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Jan. 6, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2879 NYPD: No “Unnecessary” Arrests | True News with Stefan Molyneux | January 5th, 2014

The debut edition of The Stefan Molyneux Show! Topics include: North Korea Sony Hack Sanctions, NYPD Police Assassinations/Non-Enforcement, Watch me spank my 12 year-old daughter, Loneliness: A Modern Epidemic, Scientific Journals Withdraw “Gibberish” Papers, How Play-Doh Ruined Christmas and much much more! Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/SMS0001

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	Hi, everybody.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Welcome to the new segment.
	This is called The Stefan Molyneux Show.
	We'll be talking about current events, listening to clips from the major newsmakers of the recent days.
	And we look forward to your feedback on this new segment.
	Please let us know what you think in the comments below.
	If you find the show of value, please like, subscribe, and share, as usual.
	So first order of business is that you probably have heard, of course, North Korea was accused by the FBI after about eight milliseconds of investigation as being behind the cyber terrorist attack upon Sony, the release of Sony movies and Sony emails and health data and release other sort of confidential information the release of Sony movies and Sony emails and health data and release other sort of And now the United States government has imposed sanctions against North Korea.
	Now, North Korea has praised, of course, the cyber attack on Sony, but has denied any involvement in it and has offered to cooperate with the U.S. in finding whoever may have been involved.
	The available evidence at the moment strongly suggests that the attack on Sony was an inside job and North Korea was not involved.
	So the U.S. has placed sanctions on three North Korean organizations and 10 individuals on January 2, after the FBI blamed North Korea for the attack.
	White House officials told reporters the move was in response to the hack, but the targets of the sanctions were not directly involved.
	Riddle me this, Batman, if you dare.
	How could it be even remotely logical, rational, just or virtuous to punish individuals that the White House admits were not directly involved in the attack?
	So, first of all, the FBI seems to have got it wrong by blaming North Korea.
	Evidence came out which discredited this finding.
	The White House then moved forward, aggressively sanctioning North Korea 10 individuals and 3 organizations directly.
	The White House admits that the targets of these sanctions were not directly involved in the attack in any way, shape, or form.
	And basically, this is like...
	Your pit bull bites my leg, therefore I go and strangle your neighbor's goldfish.
	It makes no sense whatsoever.
	And if you want to find out more, we've got a whole presentation on the truth about the Sony hack, which you can find at youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
	Now, all of this, in true Orwellian 1984 fashion, all of this is going on at the same time that President Obama...
	Is reducing embargoes and sanctions against Cuba.
	Let's hear what the good leader has to say about this.
	Mike, if we can hit clip one.
	I believe in the free flow of information.
	Unfortunately, our sanctions on Cuba have denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe.
	So I've authorized increased telecommunications connections between the United States and Cuba.
	Businesses will be able to sell goods that enable Cubans to communicate with the United States and other countries.
	These are the steps that I can take as president to change this policy.
	The embargo that's been imposed for decades is now codified in legislation.
	As these changes unfold, I look forward to engaging Congress in an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.
	So here you have it.
	I mean, in George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, what was true yesterday is false today.
	What was false yesterday is true today.
	And at the same time, you can hold two opposing opinions.
	So you see, the problem with Cuba is they don't have enough communications technology.
	It's a dictatorship, has been a communist dictatorship for many decades.
	But you see, they don't have enough technology.
	So we're going to open up technological access to Cuba.
	North Korea, you see, has too much technology.
	That's really bad because apparently they're supposed to be using it to hack Sony and so on.
	So that's really bad.
	Sanctions against Cuba are bad.
	Sanctions against North Korea, even against people and organizations the government admits is not directly involved in the attack, are good.
	I don't even know what to say about this other than the amount of sideways fish sticks that we're supposed to swallow in the guise of accepting the endless stream of contradictory propaganda coming out of the government is truly astounding.
	And so just remember, when they talk to you about sanctions, what they're talking to you about is, well, bad for one group, really good for another.
	You see, it punishes the Cuban people, but apparently it helps the North Korean people.
	So...
	What can you say other than rolling your eyes so far inwards that you can see your own tonsils?
	Get caught!
	Now!
	Dead Cups!
	Now! Dead cunts!
	Now! Dead cunts!
	Now!
	Moving on, we have the funeral of two New York City police officers slain by Ismail Abdullah Brinsley, who on December 20th approached the passenger window of an NYPD patrol car occupied by Rafael Ramos.
	40, and Wenyan Liu, aged 32.
	He shot the two officers multiple times in their heads and upper bodies with a semi-automatic handgun, killing both officers instantly on the scene.
	And of course, after the officers chased him into the subway, he committed suicide.
	This is after shooting his girlfriend in the belly earlier that day, and tweeting that he was going to, or posting on the web, that he was going to go and give pigs wings.
	A funeral service for Ramos, the largest police funeral in New York's history, was held on December 27th in Queens, with over 100,000 people present.
	And the service from start to end was almost five hours long.
	When Mayor de Blasio delivered the eulogy, hundreds of police officers turned their back on him.
	And a funeral service for Lou took place January 4th in Brooklyn once again.
	Some officers turned their backs on the video screen showing Mayor de Blasio's eulogy.
	So what has caused this?
	Well, Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, blames the mayor.
	Let's listen to clip 8 for more on that.
	Those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day.
	We tried to warn, it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated.
	That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.
