1947 Circumcision, Global Warming, Reason and the Moon - Emails of the Week, 9 July 2011
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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. Such great questions this week.
We're gonna do another Listener questions, these ones come from Facebook.
I want to ask your opinion regarding marriage.
I am 24, so there is a chance I will get married in the next few years.
And I really don't want to, quote, officially get married according to the government, because I would be participating in a criminal organization.
I know there are some benefits to doing it, like lower taxes and whatnot.
Also, it may be hard to find a woman who would agree with me on not doing it also.
Thanks for any light. You can chat on that.
Great question. Great question.
These are my opinions.
In order to be free of the state you kind of need to live like there is no state.
I mean imagine that, not a stretch, imagine that the mafia is running your neighborhood and you have to pay them a thousand dollars a month in protection.
Well pay them if you're going to choose to stay and pay the thousand dollars a month and pay the thousand dollars a month in protection.
But don't also surrender.
Your fretful, wasteful mental energies fussing and upsetting about the situation.
If you want to get married, get married.
If you have to throw the state a few bucks or have to sign some nonsense documents, then do it.
Don't not get married because there's a state, because that's not being free.
Because then you're saying, well, the state controls it and therefore I can't participate in it.
No, you're not participating in a criminal organization.
If the mafia sends water to your house, taking a shower is not the same as joining the mafia, right?
The government has a monopoly on these services.
That's unfortunate, to say the least.
But no, if you want to get married, Get married.
If it saves you some money in taxes, great.
Certainly don't give up the love of your life or the marriage of your dreams because you don't want to go anywhere near any paperwork.
I mean, you can't escape the state.
You can't. If you want to walk on the roads or eat food or drink water, I guess maybe you can go and live in the woods and eat berries and squirrels, but that still is not escaping the state.
Because the only reason you're in the state eating, said berries and squirrels, is because of the state.
So there is no escaping it. So pay them off and live free.
And it's through your enthusiasm and your joy and your happiness and your freedom, my friends, that is the gateway, the portal through which people can see what the worlds of the future can look like.
So what I'm saying is be a time traveler tumbling back from a stateless future and lead people through your space-time vortex dimension hole to see what it can look like.
So I hope that helps.
Someone wrote, I was watching a video, Evil's God's Resistance, and I noticed you seem to use morality and ethics interchangeably.
Can you tell me the difference in your view?
There's none. - Thank you.
Hey Steph, thanks so much for your dedication to FDR. I have inquired about your references to circumcision, though.
I was circumcised. I'm not Jewish, but I'm actually thankful that I was.
I've heard that there are many health benefits and fewer sexual complications afforded by circumcision.
And I wanted to know your reaction to that.
Thanks so much. Well, this is ex post facto justifications.
You had one of the most sensitive and erogenous parts of your body hacked off you when you were a baby and could not consent to it.
There is diminished sexual pleasure through this.
A friend of mine actually had to get circumcised as an adult for a variety of medical reasons, mostly to do with impregnating his wife.
And it was complete agony for him and just wretched.
So, no. There are no health benefits to circumcision now that you have soap.
That's all nonsense. Circumcision, I mean, certainly in the religious context, is just branding the livestock.
That's all it is. They might as well brand on the forehead.
It's a way of marking you as owned.
Look, some people suffer from appendicitis at some point in their life.
Even if we say that there are health issues that are there, some people are going to suffer from appendicitis in their life.
Does that mean that we're going to suffer newborns through an appendectomy after they're born?
Of course not.
Of course not. Some people may suffer from kidney failure.
Does that mean that we're going to take one of the kidneys out of a baby because they might get kidney cancer or some sort of kidney disease down the road?
Of course not. We don't do that stuff.
You do not hack off parts of a baby's body and call yourself civilized.
You just don't do it.
So, no. It is monstrous.
It is a form of sexual mutilation.
And it is something that should never, ever, ever be done.
Someone wrote, Steph, thanks for pointing out all the flaws with society.
Please focus a little more on solutions.
Nothing sells like hope.
Well, I get this quite a bit, this issue, this question quite a bit.
And no one wants the solutions that I provide, or very, very few people want the solutions that I provide.
People want to do political action not because they think political action is going to change anything because We've got 150 to 200 to 300 years.
If you count sort of modern free trade libertarianism as arising from Ricardo and Adam Smith in the 18th century, we have centuries of attempting to use politics to reduce the size and power of the state.
