All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 30, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:24
Twitter Thoughts: Ivanka Trump Gets Paid Family Leave!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
I just wanted to start off by offering up my most deep and heartfelt condolences to the myriad victims of attacks by crazy fundamentalist evil extremists on religious institutions last night.
There was a machete-wielding man Who entered a rabbi's home during shul and attacked the Jews there.
There was today an attack on a Christian church, I believe two dead, and a quick-witted and fast-shooting responder with a gun stopped the attack and killed the assailant.
I just want to say how incredibly Sympathetic, I feel, to the victims of this violence against religious people.
So I just wanted to point that out and be very, very clear on that.
I'm so sorry for all of this.
Okay, so let's go to our Twitter thoughts and try and shake off the evils around us with some positive thinking and perhaps some decent humor.
So I put out a tweet recently.
A guy said, my friends asked how I'd saved so much, and when I don't make much money at all.
I just don't buy girls.
I'm seeing anything.
They can hang around and come on adventures.
That's a reward. But if they want a fancy new coat, they can buy it themselves.
And I said, I never understood this one-sided paying for stuff for girlfriends.
And that's true. I'm a little tight with my money, except when it comes to lavishing goods on this show.
But... I never really got into just paying for women's things.
Like, oh, I need rent. Can you lend me some money?
Oh, I need a new coat. It's like, I've never dated anyone, I think, that financially incompetent that they can't make their own rent or a new coat or whatever.
But I've never really understood just paying for women.
Now, if you take a woman out, you ask a woman out, I'm fine paying for dinner and all that kind of stuff.
Although I do expect it to be reciprocal after a while.
And even when I was making some decent coins, As a software entrepreneur, I remember taking out a woman and I was happy to pay for dinner, but then she wanted to rent a movie and watch it at her place.
And I just stood there and she ended up renting the movie, even though she was a student at the time.
It's like, no, I mean, I'm not going to, I don't mind paying more, but I'm going to pay for everything.
So then this woman wrote back and said, come on, Stefan, you are not a stupid person.
Now that's called priming, right?
Well, I'm not a stupid person, so I better agree with you.
She wrote, Some women like gifts.
It is a love language.
If you're not into that, then perhaps find a woman who likes one of the other four.
P.S. Some men like gifts as a love language.
You are becoming insufferable as your hatred for females shows.
So this is from somebody named Dr.
Gary Chapman. And the five love languages.
One, gifts, tokens of affection.
Two, quality time together.
Three, physical touch. Four, words of affirmation.
Five, acts of service.
Love languages. I mean, is that what they call it when you just want free stuff now?
Now, it's interesting to me because It's amazing to me what people can skate or bounce over when they read something that I wrote.
We'll get to more of that in a little bit.
So I said this one-sided buying of things for girlfriends.
Now, I didn't say the mothers of your children.
Look, if you've got a wife, she's raising your children, running your household and so on, then you pay the bills if that's your arrangement.
And she's providing massive service to you, of course, by doing all of that wonderful stuff to help raise your children.
So I'm talking about girlfriends, like before you get married, before you have kids, and one-sided, right?
Which means that why would the gifts only go one way?
Well, that's a way of keeping someone as a child.
I mean, to pay for someone else who's not returning work of equal value.
Like if the man goes out and works and the woman's home raising the kids running the household, she's providing work of equal value, right?
And so that's not the man paying for her, that's them mutually investing labor into the creation of the next generation.
And I gotta tell you, you know, I've been married now, I mean, it's coming on for 20 years soon, and my daughter just turned 11.
And, I mean, this idea that the woman is still so needy, that she needs the little affirmations, she needs these little notes, she needs these constant prop-ups and so on.
It's like, what happened to the robustness of females that de Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America, that the great strength of America was the strength and power of its women?
What is with this perpetual childhood, where if you don't leave little sonnets with bows on it, then she thinks you're having an affair with the laundromat lady or something?
Like, it's just very strange to me.
You know, if you have committed to someone, if you've intertwined your lives together, like two trees growing into one, then the idea that she also, in addition, needs these little affirmations and hugs and, what is it, words of affirmation?
Are women like these leading tower of pieces that are constantly falling over unless they're propped up by the breathy exhalation of worshipful male words?
That makes no sense to me at all.
I mean, maybe, I think, you know what I think the problem is?
I think the problem is I just have too much respect for women to think of them as needing a man to buy their coat when they're only dating.
I think too much of women to think that they need this constant praise and propping up.
I'm sure there are some women who are like that.
I'm sure there are some men who are like that.
But this constant needy insecurity and needing of affirmation, it's like It's just weird.
Hey, don't get me wrong. You know, I do romantic things for my wife.
I buy her flowers from time to time.
And, you know, I'm constantly telling her, of course, how much she means to me, how much I love her.
But that's just a statement of honesty.
I don't do it because she needs it or because she's insecure without it.
And so I just...
Women are, in sort of the way that I understand it, they have different strengths than men in general, but they're very robust.