	Rudolph Giuliano, of course, former mayor of New York City, had this to say on anti-police propaganda as well.
	All these other people around the country, starting with the president and the attorney general, with all this anti-police rhetoric, are creating a misimpression.
	And in fact, they're engaging in propaganda.
	This is a very delicate subject, of course, because it involves civil liberties.
	It involves police overreactions.
	police overreactions.
	It involves concerns about the increased militarization of the police.
	It involves concerns about the increased militarization of the police.
	And it also concerns the problems of the local business owners and store owners who were not having a good day with Eric Garner in front of their stores, whether the use of chokeholds was appropriate.
	So again, we've got a whole presentation on the truth about Eric Garner, which you can find again at youtube.com slash free domain radio for more on this.
	But this is an important thing to understand.
	My My approach to the moral progress of the species has always been language and the reduction of violence The increased use of violence is almost never associated with an increase in human freedom The way that we build a peaceful society is we reason out the ethics that we need,
	the secular, universal, rational ethics that we need to organize our thinking and organize our society, and then we reduce violence wherever possible.
	And the way that I've always argued it for many years is we reduce violence against children.
	The idea that going up and shooting police officers is going to lead to anything other than an escalation of coercion in the long run I think is a complete fantasy and is a huge amount of history.
	The number of revolutions that have resulted in a permanent reduction in the power of the state is, I do have a Masters in History from Ivy League University, approximately zero.
	Even if you look at the American Revolution, which tried to bind down the federal government in the chains of the Constitution, that lasted really only a few decades.
	And the goal of the American Revolution was to create the smallest government in the history of mankind.
	This has now grown to the largest and most powerful government in the history of mankind.
	It doesn't tend to work.
	A reduction of violence and a propagation of rational and critical thinking is the way to move forward.
	And there are, of course, unstable people on the fringes of society who hear chants like, What do we want?
	Dead cops.
	When do we want them now?
	And this begins to fill their minds.
	And the more that you pour into people's ears the Iago-based sentiments of oppression and so on, the more that you will get these kinds of violent reactions.
	So...
	There are near endless amounts of threats now pouring in to the New York Police Department.
	And one of the things that has occurred, though, as a result of these murders is a significant drop.
	In arrest numbers across the city, significant.
	Arrests are down as a whole by more than 60%, according to one source that we have looked at.
	Drug arrests are down more than 90%.
	Traffic violation arrests are down considerably.
	One police officer said there's just no motivation.
	I'm not writing people's summonses if I have a chance of getting my head blown off.
	It said the officer, when he was asked if this was his own choice or a precinct-wide initiative, the officer added, seems like the entire department is on the same page.
	So, this, of course, begs the question, and there have been some reports that police have been advised to make as few unnecessary arrests as possible, which naturally, of course, begs the question, What is an unnecessary arrest?
	It's sort of like doctors being said, well, don't do any wasteful and unnecessary surgeries.
	And then the surgeries in the hospital drop by 90%.
	Well, that's not good.
	It means that there is, of course, a ridiculous amount of over-policing that is going on.
	One of the...
	Most fundamental problems in modern society is the degree to which police have become the initiators of complaints.
	This is a central problem with the war on drugs.
	In the war on drugs, there is no complainant.
	Someone goes and buys a bag of marijuana and pays his money.
	Both people walk away.
	The dealer wants the money more than the drugs.
	The guy who's buying them wants the drugs more than the money.
	Nobody's complaining.
	And making the government the initiator of complaints when there's no individual complaining is a recipe for ever-escalating fascism.
	It is foundational to a free society that the law enforcement officers be passive, that they wait for a complaint to occur before they leap into action, because when police can initiate complaints, there's really no end to it.
	And if you look at the numbers of laws that...
	Are initiated by police or the number of arrests that are initiated by police without a complaint, Eric Garner not being one of them, they are staggering.
	I will be watching this very closely and will report in upcoming shows what is happening when the police presence or police arrests go down 60, 70, 80, 90 or more percent.
	What happens to the neighborhoods?
	What happens is, are they going to erupt in violence when there was a police strike in Canada?
	A couple of decades ago, violence erupted and there was a huge problem.
	I don't know what's going to happen.
	In Detroit, where police presence has been vastly diminished, private law enforcement agencies that are unarmed have leapt in to fill the void and are doing things much more effectively, I would argue, and more peacefully.
	So I am concerned, of course, about the race baiting and this attempt to goad everyone into a race war, which will be unbelievably destructive and hugely unnecessary, of course.
	But this racism industrial complex is only one component.
	What we do have a chance for here is to observe how societies react with a vastly reduced police presence.
	And if they react in a positive manner, Then I think this is a very strong case for beginning to scale back the ever-escalating number of laws that are constantly buzzing around everyone like these laser-guided death mosquitoes that can take anyone out at any time.
	There are estimates that everyone commits in America approximately three felons a day, felonies a day, and I think that's even outside of Congress.
	So what is going to happen as well?
	What kind of rational, sensible, intelligent person is going to look at The police officer role in American society with this increased race baiting and slaughter on the streets and say that seems like a very good plan to me.
	I think you're only going to get the worst kinds of people ending up in the police force, which is only going to continue a cycle that started only in this definition.
	Well, let's put it this way.
	A man in costume watches another man spank a girl.
	Is this a really horrifying porno movie?
	No.
	This is a man who decided to call a police officer in to observe the man disciplining his own daughter by spanking her.
	And let's listen to the news story intro to this.
