Aug. 21, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:34:28
3054 Is Netflix Making You Violent? - Call In Show - August 19th, 2015
Call 1: Do you think we contribute or are complicit in violence or the initiation of force when we consume media with violent content - such as i.e. watching an episode of Netflix Daredevil or a similar show which is itself incredibly violent?Call 2: For an atheist you use a lot of religious phrases and allusions: i.e. "wages of sin are death", "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", "original sin" itself, etc. Can you make the descriptions and arguments for Universally Preferable Behavior and the Non-Aggression Principle without using the religious terms and references?Call 3: An really inspiring update from the caller on ‘Surviving The Horrific Violence In South Africa’ video and the July 26th, 2015 show about how his life has changed since appearing on the show.
I feel like I'm trapped in a Tennessee Williams play out here.
Lordy, it's so hot.
I'm going to faint and clutch at my pearls.
And hope you're having a wonderful time.
Hope it's not quite the heat wave.
Here in Canada, you complain that it's too cold or it's too hot.
You know, for a nation of such extreme temperature, it seems to have produced quite a lot of moderates in the political sphere.
And for those of you who are complaining that I'm not talking enough about Canadian politics, I understand it.
I get it.
I really do.
But until Canada coughs up a Donald Trump, I'm telling you, it's hard to stay motivated.
Because we have this fairly realistic simulacrum of a human being up here named Stephen...
Oh, sorry.
Wake up.
Stephen Harper.
And we have this dewy-eyed socialist breed, Justin Trudeau.
And we have a bunch of Albertans out there who ran out of oil money and now have elected a socialist because, you see, you've always got to be subsidized by something.
And if it isn't oil prices, it's got to be socialism and the unborn credit scores of the future.
But...
I'm sorry, there aren't enough radical proposals going on in Canada, and the conservatives aren't really conservative, and the liberals aren't really that liberal, and the population is generally complacent.
We don't have the case-styled panic that is going on in the United States.
I'm not saying we don't need it.
I'm just saying we don't have it as yet.
And when we do, people begin to freak out about the mathematical unsustainability of the existing model.
Well, uh...
And one last thing.
Oh, just...
Well, let me just ask you, Steph, real quick before you get to your last thing.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
I'm walking downstairs, so don't ask me about Canadian politics.
Crash, bang!
Well, they haven't coughed up a Donald Trump yet, but would you settle for a Canadian political bowel movement?
That's the important question I have to ask.
I would actually be interested in a Canadian politician who did Inuit throat singing as his speeches.
And if you don't know what that is, look it up and allow yourself to bask in the qualities of different cultures.
Inuit throat singing is something that...
I think it's Inuit or native.
When I was in theatre school, the first week, which I thought was going to be really cool, the first week we did...
And, yeah, one of them was like this weird thing where guys in a bar were ignoring Inuit throat singing right behind them.
And that was my first exposure to it.
And it really is...
I mean, let's put it this way.
It makes Chinese opera sound like Bohemian Rhapsody.
So, make of that what you will.
But...
What was the other thing?
Damn it, Mike!
I had something I wanted to get off my chest.
Oh, yeah!
So, it's interesting to me how...
You know, because we put out a video about Bernie Saunders.
Saunders.
And...
It seems to have elicited some...
I don't know.
Have we had more downvotes?
Maybe when we talk about Hitler.
Yeah, okay.
So we brought the Nazis out.
And I think any video that either doesn't talk about A, Hitler, or B, any shred of female responsibility for the state of the world, that is...
We've really got the most downvotes.
And I guess I'm feeling the burn.
And people are like, oh, suck it, Molyneux.
It's like...
No, A, unless it's a popsicle because it's 9 million degrees here, and B, I love it.
It's great.
I mean, how wonderful for people to be exposed to ideas that they virulently dislike.
I mean, I have to suffer through that every time I read the mainstream media, and that's part of my job, so I think it's wonderful, the people having exposure to stuff.
But the one thing I will say is everyone's like, hey, man...
Why can't we just have what Scandinavia has and Scandinavian countries have and Germany has and this and that and the other?
It's like, well, everybody picks the most socialist policies of these European countries and then assumes that if people implement those same socialist policies in the U.S., you get exactly the same thing.
But there's a lot of heavy free market stuff that goes on in Europe, and nobody ever says, well, that's what's making them so successful.
It's always like the most socialist policy you can conceivably imagine, like Denmark is doing very well, and they offer free education, So if we have free education, we'll do really well as well.
And nobody ever says, well, I think in Denmark it is where you get a school voucher and you can choose your own school.
Nobody ever says, well, school vouchers are the characteristics of the Denmark system, so if we have school vouchers and let people choose...
Like, nobody ever does that on the left.
They simply look at a country that's remotely successful in any way, shape, or form, and then they say, the most socialist policies that that country has is the ones we should adopt to be as successful as they are.
And I don't know.
You know, the thing...
Here's the analogy, you know.
Well, Steph seems like a pretty happy guy.
So if I recover from cancer, I'll be really happy.
Pass me some stogies.
I mean, it's just not the way a rational thinker works.
You look at critically.
Like, so for instance, Sweden has a lower...
A corporate tax rate than America does.
Do people say, well, Sweden has a lower corporate tax rate, so as a socialist, I must support a lower corporate tax rate.
It's like, no.
You just look at the...
Sweden is doing well despite its socialist policies, not because of.
And if you adopt those socialist policies, you're taking everything which prevents Sweden from growing even further and faster.
Not to mention cultural homogeneity, right?
I mean, a lot of these are Denmark, Sweden, and a lot of these countries, up until very recently, I mean, you couldn't, you know, ride down on a bicycle without seeing 10 billion blonde and blue-eyed people staring at you if you had even slightly a tan or, you know, less than 3 billion freckles.
And so, people don't say, well, you see, cultural homogeneity is what makes those Scandinavian countries so successful, so we should have cultural...
Like, nobody says that.
So, I just want to point out, I don't have a final proof for all of this, but that's seriously cherry-picking, which is to say, there's some policy I want enacted in America...
Some country that's doing quite well has enacted said policy, and therefore we need to enact said policy here.
That is just completely ridiculous.
You may have heard this in the YouTube comments from time to time, Steph, but shockingly, correlation is not causation.
I know.
This is a surprise.
What?
Yeah!
Shocking.
I remember that sitcom growing up, Correlation Street.
Okay, there's a couple of groans from the British audience.
Nobody knows what the hell else I was talking about.
And it's not a sitcom.
Nothing in England is a sitcom because it's raining all the time.
Alright, enough of that.
Let's get to the callers.
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So thanks so much for your support.
And thanks to those, of course, who enjoyed Mike Stoyan and I chatting about Donald Trump.
I mean, I appreciate people enjoying that format.
And it certainly is nice to have conversations in.
And I hope people like hearing like people who really like and respect each other chatting about things that they may agree or disagree with in a sort of convivial and positive way.
I really have always enjoyed those chats.
So I'm glad that you guys are as well.
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I'm too lazy to research this.
The previous two are two of the most popular shows we've done in the last couple months as far as views and downloads in total.
So if people still like it, let us know and we'll keep doing more of them.
Hang on, Mike.
I think I hear a distant chant from the listeners.
Less staff.
See, that's why I book Peter Schiff, because you don't even get a word in edgewise when Peter's on.
Peter, if you could inhale for a moment.
You're like Dizzy Gillespie with the infinite trumpet blast.
It's like, do you actually bring air in through osmosis or something like that?
I mean, I love Peter, but, you know, it's great to find somebody who can give me a chat for the money.
So, yeah, that's cool.
All right, let's move on with the callers.
Who's on first?
Alright, well, first is Evan, and you're talking about sitcoms, and Evan's got a question that makes us want to hate Netflix, potentially.
What?
Hold on, hold on.
Don't take away my crack.
Don't make me read a book.
Do you think we contribute or are complicit in violence or the initiation of force when we consume media with violent content, i.e.
watching an episode of Netflix's Daredevil, a show that is in and of itself incredibly violent?
I don't know if you've seen that one yet, Steph.
I've seen Daredevil.
I quite liked it, actually.
Is it incredibly violent?
Kind of cartoony violent, not like walking dead, you know, watching zombies head explode violent.
It's not like Grey's Anatomy is very violent in terms of, but it's incredibly explicit in that the injuries there just make you go...
I can't look at that stuff.
If someone's like injecting a needle or cutting something, oh man, it just...
That old David Spain joke, I can't masturbate to the surgery channel.
Or can I? Welcome to the show.
I have an interesting question.
