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April 8, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:47
1323 True News 29 - Obama, Corruption and Guns

The view from a few months in...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope that you're doing very well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, and this is true news.
Obama, politics, and narcissism.
Now, I made the prediction, shockingly, before Obama was elected, that he was going to be Just another politician who was going to lie and manipulate and break his word and so on and so on and so on.
And you can do searches.
There are almost 200 documented lies that he's told.
But I'll just touch on two here and we'll talk a little bit about how this is so compelling to people, this falsehood or these falsehoods.
So, of course, the first is that he has signed an executive order to close down Guantanamo Bay.
And unfortunately, he's not really doing that.
To close down Guantanamo Bay would be to release the prisoners to pay restitution and to charge the criminals, right?
Because Guantanamo Bay is essentially a concentration camp.
And when the Allies found Treblinka and Dachau and Auschwitz and the other concentration camps at the end of the Second World War, the Russians found some coming from the East and the Allies found some coming from the West.
When it was revealed that there were these horrendous concentration camps, what happened?
Well, they closed down the concentration camps.
They released and rehabilitated, released, gave food, water, medical attention, and so on to the prisoners.
And they prosecuted Not the guards, not those low in the chain of command, but those at the very top.
This is the whole point of Nuremberg, was the recognition that it is not the rank-and-file soldier who is responsible for abuses of the Geneva Convention and so on, but rather it is those high up in the hierarchy who are responsible, and it is those who were prosecuted, Albert Speer and Göring and so on, who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials, not the rank-and-file soldiers.
So when you find a concentration camp, You rehabilitate, release, help heal and care and provide for the victims.
You actually just close it down.
And then you prosecute those who were responsible for the creation of that concentration camp.
That is what is considered the baseline for morality.
This is not even considered to be high moral standing.
This would be the very baseline.
Of course, he's not.
I mean, he's going to close down. Perhaps.
We never know, right? Because politicians say stuff and then it just vanishes, right?
And nobody says, Guantanamo's still not closed.
It's not a media item. So he's going to close down Guantanamo, and then he's going to transfer the prisoners to other detention facilities and try them in court.
And of course, the courts are going to have the challenge of whether evidence obtained under torture should be admissible in the prosecution of goat herds who were forced to join the Taliban.
This, of course, is a remarkable slide in moral authority and moral reasoning that we should seriously be debating whether or not torture should be accepted in a court of law in the United States.
But this would be the equivalent of the Allies finding a concentration camp, Treblanca say.
They find the concentration camp, and they close it down, and they transfer the Jews and the homosexuals and the intellectuals and the gypsies and the retarded and all of that.
They herd all of those people up, all of whom are in the concentration camp unjustly, right?
Maybe there are one or two criminals in the concentration camp, but it's entirely accidental that they would end up there.
There is no process of law that has resulted in them going to the concentration camp.
So it's like the Allies find Treblanko.
And they transfer the concentration camp inmates, the victims, to other prisons or concentration camps in order to attempt to have a trial of them.
This, of course, would be considered completely and morally insane in the context of the Holocaust, but in the context of Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary renditions and so on, it is all considered perfectly legitimate and people cheer about the massive move forward.
In human rights, because we've taken concentration camp inmates who've been tortured for years, and we are moving them to other torture facilities, and then we are going to pretend to have some kind of trial years and years after the fact.
You really can't find any logical or moral way to sustain that in any way, shape, or form.
But this is the level of the moral debate That we're engaged in.
Of course, Obama was going to get the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan to bring the troops home.
Within six months now, it's 20 months, 24 months.
He's added another tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan.
And of course, it's all nonsense, right?
This is all lies. People say, well, you should participate in democracy if you want to change the system.
But democracy is complete nonsense, because nobody's ever accountable for the lies that are told on the campaign trail in order to gather votes.
I mean, I can't even ship a bumper sticker on eBay without negative consequences if I don't follow through on my commitments.
But what happens in the realm of politics is we are lied to and bribed, and then we are cheated and robbed.
And we have no recourse, no law, no contract to enforce politics.
You can't take your vote back because he did not provide the service or the integrity that you were promised.
It's all complete.
That is anarchy.
As I've talked about in my book, Everyday Anarchy, democracy is the worst form of stereotypical, you know, violence and shaved head and mohawks anarchy.
And so you can go into all of these lies.
We have this looming specter of fascistic temporary enslavement of the youth.
I think, what, 18 to 24, 25-year-olds are going to be impressed into the service of the state for a couple of months at a time, which is, of course, completely tragic.
And just as it takes Nixon to go to China, it takes a black man to impose a temporary kind of fascistic serfdom or enslavement.
This is sad, but true.
And I guarantee there are going to be all kinds of exemptions for the children of the privileged, and it is, of course, only going to be largely minorities and poor whites who are going to end up being impressed into this new kind of Jim Crow situation, and that, of course, is ridiculous and embarrassing.