Hasn't happened. The Libertarian Party and certain wings of the Democratic, sorry, the Republican Party have been anti-state or anti-monster state since Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, early 1960s to mid-1960s.
And now, 50 years later, The government is five to seven times the size, not even counting the deficit.
So there's zero evidence that political action is going to reduce the size and power of the state.
In fact, political action has been co-joined with increasing the size and power of the state, and that's really, really important.
One of the key things to understand in life is the concept of opportunity costs.
Opportunity costs. So, if I go to take a nap, I can't work out.
If I go to work out, I can't take a nap.
Opportunity cost is really important.
I mean, we probably understand this economically in that people say, well, we spent X amount of dollars through the government to create a thousand jobs.
And people say, yay, we're plus a thousand jobs.
That, of course, is complete nonsense.
You're minus 1,500 or 2,000 jobs because the money to pay for those government jobs...
was taken out of the free market or through debt or through some sort of inflationary measure which has cost more jobs than it's created.
The problem is, of course, that the people who get the thousand jobs feel very happy.
Yay! I got a job because of this government program.
I be pro-state! Brothers and sissies!
But the people who've lost the 1,500 to 2,000 jobs, they don't even know it.
This is the imbalance of incentives.
They don't know. You're just unemployed.
You don't know that you would have had a job if the government didn't try and create these 1,000 jobs.
So... I mean, this is a big problem.
If you pursue political action, you're not pursuing something else.
If you're pursuing something that doesn't work, you are not pursuing something that...
It does work. And I think that's really, really important.
So people pursue political action as a form of anxiety management.
Reasonably so. They're worried about the state of the world.
They're worried about the state of the Union.
They're worried about the state of the economy, the state of the future, the state of their children's opportunities.
Quite right. Quite right. And in order to manage that anxiety, they go through the pretend kabuki theater of political activism and political change.
It's not going to change anything.
It's just going to make things worse because people who are addicted, and I don't use that term lightly, who are addicted to political solutions are selfishly managing their own anxiety by pursuing a strategy which historically has not worked for many reasons that I and others have gone into and they're steadfastly refusing to do the things which need to be done which is confrontations about the evils of supporting state violence in your personal relationships with your friends,
with your brother, with your mother, with your father, with your aunt, with your uncle, with your second cousin, with your Second cousins, kids, toy Darth Vader, whoever you can get your hands on.
You talk to people about the immorality of the state, the violence of taxation, and the fact that the state, like a balloon, is held aloft only by the hot air of those who praise it, floating up from below.
And... You also intervene when you see children being abused and you raise your children as peacefully as possible.
That is how we're going to end the state.
There's no other way. I've got all the statistics in the world.
I've interviewed all the subject matter experts.
I've analyzed this six different ways from Sundays.
And you can look at my Libertopia speech where I go into the ethics of this in great detail.
I'll post a link to it. Below.
And a variety of other speeches.
And I've put out a whole book called How Not to Achieve Freedom, which dissects political action and is the reasons why it doesn't work.
And the libertarians as a whole, and even to some true anarchists, they go, well, that's very nice.
That's an interesting argument. Now, I'm sorry.
I have to go pound some lawn signs and mark some X's in a box because I want to be free.
So it's not that I don't provide solutions.
It's that people don't want to do the solutions.
And look, I understand that. I really do.
I really do understand that.
It's a lot easier to go and stump for Ron Paul than it is to confront the people in your life with the immorality that they exhibit by supporting a violent, murderous organization like the state.
I get it. It's a lot easier to pound law and science than it is to push your relationships to the brink of moral breakthrough or collapse by confronting people with the immorality of what it is that they're supporting.
Even if all you can get them to understand is the war on drugs and the war on foreigners is immoral.
Well, then you have to stop supporting that aspect of the state.
And people won't do it.
They'll have arguments about politics, but nobody's making any fundamental decisions about relationships based upon the ethics that they understand.
So, look, I mean, I understand that.
I mean, it's a shame because I absolutely know that personal integrity and confrontation in relationships and the peaceful parenting of children is the only way that we're going to get rid of the state.
And political action is a big masturbatory distraction of anxiety management.
It's just there to make you feel better and make you feel like you're doing something that isn't too scary, that isn't too confrontational, that isn't too dangerous.
So it's not that everybody says, well, where are your solutions?
As if they don't exist. They do exist.
It's just that Maybe one out of a thousand people based on the emails that I get about this.
And I've done this in New Hampshire in 2009, March 2009.
You can look for this on YouTube if you want.
The against me argument.
