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Dec. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:31:51

949 Sunday Call In Show Dec 30 2007

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining this last Sunday show of the magical full-time FDR year known as 2007, or if we go by the FDR full-time calendar, year zero.
	It is the year... That is the goose egg that does not exist.
	So, just to start with, I wanted to play the audio of the most recent Ron Paul ad, and it's very short.
	This is a television video, and then we can have a little chat about it.
	So, let's start with the ominous audio itself.
	We welcomed immigrants who came here legally, followed the rules, and led productive lives.
	Today, illegal immigrants violate our borders and overwhelm our hospitals, schools, and social services.
	Ron Paul wants border security now.
	Physically secure the border.
	No amnesty. No welfare to illegal aliens.
	End birthright citizenship.
	No more student visas from terrorist nations.
	Standing up for the rule of law.
	Ron Paul for president.
	I'm Ron Paul, and I approve this message.
	Now I'm going to be doing the rest of the show in exactly the same voice.
	Anyway, no I'm not. But I just thought it was a highly interesting and instructive video to listen to simply because it really helps to highlight the problems that any sane human being is going to have in trying to come up with a coherent position From the standpoint of politics,
	in other words, to be able to survive, the logical flaws involved particularly in base appeals to populism.
	So let's have a little trip through this video to see if we can't make some sense of it.
	The basic premise, of course, is that the immigrants who've worked hard, who...
	Who are productive tax livestock have always been welcome.
	In other words, if you don't obey the law, then you really shouldn't be welcome in America.
	But it seems hard to understand how it is that people come in who live peaceful lives, who simply evade capture by the arbitrary divisions of borderists, are somehow more criminal objectively than an American, say, who robs a convenience store.
	Because if breaking the law is enough to get you expelled from a society, then surely the more grievous the crime, the more that the human being should be expelled from society.
	Now, there is, of course, no more grievous crime than genocide, as we are all, I'm sure, perfectly aware.
	And so, of course, the person that we know who has created a genocide is George Bush.
	And so, clearly, since...
	Ron Paul is running for president on the law and order bandwagon.
	Then he should not so much worry about defenseless immigrants struggling to survive in an alien culture against the predations of the state police and the border guards, but rather he should be saying something like this.
	In 1996, the US Congress passed a law which said anybody guilty of a war crime must be put to death.
	The death sentence is irrevocable in this instance.
	George Bush has openly violated international and domestic law.
	He violated the Constitution.
	He's declared war without congressional approval.
	He invaded a sovereign nation who was not doing anything to oppose the United States.
	He has committed the international crime of aggression, which was exactly what the Nazi leaders were put to death for in 1945 and 1946 in the Nuremberg Trials.
	Therefore, I run on the platform of execution for George Bush, because I'm really interested in the rule of law.
	Now, I'm not holding my breath to see a commercial like that.
	But, of course, if he really was interested in the rule of law, then he would be focusing on genocide rather than somebody who might be in front of the line for you in the emergency area of a hospital.
	So that's one aspect. The other is no student visas from terrorist nations, right?
	Fascinating. Just absolutely wonderful.
	First of all, we have to hear the wonderful concept of collective guilt.
	And what that means, of course, is that you are to be denied visa entry to the United States if your government or somebody else in your country is a criminal.
	Therefore, if somebody in your country or who is your leader has performed a crime, the crime of terrorism, and of course terrorism is the use of violence to achieve political ends, like, say, the overthrow of Guatemalan A democratically elected Guatemalan government or the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 or,
	say, the unjust and unlawful annexation of Hawaii in the 1890s or of the Philippines in the early 1900s and so on.
	So if terrorism or, say, the bombing...
	Of civilians in Afghanistan by the tens of thousands for crimes that the Taliban are supposed to have backed up.
	Which, of course, Taliban was funded and put in place by the United States to begin with.
	So, if the logic is that we must collectively exclude from living in the United States anyone from any country where someone else has committed acts of terrorism, then naturally, of course, all United States citizens must be deported because America has committed acts of terrorism that far outstrip Places like Syria and so on in terms of its predations around the world.
	So naturally, if the law is that we must deport people, Who are members of countries where the leaders or their fellow countrymen have committed terrorist actions, then by God, it's going to be a very short presidency, isn't it?
	Because Ron Paul is going to have to take the oath of office and then ship himself off in a little crate to Mexico because he can't live in the United States.
	So this is just the kind of nonsense that goes on when you get into politics.
	And you have to appeal to the unwashed masses, the unleaded, the uneducated.
	Might I say, in the case of the Ron Paul supporters, these studiously miseducated people.
	And this, of course, is just horrendous.
	And this naturally and inevitably is the result.
	You know, the man approved his message.
	This is not something that came from some right-wing xenophobic racist group.
	This is somebody who is coming across as a moral hero talking about the rule of law.
	But let me tell you what is actually going on.
	I'm going to put on my prognosticator hat for just a moment and tell you what is actually going on.
	See, George Bush is a strong fellow.
	He is supported by tradition.
	He is supported by sentimentality.
	He is supported by patriotism.
	And so, the brave and courageous Ron Paul...
	He doesn't want to take on George Bush in terms of his desire to have the law enacted, to have the same law that the Americans visited upon the Germans in 1946 at Nuremberg and the same law that was affirmed in the 96 law about...
	96 US law, not a UN law, US law.
	War crimes, breaches of the Geneva Convention.
	Are to be punishable by death.
	That's the law. And he is the law and order candidate, Mr.
	Ron Paul. So why isn't he going for George Bush?
	Who has done more harm to America?
	The guy doing dishes?
	Who's Hispanic? Or George Bush?
	Who's inciting blowback in Afghanistan and Iraq?
	Who has started a war, has cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, thousands of American lives, tens of thousands wounded, $450 billion plus in direct costs.
	Almost $2 trillion in indirect costs, and this doesn't even count what these sociopathic swarms of soldiers over there are going to do to the American social system when they come back and end up violent, drug-addicted, homeless, bad parents.
	Who has done more harm as a breach of the rule of law to America?
	Is it George Bush or a couple of immigrants?
	Ah, but you see, George Bush is popular to a large degree, or at least putting forward the death penalty as the application of the rule of law to the case of George Bush would be unpopular.
	But by God, you can pick on the immigrants!
	By God, you can pick on those helpless people!
	Fleeing the oppression of their homeland as the Americans did originally, as the Puritans did originally.
	By God, you can pick on those poor bastards!
	This is the moral courage that we see in the realm of politics.
	Picking on the weak and the defenseless and the helpless and the unpopular and calling it the rule of law.
	This is the moral sickness that infects the soul when you want the golden gun.
	This is what you become.
	A rabble rouser.
	A hander out of pitchforks and flaming torches.
	Picking on the weakest, the least defensible, the most helpless, the most downtrodden.
	Rousing the mob against those who are unpopular and throwing them into the sea.
	Unity through hatred of the weak, masked as virtue and a commitment to the rule of law.
	And as it goes for the immigrants, so shall it go for all of us in time.
	So shall it go for the anarchists, so shall it go for the libertarians in time.
	Because what Ron Paul is bringing into the political discourse is a desire to bully the helpless, which of course is the foundation of the state.
	Desire to bully the helpless.
	Desire to get a psychological flash of strength by stepping on the back of a starving man.
	While crying out your own moral virtue and integrity, it's stomach-turning, is what it is.
	And this is the inevitable result of getting involved in politics.
