowering way in a relationship, not to get her to change.
	I mean, if she just confronts this guy or whatever, fantastic, you know, then she'll learn the truth.
	He's a total jerk and they'll begin that whole process of whatever that leads.
	But you just want to get her to understand that what she's calling good right now may not be Good, right?
	Like, you don't give a kid candy saying that, well, when I don't give him candy, he's upset.
	It's like, but you, he's only upset because you've trained him by giving him candy all the time, right?
	Mmm, candy. Anyway, so I would say just try and convince her to redefine what is meant by good, and don't worry about the effect.
	Otherwise, it's an argument from effect, right?
	I'm only successful if they confront...
	This guy. And you're only successful if they understand that it's possible that the way that they've been dealing with him is not a solution but is part of the problem.
	And if they choose to, whatever, whatever, that's fine.
	But you need to reorient that for your relationship with her.
	Because what the hell do you care about her relationship with this guy?
	Only care about it to the degree with which it affects your relationship with her.
	Does that make sense? That makes a load of sense.
	Because otherwise we get all strung out by...
	Did they confront us?
	What's happening? Did you do it?
	Did you promise to do it?
	And that's... I mean, that's way too stressful for me.
	And it's never going to work. People...
	Yeah, it's just going to bounce back at you in a fun way.
	So, yeah, the only thing you can control, of course, is your own behavior.
	And, you know, so think about the best way you can get this across and just say, one possibility, right?
	It could be the case. Like, if you turn this thing around and look at it the other way, it could be the case.
	That because people walk in eggshells around this guy, he ended up getting divorced because he didn't have checks and balances.
	It's possible. It's just, you know, let's spin it out as a wild, crazy theory, right?
	And just have a conversation about that.
	You want to infect her with that so that she won't dance around you when you're, you know, out there taking on ten cops or whatever.
	Apparently we've always got to walk on eggshells around the irrational.
	I see it constantly.
	Grandmother's kind of crazy, so her walking around eggshells on butt with her grandmother is probably what makes her crazy.
	Right, right. I mean, the reason that people act as bullies is because other people have given in to them, right?
	But you can't do anything about that.
	All you can do is redefine the good, right?
	This is what We're doing it at Free Debate Radio.
	That's what this whole conversation is about.
	Not changing the world, but redefining the good.
	Helping people understand that the good is probably looking down the wrong end of the gun, so to speak.
	Just redefine the good, and the world will take care of itself.
	If you can get her to redefine what is meant by good, then her relationship with you will definitely change for the better.
	She may still do.
	She may still end up appeasing this guy, but she won't call it a virtue.
	That's the biggest change that you can make in someone's life.
	Yeah. All right. Well, that's all I had to say.
	I've got to take care of my water.
	Okay. Well, listen. Good luck with the showering.
	And I certainly know what I'll be...
	What mental image is working on with me.
	All right. I'll talk to you later.
	All right. Thanks. Thanks.
	Got to go lace and pipe. Heat up the watermelon.
	Okay. Do we have any other questions?
	How can you respect and appease?
	Well, I think that you can not necessarily respect the other person, but there can certainly be times when you will appease someone, right?
	I mean, for me at least, if some waiter yells at me in a restaurant, I'm not going to confront him.
	If I try and send food back that's cold and the waiter says, oh, stop being so fussy, I'm not going to sit there and have a long conversation with the guy.
	I'm just going to leave the restaurant and never go back.
	That's more around respect for my own peace of mind and time.
	That would be how I would approach it.
	Once you redefine the good for someone, their behavior will change.
	You don't go out and try and swim a boat.
	You swim and push against a boat to try and turn a boat.
	What you do is you try and change the current.
	Then all the boats will change, but it takes a lot of time.
	Oh, sure. Oh, how can he respect her after appeasing?
	Well, I think that's the humility that comes from the fact that we've all appeased, right?
	I mean, we've all done it for many, many years, right?
	I did it for many years.
	Christina did it for many years.
	Not being able to get Christina to do it to me, but I'm working on it, working, working.
	But we've all done it, right?
	And what was it that changed us from appeasers to the magical, majestical moral warriors that we are now?
	Well, was somebody hopefully positively and gently and encouragingly explaining to us that what we thought was good may not be good, right?
	And so, as was done to me, as I've done to others, as Nate will now do for this woman, as this woman will now do for others...
	We recognize that the desire to minimize conflict by appeasing is something which we all inherit as children when our parents or our siblings or teachers are bullying us because we have no power.
	So it's having empathy for the appeaser in others, the appeaser in ourselves, and recognizing that it can be a perfectly valid survival strategy.
	When we're young, but there are times when it becomes inappropriate when we become older, and it's very hard to change.
	And to stop appeasing can result in the entire detonation of our social relationships and familial relationships, as those of us who've gone through this process have seen.
	So, yeah, you respect someone the same way that you don't disrespect somebody who doesn't speak English.
	They've never learned, right?
	It's not a matter of intelligence.
	They've just never been taught.
	So now if somebody says they want to learn English and never lift a finger, after a while you can begin to lose some respect for them.
	But in the absence of knowledge, I think the gentleness and humility is a good approach.
	Yeah, we don't do it now.
	That's quite right. Somebody's posted, yeah, but we don't do it now.
	But sure, but we don't do it now because somebody has intervened with us and has spread the good word, right, about redefined the good for us so that we can make better choices.