On the plus side, it certainly will help young people lose some of their illusions about the state, and that's quite important.
We wish there were an easier way to do it, of course, but there isn't.
So I wanted to mention just a little bit because it can be really confusing and I remember when I was younger being confused when you reason from first principles and you understand how Morally corrupt and wrong statism is.
And then you look at these, you know, swaggering, confident, far-seeing, big, speechifying, absolutely serene executives, it does seem to be kind of jarring, right?
Because you know that they're completely wrong.
What they're doing is evil and immoral and crimes against humanity.
And yet they are confident and serene and, as John Stewart said about Barack Obama, sitting there like he's getting an invisible massage and, you know, strolling down, all kind of hip and cool.
And that really is a remarkable thing when you think about it.
And I gritted my teeth and I sat down and I watched the 60 Minutes where one of the cantankerous old guys was interviewing Barack Obama and it was...
I mean, maybe it's because I grew up in England, but there's a special kind of embarrassment when you see pompous windbanks really parading around their vanity and narcissism.
In England, it's called cringeworthy.
It makes you cringe to see the narcissism and blindness of these herself.
Aggrandizing and pompous leaders.
I mean, he was being interviewed and it really is hard to take any of this stuff seriously.
He was interviewed and he had answers for things like, you know, healthcare and defense and the banking industry and regulations and the economy and mortgage crises and derivatives.
And he went through list after list after list after list of everything that he was an expert on and knew how to fix.
And, of course, one of the hallmarks Of an educated and intelligent man is humility, is recognizing that you do not have the answers for such massive global-spanning crises.
You do not have answers in every conceivable field.
Voluntarism or anarcho-capitalism or anarchism, and even to a large degree libertarianism, is a humble philosophy.
Because we are saying, hey, I don't have the answer as to how healthcare should be provided across an entire nation.
I don't even have sometimes an answer as to healthcare should be provided to me.
But I do know that violence isn't the answer.
So it's sort of akin to saying, I don't know who should marry everyone else, like who should get married to who, but I do know that rape is not the answer, and enslavement is not the answer, and chloroforming people and locking them up in your basement like you're in a John Fowles novel is not the answer.
And it's that humility which is staggeringly absent from these malignant narcissists who parade around with the, quote, answers for everything without batting an eye.
And in my business career, I went through a variety of industries, and I was always very cautious.
You know, I would sit across the table from someone who'd been in heavy manufacturing for, say, 20 years.
And I had been maybe working in this field for a couple of months or six months, and I would be very tentative about everything that I was saying, because I would never deign to lecture someone about something that he was far more experienced in.
And it takes a special kind of...
Asshole to do that with a straight face, to sit there and pompously windbag on about all these solutions in such a wide and brain-bending variety of highly complex social spheres, like in a finance regulation, the military, national defense, foreign policy, medical care.
I mean, it's embarrassing to watch.
And in the future, people will just like They will look at this stuff like just absolutely, like how could anyone take this seriously that this dude has some, or even those around him, has some kind of answer about all of this stuff?
How could people imagine that anybody could have this capacity to organize an economy and a society and the healthcare provisions and the national defense and the foreign policy of the EU? United States, it's complete madness.
And it's not really clear to us yet, at least to most of us, but it will become clear over time.
He said he was going to repeal the Patriot Act, not so much, all these kinds.
So anyway, I think you sort of get the idea.
So I'll just finish, and thank you for your patience here, I'll just finish up by saying that I think it's always important to try and get into the other person's Gucci's, right?
And to try and figure out where people like politicians and media and so on, the mainstream media, are coming from.
Because it's important to be able to understand What goes on behind those picky little vacant, vain eyes?
And I would say that it's really, really important to recognize the two views of the gun.
Because, you know, statism is a gun, right?
And there's two views to a gun, really, in the state, in a state of society.
There's the view of the gun like it's pointing at you, and there's the view of the gun like it's...
Sorry, this is not a very good way of doing it.
Let's say you're over here. There's a view of the gun pointing at you, and then there's the view being behind the gun and pointing it at someone else.
So, depending on which side...
Of the gun. You're on.
Is it pointing at you or pointing away from you?
That has a massive impact on your personality, your confidence, your bearing, your gait, your vanity, your narcissism.
It has a massive impact.
Now, I'm guessing if you're watching this video, you are, like me, on the receiving end, right, of Satan's squinty dark eyeball of the gun barrel.
And when you're on the receiving end, you don't have the protection of the gun.
You don't wake up in the morning, as you would if you were a president or any kind of prominent politician, where you could pick up the phone and call any reporter who would be overjoyed to talk with you.
You could get on any television program that you wanted.
You would never be asked any tough questions, or if you were, you would be allowed one windbag nonsense gassy response, and then they would move on, as if anything had been answered.
