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May 17, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:04:40
Freedomain: The Abortion Debate - and Ask Me Anything!
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A wonderful evening, of course!
The big news, and this is something that I, of course, should have well talked about quite some time in the past.
I've talked about it here and there, but I have spent the day grinding the gears of philosophy within my mind to come up with, hopefully, no, not hopefully, I know this to be the case, that it is useful and important and interesting, valuable and powerful arguments with regards to the great question of abortion.
And there are those, of course, who say that it cannot be resolved in any way, shape, or form.
I do not happen to be one of those people.
I believe that it can be resolved.
I believe that it will be resolved.
And by golly, we're going to resolve it.
So I look forward to your questions, of course, if you want to help me out.
It is a challenging time to be opposing The leftist tropes these days.
It is a challenging time on the YouTube platform.
Those of you, of course, who've been informing me that you have been unsubscribed, that my shows are not showing up in your notifications, and all kinds of stuff.
I really, really appreciate that feedback.
I do wish that There was something more that I could do about it.
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You can go to freedomainradio.com to find those.
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There's a wide variety of ways to get that.
And I will continue to produce quality shows.
The challenges now are really based upon the success earlier, particularly in 2015, 2016, leading up to the U.S.
election, leading up to Brexit, and so on.
The challenges now are a direct result of the successes in the past, and I have no doubt that reason and will and virtue and intellectual might will prevail.
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There are, of course, super chats which I will get to, but I am going to clarify.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here.
I'm going to say I'm going to clarify once and for all.
what's going on in the abortion debate.
So, as you know, in Alabama they've recently voted to, or it's on the verge, or it's going through the governor's desk, a female governor, about abortion.
Now, I was originally going to think about going into the details of that, but I really, really want to stay focused on the philosophy aspect of this here philosophy show.
So what I'm going to do is go into the arguments one by one, and at the end of it If there's still a huge amount of confusion about the issue, I will apologize in advance.
There won't be, but it will mean I have not done my job.
So let's get started now.
First of all, just from 1973 to 2011 in America, there were over 50 million abortions performed.
That's horrible.
That's horrifying.
I don't care where you stand on the political spectrum, that is a terrible, terrible thing for a society to absorb and to deal with.
Of course it has escaped some people's attention, though of course not everyone's attention, that 50 million abortions happens to coincide with a rather similar number of Immigrants into America.
You see, all throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, it was like, hey, people, particularly white people, don't have any kids.
It's terrible for the environment.
Zero population growth.
You've got to not have kids.
And then it was like, psych!
Sorry.
Turns out, funny story, there aren't enough people to pay for your retirement.
So we have to import just about everyone and their dog from all over the world.
Well, actually not really all of the world, not really importing many people from Europe.
But that's the way it has played out.
So abortion, I mean, as you know, I'm sure you know, Roe v. Wade started on a lie, which is that a woman who was pregnant was told by friends that she could just say oh the man raped me and she believed that under Texas law a rape claim would give you access to an abortion and she felt that she was preyed upon by two lawyers who wanted to test this ban on abortion and they took it through three years all the way to the Supreme Court.
The woman who was the initiating incident in that entire legal process later felt she was used and cruelly abused and she was of course horribly abused as a child ran away at the age of 13 and was just a monstrous horrible early life and then she was further exploited as she claimed by these two lawyers who got it up to Roe v. Wade and all the way to the Supreme Court and it was a very difficult situation as a whole.
So let's start with some of the basics and this is going to be really really clarifying and I apologize for not having put all of these thoughts together before but we'll get it done right now.
Does human life begin at conception?
Well, of course it does.
Because you cannot have a human life without conception, and all conceptions that are viable lead to a human life.
They don't lead to a toaster.
They don't lead to a refrigerator.
They don't lead to a squid or anything like that.
So yes, of course, human life begins at conception.
It can't be any other thing.
If you're making a statue, the statue begins with a block of marble.
A book begins at a single sentence.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Step so of course human life begins at conception because a human egg and Human sperm joined together to make a human life and nothing else can do it And if it is viable that is the only thing it does so of course human life begins at conception now I did get into a bit of a Twitter fist fest about this because of course the argument is well you see a
A woman has the right to decide what to do with her own body.
Now, there's a lot to say about this.
Well, first of all, when women support, as they generally do, big government redistributionist programs, it's kind of tough for them to suddenly say, well, it's my body, it's my choice.
You know, men work very hard to pay the taxes that women can appillage from using the power of the state, in general, on average.
Men are net contributors, according to some studies, and I think it's valuable throughout the West.
Men are net contributors to the government through taxation, and women are net takers from the government through taxation.
And of course a man uses his body, his brain, his muscles to produce that wealth, and then women come along and pillage it, on average.
So for women to say, well my body, my choice, well there's not been a whole lot of Men's wallet, men's choice going on, so it's a little tough for them to make that case.
Also, I mean, I don't know what level of scientific illiteracy you need to be cooking on in order to think that a baby is just part of a woman's body.
Spoiler, it's not.
It's not.
I mean, I challenged someone on Twitter who was making this case.
I said, okay, tell me what other part of a woman's body detaches Leaves the woman's body, grows, argues back, goes through puberty, goes to college, and has the capacity to make more human beings.
Come on!
You've got to be kidding me!
That's not even a close one.
I mean, as I said on Twitter, you must know some very talented and unusual spleens if you believe that there's any part of a woman's body that detaches and goes off to college somewhere else.
Can you imagine?
Some part of the woman's appendix.
I'm going to burrow out of the woman's body like some alien out of John Hurt's chest.
I'm going to amble off.
I'm going to hitchhike.
I'm going to date the wrong boys.
I'm going to wear shirts that are too short.
I'm going to get involved in Sylvia Plath and be tempted by feminism.
And then I'm going to dye my hair funny colors.
And then I'm going to shake it all off and get a real job and then have babies.
And I mean, come on, this is not what the elbow does.
This is not what the toe does.
This is not what the spleen does or the heart or the liver.
I mean, come on.
Plus, of course, A baby does not match the woman's DNA, right?
It's only got half the woman's DNA.
It's got half the man's DNA.
And so the idea that this is just the baby is just the woman's body and she's deciding what to do with her own body is ridiculous.
You know, mothers who view children as extensions of themselves are called narcissists.
Actually, maybe that explains quite a bit when it comes to that.
So no, a baby is not Just part of a woman's body.
Now, they say, well, a fetus is not a conscious being.
It is not self-aware.
It can't reason and so on.
Well, if high levels of mental functioning are required for there to be human rights, we're on a very slippery slope and I don't think the left is going to do particularly well out of that.
But here's the thing.
In all seriousness, let's look at this situation.
So, one terrible night.
In my life, I got a call from one of the men who was one of the best men at my wedding.
I had a couple.
And he said, my mother's in the hospital.
And I said, oh, what happened?
And he said, well, she was, doesn't matter where, she's had a terrible stroke.
And she's unconscious and in the hospital.
And his mother was quite old and she'd been a lifelong smoker.
And it did not look particularly good.
So he didn't have a car.
So I raced down to pick him up and we went off to the hospital.
And his mother, who I'd known for...
Boy, at this point, well over 30 years.
His mother was lying in the hospital bed.
Her face was all twisted up.
And they had, of course, done the scans.
And the stroke had been so severe that her brain functioning was virtually non-existent.
And they were keeping her alive on a machine.
And I just, I remember that the doctor, I mean, it's such an odd experience just sort of by the by.
And I really, really sympathize with doctors about this.
Such an odd experience.
Because for the doctor, it's a commonplace situation.
But, you know, this is your mother who's lying in a hospital bed, tubes all over her.
And...
And brain barely functioning and so on so you know it's it's your mother your history your life but for the doctor it's just it's just another patient and look I understand and I just wanted to point that out it's just a very very odd kind of situation but so the doctor basically said I mean, she's gone.
The brain is barely functioning.
I guess the brain was without oxygen for some significant period of time.
She's not coming back.
She's gone.
And then, of course, there is just that question, right?
Which is, do you pull the plug?
When do you pull the plug?
And so on.
And I won't get into it in any more detail other than to say that that is a pretty, it's a terrible situation to be in and it's not the worst way to go, you know, like you just kind of, I think it's basically just kind of your arm goes numb and the lights go out.
But that's a terrible situation and what do you do?
Well, the standard answer is, well, you pull the plug, right?
You stop the machines that aid in the woman's continued physical survival and you let nature take its course.
That is how these things generally go.
Now, I want you to imagine this.
Imagine in the same scenario his mother was much younger and his mother had had some event and what happened was It was free to take care of her and they said she is going to emerge from this process with a vastly improved cognitive capacity.
She is going to be sharp as a tack, she's going to be smart and she's going to get much much better.
So it's free to take care of her and her current lack of consciousness is going to be solved by the passage of time.
Now can you imagine if this was a situation someone saying oh yeah you should totally pull the plug.
We have a non-conscious woman whose brain is barely functioning, but it's going to improve.
It's going to get better over time.
Would you pull the plug on such a person?
Well, of course not, especially if it was free.
I mean, you could say if it was, I don't know, $10,000 a day, you could say, oh my gosh, we can't afford that.
Maybe you could go to charity or whatever it was, right?
But if it was free for whatever reason, I mean, imagine, right?
Just some alternate universe.
It was free and she was going to get way better.
Time was going to heal the wound called lack of consciousness.
Would you pull the plug?
Well, of course not.
But that's the situation with the fetus.
The fetus is free to take care of.
I mean, I guess there's a little bit extra pickles and ice cream, but the fetus is free to take care of in general.
And the lack of consciousness in the mind of the fetus is going to be solved in just a few months by the passage of time and the evolution of the fetus into a baby.
So that's an important thing to understand.
Now let's look at this another way as well.
Imagine that the fetus, let's say the mother doesn't want the baby, but the fetus can be, let's just say painlessly taken out of the mother's body and put into some other situation where the fetus can be kept alive.
In other words, there's a choice.
So if the mother doesn't want to carry the baby to term, doesn't want the baby, that you can beam the baby again.
I know I'm talking Star Trek, but just thought experiment, right?
So you can beam the baby out of the mother's belly and put it in some artificial womb that keeps it alive and then can grow it to maturity.
Now if this were possible, if this were possible, that the baby could grow to maturity, it would not inconvenience the mother, then If the mother said, I want you to kill the baby instead or kill the fetus instead, what would you think?
I mean, wouldn't that be a kind of monstrous situation where you have the choice to keep the baby alive and it's no inconvenience to you, but you decide to kill the baby anyway, kill the fetus.
That's, I mean, just from a sort of, I know it's not a rational, objective, moral argument, but from a sort of instinctive morals basis, that's, that's pretty bad.
So, imagine this scenario, which is a complementary scenario, in case the first one is challenging.
I mean, I don't mean intellectually, you're a smart audience and all of that, but imagine this.
This is, you know, lifeboat ethics, lifeboat scenario.
So you're in a lifeboat, there's lots of you, and the lifeboat is sinking, and there's, you know, 20 of you are really skinny and one guy's really fat.
But the lifeboat is sinking.
Well, what do you do?
Well, if you throw the one fat guy overboard, then you can survive.
Otherwise, you have to throw like three skinny guys overboard in order to survive.
So you save more lives by throwing the fat guy overboard.
And what would you do?
Well, I think if people ended up in that situation where they had to throw a fat guy overboard in order to save 20 people, otherwise they could only save 17 or 18 people, We would say, that's a terrible situation.
Now I know British courts have said necessity is not an excuse for murder.
So we're just talking sort of morally, not necessarily legally.
You'd say, well that's a terrible situation.
You were in a situation of massive extremity.
So I can understand why you ended up throwing the fat guy overboard.
So that you could save 20 people rather than only 17 or 18 or whatever, right?