	It's like, Ron Paul's on The Daily Show.
	John Stewart says, so Ron Paul, what's your platform?
	What are you up to?
	What are you down with?
	Ron Paul says, oh, see, the government is really bad at everything it does, and we pretty much should get the government out of everything, and everything should be privatized.
	Jon Stewart says, oh, the military too?
	Ron Paul says, oh no!
	Not the military!
	No, see, the government is really bad at delivering your mail.
	See, so we should privatize the mail delivery because the government is bad at it.
	But boy, you give that government that is so incompetent that it cannot even deliver a piece of mail on time, you give that government bombs and nuclear weapons and bunker busters and aircraft carriers and suddenly it's transformed from this unbelievably incompetent and destructive organization to stunning and stellar virtue.
	It's really bad at maintaining the roads But give it the power to murder millions, and oh, by God, is it transformed into something beautiful, wonderful, and moral.
	Do you see just how dangerous this guy is, in terms of making us look like complete and total idiots?
	Oh, I see, the government's incompetent.
	We should have everything privatized.
	What, the military do? No, no, no, no, not the military.
	But then we just like, I mean, what do people think that libertarians are there?
	Just idiots who can't string two coherent thoughts together.
	Right? This is the guy, oh yes, you're the non-aggression principle, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But we need to have the military.
	Government is incompetent and evil and destructive.
	But by God, we need it.
	We need it well-armed. We need this incompetent and destructive group of people well-armed.
	They're stupid and destructive and violent and evil when it comes to welfare, but by God, let's give them arms.
	The mafia, you see, is really bad at running charities, so let's have them run the whole country at the point of a gun.
	This is the madness of political libertarianism.
	And this now is why I don't call myself a libertarian anymore.
	Because the prominent libertarians are talking out of their asses and twisting themselves into the most bizarre shapes.
	Just to be able to wriggle through the bias and prejudice of your average idiot voter.
	It's a debasement of a noble intellectual tradition.
	So why would I want to say, oh, I'm a libertarian.
	Oh, like Ron Paul, like you want to build a big border and you want to kick out 10 million Americans and you think that the government is bad at everything except killing people and it's subtly magically virtuous when you put a gun in its hand and point it at foreigners?
	No! None of those things!
	So you believe that killing the Indians and taking over the land with smallpox-inflected blankets was a really virtuous thing, but coming to the country to work from another country without going through...
	So the government is really bad at everything, but we should give them the power to keep people out that we don't like.
	So the initiation of the use of force is really bad, When people are armed and popular like George Bush, but it's really good when people are unarmed and unpopular like illegal immigrants.
	That's libertarianism, because that's how it's portrayed these days.
	I am Ron Paul, he says, and I approve this message.
	Collective guilt, the initiation of the use of force, massive amounts of moral hypocrisy when it comes to the rule of law.
	The rule of law.
	It's a mob lynching is what it is.
	This perspective on illegal immigration.
	It has all the ethics of a Klan lynching.
	And people just want to pick on them because they're not popular and they're helpless.
	And by God, that's not something you want to inject into your political mix.
	Anyway, that's just something I wanted to start off with.
	Enough of me chewing up the scenery.
	I am more than happy to take questions or comments about this or any other topic.
	So please, feel free to have your say, my friends.
	The mic is now yours.
	Yeah, I used to...
	I used to have this position where it would be like...
	Well, deporting illegal aliens is not...
	It has nothing to do with racism because it has to do with the law and the fact that they're illegal.
	And I never really got the whole nationalism thing as the same kind of thing, I guess.
	Yeah, I mean, that's why I say, as far as deporting people who are harming the U.S. economy, I mean, two trillion dollars!
	Two trillion dollars that war has cost, and that's not even the whole mess of it.
	How many of these...
	When these, what, 150,000 plus 50,000 or 75,000 private contractors, once these now trained and broken sociopaths come back to American society, what is going to be the long-term fallout cost?
	For generations, it's going to go on.
	These people are going to come back and just be brutalized and be brutal and...
	What is the cost? Is it really some guy who's picking apples in California, who's harming the American economy, or was it George Bush?
	But those laws, see, the laws against the powerful and the popular are not invoked.
	Not invoked. I mean, Ron Paul has directly said that the declaration of whatever it was, permission to use force thing, was completely unconstitutional, which makes the war illegal, which makes George Bush a war criminal.
	That's where you, on a principled basis, that's where you would start.
	If you want to uphold the law, you obviously go after the mass murderer before the pickpocket, right?
	And the illegal immigrants aren't even pickpockets.
	You would go after the guy who initiated genocide before the guy who doesn't have his papers, right?
	And I've not seen it anywhere.
	He says, the war in Iraq is unjust and illegal.
	Then we know what that means according to US law.
	But can he open his mouth and say, oh yeah, absolutely, I'm going to try George Bush as a walker and all, and the death penalty is the result?
	And then he dares to talk about principles.
	I mean, the effrontery is amazing.
	He says that collective punishment is unjust and immoral.
	Because if collective punishment is not unjust and immoral, then 9-11 was moral as a retaliation to American predations and violence in the Middle East.
	What Bin Laden said, the three things that caused 9-11.
	Military aid to Israel, which results in the oppression of the Palestinians.
	Stationing 35,000 troops in Saudi Arabia, infidels on Holy Land, and the blockade against Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in half a million deaths of Iraqis, right?
	So that's terrorism by any stretch.
	Murdering half a million people is terrorism by any stretch of the imagination.
	So, if collective pun, if we can then exclude anybody from any country where terrorism has ever originated from, then we're talking about collective legal sanctions.
	Then collective legal sanctions must be able to be applied against the United States.
	But that's of course not...
	No, it's just manipulation of symbols.
	It's got nothing to do with virtue or integrity or philosophy or values.
	Because the first time somebody asks a question, you just have to go start dancing and start bullshitting, right?
	Oh, the military too?
	No, no, no, not the military. Oh, so should we not then prosecute the people who harmed the American people the most?
	George Bush? No, no, no, not that.
	No, no. Right?
	You just become an idiot.
	And people smell that inconsistency.
	And they know that It's just the purest nonsense.
	You're just appealing to a bunch of old Republic bigots.
	But sorry, I could go on all day and often have, so I just wanted to mention that.
	That was all I had to say on that.
	I just remember that that's the way I kind of thought back when I was a big ditto head and listened to Sean Hannity and all that.
	So, uh... That was my line of thinking.
	It didn't dawn on me that the hierarchy of values there that you're talking about.
	But it's obvious when it's pointed out, right?
	We're just trained not to see it.
	Right. Right, it makes sense.
	I mean, can you imagine if there was some guy who'd killed, what is it, 4,000 Americans, who'd murdered 4,000 Americans...
	Can you imagine how far a presidential candidate who was totally into the rule of law and said, we should put murderers behind bars for the rest of their life.
	And someone says, oh, this guy killed 4,000 Americans.
	And he's like, no, no, no, we shouldn't touch that guy.
	We should give him a pension and hopefully a presidential library.
	It's that old saying, kill one guy, you get called a murderer.
	Kill a thousand, you get called a conqueror.
	Something along those lines.
	Yeah, or there's Stalin's, right?
	A single death is a tragedy.
	A million deaths is a statistic.
	Right. I mean, and the reason that I'm...
	Because he definitely says that it's an illegal war.
	An illegal war is a genocide.
	I mean, all wars are genocide, but if we put the hat on even that...
