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April 9, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:39
ARE YOU A TROLL?!?
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Hey everybody, Stéphane Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well. Yes, that's right, I'm going full sticks, Hex and Hammer 666.
I've also felt a little bit restrained about the number of shows I should or could be producing in any particular day, but I'm tired of restraining myself, of bottling myself up.
Oh, and by the way, I found, somebody emailed me about this and I looked it up and I found a show I did some years ago called The Rise of Nazism.
The Rise of National Socialism, which is three hours of tasty historical analysis.
And I'll try to figure out what to do with that.
So I had someone who sent me a message.
It's a very interesting message. And the question that the listener had was, am I a troll?
And that's it. I'm going to take the question at face value.
It could be a troll-y question, so to speak.
But am I a troll?
No, that's a good question.
So let me read the message and then you can let me know what you think.
Dear Steph, I was the one who raised the question of viewing stolen pictures and smashing laptops on Telegram.
So this was a fellow, I would call him Bob, right?
So Bob was on the Telegram chat from FreeDomain and Bob was asking people, okay, let's say that you are on your computer and you are In a coffee shop, you are looking at stolen pictures, you know, like the fappening theft of nude pictures from celebrities from some years ago.
So you're looking at stolen nude images or some sort of stolen images on your laptop in a public place.
Is that a violation of the non-aggression principle?
Is that a violation of property rights?
Are you allowed to smash that...
Computer on the ground because it's being used to view stolen images, right?
So is that a troll question?
And so that's what he's talking about.
I was the one who was doing that. He said, I just saw the replay of your D-Livestream where you addressed it.
You called me a troll. What does that mean?
Is someone who raises an ethical question in an unfriendly environment a troll?
I think that's kind of begging the question here.
Were you a troll when you went to Parliament and the San Francisco government and asked them about how they were going to pay for their government programs?
That's a reference to, I mean, I went to the EU Parliament and did a speech on tax censorship, after which I started getting censored, and I went to the City Council in Los Angeles and demanded to know how they were going to pay for all of their spending and what plans they had to cover shortfalls, and I was virtually escorted out.
You can find, of course, my speech from the EU Parliament.
You can just do a search on fdrpodcast.com, European Union speech, text censorship, I think it was called.
And you can go to freedomain.com slash documentaries to view my three-hour documentary on the fall of California.
And it was quite interesting, right?
So he says, well, you were troll, right?
You have said you used to debate your friends as a child.
When they would win, would you simply accuse them of being trolls?
I have read UPB and I accept the theory.
You said I was trying to refute UPB, but maybe you were just mixing me up with people from past forums.
Is the purpose of your forum to have challenging philosophical discussions or to circle jerk about theories Which everyone in the group already accepts.
I'd be willing to go on your show to discuss this topic or others.
The reason I asked my question on Telegram in the first place was because I wanted to try being like you.
I had asked my friend to ask me a philosophical question and I would make a video answering it.
She asked me if it was okay to enjoy content made by a problematic artist.
I thought to myself, what's the most problematic kind of content?
I know, child's P-O-R-N. I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything before I made the video, so I decided to probe your telegram.
I thought it was fappening like adult videos, I don't remember, or adult pictures that you were watching.
I don't know. It was about the child stuff.
Okay, the child stuff's not like the child sexual exploitation videos and images.
They're not problematic. They're stone evil.
They're absolutely stone, fundamental, disgusting, vile, satanic evil.
So I don't know about problematic.
If you view that stuff as problematic, I don't really think you're down with ethics, my friend.
But anyway... So he said, anyway, I just wanted to clarify things.
I was upset at being called an obvious troll by you since I admire you.
I guess I could have prefaced my Telegram questions with my reasons for asking it, but I just wanted to get right into it.
I'm still listening to your D-Life show, and you just addressed a 35-year-old named Glenn who smokes weed and isn't doing anything with his life.
I'm in a not-too-different boat from Glenn, so maybe we should discuss this topic if you decide to have me on your show.
And... So, and we kind of look at the message in general, right?