	An unusual story tonight on the Treasure Coast where sheriff's deputies say a father called them before he paddled his daughter.
	The man wanted to make sure he disciplined his daughter without breaking the law.
	So, apparently, the man's 12-year-old daughter got into a heated argument with her sister recently, and the father wanted to, quote, discipline his daughter.
	It's funny how when you hit your wife, that's not considered discipline but abuse, but you hit your children, that's considered discipline.
	So, the deputy's report was that the father wanted to discipline the daughter.
	A deputy came over to the house, supervised the discipline, and determined it was within legal bounds and that there was no crime, and then left.
	It may sound, of course, bizarre to some of you, but the Sheriff's Office had received several similar requests in the past.
	Under Sheriff Noel Stevens said he had personally supervised approximately 12 spankings.
	He said it happens.
	It's definitely not something we advertise to do, even though law enforcement has been willing to help out in these situations.
	Watching a parent discipline their child is something that's done only when a deputy has no other cause.
	To handle.
	So onset of puberty in general happens earlier for girls than for boys between the ages of 8 to 12.
	So this is most likely a post-pubescent girl calling a police officer to watch you spank your post-pubescent daughter who's It's creepy.
	I would argue it's sexually humiliating and utterly revolting.
	And unfortunately, this meets with wide approval in a variety of circles.
	Let's listen to a woman talk up the virtues of spanking.
	Everybody's paranoid to hit their kids because of, you know, the consequences from the authorities.
	Have you ever heard of anyone doing that?
	No, that's a good one though.
	Good for him.
	That's all I got to say.
	Good for him.
	Look at the kids these days.
	Most of them are in prison.
	A little bit of a, you know, whooping.
	Wouldn't hurt nobody.
	Didn't hurt me when I was growing up.
	Didn't hurt my mother or father.
	We're all still alive.
	So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
	That is the standard for mental health.
	You're not actually dead.
	I mean, if this woman was a nutritionist and you walked into her office at 400 pounds and said, I need to lose weight, she'd say, are you dead yet?
	No.
	Then you have no problems.
	The idea that she says, of course, that parents are paranoid of negative consequences and that's really bad is all the more mind-blowing when you realize, of course, that hitting children is to instill a fear of negative consequences and that's good.
	See, negative consequences for parents are bad.
	Negative consequences for children are really good.
	You'll also notice that being spanked in no way diminished her capacities for double negatives.
	It didn't do us no harm, which I think means that it did harm since two negatives make a positive.
	So this is an all-too-common phenomenon where people say, well, you see, kids these days are running wild.
	And what's fascinating is she says most of the kids are in prison.
	Now, since most children are not, in fact, in prison, or even young people are in prison, this must mean that most of the children she knows, most of the children in her social or familial section, are in prison.
	Well, if corporal punishment was applied significantly in her environment, and then most of those children grew up to end up in prison, that's not much of an advertisement for corporal punishment.
	Recently, I had a conversation with Dr.
	Elizabeth Gershoff, one of the world's foremost authorities on spanking, and let's hear what she had to say about the outcomes of spanking.
	So I've been studying spanking's effects on children, parents spanking of children, for about 15 years.
	And there have been hundreds of studies that have been done by many people, not just me, on the effects of spanking on children, and have looked longitudinally, have looked at a whole range of outcomes.
	And I've done twice now what's called a meta-analysis, which means I take all the research that's out there and summarize it, taking into account how big studies are and things like that.
	And found looking at all these various outcomes, spanking is always associated with negative outcomes.
	And so the more kids are spanked, the more aggressive they are, the more likely they are to get into delinquent behaviors, the more likely they are to have mental health problems as children and as adults, the more likely they are to experience abuse from their parents, which is a really sad outcome.
	And this is, again, across studies across the country, across the world, various sizes and ethnicities and things like that.
	And in my first meta-analysis, I found that the more kids were spanked, the more compliant they were in the immediate situation.
	But I re-analyzed that data recently and found that actually that wasn't true.
	Once I took into account other studies, that actually is not true.
	That the more kids are spanked, they're not more likely to be compliant.
	People for a while thought, well, there's at least one positive outcome.
	They stop what they're doing right away.
	But even that doesn't seem to be true either.
	So spanking doesn't get kids to do what we want them to do, and it doesn't give them any benefit in the long term as far as positive behavior.
	Now, one of the criticisms of the analyses, at least that I receive when I post this information, is that the argument often is that spanking results in lower IQ, a couple of percentage points lower IQ. And the argument that comes back is often, but kids who have a lower IQ or kids who are more defiant...
	Are the ones who get spanked.
	In other words, it's the children's temperament that causes the spanking, and the temperament is what drives them through to negative behavior.
	So what work has been done to try and figure out the holy grail of social sciences, which is to make sure that correlation is not confused with causation?
	Right.
	And the other way of looking at that is the chicken and egg problem.
	Is it spanking causing aggression or are aggressive kids eliciting more spanking from their parents?
	And so several people have looked at that.
	The way to do that is to look over time and to really look at, okay, how aggressive are kids to begin with?
	And then we look at how much parents spank them and then look in the future to see, does their behavior change from where it was at the beginning?
	And so I and many other people have done studies to look at that.
	And I did a study looking at that with 11,000 American children.
	And found that the amount of spanking kids got when they were in kindergarten predicted increases in aggression over and above where they started in kindergarten, increases in aggression by the time they were in third grade, so three years later.
