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Sept. 3, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:27
"YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT COVID STEFAN MOLYNEUX!" Freedomail
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All right, everybody. Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well. So as promised, I'm going to do just a little smidge of email responses.
So I have a newsletter that I put out, freedomain.com forward slash newsletter.
I hope you will check it out. And let's dive straight in.
So one fellow writes, Hey, Steph, thank you for your email and question.
I asked people, of course, how they're doing, what they're thinking.
He said, I must say, I agree with you to a large extent, although I could be wrong.
I believe COVID is real, but I also believe it has been exaggerated, a tool for state oppression that can be turned on and off, perhaps endlessly.
The government is saving billions and now has a lot more control.
I agree two gems to have come out of it are homeschooling and curbed immigration.
This makes me very happy.
Children here in Australia have returned to school on a voluntary basis.
Usually single working mothers are the ones sending them to school.
There are not that many children in schools from what I see.
The biggest fear I notice and I have faced to my detriment is the unknown.
The government and the media have manipulated, lied, and oppressed us so much.
I now find it difficult to decipher what is fact and what is fiction.
Shites such as the Me Too movement is one example of this.
It's extremely dangerous and can be world-ending, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay. So, let's see here.
I genuinely reconsidered the only thing I disagreed with you on.
I read George Orwell's 1984 and reflected on your points on women and relationships.
Perhaps I'd let my MGTOW, men go in their own way, following cloud my judgment too much.
Logically speaking, I can't see how a woman can't want to genuinely love a man as much as a man wants to love a woman.
At 48, I may start to look for a woman again after 10 years of being a monk.
I mean, who wants to go old alone?
I practice your principles everywhere I go.
I am vocal, and I do not bow to virtue signaling, Marxist culture, or its intimidation.
I, in fact, challenge it.
I take it apart piece by piece, and I'm never sick at sea.
I've never lost yet, though it's not always easy.
I know if I have met a psychopath to make a quick exit.
So, look, COVID is a wild situation.
There are A lot of minuses, obviously.
There are some pluses.
And in life in general, you know, I got yeeted off Twitter, but maybe that will extend my eyesight because I'm spending less time looking at screens.
You've got to try and find some positive stuff in the negative, in my opinion.
You don't have to, but it is of value to do so, to try and find the silver lining in whatever storm clouds happen to be raging over you at the time.
And yes, mass immigration is to a large degree, not obviously completely, but to a large degree is on hold.
And I want you to know, this is with all due sympathy to the significant suffering that COVID has inflicted upon people, particularly those with a number of comorbidities, as you've probably heard.
And it seems to be taken as some big revelation that the CDC in America has released the fact that only 6% of COVID deaths are Unrelated to what are called comorbidities, you know, like obesity or diabetes or hypertension, heart disease, or whatever it could be.
And people are saying that this is some sort of revelation, but this has always been the case.
It's what we've always known, that COVID strikes people in ill health particularly hard.
And so with all due respect to the massive suffering that is occurring through COVID, If there was some politician who'd managed to get 40% of parents Or some person,
doesn't even have to be a politician, who had gotten 40% of parents interested in homeschooling, that would be considered a great step forward, right, to those who want to keep people away from this sort of statist indoctrination camps, right? Similarly, if someone had, this probably would be a politician, but if somebody had been able to achieve...
A massive reduction in the mass migration that is, in my view, destabilizing a lot of the world at the moment.
That also would be considered a rather significant win.
And again, I don't want to say like...
It's a positive, but you do try and get the positives out of the negative situations as best you can.
So when I got cancer, I vowed that, okay, well, I fought that cancer off, which is to some degree my prior healthy habits and to some degree the regimen I followed and to some degree just blind luck.
But I said to myself, okay, well...
I got cancer. Can you see this?
Yeah, you can see the scar here where it was removed, right?
So I got cancer, fought it off.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go, in a sense, to the other extreme.
I'm going to live even more healthy.
I'm going to get a big-ass Tilly hat and use wads of sunscreen and keep the sun off my skin as best I can.
So given that I'm half Irish and half German, not known for their lustrous tans, try and stay away at least from skin cancer and things like that.
So I keep my weight down.
So you can take a negative, even something like cancer and say, okay, well, I'm going to try and turn that into as much of a positive as humanly possible.
And really, what else can we do?
What else can we do in this world than try and extract as much gold from the rubble of our hopes as we can?
I think that's, I mean, everything's a choice, but I think that's a fairly good choice to make.
So with COVID, there are these bizarre upsides.
Promiscuity. You know, this hookup culture that was spreading disease, viruses, STDs, disintegration, moral decay, self-loathing, and a contemptible reduction of the spirit of man to a mere copulating bag of meaty flesh.
Okay, so that has...
Changed enormously. And again, if there was some movement that had reduced the people's porn-driven addiction to casual exploitive runt of the brain sexuality, then that would be considered, I think, a big plus as well.
Now that people are working from home, there is also the not insignificant plus that people have realized how civilized a life can be.
With somebody at home taking care of the kids and some people are reconnecting with their kids.
Look, I know domestic violence is up in some areas and some people are kind of stuck together and it's going very badly.
COVID has just made things more.
It's like, you know, when you turn up the contrast on your TV or a video editing app, it's just made things more vivid.
So there are a number of pluses coming out of the COVID situation, out of coronavirus.
And it doesn't make, of course, the suffering any better, but it's the best good that you can get out of the suffering.