Because you didn't have a choice.
Now for a woman who's pregnant, there is a choice.
And the choice is to not Kill the fetus, right?
To not have an abortion.
That's always the choice and that generally means, of course, that the baby is going to be born and have a life and make more babies and have reason and thought and all that kind of stuff, right?
So, in the lifeboat scenario, if... I mean, I know this sounds kind of silly, but if there is a choice, do you throw The fat guy overboard.
So let me give you an example.
So there's 19, no, there's 20 skinny guys, there's one fat guy, and then there's a big crate of silverware that weighs a couple hundred pounds or something like that, right?
Now, if you heard the story that they said, well, you know, that silverware is really, really nice.
So we decided to keep the silverware and throw the fat guy overboard.
Well, what you'd say is, okay, well, this is a different situation now, because now you had a choice.
So you had a choice wherein the fat guy didn't have to die, and therefore you're morally responsible for the death of the fat guy.
If it's a complete extremity, where it's like, if the fat guy stays, we all die, and oh, we got to throw three skinny guys overboard or whatever, right?
So where there's a choice, we generally say that we should opt for the saving of life, right?
And so the woman has a choice, which is to have the baby and carry the baby to term, right?
And then give the baby up for adoption if she doesn't want to raise a child or whatever.
And remember, there is a real market for this.
And there are couples, I think 10% of couples have real trouble having babies.
And so there's couples who really want them.
Especially now that women are having kids older.
It's a big problem.
So there are couples who have a deficiency of fertility in that they want babies but can't have them or are having trouble having them.
And then there are other couples or women who have an excess of fertility.
In other words, they have babies that they don't want, right?
So this is a market scenario.
You have people who want babies, don't have them.
You have people who have babies and don't want them.
And that's just a scenario wherein paying a woman to carry a child to term would solve the problem.
People say, oh, that's terrible.
You're buying babies.
Like, somehow buying a baby is morally worse than killing a baby.
I mean, come on.
Have you never seen the movie Schindler's List?
He bought Jews!
Yeah, better than getting killed, right?
So that's, I think, pretty significant.
For the woman to have the baby, she will say, well, it's difficult, it's unpleasant, it's emotionally, right, so a negative experience is considered one of the reasons why the woman wouldn't bring the baby to term and give the baby up for adoption.
So, well, it's going to be, it's difficult, it's unpleasant, and so on.
Well, if you're saying that a negative experience is justification for killing a fetus, then you're saying that the woman's negative experience somehow trumps the negative experience of the fetus Which is having its skull crushed and being pulled out by forceps and thrown into a ditch as medical waste or put up for auction, it seems, these days.
So you can't really say, well, it's a negative experience to carry a baby to term and give it up, because if you're going to say negative experiences are really important, then the negative experience of the baby being killed is clearly more important.
That argument doesn't seem to hold much weight, at least in my book, and I think sort of fairly objectively, right?
So here's another thing that sort of comes out of some of the Twitter stuff, and at Stefan Molyneux, you should really really follow, I'm fairly good with the old twisters.
So there's this argument that the left has put out, and Elizabeth Warren put this out as well, which is basically saying, well, If you ban abortions, women won't stop having abortions.
They'll just be so desperate that they'll have the back alley abortions, the butcher abortions, and then of course, you know, there's these terrible stories of women taking poisons because they want to get rid of babies and coat hangers and, you know, all sorts of ghastly stuff.
That doesn't really fit with how powerful and omnipresent leftists believe that laws are in general.
So if you're going to say, well there's no point banning something because desperate people will just get a hold of it anyway, with regards to abortions, it really doesn't make any sense then as to why you would be keen on banning guns.
I mean, desperate people would get a hold of guns as well.
What about banning speech, hate speech, censorship and so on?
Desperate people will simply find a way and it'll be terrible.
It's like, well, OK, well, if you're going to make that case, then what you're saying, you can't just make the case individually, right?
It was only abortions, guns and hate speech is different.
You have to say, well, there's not really any point banning things because people will just get a hold of them anyway.
And this makes no sense at all.
We don't say, well, even if we make murder illegal, people will still kill other people.
So let's not make it illegal.
Let's not ban murder.
Because people, crazy people, or desperate people, or violent people, or angry people, crimes of passion, they're just going to kill anyway.
I mean the whole point is that law is not supposed to be based on consequences.
Law is supposed to be based on morality.
Right?
There's an old argument which says we do not ban the stealing of horses because it's immoral.
We ban the stealing of horses so that horses are not stolen.
So that's consequentialist and that's not A moral argument and the law should reflect morality.
The law should not reflect consequentialism, which is subjective and fragmented and in opposition and so on, right?
That argument does not make a huge amount of sense to me.
Now there's another argument that gets posted which is, you know, if you don't have a uterus you can't have an opinion.
Now that's just complete and total bullshite and of course you, I, everyone else grew up hearing women talking about men and masculinity and the patriarchy and manspreading and mansplaining and male privilege and the male gaze and men men men and this this this and men men are pigs and men are misogynists and and if a man says this, right?
So women have no problem Talking endlessly, some women, and pompously about what it is to be male and everything about masculinity and toxic masculinity and this and that and the other.
And I've never really heard the argument, no testicles, no opinion.
And so that's just a one-sided bit of nonsense.
So I think we'll just have to pass that one by as not an argument.
No uterus, no opinion, no argument.
Sorry, doesn't really work.
Now there are of course the twin exceptions that come up which is rape and incest with regards to abortion.
I think we can fairly easily bypass the if it's a grave threat to the mother's life because then what's happening is the mother is under threat as if The baby is a danger, which it is, and therefore she's acting in self-defense to terminate the pregnancy in order to survive.
And nobody, of course, is going to call the fetus immoral, but if there is a danger to the mother's life, then it is a matter of self-defense, and I don't think that one's particularly hard to deal with.
Now, with regards to the rape and incest argument, The rape argument, first of all, it's important to recognize this is 0.6% according to some studies, 0.6% of abortions fall into this highly problematic category, well north of 90% of abortions are elective, which means that they're not forced by any necessity.
There's no medical issue.
It's not rape.
It's not incest.
So the vast, vast, vast majority.
of abortions are elective.
So let's just focus on that and recognize that we're talking about a very, well, half a percent, right?
What is that?
1 in 200 are in this category.
So with regards to rape, again, you can say that the baby is an unwanted intruder into the woman's body because it is placed there by force, by violence and so on, and therefore there's an argument for that.
With regards to to incest I don't know enough about the genetics.
I know that cousin marriage can shave 10, 12 or more IQ points off a baby and can of course raise the issue with certain kinds of
genetic problems because of course if you have gene pairs that match that don't have enough separation if you have gene pairs that match you have higher incidence and so on but I don't know if it's far higher than a woman having a baby in her forties and you know this is all very complicated stuff but again this is enormously tiny tiny percentage so you can't really make moral rules according to the crazy outliers so to speak right because it's like
There are mutations in all animal species, and if we said, well, we can only judge animals by their mutations, you'd never end up with a bell curve centralized and accurate belief approach or classification approach called biology, right?
So if you said, well, you know, occasionally a horse is born with two heads, so we don't have no idea what a horse is, it's like, well, you really can't make general rules according to massive outliers, and so I think we can put that one aside because if...
If we just talk about incest, which is, I don't know, what is it, 0.1, 0.2 percent of pregnancies and so on, if we just, if like 99.8 percent of abortions were not the issue, in other words, if abortion was 1 in 200, 1 in 400, 1 in 600, 1 in 800 compared to what it is now, then it wouldn't be nearly as big an issue.
So we've got to focus on the vast majority, which are the elective procedures.
Now the problem, of course, is that There's sort of two fundamental tests of intelligence in public discourse.
The first is, if someone takes personal exception to a valid statistical generalization, that person is, unfortunately, they're just too dumb to have any kind of conversation with, or they're too emotionally reactive, which is kind of the same thing in practicality.
So that's the old thing, which is, women are shorter than men.
Oh, I'm offended by that.
My sister is very tall.
All right.
So you're just telling me that you failed math, right?
I mean, not even statistics, just basic mathematical reasoning.
So that's sort of the one intelligence test, is if you put forward a generalization and people say, well, I'm the exception, or I know someone who's the exception, and I'm offended by that.
It's like, OK, well, I'm offended by the fact that you don't know how to think, so.
It's like insurance companies charge more for smokers.
It's like, well, I know a smoker who lived to the age of 102.
It's like, yeah, well.
We make collective decisions all the time based upon averages and good luck with that, right?
That's the first one.
The second test of intelligence is whether people recognize that people respond to incentives, that people's behavior change based upon incentives.
So there's an old story.
It's kind of old now, I suppose.
There was a very famous and wealthy family in Canada called the Eaton's and they had of course these famous stores they used to be used to be called the Eaton Center I don't know what it is now.
Eaton's was a big department store in Canada and I think there were four brothers if I remember the story right and they said oh sales sales are just so tiresome and so boring so we're not gonna have any sales anymore we're just gonna have what we call everyday low prices and so they gave up on the literally thousands of year tried and tested practice of having Sales!
In a store!
And, of course, everyone knows, like, you can go there for a sale, which may in fact be a loss leader, but when you're there, you see all this other stuff, which you buy anyway.
The sale is just to get the person into the store.
You may even lose money in the actual sale item, but it gets people in the store, gets them buying, and gets them talking about their purchases, and so on.
And so, they gave up on sales, and I'm sure there was lots of other mismanagement, and then this store, which had operated for well north of a century, this whole series, it just, it went bust.
It went bust.
So people's behavior changes upon incentives, right?
So if there's no incentive call to sale, people will stop shopping at that store and it goes out of business.
So it's the same thing with coupons, right?
Some people prefer, like if you have coupons, you're simply trading money for time, right?
You're spending time to do the coupons and in return for doing the coupons, you save a couple of bucks, right?
So that's People's behavior changes based upon incentives.
So if people say, well, there were 50 million abortions from 1973 to 2011, and if you make abortions illegal, there'll be 50 million back-alley abortions, then unfortunately they're just not smart enough or too emotionally reactive to participate in any kind of intelligent discussion, because people's behavior will change based upon that.
And people need to understand this as well.
Are you ready for a little scene study?
Here's my scene study class.
Oh, like I'm back in theater school.
Here's my scene study class, right?
Woman, I want abortion.
Ah, you can get an abortion if the man raped you.
Woman.
Okay, he raped me.
Okay, so that's how behavior will change.
Now, that's not, of course, all women, but it certainly will be some, and given that Roe v. Wade was founded on a false accusation of rape in order to get a hold of abortion, I think there's some reason to believe that this might happen, and...
That's a big challenge now, of course in the situation of rape where you know, there's physical evidence and there is Bruises and the semen and whatever right tissue damage you name it, right?
I mean clearly right that's that's a rape and so on right?
But what if the woman like there's no physical evidence of any kind of aggression or violence.
There's no witnesses the woman says I was Too drunk to consent or I thought I consented but you know, I don't think I did and you know all this he said she said stuff I mean we'll love as I've said before the courts can simply cannot adjudicate in the absence of physical evidence Which is why you need contracts as physical evidence of an agreement so that's going to be a A big problem.
If you're going to allow for the rape exception, then you are absolutely going to increase the number of false accusations.
And to be fair, of course, on the other side, if abortion is illegal and women keep the babies, then they will pass off babies as another man's child.
I mean, this is just going to happen.
It's going to happen.
There was an old story that I think comes back from the 70s, more than a story, it was a fact really.
about a town in Wales, England, where the, I guess, somewhat kinocentrically optimistic biology teacher put a test or a sort of a little project for his class where he said, you know, go home, get your mother's blood type, get your father's blood type, and from that you can calculate what your blood type should be or could be.