	Man swore an oath to defend the Constitution and then went to war without a congressional declaration.
	The man has ordered the continual abrogation of the Geneva Convention.
	That is a war crime punishable by death according to US law.
	I mean, we have torture.
	We have a redefinition of prisoners of war as enemy combatants, which does not anywhere exist in the Geneva Convention.
	And then we have, oh, waterboarding is not torture, which it clearly is, as described in the Geneva Convention.
	We have rendition sites where people are snatched from one country, flown and drugged by having pills shut up their asses, flown to other countries, Egypt, Syria, and tortured.
	Right, and then they say, oh, this is different because this is fighting terrorism, and then you ask them what terrorism is, and they define it as exactly what the United States is doing.
	Yes, but this is the moral hypocrisy that is always part of nationalism, right?
	This is the continual invention of moral rules that you violate in the utterance, right?
	Because if the targeting of civilians, of which tens of thousands died in Afghanistan and over 100,000 in Iraq, if the targeting of civilians to fight terrorism is moral, then 9-11 was moral.
	I mean, they just set up these definitions and you turn it around and they just wriggle like a bunch of shitty little eels.
	And this is the constant game of politics.
	Setting yourself up these little golden fucking statues of how moral you are and the moment somebody takes your principles and applies them in a direction you don't anticipate, you just start spitting at them.
	You're unpatriotic!
	Only a communist would ask those kinds of questions.
	Whose side are you on, son?
	Are you anti-American?
	Are you anti-American?
	You know I can make you take this flag anally.
	You mean you wouldn't protect me if I were...
	Protect my freedom?
	You wouldn't go fight for me in another country?
	Or is it...
	If somebody's life were in danger, you wouldn't torture somebody to get that information out of them?
	You know, it's...
	I get those arguments all the time from these...
	Yeah, from the...
	Yeah, and of course it doesn't work.
	Texas types. Well, based on your suggestion, I've been reading Sim Chalmers, listening to Sim Chalmers Johnson.
	Absolutely. I mean, except for his continual stupid-ass nagging at everyone to, you know, we've got to fight to keep this republic.
	It's like, you know, you realize they have nuclear weapons and rendition programs, right?
	What does that mean? Because that's the illusion, right?
	If only we vote for the right people, we can turn this whole thing around.
	As if... As if the government has anything to do with serving the voters.
	I mean, it's madness, right?
	But his analysis, of course, of U.S. foreign policy is chilling.
	It's absolutely chilling. So highly recommended to have a look at Chalmers Johnson.
	He's a very good writer.
	He's on Audible.com and highly recommended Audible.com as well.
	But yeah, listen to this guy.
	I mean, he talks about this. He says, I can't remember the guy's name because it's some broken glass mouthful of Arabic syllables.
	But they picked up this guy and they tortured him for months, months.
	Ah, he gave us great information about 9-11.
	It turns out later, the guy has a severe mental illness, which he had before he went into being tortured.
	He wrote in his diary, his diary is composed of notations in three different personalities.
	He knew almost nothing about Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda said, hey, this guy's nuts, we better not tell him anything, right?
	But it just makes stuff up, right?
	After you torture the guy, you have to say he gave good information so that the myth of torture can continue and you can torture the next guy.
	But, oh, it's just all nonsense.
	The ticking bomb, right?
	It's like, yeah, well, you know, why don't we ask why there's a ticking bomb in the first place rather than just ever escalating this spiral of violence?
	But that would keep us in a state of continual emergency, right?
	So every time some torture victim spits up something which turns out to be completely unverified or unverifiable, why?
	So they'll stop torturing him.
	They crank up the terrorist alert.
	Oh my god, it's orange because we stuck a poker up some guy's ass and he said there was going to be an attack.
	But this is the madness that we live in, right?
	And it's getting so mad that it's really hard for people to look at it.
	It's like saying, I've got this very powerful telescope trained directly at the sun.
	If you could just open your eyes and take a look through it and people are frightened now, right?
	And they have these new reports of, oh, Iran may have already had nuclear weapons or something like that.
	And it's like, didn't you learn the first time around?
	Did you forget, you know, the past six, seven years or what?
	Well, I mean, they've learned that if you keep talking about bad people out there with nuclear weapons and Forget about the bad people that have nuclear weapons.
	Well, yeah. I mean, then, you know, you keep people in a constant state of anxiety and fear.
	And if it's not global warming, then it's terrorism.
	And if it's not terrorism, then it's eggs.
	You keep people just in a state of continual anxiety and fear.
	And they will always feel the need to run to protectors and to give up their...
	I mean, this is old hat, right?
	Right. All right.
	Well, thanks. I appreciate that.
	I'm more than open to listen to any other topics that people have floating around in the collective Borg brain.
	So if somebody else would like to jump in, that would be great.
	Well, I could throw out a question I wrote down earlier.
	It has nothing to do with this, though.
	Why, sure. Is optimism an inboard trait, a preference such as an interest in computers, or is it something that comes from a state of well-being?
	That's a good question. I would say that optimism cannot result from a state of well-being alone.
	I mean, it certainly does generally tend to, when you're feeling good, you generally tend to feel a little bit more optimistic.
	But... If somebody is, let's say somebody is overweight, they obviously believe that if they lose the weight, like if they sit down and say, okay, I'm going to lose the weight, then they do that because they believe that they can lose the weight and that their health and energy and overall vitality and attractiveness will be better if he or she loses the weight.
	So, if I'm optimistic about how I'm going to feel and whether I can lose the weight, I'm actually going to then create a state of well-being, which will then reinforce my My optimism and so on.
	So I don't know that it's inborn.
	And I also don't know whether or not people have a tendency towards optimism or pessimism.
	But I do know that they're self-reinforcing, right?
	Like, so somebody who's pessimistic tends to avoid things that are positive because they're irksome to the prejudice, right?
	So... So they then generally hang around with other negative people or consume negative things on the media or go and see Saw 9 million or something like that.
	And then, of course, they tend to become more and more negative, right?
	Whereas optimism, well, okay, optimism can be a little bit harder to maintain because there is a bit of a downward drag in the world at the moment.
	But... Certainly, optimism is going to have you approach people in a more positive manner.
	It's going to have you expect better things from your interactions with people, which does have some effect on the quality of those interactions with people, right?
	So if I expect good service and I'm friendly and engaging to a waiter, then it's very likely that the waiter will only spit once in my sandwich, which is, you know, good service in Toronto.
	So I would say I don't know that they're built in or not.
	It certainly could be, but I don't know anyone who's a pessimist, and I know some pessimists, I don't know anyone who is a pessimist who is not a pessimist because of particular premises that they hold.
	There's no pessimist around who thinks that human nature is basically good.
	That would be a contradiction.
	I think that our thoughts definitely influence our moods in an enormous way.
	That's the whole basis of cognitive therapy.
	That would be my answer.
	There may be some inbuilt stuff, but it's your basic premises that are going to shape your experience of the world over the long run.
	Right. And I've noticed a slight increase in my level of optimism over the past couple of weeks.
	Wait, wait. Minus 98% too?
	Minus 97.5?
	Where are we? Right, right.
	Yay! Yay!
	That's right. There is one more star in the night sky that makes, let's see, two stars in the night sky.
	Sorry, go on. That's about...
	I don't know if it's that little of an increase.
	Maybe a little more than that.
	Maybe four stars.
	That's 400% increase!
	You're four times less unhappy!
	That's like joy!