Hi.
When I say Daredevil is violent, it's violent in comparison with other shows like it, like Flash or Arrow on the CW. Yeah, they have violent actions, but you don't see Oliver Queen bloodied up, where you will see Matt Murdock receive various bruises, deep cuts, and gashes.
It's, um, it actually, like, I, like, here's an example.
I would let, if I had a 10-year-old son, I would let him watch Arrow.
If I had a 10-year-old son, I would not let him watch Daredevil.
Arrow?
Arrow.
A-R-R-O-W, is that right?
Yes, it's based on the Green Arrow, the Green Arrow comics that are published by DC. Did somebody who's green...
Don't.
Don't.
I don't know.
I'm nauseous and I find this offensive.
What about the green people?
What I think happened was they wanted to get away from some of the more comic book-y elements of the show in the first season.
Then they started to introduce that when CW greenlit a Flash show and they realized their audience was responding to making it more like what's published in the Green Arrow comics.
And I think now they're trying to move towards that, but I think they're still stuck with the name Arrow.
Although, at the end of the third season, we will find that Oliver Queen will no longer call himself the Arrow, so now we have a situation where the title doesn't make any sense now.
I just spoiled it for everyone that was listening.
Now he's moved up.
I am the crossbow.
Soon, I will be the javelin.
After that, the pistol.
Right, okay.
Now, hang on just a sec.
I'd like to back up because...
Mike seemed to have...
He found my joke arrowing.
Now, Mike seemed to have quite a visceral response to me starting to make jokes about comic book characters.
Mike, is there anything you'd like to share that you need to get off your chest?
I mean, I'm not a big comic guy, but I'm just imagining all the people that are really big into comic books, which, you know, there's quite a few in our audience, I imagine, just, like, cringing as the green arrow jokes come a-flowing, but it's okay stuff.
Yeah.
Come on, Mike.
Is there anything more fun than endless, pointless edits to the show?
Come on.
I'm so glad there's nobody in the studio to slap me.
It's so great when I can do this.
Truth be told, you could have supplanted Netflix Daredevil with pretty much any other show that has violence in it.
In my question, like Breaking Bad, Homeland, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I think the principle still stands.
The reason I asked this question was I was watching, there were two videos.
One was by a woman named Bell Hooks.
I don't know if you've ever heard of her.
Bell Hooks?
Yes.
Bell Hooks?
Wait, this isn't like a villain in Arrow or something.
She's very pretty, but she's got hooks.
Oh, she doesn't even have that going for her.
In my personal opinion, she doesn't even have that going for her.
She's most known, I mean, she's cited by Anita Sarkeesian as one of her influences, and I kind of like did some digging around, and I found this video, and she described her watching the pilot episode of the show Empire.
And it's the show with Terence Howard about the African American family who creates this huge music empire, and there's a flashback to Terence Howard interacting with his son, who we later find out in the show is gay, and the son is dressed up in women's clothing, and he throws the kid in a trash can.
And Bell Hooks says, I had such a visual reaction to that, but I'm also disturbed about the people who seem to like it, and they don't seem to realize that they're complicit in violence and homophobia.
And I think to myself, okay, if you just don't...
That's her words, not mine.
And then there was another video, there's the PBS... No, no, no, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Don't pile me on with examples, because then we lose them all.
I'm not saying I agree with her, by the way.
No, no, no, I get that, I get that.
Well, first of all, no white person is allowed to talk about homophobia in the black community.
That's so important.
You cannot talk about how in California the black community violently or viciously or largely resisted Prop 13 and legalization of gay marriage, I think it was.
She is herself African American.
Okay, still.
So she can talk about it, but you and I can't.
Unless we put on heavy rap accents, which himself would be offensive to green people.
So that's just something you never hear anything about that in the mainstream media.
Because you see, blacks are victims always and forever.
And therefore, like in the mainstream media, I don't think comes in real life.
So that's interesting that she's talking about homophobia in the black community, which is...
This is obviously a different black community, and I'm trying to say they're all the same, but in South Africa, there are conversion rates to attempt to deprogram lesbians into being non-lesbians, right, to make them straight and so on.
It's really quite horrendous.
And some of the African countries have passed laws against significant, punishable, even, yea, verily, one was proposed under death, laws against homosexuality, but...
I don't know.
It's always white males at fault.
So, that's sort of one aspect.
The second is, I assume that this was not presented in a massively sympathetic way.
I don't watch Empire, so I'm going to assume not.
Right, right.
I mean, throwing someone into a trash can is hard to portray that in a positive way, unless it's like some arch-villain with hooks for hands or something.
So, the fact that...
I've seen...
They're commercials or public service announcements about battered women, and they show a woman with a bruise and a menacing guy's shadow.
My God, they're complicit in the violence against women.
Because they're showing it?
That doesn't mean that you're complicit in it.
Yeah, I know.
It's nonsensical.
And then what other people on sort of her leftist social critic bent will also say is, like Mike Rudeke made this point in his video about how to create responsible social criticism.
The example he showed was an episode of The Sopranos where Tony Soprano beats up a man who owes him money.
And he's like, we're not critiquing that happening.
We're reproducing it, and therefore we normalize it.
And I think to myself, well, I'm pretty sure James Gandolfini is not a moonlighting mobster.
And at the same time, by that same standard, if we, in the Battle of Hoth scene in Empire Strikes Back, do we then normalize people fighting with laser guns and giant mechanical camels?
So it's like, it doesn't make it...
I don't understand what their point is, and I'm wondering if you think that there's any kind of connection between Violence in the fictional world and bleeding over and possibly causing violence in the reality world.
Well, I think that it's a very tough case to make statistically because for the obvious reason that violence is declining as consumption of violent media is increasing.
And, you know, the great unspoken reality It's turned a little bit around in America, which for reasons we've talked about relatively recently, but the great unspoken truth in America is that violent crime in general as a whole, using very widespread statistics, has gone down a quarter to a third or whatever over the past couple of decades.
So I don't think that people are consuming less.
I mean, if you compare the television shows that are available to kids and teenagers now as compared to the shows that were available when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, there weren't no walking dead when I was a kid.
It just wasn't around.
And so it's a very, very tough case to make.
And that is something that's, you know, that's really the first thing people need to say is they need to say, if violent media consumption has something to do with violence, then when violent media consumption has increased, why has violence decreased?
That is a big challenge.
And I also would like to add a sort of subcategory to that question.
Why don't we hear stories about the people who perform in violent media not going out and committing crimes?
Like, I was in a production of And Then There Were None about two years ago.
I played the judge who we later find out at the end is a serial killer.
I've never had the urge to go out and murder people just for the sake of it.
So I think that's the other question.
These people I've never seen raised and I've never seen answers.
Why don't the people who go out and perform violent acts I don't think Uma Thurmer took a samurai store to 88 people in real life or after she was done filming Kill Bill.
I'm just concerned what their point is and why in the face of so much evidence they just simply are like, maybe this is just my own naivety, but why?
Hang on, sorry.
Again, we're just a stream of issues and I just want to be able to pick them apart a little bit at a time.
So, first of all, if people are worried about exposure to violent media, talk to me about the Bible.
Like, holy God, on a stick of fire!
I mean, talking about the Bible in terms of ultra-violent literature, ultra-violent media, the Bible is, I think, without par The most violent book that has ever been put down on paper.
I mean, you literally have the genocide of the entire human race, except for Noah and his family and all that.
You have rapes, selling into slavery, selling of children into sexual slavery.
You have endless amounts of murder.
You have wars.
You have the slaughtering of entire villages, the mass raping of women, of towns that you conquer, and the murder of all men over the age of 12.
It literally goes on and on.
If people are concerned about violence in the media...
Well, the first place they need to look is the Bible.
Has she ever done a show about that?
Bell Hooks?
Again, I've just recently become familiar with her.
She does believe that the women and people of color need to be exposed to other religious figures other than white Jesus, as she put it.
Okay, so the answer is no.
Also, I assume that this is portrayed relatively negatively.
In the show Empire.
But you see, in the Bible, the highest moral being says that homosexuals should be killed.
So if there was a highly influential media figure that millions and millions of people believed was real, and was the ultimate authority, and was ordering them to stone to death adulterers, to kill atheists, to beat moneylenders with whips, and to kill homosexuals and all that...
Well then, I think the incitement of violence would have a pretty strong case to make.
But fictional characters putting one child into a garbage can portrayed in a negative way, compared to the Bible with its ultimate divine commandment to murder, to kill homosexuals, again...