And it was like, what was it, 30% of the kids came back and they couldn't possibly be the father's child.
I mean, my God, it was crazy.
It was crazy.
Now people say that that's too high, and of course it is, I would assume on average, but even if it's 5% or 3%, can you imagine if 1 in 20 babies from a mix-up in the hospital went home with the mother and it wasn't the mother's baby?
People would go mental.
That issue is a big challenge, and how that can be solved, it's just something for society as a whole to figure out.
Now, of course, given that he said she said stuff is very difficult and will be escalated in the case of rape claims being the only way you can get an abortion, then You're going to have a big problem.
You're going to have a big problem.
Society used to recognize, of course, that he said she said was a big problem and used to work to prevent this kind of stuff from happening over and over and over again by having chaperones, by having no sex before marriage, by all of this kind of stuff, right?
But with the advent of the pill and the welfare state and abortion, easy free access to abortion, this stuff all fell by the wayside.
Now, of course, the reality is that if abortion were to become illegal, women would change their behavior.
Women would change their behaviors and men would change their behaviors as well.
Again, it takes two to tango, right?
So men are responsible for pregnancy as well.
And I actually think this is the real issue around abortion.
I really think this is the real issue.
When women can dangle consequence-free sex in front of men, they can get men to commit to them to at least a short time, they can get a lot of attention, they can get a lot of dinners out, they can get a lot of kind of cool stuff, because that's not... like sexual access is sort of like sugar in the modern world.
Sugar used to be extraordinarily rare and our desire for sugar was essential to help us have an additional incentive to eat brightly colored fruits, which are sugary and so on, in order to get the nutrition we need to avoid scurvy and things like that.
And also because it may rip and open a bee's nest worth the stings and so on, because a lot of packed in calories and honey.
So we had a strong taste for sugar, but it was hard to get and it was helpful and useful to us.
Now, of course, sugar is in everything and it's incredibly Addictive and so on and so now we have wild easy access to sugar without the bee stings without climbing the fruit trees without planting the fruit trees and and so on So we have all this easy access to sugar and it's really distorting our health and our bodies and our lives and our energy levels And I mean, it's just it's a huge massive snowstorm of sugar plague upon the health and vitality of society sugar is a massive vampire on energy over time and
And so, in the same way, sexual access, which is incredibly powerful, used to be, at least in the West, confined within, ideally, of course, and in general, a monogamous pair-bonded marital relationship.
That's how you got your sexual access, which was to commit to the woman.
And women developed a very strong sense of Men with a great deal of potential to choose and men developed a strong sense of women who were loyal and reliable and honest and trustworthy and so on.
Because, you know, this is the old Strindberg thing.
It's a playwright who was kind of paranoid about women in that... I can't remember that character's name from the British sitcom.
Coupling.
Coupling, was it.
But Strindberg says, you know, the woman always knows the baby is hers, the man never knows for sure that his is his.
is, of course, back in the days of DNA and even in the UK, you can't get a DNA test of your child without the mother's permission because it's all this patriarchy, you see.
So for men, the great risk was twofold.
One, that the woman was infertile, and unless you were Henry VIII, who could have his infertile wives decapitated, you had a fair bit of difficulty dealing with the situation until death do us part.
So for the man, the issue is twofold.
One is that the woman could be infertile, and two, that he might end up being cuckolded, right?
Cuckolded, of course, comes from the cuckoo, and the cuckoo Lays its egg in another bird's nest, and then the other bird raises that cuckoo's bird, and so on.
And a man raising another man's child is one of the greatest disasters that can befall his genetics.
I mean, it's great for the woman in a way, and it's certainly great for the child, but it's absolutely terrible for the man's genetics to pour that amount of resources into a child who's not even his, which is why there were chastity belts and so on when The men went away on the Crusades to try and take back the lands that the Muslims had taken from the Christian leaders.
You should really watch my video, The Truth About the Crusades.
Well, it's very good, if I do say so myself.
So that's the big risk.
Now, you can to some degree minimize the risk of a woman's infertility by looking for fertility markers, a good hip-to-waist ratio, even features indicating good genetics, lustrous hair, clear eyes, clear skin.
You name it.
And of course, fecundity in the family, right?
She's got five brothers and sisters, then fertility runs in the family, so to speak.
And so the odds of, and of course, marrying young and so on, the odds of infertility are relatively low.
And you want to keep your wife happy and keep her satisfied romantically and sexually and financially and all of that so that she has less incentive to go and have an affair and then pass the baby off as as yours.
So that's the big risk and so men used to have and had it fine-tuned for hundreds of thousands of years or at least tens of thousands of years this ability to figure out which a quality woman versus a woman who was superficially appealing but fundamentally dangerous, right?
Like I tweeted this a while back ago which was Something like... It was Mother's Day, right?
Mothers are the greatest force for good or ill in the world.
Gentlemen, choose your girlfriend like your future children have the deciding vote.
And hot messes make bad mothers, right?
I mean, if she's hot and, you know, whatever has an excess of physical attributes that get your gorge and other things rising, that doesn't really help so much when The baby is screaming with colic for the third time in the middle of the night, right?
There's a pretty funny comedian, I can't remember his name, but he used to have this... he would sort of sit there with a Dave Allen style with a drink and a... I can't remember if he smoked or not or whatever, right?
And he used to have this joke that kind of stuck with me for reasons I'll explain in a second where he would say, you know, these extreme people who want to go out there and experience what a hurricane is like and they tie themselves to a tree?
And they say, no, no, I've been working out, I'm fit, I'm ready for this.
And he's like, yeah, you know, when that Volvo comes end over end into you, it really doesn't matter how many sit-ups you did that morning now, does it?
It's the same thing.
It's kind of true.
When the needs of a baby come spiraling into your life, it doesn't really matter how many face filters you used on Instagram last year.
You know, like you just need to be there for the baby.
And a woman's beauty is like a matchstick.
It's supposed to burn up to make babies.
And then she's supposed to have all these virtues and love and kindness and wonderful attributes.
which are the foundation of love and pair bonding and respect that takes her into her old age you know I won't put it coarsely although some people have no matter how beautiful a woman is there's some man somewhere out there who's really really tired of kissing her so so yeah men used to have to look for for high-quality women now the risk for the woman of course is that the man is a player and by that I mean he only appears
cool he only appears successful because men and women got married young now that was to the advantage of men because a youthful woman is more likely to be fertile but it's to the disadvantage of women because a woman unless the man is very rich which is why the women always wanted the prince right but for the woman The big risk is that the man is all talk and won't actually succeed out there in the world trying to compete with other men for scarce resources, right?
For land, for crops, for hunting, you name it, right?
The man's got to go out and compete and bring home the bacon to feed the kids.
And so the man has a slight edge on the woman because she's young and therefore more likely to be fertile, but the youth of the man means that his Long-term success is untested, right?
She's going to kind of roll the dice a little bit.
And so this is something I learned in a long ago course I took in college.
I did two years of English literature before going to the National Theatre School, and I ended up finishing in history.
But in English literature, I read a whole series of fascinating novels from the 19th century and the 18th century even, Which was, ladies don't marry a cat, right?
I mean, you can look at Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, and even William, sorry, William Defoe, Daniel Defoe, for these kinds of things.
There were so many instructional novels written to appeal to women to say, you know, just because he's handsome, just because he's cool, just because he's admired, just because he's glib, just because he's funny, just because he's charming, that doesn't mean he'll make a good husband and provider and father to your children.
And so there were all of these look for Quality, not for surface stuff, right?
And we developed this over tens of thousands of years, this radar to figure out who was good and who was bad and how to make sure we got the right people.
So, That kind of has all fallen by the wayside, and now sexual access is one of the things that women dangle in front of men.
And because sex has become largely consequence-free, and by that I mean there was a lot of consequences back in the AIDS scare of the 80s, because everybody was told that it's going to spill from the gay community, from the drug-using community, into the heterosexual non-drug-using community, and of course it never did.
But there was real fear around that.
But Prior to that, and post that, there's been a bit of a lull.
I know STDs are significantly on the rise in the West, particularly in the United States, but they're still largely manageable, largely treatable.
The sort of superbug-resistant, antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea and so on, well that's starting to hove into view and that's going to be sort of a big issue, but there is this kind of lull in
anxiety around sexuality and what that means is you have this hookup culture and if you get an STD well you just take some pills and especially if you're poor the government's gonna pay for it and you're fine or if you get pregnant you just have an abortion and so sexuality which is the most it's it's it's been built within us emotionally as the foundation for pair bonding for the creation of new children for holding families together it is the most powerful force of
In human existence, sexuality, and now it's just being used as a fun, Tinder-based, pick-me-up, vanity-serving drug.
It literally is being commodified, transformed into something which is the foundation of civilization.
It makes babies, it promotes pair bonding, it keeps families together, it keeps societies together.
Sexuality is so powerful, And it's just been kind of shifted into, I am bored, I'm lonely, let's just go, I'll go have sex with someone.
And I mean that destroys, in particular, destroys women's capacity for pair bonding.
And I've got presentations about this where you can see, you know, penis breaking woman pair bonding is like dose dependent.
The more penises, the less pair bonding, which means that you can see.
That if a woman is a virgin, she's almost never going to divorce her husband when she gets married if she's a virgin.
And then for every additional sexual partner she has, her risk of divorcing her husband goes up because her pair bonding is broken.
I think men can survive it better than that.
But of course, a woman whose pair bonding is broken can survive breakups better than a man can.
So of course we have sexual attraction and we're supposed to temper that with a demand for quality on the part of our partner.
Now we've had a couple of generations since the 60s with the pill in the welfare state and of course abortion in in the early 70s where the absolute need for quality has largely evaporated.
The demand for quality in sexual partners has largely evaporated.
Women can choose, what is it, 80% of women are chasing 20% of the guys.
And if you look at the bell curve of rated attractiveness, men are realistic.
About half of women are above average in looks.
About half of women are below average in looks.
It's a sane bell curve for women.
It's ridiculous.
I think like 80% of men are below average in looks.
Women are now going just for looks instead of single symbols.
Arm candy and himbos and, you know, but enough about Justin Trudeau.
So the demand for quality has diminished because sexuality has been detached from monogamy and babies and all of that.
And so women have gotten kind of used to not providing qualities of character, but instead providing sexual access to men.
And it's a generalization, lots of exceptions, but this is a real trend.
You can read Tom Wolfe's essays on hookup culture for sort of more about that.
And so because of that, women have lost a lot of the charm and value that they used to have.
This is an old Margaret Atwood line about, you know, if you want to look for a woman, don't look for some hot thing.
Look for a woman with a good heart and a strong back, you know, particularly if you work on a farm.
What was the name of that Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton show?
I watched one or two of them many, many years ago.
where they just went around sort of being crazy and rich and spoilt and entitled in sort of average America.
And they ended up on some farm where they were giggling and shrieking and horrified at what went on on a farm.
And there was some old bitty grandmother there who was like, yeah, just chop the chicken's head off and pluck the chicken and you get yourself a meal.
And it's like, well, that's kind of who you want on a farm, someone who has utility.
Someone who's got your back.
Someone who's going to be loyal and reliable and someone who's going to help you make better decisions and help serve your career just as if she wants a career you can help serve her career.
It's all mutual and all.
But we don't have to look for qualities of character anymore.
Because welfare state, the pill, and abortion means that we can just have recreational sex and we've detached it from pair bonding and the making of actual human beings.
So if abortion is restricted.
I'm just... the ethics will, you know, finish up in a sec, but just as far as consequences go, if abortion is restricted, then the risk of sexuality, the risk of sexual access, increases enormously for women, because they might get pregnant, and if they get pregnant, it's not going to be easy for them to have an abortion.
Now, that means that they have to start choosing On the basis of pair bonding and making babies again.