And I think that's well worth pursuing.
Moms staying home with their kids.
Sudden infant death syndrome is down significantly.
Kids are getting information from other places than government schools.
And that is pretty positive in many ways.
Mass migration is down.
I mean, you get it, right? And, you know, people are de-trivializing their lives.
If you have the opportunity, as most of us have had over the last six months or so, to realize all the things that you can do without, all the things you don't desperately need, I think that's kind of for the best in a lot of ways.
There's a lot of value in that.
Do you need to keep buying, buying, buying?
Do you need to keep eating out?
Do you need all of the travel?
And look, travel is fun, and there's a very, very strong argument to be made.
It's based on some pretty significant data that You want to take your money and sell your money, in a sense, to buy memories, to buy experiences, and that adds a lot to your happiness in the long run.
So all of that, I think, is positive and good, and there's real value in it.
And de-trivializing, not wasting time, a sense of your own mortality, significant social goals being achieved virtually effortlessly.
There's lots of negatives, don't get me wrong.
I mean, a pregnant woman in Australia and Melbourne, I think, just got arrested for trying to organize a protest because I guess she's not in the right acronym.
But yeah, of course, of course, COVID has been exaggerated.
No question.
COVID has been exaggerated.
One of the reasons why the CDC, I think, or really the World Health Organization, discouraged testing was so that the deaths per test could be higher.
It could be made to look more dangerous.
Without a doubt, Ferguson and the Imperial College in the UK has vastly overestimated the number of deaths and so on.
Absolutely, there has been significant exaggeration And people are hanging on to the 6% number like, oh, but if you don't have comorbidities, you're okay.
And it's like, well, that's not totally true, although it's to a large degree true.
But the fact is and the reality is that, what is it, two-thirds of Americans are overweight?
And 10% of Americans have diabetes.
I mean, it's really, really important to understand that like half the healthcare costs are consumed by 5% of the population.
I mean... Healthcare costs are pretty cheap for most people and then ridiculously expensive for everyone else.
And of course, those people are paraded by the media in order to get socialized medicine and so on.
Because we've got this situation in society, it's really, really important to understand.
If you really want to understand modern society, it comes down to one fundamental thing, which is...
No one who votes left can suffer.
That's the basic reality.
I mean, no one can suffer as a whole, although they certainly don't mind if some people, like myself, suffer with deplatforming and so on.
But no one who leans left can suffer.
And that's a really...
All of the demographics who vote left, they simply cannot be allowed to suffer.
Now, that partly is just buying votes and so on.
But it's a more fundamental and deep thing, which is that the deficit...
The government deficit in America is going to be like $3 trillion this year.
Like $3 trillion.
No fooling.
$3 trillion. That is like three minutes before the intervention financial situation.
And Trump just said, hey, no evictions, right?
And because renters outnumber landlords, that's kind of inevitable.
And if you ever really want to earn money, man, you try being a landlord.
I put that out on Twitter before I was yeeted, and man, it's rough.
It's a rough way to make a buck and a half.
So, we can't suffer.
If people get sick, just socialize the healthcare.
just put in Obamacare.
If people have trouble getting insurance, health insurance, because they're already sick, you say, well, health insurance companies are not allowed to deny people coverage based upon pre-existing conditions.
You say, okay, well, then all that means is that people wait till they get sick and then apply for health insurance.
And because the health insurance companies can't survive that business model of complete dissolution and destruction, and because people are waiting until they get sick to apply for health insurance, then you have to force people to buy health insurance, which is Obamacare.
And you understand that.
People just can't suffer.
If people are thrown out of work because China facilitated the release of a deadly virus around the world, Well, they can't go broke if people didn't save their money.
Like I was always told, have at least six months savings in the bank.
Have at least six months savings in the bank.
That's maybe growing up poor.
That's growing up not being able to afford my school lunch.
That's growing up having to try and look under the couch to dig up coins to put into the heating because you can see your breath in the apartment.
Just save you money. But people who haven't saved their money, people who've spent it on trivialities, on upgraded phones, on fairly useless travel, on lattes and eating out and so on, and people who've just kind of blown their money, well, they can't be allowed to suffer, you see, so we just have to fire money at them.
And businesses that haven't saved enough to get them by a rainy day or rainy month or six months for that matter, well, you've just got to fire money.
Like, nobody can be allowed to suffer.
No one can be allowed to suffer.
Everybody has to be rescued.
Because, you know, this funny thing called morality, called economics, called life, is that it's basic reality.
All resources are finite.
All human desires are infinite.
I am sitting here chatting with you rather than...
Sorry, my voice is a little hoarse.
I've been working on my audiobook and some people have some pretty challenging voices for my voice.
And so you can get my audiobook.
It's a novel I wrote.
Great book, I think.
Really amazing. I'm really amazed at what I did.
It's called Almost, and you can get it at fdrurl.com forward slash almost.
It's a free audiobook. I hope that you will dip into it.
I think it will get you by the intellectual nads and hang on to them until the story is done.
It's the story of a British family and a German family and their likes and loves and hatreds and combats.
During World War I, through the 20s and 30s, and into World War II. It's a pan-European novel of great scope and depth and character, and I hope that you will check it out.
I'm incredibly happy with it.
I wrote it a long time ago, but I wanted to, because I'm not doing political commentary really anymore, I wanted to switch to where I started, which is in the arts, and that this novel has been sitting in a drawer for 20 years.
