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Nov. 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:03
918 Just once... no blood... (audio to a video)
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
I'm feeling a little yelly today, so if you have sensitive ears, this may not be the video or audio show for you.
Just forewarned is forearmed.
The cause of my discontent, if it should be of interest to you, is that I went to go and see the movie Lions for Lambs, with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, and Tom Cruise.
It was written by the guy who wrote the Statist Fest, The Kingdom.
And I don't want to give it away.
It's worth seeing just as a movie that on a rating of 1 to 10 you can give a 666 due to the stone evil nature of its approach to solving problems while having its pious liberal heart on its sleeve about its concern for anti-violence and the poor and integrity in journalism and honesty from congressmen and joining the system to fight the evil and so on.
But let's have a look at some of the basic arguments that are put forward in the film.
And why pick on a film by some idiot Hollywood doofus?
Well, this is the cultural norms.
Now, the film didn't do very well, but people didn't have any problem with the message.
They only had problems with the execution.
It's three stories.
Meryl Streep is interviewing Tom Cruise, who plays a senator who's come up with a new thrust-and-conquer strategy for Afghanistan, which completely reminds her of what happened in Vietnam.
You know, we're going to go with smaller groups that are going to be able to infiltrate the enemy and blah blah blah blah blah.
And the other story is...
A rather world-weary Robert Redford trying to re-motivate a younger student who has become cynical about the political system.
And the snares of the elderly are in full force and in full example, and it's well worth looking at the arguments in a little bit more detail.
The first thing, the whole thing is pretty horrifying in so many ways, but I'm just going to pick on two or three of the central arguments just so that you can stick your tongue into the hot battery acid of cultural norms these days so that you can feel the full stomach-turning wave of revulsion that helps you expel this decaying and fetid food that we're fed as intellectual sustenance and come onto something a little healthy.
So, the film is against the war in Iraq, although it does make a good point about how the war in Iraq, that the journalists are criticizing the politicians, but as Tom Cruise rightly points out to Meryl Streep, yeah, we admit our mistakes, we screwed up the war completely, there were no weapons of mass destruction, but we couldn't have sold the war without your American flags and Operation Iraqi Freedom!
And all that kind of nonsense that went on during the 2003 lead-up to the war.
The flags, the trumpets, the heroic soldiers, the America defends itself, the war on terror, and so on.
So all of this stuff is portrayed as something that was quite evil, that the journalists did.
And Meryl Streep, of course, doesn't have a good response to that, which, of course, she shouldn't.
The third story is a bunch of soldiers in Afghanistan who were originally in Robert Redford's class who've gone out to Afghanistan to fight the terrorists and end up in a disastrous situation.
Now, these two young men who end up in Afghanistan when they were in Robert Redford's class put forward a presentation about civic duty and how it is that we should serve the fatherland.
And what they basically said was they said, well, you see, Americans are just too self-involved.
They want careers. They want lives.
They want families. They want all of these things that they should damn well not have when there's one single problem in the country that the fantasy of state violence is imagined to be able to solve.
So they say that what we're going to do, see, is we're going to get rid of a year of high school and we're going to replace it with the following.
That you get a choice between, and I wrote these down.
I think they're pretty accurate, so I couldn't stomach going to watch it again.
We're going to get rid of one year of high school.
We're going to replace it with the following.
Number one. You can choose to join the Peace Corps for one year abroad.
Number two. We have the US AmeriCorps, which you have to serve for a year in one of the 500 poorest zip codes in America.
Number three, you get an ROTC-like apprenticeship here or abroad, but you have to choose one of these three and nobody gets a note from Ma.
When the fuck did it become so self-evident in the land of the free that we were the cattle-fed property of the ruling class?
This is the land of, for all his errors, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Lysander Spooner.
When did it become A non-controversial thing to put forward, to have a fascistic strength for joy, enslavement of teenagers, scarcely out of their childhoods, to be unpaid slave laborers for the state for a year, to be sent overseas, to be sent into...
To do what? Build wells?
Fuck that! Do you know how many tens of billions of dollars have been sunk in foreign aid into Africa, rendering it one of the most apocalyptic shitheaps on the planet?
When is it going to happen that somebody can put forward a solution to a problem that does not involve shooting someone?
Just once let me see that.
Not, well, you see, what we're going to do is we're going to try and ditch the war in Iraq and instead we're going to point guns at our teenagers saying, you've got to go and serve without pay at the whim of the state for a year.
Is the problem with the war in Iraq that the insurgents are armed whereas our teenagers generally aren't?
Is that the issue?
Is that why it's so much better to enslave the young at home rather than attack the armed overseas?
Is there any thinker out there at the moment who can even conceive, conceive of an idea of solving a problem without a gun?
Once let me see it in my lifetime.
Once think instead of shoot to solve problems.
How's this going to occur? What if you don't want to go?
How's it going to be funded? Well, if you don't want to go, as they say, nobody gets a note from mom.
What that means, of course, is that if you don't go, you get jailed.
If you don't go and serve in this Peace Corps overseas, if you don't go and serve in the AmeriCorps, if you don't join, what is it, the ROTC-like apprenticeship here or abroad, what happens if you just don't want to go? what happens if you just don't want to go?
Well, you're going to get shot.
Why is it that We, few, are the only people who can see the gun in the room of the state.
Nobody gets a note from Mom, meaning we shoot you if you don't show up.
Oh yeah, there'll be fines, and there'll be letters, and there'll be court dates, but if you don't show up for these things, at some point, someone's gonna come to your fucking house with a gun pointed in your face and say, come on with me, sonny.