Which means they have to start choosing good guys, not just flashy guys, not just alphas, not just whatever, whatever, right?
And I haven't told this story in years and years, so forgive me.
I don't mean to be like the old married guy.
What was it my wife said the other day?
You have a new story?
Sorry, I forgot to mention that one.
So this is a guy.
I was in a long-term relationship in my 20s and I broke it up.
I broke it off.
And I ended up Living in an apartment building in downtown Toronto, while I sort of figured out what I was going to do next in life, and I was just a roommate, I just had a room, and there was a guy in the building, a bit short, but a really good-looking guy, and athletic, and he and I used to play squash.
He was a nice guy, and he told me this story, told me this story.
Oh man, it was really illuminating to me.
So, He was an unprincipled man-whore.
Like, no question.
No question whatsoever.
But he had the looks and the charm, right?
People think, oh, I'm so charming.
It's like, no, you're just really good-looking.
So he had the looks and the charm to get away with it.
So he had this girl who he was dating, and I guess she thought he was monogamous, or she thought they were monogamous.
And he said, you know, your friend is really hot.
Let's have a threesome.
I didn't realize you were living a penthouse ladder.
Oh, there's an old-school reference for people who probably have 3D porn on their holodeck these days.
But I'm like, well, that's quite a statement to make.
That's quite a statement to make to someone.
So of course she got really angry and she was like, I thought we were monogamous, I can't believe you would say something like that and I really like you and blah blah blah.
It's like, no you don't like him, he's just handsome and he's a status symbol for you to have.
Oh, this hot guy chose me and come on, you don't like him?
I mean he's a good squash player and I enjoy these stories but I wouldn't say that I liked him either too much.
Anyway, so she got really angry at him and she hung up.
Slammed the phone down, right?
And then he said, and you know, like I wasn't feeling that well during the call and I was like, wait, you had an attack of conscience?
He's like, oh God, no, no, like I ended up having the flu.
So I get the flu and I'm like lying on the couch, I'm barely conscious all weekend.
And this is back in the day where you used to have answering machines that played, you know, like you see this in movies still, all the movies where you had an answering machine that you could hear in the room.
So he, of course, he didn't call the woman back who slammed the phone down on him.
And she then calls him back like the next morning.
And she's like, I'm still really angry at you.
I can't believe that you said this.
Call me back.
I really want to talk about this.
But he was too sick, right?
So he... Beep!
A couple hours later.
I'm so mad at you, but are you okay?
You're not calling me back.
What's the matter?
A couple hours later.
Beep!
Now I'm really getting concerned.
Are you okay?
What's going on?
You're not calling me back.
What's the matter?
Next morning.
Beep!
I'm so sorry I got mad at you.
I can't believe I said that to you.
I hope you're not wildly offended.
I'm so sorry.
Just give me a call.
Let me know that you're okay.
Beep!
I'm incredibly sorry I got mad at you.
I said things I completely regret.
I'm so sorry.
This just went on and on, right?
Like something out of Swingers.
So, that's the reality.
That he had all the cards, and all the women were chasing him, and all the women were hoping to use the V-Bomb to lock down the deal and get him to be their permanent boyfriend.
And this guy, you know, like I was, he was in his late twenties, early thirties or whatever, and he had no intention of settling down.
I mean, the guy lived like somebody with a harem or concubines.
He lived like a pasha.
Or some Turkish sultan from the I don't know, probably 21st century these days.
So, women don't have to choose great guys because sex is consequence-free.
And men don't have to choose great women because sex is consequence-free.
So if sex becomes less consequence-free, then people have to be more careful about their partners.
And I think that a lot of people don't want that.
The men who have let their souls rot and deteriorate because they've been living these ridiculously hedonistic and promiscuous consequence-free lives, They know.
They know that it's going to be tough for them to develop the personal qualities that might be necessary in a situation where sexuality has more consequences.
And I think the same thing is true for the women.
You know, I get complaints.
I'm just... I'm just... Don't shoot the messenger.
I'm just... I get complaints from men all the time in my inbox.
You can see them on YouTube comments and so on.
Well, at least you could when YouTube Actually let my videos go out.
Men are saying like, women are useless these days.
They don't cook.
They don't clean.
They don't make a lot of money.
They're in debt.
They're vain.
They're narcissistic.
They just want to take selfies.
They don't have any conversation.
They don't read any books.
You know, and I think that women have complaints about men as well.
Equally valid.
The big complaint I hear from women about men these days is this video game addiction has really sunk its digital claws into the nut sack of the male species in the West these days.
And man, women are saying, oh yeah, you know, it's like, oh yeah, I'm kind of into video games, but then, you know, they'll go out a little bit.
But after a while, all he wants to do is sit home and play video games and doesn't want to go out there in the world.
You know, video games are to your career as porn is to your future children.
You know, it's a distraction that deflates the potential.
So, I think it's not just, because it's easy to not, it's easy to not get pregnant.
I mean, come on, it's easy to not get pregnant.
Eighteen different forms of birth control for women, not including abstinence, and not including sexual acts that don't end up with Sperm swimming up the channel to get to the egg during a time of ripe fertility, right?
There's lots of ways that you can have sexual satisfaction without involving the risk of pregnancy.
Not even including just not having sex.
So, I think that people are really concerned that they lack the personal qualities to offer value in a world where sex has consequences.
And women say, well, you know, I didn't want to get pregnant and this and that and the other.
It's like, well, so what?
If you're engaged in an action that carries a particular consequence.
I mean, to take a silly example, it's like someone saying, well, yeah, I played Russian roulette, you know, you spin the barrel, right?
I played Russian roulette, but I didn't want to shoot myself.
Well, I smoked a pack a day for 30 years, but I didn't want to get lung cancer.
It's like, you know, if you engage in the behavior where there are risks, saying you want the behavior without the consequences is just kind of deranged.
So, I know I've talked for a long time and I appreciate everyone's patience about this.
It's a very, very big topic.
Fetuses are covered by the non-aggression principle, morally speaking, for all of the reasons that I've put forward.
The mother is in, or the mother-to-be, the pregnant woman, is in the situation where she is the sole person who can provide for that life.
Now, if you've ever seen the movie Misery with James Caan and Kathy Bates, it's a two-hander which is basically talking about Stephen King's horror at the hack he became.
I won't give the whole movie away, but it's about a writer who wrote a series of trashy novels that were very popular, then he wrote something more literary and complex and he's in a car accident and he's rescued in the middle of nowhere by a woman who's a real fan of his trashy novels and she forces him to write more of them.
Now, this is before cell phones and I don't even know if she has a phone, he has no access to it, and he got injured in the car crash to the point where he can't get out of bed, so she's really in control of his life.
Now, if he had died in the car crash and she'd found the body, she wouldn't be responsible for his death.
If he crawled off in the bush to die, she wouldn't be responsible for his death.
But she's brought him into her house.
He has access to no other person to give him sustenance and medicine and shelter from the elements and so on.
So now that she's taken this rider in, and she's his sole source of life, she's responsible for keeping him alive.
And if he dies, or if she kills him, She's morally responsible for that.
The woman is in the sole position of keeping the child alive.
And therefore, if the woman fails to do that, then she is responsible for ending a life.
So, babies... I mean, we recognize this, you know, that a man who kills a woman who's pregnant is often charged with a double homicide, right?
We sort of understand that.
So, yeah, fetuses are covered by the non-aggression principle.
The last thing I'll say, because I want to leave on sort of a positive note, because I don't like the whole system is terrible at the moment and it's distorted by so many awful things that trying to compare a decent moral society with where we are right now is like trying to compare Eyes Wide Shut to a halfway decent film.
It's just not even in the same category.
So There are situations of course, and this is a funny thing, about like murder is never welcome, right?
I mean, but babies are the greatest blessing or considered the greatest curse.
So if you're a couple who wanted kids for a long time and you didn't have it, I was just talking to a fellow today about this,
That he said, you know his wife and he had a bunch of Miscarriages and then by the time and a topic pregnancy and then by the time that they just accidentally had a baby They were thinking of adopting and all that It was like I was the greatest thing ever so the the pregnancy can be the greatest thing ever or for some women Of course is considered to be the worst thing that that could happen and that's a pretty wild thing so of course what we want is a society that puts more women and men into the category of being very happy and grateful that a They're pregnant, right?
Or that that's happening in their life.
And so, you know, how do we do that?
Well, of course, you can't have a welfare state, you can't have forced redistribution of resources, alimony is ridiculous, you know, you get fired from a job, you don't continue to get paid, and if you quit a job, you sure as hell don't continue to get paid.
So we want to move society towards a place of more voluntarism, of less government intervention, into the most essential building blocks of society, which is the family.
Well, the most essential are individuals, but the way in which you end up with the society is through the family, because without the family you can't transmit values, which is why getting women into the workforce and kids into daycare breaks the continuation of Values that took tens of thousands of years and untold amounts of human suffering and life and blood to build.
You can wipe those out in a generation or two just by detaching mothers from their children.
It is a form of cultural murder that can happen on a very, very wide scale.
And we're all dealing with the consequences of that.
But if we can move more women and more men into pair bonded marriages, And if we can fight against this nihilistic anti-natalist environmental hysteria, oh there's already too many mouths on the feet on the family on the planet and mother nature hates and humans are a virus and blah blah blah bad outtakes from the matrix.
So if we can get people to celebrate life, to settle more into pair bonded relationships, to love Creating new life and enjoying the growing glory and brilliance of their children.
If we do all of that, then we're going to end up in a situation where abortion is a much smaller problem.
See, you really want to try and develop a society, and this is all based upon the non-aggression principle, a voluntary society, a stateless society, and all of that.
You want to have a society where the issues that you're trying to deal with just aren't that big.
They're just not that big a deal.
Like, you can't have a society where significant sections of the population want to use violence to achieve their end.
I mean, look at London these days, right?
Knife crime, asset attacks, it's mad, absolutely mad.
Well, it's not mad, it's perfectly inevitable given their immigration policy, but you have to have a society where the vast majority of people do the right thing because, you know, killing someone takes but a moment, whereas a court trial, well an investigation, charging, court trial, the trial itself, the aftermath, the appeals, the sentencing, the prison sentence, it's all millions and millions and millions of dollars.
So society simply cannot afford a significant amount of crime, and there are arguments about one of the reasons that the West became more peaceful is that, well, there was a significant death penalty for violent crime, which takes the more aggressive genes, and there are genes for aggression, out of the gene pool,
And of course also that those who took religious texts the most literally ended up killing each other in a couple hundred years of religious warfare which gave room for more subtle and scientific and philosophical minds to take the fore coming out of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and into the Age of Reason and so on.
Right now abortion is like this overwhelming issue because there are so many abortions and so many of them are just chosen you say oh my gosh if we ban that but of course just banning abortion while still having all of the horrifying social interventions using the almighty power of the state in place is Well, it's just it's like trying to run in two different directions at once.
There's so much that needs to be fixed and reformed.
We need to make motherhood a whole lot more appealing than it is now, because right now motherhood is like waking up exhausted and getting the kids ready, dropping them off at daycare, diving off to some crappy job, sweating yourself through the traffic jams to get to your kids from daycare, and like it's no fun, it's no good.
It's no fun at all compared to the, you know, challenging but glorious in many ways fifties and early sixties where motherhood was a lot better and women had to be fairly well convinced that going to get a job as a customer service rep was vastly preferable to raising their own children.
So there's a lot that needs to change.
But yeah, fetuses are covered by the non-aggression principle.
Life begins at conception.
With regards to how that plays out, In the courts?
I don't know.
I don't like the government as a whole.
It's a terrible system.
So I prefer to think of it how it would play out in a free society.
And we'll get to that.
But I wanted to get to your questions at the moment.
And thank you for letting me talk about this to this level of detail.
