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Sept. 28, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:38
4208 Brett Kavanaugh Testimony: Final Thoughts
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Some additional thoughts have been swirling around in my brain since I watched the Blasey Ford Kavanaugh hearings yesterday.
I will release them out into the world as orphans of reason in the hopes that they find a good home.
The first is quite powerful for me, and it was a very deep realization that Kavanaugh's religious faith not only gave him the strength to do what he did, but also gives him a higher calling or standard to tell Now, I didn't witness anything from Placey Ford regarding religious faith and so on, so the question is, why would you tell the truth?
Well, you may have some abstract sense of ethics, but if there is the all-seeing judge that is going to evaluate you based upon your honesty, then that seems to be a very powerful reason to I think that's often underestimated.
For people who don't know others who have deep religious faith, Christian faith in particular, it's hard to understand just what a bedrock and a guiding principle that Christian faith is, and that seemed important to me.
The fundamental question, of course, is if you don't believe in God, if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, why be good?
You say, well, reciprocal altruism, evolution, and so on.
Yes, but evolution also commands you to seek and gain power over resources in an amoral fashion.
That's the fundamental driver.
That may involve reciprocal altruism from time to time, but it also may involve rampant exploitation from time to time as well.
So, the gathering of...
I mean, just look at the Clintons. Amoral at best have gathered hundreds of millions of dollars of resources over the course of their career.
Not through the most honorable means, I would argue, and Chelsea Clinton does very well, as do the grandchildren.
They will want for nothing. So, if you don't believe in a higher value, if you don't believe in a god, or for me it's philosophy, then why is it that you would fundamentally tell the truth?
You will tell the truth when it gives you immediate advantage, but you will also not tell the truth If that also helps you gather resources, that's what evolution commands.
So that I thought was interesting.
Another thought that I had was Christine Blasey Ford is a well-trained psychologist.
She teaches. She has a PhD.
She has two master's degrees, I believe.
A very, very well-trained psychologist.
So as a well-trained psychologist, there are things that she would have learned about.
One is the unreliability of memory.
The unreliability of Memory is not a photocopy.
Memory is not a documentary.
Memory is an act of emotionally infusing narratives that can either, well, they guide your life, for good or ill, to a better or a worse destination.
And the malleability of memory is a great failing, to some degree, in the human mind.
But it is also a great advantage in that you can rewrite We're good to go.
For those of us who wish to escape the seemingly deterministic paths and train tracks laid out by our history, she would know all about the malleability of memory.
She would also know all about the unbelievable, literally unbelievable, unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
Eyewitness testimony. It's absolutely astonishing.
You can find these little videos that ask you questions, right?
Like I watched one, where...
It's a detective who's trying to solve a murder.
It's like a, I don't know, 30 or 40 second scene.
You watch it. You don't notice anything amiss.
And then when you play it back, you realize there are 23 things that were changed as the camera panned around.
There's a famous one of people watching a basketball.
And then a guy in a gorilla suit walks past.
Very few people even notice it.
And so eyewitness is extraordinarily unreliable.
And she would know all about that.
The other thing as well is that she would know, I assume, that the American Psychological Association has discounted, strenuously discounted the value of lie detectors.
So here we have a woman who knows eyewitness testimony is unreliable.
Particularly when it's separated by decades, who knows that memory is extraordinarily unreliable, who knows that lie detectors are unreliable, and yet is using all three to come to 100% certainty.
That is astonishing.
The playbook of a smear often has very fuzzy details or inaccessible, quote, facts.
So the fuzzy details are there so that you can't provide an alibi.
So the fact that there's no location, there's no date, they can't even narrow it down to within a couple of years, This means that The person you're accusing can't provide a reliable alibi because it's a span of a couple of years and the location.
Like if they said it was this weekend on this day at this place, well, he may have an alibi and therefore you've got to keep it as fuzzy as humanly possible.
