Aug. 3, 2021 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:20:30
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Is critical race theory the biggest threat to America, or is it at least a threat to | ||
| Well, there's a lot of questions around that. | ||
| Obviously, you guys know my position on this to a certain degree, but there's a lot of other issues we need to talk about. | ||
| One of the biggest stories right now is that New York has imposed a—we'll call it a—I don't want to say limited, but it's a vaccine mandate. | ||
| For indoor activities, entertainment performances, and Bill de Blasio said the goal here is to encourage people, mostly young people, to get the vaccine. | ||
| That means if you want to go to the movie theaters, if you want to engage in normal activities like at bars, you have to have a vaccine passport. | ||
| You have to have proof. | ||
| They call it Key to NYC. | ||
| Now, Why do I bring up critical race theory? | ||
| Well, for one, you know the title of this video. | ||
| We're going to have a conversation, a political debate or discussion about this. | ||
| But there is a question some people have brought up due to the low level of vaccination among the black community and how that will disproportionately affect people and whether or not this will be truly equitable. | ||
| But today, the bigger thing we're doing is not just about the news. | ||
| It's about a conversation with two prominent individuals in politics. | ||
| We've got Charlie Kirk, who I'm sure most of you know. | ||
| Do you want to just briefly introduce yourself? | ||
| Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Honored to be here. | ||
| We're gonna have some fun. | ||
| Do you describe yourself politically in any way? | ||
| I guess you could say I'm on the right. | ||
| Conservative? | ||
| Yeah, more than that. | ||
| Conservative and love of the country. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| Then of course we have Vosh. | ||
| Howdy! | ||
| Yeah, I'm Vosh. | ||
| I'm a YouTuber. | ||
| And I guess I call myself a libertarian socialist. | ||
| I like some parts of the country. | ||
| I'm a big fan of some parts of it. | ||
| Some other parts I think could use some improvement. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| Now we've got Ian here as per usual. | ||
| Hi everyone. | ||
| I'm going to be in the chat today, uh, watching your super chats. | ||
| So keep sending them in and I'll be clipping them so that we can get to it at the end of the show. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| And I am very excited. | ||
| So I'm just going to interject here. | ||
| I'm excited for this conversation. | ||
| I'm going to be switching like a crazy person and hopefully tonight goes really well and we all learn something new. | ||
| And before we jump in, head over to TimCast.com, become a member to get an ad-free experience and exclusive access to members-only segments of this show. | ||
| And I guess, I wasn't initially planning on it, but I guess everyone's cool to do a member segment after the show and we'll find something fun to talk about. | ||
| So, you know, we'll see how it plays out. | ||
| So make sure you become a member, make sure you like this video, subscribe to this channel, share it with your friends. | ||
| If you think this conversation is important, I'm sure there are many right-wing individuals like, get it! | ||
| Get him, Charlie, crush Vaush. | ||
| And there's a lot of left-wing people being like, Vaush is gonna own. | ||
| No, share it with your friends and let's have a good conversation. | ||
| And I suppose we can start with one of two things. | ||
| Obviously, I brought up critical race theory, but also the vaccine issue. | ||
| I'm not sure if you guys have a preference for what you were... | ||
| Let me talk about the vaccine. | ||
| Why don't we talk about what's going on with vaccine passports? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| We've seen in Sydney, for instance, they issued a lockdown. | ||
| Most, or I should say enough people ignored it. | ||
| They went out in the streets and then this resulted in news articles saying, chaos in Sydney. | ||
| People aren't, you know, they're not following the rules. | ||
| The vaccination rate in Australia is ridiculously low. | ||
| I think it's 18%, really, really low. | ||
| Well, then they called in police and there were big protests. | ||
| Now they've actually deployed military. | ||
| So I'm curious if either of you wants to jump in with your thoughts on mandates, what would happen if they came here, if you're for or against them? | ||
| Look, there are elements of mandates that I can agree with. | ||