I know it's a big topic and I really, really do appreciate, of course, everyone stopping by.
And let me now get to your... Oh, let me put on my goggle eyes.
And I will get to your superchats and also to your regular questions if you would like to drop them by.
And again, you can also go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out in that manner.
Sorry, I don't know why I did that.
All right, let me make sure I don't go back too far in terms of the date.
All right, let's go back here.
16th of May 2019.
I wonder if I'm going to see some of those.
Wow, that's a big donation.
No, no, no, it's a kibblesworth.
All right.
Pro-life secular case.
Yes.
Yeah, look, this is the issue, right?
So the secularists look at, in general, the leftists look at consequences.
And consequentialism is not the foundation for ethics at all.
At all.
It's like saying that consequentialism is the foundation for science.
No, it's not.
Well, you can't study this because it might have bad outcomes.
It's like, that's not an argument.
So, of course, for Christians and other religious groups, for Christians, life begins at conception.
The body gets the soul at the state of conception.
And I remember having an abortion debate in my high school.
I even remember the woman I was debating against.
But I remember having an abortion debate in my high school, like a formal debate, and talking about how, well, you know, if the soul enters the body, well, if there's twins, the bodies don't split until a couple of days after.
So which twin gets the soul and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So for Christians it's easy, which doesn't mean that they're wrong, I'm just saying that it's easy, which is that life begins at conception, life has a soul, each life is precious and valuable and therefore to kill the baby you are performing an act of murder because the baby is a human being with a soul.
Now for the secularists they say, well the baby is a potential human being.
I mean, everyone recognizes the baby, if viable, is going to grow into be a human being.
But for the leftists, they say, well, it's a potential human being.
I don't know what that means.
Potential human being?
Yeah.
And somebody who's been put into an artificially induced coma, who's otherwise healthy and is going to recover in a couple of weeks, is in a coma and it's a potentially conscious human being.
Does that mean you can stab them in the neck?
Of course not, right?
Uh... Marusha Dark says, I've never understood how abortion pre-sentience could be considered immoral if the entity, not who can't know of its own existence but can never know and thus can't be an injured party.
Is it just to punish use of plan B?
Sorry, I don't quite understand.
I've never understood how abortion presentence Presentience could be considered immoral.
Oh, yeah, because presentience is that's why that's why I brought up the story of my friend's mother's terrible night of extinction which was so she had her brain had been destroyed to the point where recovery was impossible and therefore the the well the decision was made but Presentience on the way to sentience is valid, right?
I mean it's valid because it's going to become sentient, right?
All right.
James James.
Ah, the listeners are nice.
He named himself twice.
Hi Stefan, love your show.
Here's some kiwi bucks straight from New Zealand.
Keep up the good work, mate.
Hey, didn't didn't Paddy Gower want to do a debate with Lauren and I again?
OK, so this was like last summer when I was touring Australia with Lauren Southern and we tried to do New Zealand, but New Zealand, well, I'm afraid that the the violent bomb threats won out against The Age of Reason, but we were interviewed by Patrick Gower, and you can see this on Caelan Robertson's channel, C-A-O-L-A-N.
Anyway, just do a search for Lawrence Southerland, Stefan Molyneux, Patrick Gower, G-O-W-E-R, I think.
So, we were both kind of pissed, frankly, and we were interviewed a couple of times in Australia, and this one was in New Zealand, and yeah, it was... He was not... He was not ready, you know, because I guess he thought he was walking into, you know, like, low IQ Nazi territory, and Lauren's not, and I'm not, and so you should watch that, and I guess it's still on his mind, which kind of makes sense.
That, to me, is... I don't know why he still has a career, but Obviously, I'm not his target audience, to put it as nicely as possible.
But to his credit, he did admit that he had been outmatched and outclassed, and it underestimated us afterwards.
But it didn't take long for that to all seal up, and then we were bad people again, and all this natural human defenses.
But yeah, so I guess, what is it?
Almost a year later, and he still, he wants a rematch.
So you guys could let me know what you think in the chat.
I mean, I guess it would be fine.
I have no particular issue, but it does feel a little bit like pushing over a girl guide.
Anyway, Fodorow, thank you very much.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.
Abortion is bad in principle, yet shouldn't there be concern over the fact that an abortion ban may cause the black population of Alabama to rise?
Now come on, I mean blacks will do what everyone else does, which is if the risk of Ejaculatory egg proximate sexual intercourse.
Boy, that's the name.
It's the name for your next porn film if you want it.
But no, they just changed their behavior.
I mean, they just changed their behavior.
Isaac Ligma Anton does 100% knowing any future event equal determinism?
No.
Good heavens, no.
I mean, have you not heard of physics?
Physics, now what's going to happen in the future?
Uh, so no.
Garrett Townsend.
A society based on UPB seems unimplementable.
But if it did come to be, wouldn't the society just become a breeding ground for a might-makes-right tyrant?
Oh man.
You know, it's not your fault, Garrett.
And look, what did you donate?
Okay, well, all right.
So listen, it's not your fault.
I mean, I get it.
You know, if you don't have a government, you're just going to end up with some giant corporation becoming the government.
Right?
It's not your fault.
I've got free books out there, practical anarchy, everyday anarchy, explain and discuss all of this so this is not your fault it's just that I've been doing this stateless society stuff for decades and it's who's gonna build the roads and it's all the same and you understand this is not it's not your fault it's just how you've been programmed.
You've been programmed to fear freedom!
You've been programmed with the boogeyman of The state saying, well, without me, it's worse.
After me comes the deluge.
And you're just, it's just propaganda, right?
You're programmed to fear freedom because that serves the state.
So are you concerned about a might makes right tyrant?
And you think that the government is not that?
What do you, I mean, seriously, you gotta, like, that's not a remotely rational position, right?
The government is a might makes right tyrant.
Come on.
You know that, right?
Look at James Comey.
James Comey was just talking about, I read this on Twitter, that he was a communist when he was a young man.
Well, David Duke was in the KKK when he was a young man, and nobody ever lets him forget that, even though the body count of the KKK is like 0.00001% of communism.
Communism killed 100 million plus in the 20th century alone, as you know, I think just from 1917 to the 20th century, right?
to the 20th century, right?
So, yeah, I think it was David Duke was on Bill O'Reilly's show at some time back and, you know, he was introduced as former KKK, blah, blah, blah, and David Duke was saying, well, come on, I mean, Nelson Mandela was a communist and a communist terrorist and nobody keeps bringing that up.
And I think that Bill O'Reilly's only comment was, you know, that's just the way things are, and blah, blah, blah, right?
So, that's, I mean, to be a supporter of an ideology, even as a young man, that caused the death of over 100 million people, That is thousands and thousands and thousands of times worse than being in the KKK.
But, you know, David Duke is persona non grata, and James Comey can rise to be the head of the FBI.
Tells you who's in charge, right?
All right.
So, no, here's the thing, too.
I mean, free market companies won't become tyrants.
They won't.
And if you're concerned about that, then make sure that There's an independent audit that they pay for that ensures that they're not building giant armies of Terminator robots in their basement.
And any company that tried to develop a giant army to take over a geographical region would have to raise its prices to cover that and they'd go out of business.
It's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
And let's say that by some terrible circumstance You only get a hundred years or five hundred years of a free society and then something bad happens and you get a status society again.
Okay, well, I got cancer six years ago.
I actually got cancer probably seven years ago, but I was misdiagnosed and undiagnosed and went through this wretched revolving door descending spiral staircase to hell itself of the Canadian medical system before fleeing to the surgery center of Oklahoma.
Still recommend those guys absolutely blanketly.
And they cut out a tumor and I got better.
Now, if you were to say to me, well, there's no point getting treated, you see, because you might get cancer again in 40 years, I'd be like, yeah, I'll take that risk.
I will take that risk.
So, yeah.
All right.
Earth is Seriously Flat says, say no to abortions and yes to globe-bortions.
Yeah, I don't get it.
Yeah, okay, okay, okay.
Andrew Kerr.
Hey Steph, please accept my ever-diminishing fiat.
Australian dollar toilet paper keep fighting the good fight.
Yeah, you know, I mean I realized so I did a presentation on how to save Australia that I put out and I just have to remind myself that YouTube views are not the totality of the show.
Anyway, and so you should watch that.
I know the election is Saturday, but you should watch it anyway because it's a really good overview of things.
So just check that out and share it, right?
All right.
Tibbeth Full says, is the fetus, if not able to survive outside the mom, a part of the mom's body and thus her property?
If it's able to survive, then it's murder.
Love you, Steph.
Well, thank you very much.
Sorry, that's a love you, Steph.
Sounds like the most aggressive Hallmark card you'll ever get to hear.
But if not able to survive outside the mom, part of the mom's body?
No, it's not part of the mom's body.
Because part of the mom's body has to be distinguished from the other parts of the mom's body that don't leave and go to college, right?
I mean, you can't just say, have the same category for the liver and the living baby, right?
You just can't use the same category because they're not the same thing.
One doesn't have the exact match of her DNA, doesn't detach, doesn't become its own consciousness.
No!
Look, if you looked at the earlier situation, I talked about the Kathy Bates movie, Misery, right?
So this woman The man can't survive outside her house.
He can't survive outside her care.
Does that mean that he's her property and she can kill him?
No, of course not.
Just because you can't survive outside of someone's care doesn't mean that they can then kill you.
All right.
Jason Day says, keep up the great work.
It's hard to stay optimistic with so many asleep.
Thanks for all that you do.
You the man.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Add the optimism thing on.
If we have time, I'll do something on that.
Because, I mean, I know it is a challenge, right?
Tiffany Green says, 8-year relationship.
I didn't something marriage family until now turn 30 is it wrong to change my mind and convince him into marriage and a family I emailed you well hi Tiffany I'm sorry I have not had a chat I've been doing current events and you know I gotta think looking at some of the views the listener calls are the most popular thing at the moment so I'll probably keep on doing those But yeah, it's not wrong to change your mind.
It's not wrong to change your mind.
That doesn't mean you're going to get what you want, right?
But I'm very happy to hear that you're interested in marriage and family now.
It's, oh, it's glorious.
You know, I just, well, I just tweeted my wonderful, wonderful wife.
Like I woke up, I was working kind of late on the Australia presentation last night and So I woke up this morning and there was like this lovely plate of fruit.
Actually, I don't normally tweet my food, but you know, I... Don't tweet your meat!
Sorry, Anthony Wiener's loose!
Back out, so... How many times have I told you to tweet your meat?
So... I just... I'll just cut up fruit.
Oh my God, it's wonderful.
Absolutely wonderful.
So, um... Yeah.
Have kids, man.
Have kids, have marriage, have love.
Create life.
Something else I tweeted today like it's not an argument but the idea that my wonderful brilliant funny challenging daughter could be just an abandoned auctioned pile of medical waste somewhere is I mean it's just absolutely abhorrent to me and I hate this is stupid thing to say but I'm gonna say it anyway because I want to be honest with you guys which is you know maybe you kind of have to be a parent in order to talk about abortion in a way that hits you deeply emotionally so
Mauritius Dark says the point of the rape argument isn't to judge its frequency so much as align people's moral compasses.
Same with the mercy killing argument like how Iceland aborts all down syndrome babies.
That is that is um That is a big challenge for me.
I'll be perfectly frank with you.
And again, you know, it's like when my daughter says, to be honest, I'm like, well, wait a minute.
What do you mean when you're not saying to be honest, right?
So that is a big, big challenge for me.
So what if you get pregnant and it's a Down syndrome kid and, you know, some people will deal with that.
I personally am not At all convinced I would be a good father to a kid who had intellectual handicaps.
I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that great a dad in that situation.