Mostly. It's kind of heartbreaking, so I'm going to get it out there, and I hope that you will listen to it.
FDRURL.com forward slash almost for the novel.
Now, we just have this situation...
Where resources are finite, and you have to make difficult decisions.
You have to make tough decisions.
The most fundamental being, do I spend my money, which is pleasurable, or do I save my money, which is generally not pleasurable, but which will reduce future unhappiness, should I lose an income, right?
I mean, after deplatforming, my income, of course, as you can imagine, Well, it's all been rather exciting.
And again, I don't want to harp on this, but if you want to help me out for what it is that I'm doing and everything that I have suffered through this last year, I would really appreciate it.
You can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
I hugely appreciate it. But...
Where are the tough decisions?
I mean, this really started in the 60s, where you had the warfare welfare state, right?
So you had the war in Vietnam, which was being driven by...
Well, the war was being driven by anti-communism, and the paralysis of the American military was being driven by the pro-communists, which is why America couldn't win the war, because there was micromanagement from the leftist...
To the point where the war simply couldn't be won.
And you look at all of this anti-war stuff that happened with the music and the plays, and I was all just communists.
They love the war when it's destroying free market people, but they hate the war when it's attacking communists and so on.
But in the 1960s, you had...
A war, a number of wars really, and you also had the welfare state put in by LBJ, a pretty left-wing guy who liked banging secretaries and exposing his penis, though not quite as bad as the completely R-selected and drug-addicted John F. Kennedy.
So you say, well, we have the welfare state.
Well, we don't have enough money, so we've got to stop the war.
Or, well, I'm sorry, we're waging a war, so we can't have a welfare state.
Those are balanced adult decisions.
You know, I... Some time ago, I bought...
I like carbonated water from time to time, and so I bought, you know, a little bubble maker, a little cheap bubble maker that puts the CO2 into the water.
And my daughter said, oh, isn't it just easier and more convenient to buy a case of...
Soda water. And it's like, well, sure, because you're not buying it, right?
We're going to save money by having this bubble maker rather than buying and also saves waste and garbage and all that.
So, you know, for her, it's like, well, if the only thing is, is it more convenient to make your own soda water or is it more convenient to buy soda water?
Well, for her, given that she's not paying for it, there's only one factor, which is, is it easier for me rather than having to balance it with cost and all of that, right?
So, I mean, that's childhood, right?
Children are generally not supposed to make, you know, Sophie's death...
Sophie's choice, life and death choices, right?
I mean, that's... Childhood is about getting kids ready for that when they become adults.
You start it in the teenage years and, you know, then when they become adults.
So you're supposed to make these tough decisions and things aren't just supposed to be easy.
But in a realm of debt, in a realm of money printing, in a realm of bonds and all of that...
You don't have to make tough decisions.
You can just print money.
You can borrow money. You can just create pretend wealth out of thin air, and then you could crush down the interest rates so that the inflation doesn't show up, at least for a time.
And there aren't any tough decisions to be made.
And the conservatives versus the liberals or the left versus the right to some degree, and the right has its flaws, the left has its flaws, but to me, the right is about, well, we have tough decisions to make and we can't just wish them away and we can't just borrow and flood the next generation in debt.
We've got some tough calls to make and we can't have it all.
We cannot have it all.
There aren't any solutions.
There are only a balance of pluses and minuses, right?
And I said this, gosh, I mean, I called the pandemic back in January, and I think it was end of February or early April, sorry, end of March, early April, I was saying that the costs Of the lockdown, we're going to vastly exceed the benefits of the lockdown.
In other words, far more people were going to suffer, be hurt, get sick, and die as a result of the lockdowns than were going to be saved by the lockdowns.
I said this months and months and months ago.
Of course, people forget it if they want to get mad at me about COVID. I understand that.
Everybody's kind of frustrated and tense at the moment, and I understand that too.
I've had my moments. So...
And now, of course, the data is coming out and in some areas, right?
It's like 10 to 1.
It's 10 times more people have suffered, got sick and died as a result of the lockdowns because they're not getting their health care.
They are not exercising.
A lot of them, they're not getting their screenings.
They're not getting their checkups.
They're not going to the dentist.
They're not taking care of their health.
And for, you know, for a lot of us trundling along, I don't have any comorbidities.
But for a lot of us, Scott Adams was talking about this, he has two comorbidities.
I don't know what they are, but, you know, it's kind of tough if you can't get your healthcare, if you can't get your cancer screenings, if you can't get your blood work, if you can't get your checkups, or even in terms of quality of life, if you can't get your massages, your chiropractor, your whatever, right?
It's pretty bad.
And of course, because people are home, they're anxious and depressed.
I think in the UK, youth depression, like 19 to 30, has gone up like three times.
And it's really rough.
And for people who are living alone, and again, I say to my listeners, if you know people living alone, please give them a call.
Please give them a shout out. It's really rough and opioid addiction is vastly increased and that's partly because people have to take more pain meds if they can't get healthcare and depression and anxiety and overdoses are up, addiction is up, alcoholism is up.
Child abuse is up.
It's really, really rough.
You know, the human zoo of the cities is really beginning to break down.
And, you know, I doubt there'll be any peaceful transition of power, particularly if Trump wins.
So, anyway, I would look into options other than city dwelling, if I were you.
But we just, we as a society, like, what is culture?
