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Aug. 16, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:34
2773 Why Propaganda Poisons EVERYTHING - Atheist Thunderf00t Rebutted!

Stefan Molyneux responds to comments made by Thunderf00t in response to the recent "Defending Adam Carolla: The Young Turks Rebutted!" video involving Ana Kasparian. Thunderf00t is an notable Atheist YouTube personality who has created many videos debunking many religious and feminist arguments.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So, I am engaged in a very exciting and productive exchange of ideas with Anna Kasparian of the Young Turks and a YouTuber atheist whose work I really enjoy called Thunderfoot.
And I'm going to do the response to the Anna Kasparian response later, but I did want to talk a little bit about Thunderfoot's response To comments that I made with Anna Kasparian.
So, on the comments below my video, he wrote, Thunderfoot wrote the following.
He wrote, sigh, hardcore libertarians.
I think that would be me.
Everything is the boogeyman because it's coercive redistribution of wealth.
See 50 minutes into the video.
And then he wrote, kids cost about half a million dollars to raise, feed, educate, etc.
That's a necessary burden of society in that if there are no kids, our species...
Is dead.
It's an overhead you cannot get around.
And you would all be in favor of not giving, all caps, women, $10 a month of birth control pills to ensure that approximately $500,000 of costs is handed in a more controlled manner.
I think he means handled.
For someone who talks so much about economics, you sure can't spot a false economy.
That would be me.
He goes on to say, oh, let's take something else.
How about the police force?
Are you in favor of coercive redistribution of wealth when it comes to ensuring an optimum level of security?
If so...
Then your whole argument about coercive redistribution of wealth becomes moot, as it can be equally well a good or bad thing.
It also means you have sat here demonizing someone because of an irrelevance, where what you should really have been focusing on is, is it better for society?
If you think there is no optimum level of coercive redistribution-funded policing, then isn't Somalia your dream society?
Well, I certainly appreciate Thunderf00t taking the time to put forward these, let's call them arguments, and...
They provide a wonderful introduction to voluntarism, or anarchism, or the advocation for a stateless society.
This is delightful and delicious for atheists, because atheists claim, in general, the moral and intellectual high ground with regard to science, rationality, empiricism, principles, and philosophy.
Atheists, of course, recognize that religiosity is deeply embedded in the psyche and history of the species, but that religiosity fails the test of reason and evidence.
And atheists expect religious people to overthrow their prior prejudices regarding the existence of deities, regardless of how long they have held these beliefs, or how sensible and universal they seem to be.
So, welcome, scientifically-minded rational atheists.
Love you to death.
To a voluntarist or an anarchist, however, arguments regarding the justification for and moral necessity of the state fall into pretty much exactly the same category as arguments for the existence and value of historical deities.
The state government is a concept.
It does not exist In empirical reality, neither does a god or a deity.
So buildings and flags and guns and jails, they all exist.
But the state is a mere concept and thus cannot be validated through sense data or empiricism.
You can't empirically validate a concept.
It doesn't exist in the real world the way that a tree or a rock does.
Organized religion It generally requires opposing moral categories of human beings or moral agents.
So there are priests who generally have direct connection to the divine and the congregation who must rely on the priests to receive instruction.
Now, in some religions, divine books take the place Of priests, at least to some degree.
So in some religion, gods or the gods themselves have transcribed or dictated to individuals exactly what the deity orders or instructs.
And those people who receive that direct instruction from the deity are in a different moral category from people who just write down their thoughts about the deity.
They are infallible or they are the receptacle of omniscient transcription instructions.
Now, the concept of the state, of the government, also requires opposing moral categories of human beings.
Those who are allowed to enact laws and initiate the use of force, a law that is singular to the state, is the initiation of the use of force.
So, if the government imposes a tax, that is the initiation of the use of force.
I can't go around imposing taxes.
That's called the shakedown, and I get thrown in jail for it as some sort of mafia...
Entity with the least sinister accented mafia force you can imagine.
So, governments can raise taxes, they can start wars, they can create money out of thin air and so on, while these actions are crimes for private citizens.