It's got nothing to do with actual concern about the media or actual concern about fictional stories and their effects on people because, again, then you'd be focusing on the Bible.
The purpose of it is quite simple.
The purpose of it is simply to put people at odds with that which gives them pleasure.
That's the oldest con in the book.
Make you ashamed of your sex drives.
Ooh, do you want to masturbate?
You bad!
Ooh, do you enjoy violent video games?
You're bad.
Ooh, do you enjoy movies that have violence in them?
Ooh, that's bad.
Ooh, do you enjoy this video game?
That means you're participating in the oppression of women.
Ooh, you're bad.
All your preferences, all your likes, everything that makes you happy, everything that gives you contentment, everything that excites you is bad.
Bad.
Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
It's this finger-wagging, you know, cold-eyed kindergarten teacher from hell ice queen that is just designed to put you at odds with stuff that is fun.
Look, violent video games are fun.
I've played violent video games.
I've played non-violent video games.
And they're fun.
I don't, you know, do I have any particular preference?
Well, you know, I've invested a lot into the Twitch responses for first-person shooters, so I'm a little drawn to those.
And not a lot of those are throwing ping-pong balls at Barney the dinosaur.
And so, that's sort of where I'm drawn to.
Again, I haven't played them in a while since I became a dad.
It's really not been part of my schedule.
But, no, it's just making people feel bad.
Making people feel bad about that which gives them pleasure.
It's like the oldest con in the world.
And, you know, you're somehow participating in bad things for having fun.
I mean, anybody who doesn't see that that's the basic principle of religion is just not looking carefully at all, right?
Oh, do you enjoy this?
Oh, that's bad.
Do you like that food?
That's gluttony.
You want more?
That's great.
That's a sin too.
Sex?
Ooh, no, no.
No, that's bad.
Are you looking at another woman with lust in your eyes because you are a human being?
Ooh, bad.
No, no, that's exactly the same as adultery and so evil.
What it's designed to do is designed to get you to war with yourself.
So that you don't actually question the powers that be.
When you set people against themselves, you take away their spines and they become little worry warts looking at their own little impulses and trying to figure out how every impulse they have is bad.
And you set themselves against themselves.
And then what they don't do is they don't question the way society works.
They don't question the powers that be because they're too busy rooting around in their own little demonology trying to figure out how bad they are for drawing another goddamn breath.
And socialists are the new priests.
I'm telling you, there's nothing more you need to know about the left than that socialists are the new priests.
And so the moment that people on the left, whether it's Anita Sarkeesian or Bella Hook, I mean, the moment that they make you feel bad for things that you enjoy that are non-initiations of force, you know, I mean, if she's a black woman, then What you do, I mean, if you're responsible, right, if you're not just a demagogue, what you do is you say, oh, well, you know, let's see where violence is most concentrated in America.
Oh, it's in the black community.
All right.
How was violence in the black community before there was this media?
Well, it was pretty high.
How's violence in the black community now?
Well, it's pretty high.
And let's look at root causes of violence, particularly among young men.
Oh, look, there we go.
Single motherhood.
Huh.
I don't think that what happens is you watch The Walking Dead and a woman gets knocked up miraculously.
I don't think that's the fucking cause and effect that we're talking about here.
Oh look, I'm playing Call of Duty and I accidentally shot a sperm through the wall into my sleeping neighbor.
And she got pregnant without a father around.
You know, the fact that you've got someone lined up in your crosshairs On a video game does not result in the immaculate conception and unmarried births of kids to the women around you.
You could say, if you wanted to, like if you wanted to bitch at the media, which is a fine thing to do, I do it as well.
But what you could say, which would be much more rational and useful, and therefore almost nobody does it, is you could say, any media which glorifies single motherhood or doesn't roundly condemn it, It's incredibly destructive to society and produces a lot of violence in the world.
Because by glorifying single motherhood and by portraying single mothers as victims and brave noble souls struggling to overcome adversity that has nothing to do with where they happen to position their stilettos one Saturday night, that is incredibly destructive because it makes women feel that single motherhood is a viable option.
And a single motherhood, of course, as I've talked about many times in this show before, is viciously selfish as a whole.
Because...
A single motherhood is very bad for children and so what you should do if you get pregnant outside of a committed relationship is you should give your child up for adoption because adopted children do about as well as children born into two-parent households as long as they're adopted by a dual-parent household and so by keeping your children with you, you are harming them.
You are selfishly pursuing your preferences and harming your children's outcomes.
And so the media, which portrays casual sex, which portrays the hookup culture, which denigrates men, which denigrates marriage, that is the stuff that is producing violence in society because it is putting forward the single mother culture, which is producing violence and failure and drug addiction and promiscuity and aggression and criminality and all of that in society.
But you see, that would be to criticize women.
And we don't do that.
Because, you see, women, although women have been clamoring for equality, lo, these many years, still remain these semi-Victorian, fragile figurines of infinite Delicate tensions and fragility and can't be ever granted full moral responsibility because, you see, a lot of people understand why they want all the benefits of equality without the responsibilities of equality.
So the idea of criticizing women for violence in society and criticizing the media that pandas to these women's fantasies that being a single mother is a fine old thing for those kids, no problem.
She's great.
She's noble.
She's heroic.
She's struggling.
She's doing the best she can.
She's just, you know, let's just go give her, give her old sister a help.
And particularly in the black community, right?
So you trace violence back to its statistically most significant cause, which is single motherhood.
And then you would examine the degree to which the media supports and enables and praises single motherhood.
And the degree to which it denigrates men.
And the degree to which it keeps the dysfunctions of the children of single mothers hidden from society.
I mean, have you ever seen a movie where the single mother's kids are hellish?
I guess the movie Parenthood from way back.
But the single mother's kids are hellish.
And the...
The married parents' kids are not.
And the single mother is like a narcissistic bitch and the married mom is nice and helpful, right?
Now, this is not to characterize all single mothers that way or all married women that way.
Of course not.
But there are definite trends which support that as a reasonably viable thesis and something which could be put with some credibility on the screen or in a book.
But of course, if you do that, As Dan Quayle found out when he criticized Murphy Brown, the sitcom character from the 90s who decided to have a child on her own, criticized that and said that's really bad.
Now, of course, what, 20-odd years later, people are saying, oh, I guess he was right.
You know, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his report on the black family in the 1960s was roundly condemned as a racist.
And 20 or 30 years later, when it's far too late to do anything about it, everyone says, oh, I guess he was right.
So, that would be where, you know, but see, if you criticize violent video games, and you criticize the consumption of violent media, who are you criticizing?
Why, you're criticizing men!
Ooh, what a brave radical you are!
Ooh, criticizing men!
Wow, you're really living on the danger zone, baby!
You, oh my god, what an incredibly brave thing to do to criticize men because that's never happened before.
Nobody's been piling on men, particularly white men, for the last, say, 50 or 60 years.
Ooh, wow, it's great that there's no lineup to criticize white men, you brave, noble hero of absolutely radical egalitarianism.
Ah, you try criticizing single moms or put female responsibility front and center and see what happens.
That's where the courageous people are these days.
So I just find this complaining about the habits of men, it's like, oh, how boring, how ridiculous, how conservative in a weird way, if that makes any sense.
To answer a question you had for me previously, I've not seen that in a movie, but I actually did see that in a TV show where the single mom was portrayed as a narcissistic entitled...
Can I curse on your show?
Hmm.
Bitch.
And it was called Secret Life of the American Teenager, and it was with Shailene Woodley, and even she came out and said that the values of the show, some of the things that they had her character do was nonsensical, and she's like this spoiled, entitled bitch who expects everything to be handed to her, and is just part of this whole bunch of dysfunctional people that run around screwing up their lives and the lives of others.
How about a single mom show where the single mom's boyfriend is actually kind of a nice guy, but she's so horrible she drives him off?
Actually, that actually did happen in Secret Life.
Cool.
So there's one.
Fantastic.
But for the most part, of course, I'm thinking of the movie Parenthood.
It's an old movie with Steve Martin and Rick Moranis and other people like that.
A very young Keanu Reeves.
And...
You know, you need a license to own a dog.
You need a license to drive a car.
But any butt-wielding asshole can be a parent.
Great lines in that movie.
But of course, the single mom, Diane Weiss, I think, plays the single mom.
And, you know, she's heroic and she's noble, a little hysterical and so on.
But it's the dad who's the jerk.
But to be fair, her son is...
Deeply dysfunctional and incredibly dark and enjoys masturbating to basically rape and snuff films.
And he's a really dark character in the show.