What are values?
They are ways to organize The making of tough decisions.
I mean, a silly example, but I'm sure it's happened before, is two people are drowning and you can only save one of them.
And one of them is eight and one of them is 80.
Well, who do you save? Well, you're probably going to try and save...
The eight-year-old.
I was talking to an old person the other day who said, I wish they had checked with me about this lockdown because it's killing my kids and my grandkids slowly.
And I would much rather take the risk of COVID if I had the chance.
I've had a good life. I've had a long life.
I don't want my kids and their kids to get their lives ruined.
Because of some illness, I would be willing to take that risk because I've had a long life and my kids shouldn't suffer and my grandkids shouldn't suffer because of that.
And nobody ever asked me, though, they just shut everything down.
Because we've lost the capacity to make tough choices.
And we've lost the capacity to make tough choices for two reasons.
Number one, the aforementioned sort of debt and money printing and so on, where...
You know, if you're in a room with two people and the windows open, you don't have to make any tough decisions about who gets to breathe because air is functionally infinite in any non-enclosed situation, right?
You open a door or whatever, right?
But money has become kind of like air.
And so we no more think of rationing resources than we do think of rationing air.
And of course, if you want to deny someone air, it's because you hate them and want them dead.
And if you say, well, we've got to be rational about our spending, we shouldn't go into this much debt.
It's because you hate whoever in the mind of people, right?
You hate whoever's receiving that money and want them dead or want them to suffer or whatever, right?
Oh, you just want the poor and the sick to die in the ditch.
And it's like, well, what's going to happen when the government runs out of money?
It's always a big question, right? It's a fundamental question.
And nobody wants to answer this and nobody is answering it.
The conservatives aren't answering it.
Libertarians touch upon it. Socialists, certainly Democrats, aren't answering it at all, right?
Nobody wants to talk about that.
Basic facts that, I mean, this was probably two or three years ago when I looked up the statistic, but every human life in the world was supported by 30,000 U.S. dollars in debt.
People have adapted to debt, like fish have adapted to water, and what happens when the sea dries up?
Well, it's not pretty. It's not pretty at all, right?
So we're just not used to making tough decisions.
Number one, as I said, is because we just print and borrow money and then just make stuff up that way.
But number two, which is really important, and, you know, we're kind of a part of this, although we're working in the opposite way.
Number two is that the media and social media puts suffering So, like, right in our faces that we can't deal with it at an abstract level anymore.
And I know this harks of Stalin's ghastly statement that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths, is a statistic.
But it is putting people in her face in a sort of continual way that didn't happen really before the internet as much before social media.
So anyone who suffers, like suffering in her own personal immediate friend, family, community, town, group, tribe, whatever it is, that kind of suffering we will do a huge amount to alleviate.
But, you know, I don't particularly care about the health of some anonymous guy in...
more than he cares about my health or whatever.
I mean, they're very abstract.
But of course, social media can show you him getting ill or being poor or, you know, when I was a kid, it was the distended bellies of the African kids and all of that.
And it's rough, you know, it's rough because we sympathize with people as if they're right in front of us when they're not actually right in front of us.
And our sympathies were originally supposed to flow, you know, just a little bit more to those proximate to us, right?
Those close to us, right?
So it's become really, really tough to sort this out.
Can we accept any suffering?
Well, we can't. And this is what you see with this sort of start-stop stuff in society, right?
Oh, there's COVID. Well, we've got to crush the curve and we need two weeks and then two weeks turns into six months and now you don't have a face, right?
And so then we say, oh, people are suffering because society is locked down.
So we've got to open society up.
Oh, no, there's more COVID cases.
We've got to lock society down.
Oh, no, people are suffering because Because society is locked down, so we've got to open it up again.
And none of this has any plan.
None of this has any...
And no politicians are just going to say, look, you know, people are going to die either way.
Like everybody's talking about this potential vaccine, could be by Christmas or whatever.
And nobody's talking about the fact that a not insignificant proportion of people have negative reactions to even a healthy vaccine and there's going to be a lot of suffering around that.
Everybody's got this magical wand that they wave around that they think has magic and it doesn't.
It's just glitter dust and bullshit.
They wave this magical wand around with the seductive promise that you can avoid suffering in some fundamental manner.
And you can't. You can't.
You just plain can't.
Right now, if you open up society and it's going to happen, it's going to happen in the fall.
Like, well, it is almost the fall, right?
It's going to happen in like a week or less, some people, right?
I mean, kids are going to go back to school, they're going to spread the virus, and people are going to get sick.
Now, I mean, I'm totally fine with shut down the schools, return, stop taxing people their property tax, and that would occur even for people who are renting.
Renters pay more per square foot in property tax than people who have houses, which is totally unjust and unfair and wrong.
But, yeah, there's this fantasy that somehow we can grit our teeth, blindfold ourselves, cross our fingers and get through this with no suffering.
And, you know, part of that is...
Anybody who says to people there is necessary sacrifices and necessary suffering just gets shouted down as a cruel, mean, nasty person because he's saying, hey, some of you are going to have to be denied oxygen and people think that money and resources are like oxygen and why the hell would you deny anyone something which is freely available and costs you nothing?
This is how out of reality we've become.
And the further you drift from reality as an individual, as a society, the more you hate the truth-tellers because they are beckoning you back to limitations.
Society, reality, it's all about limitations, right?