	No, I'm sorry. Go on.
	No, that was my only question.
	Well, wait. Let's hear about your slight reduction in misery.
	That's good. Yeah.
	I kind of measured before in something I wrote that I might have gone from 100% unhappiness to...
	No, negative 100% to 0%.
	So now I'm like...
	If I were in a pit, I'm like...
	Crawling over the edge right now and about to go up the stairs or whatever.
	So, I think that's a good start.
	I'm kind of like in between the bottom and the top.
	Right, right. So, of course, this is one of the reasons why pessimism versus...
	I mean, now it's an option, right?
	Optimism is vaguely an option, which it really wasn't before, right?
	Right, right.
	So, I think you're right about optimism being based on a premise...
	I'm just going to throw it out there because I have another question for you, but just in case there's anybody out there who has a question that they'd like to throw into the mix, Christina has both put me down, medicated me in that special way that I like, and I've got the muscle back on, so I don't think I'll be back on the wrong point.
	No, wait. I'm fine.
	But if you would like to bring in questions or topics about anything else, I'd be happy to, or I can go back to a question that I have for Nate.
	So we throw the net wide to see who may speak.
	Okay, so, um...
	Nate. Yes.
	She's back!
	Yeah. You mean my mom, or...?
	Well, both!
	Both. Yeah.
	You cover him on the left! I'll take the right!
	Sorry, go on. It's strange that one came back right before the other.
	I haven't really... I told you I declined on the other one, but she's a little more potential than my mom, which I won't ever respond to ever again.
	Yeah, I liked the picture that Rod posted with the fishing net.
	It was very appropriate, I think.
	I think that's exactly what she was doing.
	Like throwing the net saying, do you love me?
	Right. That's the bait on the hook, right?
	Right, that little passive-aggressive, I just won't talk to you again.
	Well, it's more on the aggressive than passive side, right?
	Like, I mean, if I've got...
	If I've really scared...
	Like, I'm just going back to Christina and I's early dating history.
	If I've really scared someone by stalking them, right?
	And hiding in their toilet and stuff like that.
	And then they get a restraining order out against me, right?
	Then I'm not supposed to...
	The only way that Christina in that situation would feel secure is if I don't contact her again, right?
	Whereas if I leave a note under her pillow, which is, you know, cut out letters from the magazine saying, still respecting the restraining order, right?
	What's she going to feel?
	Like you're not respected.
	Yeah! You know, I'm still not seeing you because I just left the note and I'm not actually in your bed.
	I'm under it. Mr.
	C had a good Babelfish interpretation.
	Can you get access to that?
	Because I think that's a good one.
	He is a Babelfish genius.
	I'm so pleased that he's using this for the power of good and not other.
	But yeah, so your mother popping up and saying, well, now at least I understand why you're not seeing us and so on.
	I mean, I will respect your wishes and I don't know.
	It's, uh... Dear Interested...
	Well, let's see. Let me read.
	Yeah, read your mom's ones first.
	Okay, my mom says, I came across your journal...
	This is in response to a Thanksgiving...
	A translation of her Thanksgiving card that I put on my live journal.
	I came across your journal last week when I was looking for your website, and I've read it, and at least now I know why.
	I will stay out of your life as you wish.
	I love you, Mom. Yeah.
	And Rod posts his...
	No, Mr. C. Yeah.
	And then Mr.
	C comes in. Dear interested viewer, catch the shocking season finale of Drama of My Life.
	In it, I reveal that I'm such a stalker that I can't keep from watching one kid in more than one place on the internet.
	But that's not all. You also gain the clues you need to answer such harrowing questions such as, did I really find out why he's decided to break with me?
	Do I really like taking intermittent feelings like temporarily stated obsession as markers of successfully completed personal changes, like no longer stalking?
	Will he notice that I've come back into his life?
	At the exact same time, I will say I'm staying out of it.
	Looking forward to your continued viewership.
	And then he goes a little wah-ha-ha.
	Wah-ha-ha, yeah. No, it's amazing, all right?
	I mean, so, understanding, of course, that you did not experience your relationship with your parents as having anything to do with love, but rather narcissistic destruction of your identity and needs for the sake of their immediate pleasures.
	And then she says, okay, I understand that we did not love you, right?
	Right. And then how does she end the letter?
	I love you. It's brilliant!
	It's brilliant!
	God, if only we could harness this evil genius that people have for Mindfucks.
	Just harness it, you know?
	Put it behind some horses.
	We could plow the universe.
	A big trench through the entire planet.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	Amazing. Amazing.
	Like, the latent virtue in people is, like, the most vast, untapped source of energy on the planet.
	And I mean that in every sense of the word.
	I mean, if we could get a hold of this and just use it for positive results, oh, my God, it would be fantastic.
	But, of course, it's not going to happen and so on, right?
	But, yeah, I mean, if somebody says, don't contact me, then, you know, Christina's parents keep popping up and we play whack-a-mole from time to time with them as well.
	And he's like, well, we really do want to respect your wishes.
	We're going to just not...
	I mean, if you want to come over for Christmas, that would be great, but we're going to respect your wishes.
	It's okay. We're sorry for whatever we did.
	You know, it's just like...
	But we said, don't contact us!
	Well, she said...
	She said, my husband has me locked in the basement.
	If you read this in backward, it is a Greek plea for, bring me moussaka!
	Right. But they just keep coming back in and saying, no, no, we respect you.
	It's like, no, you're not respecting my wishes.
	Which is exactly why we got you out in the first place.
	But we're just contacting you to respect your wishes that you don't want us to contact you.
	Right. And what they want to do, of course, is that they know that, like, your mom is feeling anxiety and she knows exactly what's going to happen.
	When she contacts you.
	She knows, down to the last bead of sweat on your palm, exactly what's going to happen when she contacts you, right?
	Right. Nothing.
	Well, no. An enormous amount happens when she contacts you, right?
	To her? No!
	To you! Oh.
	Um... Explain?
	Well, how did you feel when you saw your mom had posted on your live journal?
	Um... Oh, um, angry and sort of just, sort of a flight or fight response.
	Sort of just a general, I guess more of a fear slash angry slash response like that.
	You were scared? Right.
	Okay, good. I just wanted to break down the syllables a little.
	Scared and angry, right?
	And you're angry because she scared you, right?
	Right. Right.
	So, either she has no idea that she's going to scare you when she posts on your journal, right?
	No idea. She thinks that you're going to experience it as a positive and warm thing, right?
	Right. In which case...
	about who you are as a human being, despite having known you for over 30 years, right?
	Right.
	So she can't possibly love me.
	Or, in which case, she actually thinks that what she's doing is going to make you feel good when it, in fact, makes you feel, like, scared and angry, right?
	Right.
	It'd be like, you know, Christina likes it when I bring home flowers to her, right?
	But, you know, if I brought home the head of a bull and left it on, you know, bleeding on her white couch, then clearly I would not have a very good idea what she likes, right?
	Right. Because she would experience that as horrible and messy.
	So, if your mom does something that makes you Scared and angry, then either she genuinely thinks that you're going to enjoy something that you find scary and anger-invoking or anger-producing, in which case she can't conceivably love you in any way, shape, or form, right?
	In fact, it's the opposite of love, because if she's known you for 30 years...
	And she does things that scare you with the genuine belief that you will be happy, then she's psychotic, right?
	My friends, during and after high school, they would always tell me that she's psychotic.
	Or she knows how you're going to react to her leaving a post on your board, right?