| We've already set standards for other things like the MMR vaccine, very basic standard vaccines that we expect everyone get before they can go to school, travel, and I think for the most part that's worked. | ||
| We've eradicated plagues from the world. | ||
| I think we should be proud of that. | ||
| With regards to COVID, since this is an ongoing pandemic, we need to focus on approaches that are effective and that don't ostracize or exacerbate tensions. | ||
| With regard to the Australian situation, it's not something I'm extensively familiar with, but generally speaking, I don't think that cracking down on protests is going to be an effective way to incentivize people to get vaccinated. | ||
| What's happening in New York might be, but my main issue with it is that I'm not entirely sure how they expect people to still have their vaccination card. | ||
| I know that there's been some confusion from the beginning as to whether or not you should keep that. | ||
| I know people have thrown theirs away. | ||
| They made it too big for wallets. | ||
| It just felt a little bit haphazardly planned from the forego, so that's unfortunate. | ||
| Maybe they can find other ways to incentivize it, like for example in schools, where they have a direct access to government records where they wouldn't have to use those little cards, you know? | ||
| That might be a little bit better. | ||
| I guess we'll have to see. | ||
| Well, I'm not saying you believe this, but some people on the left, I never want to hear about the discussion of voter ID ever again. | ||
| Because now you can force people to identify their medical history to try to get into a restaurant in New York City. | ||
| Yeah, look, I'm not getting the vaccine. | ||
| So I'm part of the 100 million people that are unvaccinated. | ||
| And it's an experimental vaccine. | ||
| The FDA and CDC has said that in January. | ||
| It's questionably effective. | ||
| Lindsey Graham just came down with COVID. | ||
| You had a vessel, a ship in the United Kingdom, 100% vaccinated ship that came down with COVID. | ||
| It's more like a treatment than a vaccine. | ||
| I'll leave that conversation to Dr. Brett Weinstein and the people that really understand. | ||
| How that works. | ||
| But yeah, this is medical apartheid. | ||
| This is trying to create a two-tiered system where if you don't make the proper medical decisions, you're not able to go to Broadway shows or go into restaurants even when the efficacy of this vaccine is questionable at best. | ||
| We see that in Israel, an 85% vaccinated country that's about to lock down again. | ||
| And most of the new cases are from vaccinated patients, not unvaccinated patients in Israel. | ||
| So, sorry, you want to interject him, but yeah, obviously against mandates. | ||
| And I think people should be able to make their own medical decisions. | ||
| I think it's pretty obvious. | ||
| Well, I disagree. | ||
| I think we actually have a, we actually have a story wrote on timcast.com that our view of the lockdowns is that it's alarmism because a new study from the public health of England found the Pfizer vaccine is 96% effective after two doses at staving off the Delta variant and AstraZeneca was 92%. | ||
| I could probably agree it's alarmism, but it's enough of an alarm for the public health leaders to undermine the argument that the vaccine is a solution to what would possibly satisfy the public. | ||
| I mean, I was against the lockdowns in the first place. | ||
| Let me be very clear when there was a thousand deaths a day, not 334. | ||
| But sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Well, a couple of points on this. | ||
| First of all, it's experimental in the sense that there was an expedited process for its release, but there have been full and extensive studies taken on the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines. | ||
| The reason why the FDA study hasn't been finished, the reason why it hasn't been fully vetted, isn't because they're looking for long-term health effects. | ||
| It's because they're determining the extent to which it protects you over a long period of time. | ||
| Ergo, the fact of the matter is, by all available data, this is undeniably much safer to get the vaccine. | ||
| I mean, by orders of magnitude. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| Wait, a couple things, because you said a few things there. | ||
| There are some instances where areas have more people being infected if they're already vaccinated, but if you take a look at, like, this is like data mining. | ||
| If you take a look at the broader statistics, especially here in America, the number of people who have gotten breakthrough cases is something like 0.003% of people who have been vaccinated. | ||
| You can take a look at the numbers. | ||
| Where is this new wave exploding? | ||
| It's in the unvaccinated. | ||