And so the fuzziness of the location and the date means you can't provide an alibi.
How the fuzziness leads to 100% specificity in the identification of the person is not particularly clear.
Now the other thing is that the quote proof is in the therapist's notes.
Now, this is often a very common part of a smear campaign because it means that the notes remain inaccessible.
If the proof was in a diary that had been kept by Blasey Ford, then she would be able to turn that over.
The fact that the therapist's notes are protected by legislation, I think it's HIPAA, means that unless the therapist is released by the patient, the therapist can't turn over her.
The notes and therefore you have the proof in an inaccessible format.
The fact that she appears to have shown it to a Washington Post reporter but wouldn't turn them over to investigators is another clue regarding that.
Just wanted to point out as well, boy, that's, you know, if you really want to smear someone, you picked the wrong diary nerd to pick on with Brett Kavanaugh because the fact that he has detailed calendars going back to when he was 14, man, it's almost like If I'm a religious man, it's almost like God said, keep these calendars, for they shall become helpful in the salvation of the Republic in 40 years' time.
And that is really, boy, that's amazing that he would have.
And this is something I didn't mention in the live stream last night, but it is important.
It's not... Full evidence of innocence.
But boy, it's pretty significant that on the summer in question, he was out of town for all but a couple weekends.
And those couple weekends, he has alibis that are pretty solid.
Or at least he has stories about where he went.
He has some written down stories about where he was.
And so that is kind of important as well.
So I talked about the four people that Blasey Ford said.
We're witnesses to what happened who all reject what she says, but the fact that he has detailed calendars that place him elsewhere for most of the summer is pretty important.
I do want to push back against this weird, syrupy, cloying, claustrophobic, believe women!
Believe women! First of all, that's To say that women don't lie, women can't lie, is to say that the only liars that exist in the world are men, which is horribly anti-male, of course, horribly sexist.
Like if I said, believe men, when it comes to these allegations, believe men and women are all liars, that would be a horrible thing to say.
So when you have different moral standards for the genders, when you believe that one gender is perfect and the other gender is always in the wrong, Well, that's called rampant sexism.
It's a little hard to see because it's anti-male, but believe women is ridiculous because women, shocker, spoiler, if you want to go back to Genesis, you can see the genesis of this realization.
Women can lie.
Women can lie.
Women can have affairs.
Women can lie about the paternity of the child that they have.
They can say that this guy is the father when it was in fact this guy.
Or when they don't know, they can fix, they can get pregnant by some guy and then find a guy with more resources, convince that guy it's his child.
They can lie in divorce.
They can accuse their husbands of abuse of themselves, of children.
They can hide money.
They can hide purchases.
They have all of the range of human failings that men do as well.
So this idea that you just believe women, that is very dangerous for women because it pumps up their vanity and their sense of wild self-confidence to the point where they're not challenged.
When you say believe women, you make them frail, you make them weak, and you could see the difference in strength of character, strength of conviction, strength of personality between Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh was really, really powerful.
Don't believe women.
Don't believe men. Believe evidence.
Believe evidence.
And you don't have to call someone a liar if what they say doesn't turn out to be true because of the unreliability of memory and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
Another thing That bothered me was they say, believe the victim.
Believe the victim. But that's, of course, assuming guilt prior to evidence.
In fact, in the direct contradiction to the evidence that was provided, which was the four statements provided under threat of felony by the other eyewitnesses to the supposed party who said it didn't happen, that the woman, her best friend, said she didn't even know Kavanaugh and so on.
So, believe the victim.
Well, we don't know who the victim is.
And all indications point to the fact that Brett Kavanaugh is, in fact, the victim.
Because if she brought these allegations, if Blasey Ford brought these allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, and Brett Kavanaugh is innocent, as all evidence points to, and the calendar points to, and everything points to, then he is, in fact, the victim.
So in the hearing, when people were saying, well, it's a shame that both families are being destroyed, you know, the Blasey Ford family, the Kavanaugh family, it's a shame that both families are being destroyed, that's an equivalence.