And I say this with the guy, you know, he's a smart guy and all of that, raised badly, doesn't know how manipulative he is, right?
So, is someone who raises an ethical question in an unfriendly environment a troll?
Well, I mean, that's, I mean, of course not, right?
I mean, of course not. That's Socrates, that's Nietzsche, that's Ayn Rand, that's myself, that's Aristotle, that's Plato sometimes.
So, no, that's a straw man, right?
Someone who raises an ethical question in an unfriendly environment to troll.
Well, you were trolled when you went to Parliament in San Francisco government, asked them about how they were going to pay for their government programs.
Well, of course not, right?
I mean, I wasn't a troll there.
You said you used to debate your friends as a child when they would win.
Would you simply accuse them of being trolls?
So that's, of course, the argument that I would call someone a troll for beating me in an argument.
And first of all, that's impossible.
I mean, that's also right.
I've read UPB and I accept the theory.
So, is the purpose of your forum to have challenging philosophical discussions or to circle joke about theories which everyone in the group already accepts?
Well, again, that's kind of a begging the question kind of stuff, right?
And so I will tell you why I called you a troll.
And again, this doesn't mean you are a troll in your essence.
It doesn't mean you will forever be a troll.
I don't know you outside of the stuff that we've intersected with online, but I'll tell you why.
And even this question is a troll question, right?
So here's the thing.
Universally preferable behavior as a theory of ethics It proves, axiomatically, praxeologically, beyond the shadow of a doubt, it proves that rape, theft, assault and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
Rape, theft, assault and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
Now, there's a section about property rights and so on and all of that, but just talking about rape, theft, assault and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
The simple reason, of course, is that, let's say, theft.
Can theft be universally preferable behavior?
Well, no, because theft is the unwanted taking of property, right?
Somebody takes your property and you don't want them to.
There are times when you want someone to take your property, right?
I mean, if you have a ticket, it's your property, but you want them to take it so you can get into the ticket venue.
If you have an old fridge, you take the door off.
Let's say you have an old couch and you put it by...
Your house on the sidewalk with a sign that says, take me, you want someone to take your property.
So there's times when you want people to take your property.
That's not theft. Theft is when you don't want someone to take your property.
So if we say stealing is universally preferable behavior, then we say everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time all over the world at all circumstances.
So you must want to be stolen from.
You must want your property to be taken from you.
But if your property is taken from you, it's not stealing.
It's not theft. So stealing can never be universally preferable behavior.
Same thing with rape. You can't want to be raped because rape is unwanted and fought against sexual penetration or sexual assault.
And so you can't want to be raped.
And a murder is when someone kills you against your will, unlike euthanasia.
And assault, you can't want to be punched.
If you want to be punched, maybe you're in an MMA ring, or you're wrestling, or you're in a hockey game, or whatever it is, or you're somewhere in Minnesota after the George Floyd trial.
So if you want to be hit, or you at least accept the risks of being hit, it's not assault, right?
Which is why you can't charge boxes with assault.
So rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior, okay?
Now, once you accept that, Right?
And once you understand that taxation is theft and so on, right?
Then you have a massive amount of work to do in this lifetime, which you will never complete in this lifetime, to oppose the moral challenges of organized, institutional, and private rape, theft, assault, and murder.
That's your deal.
It's assault. Circumcision is assault.
Mutilation. Spanking is assault.
It is, of course, the unwanted hitting of a child.
Not that children ever really want to be hit, or I guess they'll take that risk if they're playing some rough-and-tumble game.
So, you have spankings to deal with, circumcision to deal with, taxation to deal with, you've got spousal abuse, you've got fights in general, you've got murderers, you've got war, you've got, like, theft is central banking, is theft.
Inflation is theft, right?
And the way that schools are funded in the West, in most places, is theft, because it's based upon the property violations and property taxes.
So when you accept UPB, and we're just talking about rape, theft, assault, and murder, and implicit in don't steal is respect property rights, of course.
So implicitly, you have your life's work cut out for you.
You have your life's work cut out for you opposing that which you already accept.