| In spite of the fact that fewer and fewer people are remaining unvaccinated, the vaccinated stay relatively healthy and Not only do they get infected way less often, they also suffer far fewer severe symptoms. | ||
| Their hospitalization rates have plummeted and their deaths are incredibly low compared to people who are unvaccinated. | ||
| This is by all means an effective vaccine. | ||
| What's your opinion of Johnson & Johnson, the FDA saying that it might cause a rare nerve disease? | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| That's something that, first of all, when you take a look at that, you have to recognize that even if that was the case... Which the FDA says it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, they're looking into it, of course. | ||
| They've issued an official warning that it could issue a rare nerve disease. | ||
| That's a big deal. | ||
| Could issue, of course. | ||
| They're looking into it. | ||
| And that is something to look into and to be concerned about. | ||
| What's your opinion of VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| Let's do the Gillian Yeah, of course. | ||
| Stuff like that can happen. | ||
| Now, even if that claim is the case, it would remain the fact that unless the extent of that potential nerve damage is just apocalyptically severe, that the effects of getting COVID would still be far, far worse than the potential side effects of that vaccine. | ||
| However, if you were to say, let's say worst case, you know, Johnson & Johnson, it's not viable, that gets pulled, we see what the consequences are, that doesn't really speak against the greater viability of the vaccines. | ||
| I got Pfizer, for example. | ||
| We're talking hundreds of millions of people who have either been protected against the vaccine in part, or if they get it, or sorry, against the virus, or if they get it, their effects, their symptoms are much, much, much more manageable. | ||
| So I just want to just kind of just Play into the irony here that I'm the one criticizing the pharmaceutical companies and you're the ones that are you're the one defending I just think that's a I think it's delicious. | ||
| Well, that's an extremely dishonest talking. | ||
| Well, you're peddling the Pfizer vaccine. | ||
| You're so effective Wait, I'm the one saying hold on maybe AstraZeneca Moderna Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer. | ||
| This is let's let's let's let's talk about the points He's made and no, I'm just I was just enjoying the irony Well, the thing is, it's not really irony if you understand the issue at hand. | ||
| See, my praise doesn't go to the pharmaceutical companies or their CEOs. | ||
| It goes to the tireless workers who spend months and months and months developing these vaccines. | ||
| Who's getting rich from this vaccine? | ||
| Well, hold on. | ||
| Have I at any point praised the distribution or profiteering system behind Pfizer? | ||
| vaccine mandates this is the workers or this is Pfizer CEO nobody's talking | ||
| about who gets rich this is a it's not your whole like this is a toothless | ||
| right you could try and go back and forth this is a toothless critique that | ||
| you could apply to literally anything that you don't like everything in this | ||
| country is manufactured to the profit of CEOs We don't mandate it. | ||
| And so you can't go to restaurants if you don't get one of four major. | ||
| I just want to say, if that's your criticism, that's one of many, then you should. | ||
| So if that's the criticism you want to focus on, I'm in favor of nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry. | ||
| I'm willing to take it that far, but whether or not that's on the table, and I can't just make that happen when we're talking strictly about the effectiveness of the vaccine, it seems so praise of the capitalist industry behind. | ||
| No, I was just enjoying the irony. | ||
| That's not an irony. | ||
| Well, it's totally ironic, because I'm the one saying that they might be lying to us, and you're the one that's saying it's super effective. | ||
| Wait, what lie? | ||
| Usually, if we were wearing our traditional uniforms, right versus left, it would be the other way around. | ||
| That's all I'm saying. | ||
| The only comment I'm making is as to the effectiveness of the vaccine. | ||
| What do you have to say about VAERS, though? | ||
| What do you have to say about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System that says well over 7,000 people experience death after getting the vaccine? | ||
| Does that worry you? | ||
| The VAERS system is entirely self-reported. | ||
| I don't think it's generally used to form an accurate metric. | ||
| Do you think it's under-reported or over-reported? | ||