In the same way, gods in almost all the religious texts that I've ever read, gods are allowed to kill and torture and burn in hell for eternity and so on, which are sins for their worshippers.
So again, you have these opposing moral categories in statism, or the belief in the moral validity and necessity of the state, and religiosity, which is the belief in the validity and moral necessity of a deity.
Now, atheists in general roll their eyes when they're presented with the argument that without God there is no morality.
In fact, atheists will often argue that with God there is no morality, since irrational absolutes are no substitute for rational philosophy.
In the same way, voluntarists generally roll their eyes when presented with the argument that without the state, There is no social organization, no law, no order, no peace, no roads, no education, no help for the poor, the old, the sick, and so on.
Now, these are not new arguments.
Frederick Bastiat, a very famous economist and political philosopher, wrote over 150 years ago, and I quote, Statism, and he actually used the word socialism, but back then socialism meant the idea that the government should be a proactive initiator of force in society rather than somebody who aided the self-defense capacities of individual citizens.
So over 150 years ago, Frederick Bastiat wrote, Statism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society.
As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the statists conclude that we object to it being done at all.
We disapprove of state education.
Then the statists say we are opposed to any education.
We object to a state religion.
Then the socialists or the statists say that we want no religion at all.
We object to a state-enforced equality.
Then they say that we are against equality, and so on, and so on.
It is as if the statists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
And there's an old joke about life in Soviet Russia, which of course itself was no joke, wherein there's this lineup for hours and hours to get a loaf of bread.
And one woman who's been stuck in this lineup for hours turns to another woman and says, well, this lineup is terrible.
So long, so tired, want to go home, I'm freezing.
And the other woman says, well, but in the capitalist countries, the government doesn't even distribute grain at all, or bread.
So...
Now, atheists pride themselves, and in my view rightly so, on their dedication to science and reason and evidence.
Both rational philosophy and the scientific method rely on objective universals as their foundational methodologies.
In the case of philosophies, basically founded on the three laws of Aristotelian logic, plus the Socratic method as an implementation device.
In the scientific method, it is the universal requirements of rational consistency and Empirical evidence.
You have a hypothesis.
The hypothesis in math, in science, physics, engineering, must be logically consistent before you even bother testing it.
And then if it is logically consistent, it is sufficient but not necessary a standard for a validation or a proof.
A philosopher cannot justly argue that rational behavior can be the complete opposite under exactly the same circumstances.
A rational scientist cannot argue that matter behaves in opposite ways under the same circumstances.
You can't say under exactly the same circumstances, gases both expand and contract when heated.
Now, one trend that is fairly impossible to miss when one casts one's eyes across society and in particular throughout history is the degree to which the religion of the state tends to compete with the religion of the gods.
While it is certainly true that not every atheist is a socialist, atheism nonetheless is still strongly correlated with socialism and communism.
There are more atheist liberals than atheist conservatives.
On the other hand, at least in America, the more conservative, i.e.
in favor of a smaller government a person is, the more likely he is to be religious.
Again, these are general trends.
Now, replacing the irrational rule of a god with the irrational rule of a politician can scarcely be seen as a quantum leap forward in human freedom.
Anarchism, or voluntarism, has as its central message, no rulers.
No rulers.
This includes both supernatural and secular rulers, i.e.
priests and politicians.
Now, people get one letter wrong when they're discussing voluntarism.
When voluntarism says no rulers, they think that means no rules.
But the reality is, when you have politicians with all the armed might of the state in charge of a geographical region, a small band of people with the right to initiate the use of force against a citizenry that is barred from such power, you have no rules.
Just look at the Supreme Court split on recent constitutional rulings.
Where it's a slim majority, and they don't even know how to apply these rules.
If you look at the fact that Congress is supposed to declare war in the United States, that's regularly bypassed.
Executive orders bypass Congress's ability to, its constitutional right to only create laws.
It's the only institution that's supposed to be able to create laws.
So you actually don't have any objective rules when you have politically charged, bribed, and motivated Human beings in charge of the massive violence machinery of the state.