When did we turn into the property of sickos, like those who wish to have or advocate this kind of evil, violent and brutal power over others?
There's another statement that Robert Redford has this impassioned speech on.
I wonder how many of Redford's children are serving as unpaid laborers of an enforced gang in one of the 500 poorest cities in America, poorest zip codes in America.
I wonder how many of Redford's kids, I wonder how many times Redford has gone down to do what he advocates at the point of a gun is virtuous for others.
Even his professor in the movie just sits in a little office and has erudite and abstract debates with a demotivated student.
While the movie applauds the setting up of slave labor.
He has a speech where he talks about how ironic it is that the rich kids who have all the opportunities in the world never seem to volunteer for military service.
While the poor kids, and he uses the phrase, like the poorest kids that America has turned its back on, that the government has turned its back on, they're always the one to sign up to fight.
I mean...
How retarded do you have to be to think that ghettos are created through a lack of government involvement?
I mean, you can't think and have a brain cell and be able to write A cheque, let alone for a movie for 20 million or 40 million dollars.
You can't have a brain cell look at the poorest 500 zip codes in the United States, or look at these ghettos, and think that this is a place that the government has turned its back on.
The government runs these places!
This is the government!
Welfare. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, education, public housing, public roads, public libraries, public community centers.
This is the government!
This is not a place that the government has turned its back on.
This is a place you can't escape the fucking government.
These ghettos are slave pens of people sucked into the soft gulags of the welfare state.
This is not a place that has been abandoned by the government.
But this is what you have to come up with.
This is the bizarre, bizarro, sick inverted world that you have to come up with in order to justify that, boy, if you get hold of this gun, you can make it golden.
You can make it beautiful.
You can make violence shine with virtue if only you get a hold of this gun.
Give me the gun. I'll make it right.
I know where to point this fucker.
See, the problem is, they're just pointing the gun at the wrong places and the wrong way.
They're using violence badly, but oh boy, you give me that gun, am I ever going to be able to do virtue?
The state is the fucking ring!
At least, Tolkien, the anarchist, had the sense to have Gollum drop into the pit of fire in Mount Doom.
Our contemporary intellectual debates are like the Council of Elrond where everybody's grabbing for the goddamn ring, and there isn't even any Sauron!
He says to this young kid who's very smart, "Well, what you need to do is get involved in politics, you see.
You can't turn your back on it.
You can't just go and have a life.
You can't just go and have a family.
You've got to get involved in politics.
You've no right to complain if you ain't running for office.
You've no right to complain if you ain't getting involved.
And the kid says, but it never works.
Right? And, of course, the Iraq War is cataclysmic to the nostalgic, aging, boomer, hippie doofuses, because after all their goddamn work, we got another war!
Casualty count is somewhat lower, at least on our side, although the two to three million Vietnamese slaughtered by the Americans in a stupid and senseless bullshit, no domino theory ever could have happened war don't seem to register too much on the radar of those concerned with peace and freedom.
Robert Redford says in the movie, he says, "Those who are in these poor neighborhoods have terrible schools, the kind of schools that you and I can't even dream of because we're beautiful tiny-whities who get to go to these wonderful schools of our choices."
And the government is doing all these bad things around the world, propping up foreign dictatorships, waging war, having 700 plus military bases overseas, a permanent occupation in the Middle East It's a new Rome! It's a new empire!
It's evil! This is what the government is doing.
But you know what?
You should join it.
You should join it and you should make it better.
See, there's this pedophilia ring in town, Sonny.
There's this pedophilia ring in town.
And it's just terrible what they do, you see.
They get a hold of children and they rape them repeatedly.
It's just terrible. There they sell the internet footage.
On the web. Awful.
And you know what you should do?
You should join this pedophilia ring and you should work within that system and you yourself should participate in the rape of these children so that you can eventually rise to the top of this pedophilia ring and you can make them stop hurting children.
Okay, it's never worked in the past.
It'll never work in any theoretical way, because the whole purpose of the pedophilia ring is to rape children.
You can't oppose it by joining it rising through the ranks.
And you can't rape children and remain uncorrupted!
You can't join the government and remain uncorrupted!
I know. Lord Holy Ron Paul's gonna do it.
Yeah. That fantasy is what sustains the state.
The fantasy that we get one guy in there, one magic guy is going to descend into the state.
He's going to make it work.
He's going to make it all beautiful.
It's messianistic. It's madness.
The state is an agency of violence.
The state is an agency of force.
The state is a criminal organization.
It's disorganized crime.
The state is brutal.
The state is violence. The state is war.
The state is slavery. The state is two million people in prisons.
Power corrupts, we say, with Lord Acton.
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
But are guys going to get in?
Whether you're a liberal or a democrat, Or you are a Republican or even a Libertarian, a Minarchist, a Ron Paul supporter.
Our guy is going to point the gun at the right people.
Our guy can take up the gun and make it good.
Our guy can point the gun at you and make you smile with happiness.
It's never going to happen.
If you could just pry this vision, this fantasy, this sick, deluded madness out of your mind, out of your soul, out of your being, cough it up and reject it as the toxic, cancerous, vile poison that it is!
Violence begets violence.
Murder begets murder.
Taxation begets war.
War overseas. War on drugs.
War on poverty. War on illiteracy.
War on ignorance. Violence spreads.
Violence. The state is the ultimate enabler of violence.
The state we think will clean us is a showerhead filled with blood that can only sicken and destroy us.
The state cannot be reformed any more than pedophilia, rape, murder or slavery can be reformed.
We do not reform evil.
We identify it and fight it with virtue, with words, not with violence.
And we start coming up with solutions to problems that shockingly involve putting down the gun.
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