So... So for people who are saying, yeah, COVID got overblown, yeah, to a large degree it did.
Now, there are, of course, it's not just about the death statistics, right, life and death statistics.
It is also about these long haulers, right, 5% to 15% of people who get COVID. They get brain fogs.
They get significant exhaustion.
They get aches and pains.
They get sleeplessness.
They have migraines, headaches, and so on.
And it can damage the heart.
It can damage, of course, the lungs and the kidney.
I mean, it's a nasty burrowing specimen.
It's not, you know...
I think if it was just like, okay, you get sick for a week or two and then you're better and, you know, it's a bad flu and so on.
I mean, yeah, I think... Obviously, people say, well, but in the 1960s, there was this terrible flu.
It's like, yes, there was this terrible flu, but there was no social media, right?
So we weren't all getting people suffering kind of jammed in our face every day.
But to me, the big concern with COVID is not the life versus death.
That obviously matters a lot. But it is the long-term symptoms of people who get really...
They're not dying, but they're not really living either.
That, to me, is a pretty terrifying situation.
So that's a big situation.
So let's see what else.
Hi, Steph. Virus is real but not dangerous to children and not spread by the asymptomatic.
There are inexpensive, cheap cures, which of course are censored.
And he lists them.
In addition, herd immunity arrives very quickly because it seems 50% of the population has T-cell coronavirus immunity.
The various lockdowns are just massive government power grab.
I was terrified at first.
Remember people falling down in the streets in China and Iran?
Where are they? China is laughing at us.
Sorry to see you are still living in fear.
Well, I mean, of course, the other reality is that COVID has become extraordinarily politicized.
And this is not just on the left, but also on the right.
So the left wants to increase people's fear of COVID because they can use that as a weapon against Trump.
And then if and when Biden gets in, suddenly everything gets magically reversed, everything gets magically better.
And it can all be, oh, remember those dark days under Trump when people were dropping like flies from COVID?
Well, now, you know, they may release the potential cures.
They may whatever, like there'll be something that happens that turns COVID around if the left gets in.
So they are, of course, using it to hammer Trump.
And people on the right who are afraid, and I get why, and I don't disagree with them, that some rights are being taken away.
A lot of rights, really. They want to downplay COVID because they also want to protect Trump.
You get all of this, right? I don't want to get too close to the political commentary thing, but it is hard to get the facts because there are And of course, the communists wish to, or the socialists wish to push back against any identification of the virus with China.
That's why they get mad at it being called the China virus, because China is communist, and they don't want communism to be blamed for a virus which the communists helped to spread around the world, right?
So... Yeah, herd immunity is very interesting.
I've heard that the numbers can be quite low.
I've also heard, of course, that people who've had a variety of colds and flus in the past, they might actually have some immunities and so on.
And I think this is all very, very interesting and great.
Hey, Steph! I asked people how they were, of course.
I'm fine. Just got back to work.
Home office, office, and summertime off.
It has been very nice to spend time with my family during the summer.
I'm finding it very hard to start working again and find motivation for the autumn.
I live in Sweden, and it's really awful with the high criminality and violence here due to immigration.
It feels even worse than the COVID-19 scare and the new wave.
People in Sweden are starting to wake up, but it's going slow.
I'm starting to think it's too late.
I'm Catholic, so I trust in Jesus, so that helps a lot.
I appreciate that feedback.
Let's see, what else do people have?
Stefan, if I knew what the next 12 months held, I'd be buying stocks and getting rich.
All I can predict is this.
Trump win in 2020 by either a narrow margin or a landslide victory, depending on how the riots go.
Escalation of violence in response of myself moving back to Japan for a few years while my home cools down.
Could be quite right.
I definitely agree, says someone, with getting at least a month food.
I can't afford the good stuff, so me and my fiancé are buying what we can keep longer than three months.
On the COVID dangers, I've been in two minds.
Well, I think that's true for most of us, right?
The CDC said it was super dangerous, then recently said that it has a 99.98% survival rate.
Admittedly, I got that from Crowder and not verified that, but will.
Having said that, a janitor at a school near my area has come down with confirmed COVID and they have not yet shut the school.
Our politicians keep yo-yoing on different parts of the phase reopening and most people are getting sick of all the government regulations surrounding it.
Well, that's, yeah, I mean, the kids thing, yeah, I mean, kids don't get, they certainly are statistically less susceptible to COVID. But, you know, that's the challenge.
So there are indications that people can still be transmissible for a long time after they get it, even after negative tests, because a fifth of tests that are negative are false, right?
The people are still actually positive.
You can still be shedding viruses. So the issue isn't, are kids as damaged by COVID as old people, for instance?
No, they're not. But...
Kids are going to get together, particularly in winter.
And there was a dry run for this in Israel, where they had kids come into school.
There was a heat wave.
They... Closed the windows and turned on air conditioning because it was just too hot in the classroom.
And, yeah, they had to shut down a bunch of schools and there was a bunch of transmission and so on.
So the kids are going to get in together, particularly the younger kids, and they're going to spread the virus.
I mean, that's going to happen.
And then they're going to go home.
Maybe there are old people living in the home, maybe a variety of other things and so on.
So, yeah, it's not so much that the kids are going to get harmed by it.
It is that... That is the spread, the spread factor.
And, you know, maybe at some point there will just have to be a sprint to herd immunity, but I don't know how well herd immunity is going to last, given that coronavirus is pretty mutation-friendly and therefore immunity unfriendly in the long run.