	But what we also found was that kids' aggression also predicted more spanking.
	So we saw both.
	And actually, the effects were almost the same in the study I did.
	So we saw this kind of cycle that when parents spank, their kids get more aggressive.
	Aggressive kids elicit more spanking.
	So you get what we call a coercive cycle that they kind of keep egging each other on into the cycle that kind of never ends.
	And they both are aggressive to each other.
	And it's a hard cycle to stop.
	Are you lonesome tonight?
	Well, if you are, you're not alone, and it can have enormously negative impact on your health.
	So, loneliness is a modern epidemic in need of treatment, according to a leading researcher psychologist, John Cacioppo.
	So he says that feeling extreme loneliness can increase an older person's chances of premature death by 14%.
	This psychologist and his colleagues' work showed that the impact of loneliness on premature death is nearly as strong as the impact of disadvantaged socioeconomic status, which they found increases the chances of dying early by 19%.
	A 2010 meta-analysis showed, meta-analysis being an analysis of a wide variety of studies, showed that loneliness has twice the impact on early death as obesity does.
	This is very significant.
	We are, of course, social animals.
	We are dogs, not cats.
	And we need other people to talk with, to support us, that we can help support.
	We need a community of social animals.
	Fish, of course, swim to the center of the school in order to avoid being eaten.
	Stragglers and strays are often picked off by predators, so when you are isolated, you feel, I think, deep down, you most likely feel increased risk of anxiety, and of course, we don't work very well.
	As Aristotle said, the only beings who can live alone are beasts or gods.
	Man is not one of them.
	Now, the way that I've always viewed it, and this is particular for loneliness in old age, is that if you decide not to have children, as increasing numbers of us are not deciding to have children, if you decide not to have children, it's really important to nurture and build the bridges to your friendships to it's really important to nurture and build the bridges to your friendships to make sure that you
	We're a highly mobile society in many ways and it's a lot easier when you're in the hurly-burly of the day-to-day to forget about your friendships or assume you can put them in the back burner and start them up again later.
	But in the same way that you go to the gym, you need to call your friends and family to make sure that you stay as close with them as possible.
	I I certainly wouldn't suggest doing that if you end up holding completely opposite moral views to them.
	That's a topic for another time.
	But where you can find compatibility, particularly moral compatibility, hold those people close to your heart.
	It is as important as watching your ways and exercising and not smoking and not drinking to excess and so on.
	A social clique, a social club, a social gathering, a social tribe is essential and effective defense against premature death and illness.
	Now, remember that relationships, and the way that I sort of characterize them, is relationships are kind of like deposits and withdrawals.
	So when you do nice things for other people, you're putting deposits in the sort of bank of friendship, and then there'll be times where you need to withdraw from that bank of friendships.
	Now, if you just withdraw, withdraw, withdraw, you end up in overdraft, and the friendships will often tend to fade away as people feel exploited.
	If you give and give and give without any reciprocity, if you're sort of an enabler, then what happens is the only people you will attract to your life will tend to be those who want to exploit you and they will either find someone better to exploit after you've run out of resources or you will grow in resentment to the point Where you don't want to deposit anything when nothing is coming back.
	So reciprocity, the sort of tide comes in and tide goes out of mutually beneficial relationships is very, very important.
	Don't try and save for your old age retirement after you've already retired.
	In other words, don't try and make friends by the time you're already mired in loneliness.
	Work for that very early.
	There's not much point quitting smoking when you're 70.
	You want to quit smoking if you're a smoker when you're much younger so you can accrue the benefits.
	And to have the benefits of a society, of a social circle around you, give and receive early on.
	Build your relationships.
	Provide value to people and ask that they really demand that they also provide value back to you.
	And most times this will happen organically if you're around the right people.
	If you are a parent, One of the things to be aware of is that if you are a parent, you will require a lot of resources when you get old.
	I mean, you may need money, you may need support, you may lean more upon your children as your friends and relatives of your own age die off.
	You may have health problems and need a lot of support.
	So you want to make a lot of deposits as parents when your children are young.
	With regards to the aforementioned study, don't hit them.
	Don't scream at them.
	Don't have this carrot and stick reward and punishment matrix going on, which is going to basically turn your children into pinballs bouncing around your approval and disapproval.
	See how I did that?
	I used a pinball metaphor for people who are older.
	I guess younger people know it from Xbox games.
	When you are parenting, you need to parent far into the future.
	You know, there are tech companies that have research departments looking at five or ten or even further years into the future to figure out what products they need to develop in the long haul.
	You have to look even further as a parent down the road.
	You have to be parenting for the standards that are going to be around 20, 30, 40 or more years from now.
	Let's say you're parenting in your 30s.
	By the time you're in your 70s, 40 years have gone by.
	And 40 years, just think of the difference between how race was viewed in 1950 and then how race was viewed in 1990.
	It's a huge difference.
	Same thing with gender, sexism, and so on.
	So you need to look deep into the future, and you need to parent now according to where you think the values are going to be in 30 or 40 years.
	And I can guarantee you, based upon the science and evidence, the values are going to be very anti-spanking and very pro-constant negotiation with your children, because your children are going to judge you according to the standards 30 or 40 years from now.
	Look ahead.
	Deep, deeply ahead in order to parent most effectively.
	And then if you provide enough goodies to your children, then they will want to spend time with you when you're older.
	Also develop your wisdom.
	Develop your wisdom.