He says, I've read UPB and I accept the theory.
So what you do, of course, and I'm going to give you an analogy, a plague analogy, right?
So let's say I have a medicine, we're in the middle of some genuinely dangerous and deadly plague, right?
Some smallpox, Ebola, ice-plosion, Space aliens crawling out of your chest, John Hurt-style kind of plague, and I have a pill that cures that plague, but everyone thinks that the pill is actually the plague, right?
This is the story of philosophy.
There's a plague that's killing people, you have a cure called reason and evidence, but everyone thinks that your cure is actually the plague, and that's what they're trained in by the people who want everyone dead or whatever, right?
Or to sell them a cure that doesn't work.
So I invent a pill that cures a plague and thousands and thousands and thousands of people are dropping dead every minute, every hour in your environment.
And you're like, oh my god, I totally get that this pill is going to cure people.
Then what you should do, of course, is grab a handful of pills, go out and try and convince people to take the pill so you can save their lives.
That's what you should be doing if you genuinely accept that the plague is bad and the cure is good, is necessary, is useful, will save people's lives.
That's the reality. So when you accept UPB, rape, theft, assault and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
Then you have, for the rest of your life, you could spend 20 hours a day fighting manifestations of violations of UPB, and you'd never be done.
You'd never be done. So there's a plague.
Thousands of people are dropping dead every minute in your environment, in your neighborhood, right?
And there's a cure.
There's a pill that cures the plague.
But people think that the pill, the cure, is the disease.
They think you're making...
They think that you're making them sick by giving them the cure.
So if you accept that and there's an emergency called thousands of people are dying every minute, then you grab the sack of pills and you go out and you try and get people to take the pills, right?
That would be a rational, objective, sensible response to wanting to save people's lives, to studying medicine, to accepting that the pill cures the disease, that the disease is bad and you want to save.
You can save thousands of lives.
You can save thousands of lives.
Thousands of lives you can save by going out and talking about UPB, right?
So, that's what you would do if you weren't a troll.
Now, if you were a troll, what you would do is you would try and engage with all of the people who were trying to get people to take the cure for the deadly disease.
All the people who are out there trying to convince people that this pill will cure your disease.
I've taken it myself. It's wonderful.
It's beautiful. It's great. You can save your life.
Save the lives of your loved ones.
Save the lives of your children. But you've got to take this pill.
It's going to hurt a little. There'll be some...
You know, the vaccine against irrationality has a couple of impact effects, right?
But what you do instead is you go out and you interfere with the people trying to cure everyone, and you say, well, that's really, really interesting, but what if a Klingon has a hangnail?
Look, stop, stop, don't go, don't get, stop your pill proselytizing, stop trying to save people, stop and answer my question.
What if a Klingon has a hangnail?
Now, people, of course, forgetting their own dedication to going out and saving lives by curing people of a deadly plague, sit there and say, okay, well, hang on a sec.
That's a good one. Okay, the Klingons would be carbon-based life forms.
They would have this particular kind of RNA and DNA. I mean, just, gosh...
I wonder if this would cure a Klingon who has a hangnail.
That's a very interesting question.
And what's happening is you're interfering with people's lives getting saved.
You understand what I'm saying?
And that's why I called you a troll.
If you accept UPB, if you accept that rape, and this is just, I mean, the four commandments, so to speak, rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be moral.
They're immoral, they're evil. If you accept that, then get the hell out there, like I do, and try and talk to people about this, and try and get people to stop violating or supporting violations of rape, theft, assault and murder.
You'll never be done. In this life, in the life of your children, in the lives of your grandchildren, you'll never be done.
And that's why you should be grabbing a sack of pills, going out and getting people to take the pill and save their lives.
Instead, what you're doing is you're coming and getting people tangled up and tripped out over unimportant stuff that's never going to happen.
And that's why I called you a troll.
And that's why I called you a troll.
Now, of course, people can say, Well, but it's not a Klingon thing.
It is possible that a guy could be looking at stolen naked pictures of some celebrity on his laptop in a public place.