All right, so let's do a couple more.
And again, thanks everyone so much.
Thank you, Mr. Molyneux or Stefan, if you prefer.
Know that I appreciate your work and will donate in a few minutes to support it.
I am currently watching your discussion with Dr.
Walter Block, which is excellent so far.
Yes, he's great.
So thank you very much, by the way, for your donation and your support.
It's very, very helpful.
Hi, Steph. I've been watching you for some time now and find your videos fascinating, informative, and in many cases reaffirm my own thoughts on many of the subjects you cover.
Your eloquent use of the English language in debates has helped me when having similar discussions with friends, family, and members of the public.
On COVID-19, I was very much with you at the start that lockdown and throwing caution to the wind was the proper thing to do.
I get the lockdown thing.
So just for those of you who didn't, you know, maybe hearing secondhand what my arguments were, my arguments were, no, I didn't think the government should shut things down.
I did think it was worth...
Staying home, not traveling, if it was possible, because we didn't know what we were dealing with when it came to coronavirus.
I have my strong suspicions that it was man manipulated, man made or, you know, and that doesn't mean it was released on purpose.
But I'm pretty sure that this thing did not come from pangolins or bats 800 miles away or anything like that.
I mean, the fact that it emerged right next to Wuhan's China's only level four weapons lab.
Come on.
I mean, this is not not brain surgery.
Right.
So we didn't know what we were dealing with.
And as a weapon, as you can see, if it was a weapon, it's a pretty good weapon.
Right.
Because.
I mean, SARS back in 2000, 2002, 2003, SARS was nipped in the bud pretty quickly, but SARS only got to 26, 27 countries.
And with SARS, when you got sick, I mean, you couldn't get out of bed, and you weren't really able to transmit the virus before you got sick.
Now, the problem, of course, with SARS... But COV2 is that you are asymptomatic for a week, two weeks while shedding the virus before you get sick.
And again, there is this issue of the long-haul, the long-term damage, which will take a long time to figure out.
It's going to take a long time.
It's like when you first get your suspicions about smoking being bad for you, it's going to take a long time to prove that case, right?
Because we still only have...
Seven months. I mean, you can't really count December, January, because it was largely covered up and suppressed.
But we don't have much data when it comes to the long-term effects of COVID, right?
We do know that there's reinfections.
We do know that there seem to be relapses for these long-haulers.
We don't have a lot of data.
And so coming to conclusions about what the long-term effects of this are going to be is, with all apologies to my teenage listeners, it's premature.
It's premature. So I never said that the government should lock down the economy.
I'm an anarchist, for heaven's sakes.
I'm a voluntarist. I don't want big government programs.
Lockdowns being one of the big government programs I don't want.
So I said...
Yeah, let's try and crush the curve and see what we're dealing with here.
But no, I never wanted the government to do it.
Of course not, right? So on COVID-19, so in all honesty, I very quickly realized in the majority of cases, the infection was no worse than a case of seasonal flu.
Yes, I believe it to be a new virulent virus, but isn't it the case we have to live with these and adapt, not go into hiding?
Yeah, I mean, for sure.
I mean, there's no putting the toothpaste back into the bottle or the toothpaste tube, right?
My guess is, yeah, there'll be some levels of herd immunity, there is going to be a second wave, there'll be a third wave, and it's going to sink into flare-ups, and it's something we're just going to have to get used to and deal with, like we do with the cold, like we do with the flu, although it's worse than both of those, in my opinion.
So it's just going to become a permanent part of our human landscape, and it's really sad.
I mean, I think about my daughter and the future life that she's going to have to face with limited travel, with a fairly crippled economic opportunity situation, and so on.
And, you know, it's really sad.
And, you know, we're still in, to a large degree, the denial phase of this, and I get a lot of this from emails.
I'm not talking about this guy in particular.
We're still kind of in the denial phase.
That life as it was is done.
I mean, because I don't think there's going to be a magical vaccine that's going to solve...
Sorry, magical is kind of prejudicial.
It's not an argument. I don't think there's going to be a vaccine that's going to solve all the problems.
And so I think that there are going to be continual flare-ups and it is going to be part of our life going forward.
It is something that...
I believe was made or adapted in China, got out in China.
China denied that there was human-to-human transmission, and even after the World Health Organization was warned by Taiwan that China knew that there was human-to-human transmission, China let people flow all over the world.
They shut down internally people from Wuhan.
But they let all those people for Chinese New Year flow all out into the world and against the most solemn and fundamental treaties that people sign.
People think tariff treaties are important or reciprocal agreements regarding justice and all of that, extradition treaties.
Those don't mean anything.
They're completely irrelevant.
Diplomacy and completely irrelevant relative to Pandemic.
Pandemic treaties are the most solemn, fundamental, and essential treaties that countries ever sign.
Ever sign.
And I remember, of course, people went nuts when Trump pulled America out of the Paris Accord.
Oh my gosh, solemn treaties, blah blah blah.
Oh, come on. I mean, look at the damage that this illness has done.
And some of that damage is because of the state, and some of it is just because it's an illness, right?
And... It's amazing.
It's amazing that, well, we've got to figure out some way to deal with this.
You know, it's like some guy stabs you in the back and you just wander around trying to figure out how best to deal with the stabbing and completely forget about the guy.
I mean, it's just wild.