If she brought... These charges against him, and these are powerful criminal charges that could end up with him being in jail for the rest of his life, if she's mistaken, if she's wrong, then his family is being destroyed, and it's her fault.
And the reason, like, so she may believe it, but if you say that something is true and everyone else who was there says it wasn't true, you should have some doubt.
You certainly shouldn't say you're 100% certain.
Now, the cost was talked about by Kavanaugh, and the cost of, you know, you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.
Here's the problem. And this is personal for me, so I feel very strongly about this, of course.
This undermines the credibility of women who bring forth these accusations.
And it is terrible.
It is terrible. You need a high standard of proof for he said, she said, because you want to make sure that when things progress along the path towards criminal prosecution, that the women can be believed, right?
The mere statement is not enough, of course, right?
This is just a philosophical principle.
If everyone should be believed in a criminal charge or a criminal accusation, then you can't have any such thing as a legal system.
You can't. Because then the woman says, well, you did it.
And the man says, I didn't. But everyone has to believe it all cancels each other out.
You can't do anything. This is why you have to have proof beyond mere statements.
So the problem is that women down the road will not be believed as much.
And what that means is that fewer women will come forward who have genuinely been attacked and assaulted.
I mean, men, of course, very few men come forward because there's almost no social sympathy for male victims of rape and sexual assault and abuse and so on.
Even though domestic abuse is initiated about equally between males and females, and there's a study that just came out that females are more likely to be physically abused in relationships, but there's no, we don't have any patience for Male victims.
That's still a long way to come.
But the reality is that women are less likely to believe, which means fewer women will come forward to say so because they don't want to be put in the camp of what a lot of people will perceive as the last round of women who accused men who were incorrect.
And that's pretty harsh.
That's pretty harsh because what that means is that The rapists and sexual abusers who are out there will know that women will be less likely to come forward, which gives them more scope to prey on women.
More scope to prey on women.
You are actually aiding and abetting rapists by promoting very hard to believe women's accusations against men, because anybody with half a brain knows that this should not have gone the way that it went.
It should have been handled privately.
What should have happened is Dianne Feinstein's office should have got the letter from Blasey Ford as they did like 46 days ago, I think.
It should have all been handled behind closed doors.
The witness statements should have been received, and the claim should have been rejected, and this way.
But the fact that they bubbled it up publicly was because they wanted to call for the FBI investigation, derail the nomination, and so on, because the FBI investigation will take months, and there's nothing to investigate.
There's nothing to investigate. The investigation has already been performed, and our Blasey Ford statements have been Shown to be incorrect.
I mean, this is what all of the other eyewitnesses are saying, that the statements are incorrect.
So what that means is that by promoting these statements that no one can really believe and that the eyewitnesses all have said is false and that the calendar largely disproves as well, it means that women are going to be less likely to come forward because of this kind of manipulation and this kind of promotion of What seems to be a pretty false narrative.
Now, I don't like anything that empowers rapists.
I don't like anything that empowers sexual abusers of women.
I have a daughter, and it's terrible.
It's absolutely terrible.
But you see, they don't care.
Because they're post-Christian, amoral, Darwinian, lustrous after power, and therefore they have no particular moral standards.
They will manipulate. They know other people have moral standards, and therefore they will manipulate.
Are you calling her a liar?
It's like... This, oh, it's terrible to call someone a liar.
No, it's terrible to call a woman a liar.
The fact that everyone's calling Judge Kavanaugh a liar, nobody cares about that, of course, well, except rational people.
But I really don't like anything that makes women more reluctant to come forward, because it empowers rapists and sexual abusers of women.
So this all, yeah, it's pretty good for rapists, this whole process.
You know, like how pedophiles tend to be On the left because the left promotes the welfare state.
