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Jan. 7, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

12:14

2880 Charlie Hebdo Terrorist Attack in Paris, France

Gunmen have shot dead 12 people at the Paris office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in an apparent militant Islamist attack.

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	As you are doubtless aware, a savage attack upon a satirical magazine in France has resulted in the wholesale slaughter of 12 people in the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
	In an apparent militant Islamist attack.
	Four of the magazine's well-known cartoonists, including its editor, were among those killed, as well as two police officers, one of whom was lying on the ground begging for his life when he was gunned down by the fleeing assailants.
	They abandoned their car, carjacked another car, and have vanished into one of the immigrant neighborhoods of the town.
	It is believed to be the deadliest terrorist attack in France since 1961, when right-wingers who wanted to keep Algeria French bombed a train, killing 28 people.
	The magazine has a long history of offending just about anyone with a pulse.
	This, of course, is a tradition of French literature and French journalism going back hundreds of years to the marking of Marie Antoinette.
	So the big picture in my view of how all of these horrifying events come to be is that we are basically livestock for our rulers to be ordered around, marched around, taxed from, sent to war, blown up, incarcerated on the whims of whatever gives them the most power and money.
	Why are tribal species like human beings constantly co-joined in amongst each other?
	I'm sure that the people who are Islamic or Muslim would rather live in Islamic or Muslim countries, but they don't.
	A lot of them will come to America, to the West, to Europe, and so on.
	Why?
	Well, as you're probably aware, Europe and pretty much all of the West, with the minor exception of America, is suffering a significant demographic winter, a massive demographic decline, where birth rates are far below what is needed to sustain a society.
	When you have a top-happy, grey tsunami of people heading into old age and retirement, there's just not the younger worker people who can have their tax money extracted to pay for the elderly.
	And one of the reasons, of course, why The birth rate has declined so significantly is because of the crushing tax burdens, particularly on the middle class.
	And because it's become so expensive to live in the West, then people are having fewer children, if any.
	And you can't attract rich people to a country like France with this exorbitant taxation that even Gerard Depedieu had to flee.
	And so...
	When the birth rates go down and your population is shrinking, then a lot of Western leaders, of course, want to import people from other countries.
	And certainly since 1965, in America, 80-85% of the immigrants have come from third world countries.
	Why do people even want to leave these other countries?
	Well...
	Largely because of U.S. interference and Western interference in terms of foreign aid.
	The U.S. has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into pretty much every country outside of the West in Europe for the last 40 or 50 years.
	And a lot of that has been military aid and has been aid in helping to prop up corrupt dictatorships.
	Of course, also a lot of American food and European food gets dumped in third world markets, thus destroying The markets for locally grown produce throwing people off their land.
	And so when you combine the welfare state, the demographic winter at home, the welfare state, which to some degree draws people from outside the West to come and live on the welfare state welfare, Rates or welfare participation among immigrants is twice that of native-borns in France.
	You create a perfect storm of cultural incompatibility.
	So when you have people from vastly different cultures coming into a particular culture, it's not much of a melting pot, particularly when there are visible or racial differences between the two groups.
	And the two major effects that work to civilize the savage heart of men in particular, work and fatherhood, become harder and harder to maintain.
	The welfare state shields people from the desire or the need to normalize themselves to get a job, and the welfare state also keeps people in a state of poverty to the point where having kids becomes more vulnerable.
	That's particularly true for the French domestic residents, native Mont-French, but a little less true, of course, for the immigrants who have a very high rate of reproduction.
	Now, this fundamentally comes down to freedom of expression.
	The tabloid or the magazine in question had published some satirical attacks upon all the major religions and had recently published a satirical attack upon Islam depicting the prophet and they had been firebombed and the editor had an armed policeman escort him all over the place.
	This question of freedom of expression, this question of the right to write things or publish things that are provocative to other people is foundational to the West but is relatively recent.
	In the 18th century, after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, this is when it became possible to write or say things that offended other people without necessarily being thrown in jail.
	This is after centuries of religious warfare across Europe after the breakup of Christendom that was fomented by Martin Luther.
	Everyone got their hands on the locally transcribed or transcribed into the local vernacular, where it's formerly been held in Latin, the Bible.