Do you support the use of force against me?
It's highly volatile stuff to bring into your personal relationships.
People don't want to do it. And maybe they're right.
Maybe it's too late. We have to go into a dark age and people want to hang on to their relationships.
So I can understand that.
But I do have solutions.
Just... People no likey.
People have asked me, have I ever lost good friends over your beliefs?
Well, no. Never once.
Because if friends reject me for rational arguments and my commitment to virtue, they're not good friends, by definition.
Your show has been great so far, somebody else writes, and this is an encapsulation.
I can see myself agreeing with you on many issues.
That is except denying science.
Sorry to break it to you, but like evolution, the climate change theory is fact.
And yes, we are a major factor driving the accelerating extinction rates of millions of habitats and species, including our own.
So just because you have yet to care enough to actually sit down and study the subject matter, CO2, CH4, N2O, O3, SO2, surface factors, atmospheric factors, radiation factors, halo carbons, etc.
Though the sun has much to do with the heat and light and fuel on this planet, the excuses you put forth on Adam versus the man were a blatant disregard and denial of scientific evidence and 97% of scientific consensus coming from peer-reviewed journals, if it matters.
Please correct yourself. It seemed innocent enough, and because, obviously, someone stands to gain in the coming energy crisis, whereas it seems that my generation onwards stand to lose everything, why not spend some time discussing, possibly, rational left and right libertarian solutions to catalyze clean and sustainable energy for a future that does not include catastrophe.
Examples, military resource wars, natural disasters, radioactive toxins, drinking water, ocean acidification, deforestation, thinning atmosphere, hotbox pollution, etc.
Just saying.
Well, I certainly have never claimed to have the final answer on climate science, but to compare it to evolution, I'm afraid it's not accurate.
Evolution has about 10,000 ways that it can be falsified.
So, for instance, if you find more evolved fossils in among less evolved fossils, right, that don't go through the sort of evolutionary chain, evolution is Ipso facto denied, right?
You find human fossils in but the dinosaurs, then it's denied.
There's 10,000 ways in which this can be falsified, I'm not sure of any, by which the The greenhouse theory can be falsified.
And a number of its predictions about where the atmosphere is going to be heated from, how it's going to go forward, whether things are going to get hotter or cooler or simply more variable, the story keeps changing.
And the predictions that I've read about, see, this is one of the benefits of being older and thus needing a brown bandana when it's sunny out.
One of the things about being older is, this is a younger guy for sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I was around for the beginning of climate change, so I've heard a lot, a lot, a lot about Climate change.
And I remember all of the predictions.
And so I went and looked up that this one guy said, you know, come, you know, in a few years, he said this in 1990, I think he said, within 20 years, the West Side Highway, which runs along the Hudson River, will be underwater and there will be tape across the windows, across the street because of high winds and the same birds won't be there.
The trees in the median strip will change.
There will be more police cars because you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.
And... He also said that the droughts will get more severe and you'll have signs in restaurants saying water by request only.
The UN predicted 50 million climate change refugees by 2010.
50 million climate change refugees.
People fleeing countries that are on fire or underwater.
All nonsense. So here's some of the predictions that did not come true.
One, within a few years children just aren't going to know what snow is.
Snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event.
Dr. David Viner, Senior Research Scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent March 20th, 2000.
Well, within a few years, I'll do a podcast here in winter.
We'll see whether it's a rare event.
Let's see, 10 years later in December 2009, London was hit by the heaviest snowfall in 20 years and just last week a snowstorm forced Heathrow Airport to shut down.
Number two, by 1995 the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought causing crop failures and food riots.
The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.
This was published 3.
Arctic specialist Bernd Bachen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.
Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.
Ice coverage has fallen, though as of last month.
The Arctic Ocean had 3.82 million square miles of ice cover, an area larger than the continental U.S., according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide 2 degrees by 2010.
This was in the late 80s.
Global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees since 1989, and U.S. temperatures has increased even less over the same period.
1970. By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by one-half.
Air quality has actually improved since 1970.
Studies find that sunlight reaching the Earth fell by somewhere between 3 and 5 percent over the period in question.
1970, the prediction.
If present trends continue, the world will be 11 degrees cooler by the year 2000.
This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
Kenneth E.F. Watt. According to NASA, global temperature has increased by about 1 degree since 1970.
Anyway, so, I mean, you can just go on and on.
When people keep making these doomsday predictions, which I remember when I was a kid and were frankly really, really fucking frightening.