	What is the value of older people?
	They're expensive.
	They can often be smelly.
	They can often cling on to prejudices from times gone by.
	They cost a lot of healthcare resources and so on.
	So what is the value?
	Well, the value...
	That we get out of older people is that they are wise, that they can help us avoid life's problems, that they've lived and thought deeply and examined possibilities and learned from their mistakes to the point where, yes, we will give them hip transplants because they help us to avoid negative and difficult situations in our lives.
	So develop your wisdom and share your wisdom with the world.
	Remind the world that old people are a source of Of wisdom and calm and peace and virtue.
	In the absence of that, good luck.
	Moving on.
	Publishers of scientific journals have recently withdrawn more than 120 papers That were complete gibberish.
	So, a French researcher recently discovered that more than 120 papers published by Springer and IEEE were computer-generated nonsense.
	So, computer scientist Cyril Labbé, a France catalogue, computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013.
	16 appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, based in New York.
	So there's a software program called SciGen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer science papers.
	It was invented in 2005 by researchers at MIT to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers and, as they put it, to maximize amusement, which I believe is MIT-speak for the lulls.
	And...
	The researcher used SciGen in April 2010 to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antcare.
	He showed how easy it was to add those fake papers to the Google Scholar database Which boosted the age index, which is a measure of published output to 94, and this made his fictional researcher with gibberish papers the world's 21st most highly cited science.
	Labbe, the researcher, says that the latest discovery is merely one symptom of a spamming war, he says, started at the heart of science, in which researchers feel pressured to rush out papers to publish as much as possible, the old publish or perish.
	And you can look up a SoCal dispute in which a professor of physics...
	He submitted a bunch of nonsense papers to sociology journals and got them all published.
	And then said that he didn't know what he was talking about.
	It was just making up gibberish nonsense words.
	And they got very upset with him.
	And then, of course, they said, well, that's easy to do.
	And he said, well, then why don't you try it in the realm of physics?
	So this has also occurred.
	There's a journal called The Journal of Vibration and Control, which is probably a whole lot less fun than if you attach...
	A Play-Doh article we'll get to in a moment to it.
	This is a reputable academic publication.
	It had to retract 60 different papers over the summer.
	The editors concluded that a researcher in Taiwan had created a peer review and citation ring.
	So, yes, agreed.
	It's not exactly a plot to The Sopranos, but it's pretty shady for higher education.
	A researcher went to great lengths.
	He made up fake email addresses and assumed the names of other scientists who write approvingly of his own And this is also true in the softer sciences.
	In psychology, it has been absolutely tragic.
	There's an article written, we'll put all these below, lead authorist New York University's Jonathan Haidt found that academic psychology has lost nearly all its political diversity over the last 50 years, and that the validity of the discipline has been, quote, undermined, end quote, as a result.
	And basically it's liberals versus conservatives, as it is in the softer sciences and academia in particular.
	The greater political diversity would improve things, of course.
	Non-liberals face what they call a hostile climate and discrimination.
	At a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Haid asked the audience, by a show of hands, to identify themselves by their political orientation.
	He estimates the resulting ratio of liberals to conservatives at 267.
	267 liberals for every one conservative.
	And that is really, really tragic.
	Of course, I found this when I was in higher education as well.
	If you're a Marxist or a leftist, you were fine.
	I was a libertarian.
	And this was a constant battle.
	It's the old thing that if you say something the professor agrees with, you don't have to cite your sources.
	But if you say something the professor disagrees with, you cite your sources, which he can then cite counter-sources too.
	So if you're not swimming like a salmon in the current of other people's prejudices, it's far more work.
	I did end up struggling through to get an A on my master's thesis, but that was an enormous struggle.
	And this is one of the laws...
	An example of the laws of unintended consequences.
	So originally tenure, which is basically you can't get fired as a professor, tenure was put in supposedly to protect professors from having unpopular opinions.
	Now what's happened, of course, is that because you can't fire anyone, you're never going to hire anyone whose opinions you don't already approve of.
	So in an attempt to protect radical voices, it has merely imposed a crushing level of conformity in academia.
	And this is the general tragedy of unintended consequences.
	So we've, of course, saved the best for last.
	Yes, Plato, veteran squishy stuff of the preschool set has in fact been an veteran squishy stuff of the preschool set has in fact been an unbelievable and often multi-swirl colored Grinch that has stolen and destroyed Christmas for countless children across Some parents were shocked.
	Over Christmas, not just because their new PS4s and Xbox Ones could not access the networks, thus forcing millions of families to actually have a conversation rather than stare slack-doored at a shiny screen.
	They were shocked when their children opened their new Sweet Shop Cake Mountain play sets this Christmas.
	A tool intended to act as a tool for putting icing onto Play-Doh desserts looks, well, kind of like a dick.
	Now, kids don't seem to have been particularly traumatized.
	I mean, I think that if your child knows exactly what a penis looks like, they might be too old to be using Play-Doh.
	Kids didn't seem particularly traumatized, but their parents took to Twitter and to the company's Facebook page to bash the phallic toy.
	One Twitter user asked in apparent disbelief, seriously, no one in design, engineering, or marketing didn't say, you know, this kind of looks like a dildo.
	Well, I will provide to you my impression of the thought processes that were occurring at the meetings wherein this dildo toy was being proposed.
	So, first of all, it would be something like this.
	Wow, you know, that really does look like a dildo.
	Maybe I should say something.