But of course he gets all better because Keanu Reeves idiotically tells him that there's nothing wrong with masturbation.
And then he's fine because that's how you cure symptoms like that, of course.
But it's just very rare.
And it is just one of these eye-rolling cliches.
It's the old statement, if you want to know who rules over you, look at you, you're not allowed to criticize.
That's how you know that male privilege or white male privilege is just nonsense.
Because piling on the white male pleasure factories is just boring.
I think this is partly, incoherently though, I think this is partly what people are responding to in the Anita Sarkeesian stuff.
It's that if you're really worried about About negative stereotypes of women or imprinting negative stereotypes of women, then you really need to be talking about single mothers.
No, I don't know.
I don't know much about her as a person.
In terms of negative stereotypes of women and damage to women's credibility in the eyes of men, does one video game have much impact or is the fact that 73% of blacks and close to 40% of whites these days are growing up without a father.
In other words, they have a mother who's so irresponsible that she can't even find or choose a decent man or keep a decent man.
So she should be saying, well, you know, here's the problem.
But you see, the problem is not women behaving badly.
The problem is that men like video games.
And it's so unbelievably blind.
I mean, and it's so unbelievably blind, they don't even know that they're blind to it.
Like, I bet you...
I mean, if you ever talk to one of these activists and say, okay, so you think that media is having some sort of negative impact on boys' perceptions of women, do you know that the average middle-class mother hits her child and hits her boys even more than she hits her girls?
I mean, that would be like if a man beat up his wife...
A man beat up his wife, or hit his wife.
Let's just say hit.
A man hits his wife, and his wife is depressed.
And we say, you know, I'm really concerned that the wife is reading Jane Austen novels.
And that's why she's depressed.
You know, we really should take We really got to take these Jane Austen novels away from this woman because they're giving her such an unrealistic view of marriage and giving her a negative view of men because there's a lot of cats, a lot of guys who are not very trustworthy in those novels.
So here, you poor bruised victim, I'm going to take away the one thing that's giving you some pleasure in this world and then you're going to all be better because you see those Jane Austen novels are really giving you a negative view of men.
If you tried saying that, Every feminist in the world would go completely insane, and rightly so, and would say, are you kidding me?
She's getting hit by her husband a thousand times a year, and your concern is somehow a female writer is contributing to her negative view of men?
And how about if all of her friends or 80% of her friends are also getting hit a thousand times a year by their husbands and she's surrounded in a culture where that's praised and normal and considered healthy and defended and perfectly legal.
They'd say, I think you're completely missing the boat.
You're taking away one of the few solaces and fun things that she has and saying that her husband hitting her a thousand times a year and all of her friends' husbands, or at least 80% of her friends' husbands hitting them a thousand times a year, that that is not important.
It's not even worth mentioning in terms of how she might have a negative view of men, but the only thing is the media she's consuming, the books that she's reading.
That's the only problem.
I mean, again, when we put it in that context, can you just see how completely mental where we live?
Oh, absolutely.
So, when people start talking about female violence and female sexual irresponsibility, and I don't mean that that's the only cause of female violence at all.
I mean, but this is, I mean, and people, this is how defensive people are, because I see these comments a lot.
Which is that, oh, well, what about the guys?
It's like, for Christ's sake, we've just spent about the last 5,000 years talking about the violence of men.
Can we just take a break and focus on women?
You know, maybe just for a year or two.
Just a.0002% of the time, let's just focus on the ladies, right?
Equality of opportunity.
Okay.
Equality of opportunity for moral criticism.
Let's include that.
But as people say, well, it takes two to tango.
What about the men?
Well...
Like for the women who get pregnant and have the kids.
What about the men?
It's like, come on.
Well, I went over this last show.
I won't go over it again.
But it's sort of like, to me, if everyone said that drunk driving was really great and you should really try and drink as many shots of tequila before getting behind the wheel as you can possibly stand...
And it was all considered wonderful, and you were never allowed to criticize drunk driving.
And I said, well, you know, We've really got to start talking about drunk driving here, and people were like, oh yeah, so you're saying, even if it were true that drunk driving contributes to accidents, there'd still be accidents without drunk driving, man.
It's like, well yeah, but there'd be fewer, and it really matters.
And it's the same thing with female responsibility in this era.
So yeah, in their largely incoherent way, I've circled around the issues of Gamergate, and I'm scarcely an expert on it, but my guess would be, just off the cuff and without any detailed research, A lot of men, of course, are raised with single moms.
And that has a much more negative impact on their view of women than anything that could possibly occur in the media.
And also a lot of men, boys, when they're boys, they're raised with a lot of being hit a lot by their mothers and by maybe other women.
And that is going to have a huge amount more to do with a negative view of women than anything on their Computer.
So, that would be my response to that.
Mike, you got a bit of research on Empire?
Yeah, would you want to read it or shall I take a swing?
No, go for it.
Alright, this is from an article.
For openly gay African-American Empire creator Lee Daniels, he revealed that he and Jussie Smollett, who plays Jamal Leon on the hit series, have both received death threats as a result of the ongoing storyline regarding homophobia.
Daniels and Smollett are both renowned figures in the LGBT community and have been praised for infusing the issue of homophobia within the black community into the storyline.
As for the idea of a little boy dressed in his mother's clothing being heaved into a trash can, Daniels fetched back to his own experiences growing up with a father who tossed him into a trash can after seeing him walk down the steps in his mother's red heels.
All the while plaguing him with hateful slurs and the idea that he would, quote, The two-time Academy Award-winning director also cited other reasons for the plot surrounding homophobia, such as the black community's bigoted attitudes towards homosexuals and closeted men who fear harassment and ridicule.
Despite the death threats, Daniels said that he would continue to address the issue of homophobia in his work until it is resolved.
That's a positive thing to see, this being addressed in what is a mainly black show.
But it's not nice to see the death threats coming from the black community because of this.
We had a very brave young black gay man on this show talking about how difficult it was in the black community.
He was gay and an atheist, and he said it's very, very tough in that community to be gay.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I consider this progress.
I think that's a good thing.
But, yeah, the death threats.
Yikes.
Yikes.
I might have to check this one out.
Is that enough?
Can we move on to the next call?
I say this to the listener, of course, because it's your question.
I just think it just shows how ignorant Bell Hooks really is when she has no idea why that scene was even included, because it sounds exactly like...
The scene that Mr.
Daniels described sounds completely how Bell Hooks described the scene that she had such a negative reaction to.
And also, I think it speaks to profound weakness of these people that they can be so affected by things that aren't real.
Yeah, and have you ever heard homophobia...
Is it applied to, say, black people's fear and hostility towards lesbians?
I haven't really heard that, to be honest.
No, of course not.
When people say sexism, they mean white males.
When people say homophobia, they mean white males.
Yeah, because white males are about the least homophobic group in the known universe.
And we can see that just by looking around countries that are largely run by white males are far more friendly to lesbians and gays and bisexuals and transgendered people than any other countries, any other cultures.
So white males are by far the most tolerant and the most positive.
And yet whenever you hear about homophobia, it's only and forever to do with my white males.
This is just part of the general horrifying anti-white male prejudice that goes on in society as a whole.
When people say racism, as I pointed out in a show, are they talking about black people's racism towards Hispanics?
No.
They're only and forever talking about white males' racism.
And so I just really sort of wanted to point out that homophobia is just code for anti-white male, and racism is code for anti-white male, and sexism is code for anti-white male.
And again, it's really hard to see this, and it's hard for the people who even use these terms to see this.
You kind of have to be a self-aware white male to see everything that's going on.
So to me, this is just part of the same thing.
I've also heard no stories about Jennifer Lopez getting death threats for having a black lesbian on her show.
So you can see that in action.
So if white males were as hot as Jennifer Lopez, we'd be fine.
I think that's what you're saying.
I don't know.
Challenge accepted.
Yes.
Oh dear.
Alright.
Well, thanks, man.
Great set of questions.
I get to just when I was saying the last thing about white males, I recognize that these are threats against the black male director.
So I just really want to be clear.
I'm not trying to appropriate and I applaud him for what he's doing.
I'm not certainly trying to appropriate the hostility that he's facing and trying to make it about a white male thing.
But just in general, homophobia is you didn't see a lot of articles when the blacks in California opposed gay marriage saying talking about rampant homophobia in the in the black community.
Unless, of course, people were going to say that rampant homophobia in the black community could be blamed on white racism.
Because then if somehow white white males in particular are responsible, it's OK for black people to have a vice if white males are somehow responsible, which, again, is incredibly racist towards blacks.