We were predicting the end of oil by 1980, global food riots, starvation, ice age, or perhaps we were all just gonna...
I mean, this shit is in the culture, and people are consistently telling this and frightening the living crap out of children, robbing them of ambition, of a sense of the future, and I think it's incredibly abusive and irresponsible to put these kinds of things out.
So, yeah, I have some skepticism about it, and I think that the people who all put this out are assholes of the First Order.
Now, yeah, look, I've never said that I know what's going on with global warming.
I'm just entirely skeptical, because it seems to me that it was just another thing.
Once the fight against communism began to diminish in the late 80s, then we needed another enemy, and global warming, and all the money goes towards it.
And, look, a lot of these 97% consensus, you just need to look this stuff up, see if it's actually true.
That's all. And the 97% consensus, a lot of people aren't even scientists.
A lot of people's names are on there without their say-so.
And what was it? The guy said all the Himalayan glaciers were going to be gone, and that turned out to be a prediction, even though he said it offhand and never made it.
Anyway. All right.
So, let me just...
This is going to be a lengthy one, so if you don't, but it's a very, very good one.
Dear Steph, I'm sure for you this is simply another letter on a virtual pile of letters reaching far up into the blogosphere, so I will not pressure you with any unreasonable expectations for a response.
I have recently become a $20 a month contributing member, so at least you know I'm not some self-entitled parasite.
I wouldn't say that everyone who doesn't donate is a self-entitled parasite.
But I will say that, you know, just by the by, I get lots of emails from atheists complaining that religion is still so successful and socialism is still so successful.
Well, it's because religious people and socialists are more generous than most libertarians and atheists when it comes to supporting philosophy or supporting their ideology.
I'm just saying, there's an economic aspect to it.
And the other thing that I find interesting is I get letters from free market libertarians talking about how the freed rider issue really isn't an issue.
95% of them haven't donated and they say oh I was listening to hundreds of your podcasts and I was really interested in the free rider thing how you talk about the government is the ultimate example of the free rider and blah blah blah and I don't think it's not it's like dude I mean I mean come on please don't make me say it Okay, you get it. All right. So he goes, I want to thank you for the work you're doing.
I've always been interested in Western philosophy, but you're the first person I've encountered who manages to apply reason to real-life problems without succumbing to the temptations of personal bias and projected fantasy.
Well, I'm sure I do sometimes, but I do my best not to.
If you do get around to reading this, I wanted to ask you a question about reason in general.
Sorry, I'm sinking out of the picture here.
When I was studying philosophy at school, he writes, I wound up having a sort of intellectual nervous breakdown.
After reading Descartes' Fourth Discourse, in which he so famously puts the notion forth that nothing is certain except the fact that we are thinking, doubting.
I think, therefore, I am.
His argument is that everything that is in my senses could be the creation of some monstrous demon, I could be a brain in a tank, and I can't be certain of anything except that I am thinking and questioning.
Descartes was insane.
But we'll get to that perhaps another time.
This idea was so disturbing to me that I had to miss a day of school.
And I just wanted to compliment the reader.
Philosophical problems, the kind that vex people so badly, would be almost completely solved in about two days if people actually took what people were saying seriously.
So I commend you on taking what Descartes said very, very seriously.
People will say, well, I'm a determinist, but I'm still going to think that you're wrong about being a free willer and I'm right, so I'm still going to have a preferred state even though there's no such thing as a preferred state.
If you take determinism seriously and live by its consequences, I would never hear you try to argue me into anything.
But people will say, well, I want to be a determinist and I want to argue, I want to have the cake and eat it too.
And people say, well, I want the state to solve problems, but I don't like the initiation of force, right?
But if people simply took philosophy seriously, philosophy would be ironed out very quickly.
The search for an objective truth, he writes, was of course taken up by many philosophers after Descartes, but none of them ever managed, in my view, to escape Descartes' logical trap.
When Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead, he ushered an age of subjectivism in that still permeates the fabric of our politically correct society to this day.
No one is right, no one is wrong, no one is smart, no one is dumb, we're all just seeing the world differently.
Children are never stupid anymore, they are now attention impaired.
I don't think children are stupid.
Religions that preach the eventual extermination of all non-believers are not evil, they just have a...
Different perspective on our world.
Of course, this kind of moral malleability, this kind of spineless subjectivity is only reserved for the most high-minded thinkers in our society.
Most people who lack an education remain in an even more primitive medieval mindset in which God is good and people are bad, especially those who do not believe in a God.