They're very strong.
You know, women can lift cars off toddlers that are pinned beneath and do the most amazing things and have, you know, wonderful strengths and powers in the world.
And I just...
I refuse to look at them as these tender, wind-whipped little saplings that are just about to upend their roots into the sky and go tumbling across the plain because some guy didn't bring home a rose.
So, I mean, maybe that's, you know, the business of love, like, the business of love is children.
The business of love is... Having a family structure.
The business of love is monogamy.
The business of love is creating a stable foundation in which to launch the next generation to the skies.
It's not about you.
It's not about me.
It's not even fundamentally about the kids.
It's just about the continuance of culture and of life and values and so on.
It's not there to serve your needs.
You're there to serve life as a whole.
I just thought that was...
I found that quite interesting.
So, there's another topic that came up, which was Ivanka Trump.
Now... She seems very nice.
But Ivanka Trump said, people aren't debating anymore whether paid family leave is a good policy.
So President Trump's daughter and senior advisor Ivanka Trump declined to comment on CBS News Face the Nation whether she was endorsing any specific bill on paid family leave, but said she could support Democratic-led legislation if it was the, quote, right policy.
So she said, when I first came to Washington, I was surprised at how few Democrats had taken their argument for the merit of paid leave to their colleagues across the aisle.
So it really was startling from the beginning and talking about this policy and framing it in different terms.
So Republicans didn't want a payroll tax increase that disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.
So what are new solutions?
We proposed the first ever bipartisan, bicameral plan that would allow people the flexibility to determine if they want to pull back Pull forward their child tax credit and then pay it back over 10 years.
And that is really quite something.
And so this idea, and it's complex of course, paid family leave is a good policy.
Now there did used to be, historically of course, And even prehistorically, there did used to be something called a paid family leave, and it was called having a husband.
The basic reality is children consume resources, lots of resources.
And in particular, they consume time.
They don't consume that much food when they're young, but they consume immeasurable amounts of time.
And as their requirements for time diminish, their requirements for food increase.
And so to raise children well, the mom needs to stay home.
That's just a fact. Now you can take your kids and you can drop them in a daycare and I worked in a daycare for years as a teenager and I know very clearly what they're like and they are...
Amoral, value-free holding pens for children.
I mean, I tried to do my best.
I actually, I remember with the kids, I told them the story of the Silmarillion over a couple of weeks.
It was really quite a room.
It was like 40 kids aged 5 to 10.
It was me and one other daycare worker.
And I was there in the summers.
I do sort of full-time work up there.
I remember going to see a movie called The Last Starfighter, which I actually did kind of want to see, saying to all the kids, hey, does anyone have to go to the bathroom before we go to the movie?
I want to see this. Oh, no, no, no.
We don't have to go to the movie. Don't have to go to the movie.
And then I literally spent most of the movie taking kids to the bathroom because, you know, they got the big gulps and, you know, the...
Like when I went to go and see Titanic and I didn't realize how long the movie was.
I had a big drink of club soda and, you know, got kind of a full bladder and, of course, the last hour of the movie is just watching people slosh around in semi-deep water.
So it was quite vivid as far as I remember that.
But... The daycare is not...
You can't transfer values.
You can't teach kids right from wrong.
I mean, you can sort of restrain them from bad behavior, so to speak, but it's not the same as transmitting actual cultural values.
So, yeah, mom needs to stay home and raise the kids.
Now, she doesn't have to. Of course, she can go and work.
But then you lose your cultural continuity and you end up with, you know, the current mess we have where leftists have taken over most of the major institutions.
And now a third of millennials believe that communism, they have a positive view of communism.
And I tweeted this on Twitter today like I can't, excuse my French, but I cannot believe we have to go through this goddamn fight again.
We have to go through...
People approving communism.
This is why I say, like, if you think that communists are all over the place in the media, they're all over the place.
In academia in particular, there are thousands and thousands of outright Marxists.
I think the highest proportion is in anthropology.
Outright Marxists out there.
And Marxism responsible for many, many more deaths than National Socialism or Nazism.
And so if you believe that Nazis are a big problem in the West, but communists and communism is not, well, that just shows you how powerful and effective the communist propaganda has been, right?
International communism hates national.
Well, international socialism hates national socialism in the form of Nazism.
And so the paid leave has always historically been the bankruptcy The woman certainly does her part for food production with vegetable patches and hunting and gathering and so on.
But the woman raises the children and transmits the values down through the generations while the man goes out and gains the additional resources he needs to support a family.
A man needs approximately 9 to 10 times the resources if he has a wife and kids.
And so that's the deal.
So paid family leave used to be actually having a husband who would pay your bills while you were raising his children and contributing your labor that way.
But now that so many sad and lonely women have ended up marrying the government, I guess it's the government who has to do what the husband is no longer around to do.
And I just think that's really tragic that everyone was talking about paid family leave when this has always been the case for humanity, that we've always had paid family leave and it just used to be private and now it's the government as a whole, which is really, really quite tragic, of course.