The welfare state produces single moms and then pedophiles can date the single moms and have fairly unfettered access to children who they are not biologically related to and can pursue their evil goals.
So I wanted to mention that and the last thing I wanted to mention is...
I have absolutely no doubt that Dr.
Christine Blasey Ford knows everything there is to know about the most famous experiment in all of psychology called the Milgram experiment.
Stanley Milgram, he was a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment Between the conflict between one's own personal conscience and obedience to authority and this happened in 1963 and Of course in 1963 the World War II had ended almost two decades before the Nuremberg trials had gone on and a lot of the defenses in the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis was well I was ordered to do this I was ordered To kill the Jews.
I was ordered to kill the homosexuals.
I was ordered to kill the intellectuals.
I was ordered to kill the gypsies.
I was ordered to kill the mentally deficient and all the other evil acts of the Nazi regime.
He said, well, I was ordered.
So, of course, Milgram wanted to find out what had happened.
And is this something that was particular to the Germans or to the Nazi regime?
Or is it something more common?
So one year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, this was in July of 1961, Milgram came up with an experiment designed to answer this question.
I mean, were they just, were Eichmann and his accomplices in the Nazi regime, were they just following orders?
Could we actually call them willing accomplices or not, right?
Is it a particular to Germany or is it a more common situation?
So, the way that he devised the experiment, so there would be a participant, they would pay like 4 bucks and 50 cents coming in, there were males around 20 to 40, and they were from all sort of ranges from like minimum wage guys to professionals and so on, a wide swath of people.
So what happened was, the participant was paired with some other person and they drew straws or lots to find out who would be the learner and who would be the teacher.
And so they brought these two guys in and, you know, basically flip a coin and so on, but it was always fixed so that the participant in the experiment was always the teacher and the learner was just someone who was pretending to be part of the experiment.
So the learner was then taken into another room and he had these electrodes attached to his arm.
Now the teacher, this is the participant in the experiment, the teacher and the researcher went into a room next door And this contained an electrical shock generator, and there was a row of switches.
And they went all the way from 15 volts, which was labeled a slight shock, to 375 volts, which was labeled danger, severe shock, to 450 volts, which had three X's, which I guess back in the day meant death.
So... Here's the question he wanted to answer.
How far will people go if they're told to increase electrical shocks against others?
Because it's going to involve harming another person.
Even to the point of killing that person.
And that, what a question.
What a question that is.
So what happened was, the learner, who was actually a confederate of Stanley Milgram's, and the learner was always called Mr.
Wallace, the learner was led into the room and strapped into a chair, and then the electrodes were attached to him.
Now, after the learner had learned a list of word pairs, the, quote, teacher, who's the actual participant, but thinks he's just part of a randomized trial, tests him.
And so the teacher names the word and asks the learner, Mr.
Wallace, to recall its pair from a list of four possible choices.
That's a multiple choice question. So it might be blue and box, right?
And then you have to remember that association.
You're given a multiple choice.
Now, every time Mr.
Wallace, the learner, made a mistake, the teacher is told to administer an electric shock.
So, you understand, right?
Two participants come in, the randomized thing, one of them is actually part of the experiment, the other one doesn't even know.
And so he's told every time the learner makes a mistake to administer a shock.
Now, there were 30 switches on the shock generator from 15 volts light shock to 450 volts, which can be considered fatal.
Now, what happened was the learner, who was one of Milgram's Confederates, gave mainly wrong answers on purpose.
And then the teacher had to give him an electric shock.
And then we're supposed to dial it up.
Start at 15, dial it all the way up to 450, which is fatal.
Now, when the teacher refused to administer such a shock...
The experimenter was able to give a pre-set series of orders to ensure that the experiment would continue.
So, there were four prods or commandments.
Now again, there's no authority.
These people have no authority. It's not a military situation.
It's not even a boss employee situation.
It's not a police situation.
It's not anything like that.
It's just a psych experiment.