	I don't know.
	I did read The Emperor's New Clothes when I was a kid, and people who say something generally get in trouble.
	It's pretty small, so I certainly don't want to say it looks like my own penis, because that would make my penis look small to everyone else, in everyone else's mind.
	The other thing is that if I say that it looks like a dildo, everyone's going to know that I know what a dildo looks like.
	So I guess I'll just hope that nobody notices.
	And the other thing, too, is that there is a lot of criticism of STEM fields, right?
	Science, technology, engineering, and so on, the mathematics, that there's not enough women in STEM fields.
	I think this is a perfect example as to why there should be more women in STEM fields, because I'm going to guess that more women know what a dildo looks like We're good to go.
	They got very upset.
	The parents said, this is not okay.
	This completely ruined Christmas because my daughters love Play-Doh.
	And Play-Doh acknowledges that it has, quote, heard some consumer feedback about the tool and was offering a replacement item.
	We can only, of course, hope that the replacement item will be battery-powered.
	because just because your kids can't have a great Christmas doesn't mean that grandma can't have a great Christmas too.
	Well, we're going to end up with a few questions from listeners.
	The first one, Mike, if you would like to give it a read.
	Alright, question one today.
	Your recent call-in show entitled Racist Until Proven Innocent contained a short snippet where you argued that Eric Gardner was victimizing the people who pay cigarette taxes because he was selling loosies, or loose cigarettes, and thus avoiding any taxes on that product.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, tough call.
	I mean, I think that Churchill said never explain, never complain.
	But I think that the amount of emotional reactivity in this community can sometimes be a little bit on the pitchforks and noose side of things.
	Burn him!
	Burn him!
	Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
	Like Shrek, I feel like taking to the woods like a giant green booger with legs.
	And I did.
	I listened to this again, and I still stand by exactly what I said.
	First of all, it was not a moral judgment.
	The caller called in and said that...
	It was a victimless crime for Eric Garner to be selling his cigarettes.
	Now, I don't know how Eric Garner got his cigarettes.
	I don't know.
	He was apparently...
	He was reputed to.
	I don't know if it was proven.
	He was reputed to be part of a cigarette smuggling ring, which I think buys cigarettes from lower tax jurisdictions, smuggles them in, and then sells them.
	So, to put this in context, the caller said that it was a victimless crime.
	Now, to me, a victimless crime is one in which there's no complaint.
	As I mentioned earlier, if someone decides to go gambling, We're good to go.
	It is not technically correct to say that that's a victimless crime.
	I certainly didn't say that Eric Garner was initiating force, and I certainly accepted and explained that the government was initiating force against the store owners, but to say that it's not a victimless crime, sorry, to say that it is a victimless crime.
	It's incorrect because he is taking away business from the store owners and the store owners have no choice but to call the police because they can't exactly go and get the law removed and they certainly can't disobey the law because they will be arrested and thrown in jail and so on.
	So it is a terrible situation all around.
	I completely disagree with the taxes on the cigarettes.
	But to say that nobody is negatively It's being affected negatively because of what Eric Garner is doing is simply incorrect.
	It was simply a matter of language precision.
	There was no moral judgment involved, and I repeatedly said, in the context of the situation rather than compared to an ideal society.
	So...
	If someone can tell me how what he's doing in no way, shape or form negatively impacts anyone else, particularly the law-abiding store owners who are, as I said, getting up early, have put their life savings into their store and are losing business as a result of what he's doing, If someone can tell me that that is not the case, then I will certainly be happy to revise my opinion, but I think this is just kind of praxeologically true, that those who go and buy cheaper cigarettes from Eric Garner are not then going to go into the store and pay much more money for the cigarettes they've already gotten for cheaper.
	That negatively impacts the store owners.
	One person I think said, okay, so if I'm in some mafia-controlled neighborhood and I choose not to pay the protection money to the mafia, Then I can then sell my goods for cheaper.
	Am I then taking away business from the people who are paying their mafia protection money?
	And then they can say, well, that's really bad and so on, right?
	But the difference is, of course, that the mafia and the police are not the same thing.
	You can hire private security guards to protect you from the mafia.
	The police will assist you in protection from the mafia.
	You can move away to a locale where the mafia is not operating.
	And all of these things are choices that you have, but you cannot do that in the case of the police.
	So it's really not the same thing at all.
	So, what was the next one?
	Alright, the next question is, I have a question about the podcast Death by Incentives.
	Why are health insurance companies liable if their clients spread infectious diseases in other countries or regions?
	Why is that not the personal responsibility of their clients?
	Well, no, I don't think I ever said that they were responsible in some existential or Abstract matter.
	The question is, if you are going to go overseas in a free society, right?
	So we're going to free society.
	If you're going to go visit a place, let's just say you're going to Liberia and there's Ebola, and then you come back.
	The question is, would the insurance company cover the resulting problems that would have occurred?
	Now, you can, of course, choose to not have health insurance and pay out of pocket just in a free society.
	I think a lot of people will choose to have health insurance because it would be very cheap because you would really only insure against very expensive, very unusual illnesses, you know, something that required, you know, a bone marrow transplant or something very rare.
	So it's not that the healthcare companies would somehow automatically be responsible, but what would they negotiate with their clients?
	So they would say, look, if you want to go and visit this place, which we've identified as...
	A disease-ridden area, then we will cover you, but we have to put you in quarantine.
	Like, we'll cover you.
	You have to follow these procedures.
