Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Oct. 11, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

25:09

2818 What Pisses Me Off About Ebola

Stefan Molyneux is irritated - a scathing look at the rampant incompetence - including claims of racism - which have infected the mainstream conversation and hampered action to contain the Ebola outbreak.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	So, some thoughts on the Ebola crisis and panic that currently seems to be consuming about 99% of the world's internet non-porn dedicated bandwidth.
	By God, I think it's time for a bit of a bigger picture, folks.
	There's a lot of questions about whether Ebola could go airborne.
	This is all nonsense.
	Ebola has gone airborne.
	Do you know how we know that?
	Because there are people inside airplanes who have Ebola who are traveling.
	See, airborne means if you're in the vicinity of a sneeze, that's bad.
	There's no airborne virus that can cross an ocean except for one currently attached to a human being who has lied his way through non-existent security manned by mouth breathers who can barely figure out a digital thermometer that is supposed to be the thin red line between plague and health.
	It is airborne.
	And there's almost no better way to transmit the virus than to permit travel from an infected country.
	See, they say, oh, don't worry, because you see, before you show any symptoms, you're not contagious.
	Okay, but it can take about two days, say, to travel from Liberia to the United States.
	You could get sick along the way.
	You could start showing some symptoms, even wild ones along the way.
	And is there a better place to transmit illness all around the world than being in a sealed tube of recycled air flying through the sky or in an airport touching everything under the sun, which will then touch everyone else who will take it to all the four corners of the world.
	So, of course, it is airborne.
	It is just airborne in the most terrifying way possible through international travel.
	Obama has said, well, you see, but if we block travel from these countries, it will be harming their economies.
	So apparently, Obama and others are really, really concerned that the 151st, 208th, and 223rd most wretched economies in the world, and the number only goes up to 228, which is DR Congo, the other African Ebola outbreak country, they're really, really concerned, you see.
	That banning travel from these countries might hurt their economies, which are already completely and totally in the shitter, in the crapper, in the toilet, which they don't have in general.
	Sierra Leone had a grand total of 115 doctors in the entire country before the Ebola outbreak hit.
	The amount of incompetence and corruption in African countries is absolutely staggering.
	And the amount of incompetence in Western hospitals is equally tragic.
	Thomas Duncan, the man who flew from Liberia and ended up in America, who recently died of Ebola, was discharged from the hospital when he had a 103 degree fever.
	In fact, the nurse who entered it into the computer put a little exclamation mark there.
	That's like three degrees before spontaneous goddamn combustion.
	He was sent home.
	The ambulance wherein he was transported was in service for two more days before being cleaned.
	They took him to the hospital and the ambulance went around, got a whole bunch of other sick people, drove him around before it was cleaned.
	In Dallas, incredibly stupid workers pressure-hosed his vomit off the sidewalk, thus spraying it all over the place.
	In Spain, a nurse who was treating some missionaries, oh, and we'll get to those missionaries in a sec, but in Spain, a nurse who was treating the missionaries went to her doctor after she came back and said, I'm sick, I've been in Africa, I've been in contact with Ebola patients.
	He sends her home.
	She goes back.
	She gets sent home again.
	She goes back.
	To a hospital, they test her.
	Within two hours, they find out that she has Ebola.
	For eight more hours, she's sitting in a high-traffic emergency room awaiting transportation to a quarantinable facility.
	So they know she has Ebola.
	She's showing symptoms.
	She's highly contagious.
	And where do they think the best place is to put her?
	Right with everyone else in the hospital.
	This is the kind of incompetence.
	The most airborne virus is just human beings walking around who are idiots and incredibly dangerous in their incompetence.
	Look, Africa is a mess, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
	The good news and bad news is that it was a mess long before Western Europeans came for their colonialism activities, let us say.
	In sub-Saharan Africa, they hadn't figured out the wheel yet.
	There were no two-story buildings.
	They hadn't domesticated any animals.
	They had almost no written language.
	So, kind of Stone Age before the Westerners came along.
	First two-story building in Western Africa was built by a missionary in the 1850s.
	And there's a lot of white guilt floating around Africa, which is just continued racism.
	We've got to stop treating Africa like the retarded child of the planet and treat the Africans the same way we treat everyone else.
	Look...
	The Turks were in charge of the Ottoman Empire.
	The Ottoman Empire, just two countries off the top of my head, Bulgaria and Greece, were ruled for 500 and 400 years respectively by this totalitarian Turkish dictatorship.