	And everybody began to interpret the Bible in different ways across Europe, thus resulting in everyone trying to gain control of the state and use it to impose their view of Christianity on everyone else.
	And you had the Anabaptists and the Lutherans and the Swingalians and the Calvinists and the Catholics.
	Everybody was.
	And the Protestants were all at war.
	After a few centuries of this, Europeans got tired of barely being able to walk through a forest without seeing a heretic hanging from every tree, and they began to enshrine in the local constitutions, in the laws, separation of church and state, and the right to freedom of expression.
	And this goes back to John Milton's Ariopagitica, which is an argument that the best way to get the best ideas is to let all ideas into the marketplace and have them duke it out.
	That is the best way to do it.
	Or as Voltaire said, I disagree with everything that you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.
	This, one of the most noble achievements in human history, was fought for and died for and slaughtered for by the millions and millions of people.
	It is a concept and a legal standing or a legal statute that seems fairly peculiar to the West and that is Really, what is under attack here?
	Do I have the right to say things that are offensive to other people?
	Well, when you think about it, of course, all human progress starts, particularly moral progress, starts with something that is offensive to other people.
	If you look at the emancipation of women, offensive to a vast majority of people.
	If you look at abolitionism or the end of slavery or In the mid-19th century in the South, only 2% of people believed in it, and it was highly offensive to other people.
	If you look at what Socrates was talking about, he was offensive enough to other people in that Miletus in the court of Athens brought charges against him that he was corrupting the young and failing to believe in the gods of the city, which was offensive, and he was forced to drink his own death through hemlock as a result of the democratic actions of the Athenian citizens.
	So if we don't want to be offended, we simply say or admit that we don't want progress.
	Offense and progress.
	The creative disruption of the free market, where that which is established today is overturned tomorrow.
	The creative destruction of the Stalwart moving forward of human reason and human progress is inevitable, but only results from our capacity to withstand being offended.
	If you look at progress in the sciences or in the arts, that which is new is always considered offensive or upsetting to a lot of people in the old world.
	A paradigm.
	If you look at cubism and if you look at some of the nonsense poetry that came out of the 20s and 30s and Dadaism and so on, these were highly offensive to people of older sensibilities.
	So if we say we don't want to be offended, we say, A, that...
	We wish progress to stop, and we also say that we have no good rebuttals to those who are offending us.
	Of course, if people say that two and two make five, there's no reason to get offended.
	You simply correct them in a rational and calm way.
	In the realm of science, people from different religions can co-mingle no problem because there's an objective methodology For resolving disputes.
	It's the scientific method, testability, reproducibility, the presence of a null hypothesis or a way of disproving the thesis.
	So when you have rational objective beliefs or at least a rational and objective methodology, different cultures, groups and religions can mix in professional manners.
	It's impossible to imagine a group of mathematicians bursting in to somebody with an opposing theory's office and shooting everyone up because they don't need to.
	They have An objective methodology for resolving disputes.
	In the mathematical field, in the field of physics and biology and so on.
	So, where there are rational disciplines, there is human accord, which is why, as the man who runs the biggest philosophy show on the web, I consistently try to put forward a rational methodology because it's the only way to oppose these kinds of brutalities.
	We really have the choice between irrational beliefs and peace.
	There's really not much in between, save an eroding wall of compromise that barely keeps out.
	The swords of the extremists.
	Extremists being those who more closely adhere to irrational doctrines.
	So, I hope that it's a bit of a wake-up call that the edifice of the West, the edifices of freedom of expression, freedom of association, property rights, free trade, and so on, all of the unbelievably bitterly and hard-won victories of Western civilization,
	which I believe is just civilization, are under attack and under assault and not just by obviously radical Islamists if these are the people who perpetrated these attacks, it seems to be the case, but also from within, from academia, from Marxists, from leftists, from fundamentalists of every religious stripe and hue.
	We need to stand tall.
	We need to uphold and maintain the values of freedom, peace, reason, negotiation, free association, Freedom from religion as well as freedom of religion and, most importantly, freedom of self-expression.
	Freedom to cry our barbaric or civilized jobs from the top of the mountaintop and have people evaluate what we say based upon the reason and evidence behind our thinking.
	Anything less is a surrender to rank barbarism, a light that would go out in the world that may never, ever be relighted.
	Thank you so much for watching.

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