And one of the objections to a religious society is that there are no rules when it's revelation, when people have visions, when they can interpret a text anyway, they can cherry pick and so on, then you don't actually have any kind of objective rule.
So, you know, priests often possess the singular capacity to send you to hell.
Politicians also possess the singular capacity to send you to prison.
Priests rely on irrational rituals, opposing moral categories, and the blind momentum of cultural history.
It just seems right because it's been around for so long.
Exactly the same is true for politicians.
Nationalism is the religion of the state.
Nietzsche said in the 19th century, whatever lives long enough is so gradually saturated with reason that its irrational origins become impossible to conceive of.
And anything which has been around for a long time just kind of seems to make sense.
And so for religious people, that's God.
For a lot of atheists, that is the state.
But there are no more justifications for the validity and necessity and morality of the state than there is for any religion.
So let's look a little bit at Thunderf00t's arguments against voluntarism, or what he calls libertarianism.
So he writes first, sigh.
Hardcore libertarians.
Okay.
Dude, love your videos.
This is not the most mature way to begin a debate on the use of violence and ethics in society.
So the word sigh is a silly sophist trick and emotional manipulation designed to give the impression of infinitely superior world weariness in dealing with childish and ridiculous arguments.
However, since the use of the word sigh is a childish and ridiculous trick, it only works on fools.
Then he says hardcore libertarians.
Again, I mean, this is just a silly sophist trick.
Sophistry is the presentation of an invalid argument in an emotionally compelling manner.
The word hardcore is not an intellectual or rational category, but an appeal to rejection by extremism, like far-right or extremist or radical left.
Moral arguments are not rebutted by putting the word hardcore before them, even if we erroneously split it into two words.
It's supposed to be one, he wrote it twice.
So adjectives are not proof.
I don't rebut an atheist argument by saying he's just a hardcore atheist.
He's an extreme atheist.
I mean, it's not an argument, right?
Truth is binary, not a continuum.
So, voluntarism, basically, what is it?
It's the inevitable and natural extension of the principles we're all taught by our parents and in kindergarten.
Do not initiate the use of force.
Do not hit, push, or steal.
And that's basically the principles.
The principles that we expect children to live by must be universal.
We don't present them as opinions or cultural facts, like this is where your fork goes.
We present them as universal and eternal principles.
Moral truths that don't hit people out of nowhere, don't push kids over, don't grab from them, don't elbow them in the face, and so on.
This is like, except on Wednesday, or except on the other side of the room.
These are universal truths that we tell children and...
Philosophy simply says, okay, well, if it's universal, guess what?
It's universal.
And under not an initiation of force, you can't create this sort of cyst-like political bubble wherein you can stuff people who can do the exact opposite of what you say is moral and still be moral, right?
I mean, this is not philosophy.
This is historical, cultural, irrational prejudice.
Now, I've gone into great detail regarding the philosophical reasons why the Non-Aggression Principle, or NAP, is a universally valid foundation for secular ethics.
And I strongly suggest you take the time to read this book.
It's completely free.
HTML, PDF, audio book, you name it.
It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
You can get it at freedomainradio.com slash free.
All my books are free.
Now, when you think of science, like a dog can catch a Frisbee, but a dog cannot understand the equations of gravity.
A dog knows how far it can jump from a wall.
A dog does not understand the concept that objects accelerate to Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
So, science advances by extending personal physics, or the sort of physics that we understand in our personal lives, to universal physics.
So we all know how to catch balls, but a theory of gravity explains both this ability and how and why the planets revolve around the sun, and the sun revolves around the galaxy, and so on.
In the same way, morality advances by extending personal ethics to universal ethics.
We all know that initiating force in our personal life is immoral.
Extending this to a true universal changes our view of society as well as the ethics of society in extraordinary and fundamental ways.
It is the unified field theory of ethics to take the non-aggression principle and truly universalize it, and will be as revolutionary.
Of course, now, atheists should not be rejecting ideas because they're startling, or unusual, or unprecedented, or that feel alien to their moral sensibilities, because atheism itself is startling and unusual for the vast majority of the world's population, both in the present and throughout history.