I might get too frustrated, I might get too alienated I'm not sure but again that's that's the area where it gets closest to me and but you know I have to stay on on on principle which is that there are people who will raise those babies and if you don't want a baby who's handicapped or who is challenges then all right oh yes Michelle haunting you for a conversation a long day's journey in tonight Spooky ghost sounds.
We debated magic and madness and discussed plays last year.
I really owe you an apology.
I actually thought about this today.
So haunt me away and let's do it over the next seven days because I'd like to see that again.
That play is grueling as hell for me to watch because it's like...
Hello childhood!
So thank you for reminding me and just ping me again.
I apologize.
It's rude because I did dangle the bait in front of you and you're quite right to remind me and I'm very sorry for taking so long.
So we'll do it.
Ricky Rocks.
For pro-lifers, if you, your sister, mother, wife, etc.
was raped, do you have them carry on with the baby?
Yeah, like I get the argument.
Why should the baby pay for the criminality of the rapist?
I also wanted to point out as well, just because there seems to be no level of controversy I'm not willing to wade into these days, but I will also say this.
Because women say, oh you know, there's these back alley abortions and so on, and that would be terrible, don't get me wrong, that's nasty stuff and it's horrible to think about.
But, and I'm not speaking for myself, but I think, you know, just for the women who make in this case, you know, a lot of men ended up going to jail on the word of a woman that turned out to be false on accusations.
I don't just mean rape accusations, just abuses accusations or I have known a man or two who've had false allegations of sexual abuse of children in divorce and those men can end up in jail and they can end up being raped which is
damaging physically and haunting emotionally and psychologically and and so on and men have gone to jail for failure to pay child support and have been stuck in this revolving door where they can't get a decent job because they've been to jail and that they go back to jail because they can't pay child support where they can get raped as men and so as far as you know horrible things that happen to physical integrity yeah but the back alley abortions are absolutely terrible but I think because men have not seen
women really step up to to say this is terrible stuff and you know you know you you you you get what you give you know if if you haven't if ladies if you haven't been listening to men's concerns about their literal terror of women enlisting the power of the state to throw them into the rape room of modern prisons often unjustly if women haven't been speaking out about that I'm just telling you.
I mean, there's a lot of white knights out there, but a lot of men are like, eh, you know, you get what you give.
You get what you give.
Douglas Mark says, view on third cousins, pregnancy and abortion, asking for a friend of a friend.
Okay.
So in a free society, you are going to need health care.
Now health care, of course, will be much cheaper.
We know this because way back in the day, and Rod Long has a great article on this, which I keep referencing because people should really, really read it.
Well, he was saying that about a century ago, about a hundred years ago, the problem with healthcare was that it was too cheap.
The doctors were having a tough time making money because when you joined a friendly society, now the Shriners and the Elks and so on, the sort of leftover vestigial organizations of these friendly societies.
So working men would join a friendly society and you get to get a year's worth of access to a health care provider for one day's wages.
One day's wages.
So what is it?
0.5%, 0.4%, 0.3% of your annual salary.
You would get access to a doctor as much as you wanted over the course of a year.
So in a free society you would buy insurance if you were going to have a kid you'd buy insurance for okay well what if the kid has down syndrome or what if the kid has some sort of uh chromosomal issue or what if there's a rare genetic disorder or not rare genetic they're all rare i guess and so the costs of
future health problems would be determined to some degree by genetic counseling of course you could say no to genetic counseling in which case you'd probably just pay more and so the costs of genetic issues with children would be sort of baked into and you could of course before you even got married you could get this sort of stuff sorted out and so on so
This is always the big question which is you know the I don't know the amount of medical resources that are poured into like we just look at abortion so 50 million abortions that's a lot of doctors who aren't doing surgery on people who are actually sick.
It's a lot of health care and medical resources that are poured into the termination of pregnancies the killing of fetuses and they're not being turned into Cutting out tumors from people's necks, or giving them knee replacement surgery, or dealing with amputating the feet of jazz singers who got too fat, or whatever.
I mean, it's like... That's a lot of people who didn't get healthcare.
I mean, one of the reasons why healthcare is expensive is because of abortions, which divert scarce health resources to kind of the opposite of health.
I mean, I thought there was this do-no-harm thing, and... Anyway.
All right.
Ryan B says, we agree on some all is appreciated blessings.
Thank you.
That's a very nice way to put it.
And Bronca Boca says, oh, sounds like Toka Boca.
Might want to list that hair salon program.
Says, oh, nothing.
Says nothing.
But thank you for your donation.
I appreciate that.
That's very, very kind.
So, yeah, a couple more questions here.
Oh, Hey, I think I recognize that name, Milan.
Do we know each other?
All right.
Prolific work, Steph.
You are appreciated more than words can say.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Dan says, after how many miscarriages do you think a woman should stop trying, knowing that you're likely going to end another life?
No, no, no, no, that's not you ending a life.
You know, this is an argument that some fairly callous secularists make, which is if abortion is wrong, then God is the most prolific abortionist of all, because a third of pregnancies sometimes end in miscarriages.
And miscarriages, in particular, if you're over 30, unfortunately, it just kind of comes with the territory and Well, miscarriages are very, very tough.
And I know couples who've struggled through four or five or even six before having... So it depends.
Like, if you have... I mean, I know a couple.
They've got kids and they are having miscarriages.
And it's tough, you know, because in that situation you already have kids.
And the miscarriage is tough because the kids are too young to understand and of course you don't want to burden kids with that kind of stuff and so are you less emotionally available because you're having these miscarriages and is it unfair to your existing kids?
That's a question that really only your conscience can answer but with regards to if you don't have a kid yet just keep trying.
Just keep swimming just keep swimming I've known I knew a couple at six miscarriages and then great kid so Again, you're not obligated to you're not compelled to but I would just say given how great I Parenthood is, and I'm sorry to say that to people who are having miscarriages, especially if you don't have any kids as yet, but given how great parenthood is, it's worth keeping trying.
And remember, there's not you.
Not you is causing that, right?
Unless you did something to yourself that messed up your genetics like lived in Fallujah.
All right.
Godzilla says, from someone who grew up similar to you in a household where the one quickest to anger and violence was always in charge, how do I let go of anger?
Ah, that is a great, great question.
It's a great question.
I had... Have I talked about this before?
I don't know, 4,400 shows?
I had quite a temper when I was younger.
Yeah, I had quite a temper.
And I worked really hard to wrestle down and focus that temper into something productive.
But I really did have quite a temper when I was younger.
And for me, why do you have fight or flight?
Because you're still in danger.
And the problem of course, what I think PTSD is, is when the fight or flight is supposed to be pretty rare, and it's supposed to be pretty quick.
So fight or flight, you get chased by a lion that you're trying to hunt, right?
And the lion turns on you, or the bear turns on you, and either you get away, or you die, but it probably doesn't last more than...
30, 60, 90 seconds.
Right?
Fight or flight is supposed to be pretty quick.
Even in a war, you know the old saying in the army?
Well, there's two sayings.
One is, if it moves, move it.
If it doesn't move, paint it.
And the other is, the army, hurry up and wait.
You gotta hurry and then you get there and just wait.
I've actually been reading about MacArthur, the Philippines, and the Bataan Death March.
By God, he was an incompetent general.
It's always shocking.
Anyway, I'll talk about that another time.
But fight-or-flight was supposed to be pretty quick.
Situations of chronic danger we're not really built for, really.
Now, I know childhood has been pretty brutal throughout human history, but the situation of chronic danger is unusual for us.
So why did people go nuts in Vietnam?
Because Vietnam was constant danger Undersupply, political interference, incredible frustration where the Viet Cong were allowed to do whatever they wanted to win and the LBJ and its administration were constantly hamstringing, and Alan Coulter writes about this very well, the LBJ and its administration were constantly micromanaging the war largely because there were so many freaking communists in the State Department and in other places that the communists wanted America to lose against the communist Viet Cong, right?
It's one of the reasons why people went nuts in Vietnam without going quite so nuts in World War II.
Plus, World War II soldiers were much older.
As the song says, you know, it's a 26-27 for World War II soldiers and 19 for Vietnam soldiers.
So, we're not really designed to be in a situation of constant fight-or-flight.
It's supposed to be real quick, adrenaline dump, cortisol dump, You kill or you die.
That's how it's supposed to work.
And war was relatively quick in the past as well.
I mean, there were sieges and so on, but war as a whole was relatively fast.
I mean, compared to 18 years and 17 years in Vietnam?
No, 18 years in Afghanistan.
Sorry, the two are not going to be a quagmire.
Yeah, right.
But the way to deal with anger is to first of all honor it.
To recognize that your anger was essential for your survival.
Because the alternative to anger is submission.
And submission to brutality often means a reproduction of that brutality in the future.
Because when we submit to something we say it is overwhelmingly powerful and we're all attracted to power and want to do things that are powerful.
And if we say that we must submit to anger, and because we particularly as men seek power, we will then end up using anger as our power.
You know, when you say this weapon is the greatest weapon of all and you're in a war, the first thing you want to do is get a hold of that weapon, right?
That's I think really really important to understand.
You honor it as a basic and essential and powerful survival mechanism that got you through and got you to adulthood and then you listen to your anger.
Your anger is telling you something.
Why are you still angry?
You're still angry because there's something in your environment that is stimulating that response.
And you then have to be, in my experience, pretty damn ruthless.
And that if people are dangerous or unstable or abusive or destructive or toxic or harmful and so on, for me at least, you've got to get them out.
You have to have people around you who are nice, who love you, who are honorable and decent and challenge you in fun and productive ways rather than bully you in mean and destructive ways.
Your anger is there because the danger is there.
And when you listen to your anger, because your anger is saying to you, there's danger around us, we are still surrounded by dysfunction and abuse.
Then you just, your anger won't go away until the danger goes away.
So, just try and find a way to live in a more safe manner.
All right, Pumpkin Face, finally got to see you live!
Thanks for all that you have done for improving my life.
Thank you very, very much.
Hater Gator says, Stefan, I think you should grow a large beard for a more philosophical look.
Well, if we end up kissing buddies, I'll listen to you about that.
Regea says, off topic, what tips do you have on maintaining focus when writing?
Oh, that's a good one.
Sorry, that sounds like the other ones weren't good, but that's a good question.
So there are a couple of tips that I have, and these are not particularly revelatory, but first of all, if you have an incredible amount of passion for what you're writing, then you'll probably be able to maintain your focus.
So if you're writing things that are boring, like if you've got some essay to do for university, you're not that into it.
I remember having to write an essay for Professor Barry Olson at Glendon College many, many years ago.
He's pretty properly retired now.
But I remember having to write an essay on John Fowles' The Magus.
It's a pretty good book, but I just, I couldn't find any way into it.
I also remember writing another essay on the Crimean War when I was in history that I just couldn't get into, and you just, you know, recognize you're going to be bored, distracted, and just grit your teeth and power through it.
But pick the most interesting subjects, you'll stay focused.
I found music really helps, particularly Classical music.
I'm a huge sucker for, I mean some of the cliched ones like Mozart's Requiem and so on, but non-vocal classical music or music that has non-english in it.
So you could have foreign language music.
I was also a big fan of Gregorian chants and there's almost some wonderful albums where people have recreated, like they haven't just done medieval music, but they actually rebuilt the instruments according to the specifications of medieval instruments and there's some amazing stuff.
to do with that and so yeah music that is not going to distract you with alternate language or failing that if there's songs that you like and know very well you can get EPs.
There's a good it's a pretty good EP from some movie I don't even know about which is Pete Townshend's Oh, let my love open the door.
Anyway, so you can go for that.
There's a pretty good one of Small Town Boy by Bronski Beat, which starts with this glorious falsetto.
It's an extended version.
I think this is my particular thing.
So I put those on.
I can't even put those on a loop because it doesn't take much brainpower to listen to them, but it gives you a great sense of richness and creativity and so on.