So what? That's not even, like, I don't know if you've never understood the concept of triage.
I mean, we all do kind of understand the concept of triage, right?
The concept of triage is you treat the people who are, like you divide people into three categories, right, as a whole in triage, right?
The first category is people who aren't going to, like in some accident in the emergency room, the people who aren't going to make it, and you don't deal with them, right?
And then there are people who are going to make it, but they're not totally critical, right?
And then you deal with them later.
And then there's the people who aren't going to make it if you don't act right now.
So some guy on his death rattle, you move past the bed.
Some guy who's got a bad gash, but they've got it kind of bound up and he'll be okay for a couple of hours, you move past him.
And you go to the guy who's bleeding out, but you can patch him up.
You can plaza him up and save his life.
So that's triage, right?
It's the same thing when you're trying to deal with the world as a whole.
There are people who are never going to get it.
Unfortunately, their brains, their souls, their minds, their capacity for critical thinking has died years ago.
And you move past them.
There are other people who are kind of on the journey thinking and reasoning for themselves, and then there are other people who are on the verge of losing their capacity to think, and you try and focus on those the most.
And that's sort of how I choose to call in people in many ways.
So that's your thing.
Now, as far as moral problems in the world go, some guy in a public place looking at nude pictures of a celebrity when those pictures were taken through some phishing or hacking mechanism, it's not even the top 10,000.
Now, of course, it is a difficult question to answer, right?
And there's nothing wrong with difficult questions.
Trust me. Morality without guards for governments was a difficult question to answer.
I have no problem with difficult questions to answer.
It's perfectly fine. But it's a difficult question to answer because it's easy to get polarized, right?
So let's say that you say, oh, well, yeah, if you see somebody looking at stolen pictures on a laptop, sure, you have the right to smash that laptop on the ground.
And then... That seems like an extreme response, so people don't want to say that.
And then if you say, well, you know, I really wouldn't, blah, blah, blah, it's like, okay, well then the fact that he's in possession of stolen goods, you can't enforce it, therefore no property, right?
All that kind of stuff, right? So, why is that a tough question to answer?
Because the genuine answer to this is, have you run out of pills?
And is everyone in your environment cured of irrationality?
Like, why are you coming here and asking really obtuse questions about theoretical situations which will almost never arise?
Have you actually gone out and brought to reason everyone in your environment?
Have you prevented people from hitting their children, from yelling at their children, from abusing their children?
Have you got kids out of government schools?
Have you got, you know, whatever it is that you're picking as your cause to bring reason to the world, are you so advanced in your pill curing of the plague that you're coming back here and asking this question?
I mean, can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
You're in the middle of a massive crisis.
There's been like a 50-car pileup on the highway, and they're bringing in bruised, broken, and bleeding people into the ER. And you're a doctor.
You're marching through.
You're trying to save lives. You're desperate.
Your adrenaline is pumping.
Your heart is pumping. And you're just horrifying.
Horrifying levels of responsibility and decisiveness, and you've got to look at people and say, you're not going to make it, I've got to move on, and you've got to order your nurses to stay away from the people who are bleeding out because they're just wasting resources, and to focus on the people.
You've got people screaming in agony, but you've got to ignore them because you've got to save your morphine for the amputation person, right?
So this is your day, right?
And then what happens is, Some guy comes in and starts tying the shoelaces of your nurses and doctors together and asking them how they would deal with a Klingon hangnail.
What would you do? You would recognize that this person tying shoelaces together and trying to demand about Klingon hangnails was an agent of death, right?
It was literally an agent of death because by tripping people up and distracting them from the The purpose of what they're trying to do, which is to save the lives of those who can be saved, that he is an agent of death, that he is preventing people from going out and saving lives, or just staying in the ER. And so he's getting people killed.
He's getting people killed by interfering and interrupting and tripping people up.
So what happens as well is that people who are paralyzed themselves, right?
People who are paralyzed themselves will almost always attempt to recreate or reproduce their own paralysis in you.
It's very, very important to understand.