So, to continue, Thunderfoot writes, everything is the boogeyman because it's coercive redistribution of wealth.
I don't know.
It's just, it's kind of disappointing, I think.
It's hard to imagine a scientist or a mathematician considering his argument repudiated because somebody uses the phrase boogeyman.
This sentence makes absolutely no sense.
When I talk about the coercive redistribution of wealth, that is a very specific phrase detailing very specific behavior.
Saying that this somehow correlates to everything, right, he writes, everything is coercive redistribution of wealth, is exactly the same as saying everything is two and two make four.
This is sort of silly and irrational.
Sophist trick.
It's designed to portray one's opponent in a debate as some crazy or irrational, one theory explains everything, adherent.
So like if I said, the price of magnesium controls everything in world history, then Thunderfoot could accurately reflect my argument by saying, oh, Steph argues that everything is the price of magnesium.
However, when I am putting forward one particular definition of a narrow subset of human action, saying that this somehow correlates to everything, is genuinely incomprehensible.
So, Thunderfoot goes on to say, kids cost about half a million dollars to raise, feed, educate, etc.
This is not wholly accurate, and I'll put the links to all of this below.
According to a 2012 study, Husband-wife families with annual before-tax incomes of more than $105,000 will spend half a million dollars to raise a child born in 2012 to age 18.
But that's just the very top end.
Parents with before-tax annual incomes of $60,000 to $100,000 spend about $300,000 to raise kids.
And those with before-tax incomes of less than $60,000 a year will spend $216,000 to raise a kid.
Rural parents spend just over $143,000.
So, taking the very top end and saying kids cost about this is like saying cars cost about a quarter of a million dollars because Lamborghini.
No.
Lamborghinis cost that much.
Now, just by the by, the amount that it takes to raise a child has increased about 23% since 1960, but that's largely because people are buying and living in much bigger houses, and also because more women are entering the workforce, and that means they have to pay for usually, or sometimes or often have to pay for someone to take care of their kids.
So basically, a good chunk of these costs are voluntary, and if you don't want to pay them, you don't.
However, they can also be considered reasonably good investments.
And current housing crisis aside, generally, houses often appreciate in value.
And women who go into the workforce generally make more money than they spend in childcare expenses.
So the money that you spend raising a child is not necessarily a net loss, any more than saving for retirement is a net loss.
Now, Although it can cost $143,000 plus to raise a child, viewing this as a net negative or cost to society is a pretty shocking ignorance of basic economics.
For society as a whole, spending a couple hundred thousand dollars raising a child is a great investment, even for those kids who only complete high school.
So this is from a USGovInfo site.
Again, the links are below.
So, quote, Over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million.
Those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million, and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million.
Persons with doctoral degrees earn an average of $3.4 million during their working life, while those with professional degrees do best at $4.4 million.
However, people with a master's in history who podcast, well, let's not get into that, because that would be me.
So let's just say a society where on average they're spending $216k to raise a child who then earns $1.2 million is, you know, I know this is a general approximation, but if you spend $216k to raise a kid who earns $1.2 million, that's a return on investment of 550%.
Not bad.
Not bad.
So this is probably why you see this particularly in Europe, where fertility rates are very low.
Governments urge under-fertile populations to have more children, and they even pay women to do so, because it's a good investment for society as a whole.
Now, of course, society, this is a direct parental cost.
There are, of course, costs for public schools and so on, but still a good investment.
And, of course, in a truly free society, There are no government schools because there's no government, right?
In the same way, in a slave-free society, there's no slave labor, almost by definition.
So regarding the race, so he's basically accusing me of having no concept of cost, value, and economics.
That's not a very good case to be made.
Now, I'm leaving all of his spelling and grammatical errors in for two reasons.
I mean, he's obviously a very intelligent man.
I respect his intelligence.
The fact that he would type so rapidly, again, it's kind of a sophist trick saying, well, I'm just going to whip this off because this argument isn't even worth my time.
So regarding the raising of children, Thunderfoot says, quote, that's a necessary burden of society in that if there are no kids, our species is dead.