	She knows exactly what it's going to do to you.
	In which case she's sadistic and...
	Exactly. And this is why I say these relationships with corrupt parents are so completely and totally unrecoverable.
	Unrecoverable. Because by the time you're an adult and 17 and you can get free of them...
	Then if they frighten and scare you, they either genuinely think that screaming at you and abusing you and so on makes you feel good, in which case they're just psychotic.
	Or they know how much it hurts you and they want to do it.
	So you got psychotic or you got sadistic.
	In neither way are you safe, right?
	In neither way can you have any trust or positivity in that relationship.
	That's why, I mean, it's not because I hate parents.
	I think parents have the capacity to create a paradise in this world if we treat our children with respect.
	But the parents who haven't, that's why I say when people get to be adults, it's like, forget it.
	You know, you don't reform the marriage after the guy's been beating his wife for 20 years.
	Maybe you approached him in a different way and he won't beat you.
	Roll with it, honey! Roll with it!
	You're hurting his hand! Why don't you try placing your hand on the stove backwards instead of frontwards?
	Especially if you sit down with a guy who's beaten up his wife for 20 years, she's got broken arms, and you say to him, do you know she doesn't like it?
	What's he going to say? He can either yes or no, in which case he's either psychotic or sadistic.
	Right. No, no. I thought she really liked it.
	That's why she hid and tried to crawl under the bed.
	I thought she really liked it.
	That's why I punched her silly.
	Right? And then you say, oh, so you think that being punched silly is great, right?
	And he says, yes!
	And then you say, what happened if she ever tried to punch you?
	He said, she didn't dare.
	How come? I'd have killed her.
	Why? I don't like being punched.
	I mean, it's either that insane, or he says, yes, I know, she hated it, and I still did it for 20 years.
	You can't come back from that.
	You can't come back from that.
	That's completely true.
	Yeah, that's a great perspective to have on it.
	And that's what I mean when I say we've got to empathize with those who don't empathize with us.
	It doesn't mean sympathize.
	But we have to sit there and say, and this is so important when you're dealing with your family, and this goes out to some other people I've talked to recently as well, you've got to sit there in your mom's shoes, however much they may pinch, and say, why would I do this if I were my mom?
	Because what happens is we're just on the receiving end, right?
	A post pops up or somebody sends an email or a voicemail message to some defood abuser, right?
	And we take it like, oh my god, you know, like a lightning strike or like, oh man, I got attacked by a ferret, right?
	I mean, we don't ascribe any particular motive to it.
	But that's not a good or productive or positive way to approach it in the long run.
	What you need to do is sit there and say, who would I have to be to want to frighten my child?
	How would I feel?
	What would I be like?
	We have to step into the skin of our abusers, because then what we can do is we can realize just how unsafe we really are around them.
	Yeah, I can imagine that.
	sniff Thank you.
	Alright, so your mom's read all of this stuff about how scared you are of your family, how scared you are of your parents, how tough a road of recovery it's been for you, right?
	And she decides to communicate with you.
	Now, why would she do that?
	Because she's, uh...
	Sadistic, crazy, psychotic bitch.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Well, sure. Well, sure.
	But I don't know that you feel that.
	Like, I think what you do is you withdraw and you judge it, right?
	And there's nothing wrong. Of course, you need to judge it, right?
	But I'm saying that the real security comes when we get what it's like in the skin of these people.
	Because then we're never tempted by anybody who's within a million miles of them ever again in the future.
	But if we withdraw and we judge and we say, well, it's just crazy and evil, right?
	But, you know, when we think back, when I think back to the extremities of violence that my mother committed against me or the sadist brother had and all that, it's so important to try and get inside the mindset of somebody who's beating a kid.
	Right? Or just being impatient perpetually with a kid or snapping at a kid or swatting a kid or rolling their eyes at a kid's enthusiasm or whatever, right?
	Because if you can get into somebody's skin like that, then you really just understand how foreign it is from your experience.
	Just how mind-bendingly, insanely, inhumanly different You would have to be to make those choices.
	So I would say she wants to hurt me.
	Well, she wants to scare you and make you angry.
	And more generally, she wants to make things worse.
	Well, you have a temper, right?
	Yeah. Right.
	And one of the reasons you have a temper is that your mom...
	Provokes you. Right.
	Right? You get attacked randomly, right?
	Pretty randomly, yeah.
	So, what kind of person wants to do that?
	Right? What kind of person comes into a room, sees a kid sitting there, reading peaceably, or playing with some toy quietly, What kind of person comes into a room and sees a kid doing that and gets angry?
	And wants to smash that child's sense of peace and security?
	Someone profoundly disturbed?
	Yeah, somebody profoundly disturbed.
	Right? Somebody who just can't take any pleasure In pleasure.
	Can't take any pleasure in joy.
	Can only take pleasure in dismantling and destroying and inhibiting and confusing and disorienting and distracting and attacking.
	who experiences the original, happy, natural, rational relaxation of a child as a cancer to be cured, as an offense to be attacked.
	Yeah, and I'm guessing the why is, is that important?
	Yeah.
	Well, I wouldn't say necessarily the why is that important, because the why goes towards sympathy, which I think is very dangerous, right?
	Somebody may have sympathy for the rapist, but it should never be the rape victim.
	That would be inhuman. But...
	One of the ways that we free ourselves from our abusers is to recognize that however much we may want vengeance, vengeance has already occurred.
	How, in this case, I guess because she no longer gets to get to me, or she managed to do it this time, or...
	Yeah, no, she will always get to you.
	She will always get to you.
	There's no shame in that. It's just the way it is, right?
	You know, like a guy who spent 20 years in combat can never not react to a car backfiring on the street, right?
	That's just grooved. It's ingrained.
	You can't undo it.
	And that's just the way we are, right?
	But... The punishment is that once you understand how sick, evil, and self-hating you have to be, that you are resorted to frightening your child to gain a sense of power,
	that you have to resort to Terrorizing and bullying a helpless, innocent, and dependent child to gain any sense of efficacy and power.
	And if you could understand what a bottomlessly ugly and hellish place it is to be, that the only thing that you can desire with regards to your son is to take vengeance on him.
	You don't get happy cards and calls on Mother's Day.
	I'm not saying you should.
	You don't get people who want to come over and do things for you, mow your lawn.
	You don't get people who want to call you up and talk to you.
	You don't get any of the happy graces of aging parenthood.
	You don't get grandchildren on your laps.
	You don't get any of that. What are you left with?
	After having hurt your children for so long, what you're left with is a desire to scare them on the internet.
	There is such an unbearable and unbelievable hell in that skin There is a conscience that is within us that is implacable, that is unstoppable, that is unnegotiable.
	All the shit she made you eat, she's living in, now and forever.
	You're past.
	You blew out.
	You made it out.
	Instead of having you call her with happy marriage, grandkids, whatever, right?
	Whatever. That makes you happy.
	You want to share it with your mom.
	You want to have a chat with your mom.
	You want to have a powwow with your mom.
	She makes you laugh. She's wise.
	She's funny. She's perceptive.
	You love her. Instead of that beautiful union, which there should be between a parent and a child, all that she has is Is a child who hates and fears her, and the only thing that she can bring to the table is hypocritical bullying over the internet.
	That's all that's left of that incredible landscape of parental relations with the child.
	A beautiful relationship that could be.
	All that's left is her spitting over a fence.