You know, when you say these people can be nasty and jerks and horrible and monstrous.
You're actually showing them the same respect that everyone shows to white males.
So I am an all-for-one and one-for-all kind of guy.
Whenever you say this group of people are always victims, you strip their moral responsibility, and it's really dehumanizing to them.
All right, let's move on, if that's all right.
Up next is John.
John wrote in and said, For an atheist, you sure do use a lot of religious phrases and allusions, i.e.
wages of sin are death.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Sin itself, etc.
I'm not criticizing your atheism.
Not only would that be stupid and wrong, but it would also be contrary to my question.
Can you make the descriptions and arguments for universally preferable behavior in the non-aggression principle without using the religious terms and references?
I've seen a few of your videos in which you discuss the concept of evil as being no religion required, and although I agree with that premise, I find myself wanting for better descriptions and arguments, but I can live with it so far.
I'm rather poor at debate myself, and I'm looking for better arguments, and falling back on religious descriptions just feels weak to me.
All right, John, are you there?
Yeah, I am.
So, let me explain a little bit about my situation so you understand where I'm coming from, and that is, the people that I am having discussions, these philosophical discussions with, where your ideas come up, They know that I am a follower of the teachings of the Rabbi Jesus Christ.
This puts me at a distinct disadvantage because...
Was he a rabbi?
Really?
Well, let's see.
He was Jewish and a holy man.
I thought the rabbi was a bit more formal, wasn't he?
I thought the rabbi was a bit more formal.
Not that I'm aware of, at least not 4,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago or however you're counting your calendars.
I think you can just look at the calendar and get the number of years ago, but okay, okay.
I think that in emergencies you can promote a rabbi, but I thought it was a bit more formal.
But anyway, it doesn't really hugely matter.
Okay, so you're a Christian.
That's the lump I get plugged into, and so every time I use...
Wait, wait, wait, no, hang on, hang on.
I haven't plugged you into any lump.
Just tell me what your beliefs are, because if you're not a Christian, I don't want to refer to it.
So let me put it this way.
I look to the ancient text for the ancient wisdom within the context of the ancient time.
I recognize that the Bible is ancient Hollywood.
Okay?
It's got all your stories in there.
It's got your children's stories.
It's got your cute and cuddly.
It's got your war stories.
It's got your love stories.
It's got your outright porn.
It's, you know, it's Hollywood.
But there's some wisdom in there to go strain out and then some reasons that was put in place to spread this wisdom.
And so that's what I'm looking for.
When I look at it, but because I do spend a lot of time with my nose in the Bible, I get placed into being called what is a Christian, which I used to believe I was, but given what I've seen recently, I don't.
I ain't that, given the behaviors and some of the crazy things I've seen people saying.
So that's where I am, and it's because of this understanding that I have in looking to this ancient text that any time I bring up a religious reference or a biblical reference, it's suddenly that's just your religion and the argument's invalidated.
Even though things like killing people who aren't a direct and immediate threat to your person or your family is a bad thing can be accepted.
You say, thou shalt not murder.
Oh, that's just your religion.
That can't be right.
It's wrong because that's your religion.
This is what I run into.
Right.
Okay.
And have you read...
I just listened to it again in preparation for this.
Oh, and I just listened to your fisking of Donald Trump's plan as well, and I like it.
Well, I appreciate that.
So, were there religious terms in the book that you found objectionable?
Okay, let's start with the concept of sin itself, you know, which sin means to miss, right?
As in, you know, you miss the target when you're throwing a spear or shooting an arrow, at least in the ancient Greek.
But the idea that if you Do not behave in a way that is conducive to the great spirit of whatever form it is, then something bad is going to happen to you.
Mike, can you just, sorry to interrupt, I don't remember, I could of course, it's been years since I wrote it, but I don't remember using the word sin in any fundamental way in UPB. Could you just put up the book and just have a quick search?
I don't remember using the word sin in there, but I'm certainly happy to be corrected if I'm incorrect about that.
It just stuck out to me there as being this concept where you do something wrong or you're incorrect about something and then bad things happen.
If I go and kill your dog, you're not going to be really happy with me over that and you're likely to do something bad to me.
I wrongfully took the life of your dog.
This would be a sin, but if I put it in terms of a biblical...
Well, no, but see, that's not the violence that people have to deal with in the world, right?
I mean, very few people.
I remember Erin Pizzi on this show was talking about how people hurt her dog when they disagreed with her political stances.
But most people don't have to worry about their pets being murdered by someone or pets being killed by someone.
The violence that people have to deal with is the violence that everyone thinks is good, right?
Like spanking and taxation.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Pet death is, you know, we're in the middle of a plague and the plague is not the violence that people all know is wrong and how to rationally delineate that which everybody knows is wrong.
That's like having a massive and expensive anti-smoking campaign among 16th century Inuit who've never even heard of tobacco, right?
I mean, this is not what people are dealing with in terms of their issues.
The problem that we have in the world is the evils that people think are good.
And that is the big challenge.
So if you want to start talking about taxation or spanking, not the only two, but the two that I think are most important in many ways, then that is, I think, where we would begin the discussion around ethics.
Okay, then that is just fine.
And we get back to this idea that killing somebody who is not an immediate threat to you is bad.
This is, you know, throughout the religious text.
Yeah, but bad, sorry, but bad is not a philosophical word, right?
People try and stick some negative adjective to a behavior and think that they've achieved something philosophical.
Or they try to stick a...
The totalitarian commandment, like thou shalt not kill or burn in hell kind of stuff, these are not philosophical exercises.
The mere attaching of a pejorative to a behavior or the mere attaching of a punishment to a behavior is not a philosophical argument.
Otherwise, when someone swats a puppy with a newspaper, they're engaged in a Socratic dialogue, which they're not.
It's just attaching negative consequences or negative language to a behavior is not a philosophical exercise.
Yes, I agree with that, but I'm also talking with people who will take that and say, well, this religion says that that is a quote-unquote bad thing, and observing your discussion of putting a value on it.
Sorry, sorry.
There's no religion that I know of that...
case against murder.
In fact, most of the religions that I know of have at their center gods who murder regularly.
And so there's no possibility that you can have a religious system that condemns murder when the most high moral being in that religious system is a serial killer.
What of seeing that conflict, though, between it is the wrong lesson you're trying to learn.
You know, because there's two places.
There's multiple places, actually, within the text where, you know, you have the Supreme being being a serial killer, and And yet saying, you know, thou shalt not murder or kill or however your translation.
There's a conflict there, but maybe that's not the lessons you're supposed to be learning.
No, there's no conflict there at all in terms of the political purpose of religion.
I'm not disagreeing with that.
The political purpose of religion is to make the slaves dance in happiness, right?
At being slaves.
And the political purpose of religion is to make the slaves not attack each other because that ruins the value of the slaves to the slave owner.
So make the slaves not attack each other.
Thou shalt not kill each other because you cost about a Volvo for me and I don't want Volvos involved in robot cage matches and scratching up their paint or maybe breaking their axles.
So the purpose of religion in general...
Hang on, let me finish.
Let me finish.
The purpose of religion in general is to convince the slaves neither to attack each other nor to attack the masters.
And the way that it does it is, of course, it creates hysterical punishments, which creates conformity, and then the scar tissue of conformity is self-righteousness.
Because when people are forced to conform to a brutal power...
The only way they can live with themselves and their subjugation is to take a perverse pride in their subjugation, which is why the meek are so often praised and self-praised in religion.
So you make sure that the slaves don't murder each other, and you make sure that the slaves never think of rising up against the slave owner or the slave master.
Those are the two central purposes.
And the third is to make sure that the slaves never imagine...
That the moral rules imposed by the rulers ever apply to the rulers.
By making it a blasphemy to actually believe that a moral rule is universal when it is claimed to be universal.
Which is why so few people, even raised in a religious environment, why so few people say, well, if murder is evil, how is God, the greatest murderer in the Bible, possibly not evil?
Because you have to sort of completely detach yourself and say the rulers can do whatever the hell they want.
The rulers can violate their own moral rules at will and still be perfectly virtuous.
Therefore, it is not universal.
Or they can designate who needs to be murdered.
They can designate for you who needs to be murdered as well.
Absolutely.
And the fourth part is to make sure that the slaves will kill whoever you tell them to.
And you do that by having endless stories, as you say, of God hiring hitmen, God's hiring hitmen in order to perform the murders that are advantageous to those in power, and that trains people to become good soldiers and kill whoever the rulers point at.
So the idea that there's any fundamental moral exercise in religion, no, it is merely a fantastic way to get people to relish and worship their subjugation to violent secular power.