Paralysis, emotional paralysis, is something that...
It transfers itself.
It's like a respiratory virus.
It translates itself from the breath, right?
From the breath of voice and talk and arguments and so on.
So this guy, and he says it at the end here, Bob, right?
He says, some guy smoked weed and isn't doing anything with his life.
I'm in a not too different boat from Glenn.
So, my friend, I won't give you a real name, right?
But... Yeah, so you're not doing anything with your life.
You're paralyzed. And then you come across a community where people are actively trying to bring virtue to the world, and you try to bring them to a screeching halt.
With inane bullshit questions that have no relevance, no importance, no material actionability in this or any other universe.
And then what happens is people are like, oh wait, I can't answer that question.
I don't know how this pill would help treat a Klingon hangmail, but in order to bring pills to the masses and cure them of this plague, I have to figure out now, oh my god, I've got to sit here and Venn diagram and whiteboard and molecular biology deconstruct how this pill is going to help cling on hangnails.
And only when I've done that can I go back out and make...
So what happens is you're seeing people who are out there actually doing good in the world, fighting evil and You know, kicking ass and taking names, right?
And then you're like, well, here, abstract, tripwire, landmine question, and then everybody stops.
And it's their issue, right?
And I understand that, and I'm just sort of modeling, right?
But what's happening is you're seeing people who are actively doing good in the world.
It makes you feel like shit.
So then you come in and stop them by tripping them up and paralyzing them.
With obscure, abstract, unimportant questions, which they then feel, well, you know, we've got to be consistent, and we've got to honor people who bring up ethical questions in a challenging environment, and you're just stopping people from getting the pills out there.
Now, it's one thing, look, if you don't want to grab pills and go cure the sick, that's fine.
I mean, I think it's a shitty thing to do, but if you don't want to do it, I'm not going to sit there and nag you about it.
But it's one thing to not take any pills and go out and cure people.
There's another thing to come in and tie the shoelaces together and trip up people who are actually sick.
Trying to cure the world, right?
So this is the level of your paralysis and how much you want to paralyze other people.
So a troll will come in and see people doing good and will trip them and paralyze them.
And in that way they can say, oh well, wisdom is paralysis, because I've now paralyzed all these people with this quote, impossible question, you can't answer it correctly, and they're sitting there answering and I can get progressively aggressive and they'll get sucked into my aggression and feel that they have to answer this question in order to be philosophical and they have to answer this question in order to save the world!
And you gain power by paralyzing others because your own paralysis has so much power over you, you use it then to paralyze other people and spread that sense of incompleteness and futility.
And then when people basically tell you to F off, you're like, oh, I guess this really isn't such a philosophical community now, is it?
Because I simply asked some rational, sensible questions about the limitations of UPB and people got all kinds of anger, right?
Come on. If you want to do good, and you've already...
This is why he says, I've read UBB and I accept the theory.
Fantastic. Then go out and do good in the world.
Fight instances and theoretical justifications for rape, theft, assault, and murder.
You'll never be done. And there's no need to answer these ridiculous questions about people looking at stolen nudes on a laptop.
And of course, the other thing too, if that's your primary...
If the society you're wondering about is a society where somebody looking at stolen pictures on a laptop in a coffee shop is your big issue, well, you already have a utopia, you understand, right?
Because we've already solved child abuse, pedophilia, rape, theft, assault, murder, taxation, money printing, inflation, war, like all of these have been solved and now, so we've already got a perfect society at that point.
So, that is...
What's going on? Now, you are probably not consciously aware of this, Bob.
You're probably not aware that this is your motivation and that you have a genuine, deep, and abiding terror of doing good in the world.
And you should. Absolutely you should.
Because when you do good in the world, and I can tell you this from 40 years of experience, when you do good in the world, you draw the attentions of some very bad people who really want to hurt you and wreck your life and spread lies about you and try and get you, well, Successfully, I often get you deplatformed and they can make your life quite challenging and exciting while ironically driving up the price of Bitcoin.
But if you don't, so you have, and this is why I'm spending time on this, you have a great desire to do good and a great terror of doing good.