It's an overhead you cannot get around.
So again, talking about kids as a money-losing overhead is exactly the same as talking about education only as a cost, not as an investment.
Or a gym membership, healthier but more expensive food, preventive medicine, and so on.
They all cost money, and they generally pay off.
So one...
A couple of basic things about economics that people need to understand.
First, of course, is that people respond to incentives.
Second is that human desires are infinite, but resources are finite, and therefore some correlation or organization must exist between finite resources and infinite human desires.
Your cell phone is never fast enough.
Your computer is never fast enough.
Your car is never, I guess, friendly enough.
I mean, you never have enough time.
We all have more desires than we can possibly enable or enact.
Now, the second thing is that the skill in talking about economics is fundamentally, you cannot just look at the visible benefits, you must look at the hidden costs, right?
So when the government spends $100 million creating a bunch of jobs, then people say, well, look, there are new jobs.
But the economist looks at that and says, well, but the government had to take that money from other people, which then meant that those other jobs, which would probably be more sustainable, were not created.
So, you have to look at the hidden costs as well as the visible benefits, and you also have to look at the hidden benefits as well as the visible costs.
They're sort of two sides of the same coin.
So, if you don't do that, Then it's intellectually lazy and kind of emotionally manipulative.
So if I say all colleges should be shut down because they cost society money, people would roll their eyes at my naivete.
Referring to children as overhead, despite being rather cold emotionally, provokes the same response from anyone with half a brain regarding economics.
So Thunderfoot continues, and you would all be in favor of not giving, all caps, women $10 a month of birth control pills to ensure that approximately $500,000 of costs is handled, I think he means handled, handled in a more controlled manner.
There is nothing true about this statement, including the word the.
First of all, Thunderfoot has previously described my position as being against the initiation of force.
And in my video, Rebuttal to the Young Turks, I make a very clear and specific case that the forcible transfer of wealth is not charity.
And that's what Thunderfoot watched.
Now, Thunderfoot says, I am not in favor of giving women birth control pills.
It's baffling.
How on earth can he conflate violence with voluntarism?
It's exactly the same as if I argue against rape, and then Thunderfoot says, well, staff is against voluntary and pleasurable sex.
It's truly astounding the degree to which unconscious biases, irrational preferences, and just plain not listening to either you or your opponent, or your own arguments, can so thoroughly distort someone's mental processes.
This is one main reason why I argue that statism is a religion, because almost all the same cognitive biases and distortions occur as with religion.
When I say that I'm against the forced redistribution of wealth, I'm arguing against the initiation of violence.
He, Thunderfurt, has no idea whether I would be against voluntarily giving women $10 a month for birth control pills.
If I say I do not want people to steal money at gunpoint, what does that say about my desire to provide needy and worthwhile people with charity?
Nothing!
It's a complete red herring.
It's a complete non sequitur.
And it's kind of a cheap, sophist, emotional trick unworthy of a televangelist.
If you are against theft for birth control, then you should be for men being able to go into a pharmacy and steal condoms.
And if the pharmacist objects, and then you say, well, no, but you see, kids cost half a million dollars to raise, so these condoms are like ten bucks.
You should be really happy that this is such a sensible investment.
This would make no sense, but this is exactly what the state forcing people to pay for birth control is doing.
But even if we accept the invalid argument that using the force and power of the state to forcibly transfer birth control pills to women, let's say that that does result in massive cost savings to society.
So what?
That has no bearing whatsoever on the ethics of using violence to achieve such a transfer.
Consequentialism is a principle strongly rejected by atheists when it comes to religion.
Why should it be any different when it comes to ethics and violence?
A lot of people claim to be happier because of religion.
This does not make religion true or valid.
The validity of a proposition is not judged by its consequences, but rather by its rational consistency and supporting evidence.
Questions regarding the use of violence cannot be settled by appeals to consequences.
Every rapist prefers to rape, I assume, is happier as a result of raping.
This has no bearing on the ethics of rape.
Stealing money is more economically efficient for an individual than going to work for a living, which is why there are thieves, of course.