And that is the religious standpoint, and that is the religious teaching that I actually—that's why I distinguish myself from being a Christian, because that's not the lesson I learn.
I learn that exactly what we see as being used over and over again In the Bible of the rulers themselves either directly and deliberately deciding who is going to be killed or giving it up to the mob and telling the mob who it is that they're going to kill and sending them after them,
just as we see today as in the courts going after some bakers that decide they don't want to bake a cake for somebody for some purposeful belief of their own.
And so the Lord will come after them, or as we see in the case as happening in Ferguson most definitely, as you've been noting recently, or as happened in Baltimore, they send the lynch mob out or the riot squad out to go off and create these horrible events as well.
And this has been predicted and shown to us over and over again in the text.
This is what I'm talking about.
with learning the wrong lesson is that we see this over and over again where the uninformed and the aggrieved are pitted against some group, whatever group, be it a weak group,
a strong group, a rich group, a poor group, a group just trying to get by and they are spotted out as the bad people and therefore they need to be attacked and so the Lords and masters,
either directly or indirectly, will send out—will either come after the bad guys and stoke up the fires and say, these are bad guys because they have too much, they took too much, they earned too much, they speak too much, they have too nice of teeth, their hair is too nice, whatever the reason is— They send them out.
And this is the type of lesson that I'm looking at.
Not that the supreme being is a massive genocidal maniac, but the fact that these mobs keep coming back over and over again, believing themselves to be righteous because they're stoked up by who?
The priests or stoked up by the popular ones or the powerful or the merchant class or whichever class group it happens to be.
They get stoked up And sent out after them.
So that's an example of the types of things that I'm saying.
Maybe we're learning the wrong lesson.
There's some things that are universal in here.
And so that's what I'm after.
No, if they're in religion, they're not universal.
Because it's based upon irrationality, which is subjectivism.
I used the word sin once in the entire book, Universally Preferable Behavior, which people can get for free at freedomainradio.com slash free.
I recommend the audiobook.
I don't read fast.
But the audiobook goes really great.
So this is the quote.
I write, Children do not have to be bullied into eating candy or playing tag or understanding that two plus two is four.
The human mind does not require the truth be inflicted through terror, boredom, insults, and repetition.
A child does not have to be taught that a toy is real by telling him that he is damned to hell for eternity if he does not believe that the toy is real.
A child does not have to be bullied into believing that chocolate tastes good by being told that his taste buds are damned by original sin.
So I don't use the term sin other than in its religious context in terms of criticism.
I just wanted to be clear about that because you were talking about how There was a religious context to the book.
Yeah, there was a couple of other discussions that I had heard you bringing that up in as well.
No, that's the only time.
Mike just did a search.
That's the only time.
He's got the text, right?
So that's the only time.
I'm not trying to catch you out or anything.
I just really want to be clear that I don't think the term sin to justify anything in the book because that wouldn't make any sense to me.
Well, see, that's what caught me up.
It was a different discussion you were having that had come up more frequently.
But it's the idea that we're learning perhaps the wrong lessons and we're arguing over the wrong points.
I'm sorry, I don't really know what we're talking about.
So I'll give you a very brief sort of ABC of UPB, so to speak, about how I can argue for this.
So first of all, It's the universality that is important.
Ethics must be universal.
Otherwise, there's no way to differentiate an ethical statement, which must apply to all people at all times.
There's no way to differentiate that from a statement of preference.
I like the color blue.
I like Mozart.
These are not universal preferences.
And so the proof for all of this is in the book, so I'm not expecting to...
So if you have a proposition, if you have a theory that you claim is universal, it must be universal.
That's sort of an Aristotelian A is A thing.
If I claim something is universal, then it must be universal.
So if I have a scientific theory that claims this is how matter will universally behave, then it must be true everywhere at all times and under all circumstances.
Otherwise, it is no longer universal.
It can no longer be called universal, right?
So if I claim that a theory is universal, then it must be universal.
Now, if I say I have a theory that murder is universally preferable behavior, not that everyone will prefer it at all times and in all circumstances, But it is universally preferable behavior for everyone to murder all at the same time, then the theory fails because it cannot be universally implemented.
It's sort of like if I have a theory which says that if I let go of a rock at the North Pole, it must fall up and down at the same time.
If that is my theory, we do not have to go to the North Pole and test it because what I propose is a contradiction, a rock falling up and down at the same time.
If I have a theory of navigation which says that to sail from Auckland to Vancouver, you must sail north, south, and east and west at the same time, which is a physically impossible thing to do, then we do not have to do anything further, but simply point out the inherent self-contradiction of the hypothesis or the proposition and say that this is false.
So in the same way, if I say that murder...
The initiation of a killing action against somebody else's will.
If I say that murder is universally preferable behavior, and it turns out that even in two people within the same room, murder cannot be achieved as a universally preferable behavior, then we do not need to do anything further other than reject the thesis.
And so if we have Bob and Doug in a room And we say to them both, murder is universally preferable, then they must both prefer to kill each other and be killed at the same time.
But unfortunately, if somebody prefers to be killed, it is no longer murder.
In the same way that if I offer you something to take from me, if I say, here, I bought you a cup of coffee, here you go, it's free, And then you take it from me, I cannot call that theft because I wish for you to have the cup of coffee.
On the other hand, if you come and grab my cup of coffee against my will, that is theft.
And so you have oppositional states for two people in the same room if murder or theft or assault or rape is universally preferable because all of those behaviors are desired by one party, murder, theft, rape, and assault.
They are desired by one party And specifically opposed by the other party.
The example I've used before is that if I take an old fridge of mine, forget the fridge, it's dangerous.
I have an old couch, let's say, and I put it on my front lawn and I say, free for the taking.
I can't call the cops and say someone stole my couch from my front lawn because I've clearly said that I don't want it and other people can have it and it's not theft because I want them to take it from me.
In fact, if they don't, it's a bummer because then I've got to drive to the dump or something, right?
And so if you have universally preferable behavior, then it must be preferable by all people at the same time under the same circumstances.
But murder, theft, rape, and assault in particular are actions that one person prefers, because if one person doesn't prefer it, it will never happen, and one person must oppose it, right?
Because if...
If I do not oppose someone stealing from me then it's not stealing.
In other words if the person stealing from me thinks that stealing is wonderful and I also want them to steal from me because I think that stealing is wonderful then it's not stealing because I want them to take my property.
So if two people simultaneously wanting stealing to be the most wonderful thing evaporates the very concept of stealing, then we have a self-contradictory proposition, wherein the universality of the proposition cannot possibly be achieved because it requires opposing states of mind, and therefore it cannot be universally preferred.
So that's a very brief, and I know it's a bit of a tongue twister and a bit of a brain twister, but if somebody says...
My universally preferable behavior is theft.
Everybody should steal at all times, in all circumstances, in all situations.
It's impossible to achieve, even for two people in a room.
Therefore, it cannot be universalized.
However, if I do say people should respect each other's property rights, well, two people in the same room at the same time can both respect each other's property rights.
And so, respect for property, respect for the sanctity of life, Those universals can be achieved by all people at all times and therefore there's no innate self-contradiction to the proposition that respect for property is universally preferable behavior.
The non-initiation of violence.
Two people, believe it or not, despite what happened at Bobby Houston's funeral, two people In the same room at the same time can absolutely not assault each other at the same time.
They can both sit there reading books and not assaulting each other, and therefore the non-initiation of force can be universalized.
It doesn't mean that everybody's going to do it.
It just means that the theory can be universalized, whereas the initiation of the use of force against somebody else's will cannot be universalized because one person has to not want it And the other person has to want it, and therefore it can't be universally preferable for both people or for all people.
So that's, again, I'm not saying that that's immediately going to make everything crystal clear, but that's the genesis, so a general outline.
Oh, genesis!
Damn it, I used another.
Oh, wait, I'm referring to the Bible.
We'll drop that one for now.
So that's the general idea.
I get that.
That is entirely what you have gone over just there.
I get completely...
What I have a problem with is with people that say that their own beliefs of, I want this, therefore I should have it, and therefore you should want me to have it as well.
They don't view it as theft.
They don't see it as theft.
They see it as, yes, it is universally preferable because I want it and you should want me to want it.
No, then it's not universal.
No, this is the mentality I'm dealing with.
No, then don't deal with it.
Just tell them they're wrong.
And if they don't accept something as obvious as being wrong, the principle is not, I want, you give.
The principle is, if it's going to be universal, it's going to be, everyone should give everyone else exactly what the other person wants.