So there's all that kind of stuff.
That can work really well.
So I'm a big one for music when I write.
Not too loud, of course.
Always protect your hearing.
But that can really help.
But the best way to focus yourself is not to focus on the writing, but to focus on the effect of the writing.
So when I was writing The Art of the Argument, I wanted to really I want to improve people's capacity to debate with each other and think that it's really, really important to the world.
It's really important to the world.
So then you focus on the writing, not because it's the writing itself, but the purpose of the writing that really matters.
When I'm working on essential philosophy, I want to help people understand that the world is not a simulation.
Sorry, Mike.
And I want people to understand that the determinism is false and I want people to understand ethics and how much greater that's going to make their life.
So in this, I'm not really focused so much on what it is that I'm saying, which sounds kind of irresponsible, but I'm focused on how what I'm saying can do something useful out there in the world.
So if you focus on the effects of your writing, then you can, you know, voice it.
Somebody was crabbing at me a while back ago about something in the art of the argument.
It's like, You didn't get the... at some point you made a mistake regarding the technical definition of valid versus sound or something like that.
It's like, yeah, yeah, professional logicians have had 2,500 years to pound these definitions into the minds of the general population and they failed.
And somehow it's my problem if I use colloquial terms for the accuracy of an argument rather than technical terms that people have never ever absorbed in the history of the world.
You know, it's like It's like doing a nature documentary using Carcharodon carcharus instead of Great White Shark and then saying to people, well, you know, you didn't use the Latin name for the word of the heart.
It's just, you know, you meet the world where it is, and logicians have not got the difference between valid and sound pounded into the general population's head.
That's not my fault.
I've got to meet people where they are, and I'm not going to sit there and baffle people with terms they've never heard before, which weakens the power of what it is that I'm doing!
I don't know, people are just funny.
So yeah, if you're just focusing on the writing, you're going to lose your focus.
If you focus on the effects of your writing, then that's...
Nietzsche and Modernist.
Why do you fear them, Stefan?
I don't know.
Sounds like some bad horror movie.
Isaac Ligma Anton says, Does omniscience contradict free will?
Yes, because omniscience means that you know exactly what's gonna happen in the future, which means people don't have a choice.
David Gansitano, Devio Gansitano says, You would make Socrates blush.
Would love a show on the unconquered Seminole peoples.
The treachery of the legal systems It's never better displayed than in our histories.
Bless you, Stefan.
Well, thank you.
The unconquered Seminole peoples.
Well, send me an email and give me a philosophical angle.
I'm really working hard to keep things at a philosophical level.
If you'd be so very kind as to do that, that would be excellent.
All right, let's do a couple more.
You guys are great, by the way.
Sorry, I swiped and I lost it.
I know, boomer tech, boomer tech, boomer tech.
Alright, let's throw a little extra light on here.
There we go.
What do we got here?
If a fetus is subjected to the non-aggression principle and the same rights and protection under the law as born children and adults, then what can anyone, law or otherwise, do to protect an unwanted fetus from a mother seeking abortion?
I mean, if there are sanctions against the mother.
And in a free society, it's not law, it's not necessarily the courts and prison and this sort of thing, right?
But it's like saying, what can you possibly do to prevent a child from being killed?
Well, you have a law against killing a child.
I mean, if the woman's going to kill the child, and usually it's the woman who kills the child, then that's going to happen, right?
Mia M. Thoughts on vaccines, unvaccinated versus vaccinated children.
Yeah, it's I'm not an expert on this, and listen, I know everybody wants me to... I don't want to say pet issue sounds really dismissive, because it's an important issue, but the amount of time and effort and energy it would take for me to get... Look, I know how long it takes for me to become even remotely competent in IQ and all of that.
It's just, it's a huge deal for me to become expert on something like vaccines, and there's so much information, so much Contradictory information that for me to sort it all out would literally take months of my time and there are other people who are actually doctors who know what they're talking about.
So I think that vaccines are a great plus in human society.
I mean the fact that we don't have to deal with smallpox and so on is great.
So I think the vaccines have been a huge step forward in terms of keeping the population safe and healthy.
But I'll go with Mike Cernovich on this, you know, because he was talking to me, we had dinner the other day, and he was saying that, you know, his perspective, if I'm paraphrasing, so, you know, obviously go to Mike at Cernovich.com to get more on this, but he was saying, you know, so, you know, the government mandates really clustered vaccines and companies make a huge amount of profit, and that's not a situation where I think that the health of the children is being served at the very best.
Mr. Cernovich said, where do I email you about a possible interview?
My email is on the website.
All right.
Kenny O says, Am I morally required to be there for my eight-year-old nephews?
I was around them far less than semi-regularly for five years.
Morally required?
Well, no.
See, moral requirements are bans.
Like, you're morally required to not rape, theft, assault, and murder people.
Positive moral obligations.
There's aesthetically preferable actions like telling the truth and being on time.
There's more of this in my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, available at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
But... No, you're not morally required to be there for your eight-year-old nephews.
At all.
And I certainly would not be there for your eight-year-old nephews if it interferes with you having your own children.
So...
Stefan, do you like Earthworm Jim, says John Bob.
If so, I wanted to bring attention to the Indiegogo campaign for a new Earthworm Jim graphic novel by... Earthworm Jim?
Is that a video game?
I really couldn't answer that.
I apologize.
I don't really know.
All right, Marstic19.
What tips do you have for a 21 year old male who has no interest in any particular career and can't figure out what he wants to do?
Hmm.
That's interesting.
So you might want to look, I don't know where he's talked about this, but Charles Murray basically says, take a thousand dollars, go to a foreign country where you don't speak the language and try and make it.
You know, I mean, what's the Jack Posobiec did that in China when he was in his early twenties and, um, There's nothing, I mean, it can be very valuable to kind of jumpstart your ambition by just putting yourself in a challenging situation.
And I think that's very interesting.
Robert Atkinson says, are you still cool with your fellow panelists from A Night for Freedom?
I know you have a book list.
Do you have a YouTube watch list?
Like, who do you follow?
I don't.
I'm really, really sorry.
So, I mean, there's people I like.
I like Steve Crowder.
Some Ruben stuff is great.
Mike's on Ruben and I certainly mean to watch that.
No, but I don't really watch people on YouTube.
I mean, I hate to sort of say it, like I'm so busy creating my own content, but I am, that it's hard to consume other people unless it's directly related to what it is that I'm creating.
So, I can't really give you much of an answer on that.
I.B.
Queefen says, my butt makes noises, noises, noises, noises.
I'm gonna have to take your word on that, and I don't disagree.
I'm a man as well.
We are known as the Thundercracks of Dawn.
MarussiaDark says, on the vaccine issue, why not mediate discussions between pro and anti-vax experts like what Scott Adams did with climate change?
Again, I mean, it's not a particularly philosophical issue.
I mean, the government should not be in charge of it.
People should not be forced into this kind of stuff.
And it should all be voluntary.
It should be based upon the best available evidence, which is not the case at the moment.
Other than that, the content of it all becomes, and again, look how, I mean, how long it took for me to become even remotely competent in some minor aspects of climate change.
There's lots of people out there who are doing it.
I know that you want me to do it, but lots of people out there who are doing that and I don't know that I would have a great deal of philosophical value add.
All right, Badass Game says, is everything that we can possibly experience all that exists?
Or is all that we can possibly experience a subset of all that exists?
Now that's interesting as well because that begs the question on what you mean by experience.
You know, you experience your dreams at night, you experience daydreams, you may experience visions if you have particularly powerful dreams and so on.
So when I, you know, when I was writing novels Which I kind of miss, but when I was writing novels, the people were real to me as family.
I used to do, like I'd fill notebooks up with, okay, if this character would sketch a landscape, how would he or she sketch it?
You know, like just really getting into their skins, really getting into their bodies, and those conversations were vivid to me as I was listening in on some rural party line from the 1950s.
So I never experienced the Industrial Revolution as a little girl, but I wrote an entire book called Just Poor about a brilliant little girl and her struggle to make some kind of impact on a world where she had no advantages whatsoever.
That is... I experienced all of that very vividly.
When I was in the theater world, I mean, I played a variety.
I was in The Seagull, a very minor character, and I was the lead in Macbeth and so on.
Very vivid, very powerful, you know, you have to really see that stuff.
So, if you include imagination, yes.
Victory asks, who keeps the profits from federally funded abortion clinics?
I don't know.
Booker Dewitt says, hi Stefan, you once, I'd assume said, the universe doesn't exist but within the mind of human beings because the universe has no concept of existence outside of consciousness.
Could this be used as an argument for a pro-choice?
I don't know about that.
Sorry, I can't quite make that leap.
All right, so I guess we're almost ready to finish up.
You know what?
I hate to be late.
Let me be not such a super chat snob and head into the regular old chatty chat.
Bearheart says thank you Stefan.
I'm a young man 24 years old.
I've been I'm between two decisions military or trade school.
Thoughts?
Well my friend I will tell you this trade school if I were in your shoes and the reason that I was actually just talking to a friend of mine who's ex-military and he was saying that you know he wanted to be a SEAL he wanted to be toughest of the toughest he wanted to be a marine and he ended up in the Navy And he said, you know, he said, I never fought.
And he says now, you know, like at the time, I'm like, oh, but now he says, you know, I have some concerns about, you know, how fair it is, how good it is, how honest it is.
So, you know, when you go into the military, you are at the mercy of the military industrial complex, and they may send you on a war that is Not for the interest of the people paying your salary.
And that's a pretty, pretty tough thing to deal with.
And so that would be something I'd be very concerned about.
And I don't think there's any way to solve that easily.
Ah, all right, fine.
I'll do more.
That's very kind.
Thank you.
Kenny O says, for really, really bad people like Charles Manson and other killers, there were hundreds of women who publicly professed their attraction to those men.
Why is it such a slippery, steep climb for good, smart guys?
Well, yes, well, female preferences have been largely corrupted, as have male preferences, to a large degree, by the welfare state, by debt, by consequence-free lifestyles, and so on.
Babies take massive amounts of resources.
I don't just mean money, but time, energy, breast milk, focus, sleep.
I mean, they take huge amounts of resources.
Where are those resources going to come from?
Well, if the women can run to the state...
Then they don't have to be nice to men, they don't have to choose good men.
There's a reason why feminists went for the welfare state, were pro the welfare state, partly because they're useful idiots for the left and the commies as a whole.
But the reason why the feminists wanted the welfare state is that feminism being so anti-male and so hostile towards men can't survive if women need men to voluntarily provide them with resources in a monogamous loving relationship.
Because you can't say I hate men, now men give me resources for my Two children, right?
Because men will say, no, you hate men so much, why would you want to poison your bank account with our money?
So once you have a welfare state, women don't need to please men.
And so they can just indulge in every dark fantasy that you can imagine, which is why you only get Fifty Shades of Grey after the welfare state.
Esposo de Casa says we have a nine-month-old and he still wakes four to six times a night, has never slept well.
It is no doubt damaging, I guess cry it out, it's no doubt damaging to a new baby, but do you have any opinions on sleep training an older baby?
Opinions on co-sleeping, how did Izzy sleep as a baby considering how smart she is?
Thank you.
Again, I'm no expert here, I'm just going to talk about my own personal experience and this was, I mean, believe it or not, or maybe you do believe it, pretty easy to believe I suppose, but This was a very, very, a fairly controversial medium to big deal back in the day, in sort of the dawn days of free domain radio.
And the reason for that was, of course, being into peaceful parenting.
You know, didn't want to use upsetting or problematic behaviors with regards to my daughter.
So, we did end up sleep training, simply because my daughter was simply not sleeping.
I mean, barely sleeping and I mean it was just...
You know, we were stumbling around and tired and it wasn't a good situation for anyone.