And the great desire to do good is wonderful, and the great terror of doing good is admirable, because it's very wise to be afraid of doing good, because when you actually do good, this is why people get mad at me and not libertarians.
Because libertarians, by talking about the Federal Reserve and the gold standard and praxeology, and they're not doing anything to harm the interests of evil people, but when I empower adult children to confront Their own abusers, then I'm bringing negative consequences to people who've bullied, raped, abused, harmed, beaten, insulted children, right?
And so I am actually doing good in the world.
And you only know if you're doing good in the world if bad people don't like you, right?
I mean, of course, right? I mean, cancer doesn't like the cure, obviously, because cancer wants to keep doing its thing.
So, what's happening is you want to do good, you're terrified of doing good, and instead of addressing that tension, which is a very wise and important thing to do, you've got to want to do good and you've got to be nervous about doing good because, I mean, there's times when I took on particular topics and I literally could feel my heart pounding, like I was in the presence of a predator or Or I was leaning over a cliff to a great fall.
It was very scary, of course, right?
Because I'm not an idiot.
I'm not a fool. I know what blowback is.
I've known this since 2008 when The Guardian first began hammering at me and calling me a cult leader for saying that adults aren't actually obligated to spend time with endlessly abusive people, right?
So you want to do good.
You're terrified of doing good.
And I understand that.
And if the fear is too great, then you can step away from the medicine, and you can go and have some other kind of life.
It will be humiliating for you, and you'll have to deal with the shame of having backed down from something that's important to do.
But it's not for everyone.
It's not, like, the special air service is not for everyone.
And, you know, ninja philosopher unraveling The chains of power with the mere force of breathy words is not for everyone.
And if it is too much for you and it is too scary for you, then you can back away from it.
And you can do anything you want as long as you're honest with yourself.
Like, you can't violate the non-aggression principle.
But you can do anything you want as long as you're honest with yourself.
And if you say, look, I get UPB, there's a lot of work to be done, but I'm not...
I'm not going to do it because it's too scary.
I'm going to experience too much blowback.
I'm in a vulnerable position.
Maybe you're dependent upon an abusive parent or whatever it is you feel you are.
Okay, look, I'm not going to sit there and say, oh, you're a bad guy or whatever, because the bad guys are those who commit evil, not those who don't fight evil.
You're sort of more neutral in that sense, right?
So just be honest and say, I don't want to take on this topic.
I don't want to do this good.
That's fine. But it's one thing to say, I'm not going to go and help out at the hospital when there's a 50-car pileup.
I'm not going to go be a candy striper.
I'm not going to go and hold the hands of patients and tell them they're going to be fine even if they're not.
I'm not going to go and help out.
That's one thing. Okay, that's fine.
Don't go and help out.
But don't come and interfere.
Don't come tie people's shoelaces together and distract them with questions because you're getting people killed.
Like, I don't mean overly dramatic, but it's kind of true, right?
It's kind of true. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to drive people away from virtue by saying, well, UPB doesn't answer this question in an easily digestible format about guys looking at nudes, stolen...
And a laptop in a coffee shop.
It doesn't answer this. And what you're doing, of course, is you're reducing people's belief in and commitment to virtue, which stems out of your own lack of belief in and lack of commitment to virtue.
And because you're tortured by your own cowardice and paralysis, you want to induce...
Paralysis in others by sowing the seeds of doubt and so on, right?
And, you know, my answer to this has been, okay, has this ever happened to you?
No? Well, then shut up.
You know, has this ever happened?
You know, this is going back way back at the beginning of my public career as a philosopher, and people were like, oh, you got a guy hanging from a flagpole outside a...
The window of an apartment and, you know, you're not supposed to kick in the window and climb in an apartment you don't own that's breaking and entering, so should he just fall and die on the side?
Right? You ever dealt with that?
You ever dealt with that? Ever?
No. Then shut up.
Don't care. Irrelevant.
Klingon fucking hangnails, okay?
Don't care. You're a troll.
You're a fucking troll.