In which case, if I have $5 and you want it, then you say, well, you have to give me everything that you want.
Everything that I want, you have to conform to.
Therefore, give me the $5.
And then I say, well, I don't want to give you the $5, and so you shouldn't be asking me for it.
Because so then we stymied and we end up, right?
We can't both get what we want, and therefore, you know, it's not universal.
And I don't know, I mean, why bother keeping dealing with people like that?
I mean, if they can't understand that, it's not complicated.
Well, I don't have much choice.
They're the people I work with.
So, you know, I'm trying to...
Sure you have a choice.
What do you mean?
Are you cursed to discuss philosophy with idiots?
I mean, were you, like, bad?
Were you one of the people who voted to kill Socrates in a past life?
I mean, what punishment are you undergoing here?
It might very well be that I was one of them that voted to kill Socrates in a previous life because I keep running across these people that say, well, no, I want this done.
No, no, no, no.
Don't give me this passive talk being running across people.
Deciding to engage with people in a philosophical conversation is a choice, right?
Absolutely.
And I keep trying to bring this up.
And I keep tripping over myself with coming across, and it's probably more my fault than yours.
Okay, well why don't we give a role play?
Why don't we do a role play?
You be one of these dunderheads that you're trying to have a conversation with, and I'll be you.
Or I'll be me.
That's a little easier, right?
I don't have the rotund vowel noises that you have, but a lovely voice.
So, you be the dunderhead, and I'll say...
I've got that problem, too.
Let's see.
I come up with the idea that, you know, killing unborn children is a really bad choice, and But, and then I'll come back with, but God determined that they weren't supposed to be living, so therefore they can, you know, we decide that they're not supposed to be.
Wait, you can't stop me off on abortion, because, I mean, that's, like, we haven't discussed any of that, right?
So let's just go with, because all the other examples you gave before were like murder and stuff, right?
So let's go with that.
Okay.
So...
This guy is not looking at my wife or my daughter well.
You know, what am I supposed to do?
You know, protect her.
Is he a bad guy?
Is he a bad guy who's looking at your daughter badly?
I don't know.
I don't know.
And I see somebody...
Wait, hang on, hang on.
Are you saying that you don't know the difference between a good guy and a bad guy?
You have no way of identifying it?
I'm not allowed to.
See, this is a problem.
I can't judge them by their character.
I can't judge them by their dress.
I can't judge them by their behavior.
Hang on.
Why can't you judge them?
I understand.
Well, these are the people I'm dealing with.
What do they mean they say they can't judge?
Is it a sin?
Judge not lest you be judged?
Oh, but I can't whip that one out.
Okay, so why can't they judge?
Because they're just another person.
They're just somebody...
Hang on.
What if someone has a giant swastika tattooed on their forehead?
Is it possible to judge this person as, say, not Ben Shapiro?
Well, it's possible, but as it happens, one of my...
Let's see.
What is it?
He's my god-brother has a swastika tattooed on his forehead.
And he's actually not a bad guy.
But they bring this up and say, well, you can't tell because he's got his pants hanging down low and doesn't bother to shower.
And he's got some funny dialect there and you can't really axe him much.
Wait, are they talking about a black person?
Actually, no.
They're talking about a white guy.
Okay, I'm just wondering.
This is the Thomas Sowell idea that the cracker culture comes from Wales and the south of Scotland.
Exactly.
This is the type of thing that I'm running into.
I'm saying, you know, no, I'm not going to let my daughter go out with that person because I see some telltale signs and I get jumped on because they're saying, oh, you're looking at, you know, just the stereotypes and this.
And just like you did, I'll get asked, well, was he black?
And, you know, I don't have any issues with my daughter.
You've probably seen my photo.
I'm as pasty white as a Clorox bottle.
I don't have a problem with my daughter dating a black guy.
I don't have my daughter dating another girl.
I don't, as long as they have some level of standard.
As soon as I start bringing things up like this, it's like, well, you're just judging them.
Oh, that's your religion because you've got this bias.
No, no.
This is as simple as low-IQ people not wanting you to cock-block their gene pool.
Yeah, but I'm not dealing with low-wit IQ people.
I'm dealing with computer engineers.
Okay?
I'm in the computer industry.
Wait, hang on a sec.
Computer engineers who say that there's no possible way to judge the quality of a mate of your daughter.
Yeah, pretty much.
At least not by appearance and behavior.
Now, to be honest, I have pink hair.
I dye my hair pink because I like it.
Why do you like dyeing your hair pink?
Because I like the color.
And it looks better in gray on me.
Have you not heard of pink shirts or something?
Unlike you, I still can grow hair, so I'm going to grow hair while I can.
I just don't understand.
Why would you dye your hair pink?
You can't even see your hair.
I love the color.
It adds some color.
And you know what?
It catches people off guard.
Why do you want to catch people off guard?
Because that makes them think certain things about me when they're completely dead wrong.
And I love watching the expression on their face when my behavior and my conversation contradicts what they believe in my view, my appearance.
You know, to be kind of frank with you, it sounds like a bit of a power trip.
Like, haha, I fooled you, you know?
Oh, sure.
Why not?
Oh, come on, Steph.
Come on.
You'd do it if you could.
You just love to watch people.
You're a people watcher, aren't you?
I'm not sure why we're talking about me.
We're talking about you.
I'm trying to understand still why you want to have pink hair and screw with people's heads.
Well, because that just shows people that, you know, you can't really judge a book by its cover.
I went to SakuraCon as Princess Peach last year, just for the fun of it.
But that's another thing.
But yes, just to throw people off from...
Why do you want to throw people off, though?
I don't understand.
Just throw them off from their stereotypes.
But why?
Because they're going to look at something.
It's fun.
Just to watch them.
No, I get that it's fun.
Why is it fun?
Golly.
To see people stereotype shattered.
To see people not able to cope with a situation that they have prepped themselves for.
But why don't you look normal and have...
Really original and radical thoughts, wouldn't that also equally blow people's...
Like, when people meet me, I mean, I'm a nice, middle-class, middle-aged-looking guy, no tattoos, no...
I'm an anarchist.
Now, that blows people's minds, but I don't know how putting forward a very unusual appearance, while having really unusual ideas, you know, I'm suggesting you up your game.
Look completely normal and have radical thoughts.
I think that would blow people's stereotypes a lot more.
Oh, I hate that look.
Oh, it's disgusting.
It's terrible.
My look is disgusting?
No, no.
You said that look, and I was just describing my look.
I'm not offended.
I'm just curious what you mean.
No, no.
It's not what I want to appear as.
You said it's horrible.
It's disgusting.
Yes, it is.
It's horrible and disgusting to look blah.
Okay, so my look is horrible and disgusting.
I'm not trying to be confrontational.
I'm not sure if you know exactly how you come across to people.
I'm not offended either.
I mean, I'm fine with it.
I don't really care about my look.
I don't think about it.
Okay, I've been listening to like 50 hours of your discussions for the past two weeks.
So, yeah, you're fine with who you are.
You are who you are.
And I am who I am.
But I look at a lot of just, especially suits, but you don't wear a suit.
I get that.
You don't wear a suit.
You change your look up every now and then and you accept the fact that you can't grow hair so you adapt to how you think you want to appear and you adapt to how you expect society is going to want you to appear.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that.
Wait, hang on.
I conform to how I think society wants me to appear?
I'm not sure I fully understand that.
Sure.
Do you think I wake up and say, well, I'd really like to dye my beard pink, but that's not what society expects of me, and therefore I won't?
No, no, no.
You get up and you say, oh, how am I going to look today?
Am I going to be scraggly today?
Am I going to...
Go through the grooming standards that are expected of me.
Depending on your situation.
I do the same thing myself.
I get up in the shower when I have to go to work, even though I might not necessarily want to, but that's pretty much what's expected.
When I have the opportunity to go outside what's normally expected, yeah, I'll go outside what's normally expected.
I'll add a little color, I'll add a little flare here, And I'll have people expect something out of me that's not going to come out of me.
And that's the way I do that.
Alright.
But I don't get up every morning and say, how am I going to mess with somebody today?
Although some days I do.
Some days I do.
Alright.
Okay.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your call.
I think we've gone over the UPB stuff, and I appreciate your call.
Thanks for taking my call.
Thanks, man.
All right.
Bye.
And thanks, everyone, of course, so much for listening on this fine evening of Wednesdayness, 19th of August, 2015.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate to help this show continue to grow and survive and thrive and live.
So have yourself a wonderful, wonderful night, everyone.