So if the teacher says, I'm not going to shock the guy, then the experimenter would read out these phrases.
So the first was, please continue.
And then if the guy said yes, then they would continue.
If the guy said no, then the psychologist would say, the experiment requires you to continue.
See? Please continue.
The experiment requires you to continue.
If the teacher says no again, then the psychologist gets to say, it is absolutely essential that you continue.
And if the person says no, then the psychologist says, you have no other choice but to continue.
Right? So you can stop.
No force, no compulsion, nothing like that.
Please continue. The experiment requires you to continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice but to continue.
Fascinating, eh? Now, when this experiment was set up, Milgram asked some people and they said, oh, there's only a couple of percentage points of Real sociopaths and psychopaths in the population, vast majority of people, will say no pretty quickly.
Because as they dialed up the voltage and as they pushed the button, the learner would scream, would scream out and pay, would beg them to stop, would plead for them to stop.
So they know, in that moment, they truly believe that they are administering ever more agonizing electrical shocks to someone.
Fascinating. So they said, oh, most people are going to say, no, only a couple of percentage points of people are going to go all the way.
However, as it turns out, 65% of the participants continued cranking up the voltage to the highest level of 450 volts with an XXX, which is fatal.
That's almost two-thirds of the participants were Went up to 450 volts.
Every single one of the participants continued to 300 volts, which is again, extraordinarily painful and potentially dangerous.
And this is horrifying, you understand, that two-thirds of people We'll kill someone else if told to in a non-authority-based situation.
Just some guy standing around says, it's essential that you continue.
You say, no, I don't continue. This is horrifying.
I'm calling the cops. Right?
Nothing. Every single participant went cranked from 15 to 300 volts, and two-thirds of them went to 450 volts.
Fatal. Willing to kill someone if someone just mildly tells them they have to continue.
Now of course, what's common among almost all these men is that they were raised in government schools.
Raised in government schools.
Now Milgram, knowing that this was a shocking result, did more than one experiment.
He actually did 18 variations of this study.
And this study has been reproduced all around the world.
In some studies, women are slightly more I mean, there's little things that change it, too.
If the guy carries a clipboard, people are more likely to go and kill someone.
If somebody's wearing a white coat, they're more likely to go and kill someone.
But ordinary human conscience and basic empathy has been just stripped out of people.
I don't believe we're born that way.
But when you are raised in these Prussian-based Horrifying, brain-crushing, soul-crushing, lack of concentration camp propaganda mills called government schools, then your conscience is stripped out.
You learn to obey authority. That's the whole point.
The whole point of the government school system, based on the Prussian model, was to produce violent soldiers and passive manual laborers.
And it's horrifying.
So, two-thirds of people We'll follow orders given by an authority figure to the point of killing an innocent human being.
Isn't that horrifying?
Isn't that horrifying?
Because everyone involved here, most of the people involved here went to either government schools or went to private schools that follow a government curriculum and are taught by teachers who themselves went through government educational programs.
So, even the, quote, private schools are still very heavily government-focused.
And it's appalling.
It's not specific to Germany.
And this is back in the 60s, when there was still very strong Christian faith relative to today, before post-modernism had spread like the cancerous wildfire that it is throughout the ruined mental landscape of the West.
What would those numbers be now?
What would those numbers be now?
It's hard to imagine.
I would imagine that they would be higher.
Ethical considerations means you can't do this anymore, but I pretty much can guarantee you that...
I mean, imagine the experiment where you bring someone in from an arts program, from one of those left-leaning arts programs, and say that the person in the room is a Republican.
How high would they go and what would they do?
I bet you they would not hesitate and most of them may even enjoy it.
So the reason I'm bringing all of this up is that Christine Blasey Ford knows how susceptible people are to influence from authority figures.
She's a staunch Democrat and I can guarantee you that a lot of high-powered Democrat handlers And fixers and lawyers descended upon her, and I just wonder where she thinks the voltage meter is at,
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