	Are they seeking reparations?
	Are the Turks wracked with guilt and feel the need to send massive amounts of aid and food to Bulgaria and Greece?
	No!
	Because they're all whites.
	But suddenly, blacks come into the equation and white people just lose their minds.
	It's been suggested that it's racist to want to ban flights from Liberia or New Guinea or Sierra Leone.
	Racist!
	I mean, imagine if the outbreak was happening in Bulgaria.
	He said, we've got to cancel flights from Bulgaria.
	People are like, well, that's a sensible precaution.
	This guilt...
	It is so destructive and so harmful to Africa as a whole.
	Look, can't all be white colonialism that is responsible for all the problems in Africa.
	I've actually spent some time in Africa on two periods in my life and have actually talked to people there, which we'll get into another time.
	I have a little bit of direct experience.
	I'm certainly no expert.
	So Haiti got its independence from its colonial masters, oh, I guess roughly around the same time that America did, more than 200 years ago.
	How's Haiti doing these days without any white colonial overlords to screw them up?
	They're doing a pretty good job of it themselves.
	This guilt over Africa, this guilt over, this insane white guilt over historical treatment by other people hundreds of years ago and thousands of miles away from most whites now is insane.
	It has created A fever pot of disease-ridden countries.
	So the less developed countries over the last 50 years have received $4.6 trillion in direct aid.
	This doesn't count all the other stuff that goes on, indirect aid and subsidies in kind and so on.
	So $4.6 trillion.
	Over the last 60 years, over a trillion dollars has just been sent to Africa alone.
	A trillion dollars has been sent to Africa alone.
	The per capita income in Africa now is lower in real dollars than it was in the 1970s.
	More than 50% of the African population live on less than one dollar a day.
	More than 50% of the African population live on less than one dollar a day after a trillion dollars of aid has been transferred.
	This is madness.
	In per capita, compared to welfare aid, Africa has represented over the last half century by far the biggest government-sponsored welfare state experiment in the history of mankind.
	I mean, repeat this, it's so important to understand.
	Compared, like, per capita?
	Compared to the Amana aid coming in, it is by far, by far, the biggest government welfare program in the history of mankind.
	And it has been worse than a failure.
	The countries are poorer, disease is higher, corruption is higher.
	Do you know that the world's developing countries, this is from 2011, every year lose about a trillion dollars just to corruption.
	And sub-Saharan Africa is losing the most percentage, the highest percentage of gross domestic products of corruption in the world.
	In the world!
	Because there's so much foreign aid pouring into these countries, getting control of the government is like winning the lottery, which is why there are so many battles about the government.
	Who's in control?
	Who gets power?
	And it's why the most brutal and vicious people tend to gain the most power.
	Because there's this pot of gold called foreign aid, And arms sales, which is also another issue.
	But this is part of gold called foreign aid, which you can get if you get in control of one of these third world developing countries.
	Because of the amount of aid and the amount of particularly direct food aid, a lot of American and to some degree European farmers produce is dumped into Africa.
	To help prop up and keep high food prices in the West.
	It's a form of subsidies for farmers.
	Incredibly destructive to, of course, local African farmers.
	You can't sell corn for a penny if it's being handed out for free.
	So it's incredibly destructive to local African farmers.
	And incredibly destructive to the population as a whole because it provokes overpopulation.
	Population growth in Africa has been enormous because of subsidies, because of agricultural dumping, because of all of this stuff that goes on.
	The population is now far higher than would normally be supported by self-initiative and the environment and so on.
	So because you have this massive population growth, overpopulation in Africa, transmission of disease becomes much more common.
	In the more remote parts of Africa, where some of the Ebola crisis started, It's actually been fairly well contained because the tribes are remote.
	They're not all crammed together in cities with very little sanitation.
	A lot of that is to do with Western aid.
	So Western aid has created this Petri dish wherein the flash fires of disease transmission can occur far easier than it would have otherwise.
	Missionaries!
	Missionaries going to Africa, going from town to town, spreading disease.
	It happens.
	A lot of the people who've died, of course, have been missionaries, and missionaries, of course, come in contact with a lot of different people.
	The corruption in Africa is also preventing aid from getting to the right people.
	According to the New York Times, $140,000 worth of crucial Ebola supplies are sitting unused in docks.
	Why?
	Why?