Now, you ever pay taxes?
Okay, that's something you can talk about.
Do you know any child who's ever been physically or verbally abused?
Well, of course you did. Do you know anyone who's been circumcised?
Okay, so that's real shit that you've got to deal with.
That's real stuff, moral stuff in the world that you can actually deal with.
But no, you want to talk about things that will never happen.
Guys, hang and reflect. Ball's going to kick it.
So, as it is, has happened to you.
Because violations of UPB Violations of universally preferable behavior happen all the time all around us.
The bodies are hitting the floor like a metronome.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
That's the reality of where ethics should be applying its energies.
Some guy in a future society in a laptop with stolen blah, blah, blah.
My God. Who cares?
Never gonna happen. Doesn't matter.
Who cares? It's irrelevant.
Oh, yes. Oh, so I see.
So then any time a situation comes up that your theory can't handle, you just say it's unimportant.
It is unimportant.
It is absolutely unimportant.
I mean, listen. I can...
I can answer the question right now.
Listen, I'm not expecting the people on the Telegram chat to have great facility and ability to answer a question like this because it's a challenging question, right?
And they are not philosophers.
That's my job, right?
So they can probably explain UPB to people as a whole.
And you can explain the rape, theft, assault, and murder stuff, and that's great.
You know, then you've just given them the pill.
Now, whether they take it or not is up to them.
You can't force-feed ideas into people's minds.
You can force-feed stuff into people's bodies, but you can't force-feed stuff into people's minds.
And so, yeah, you give them a pill, and you tell them why they should take it, and then it's up to that.
So... Ah, you anti-Semites, I'm telling you.
You are lying, too. Dear, oh dear.
So, if you believe, I don't know, that...
To be fair, the chat did answer and we pegged the troll pretty quick.
Yeah, sorry, I didn't follow the whole ins and outs of that, so I appreciate that feedback.
Just for you anti-Semites, I mean, if you think, oh, the Jews control this, that, and the other, the problem is the state.
The problem is the state, and some group is always going to end up taking over the state.
You're dealing with a symptom, not a cause.
So... And listen, so Bob, like the guy who sent me this message, I'm not, you know, I'm not mad at you.
I mean, I was just like, sorry, you're being a troll.
And I appreciate the question.
I appreciate the opportunity to be more clear about what it is that I'm doing.
I will now answer The question, which is a challenging question.
And so to Mark who says that the chat did answer, pegged the trial pretty quick.
Fantastic. I think that's wonderful.
And this is way back in the day.
Gosh, this is many, many, many years ago.
Very early on in Free Domain.
Back when it was Free Domain Radio, long before it became Free Domain.
There was a guy, he turned out to be like a professional troll, like this was his gig.
He just would go to communities and just mess them up.
And he brought up hookers and cocaine, hookers and blow, hookers and blow, right?
And I talked about the evils of prostitution.
And it was like, well, but it's voluntary and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, well, yes, for sure.
But it's highly dangerous.
It arises from abused childhoods.
It's destructive to everyone involved.
And it's pretty, pretty wretched.
And that caused a lot of emotional turmoil on the...
It's the same thing because with libertarianism, and I was a libertarian...
Oh, there was a lot of libertarians back then.
Libertarian kind of makes license for everything.
Well, there's nothing wrong with it if it's not specifically immoral.
Like, if it's not evil, it can never be wrong, right?
So they fence off this tiny little portion of things, right?
Theft, assault, and murder, and they say, well, everything else is fine, right?
And that's just not true. That's just not true.
It's just not true. Prostitution is not fine.
Drug addiction and abuse is not fine.
It's not fine. I mean, if you're a parent and you're going out scoring drugs, You know, hillbilly elegy style, then you are a terrible person.
And it's a great evil because it's harming your child.
It's harming yourself as well, right?
I mean, if you really want a challenging one, given that obesity is largely a choice and obese people tend to be the super spreaders of COVID, is obesity plus COVID a violation of the non-aggression principle if you're much, much, much, much more likely to infect other people because you're overweight?
