July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:40
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| Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| Let's talk about one of the most rabidly and frustratingly pro-gun movies to have come out of Hollywood, lo these recent years, the movie Captain Phillips. | |
| So Captain Phillips is a story about, based on a loosely based, according to the crew members, of an event where four Somali teenagers, two of them with no shoes, managed to capture a giant cargo vessel with millions of dollars worth of cargo on it. | |
| with a few guns and a skiff that looks like it was made half out of papier-mâché, prayers, twine, spider web and hope. | |
| And they board the ship and then they take the captain hostage and the U.S. | |
| Navy sends Death Stars or Star Destroyers or whatever they're called to go and rescue the captain, which they do. | |
| So, sorry about the spoilers, but it's sort of important to get the full story to understand just what kind of movie this is. | |
| So first of all, of course, Somalia, which has a sort of new government emerging, but the prior dictatorship collapsed some time ago, and I've got some videos about the truth about Somalia which you might want to check out. | |
| It's portrayed as a complete crap heap, both in this movie and in Black Hawk Down, but the reality is it actually has some of the highest status of living around in Africa, a fantastic telecommunications network, lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy than when it had a government, but of course You're not going to hear about much of that out of Hollywood, which is generally enormously pro-government and left-wing, partly because they rely on unionized labor to get anything done. | |
| So the reality of why there are pirates is touched on in the movie that the western fishing vessels are going and scooping up all the fish, leaving the fishermen with nothing. | |
| But more importantly, a lot of vessels were dumping toxic waste into the ocean off Somalia, and this killed a lot of the fish in marine life and didn't leave the fishermen with much choice. | |
| So they think of them as sort of an impromptu navy that was attempting to drive destructive foreign ships away from the shore. | |
| So three weeks leading up to the events in the movie, 16 container ships had been hijacked, eight of them were captured, and the crews were held hostage and then sold for ransom. | |
| The ships approach and Captain Phillips tries a variety of strategies to keep them away, and one of them involves setting up the least fun water park known in the history of mankind when they turn these massive hoses. | |
| on these pirates as they try to board the ship and one of the hoses goes awry and the guy goes out and risks getting shot to turn the hose back the right way at which point the pirates just climb up anyway so not the most effective strategy and at one point Captain Phillips opens the safe and pulls out a box and you think ah-ha finally a gun to chase the pirates off with yes it is a gun but it's the flare kind of gun which he then shoots at and misses a number of times | |
| For anyone who's had any exposure to these kind of arguments, one of the things that's just so frustrating about the movie is why don't they have any weapons on board? | |
| Why don't they have, you know, a rifle, anything, an anvil to drop Roadrunner style on the boat below, the pirate boat below, would have been helpful. | |
| You know, why is it that a couple of dozen crew members in a multi-million, multi-billion dollar, well, multi-million dollar ship could have been hijacked by a bunch of teenagers, again, two of them who have no shoes on. | |
| Like all of this sort of nonsense, a lot of it has to do with international law, wherein you can't sail into a foreign port with any real weapons on board, and so it's governments that don't allow the ships to have any kind of security. | |
| The government's advice to the ships sailing through the Somali waters is sail super fast, like 18 knots and above, and what that does is it actually burns hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of extra fuel, like Ships are like highway cars on steroids. | |
| The faster you go, the more fuel you use proportional to the distance traveled. | |
| So these ships are told to go super fast, and then they burn up hundreds of thousands of dollars of fuel extra. | |
| And it doesn't usually work anyway. | |
| Captain Phillips was instructed to stay 600 miles away. | |
| from the Somali coast. | |
| He says he was less... he says he was 300, reports have him at 250, 260 miles away. | |
| So he was sailing a bit too close, but that's something for the lawsuit from the crewman to the captain to be sorted out. | |
| What's happened since this incident is that shipping companies have now got trained gunmen on the ship. | |
| And this cost them about $30,000 to do. | |
| And it's a lot less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it would have spent burning up the fuel and it has no ship that has one of these paramilitary crews on it has ever been hijacked and in fact the general sort of piratical activity has diminished and is almost non-existent now as a result of some basic defensive maneuvers. | |
| Why is it thirty thousand dollars to go? | |
| Because they can't put The defense team on the boat in a port because they have weapons. | |
| So they have to have a boat meet up and put the defense team on board once they're in international waters and then they have to have another boat come and take the military team off when they get close to and because the governments don't allow the weapons to come into the dock. | |
| Now some countries have changed that and have allowed the weapons if they're secured and locked up and all that by the time they get to the port and so on. | |
| But again it's just governments don't allow you to carry weapons and therefore you need Billions and billions of dollars worth of military hardware, and lord knows how much fuel. | |
| You need Navy SEALs, paratroopers, assault helicopters, aircraft, and small sea craft, again, to deal with four Somali teenagers, two of whom have no shoes. | |
| Three warships alone cost tens of billions of dollars each, and this is the kind of nonsense that occurs when the government takes over your protection. | |
| There are lots of other ways to deal with pirates. | |
| One that is employed by the British Navy is Britney Spears. | |
| Not individually, but in terms of her songs. | |
| They pump out Oops, I Did It Again and Baby One More Time at massively high volume, and it drives the pirates away because apparently they hate Western culture and Western music, and this drives them off. | |
| So again, fairly creative. | |
| Tragically, one of the British Navy officers have said that they would use Justin Bieber's music, but they would consider that to be against the Geneva Convention. | |
| Hey! | |
| No hatin' on the Biebs. | |
| So this is An example of just how crazy governments are and how they strip away your protections and how a free market solution would just be ridiculously efficient. | |
| And so I think it's an interesting movie to watch. | |
| I think the performances are good, but you have to just kind of get over the annoyance at how unnecessary all of this stuff is and how ridiculous disarming people puts them at such risk of death, of mutilation, and so on. | |
| And it's a very good argument as to why governments should just stay out of industry and business as a whole and let people find, whether it's, you know, hired guards or Britney Spears' music or even the aforementioned nuclear strike of Justin Bieber's music, this is the way that you keep people protected. | |
| You let them protect themselves, because there's no guarantee that even with tens of billions of dollars of U.S. | |
| military hardware, you're not going to get killed in the process. | |
| So, this is Stephen Muller from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Thank you so much for watching. |
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