	Mattresses, protective gear, medical equipment, they say, mainly due to official agreements between officials and those who supplied the goods to begin with.
	Now, in general, Western companies, Western corporations, are not allowed to bribe.
	But if you want to get anything done in Africa, a little back sheath is the grease that keeps the social wheels of corruption turning.
	So they're not able to bribe the customs officials to get the medical help and the essential supplies into the country.
	So they just sit there and rob.
	Or they're stolen by the local warlords and sold at a high profit, which are then used to pay off goons with Western-supplied guns to keep down the local population.
	Bad ideas.
	Superstitions, irrationalities are incredibly destructive to human life.
	If I believe aspirin cures my cancer, I'm not going to do very well.
	Africa is a hotbed of crazy ideas.
	Not for everyone, but in general, as a whole, there's a lot of bad ideas in Africa.
	What is one of the main reasons that AIDS keeps spreading?
	1.5 million Tanzanians infected with AIDS. Well, one of the reasons is because there's this belief that if you have sex with a virgin, it cures you of AIDS. And you could not design an irrational belief better able to spread a deadly disease than that.
	There are some reports that this belief is so prevalent that terrified parents are paying HIV-negative Men to rape their daughters so that the HIV-positive men will no longer try to use them to cure their own AIDS. That is some bad, bad mojo.
	That is some bad, bad thinking.
	There are practices in West African countries that when a relative dies, what do you do?
	You wash the body.
	Yay!
	That's great.
	Let's get as much as we can of bodily fluids on our fingers.
	And then, you know what else you do?
	You throw yourself on the body.
	And you hug it.
	And you kiss the disease-ridden corpse.
	And then everybody at the funeral party rinses or washes their hands in the same bucket.
	God!
	Superstition.
	Bad ideas.
	A lot of people in Africa think that Ebola is a curse from a sorcerer.
	A curse from a sorcerer.
	And so, if you've been cursed, it means you've been targeted by the local witch doctor, warlock, Voldemort, Merlin, Dumbledore, whatever...
	And so you're ashamed.
	Why would you go see a doctor when you've been cursed by a warlock?
	Wouldn't make any sense.
	They think the disease doesn't exist and that the death is triggered by enemies using witchcraft.
	One place in West Africa, the local sorcerer accused four teachers of killing people to acquire supernatural powers.
	And the teachers were lynched by a mob wielding iron clubs and machetes.
	Machetes is one of the weapons that's killed the most people in the last hundred years.
	Bad ideas kill.
	Irrationality and superstition kills.
	Some places, particularly in Tanzania, well, they think if you kill albinos and make potions from their innards, that will help control the spread of AIDS. Corrective rape is a common belief in South Africa and other African nations.
	So if you rape a lesbian, it will cure that woman of lesbianism.
	In Uganda, a lot of people believe that homosexuality is a contagious disease import from the West.
	and help promote the death to gays bill proposed by David Bahati, a lawmaker with ties to anti-gay American evangelists.
	Many locals from West African countries think that the doctors who are treating them will actually harvest the organs of those dying from Ebola cancer.
	Because there's nothing anybody wants more than an Ebola-ridden kidney.
	Because, you know, dialysis is tough.
	So bad ideas kill.
	Bad ideas take stupid people out of the gene pool.
	And it's absolutely tragic.
	Where are the people constantly going into Africa?
	And saying, guys, guys, guys!
	Think a little more.
	It's okay to let go of the witch doctor stuff these days.
	It's okay to do that.
	You can do that.
	You know why?
	Because otherwise, disease is going to take out significant sections of the population.
	Stop attacking aid workers with machetes.
	In one country, a bunch of aid workers trying to help the local population deal with virulent disease We're caught up with machetes and dumped into a sewage treatment septic tank.
	This is not going to help things.
	People have to start thinking more clearly both in the West and in Africa in order to prevent just these kinds of horrors from occurring.
	Western leaders, Western intellectuals, the Western population Stop being racists, for God's sakes.
	Stop it!
	Just stop it!
	If you would never think of the Ottoman Empire paying restitution to, say, Bulgaria and Greece, stop thinking that people who've never owned slaves, who had nothing to do with it, and most white people hated slavery because it undercut wages and they were forced to participate in slave patrols to catch slaves.
	It's just a tax on their time.
	Stop being racist.
	We can't find this Aristotelian mean.
	It's like you've got to be mindlessly anti-black or mindlessly pro-black.
	No!