What does economic efficiency have to do with ethics?
Nothing whatsoever.
That's like trying to disprove modern physics by saying that nuclear power is dangerous or has negative consequences or is just plain icky.
It doesn't matter.
The consequences don't matter.
What flows from the truth or falsehood of a proposition has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of a proposition.
So Thunderfoot finishes firing his gun at his own non-argument with the following flourish.
For someone, for and someone, who talks so much about economics, you sure can't spot a false economy.
Oh, would that Thunderfoot had actually listened to me about economics.
So his issue here, I guess, is that I am unable to process the fact that, according to his argument, $10 is less than $500,000.
That is interesting.
Not because it is a particularly difficult comparison, but because Thunderfoot is directly implying that women are unable to do the same math.
Is he arguing that women are unable to comprehend the reality that $10 is less than $500,000?
If women can perform that basic calculation, then women will be the ones lining up for $10 a month birth control pills.
If he does not believe that women can do that kind of math, well, that is nothing more than insulting sexism.
Barbie may not like math, but confusing women in general for plastic dolls is neither wise nor defensible.
Ah, you may reply, but what about women who cannot afford $10 a month?
Homeless women, perhaps.
Sadly, including women's birth control and Obamacare doesn't do a whole lot to help women who are living in cardboard boxes under bridges, since they usually don't have a whole lot of health insurance to begin with.
To get health insurance, you need a fixed address, the alertness and mental capacity to go and apply for it, which means that you probably have $10 a month available to you in some form or another.
And of course, for women who don't, I would be happy to contribute to a charity for that.
I contribute to many charities.
I think that there's wonderful work the charity can do.
I just don't consider it charity when there's a gun to my head.
I mean, what is so disturbing about these series of comments from Thunderfoot is not that they range from unintelligent to unintelligible, but that he truly thinks he's disposed of my arguments.
So he continues...
Or let's take something else.
How about the police force?
Are you in favor of coercive redistribution of wealth when it comes to ensuring an optimum level of security?
I'm not actually sure what this means.
Does Thunderfoot mean that the current levels of policing in government-run societies are optimum?
I suppose that means he is in favor of the war on drugs, NSA spying, insanely complex and impossible to follow tax laws, the three felonies a day that almost every American commits without knowing it, the prison industrial complex, hundreds of thousands of pages of incomprehensible federal regulations, war weapons being handed out to local police forces, and the arms sale around the world that America and Russia and England are engaged in and others.
That America has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world, and even more than those who were formerly locked in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago.
If he's in favor of all of that, then I guess he considers The coercive redistribution of wealth to fund the police to have provided an optimum level of security.
But if Thunderfoot is in favor of the current level of police power in America, then clearly it was not optimal when it was smaller in the past, right?
So if I say this bath temperature, it starts cold and you're adding hot, oh, it's perfect now.
Well, then it wasn't perfect in the past.
It won't be perfect if you keep adding the hot water.
If Thunderfoot is in favor of less police power, then clearly it is not optimal now that it has grown.
And equally clearly, it is getting less optimal as it continues to grow.
Well, maybe Thunderfoot, I doubt it, but maybe Thunderfoot is in favor of more police power.
Well, if he's in favor of more police power, then clearly it is not optimal now since it is too small.
And if it continues to grow past the point of his perceived optimal state, then it will no longer be optimal since it will be too large.
In an ever-changing environment such as police power, there can be no such thing as optimal overtime.
Is Thunderfoot unaware of this?
He's a scientist!
It seems hard to understand how this can escape him.
Again, this shows the power of propaganda, of faith in the religion of the state.
My daughter's five years old, and she likes a hot bath.
I made her a cooler bath.
I was just curious whether a five-year-old could get this.
I ran her a cooler bath, and I added more hot, and she said, too cool, too hot.
Perfect.
Don't add more!
And I said, but was it too cold before?
She said, yeah.
I said, is it just right now?
She said, yeah.
I said, would it be just right if I added more hot water?
No.
So five-year-olds completely understand that in a changing state, there can't be something as optimal over time.