	You have to have blood tests.
	You have to be in quarantine.
	And then we'll cover you for anything that happens.
	And then you would voluntarily agree to that or not.
	Now, if you didn't voluntarily agree to that and you went out and you got sick and then you came back and you made other people sick, I think in a rational society you would be guilty of negligence and you would be guilty of causing the deaths of people by not taking the proper precautions after traveling to a place where you were exposed to transmittable illnesses.
	And so, to my mind, that would be something that would protect a free society from people coming in with communicable illnesses.
	That to get the insurance, you would have to submit to particular procedures that would guarantee that you would be not infected when you went back out into the general population.
	So this was really an answer to a question, how does a free society protect itself against things like this?
	I do not believe...
	would be willing to transmit you if you didn't have health insurance for this kind of stuff.
	Because the airlines would have a safety guarantee.
	Like we guarantee that your air is going to be free of diseases.
	I mean, that would make sense.
	They probably wouldn't transport you if you didn't have health insurance.
	In fact, I don't think there's any way that they could.
	I mean, if you remember the stuff that happened between Sony with the movie The Interview and the theaters, when there were threats made against the theaters who were going to show it, the theaters decided not to show it because they may be liable then since they knew about the threat beforehand.
	So the airlines would not ship you to Liberia if you didn't have health insurance, because through having health insurance, they would know that you would be clean of disease when you got into the plane, not this temperature stuff that was waved around that was pure nonsense at the airports, or largely nonsense.
	So this was just an example of how a free society could protect itself against people who might be transmitting infectious diseases.
	You would be liable if you said that you had covered this person.
	So if I'm the health insurance company and I say to someone, I'm going to cover you for all the illnesses, then if you then come back and spread those illnesses, I'm liable because that's my contract with you.
	You wouldn't be automatically liable in some abstract sense.
	So I hope that makes sense.
	But Steph, I mean, I'm kind of confused in this type of situation.
	How would someone like Thomas Eric Duncan get a million dollars of free healthcare?
	I mean...
	It would be a challenge, of course.
	And I would only assume that a genie in a bottle may be able to help him.
	That would be my answer to that.
	The next question on the list is, Steph, how would you define happiness?
	A Todd Solentz movie?
	A Will Smith movie?
	Happiness is a warm gun.
	Yeah.
	Wait a minute.
	Never mind.
	Happiness is...
	A complicated question, so let's move on.
	Happiness is a challenge.
	It obviously is different for different people.
	I think that happiness is the feeling of self-benevolence that one receives from acting virtuously and courageously in the world.
	People want happiness to be a state that can somehow continue without effort, which is kind of weird when you think about it.
	We don't expect cardiovascular health to be a state that continues without effort.
	You've got to go and do your cardiovascular exercises, which for me means just watching the mainstream media.
	So...
	Happiness is a state that, like optimum health and so on, is a state that needs to be maintained.
	And the way that you maintain it is acting virtuously in the world.
	And just as diet and exercise have pleasant effects but are unpleasant sometimes in the moment...
	So the practice of virtue has pleasant effects in terms of happiness, but can be unpleasant in the moment.
	If you're confronting someone about an immorality that they've done, if you're standing up for a virtue that is not yet generally accepted in the world, these can cause discomfort and hostility towards you.
	And so the reason why we need philosophy is that we wish to conform.
	We are a social species, and the vast majority of times throughout human history, when people didn't conform, They got killed.
	So non-conformance genes are, let's just say, as recessive as my hairline.
	It doesn't mean that they don't pop up from time to time, but in general, societies stagnated throughout human history because non-conformists were killed.
	Now, it actually turned out that a mixture of conformity and non-conformity is very important.
	Just as if genes never mutated, we'd never have evolution and advancement and never be having this conversation because we'd be trilobites or single-celled organisms or whatever, having sex with ourselves in grotesque ways.
	So you need conformity, but you also need non-conformity within society, just as you need reproducibility with fidelity and mutation within the gene pool in order to get evolution.
	Societies that are only conformist don't tend to work so well, because societies where everybody's non-conformist don't tend to work so well.
	So it's kind of a mix.
	Now, I believe that if you are interested in this show, if you're interested in this philosophical conversation, then you have a yearning for consistency, critical thinking, truth, and so on, virtue.
	And so happiness, I think you will get the most and deepest happiness by standing up for the greatest and most essential moral virtues, honesty, the non-aggression principle, and so on.
	That will give you lasting happiness.
	The more difficult it is in the moment, the more happiness you will receive on the other side.
	And just as the more difficult within reason the exercise is, the stronger you will get on the other side of it.
	The more rigorous the diet, the more it's going to change your body, again, within sensible reasons.
	So, that to me, happiness is the long-term satisfaction that we receive from the consistent pursuit of and advocation of virtue.
	Alright, the next question on the list is, my question today involves my sister and her parenting of my two little nephews, a three-year-old and a five-year-old.
	My sister sent me the following.
	My son is asking about ISIS and the Khmer Rouge.
	He then compares the former to American colonist revolution against the British.
	One was good, so why not the other?
	What would you say to him?
	Well, I would not say anything to him.
	I'm going to assume this is the five-year-old.
	I would, in fact, bow down before him as the future master of time, space, and dimension who will be the overlord of all mankind given the questions that he's asking at the age of five.
	Good job, my lord and master.
	I will serve you until death parts us magically.
	So, there's two ways to answer this question.