So we did end up sleep training, which was tough.
And one of the reasons was that I read somewhere that babies who have sleep issues that aren't corrected still have sleep issues when they're in college, like they have trouble sleeping and so on.
And that's kind of a lifelong curse to give to a kid, to have that kind of issue go on for so long and could become sort of a permanent life issue.
So just for sort of quality of life and so on, we did end up sleep training and it didn't take very long.
And my daughter slept through the night and has been, she's still a night owl, but she's a, she's a good sleeper now.
And I think that's been a good gift to her because I've had some sleep issues at times in my life and it's, it's really not a whole lot of fun.
I would say that you know do all the research and so on but as far as quality of life goes sleep training is as important like having a baby or a toddler I guess in this case nine month old is still I don't know I don't know what the official designations are but it's closer to baby than toddler I think
Teaching a child how to sleep well is as important as teaching a child good nutrition and making sure the child gets enough exercise and gets access to conversation and playtime and so on.
Sleep is a very essential human skill and you know we live in a world with artificial light.
You know what is it?
It's almost ten o'clock and oh my gosh we're home too early.
You know I've got lights shining on me and you know we watch Screens and and we have phones and tablets and and you know, we're not in a natural sleep Situation hell even even a candle is not a natural sleep situation whale oil Kerosene lamps are not natural situation.
So we live in this kind of really artificial situation when it comes to lights and and Sleep and so we kind of have to learn to sleep again with all this stimulation unless you want to have no electricity And no candles in which case I guess you'll be okay You can go to bed when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up or something.
So, given that sleep is kind of an essential skill for people to learn, and we have situations wherein we just are against all of our natural sleep instincts and histories, it's like the sugar thing, right?
I mean, sugar was rare, now it's everywhere, and we kind of have to manage things in a different way.
And sleep was easy, and now it's hard for a lot of people, and so we need to manage things in a different way.
So, I do believe that it is as essential to help your child learn how to sleep as it is for any other health issue because as you know sleeplessness is associated with uh... a significant number as far as i've read of negative health outcomes and so You know, you don't want your kid to have too much sugar because there's negative health outcomes and you want to make sure your kid learns how to sleep because there will be negative health outcomes if there's a lifetime of poor sleep.
And so it is important.
The child, you know, my sort of vaguely amateur guess is something like this.
Babies panic because they don't know that Their issues are going to be dealt with or if their issues aren't dealt with that they'll be able to solve it for themselves.
So if a baby's hungry the baby will cry so that you give the baby food and then the baby will stop crying and you learn this enough and then the baby cries less because they know it's going to be dealt with and solved and so on.
Sleep is different though, because you can't go in and feed the child sleep, right?
Assuming you don't drug the child, which of course is horrible, even a horrifying idea.
I just have to be really technical because there's so many nitpickers.
I'm trying not to have them run my brain, but let's face it, they're running my brain.
So teaching your baby to sleep, you can't really directly do it.
But what you can do is the child is going to wake, assuming the baby's not ill or hungry or thirsty or anything, the baby's going to wake, and then the baby is going to be distressed about something.
And if that something is not something that they need external, then they will cry for a little while, and then they'll go back to sleep.
And what they've learned is that they can get themselves back to sleep. - Right.
So they wake up, they want you, because in the past when they were babies they would cry and you'd come.
So they're used to you being there.
So they wake up and they want you, so they cry.
Now if you don't come, then the baby, assuming again the baby doesn't need anything external, the baby will eventually go back to sleep.
They'll cry for a while and they'll go back to sleep.
Now you say, oh that's suffering, that's suffering.
It's like, well yeah that is suffering, but it's You know, the baby suffers when he wants candy, and you don't give him candy.
When you cry about that, it doesn't mean you give him candy, right?
And so, that suffering for the baby is what builds trust in the baby.
Trust in the baby's own ability, which the baby perceives, to be able to put himself or herself back to sleep.
I woke up, I was upset, I learned how to self-soothe and get myself back to sleep.
And the next time you wake up, oh, I'm upset.
Wait, actually no, last time I was able to get my, let me try to get myself back to, right?
And so the baby then learns how to get back to sleep.
And then the upset begins to diminish and the baby doesn't eat, like the baby gets himself back to sleep.
and eventually the baby doesn't even wake up because Waking up doesn't do any good.
Well, what's the point of waking up?
I'm just gonna sleep myself back to sleep again, right?
So you sleep through the baby sleeps through the night and so, you know, it's nice if the baby does this On his or her own, but if the baby doesn't, then I have no particular issue with sleep training.
I'm very glad that we did it.
I wish we didn't have to do it, but you know, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
So I do think it's very, very important to teach your children good sleep habits in the same way that you want to teach your children good eating habits and exercise habits.
Just very, very important.
And also, of course, as you know, you have to remind yourself Or you have to ask yourself the question, are you modeling good behavior?
I mean, are you up half the night on your cell phone?
Are you constantly don't want to go to bed because for whatever reason?
I mean, are you modeling good sleep behavior for your child?
And one of the ways to model good sleep behavior for your child is to actually sleep through the night yourself.
I hope that helps.
If there's anything else I can do, please let me know.
We could maybe do a call or something like that.
I mean, I love the parenting questions and issues and all that.
So if there's something else that I can do to help that out, I would be very, very happy to.
Oh, the questions they come pouring in.
He is breastfed.
I am so tired and we are wanting to start trying to baby number two when he is a year old.
Yeah, you know, I am...
I really sympathize.
You know, the breastfeeding stuff is really tough.
It's really tough.
But your baby... What was it?
These silly things that pop into my head, but I think it's relevant.
So I remember reading some story years ago about some girls were out playing soccer and some mom showed up, you know, like, here's a plate of cut up fruit and the dad was like, they're playing soccer for an hour.
They don't need to eat for an hour.
They'll survive without food for an hour.
So again, I don't know, but my understanding is, and again, it's just my opinion, look it all up for yourself, I'm pretty sure a nine-month-old can get through a night time sleep without eating, right?
I don't think you want to do that with a newborn, pretty sure you don't, but yeah, pretty sure that A nine-month-old can get through the night without feeding on your breast milk, and he'll survive.
He'll be fine, right?
So, don't be so tired.
Don't be so tired.
I'm sorry to be annoying about this, right?
Because I know it's an annoying thing to hear when you're tired.
Don't be so tired.
But you have to take care of yourself.
You have to enjoy being a parent.
And you have to be rested because you drive your kids around.
Because you have to be alert if you're at a playground.
You have to be rested so that you can not only be a happy mother, but so that you can help keep your children safe.
Because if you're kind of half-dozy or kind of out of it, I mean, you may not be there if your kid's walking near a staircase.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to freak you out because, you know, moms and dads too, right?
We don't worry about this kind of stuff.
But, you know, you really need to be responsible not just for your own enjoyment of parenting, but also for you need to be rested as a parent so that you can take good care of your kids and be happy with them and play with them in a positive way and so on.
So it can be a couple of nights or a week or two of sleep training, but I think pretty sure the baby will be fine and
you'll end up being better rested a happier mom and I don't know I mean do you end up with more it's funny I don't know this but it just sort of popped into my head do you end up with more stress hormones in your milk because you're exhausted all the time and then that keeps your baby I don't know but I would really focus on you have the right to have good sleep as a mom and once your baby and again look all of this stuff up ask your doctor whatever right once your baby can survive eight or ten hours without food Pretty sure they can at nine months.
Then cry it out is fine.
Cry it out is fine.
It's not traumatized my daughter and in fact it would have been traumatic for all of us because the bad sleep doesn't resolve itself without intervention at least from my experience.
So I hope that helps.
Father Enrico says can you achieve heaven by resetting the universe?
I gotta say no to pretty much most of that.
Archer says, I believe we spend too much time demonizing each other and not enough time suggesting solutions.
The right is pro-life.
The left is pro-women's rights.
It's time to come to a happy medium.
I believe that is the only solution.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's like going to a business conference and saying, I think it's really important to deliver products your customers want at a profit.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, the what is not the deal.
The how is the deal.
All right.
Well, thank you, everyone, so much.
I'm going to just drop past in case I miss something absolutely crucial on... Do I have my...
Do I have my regular... Oh, here's the part.
I'm always like, should I edit this or should I not?
I don't know.
Let's see here.
Ah, there we go.
All right.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, And again, thanks everyone for dropping by.
It's a real pleasure to chat with you guys.
I mean, I could do this every night, but I'm always a little bit concerned that I'm producing too much content because, you know, I did a three-hour Discord Q&A with people and I'm always like, hey, am I producing too much content?
It's not really possible to... It's not really possible to Actually consume what it is that I produce.
Well, I guess picky choosy stuff, right?
People can play it a little bit faster, but yeah, I could turn... Nah, don't edit it, someone says.
Someone says, hi Stefan, I would like to set up a debate with you.
Well, I'm just...
Give me a shout, and maybe we could work that out.
I like debates, and I haven't really done that much, that many of them lately, mostly because, well, people, they don't want to debate me anymore.
Anyway, let's see here.
How to convince a woman that is about to do an abortion to refrigerate her baby.
Call in about that, that would be, if you can get her to call.
Jessica B says Jesus F this guy isn't a goddamn expert on every effing subject.
Yeah, that's that's true.
That's very true.
I'm a very psychotic Nook says mama five here telling you crying it out should be a last resort for sensitive kids.
It can be harmful I don't know.
Kids are pretty robust.
I think they're pretty robust.
Dan says, if the baby was the woman's body, it would have identical blood type.
It's not her body.
Interesting.
What are your thoughts on cryptocurrency?
Oh, dude.
I've got so many videos on cryptocurrency that I think it's fantastic.
I think it's the wave of the future.
I think the sky's the limit.
And I think you should definitely look more into it.
This woman says, I was the only one at my son's daycare who openly breastfed.
I don't care how many dirty looks from the other my wife couldn't make it.
And he was hungry.
Oh, right.
I guess.
I didn't get the joke till the end, but that's pretty funny.
The truth about cult mentality.
Interesting.
Interesting.
All right.
Let's just see here.
Let's see here.
Fish pee in the water.
Don't drink it.
Don't drink the ocean anyway.
All right.
Let's see here.
Take advice from actual mothers, not this strange effeminate charlatan.
I don't know if that's in reference to me or whatever.
whatever.
Nice to see fewer anti-Semites around.
All right.
I think, yeah, I think we are.
I'm sorry.
I'm just scrolling through.
That's not particularly helpful or interesting.
So let me just see if any last Super Chats came in.
Am I stalling?
Am I stalling it?
It's too much fun.
What can I tell you?
What can I tell you?
All right.
Let's try and see if there are any last Super Chats that came in because, you know, people drop in Super Chats at the end just because they don't want me to stop.
Well, it's fine.
I don't want me to stop either.
So let's see if anything else came in.
No?
Okay, good.
All right.
Well, thanks everyone so much for a wonderfully charming evening and let me know what you think.
I'm happy to talk about sort of positive stuff around abortion and how abortions would be handled in a free society.
And now is the part, at the end of the show of course, I do say please help me out.
Please, please help me out.
Freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
Follow me on Twitter at Stephan Molyneux.
I'm on Facebook.
I'm now on Telegram as well under Free Domain.
So please search me up there as well and let us join together no matter where I may in fact end up.
You can go to freedomainradio.com And sign up for a newsletter, also very helpful and important.
Again, who knows what's going to happen?
And, you know, please share the videos.
You know, they're really not showing up much in Recommended anymore.
They're not, you know, hard to find these days.
And I imagine these days are going to be quite a few days.
And so, if you could share my videos, I think that would be really, really helpful.
I know that would, and I would really appreciate it.
And so have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week and I appreciate everyone's support on this amazing journey.
Love you guys so much.
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