I'm sure that Thunderfoot understands this, but when you have propaganda, things seem to make sense that are mental, right?
Now, Thunderfoot also attempts to smuggle some sort of argument in his question regarding coercive redistribution of wealth producing optimum levels of security.
So he assumes that violating the non-aggression principle, which is how state police forces are funded, violating the non-aggression principle will produce an optimum level of security in society.
But that is begging the question most outrageously.
First of all, giving governments the power to violate property rights at will, i.e.
through the power of taxation and public debt and money creation, cannot possibly be the optimum level of security, since political power is never stable.
Maybe he never heard Lord Acton's dictum that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
Making the argument that violations of property are necessary to protect property is like arguing that rape is necessary to protect lovemaking.
One cannot protect a value with its unnecessary opposite.
One cannot protect a value with its unnecessary opposite.
How does Thunderfoot know that using the initiation of violence to fund government police agents is always and forever, under every situation and condition, the very best way to achieve the optimum level of security?
Well, he never makes this case, and of course, it is impossible to make this case.
He just assumes it to be true and then pretends that it has been proven, which is exactly what religious people do.
They assume that God exists and is valid, and then they just go on as if it's been proven.
But at least they have the intellectual honesty to call it faith.
How would Thunderfoot view a creationist who asked, are you in favor of atheism if only religion provides the optimum virtue in society?
After asking his rhetorical question-begging non-question, Thunderfoot finishes with, if so, then, like, if you're fine with coercive funding of police agents, if so, then your whole argument about coercive redistribution of wealth becomes moot, as it can equally well be a good or bad thing.
It also means that you have sat here demonimizing, and actually I was standing for the video, someone because of an irrelevance.
But what you should really have been focusing on is, is it better for society?
Well, first of all, Demonizing should totally be a word.
Secondly, I think what he is saying is that if I am happy with the forced redistribution of wealth for the police, then I should be equally happy with the forced redistribution of birth controls for women, since I have already broken the non-aggression principle.
He is somewhat correct on this, although if I were a small government libertarian, sometimes called a minarchist or the minimal state possible, I would argue that the police are there to protect life, liberty, and property, not make it easier for women to have sex if they don't want to have children.
However, I have to reject the moral validity of using coercion to fund government police agents, because, as a philosopher, I have to be consistent.
The non-aggression principle cannot be magically reversed through costumes or paperwork, and putting on a blue outfit does not grant an individual the right or capacity to fly, breathe underwater unaided, or morally violate the non-aggression principle.
Also, just sort of by the by, I genuinely never know what to make of better for society.
Human society is a complex ecosystem of competing and sometimes opposing interests.
So I never know what it means to say that something is better for society.
Now, Thunderfurt's last question is, if you think there is no optimum level, optimal level of coercive redistribution-funded policing, then isn't Somalia your dream society?
Ah, in status bingo, we land on the Somalia card.
The old move to Somalia argument.
Voluntarists or anarchists, well, we hear this about as often as atheists here.
Stalin and Hitler were atheists, and they were bad, bad, bad.
Well, I've got videos on Somalia on my channel.
We'll put the link to them below.
But Somalia is not a philosophical, rational, post-state society.
It is a society where the government simply collapsed, which provided no particular philosophical or moral insights to the half-starved population.
So atheists no longer go to church, and nuns also no longer go to a church that has collapsed.
This does not mean that those nuns are atheists.
I hope you can follow that.
It's not that hard.
Look, I know it can be startling and upsetting when ancient irrational institutions are brought under rational scrutiny.
And honestly, this is what is frustrating about so many atheists, that they steadfastly refuse to see the direct parallels between religion and the state.
Theists see the world without God as meaningless, chaotic, violent, and predatory.
Atheists see the world without the state pretty much the same way.
Theists associate love, morality, and truth and meaning with God, and imagine that atheism denies these virtues along with denying God.
Atheists associate law and order and stability and charity with the state, and imagine that voluntarists oppose those virtues by opposing the state.