Of course, I realize there are the Ayn Rand Objectivism camp who believe that there is observable truth in the world, but until I found you, Most of those people seemed like pseudoscientists, i.e.
their confidence in what they observed to be true operated on assumptions built on arrogance, not intelligence.
And so we come to my question. Do you believe that post-Aristotelian logic, which is limited to the use of words and symbols in math and language, is a sufficient system for describing the truth?
Or will the universe forever be slightly beyond the reach of our most reasoned thinking?
The difference between the word moon and the moon itself is of course bigger than we can fathom, and so it does not follow that language and logic itself, systems that resulted from the architecture of our flawed-by-camera minds, are in themselves like the word moon, Attempting to replace the actual moon.
I would love to know your thoughts on this subject, but again, I do not want to pressure you to respond.
Only if doing so is enjoyable to you, yours truly.
Kind, generous, supportive listener.
It's a big topic. It's a big topic, and I'm not going to pretend to do justice to it as I slowly melt under global warming.
But I will say this: People think that there was a time in the past where there was truth.
You see, there was truth in the past.
There was truth in Socrates, Aristotle and Plato and the medieval philosophers and the scholastics and so on and I guess before Hume and all these people, that there was truth.
And now in the modern age, you see, we simply have relativism and relativism is a big problem and so on.
I'm afraid I have to inform you that is not a true statement.
There has been nothing but subjectivity throughout philosophy in history.
So, I will give you an example.
If you look at the ages of religion, and remember, Greece was dominated by religion, not philosophy.
We remember Socrates because of his exit hemlock cocktail, but he was, of course, put to death for corrupting the young, which means to We stimulate the Yang to ask questions of their elders that their elders don't like.
It's called corrupting the Yang, which of course is pure projection because it's the elders who lie to the Yang who corrupt them, not the philosophers who teach them reason.
Greece was dominated by religion, was dominated by statism, was dominated by imperialism, was dominated by mysticism, was dominated by spirituality, was dominated by irrationality.
There are a few faint green shoots and tendrils, but they were stomped on pretty heavily by the state.
The same thing is true of Rome. The societies which fail, fail because of irrationality.
Like any theory, it fails if it's irrational and anti-empirical.
So, When you look at all of the different gods that the Greeks and the Romans worshipped, the Greek versions and their Roman derivatives, they all had different perspectives.
They all warred with each other, they all fought with each other, but they were all considered absolute statements by their worshippers.
If you look at the Middle Ages, even prior to the breakup of Christendom into its warring factions of the Anabaptists and the Zwingalians and the Calvinists and the Lutherans and blah blah blah blah blah in the 15th century, 16th century, There was a continual war of interpretation of the Bible.
This was ranked subjectivism throughout history.
The skepticism that was first leveled was first leveled against religion and irrationality.
That's really, really important to understand.
The modern world is far, far less subjective than the ancient world because we have Disciplines like science, in the way that we understand it now, simply did not exist.
And certainly engineering and material, economic, capitalist productivity did not exist in the ancient world.
In my opinion, largely because in the ancient world, you had slavery.
And when you have slavery, you don't want labor-saving devices because you've bought your slaves.
So why would you want to make your slaves useless or worth less?
So you had to end slavery in order to have the Industrial Revolution.
And so you had massive subjectivity throughout history.
And the modern age is far less subjective than...
The historical age. Now, it's less subjective in the realm of economics, it's less subjective in the realm of physics and biology and geology and most of the sciences, and it's less subjective in many other realms.
Certainly in manufacturing, it's not subjective.
If a camera you produce doesn't work, it doesn't work.
There's an objectivity that's there.
In the free market, there's massive amounts of empiricism and objectivity, which is why, you know, whenever I go to a restaurant, they give me five bucks off my next meal if I will tell them what my restaurant experience was, because they need that empirical evidence, they need that objectivity, at least from their standpoint, the objective understanding of my subjective experience.
And so, objectivity is, I think, at its peak now, relative...
To the past, with the exception of the most profitable subjectivity that is around, which is moral subjectivity.
Moral subjectivity is the fundamental way in which the noose of the owners is placed around the necks of the tax slaves, of the tax livestock.
So morality is the last thing to become objective, because when morality becomes objective, The state and religion fall.
The state falls because it cannot survive its perpetual violation by definition of the non-aggression principle.
Religion falls because, fundamentally, religion is about making up an arbitrary absolute that is wielded by those in power to subjugate those in chains.