	Can you imagine that that's all you thought you could ever bring to the table?
	you Was a big plate full of shit that you could throw at everyone?
	I have no value, and on top of that, my only value is shit.
	Yeah, it is.
	The best thing that I can come up with is to hurt my child.
	To hurt and frighten my child.
	And I have made such staggeringly unbelievable and evil errors so many decades ago that can never be undone.
	That I can never go back and not beat my child.
	Can you imagine, deep down, I'm talking way down past your mother's consciousness, past anything that she's aware of.
	I'm just talking deep down, where the wounded and brutalized true self says, fuck me, no, fuck you!
	Can you imagine the agony of regret and self-loathing that your mother experiences?
	It's... It's impossible for us to conceive of, but it's worth taking just a little step into that living hell.
	Yeah, I think with the dark side conversation we had, I think I can take a small step into that direction and understand why Someone would...
	I can just imagine that kind of hell, that interstellar nightmare she must be in.
	Yeah, imagine, like, we've got this free domain radio board, right?
	Imagine if the only thing that you could think of to do to, quote, interact with people on that board would be to frighten them.
	If the only thing that you could do on that free domain radio board would be to post to someone, I know where you live and I'm coming over.
	You haven't gotten any posts like that, have you?
	No. Oh, okay.
	But what I'm saying is, can you imagine what kind of state of mind, how unbelievably horribly lonely and self-loathing and sick that you would have to be that the only way that you could reach out to connect with anyone would be to frighten them?
	Good grief. It's very hard for me to imagine.
	It's like trying to wrap my brain around things that are hard to wrap your brain around.
	It is, and none of this is around having sympathy for these monsters.
	Nothing is about having sympathy for these monsters.
	But it is about understanding just how utterly alien they are To our experience of the world, right?
	Right, they're at the bottom of the pit.
	Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that the only thing that I can bring to the table is frightening people.
	I can't leave them alone, because then I'm alone with myself, right?
	So even in my negative 100% state of mind, I guess, of unhappiness, I was still clinging to the side of the wall of the pit, and I could either join the rest of the beasts below who are running around torturing the people that have fallen off, or... Well, who knows where we'd be without philosophy, right?
	I mean, who knows? I don't even like to think of that, right?
	Who knows where we'd be without reason, without benevolence, without kindness, without the strength that reason and empiricism and virtue give us?
	I mean, God knows, right?
	It would be a nightmare for us.
	But that's where these people are. In your darkest spot, at least post-FDR, you were still six million layers of hell above this, right?
	All right. There was this guy, this character, a strange guy, a very strange fellow.
	And he posted a picture saying, this is the real Defoo, and it was a cartoon of a guy holding up the severed head of his mother.
	Right? That's scary!
	This guy is saying, you know, this is very difficult and common.
	As a post, I said, look, this is a very difficult, complicated, ethically challenging dilemma to deal with corrupt parents, right?
	I had to delete his post.
	I said, you can't just sit here and associate it with murder.
	He got angry and offended and you're censoring me and all this kind of crazy shit and he ended up over on the slimy forum, right?
	Right. But can you imagine, if that's all you could do, this is the only way that you could think of to maybe even connect with people in some way, is to post pictures of a murder.
	Well, and this is how a lot of people seem to view it, as though I'm doing something to them by defooing.
	I'm essentially doing something that horrible to them.
	Sure. Well, and this is in the book that I'm just finishing up.
	But yeah, I mean, of course, because you are creating...
	You are in your mother's mind.
	She's acting in self-defense, right?
	She's making you feel like shit because you're, quote, making her feel like shit.
	Right. And what kind of human being do you have to be to blame?
	Not just to beat a child, but to blame a child.
	For making you beat him.
	I mean, these people are parents.
	They're on the same human spectrum that we are.
	They could have taken other choices, gone in different directions.
	They could have admitted to their crimes, sought absolution, sought health, sought healing, sought therapy.
	This is not unknown. Dr.
	Phil's on every day. But they're on the same...
	I mean, they're human beings. They're on the same spectrum that we are.
	And that's why I'm sort of saying to people in conversations, and they don't grasp the evil of, say, their father.
	I say, well, what if your husband was doing this?
	Oh, my God.
	But this is UPB. Run rule to rule them all.
	Yeah. But to imagine what it's like to sit in the skin of someone who beats a child and then takes pleasure in telling that child, adding the psychological insult to the physical injury to say, you made me do this.
	A helpless, beautiful, dependent child.
	And then to continue to stalk and crush and abuse that child as he walks into adulthood.
	And every time he seems to be lifting his head up to cut him down, to frighten him, to confuse him, to twist with his mind.
	I mean, if that's all you have to bring to the table, what a nightmare of self-loathing your existence must be.
	I mean, that's why people say, oh, aren't you angry at your mom?
	I mean, yes, I can get angry at my mom if I go back in time and I think about the evils that she did, but I don't need to lift a finger now because the punishment that her own conscience is inflicting upon her, it releases me,
	right? Once we get into the skin of how horrible and hellish this existence is of these people who abuse children, Once we get into the skin of just what a nightmarish existence that is, how barren of love and of comfort and of ease and of peace of mind and of joy and of laughter that they just drag their sorry scabbard asses from one day to the next, barely able to lift their heads in misery.
	Once we get that, it releases us because...
	We all have a desire for vengeance.
	We all have a desire for justice.
	But once you get that the existence that is served up by the conscience to the people who abuse children is more cunning and evil a hell than we can ever dream of, that's what helps us not look back.
	Because justice has been served.
	Justice has been served many times over what we in our most angry moments could dream of.
	I'm going to have to mull over this one for a week or so.
	It's heavy.
	Yeah, and I'm not trying to inflict this kind of suffering on anyone, but once you get it, once you understand it, what a terrifying self-hating...
	You're constantly looking around for people you can put down and frighten so that you don't dissolve into nothing.
	You're like a shark.
	You can't stop swimming and chewing and eating and biting.
	It's a nightmarish existence.
	In Paradise Lost, the devil has one of the best lines.
	Milton, the great blind poet.
	Satan tries to get out of hell.
	Because... It's hot and it's uncomfortable.
	Satan tries to get out of hell and he goes rocketing up out of hell, flying into the stratosphere, into the heavens.
	And he can't shake the nightmare of being in hell.
	He's trying to get out of hell.
	He's trying to leave hell. He's trying to get out of hell.
	And finally he says, everywhere I fly is hell.
	I am myself.
	Hell. It's not a place I live.
	It's the place I am.
	It's not something I inhabit.
	It's something I am.
	And that's why these crazy psychotic religious people can describe hell so vividly.
	They're not describing a state After life?
	Happens to other people.
	They're describing their daily existence.
	Yeah, I can see that with her.
	And I've...
	I don't know...
	I can't say I've been where she is, but I'm certainly...
	I've been at least a few inches into that.
	But you know this infinitely.
	You know this intimately and deeply because you were raised in this.
	You know every scrap and corner of your mother's dungeon.
	You know where all the bodies are buried.
	You know where all the skulls are that you can trip over.
	You know where all the tripwires and ploys and blow darts are and all the torture implements.
	You know your mother's dungeon down to every last crack in the flagstone and dust particle in the air.
	And that's what I mean. This is nothing you don't know.
	And this is not to say this is you, right?
	Right. But when we are raised by these fettered and self-stunk people, by these rotted corpses, we know this evil intimately.
	And knowing it is the best ward against it, right?
	The best way to avoid...
