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April 12, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:58
4054 War In Syria: What You Need To Know!
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Some thoughts on the incipient war that is brewing around Syria at the moment.
First of all, as we can well understand, and nothing of course has been learned since the point of all of the prior conflicts was not to learn anything but rather to kill people and make money, nothing has been learned from the disasters in Libya and the disasters in Iraq and the disasters in Afghanistan and so on, which is There is no post-war plan.
There is no plan for improvement.
There is only a plan for destruction and money-making.
That's really the military industrial complex is akin to an eternal vampire forever feasting on the youth in particular.
So what is the plan? There's no group in Syria that has any affinity to Western-style classical liberalism, small government, free markets, separation of church and state, for heaven's sakes.
I mean, Syria is one of the few places where there is some separation of church and state and some protection for Christians in the region.
Maybe that's the point as well. But there's no post-war plan.
And the thing is, too, that the West now has lost its capacity to motivate and inspire people.
It's like the fact... Trainer snorting Twinkies up his nose.
I mean, it's just not something that's going to motivate people.
I mean, what, do they want Syria to become some Western-style democracy with massive gender conflicts, political correctness, tearing apart the culture-massive Ideological wars, huge intergenerational deaths, collapsing birth rates, endless third world immigration, radical feminism, destructive family courts, the end of the family, single motherhood running rampant.
Is that how we're supposed to inspire people around the world to be like us?
We've forgotten what freedom is like in our own countries.
The idea that we can bring it to other countries is...
It would be laughable if it wasn't so horrifyingly tragic.
Now... The anti-war movement is nowhere to be seen.
First of all, of course, the left says that Trump is crazy and militaristic and a warmonger and a madman, and now they're like, yeah, sure, go, go to war.
Why? Well, the left was never anti-war.
They were anti-individualism and pro-collectivism.
They were anti-freedom and pro-socialism and particularly pro-communism.
They were never against nuclear weapons.
They were against the West using nuclear weapons so that they could be bullied and pushed around by the communist world into surrendering their freedoms.
The left was never an anti-war movement.
They were anti-Republican, anti-free market, anti-individualism, anti-small government.
They used this quote anti-war movement To disarm small government advocates and to cripple the remnants of capitalism, to disarm individualism in the face of collectivism.
In other words, they used war for ideological purposes, and this is why they had no problems and in fact defended and advocated Russia when Russia was the Soviet Union, when it was communist, and now that it's largely Christian, largely nationalistic, and of course largely white, they hate it with a burning passion.
The burning passion of a thousand suns that may in fact bring a thousand suns.
Now, Paul Ryan has just announced his plans to leave Congress, not going to seek re-election.
I don't know, maybe this has something to do with the war.
Congress is supposed to authorize war, and the whole point of that, of course, is you don't want an imperial Julius Caesar-style presidency where the president can just walk around declaring war on a whim.
You need debate.
You need deliberations.
You need the examination of evidence.
The act of war is the most serious and, it seems, constant action that governments can get into.
America has been at war for 93% of its...
History, so that's a lot.
So I wonder, it seems weird that Paul Ryan would leave Congress or contemplate leaving Congress during an international war crisis.
I mean, doesn't he want to stay so that Congress can review, deliberate, examine the evidence and approve any military action?
Oh, no, sorry, I guess there's a congressional bypass or a constitutional bypass which says, oh no, Donald Trump can just declare war in a tweet.
So, never mind.
The idea that you go bomb people because a dictator is doing bad things means that you, of course, will never end up running out of places to bomb.
That's the entire point.
The fact that women and children are harmed by a dictatorship, the logic is insane.
First of all, Saudi Arabia and Saudi-led coalitions have bombed and slaughtered and murdered women and children in Yemen for years.
Do they get the full Assad treatment?
No! Quite the contrary.
The US sells hundreds of billions of dollars worth of high-tech weaponry to Saudi Arabia.
So, that's the reward you get for killing women and children.
If you're Saudi Arabia, the US will consider you an ally of some kind and will sell hundreds of billions of dollars of high-tech weaponry.
And that's all confirmed.
But you see, if there are unconfirmed reports of chemical weapons use in Syria, the previous two were completely false.
The response is to attack and slaughter.
This is not even close to rational.
Good heavens, I mean, the United States considers Turkey an ally, and Erdogan has disappeared countless numbers of people during his reign.
Just over the past few years.
Ooh, performing horrible actions against your own people.
Makes no sense. But this, let me give you sort of a big picture landscape of American politics.
This is not just American politics, but it shows up more vividly, at least at the moment, in America.
So, you got the Republicans and you got the Democrats.
Now, the Democrats...
The Republicans want the welfare state and immigration in order to get votes.
They can't make a case.
The Republicans want their military industrial complex in order to Make money.
Spill blood. Make money.
Now, the Republicans say that they oppose the welfare state and illegal immigration in particular, but they're willing to give the Democrats those two tools to maintain power as long as the Democrats are willing to give and leave alone the Republican war machine.
That's the deal. They both say they disapprove of the other's foundational tactic for maintaining power, but they don't.
It's kind of mutually assured destruction.
Like, okay, well, the Democrats basically say to the Republicans, if you genuinely go after...
The welfare state, we're gonna go after the warfare state and neither of us will be left in power.