And so, religion falls, and the state falls, and those are the two areas of subjectivity that still exist so powerfully.
As far as reason goes, I don't view reason as disconnected, right?
I have this absolutely beautiful memory of when my daughter was, I think, nine or ten months old.
It's because you use the word moon.
I have this beautiful memory of my daughter when she was very young.
I was up with her late.
She wasn't asleep. She was not a sleeper at all.
At all! She would sleep an hour or two at a time, maybe.
And I was up with her very late at night, and I have a skylight at the top of my stairs in the house.
And I was walking her back and forth.
Her mom was getting some sleep. I was walking her back and forth and singing and humming to her.
And I noticed that there was this silvery ghostly light that was passing back and forth over us.
You know, like a very slow ghostly window going past, just sliding back and forth.
I couldn't figure out what it was until I looked up.
And through the skylight...
There was a full, beautiful, shiny silver dollar of a moon.
And it was shining all the way down the skylight.
And I looked down to my daughter and I said, Izzy, look!
Moon! Moon!
And I looked back down at her and she pointed up and she said, Moon!
And what was so beautiful was I saw the light of the moon reflected in her eyes.
Like the moon had lit a little silvery dot in her brain where the word moon had been given birth.
The light from the moon went into her eyes.
I saw a pinprick, two pinpricks of the moon deep in her eyes.
And she said the word moon.
And it was beautiful. And she, through her language acquisition, which is an unbelievably phenomenal thing to experience, every single day she learns new words and new ways of putting things together.
It is an absolute eruption of language capacity.
I view language as, in many ways, less deceptive, if used correctly, less deceptive than the evidence of the senses.
You look at a stick and you say stick, it's a stick.
You put that stick in water, it looks like it bends.
If you put it in a cup of water, it looks like it bends.
Language can be incredibly precise, right?
You say brown bandana, somebody else says black or gray bandana.
If they're colorblind, that's fine.
That's subjective to some degree.
But you bounce something off here, and you read the wavelength of a spectrograph, and you have the objective term for the color of the bandana.
The language is incredibly precise, and I do not view language as an impediment to understanding the world.
My daughter sees the moon during the day.
She knows it's the moon, even though it's half a moon, it's in the middle of the blue sky, and it's not in amongst the stars.
And she understands now that the Sun is a star, that we live on a giant ball called the Earth and so on.
So, language is very precise.
Language is very clear. Now, there are a lot of people who will manipulate language for the sake of self-advantage and language can be incredibly exploitive.
But... That's what philosophy is for, right?
To help you unravel and unpack the illusory spider works that people attempt to assemble in your brain, to lay these eggs of subjugation and compliance in your mind so they flower into the evil seeds of compliance with an immoral system like the state or like religion.
So, no, I view language as incredibly precise and I view logic as incredibly precise.
There are limits to logic in terms of its capacity to describe certain things, for sure.
But... Well, the oxygen thins out about a mile above me, but that doesn't mean I'm having any trouble breathing now.
So, I think we have a long way to go as a society before we reach the limits of logic.
You know, it's like... I say rape is wrong, right?
And somebody says, well, what about some woman who's really masochistic, gets off on it, she gets raped, and she likes it!
Well, I think that if we as a society accept that the initiation of force is wrong, we have a couple of hundred years of work cut out ahead of us to deal with that issue.
So if we come to the limits of logic, if we come to the limits of ethics, it's because we've dealt with everything behind us.
And that, to me, is the most important thing.
We have lots and lots of trees to cut down, so to speak, that obscure our view of a beautiful world and a beautiful society.
Or, you could say, if you're more environmentally minded, we have lots of trees to plant to give us shade from the evil sun of statism and religion.
Anyway, I think I'm out of math.
I think the moon metaphor just did it in for me.
But we have so much work to do.
That to me, we're like medicine sans frontiers, doctors without borders.
We're off the plane in some god-forsaken nation, some third-world nation, and we see people starving and dying and drinking contaminated water and so on.
And someone's saying, well, what about people who have pimples?
Well, let's deal with the people who have pimples once the starving are fed, the naked are clothed.
And the houseless have a roof over their head.
Let's deal with all of that. Forget about the limitations right now because that is a problem we can only pass to our deep, deep descendants.
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Thank you everybody for writing.
It is a deep, deep delight.
I also wanted to point out that the guy who talks about the limits of language, which was one of the best writers that I've ever received an email from, which is also a coincidence that's not just a coincidence.