Saying that voluntarists like Somalia because Somalia is relatively stateless is like saying that gun control advocates love North Korea because private gun ownership is illegal there.
It is superficial sophistry which denies underlying arguments by poking holes at superficial coincidences.
Hitler and Stalin both sported mustaches, but mustaches do not make men evil.
Atheists are...
Usually big fans of science, as am I. And science itself works through voluntarism or anarchy.
There's no central governmental body of scientists with the power to grant or revoke validity to scientific hypotheses.
Science works as a free market of ideas, as all intellectual pursuits in society should, wherein in the exciting hurly-burly of competing ideas and expressions...
Produces mankind's greatest forward momentum to truth.
So, we cannot determine the morality of a proposition by an appeal to consequences, because consequences are irrelevant to the truth value of a proposition.
And all of this, well, what happens to criminals in a stateless society and so on, Well, imagining it is possible to determine what methods of dispute resolution, law and order, crime and punishment will replace the irrational, violent, centralized authority of the state is a fool's quest.
In the 18th century, abolitionists, opposed to the hideous practice of slavery, were not required to explain exactly how agriculture would function 100 years in the future, because the arguments against slavery were moral, not consequential.
Those who argued for equal rights for women under the law were not required to explain how such egalitarianism would affect society down to the last detail for obvious reasons.
It's unguessable.
When you fundamentally change or extend the universal moral principles of mankind, the results are unfathomable.
I mean, if you were...
In the 18th century, and you were arguing against the use of slavery, the validity of slavery.
Slavery is immoral, it's an abomination, it's evil, and so on.
And people said, oh yeah?
Well then you just don't want food to be picked, you just don't want people to eat.
Or, tell me exactly, exactly!
How crops are going to be picked 200 years from now?
And you said, you know what?
I had a vision, man.
I smoked some wild-ass peyote and I had this vision.
I can tell you how crops are going to be picked after the end of slavery.
Giant metal robot machines with spinning arms Are going to thunder through the fields without any horses, without any oxen, without any obvious motive powers.
But they're going to run on the crushed tree juice of prehistoric foliage.
That's how it's going to work.
And people would say, well, that's insane.
There's no way I'm giving up slavery for that drug trip.
But of course, that's exactly...
What has happened?
After slavery ended, instead of 80% of people being involved in agriculture, now it's down to 2% or 3% of people involved in agriculture.
Because without slavery, you have an efficient cost-benefit analysis for automation.
If you've already bought slaves, you're not going to invent machines that make those slaves valueless or less valued.
Anyway, look, the state is not morally legitimate because it is a fictional entity.
Whose power rests upon a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Like God, it's a fictional entity whose power rests upon the violation of the non-aggression principle.
Burn in hell, you can kill without...
Thou shalt not kill, right?
So this is the central argument.
It's the non-aggression principle and whether the state violates the non-aggression principle or not.
That's the central argument that needs to be addressed.
It's not about education.
It's not about birth control.
It's not about Somalia or the welfare state.
These are all effects of the core violation of morality the state represents.
If I argue, and consequentialism has nothing to do with that, if you argue against rape, you have to deal with the arguments in a self-contained manner.
If I argue against rape, I'm not required to produce certain evidence that all men denied rape will find sexual gratification in some other manner.
The question is, is it moral or not?
Are violations of the initiation of force moral or not?
So questions of morality are not decided by consequences any more than questions of mathematics or science are decided by consequences.
All atheists must examine the non-aggression principle and, just as they demand of the religious, subject even the most cherished and unquestioned principles in their minds to the philosophical tests of reason, universality, and empiricism.
For atheists to fail that test, Is to reveal that atheism is merely a competing religion to theism.
And they're not atheists.
They're statheists.
They worship the state instead of gods.
To the equal irrationality and destruction of mankind, governments in the 20th century alone murdered a quarter of a billion innocent citizens, even outside of war.
It is a very dangerous beast and needs to be examined with the same critical rationality and freedom from historical prejudice as religion.
Thank you so much.
I look forward to your response.
Anytime you want to debate Thunderfoot, I would have a great deal of happiness at the prospect.
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