So like two people up to their mustaches in gasoline, neither of them want to light, let alone throw a match.
And both the warfare and the welfare state feed off the ghost currency of the Federal Reserve because that way you get to pay for things with imaginary money and you don't have to send a direct immediate bill to the people which Drugs them.
It robs them of their capacity or willingness to get involved in politics and fight that which they cannot control.
So, that's really, really important to understand.
One of the reasons why all of this is happening.
And, I mean, just a quick survey over the last seven years.
I won't go into details, but anytime the U.S. attacks a country, there are two things of certain.
One, the provoking incident is a complete lie.
And two, the country poses no direct threat to the United States.
One of the ways in which you know that a country poses no threat to the U.S. is that the U.S. is willing to actually attack it.
And I was worried about this.
I put out a video the other day, but I thought...
A salvation thought came to me.
And I now have peace of mind.
I mean, when you think about it, it is, of course, a massive relief.
To realize that America can't possibly afford to go to war.
I mean, America couldn't even find a couple billion dollars to build a defensive wall along the southern border when the entire population virtually came out to beg for it.
So don't worry.
No wall means no war.
And there is a foundation of reality that needs to occur, needs to understand.
You need to understand. IQ differences between the Middle East and other countries are enormous, up to a standard deviation, 15 points.
So the question is, well, why is the Middle East so influential?
Well, the Middle East is so influential fundamentally because the West developed a giant thirst for oil.
And then the Middle East had the oil at the time.
It was the easiest to access oil.
And so what happened was the West built up all of these companies in the Middle East to get the oil.
And then a lot of the Middle Eastern countries, after the West was exhausted after the Second World War, basically took those companies.
And then, to some degree at least funded by the Middle East, there was a huge environmentalist movement that said no oil drilling in the West.
Now that's recovered a little bit under Trump, but the West as a whole is so hypersensitive.
to environmental drilling concerns that they're funneling trillions of dollars to the Middle East because the Middle East has the resource at the West Need.
So, if you want to get the West out of the Middle East, you have to open up domestic oil drilling.
Now, of course, people will say, well, that's bad for the environment.
I would submit that it's actually better for the environment than, I don't know, say, World War III, because cougars and bears and other predators tend not to thrive when all they have to eat is radioactive human bodies.
So, as far as all of that goes, it's just a big picture ticket item.
I try to give solutions that aren't easy, but will Actually work and of course that makes me a minority now The average IQ in Syria as of just close to a decade ago is 83 83 now this is before a lot of these smarter people bugged out because of the endless civil war So what are we talking about here?
And before that, given the war in Iraq, there would have been some Syrians who would have said, hmm, time to get out.
I would assume that they would tend to be the smarter ones, even though two-thirds of the migrants who arrive in Europe from Syria are illiterate, even in their own language.
So let's just say that the smarter Syrians got out some time ago, which means that the average IQ in Syria is lower, probably quite a bit lower than 83, maybe in the high 70s.
Now that's interesting for a number of reasons.
So, in a California Supreme Court recently, a man with an IQ of 77 was deemed to be exempt from the death penalty because his IQ was so low.
In other words, he could not be punished with the death penalty because his IQ was too low.
And if you start thinking about, whether it's in the low 80s or the high 70s or somewhere in that range, the idea of going to bomb a group.
First of all, they'll never have a Western-style democracy or free market or separation of church and state, even at its height.
Those very concepts, the Enlightenment concepts, the Lockean concepts of limited government and free market, separation of church and state, objective rule of law, these require a high IQ population.
I mean, don't get mad at me. Don't shoot the messenger.
Helmuth Nybrook has done these studies.
You don't get any of these advanced societies, or they tend to collapse when IQ drifts below 90 or a little over 90.
So, I'm sorry.
You're not going to get the kind of countries you dream of.
In these countries, it is simply a function of where the population is.
Whether it's environmental or genetic, it doesn't matter as much in the moment because that's what you have, right?
I mean, let's say that you end up only being five foot two and nobody knows if it was genetics or you just didn't get enough to eat as a child.
It doesn't matter in the moment.
You're still not going to get on the basketball team, right?
So you are attacking a country full of people who, unfortunately, are just not very smart.
And that is a vicious, ugly, Nasty bullying tactic.
To go and bomb people in this IQ range is absolutely horrifying and astonishing.
And, of course, what it means is that there is always supposed to be some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But we punish them and they learn.
Or we get rid of their leadership and there's this massive thirst for Western-style politics and free markets and separation of church.
There's not that there at all.
At all. There are maybe a tiny minority of people who are interested in it because the bell curve is the bell curve.
But it is important.
There's a reason why I talk about this IQ stuff.
Because if you understand it and you accept it as people who are interested in science and math and other objective disciplines should, then you can make intelligent decisions.
If you can't, well, in this particular case, You get war.
And it will dismantle and destroy the country.
And terrible elements will pour in to do their terrible work.
And like Libya was destroyed.
Was Gaddafi a great guy? Absolutely not.
Do the people now being bought and sold like cattle in the open-air slave markets in Libya have their lives improved because Gaddafi was dragged through the streets and sodomized to death with a bayonet under the orders of and support of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?
No. No.
The lives of the people in these countries matter.
And supporting a war with the idea that somehow it's going to magically fix IQ problems is homicidal beyond words.
Truth, science, reality brings empathy.
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