Now, something else that showed up in my timeline, or I guess it did sort of show up in my timeline because I typed it.
So, whenever I talk about the value of motherhood, there's something interesting that happens.
Two interesting things that happen. One is that people talk about having children.
You know, the process of pregnancy, the process of childbirth and so on.
So they talk about having children.
What they specifically don't talk about is raising children.
Now, sometimes the having children is somewhat implicit in that they say, well, you're having a couple of kids, blah, blah, blah.
Or it's very explicit and they say, like, I'm more than an incubator.
I'm more than a broodmare, which is a completely sociopathic way to look at motherhood.
Like you're just some walking womb for the photocopying of human DNA. I mean, that's like a Terminator would look at that and say, whoa, man, that's too cold.
That's too cold for me.
I can't get there. And so, that's one thing that happens, is they talk about having children, not raising children.
Now, raising children is a fascinating, complex, deep, powerful, and philosophical process.
I mean, I've run a philosophy show for 15 years, I've been into philosophy for over 30 years, and I've done my entrepreneurial stuff and all of that.
So I've done academia, graduate school.
I've done a lot of really interesting intellectual exercises.
And parenting has been one of the most fascinating and deepest and most powerful things that I've done.
And I'm not the dumbest person around, so it is really, really fascinating to raise children.
Now, if you ignore your children, if you dump them in daycare, if you don't have much to do with them when they're growing up, then sure, it feels like just a chore because you're not having those Great conversations, those transfers of values, those wrangling with the bestial nature of humanity and attempting to lacquer on a few layers of civilization on top of that, you're not doing any of that. So there's no real complexity.
You're just wrangling and managing and bathing and feeding and, you know, it has about as much emotional complexity as having a lizard or a boa constrictor for a pet.
So that's sort of one thing that people will do is they will say, well...
You're just having children.
You're just a broodmare, not the actual mothering or the raising of children.
And that just tells me everything I need to know about their mothers.
They probably dumped them in daycare and didn't have much to do with them or anything like that.
So that's one thing. The second thing you see when I talk about the positive aspects of parenting, and in particular motherhood, the second thing you'll see is, oh, that's all women are good for, is having children.
Now, even if that's extended to the raising of children, that's really fascinating.
In other words, if a woman...
Has and raises children.
And that's all she's going to be doing for her entire life.
Look, women live to be about 80 in the West.
So, you know, just say 20 to 80.
That's like 60 years. So let's say that you take 10 years of those and you stay home, a couple of kids, you breastfeed, you get them through toddlerhood, you get them, you know, hopefully homeschooled or whatever.
You kind of get them on their way.
You get them to, I don't know, 10 or 12 or whatever it is.
So let's just say you spend 10 years doing that, right?
Okay. So, of the 60 years you're going to spend as an adult, you spend 10 of those years having and raising children, which gives you half a century in which to do all of the other wonderful things that you want to do.
And it's so funny. I tweeted this as well.
The selfishness and narcissism of some of these women, particularly in the West, is really, really staggering.
To build and maintain Western civilization, countless men, literally countless men, for thousands of years were forced to fight.
They got wounded. They died in agony.
They lost limbs.
They lost arms. It was horrifying what men had to go through to build and maintain our civilization.
This doesn't even count the extraordinary high levels of workplace deaths of men relative to women even in the modern age.
And so that's what men had to go through to build and maintain the civilization that we have.
And then, if you say to women, you know, it would be nice if you had children, because there was really little freaking point to any of it, if nobody has any kids, or very few people have kids.
It'd be really nice if you could have, and hold, and cuddle, and raise babies.
Have some babies. Have some babies.
You know, compared to being forced to fight, and D-Day landings, and the Bataan Death March, and Agincourt, and King Harold taking an arrow through the eye...
What's your big sacrifice?
You've got to have some babies, which is great fun.
Babies are ridiculous amounts of fun.
That's your big sacrifice.
That's your big challenge. Would you rather be a guy stuck in a trench, snapping off his frozen toes while rats ate at your dad's In World War I, would you rather poison gas, mustard gas?
Would you rather shells raining down on you from on high like the thunderbolt ass clamp of the guards?
No. What's your big sacrifice, ladies?
Have some babies, raise some kids while other people, while your husband pays the bills?
I mean...
We're talking club crib here.
That's the vacation land that you get to.
You know, raising babies can be hard work, and I get all of that.
I've done that. But if you look at sacrifices that men made in order to have the civilization, and then you can't even talk to women about having kids without, you monster!
What are you talking about?
I might have to have children and cuddle babies.
What are you, monster?
I can't believe you.
What was it all for?
What was it all for? My family both killed and died.
I'm half German, half British to some degree Irish.
My family killed and died in multiple wars throughout Western history.
For what? So women could run spreadsheets instead of raise children and yell at everyone that thinks they should maybe have a couple of babies.
What was it for? It wasn't even for nothing.
▲
Export Selection