In the 60 Minutes interview they said, is this constitutional?
Because you're a constitutional scholar and so on.
And of course there was no answer, which means that the answer is no, it's not constitutional.
But what does that matter? I've got the gun.
You've given me the vote and I've got the gun.
So really this negotiation is just show.
And if you imagine, right, I think it's so important to try and get into these Buster Browns, right?
If you imagine waking up in the morning, people are bringing you trays of food, there are people begging for your time and attention, whether you're, you know, any politician from, you know, municipal on upwards all the way to the presidency.
You have massive goodies to hand out, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions or billions or ultimately trillions of dollars to hand out.
Everybody's baying and yapping and begging at you.
You can get any interview you want.
You can get on a plane.
Everybody will fly you around.
You never have to see a credit card.
You never have to pay for anything.
You are completely set.
Your family is completely set for life.
You will never have to work again if you don't want to.
You have all the money in the bank that could be spent for 10 generations.
And this is the world that you live in.
This is the bubble that you live in when you're on the other side of the gun.
When the gun is not pointed at you, but pointed away from you.
Now, when you're on the receiving end of the gun, your money depreciates your financial calculations, whether it's buying a house, starting a company, getting a job, getting an education.
You live in a state of chaos and instability and flux and confusion and betrayal and degradation and humiliation.
And when you're on the receiving end of the gun, you are standing on an earthquake zone that is constantly trembling, fissures are opening up, steam and lava hissing up, And exploding people all around you, right?
People who are picked up for various non-crimes, drug possession and so on, they just vanish into the bowels, right?
We have the temerity as a society to look at kidnapping off the coast of Somalia and talk about pirates, because a few dozen people are kidnapped every year, but hundreds of thousands of people are kidnapped within our own countries, and millions really, and locked in jails and assaulted and raped and We say that piracy is occurring.
Kidnapping, you see, is occurring off the coast of Somalia.
This is the insanity that we live in, right?
That people can't see. So when you're on the other side of the gun, you live in this incredible, serene, perfect world where everything is done for you and you can basically type whatever money you want into your bank account.
Everybody wants a piece of you.
Everybody will support you. Everybody cheers you.
Everybody stands and applauds because you are the king and you have gifts to bestow and you have punishments to bestow.
You can gift your friends and punish your enemies however you see fit.
You can start wars. You can push through legislation.
You can do whatever you want.
And that's what life is like gunward, like on the gun side of the equation.
And on the receiving end, I live in a world and have always lived in a world where you really have to work and provide value for a living, where lying is attended with significantly negative consequences.
If I lie, if I'm a salesman and I lie about sales, In order to get a bonus, and then it comes out, as it always does, I will end up not just being fired, but very likely prosecuted.
But of course, I can lie about law and trillions of dollars and war and everything under the sun, and when it is later revealed that I have lied, nothing happens.
Maybe people blog about me in a negative way.
But when you're on the gunwood side of things, it doesn't matter at all.
So, I live in a world where I have to, you know, fight to provide value to you, the listener and the watcher, to provide stimulating, insightful, intelligent controversy, like intelligent statements or speeches that hopefully stimulate and excite you and get you thrilled with the buzz of exercising your mind.
Pointing out difficult and challenging moral truths to people.
And that's my world.
And there is a lot of chaos and instability on the receiving end of the gun, right?
My portfolio of stocks like yours is going all over the map.
You know, jobs are created and then destroyed.
Industries are successful and then fail, like the tech industry from the 90s to the 2000s, and then again in 07, 08.
So we live on this incredibly unstable Tectonically erupting plateau, lightning strikes and chaos and instability and insecurity, and we are bound by all of these laws and moral rules, honesty and plain dealing and so on.
But on the other side, in the bubble of violence, on the gunward side of the equation, They are perfectly secure, perfectly serene, they can have bald-faced lies with no consequences, they can make up whatever crap they want, and it doesn't matter.
They can order torture, they can invade countries illegally, they can become war criminals, they can jail people for non-crimes, they can lie, they can cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they float.
Right in this serene bubble, which is impenetrable because it is ringed by violence.
On the other side of the river of blood, the river of blood that you and I and our children produce, on the other side of that river, is a kind of paradise.
Now, obviously, it's evil and corrupt and so on, but the confidence that the people have who live there is the confidence of living inside the protection of institutionalized violence, the violence of the state.
And you and I don't, we're on the receiving end, so we feel insecure, we feel, we tremble, we are afraid, we are angry, we are relatively unstable, but the people on the inside Right?
In the fort built on the bones of us.
They are serene.
They are perfectly confident, just as you would be if you never had to work, if you could do anything you wanted, if your finances were completely secure, and if you could never be prosecuted for anything, you would develop this kind of malignant narcissism as well.
So I hope that clarifies a little bit about the confidence that you see.
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