	Turning into this kind of person is to really get who they are when you're young, right, particularly.
	Because if you know, say you have kids and you want to hit them, you get mad at them, they're not listening, you want to hit them and you go, wait, I don't want to create a hell for myself.
	I don't want to end up being that person that the only thing that they can do in one of the most treasured relationships in the world, parent-child, is to frighten, fuck up, and bully my child over the internet.
	That's not who I want to become.
	That is not the future that I want to make for myself.
	That I'm not going to catapult myself because of this one temptation.
	I am not going to catapult myself.
	Into a lonely, self-god, self-loathing, self-infected of my conscience hell in the future.
	That I'm not going to become someone who has to squirm and justify and spit venom and twist and turn and never feel a piece of my own skin and always be on the lookout for people I can put down and frighten so that I can feel power.
	I'm not taking that road.
	Right?
	It's the lung cancer that helps you put down the cigarette.
	But the people only end up on that road because they never think about that road, right?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Why? Because they don't know where it goes?
	Or they do and they're already there?
	Well, the guy who actively avoids finding out anything about the health effects of smoking is never going to quit smoking, right?
	Right. You have to stare at that diseased lung, right?
	You have to watch somebody dying of lung cancer.
	Like that's going to help you put down that cigarette, right?
	That's the confrontation with the dark side that I've talked about for quite some time.
	And we do that so that we can have trust in our own desire for virtue because we know, we get, we see where the undertow is and where it could lead us.
	Yeah. Wow.
	Yeah, you've left me speechless.
	Okay. Should we get back to Ron Paul?
	But this is why, for me, the whole politics thing just is so ludicrous, right?
	The people think that we're going to deal with evil by voting in a decrepit Christian, right?
	I mean, just the idea that we're going to deal with evil through voting, when the evil that we need to deal with is in our own hearts and is in experiencing, truly experiencing the fear and horror of the evil people around us, I mean...
	We're still very far from that, right?
	I mean, we're still very far from that as a culture.
	And that's why it's so easy for us to project the crimes of our governments onto terrorists or whatever, right?
	Because we just don't go to this place, which is very real and very important.
	And that's just in this world, right?
	Think of the people who, in other cultures, they're not just posting scary notes over the internet.
	They're cultures with honor killings.
	What kind of hell is it where you strangle your daughter?
	No, seriously, but this is very real.
	what kind of hell do you have to be in where you cheer when an Iraqi house gets blown up?
	If we understood the generations of devils that we are forging over in Iraq, the question of slow withdrawal would be unimaginable. the question of slow withdrawal would be unimaginable.
	Thank you.
	Where the goal of an election is to vote and find the smartest evil guy to win.
	Yeah. Not just an evil guy, because, you know...
	Well, but this is how corrupt we've become, that the best that most libertarians can think of is, let's have less evil.
	Maybe. That's not a flag that anyone's going to line up behind.
	How about let's have good?
	Fuck this less virtue thing.
	I'm not going to be satisfied with that.
	I'm not dedicating my life to let's reduce evil by 5%.
	No!
	Let's have glory!
	Let's have beauty! Let's have virtue!
	Let's have a paradise! That's what I want.
	I am not going to take less.
	But then they say, no, that's impossible, so I'm going to defend evil.
	Well, it's impossible for them because they are willing to defend evil.
	Right. If you're willing to defend evil, you can't complain about evil.
	But that's your standard. Not yours.
	That's your standard, right?
	Right. Not mine. Yeah, we had a kind of discussion like that in the chat room this morning.
	It kind of went that direction.
	Oh, I've always said, well, you've got to be practical.
	No. We got here by being practical.
	Let's stop being practical.
	We got here because the republic was the best small government you could come up with.
	Well, look where it ended up.
	This practicality is just another bit of mayo on the shit sandwich.
	You've got to be practical.
	You've got to be reasonable. No, we don't.
	Because practicality and rationality, as defined by these people, has gotten us nowhere and through Ron Paul will get us nowhere.
	Worse than nowhere.
	And I won't.
	I mean, I won't go down looking for a little less war.
	A little less murder, a little less torture, a little less imprisonment, a little bit less genocide.
	That's not where I'm pointing my ship.
	That is the agnosticism of the political world.
	And it's a supremely cowardly position to say, I know what evil is and I'm going to work with it.
	These are the people who say about Chamberlain, he should never have pursued a policy of appeasement.
	Ooh, let's vote for Ron Paul. I don't know who that is, really.
	Chamberlain was the guy in the 30s who was the Prime Minister of England before Churchill, before Churchill got in in 1940, after the war began.
	And he negotiated with Hitler under the table.
	You take Western Czechoslovakia.
	You can have Austria. And Hitler said, OK, yeah, but this is the last one.
	After this, I'm perfectly happy.
	That's it. We're going to be done. And in, I think, 1938, after Czechoslovakia fell, he flew out to Berlin.
	The only time he'd ever left the country.
	Sat down with Hitler and had Hitler sign a piece of paper saying, that's it, no more war.
	Right? As he walked down, away from that meeting, Hitler turned to Goebbels or Ribbentrop and said, God spare me from these old fools!
	And he came back to England, he came back to England, waving the piece of paper, people cheering in the streets, waving the piece of paper, and he said, I have achieved peace in our time, one year before the opening of the war, and all that did was give Hitler the chance to consolidate the Massive munitions factories in western Czechoslovakia beef up his army and then get ready to take on everyone else.
	Just appeasement. I'll give them this.
	I'll give them this. As Churchill said, appeasement is the hope that the crocodile will eat you last.
	And then these people say, I say, I don't compromise with evil.
	I don't compromise with violence.
	I don't compromise with child abuse.
	I don't compromise with even verbal abuse.
	I don't compromise with evil.
	And I say, well, but we have to.
	We have to be practical. Because, you see, evil is so powerful.
	It's like, no, evil is powerful because people have used appeasement.
	People have decided to be practical.
	Yeah, next time I hear the word practical, I'm going to be kidding.
	You're a dreamer!
	Right, right. So, we're a dreamer for saying don't compromise with evil.
	But the libertarians who are continuing to pursue the last couple of centuries course in controlling the state, which has ended up with the largest and most powerful state in history.
	We're the impractical ones.
	One more election, boy, this one's going to turn it around.
	After hundreds of years of exactly the same direction.
	The biggest state, after Libertarians spent hundreds of years trying to control the state through political means, we now have, ladies and gentlemen, the biggest state in the history of the planet.
	But boy, one more election when the state is this big, it's going to turn it around.
	And they call us dreamers.
	They call us impractical.
	That's amazing.
	That takes a special effort of willpower and self-delusion to be able to say that with a straight face.
	Back to the...
	I think Joey wanted to say something.
	I saw that a while back, so it was quite a while ago.
	Okay, we can throw the mic wide.
	I can keep ranting for a while.
	Because I haven't done any podcasts for a while, I've been working on this book.
	It's all bottled up, baby!
	Right. Actually, I just did the next thing, part two today, so I'm going to post the video later, but you might want to...
	It's in the feed now in volume four, so you might want to check that out.
	Yeah, it was either Joey, Steven, or Laura.
	I think maybe Steven. One of these guys.
	First one then is a rotten egg.
	Hello. Hi, is this my conscience?
	No. Oh good!
	Hi, how's it going? It's going pretty good.
	How are you? I'm fine, thank you.
	Good. So, I just wanted to say hello, and I guess share, I guess, what was a kind of exciting story for Laura and I this week.