Interesting question. Some trolls seem to be sores paid.
Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true.
So the answer is, and I've only got a couple of minutes because I've got a thing at two, but the answer is fairly simple.
The answer is fairly simple. So if someone is looking at what you perceive to be stolen pictures in a free society, you can go and talk to them.
You can ask them if they're stolen.
You can try and find their identity.
You could report them to their ISP. There could be lots of things that you could do.
You could take a picture of them.
You could put it to the local DRO and so on.
There's lots of things that you could do, but you sure as hell wouldn't be smashing their computer.
Absolutely not. Absolutely.
You can't be smashing their computer because you don't have context.
You can't be judge, jury, and executioner of the guy's laptop.
It could be that he's a researcher who's trying to figure out the source of the hack.
It could be that someone got a link and they didn't get into their spam folder, they clicked on the link and they're looking at it accidentally.
It could be somebody who's researching this stuff as a whole.
It could be any number of things where somebody could have those images on their screen without Being necessarily culpable of that.
Of course, most people won't look at this kind of stuff.
You know, I've been to a lot of coffee shops.
I've never seen any naked pictures on any laptop in any coffee shop I've ever been to.
And I wrote two entire novels in a coffee shop.
And never saw anyone with anything like that.
So, again, it's pretty rare.
It's pretty unusual. There's ways that you could deal with it.
But it's not something where you just go and smash people's laptop.
Because if you smash someone's laptop...
Then you have initiated the use of force if they themselves have not been guilty of the crime.
Even if they are guilty of the crime of looking at stolen pictures with full knowledge that they're stolen, right?
Maybe he's looking at these pictures, he doesn't even know that they're stolen.
He doesn't know, right? Maybe somebody just, hey, here's a picture of so-and-so naked.
Have a look. And he's like, well, I guess I'm curious, right?
And he goes, he doesn't even know that they're stolen.
So you would have to read his mind.
You'd have to know his intentions, his history, and what he was doing.
And so, of course, you wouldn't just be able to go and smash his laptop.
And, of course, if you smashed his laptop, and smashing his laptop was a greater punishment than would be inflicted upon the guy, even if everything was wrong that he did, well, then you're liable for excessive punishment, excessive use of force, right?
You know, like if someone steps on your toe and you shoot them, well, that's excessive use of force in response to a very minor transgression, right?
So if you smash someone's laptop and it turns out that even if everything he did was wrong, if the punishment would be, I don't know, a $50 fine or a letter of apology to the celebrity or whatever it is, you know, two days without internet, If smashing his laptop was even bigger, plus you smash his laptop, maybe he's got his bitcoins on there, and then you owe him a million dollars.
Like, who knows, right? It could be...
No, this is not going to happen.
A, it's never going to happen.
And B, you wouldn't be smashing laptops anyway, because that would be putting yourself under too much risk of liability and all these kinds of things as a whole.
Please release the three-hour presentation you shared on Locals.
It seems like a masterpiece.
It really was. Please upload this to Library or FDR Podcast.
Yeah, I will. I will. And I'm going to just stop here because, again, I've got a thing or two.
But I just wanted to drop by because I got this email or this message a week or two ago.
I completely forgot about it, and then I just found it while I was looking for something else.
So I wanted to... I'll give people this, and I'll put the question without the guy's name, but I'll put the question there.
So, yeah, I hope this helps. If you do want to talk about your general paralysis, I think that would be very helpful because, yeah, right now, unfortunately, your paralysis is making the world a worse place, and that means that the bad guys are winning in your life.
The bad guys from your history are winning.
You're not, and you're doing great harm to the world by interfering with the good actions of good people, and it's giving you a sense of power to paralyze others.
Which is really, I would say, kind of pitiful.
But I don't mean that you're pitiful. I just mean the history that brought you here to this place is kind of pitiful.
So, thanks everyone.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
Appreciate that. Don't forget to tune in tonight, 7 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time for my call-in show.
You can find the links.
Freedomain.com slash connect.
Have a wonderful afternoon and evening, guys.
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