	I'm going to take the short way.
	We can talk about the other one another time.
	I don't think it's appropriate to be talking to a five-year-old about ISIS and the Khmer Rouge.
	The Khmer Rouge were communist dictators in Cambodia who caused the death of massive portions of the population through the forced relocation from cities to the country and the resulting starvation that always results from collectivized farming and so on.
	So I don't think that you should be talking to your five-year-old about ISIS and the Khmer Rouge and totalitarianism and mass graves and beheadings and, and, and, and.
	So that would be...
	What is appropriate to children?
	I think what's appropriate to children is...
	You want to give them the facts, but you don't necessarily want to give them all the facts.
	I mean, you can thumb through a manual, a pictorial manual on surgery while eating your food.
	It's just not particularly appropriate for your enjoyment of your food and or your digestion to look at people's innards splayed out all over the place.
	So I think that this may be, in fact, I would argue that it is premature to give your children information about dictatorships and mass graves and starvation and beheadings and all of the gruesome stuff that goes on in Statism Gone Wild.
	So I hate to suggest this, but perhaps buy them a dildo-based Play-Doh set instead.
	It will do them far less harm in the long run.
	That'll solve all our problems, is buy a Play-Doh dildo and we'll go from there.
	Well, at the same time, you have talked about evil with Isabella previously.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	I mean, but the difference is, you know, she knows there's such a thing as surgery.
	That doesn't mean that we have to show her slow motion eyeballs getting cut open or whatever, right?
	Exactly.
	It's one thing to discuss things in the abstract, and it's another thing to provide concrete examples.
	Now, again, I'm not saying that This woman has shown all of these things to the kid.
	But I think talking about evil is important in the same way that talking about illness.
	You know, when a child is old enough to know about illness, in other words, why not so much sugar because of diabetes and blood pressure and obesity and blah, blah, blah.
	And generally, it seems that sugar is an environmental toxin for a lot of people.
	So it's one thing to say to a kid that if you eat too much sugar, you could get diabetes, which could make you sick.
	And another thing to say that...
	I don't know.
	What are these statistics?
	I think 1,500 American soldiers lost a limb in the war in Afghanistan.
	Over that same time period, 1.5 million Americans lost limbs to diabetes, right?
	So it's one thing to say, well, there's this illness that can result in diabetes, which is not good for you, and so on.
	And it's another thing to say, okay, you know, for the next three years, we're going to watch slow motion amputations of 1.5 million limbs just to drive the point home.
	There's information without trauma that I think is important.
	And you certainly don't want to associate...
	The gathering of new information with deep body traumas that result in nightmares.
	So, that would be my response.
	Alright, great clarification there, because I knew that would be the follow-up question.
	Last question on the list today is, what would happen if social entitlements were severely curtailed, either from a collapse of the dollar or a stringent political approach?
	Nobody knows for sure, but there certainly have been some examples in the past.
	If you look at the crash of the ruble after 1991 in Russia, people adapt.
	People adapt.
	The welfare state and, to a large degree, the military-industrial complex have shielded people from the need to adapt to new situations, to new conditions.
	But people adapt to virtually anything.
	There's, in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Apicalago, The men and women are separated in these concentration camps, but they still manage to have affairs and even have sex through barbed wire.
	This is the degree to which human beings can adapt to ridiculously terrible circumstances and adapt very successfully.
	So if there is a change in these entitlement spending, people will simply adapt.
	I mean, they will double up.
	They will find ways to make money that they were not looking at before.
	There will be a sudden influx of people getting married.
	The welfare state is basically the single mom state.
	And so if the welfare state is curtailed, the incentives for being a single mom versus being married will change.
	Therefore, a lot of women will simply get married.
	And there will be a huge amount of adaptation that occurs.
	The chaos and mess will last approximately five to seven days.
	And then everyone will look back and say, well, taking that Band-Aid off was a whole lot better than we thought.
	I mean, there'll be lots of fussing and fighting, of course.
	But once people realize that their emotional and even violent outbursts aren't going to get them what they want, you can't get blood from a stone, They will simply say, well, you know, it's a pretty good gig while it lasted, but I guess the new reality means that I'll have to adapt and people's innate capacity to maximize resources and adapt to changed circumstances will simply manifest.
	I mean, good heavens, we survived an ice age, people.
	We can survive a cutback in welfare checks.
	So it will just...
	It will be a fantastically instructive adaptation and people looking back will say, what was the big deal?
	I can't believe we were so afraid of this and it turned out to be so beneficial.
	I can't stop thinking about Gulag barb lawyer sex after that.
	I leave it to you to find the graphic for this segment or make the graphic for this segment.
	You can't find it.
	That doesn't speak to the adaptability of the human species.
	I don't know what does.
	You get sex plus a circumcision.
	Oh, God.
	I know.
	I know.
	It's amazing.
	It's astounding.
	You know, it's that old thing from Jurassic Park, right?
	Life finds a way.
	Life finds a way.
	Okay, folks, just so you know, don't describe gulag, bar boy, or sex to the five-year-olds.
	That covers the territory of too much information.
	No, not when Mike is getting you such wonderful graphics for it.
	So thank you everyone so much for this inaugural episode of The Stefan Molyneux Show.
	Thanks to Mike for digging up some great source material.
	And please let us know what you think of the show in the comments below.
	We really look forward to your feedback.
	Please help out the show by subscribing or donating at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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	Have yourselves a wonderful week.

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