But this is the unreality that we are dealing with and trying to deal with and trying to bring back reality to people.
It's really, really tough.
So it is sad.
Just a silly example.
Just think of the movie makers and the novelists and so on.
All the people who...
How do you deal with COVID in a novel now?
How do you deal with COVID in a movie just as everybody wandering around without masks as if COVID never happened?
It's pretty wild.
How do you deal with it?
I can deal with it more in real time because I'm doing this show and all that, but We're not even close to digesting what's happened to us in the world.
We're not even close. We're not even close.
I mean, gosh, you want to see some crazy stuff, man.
You want to hear some crazy stuff.
You probably heard this.
I want to get these numbers down and make sure I don't get them wrong because I remember when I first saw them, it just blew my mind.
So, in India, yeah, India.
India suffers world's largest one-day spike in COVID-19.
This is August 31st, 2020.
India registered 78,761 new coronavirus cases on Sunday.
The biggest single-day spike in the world since the pandemic began, just as the government began easing restrictions to help the battered economy.
And India has been reporting more than 75,000 new cases for four straight days.
And that's...
Now, of course, COVID also hits the West harder than the developing economies.
It hits... Japan, harder than it hits other places.
Because it's so harsh on the elderly, then the people, the civilizations, the countries that have an older population, they're going to get hit disproportionately hard.
And this is, you know, the great pendulum of history, that we have an older population because We went to hedonism because we have a lot of debt and because there's a whole anti-natalist thing in the media and academia and as a whole.
And so we have this aging population to a large degree because we had all this wealth and therefore can afford to support and keep alive an aging population.
And now the aging population is under the most threat.
And the aging population has to a large degree been sustained through socialist policies and then a socialist slash communist country like China released a virus that's harming the elderly the most who have themselves relied upon socialism the most.
It's pretty wild.
So as far as at risk goes, it's not just the flu.
I mean, this thing has hooks like these ACE2 receptors that plug into just about every human cell in your body.
It's a very, very big deal.
It's a very, very big deal.
All right. Do you want to do more?
Let's see here. Well, once somebody says, as for the prediction that I sent out in my last newsletter, homeschooling is great and we're looking into it, but as for the disastrous consequences of school reopening, Sweden never closed schools.
Most of Europe reopened theirs already.
While infection rates climb ever so slightly, controlling for increased testing, the death toll barely moves at all.
Thus, the mortality rate also drops by necessity.
Whatever happens, and experts don't know what it is, upper respiratory viral infections breakouts tend to follow a similar curve and tend to extinguish themselves in a few weeks.
Which seems to be the case here as well.
Fantastic. I mean, I'm always happy to hear good news about all of this.
Hi Steph, I support your position on COVID, but there is the issue of civil liberties.
What do you think of that?
Well, it's a lockdowns for a government program, so they're going to achieve the opposite of, like violence always achieves the opposite of what you want it to, right?
So if you like a girl and you pull some John Fowles collector stuffer in a windowless van, then you've used violence to get her close to you, but she's going to end up hating and fearing you rather than loving you.
Violence achieves the opposite of your intended goal.
And by violence, I mean the initiation of force, not self-defense.
So the government said that they wanted to save lives with the lockdown, but the lockdown has now cost in some places more than 10 times the lives that it saved.
So yes, it has achieved the odds.
Like whatever the solution, whatever the problem is, the solution is more freedom and less violence.
That's fundamental. So let's see here.
Thank you for inviting a reply.
I don't think any email I've received in the past few years has actually given me the option.
Ah, read them. I like them.
I can only speak or write in this case for myself when I write that I would never criticize your evaluation of COVID at any point.
Well, I think that's not reasonable.
I'm sure that I could well be criticized and should be.
I mean, everybody should be, right? You've given the time and research to finding the truth amidst scarce and or contradictory information we were all bombarded with from the onset of this fiasco.
I am a loyal subscriber, thank you, because you put in the hard work and are able to articulate extremely complex subject matter into understandable and useful information to work with.
I have listened to your interviews with the young Dr.
Paul Cottrell of Harvard. He's working on his MD, but he's not a medical doctor as yet.
Excellent guest to have in this topic.
I'm still confused as the origins of this virus.
Has Paul concluded absolutely that this virus was man-made?
Well, I don't want to speak for Paul, but we'll never know.
I mean, China for sure has disappeared anybody involved.
China has destroyed.
We know that they've destroyed massive amounts of evidence from the Wuhan seafood market itself, which was basically scrubbed down and evidence was destroyed from top to bottom.
Lab samples have been destroyed.
Paperwork has been destroyed.
So we'll never...
You know, there is this...
If you destroy evidence, it's considered to be proof of guilt, right?
Isn't that one of the fundamental principles of this kind of stuff?
So... We won't ever know for sure, but you can look at my presentation called The Case Against China.
You can find it on BitChute or LBRY, which is also another great place in Brighteon, another great place to get my videos and so on, right?
So we'll never know for sure, but we would look at the evidence, and I think that there is very strong evidence.
Somebody says, hey, not only is this not a pandemic, not more than a flu, but it is the biggest outrage to people since the war.
The number of COVID deaths are basically nothing considering all the lies and all those died of other main problems.
But you see, that's the challenge, right?
I mean, death is death.
And so saying if somebody is overweight, they get COVID and they die, saying that they didn't die from COVID but died of being overweight is a tricky position to maintain, right?