	Sorry, just to interrupt you, I appreciate it.
	I do want you to share the story, but please don't call me Cher.
	I mean, I may have the outfit, but still, you don't have a webcam, so you don't know that for sure.
	But anyway, go on. I can imagine it.
	Wait, who said that?
	Couldn't have been my wife!
	Wait, let me lift my armpit. There we go!
	Sorry. Please, go on.
	No more coffee. 19 is my limit.
	Please, go on. Way to break the ice, Steph.
	There's somebody on the chat window.
	Now we can't even remember his name, let alone his topic.
	I'm sorry. I will be quiet.
	Please go on. It's not like I don't get up to the head.
	Please. Just keep chipping.
	Keep chipping. I wanted to...
	I guess it's like a slight follow-up on the conversation you had with Laura and I last week.
	I guess...
	Oh, I won't...
	At one point during the conversation, I was saying that I was starting to recognize how I was, you know, managing my anxiety, or trying to use art to manage my anxiety, and you made a comment like, Like, it's been successful in the past, and I said something to the effect of, well, no, no, it's not working at all.
	And I was confused by your saying that it had worked in the past.
	And I guess, like, just the other night, we were cooking in the kitchen, and I started laughing.
	We were cooking in the kitchen and I was just sort of observing how I was feeling.
	You know, not doing anything.
	Other than, I guess, being in the kitchen with her.
	And I guess I was way very aware of how anxious I was feeling, you know, watching her do different things.
	And, like, having to stop myself from, like, jumping in and, you know, Correcting her to do something different.
	At the end of everything, I shared that experience with her.
	It was very interesting for both of us because I guess we've observed, like, we understood that, you know, in the past we've enjoyed cooking together a whole lot, and, you know, we've observed that, you know, in the last, I don't know, year or so we've not been cooking together as much, but never really understood why exactly.
	And I guess last night we were able to pretty much recognize that, you know, Because I'm constantly trying to control what's going on in the kitchen rather than experience the anxiety that I'm feeling in the kitchen, Like, it's totally unpleasant for her.
	And I guess, I don't know if I'm missing anything important here.
	I guess it was a bonding experience to be able to talk about what was really going on and for her to have an opportunity to say, yeah, I hate it when you try to take over in the kitchen.
	I guess I realized how I guess it was completely horrifying because I realized that, like, the way she was describing how she felt when I was, I guess, doing my thing in the kitchen was exactly the way that I used to feel when I was at home with my dad, which is...
	I mean, it's so perfect the way she described it, I'm gonna mess it up, but it's like, you know, Isn't she there?
	Yeah, she's here.
	Hello! Hello!
	So, your experience of his minor controlling tendency when he felt anxious?
	Oh, oh, yeah, you describe it.
	Oh, well, I mean, it's horrible.
	It's happening slowly.
	I just, I know that if Stephen's in the kitchen, I need to do things however Stephen wants them done in the kitchen.
	Even though I've always liked cooking, and I think I'm a fine person in the kitchen, I know that if he enters the room that I need to Do whatever he wants me to do, and if that means using a certain measuring cup for a certain ingredient, then that's what I need to do in order for him to not tell me what to do.
	And if he tells me, you know, you're not using the right measuring cup, then I'd feel bad about it.
	And then I'd beat myself up.
	So, it was last night.
	I was making cookies and he came in and immediately I went ahead and just sort of turned over control of everything to him and this time around though he was able to afterwards, the cookies were in the oven, tell me about how he was feeling and we noticed just how strange that was because it is exactly the way...
	I think he's been treating me the same way that his father used to treat him in the kitchen and other places too.
	Can you describe?
	Yeah, because you described it perfectly yesterday.
	Oh, well, I feel like... I mean, I asked you if I need to do something.
	Can I help do something?
	Or what should I do? If I just ask you, what should I do to help?
	Right, right. First, I take over everything, and then you're like, okay, well, what do you want me to do?
	And then I'm like, you know, nonchalantly, oh, you just do this thing over here, but then you don't know how to do that one thing, and then I'm...
	I guess, you know, like, critical of how you're doing it.
	Sorry, could you just lean in a bit?
	I couldn't hear you. Yeah, you know, it'll be something like an example of, you know, you need to measure some milk, let's say.
	But I need to say, well, how do you want me to measure the milk?
	Because if I do it incorrectly, then that would be wrong.
	Right, right, right. So what happens is you feel less and less possibility for initiative, right?
	Because you don't want to be criticized.
	And also, it's not just because we're afraid of being criticized.
	I mean, Lord knows we can all survive that.
	But what generally happens is that we feel like if I point out that you're criticizing me, the evening could go very badly, right?
	So just in that moment, it's like, okay, I'll just measure the cup of milk.
	I'll measure the milk the way that he wants me to.
	Because if I stop and say...
	I'm sorry, are you actually trying to tell me that you don't think that I know how to measure milk?
	Seriously, do you think, do I open books and read them for an hour upside down?
	Do I tie my shoelaces together and face plant on the front porch?
	And Christina and I will occasionally have this, because she's very competent in the kitchen, and I'll come up with a solution that she came up with later, but if she gives me an instruction that assumes that I have three brain cells or so, I'll actually say, I'm sorry, you think that I'm a really smart philosopher and a great writer, but But at the same time, I'm not exactly sure how to put dishes in the dishwasher.
	Help me unravel this mystery that I have this incredibly grave and wonderful abilities in just about every area, but when it comes to stacking plates, I turn into an orangutan.
	It's funny, right? But it's just helping to unravel somebody's complexity.
	But you can make a joke out of it too, right?
	Or I'll pretend to eat the plate, you know, or just start rubbing it on my body or something, because clearly I don't know what to do with it, right?
	So I'll wear it as a hat or something.
	That's good.
	Yeah, I mean, it was simultaneously horrifying for me to realize that I was literally doing the exact same thing to her that I had felt from my father.
	And, you know, like...
	There was a great sense also of relief that we were able to talk about that and actually figure out what has been causing...
	Because we both enjoyed cooking, I thought, you know, it's like a nice time to, you know, avoiding that because it's just awful.
	But, you know, I don't feel like I'm communicating the positive outcome.
	No, no, I do understand that.
	Sorry, I just want to interrupt because I know that Greg is on the road.
	Greg G? Oh, did we just lose everything?
	Hi, yes, sadly, this is when the podcast recording software crapped out after we lost the line and didn't come back.
	So, sorry to...
	It was a few more minutes in the show, nothing particularly major, but I just wanted to wish everybody a happy, happy, happy new year.
	and to thank you, listen, you, my listeners, and participants in this general free-for-all philosophical discussion, and just to let you know how much it means to me that everybody is into this conversation. and just to let you know how much it means
	Your emotional generosity, your financial generosity, your spiritual, your intellectual generosity and vulnerability is just magnificent, and I just wanted to let everybody know, and you, you sitting right there in particular, just how much it means to me.
	For what it's worth, I mean, you guys have given me my dream, the dream in my life to be able to talk about philosophy and have an effect on the world.
	And it's your participation in this conversation at every level.
	That makes this conversation what it is, and I just wanted you to know that I am so appreciative just for myself.
	I mean, yes, we're doing good things for the world, and we're going to be happy about that, but just for myself, sort of one-on-one, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for the patience and interest and devotion that you have to what it is that we're doing here.
	And I hope that you have an absolutely wonderful New Year's, and I will talk to you soon.

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