We will talk to you soon.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, everyone.
We're not done yet.
Earlier this week, we did an update call with Peter, who was on the show about a month ago, talking about the violence in South Africa where he currently lives, and I want to play that for you here.
So, hope you enjoy it.
Here's the update from Peter, and have a great day.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
So we have Peter, a listener who called in recently.
You can check out the show numbers 3034.
Peter is currently, though not for long, residing in South Africa.
And of course, Peter called in and was talking about some of the...
Not so great aspects of living in South Africa.
And we talked quite a bit about that.
And of course, Peter said, be nice to get out.
And we're just going to sort of circle back and follow up.
You know, we have these great calls with people.
And oftentimes people are saying, and then what happened?
And so now in this situation, we can actually circle back and check it out.
So, Peter, nice to chat with you again.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you for having me again.
So what's the story?
What's been going down since our last conversation?
Well, I got into contact with a couple of callers who gave Michael some information that could potentially help me out.
One guy specifically, Charles, he is currently teaching in China and he set me up with an interview with a company there and they contacted me and Basically, I set up an interview date, which was this Monday that passed.
After they interviewed me, then I would probably say all hell broke loose.
They said, okay, we want you to come over as soon as possible.
Between working 12-hour shifts this whole week, I had very little sleep trying to get everything organized.
Basically, I was just going to the embassy and filling out forms after forms after forms.
It's actually quite amazing how everything just kept falling into place.
As if it's predestined to be like that.
I'm very tired and very little sleep, about four hours a day trying to get everything done.
I feel amazing.
I'm very, very excited.
Well, and just for those who haven't listened to that show, of course, I mean, you may notice that I, who live in Canada, have a slightly better tan than Peter, who lives in the sun-drenched capital of the planet.
And I wonder if you could mention to those, of course, most people won't have heard the show if we had a conversation, some of what is giving you the impetus to leave and perhaps see a little bit of the outside world from where you are.
Basically, the reason why I want to get out of the country is basically just horrific risk of pretty much being killed.
On the previous show I mentioned how often I get involved with scenarios where people get killed and After a while, you just get pretty much fed up with having to look over your shoulder every two seconds.
It's literally like that.
It's not something that I want To live like for the rest of my life.
You know, I'm single and I'm single for a specific reason.
You know, I just cannot think of having a family inside Having children and things just carrying on the way they are.
I'm just not willing to do that.
We're not supposed to live that way.
I want to move to a place that's much more relatively safe.
Yeah, we were just doing some research on South Africa, and certain places in Johannesburg have a murder rate of 600 per 100,000 people.
That's 12 times more than even some of the worst ghettos in the United States.
And I think you were mentioning in the show that people basically live in cages.
You have bars on the window, you've got razor wire and broken glass in the fortifications around your home, that it is in many ways like living in a war zone.
Absolutely.
I remember many years ago as a child when things were much safer.
You were able to go and play in the streets and parents didn't really worry about you as long as you came back just before dark.
It was never a problem, but you cannot do that today.
Unless you fancy getting killed or kidnapped or whatever.
Your children have to grow up behind bars basically.
That's no way to live.
Peter, you mentioned something before everything came together with the referral in the China interview about driving on the road and almost hitting someone, some really scary situation.
I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, that's happened more than once.
It happened many times to me where, you know, you'd go, you know, travel about 60 kilometers an hour.
That's the speed limit in the city.
I'm not quite sure what the conversion ratio is to miles.
But, you know, the thing is, even at that speed, if you...
Come across an intersection and some drunk idiot just decides he's not stopping for the red light.
Bear in mind that he's not obeying the speed limit either.
The thing is you run a great risk of getting killed.
It's not just cars.
If you've got an 18-wheeler deciding, nah, he doesn't feel like stopping.
What chance do you have against that guy?
That has happened many times to me and it's just like I'm getting so fed up about it.
You start developing anxiety issues.
I hate being on the road.
It's just not a fun experience.
Even people who live in different towns, we have got a thing that we call the Into Hell Run.
So basically it just means that we've got our freeway and when you travel to work, you're doing a hell run.
Because basically what will happen, you know, you get angry protesters.
They would stand on top of a bridge.
You'd be traveling at the speeds that you would travel on the freeway.
And you can imagine what happens when they start throwing bricks.
They don't care if you've got a nine-month-old baby in the car, because it's your fault because of their poverty and whatever else.
They just throw debris into the freeway and basically I mean, you don't see it, you hear it, you have to pull over because you've got a puncture, and, you know, you get robbed and killed.
One of the police officers recently died.
You know, he pulled over and got stabbed to death.
So, I mean, that's the type of living conditions that we live in.
And what are your friends?
Is it sort of slowly diminishing as people try their best to get out?
Or what is it?
I think you mentioned the last show, it's pretty hard to get out at times.
Yes, for some people that are more financially well-off, it's easier.
Obviously, I know there's a lot of German people that live here as well.
So, I mean, if they've got a German nationality, it's much easier for them to get out of the country.
But for people less fortunate like myself, you don't have the finances to just say, hey, let's go.
It's very, very difficult and I feel for those people that are in similar situations that I'm in as well.
And how long till you leave?
I think it's about 14-15 days.
Just about two weeks.
Well, and just for those who don't know, listeners have donated to help get Peter airlifted out of the country and get him to a more peaceful and secure location.
So we certainly want to thank everyone who's chipped into that.
If you'd like to help out with that, you can go to freedomainradio.com slash donate.
I don't know, you can put in Save Peter in the donation line.
But I really, really appreciate, of course, everyone who's chipped in to help him because...
It's a terrifying situation.
Now, I visited South Africa twice in my life, once when I was a little kid and then when I was 16, both times for a couple of months at a time.
It's one of the great tragedies of the world that often the better the climate, the worse the politics, the more beautiful the scenery, the more hellish the...
The political environment sometimes.
And it is a shame.
But I'm incredibly happy that you're able to get out.
There's nothing like climbing over the mountain of paperwork it takes sometimes to get out of a country.
And is there anything else you want to add before we wish you your very best?
Well, basically, I just want to say thank you very much for everyone that was involved in helping me.
It was just jaw-dropping, the amount of support that I got from everyone.
So I just want to say thank you, thank you very much for everybody, everybody's advice, their financial contributions.
They contributed to this whole thing.
And, you know, I just want to say specifically thank you also to Charles that set me up with the job.
And, you know, last but not least, thank you to you, Stefan, and Michael.
I couldn't have done it without you guys.
I really, really appreciate it.
I know you guys are not very religious or anything, but I just want to say, you know, God bless you guys.
I just want to say thank you to God for everything that he's done.
Well, we hugely appreciate the sentiment.
And if you're in China, I know it's a big place, but if you're in China and you want to help Peter get acclimatized, if you have expert, expat opinions and perspectives to provide to him, please email Michael, operations at freedomainradio.com, and we'll forward contact information on to Peter, so he's not a big-nosed foreign person in a strange land, because that's what I was referred to when I was in China.
But we will do our best to get you some contacts and some people that you can hang out with, because obviously it can be a bit of a challenge going to a new country, a new culture, and so on.
But, man, we are thrilled.
Oh, I just, I'm blown away that you called into the show on July 26th, now the end of August, and You're going to be moving out of South Africa.
You can call it in, like, how do I continue to exist living in South Africa?
And, you know, that's a pretty quick turnaround for getting out of there.
So thanks to everyone who, you know, emailed in great suggestions and ideas for Peter.
And, yeah, I'm absolutely thrilled.
I couldn't be more delighted that something like this came out of the show.
So wish you well in your new occupation, Peter.
And I can't wait to hear how things go in China.
Yeah, keep us posted, Peter.
And, you know, very, very happy journeys.
Just looking at your webcam here, I can see, obviously, that the thing you're most going to miss about South Africa is those wonderful curtains.
The beauty of those curtains that really look like they've been stripped off an abandoned 68 Volkswagen.
But maybe you can pack them and bring them with you and see the glory of artisan culture from South Africa brought finally to China.
But we're completely thrilled.
You know, this is what's great too, is that when we get listeners calling in who are complaining about their lives and what can I do, we'll just point them to this and say, so this guy, you know, when he got an opportunity to get something positive going in his life, he grabbed it and slept four hours a night just to get...
Where he wanted to get to next in life.
So you are a great example, I think, to listeners about get up and go and get things done with your life that make your life better.
So yeah, we're thrilled.
Keep in touch.
Let us know how it's going and we'll certainly forward everything to you that we can that will help you acclimatize to hopefully what will be your know-how.