I get that people who have comorbidities often have issues with their immune system, and that's pretty rough.
COVID is pretty harsh on that, or you get this storm, cytokine storm that comes out where, because the virus is kind of everywhere, your immune system freaks out, and that can be dangerous as well.
But saying, well, a fat person got COVID and died, and therefore it's not COVID, I mean, the fundamental question is, would they have died otherwise?
Now, there is, of course, the basic fact that over a six or seven or eight month period, people over 80, some proportion of those people are going to die just from old age anyway.
And people are working through these statistics of what are the excess deaths that have occurred.
And it does seem to be that the lockdown has produced more deaths than it saved through suppressing the spread of COVID. It's all very important.
I don't know. I mean, I do know how a free market would handle this since I have got this question a bunch of times.
A free market society would handle this because the airlines that flew infected people into the country would themselves be, and the leaders of those airlines, the CEOs, the executives, the CXOs of those airlines, would themselves be personally liable and For the resulting illness, right? So if you break quarantine in Canada here, if you break quarantine, you could be fined a truly staggering amount.
If you break quarantine and somebody gets serious ill or dies, you can get like three years in prison, you can get a million dollar fine, like it is a very, very serious business.
So what they're saying is that if you do something that facilitates the spread of a potentially deadly disease, then you yourself should be personally liable for your own personal money and you yourself might personally go to jail.
Well, the way that it would work in a free society is the airlines would have an agreement because nobody wants this kind of stuff in their society that says if any illness Comes into the country through your airline.
Of course, the people who flew would themselves be guilty, but you as the carrier, as the driver of the getaway car, so to speak, would also be...
I mean, you'll have to be in the bank to rob the bank to be liable for it, because if you drive the getaway car, you're liable for that, right?
So the executives of the airlines would be responsible for that, and therefore they would have a strong personal lose-your-house-go-to-jail financial incentive to make sure that the illness did not come in.
And if there was illness in...
a country, then people would be paid to get tested and they would be paid good money to be quarantined.
They'd be put up in wonderful hotels.
They would get great meals.
They would try and make it as pleasant as humanly possible because the economic cost of housing people who got infected to the point where they're no longer infectious is far less than allowing the disease to spread.
But of course, nobody in the airlines, nobody in the government, nobody domestically, nobody overseas, nobody is going to lose their house or go to jail for facilitating the spread of this disease unless you happen to be a private citizen, in which case you could conceivably be in trouble and probably it will happen at some point. in which case you could conceivably be in trouble and They've started finding people who've had big parties and so on.
But it's lack of accountability.
We teach our children personal accountability all the time.
And we have a society where the elites have no personal accountability for anything that they do.
And in fact, they gain. They gain from these kinds of things with additional power.
Not the airline leaders, of course.
But yeah, that's kind of important.
Let's see here. Let's do one more.
Do one more. One more!
So somebody says, I am not one who has condemned you for your predictions way back in the early part of this year.
Of course no one was going to get this completely right, and even you said from the get-go, I hope I'm wrong.
I also seem to remember you suggesting stocking up on essentials at the time.
Like you said here, you'll just end up eating your caution.
So yeah, I would suggest buying some extra food if there's no interruption to the food supply chain.
And my contact in the shipping industry regularly sends me more outrageous stuff that's happening in the shipping industry, which takes a while to trickle through the supply chain.
If you buy more food and you can store it for a long time, if it turns out that there are no problems, you eat your caution, which is not a bad thing, right?
Once again, I say thanks for the truth that you help us discern.
To some extent, because of your work, I have prepared for troubled times in ways worth mentioning at another time.
And of course, I have been talking about, you know, save your money, have some resources and all of that, right?
I mean, I'm able to continue doing what I'm doing to a large degree because of savings.
Suffice to say, bug out plans for myself and my family, as well as more education for myself and my family.
I've also made myself more adaptable to the changing times, including more mobile.
Through all of this, I've also come to see more clearly who my friends are.
That alone, I can almost say is worth everything.
Thank you for helping me see the silver linings in this, and yet encouraging caution.
Perhaps more than ever, with a growing awareness of the lies we have been told, and now with their antidote philosophy, we can get through this with a rosier world on the other side for our children.
Yeah, I mean, the last thing I'll say, and thanks again, everyone.
I really do appreciate your replies and responses.
You can, of course, get my newsletter at freedomain.com forward slash newsletter.
You can join the people who are helping out the show, which I still consider essential, perhaps more now than ever, at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
But the existing system couldn't last.
It couldn't last. I'm not a staunch accelerationist, but the existing system couldn't last.
And... To some degree, if this accelerates whatever transition we need to get to a freer and better society, I, again, with all the sensitivity you can imagine for the people who have suffered under this ailment, and it really is absolutely terrible how people have suffered under this ailment, and in the lockdown and so on.
Unfortunately, in society, there rarely is any progress.
And I can't really think of a single instance where there's been progress without suffering.
I mean, the end of slavery was massive suffering and war.
And I mean, England got bills or got more assumed debts to buy and free slaves that the British taxpayers had to pay off for like 150 years.
And slave owners lost their investment in their property and there were riots and, I mean, the American Revolution.
I mean, there rarely is any kind of progress without suffering.
And in a very real sense, in a very real way, if we avoid suffering, we avoid progress and deny all of the momentum and acceptance of suffering that got us here in the first place.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid.
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