	Let's have a colorblind world.
	Let's have a colorblind society.
	Blacks don't get foreign aid any more than Bulgarians do.
	Colorblind means colorblind.
	I don't want to care what anybody's race is.
	If you want to know if you're being a racist, Just change white for black and see if you think of things differently.
	If it would make you think differently, you're being a racist.
	If this was an outbreak in Bulgaria and you said, hey man, we've got to stop Bulgarians from flying to the United States until this thing is kept under control, if that would seem reasonable to you, and then it's Africa and you're like, ah, racism, colonialism, white guilt, then you are a racist.
	It means you are not thinking of the world in colorblind terms.
	If you would not think that in Turkey, all the Greeks and all the Bulgarians and all the other victims of the Ottoman Empire need to get preferential hiring, need to get preferential gateways to academia, need to get preferential gateways to academia, that you need bias in Turkey for the victims of the Ottoman Empire, if you would find that to be kind of ridiculous, but then you're for affirmative action.
	In the West, you're a racist!
	You're a racist!
	If you think that somehow white people who historically hated slavery owe massive resources to these West African countries, you're a racist.
	If you say it's racist to not let blacks fly from disease-ridden countries into your country, but you'd be fine with Bulgarians being banned, you're a racist!
	It means you're thinking in terms of race.
	Stop thinking in terms of race.
	And if you think that more aid to Africa is somehow going to solve this problem, you're not just a racist.
	You're morally insane.
	And you are allowing irrational, superstitious guilt To completely cloud your thinking to the point where all of the Western money and Western aid pouring into Africa, increasing its hellhole status, declining its income, destroying its economy, overpopulating its countries, making it a febrile hotbed of disease transmission.
	If you think that somehow you can change the history of the world, And expiate the sins of a small proportion of rich, long-dead white people and blacks.
	First slave owner in America was a black guy.
	This is magical thinking exactly on par and analogous to the irrationalities of the African population when it comes to dealing with things like disease.
	Irrationalities that reinforce each other create ever escalating tornadoes of destruction.
	Black superstitions about illness matched with white superstitions about racism create a perfect storm of near infinite destruction.
	I don't have the solutions that can be implemented like that.
	People in Africa need to be less superstitious.
	Now, either people in Africa, and of course around the world, everybody needs to be less superstitious or non-superstitious, but people in Africa are either going to listen to reason or they're going to have to learn from bitter experience.
	Superstition is an addiction.
	Somebody's addicted to drugs, they're either going to recognize that it's a bad thing to be addicted to and stop using drugs, or they're going to die, or they're going to hit rock bottom and change because they simply can't put another step forward with a drug addiction in their life.
	Superstition in society as a whole.
	And I'm not talking about just blacks in Africa and illness.
	I'm talking about whites and others in the West with guilt.
	Superstition ends because you can be reasoned out of your superstitious beliefs or you die.
	And then your death is like a giant flare up into the sky of human thought saying, this is what happens to really superstitious people.
	They tend to die, so don't be superstitious.
	Either your life is a giant warning to others.
	Remember that guy who died of smoking?
	We shouldn't smoke.
	Or things just get so terrible that you're willing to even confront your deepest prejudices, your deepest superstitions, your deepest irrational guilts.
	I'm hoping that we can reason our way out of these incredibly destructive superstitions.
	Keeping them out would not work, and the idea that you can keep out a whole group of people who are America's partners, whether we like it or not, West African nations are partners with this country.
	Well, and trying to do that is racist.
	Let's just be frank about it.
	Chris, it's also somewhat immoral to say, you know, well, that part of the world has a problem.
	Let's just close our eyes and close our nose and just shut them off, and then it won't be a problem for us.
	In a globalized world, we've seen that the problem will come to us no matter what.
	We have to do more than just shut our eyes to the problem.
	People talk about, well, we shouldn't allow any flights in from Liberia.
	I mean, we in America, how dare we turn our backs on Liberia, given the fact that this is a country that was founded in the 1820s, 1830s because of American slavery.
	Africa is facing its greatest catastrophic crisis, arguably since the days of slavery.
	Part of me thinks, when you look at the sum total of evidence, that a huge part of the consternation around this has to do with race.
	These people are bringing diseases here.
	They may be terrorists.
	I mean, it's a grab bag of sort of paranoid theories.
	But it just basically comes down to the division of us versus them.
	Stop being racists, for God's sakes.
	Stop it!

▲