	You know, some people to me, me to Christina, Christina to her patients, and so on, right?
	And I told two friends and they told two friends, we don't do it now because somebody's guided us through the transition and this is how you can...
	You don't disrespect somebody for having bad habits if they've never been taught anything better.
	You don't disrespect somebody in the Middle Ages for not understanding the scientific method, but you may disrespect a scientist who just decides to go all mystical on your ass.
	I just say it's the patience and recognizing that morality is a form of knowledge that needs to be transmitted, and we can't call people dumb for not knowing it beforehand, especially because we all get taught such bad morality anyway, to begin with.
	Well, at what point is enough enough?
	Well, if somebody appeases you and you can't penetrate that in any way, but you'll know.
	You'll know. I mean, you know in your gut when somebody's not going to change.
	You know, I remember a friend of mine was married, I guess in his late 20s, and he was having a very tough time with his wife, and he went with his wife to marital counseling, and after an hour, the counselor said, can you stay?
	And the wife went out, and he said to this, and I don't know if this is valid or not, but this is what turned out to be the case.
	He said to my friend, you can choose what you want to do in this marriage or not, but I tell you, she's never going to change.
	She's never going to change.
	There is no capacity within her To self-reflect.
	She has no third eye, no ego strength.
	She simply will not change.
	She will continue to do this. So if you can't live with this, you've got some tough decisions to make, but she's not going to change.
	And it did turn out to be, he was very skeptical, but it turned out to be the case, right?
	When you get trained on this kind of stuff, or you sort of learn about it as you continue to work through it, then you just, you know, right?
	You know when the appeasement, you know, fog is being spewed in your face in order to get you to stop pursuing the matter and so on.
	Or when somebody makes a commitment and says, yes, it's the right thing to do, and I'm going to do it tomorrow, and then doesn't do it, or lies and says they did do it, doesn't do it, it doesn't say, well, here's why I couldn't do it, I got too nervous, maybe we can talk through it some more, whatever.
	If you just become someone else that they manipulate, then you can be patient with that too, right?
	Because the false self squirms the most when it gets the spotlight shone on it.
	But at some point you recognize that things aren't going to change and you can just trust your gut that way.
	Yeah, that's absolutely right.
	So where there is progress, then there is patience, right?
	Where there is progress, there is patience.
	And when you're trying to get somebody to lay down the false self-manipulative stuff, it's a rocky road.
	It takes a long time, but it's an investment that pays off.
	Because you learn, right?
	I mean, the more you confront somebody else, if you do it in a gentle and empathetic way, The more you grow as well, right?
	I mean, I have gained an enormous amount of integrity through talking about integrity in the show, right?
	I mean, that's been very powerful for me.
	It's why I keep quitting these jobs.
	So that's another way of doing it, too.
	So I'd be manipulating her about not giving her into manipulation.
	Sorry, I don't quite understand that.
	Wait, wait!
	You know, if you're in the shower, sometimes it's really tough with the soapy keyboard.
	How about not giving in to manipulation?
	No, don't manipulate her at all, right?
	The opposite of manipulation is honesty, right?
	So you don't manipulate her at all.
	Look, you could use, Nate, you could use some diplomacy.
	So could I. And Christina helps me with that.
	Christina can use some bluntness and some more freedom in communications, and so I help her with that.
	But with the knowledge that as I help her to become more blunt, I'm also totally willing to learn to be more diplomatic.
	So this is a mutual two-way supportive teacher-teacher-student-student kind of thing.
	The moment that you step into the saddle and say, ride left, ride right, whoa Nelly, people just throw you.
	They don't want to be ridden that way, so to speak.
	Right, yeah, keep your caps lock key on.
	Absolutely, that is the key.
	All right, do we have any other questions?
	Or is it dinner time?
	I like caps around here.
	All right. Well, thank you everyone so much for dropping by.
	The show, once more, has been fantastic.
	Thanks to the excellent questions of the listeners.
	And I really do appreciate it.
	Wonderful questions and comments.
	And I really appreciate that.
	And we will spend some time this week.
	I spent a good, good deal of time on vacation thinking about the future of the show and so on.
	And, of course, I'm enormously thrilled at the progress we've made, significant progress over the last month in terms of, oh, gosh, 70,000 or 80,000 more, no, it's a 20,000, 30,000 percent increase in listenership since last week, which is fantastic.
	One more listener, I'm going to panic and freeze, but so far, so good.
	And so I'm going to put some thoughts down.
	Maybe we can have some conversations with interested parties about Where I'd like to take things next, I think I have a very good idea for what it is that I want to write about in terms of something that could go out beyond the political or philosophical or economic circles into more of the familial and psychological stuff, which I think is where the real key is.
	And so this book that I talked about with Christina, Ad Nauseam on Vacation, It's called Privatizing the Family, which I think would be a very interesting topic to work on.
	We'll talk a little bit more about that.
	So I certainly do appreciate your patience during the break, but it's really great to be able to spend the time to sort of regroup your thoughts at the same time as playing beach volleyball.
	So a good combination, really, of many things there.
	All right. Thank you so much.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	We will, of course, be back next week.
	Same bat time, same bat channel, where I will give you my review of the Queen show, We Will Rock You, which they never returned my audition message.
	Anyway, we won't have to get into that.

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