| With VAERS, it's almost impossible to say. | ||
| You know what VAERS is, right? | ||
| Can you tell me what VAERS is? | ||
| Yeah, VAERS is a government website that physicians or individuals can submit complaints or concerns after an adverse event report from a vaccine. | ||
| Since you cannot win in court against a vaccine production company, then they go through some process where the government then can distribute some form of remedy if you had an adverse event reaction. | ||
| That's what varies. | ||
| And researchers like it because if you take a vaccine or you get some other procedure, any medical drug done, you can report the effects there and it can be a way of gathering sort of aggregate data concerning the effects of these potential treatments. | ||
| The problem is researchers don't use this as a bulletproof way of determining the outcome or effect of anything because They're literally just unvetted online submissions that anybody can put in. | ||
| So I ask you, because I want to know, how do you arrive at the conclusion that... How many people did you say applied? | ||
| Well, VAERS' own data is 7,000 plus, and most of which, by the way... That anyone can submit? | ||
| No, by the way, most of which are physicians submitted, just so you know. | ||
| The total number? | ||
| Most of the submissions on the VAERS website are done by, like, family doctors or local physicians. | ||
| So I'm just asking, what number of adverse event reactions would you say maybe there's something wrong? | ||
| But I'm asking, how do you know these deaths were caused by vaccines? | ||
|
unidentified
|
10,000 deaths? | |
| 20,000 deaths? | ||
| No, I'm just saying that's what VAERS says, right? | ||
| No, wait, so I need to know this. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| So wait, is these just people who have died after taking the vaccine? | ||
| Like they may have died from some medical incident afterwards and it just gets put up there and we're saying it because of the vaccine? | ||
| This is the question. | ||
| Usually a vaccine gets pulled when you have 15 attributable deaths. | ||
| We have 7,000 that we have to go through. | ||
| The question is, when do you call Time Out and say, maybe we should mandate it? | ||
| You're not answering the question. | ||
| How do you know that they're from the vaccine? | ||
| We don't. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| But you don't either. | ||
| But the position is, let's mandate experimental medicine. | ||
| We don't know actually what's happening. | ||
| Wait, if you don't know, then how can you say that medical doctors are the one uploading this information? | ||
| Is there any methodology? | ||
| We do know who's actually uploading it. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| We know the entries are usually and typically traditionally. | ||
| What are the claims being made? | ||
| How about menstrual cycle disruption? | ||
| Loss of nerve capacity? | ||
| Unable to walk? | ||
| Paralysis? | ||
| Miscarriages? | ||
| Mood changes? | ||
| Also, you could go through the VAERS database like, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| Mood changes. | ||
| What about the death? | ||
| Let me interject something real quick. | ||
| Death is 7,000 plus. | ||
| That's a serious number. | ||
| How do they know what's from the vaccine? | ||
| I keep asking you this. | ||
| You don't have an answer. | ||
| Let me address two points, one from each of you, real quick, so we can try and How do we know it's from the vaccine? | ||
| It's a difficult question. | ||
| I would say that if you have a mass vaccination program, which gives out 330 million doses or so, and then people start saying, hey, I got the vaccine, then this happened. | ||
| VAERS isn't here to say it is or isn't. | ||
| They're here to say, can we find a pattern in this? | ||
| And I think 7000 suggests there may be one at the very least. | ||
| I'm not a scientist, so I can't stress that. | ||
| I will also say, however, to Charlie, Guillain-Barre syndrome, which I'm probably pronouncing wrong. | ||
| I always mispronounce it. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| My understanding is actually a side effect of many vaccines. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Totally, that's correct. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| Well, so the issue I have is one of the things that Vaush brought up is that there's been, how many you mentioned, 100 million, 160 million? | ||
| 115, I think it is, million. | ||
| Who have been fully vaccinated? | ||
| Fully vaccinated. | ||
| I think in that ballpark. | ||
| So, of course, you know, if you have something very different from any other vaccination we normally do because we're not having everyone do it all at once. | ||
| Yeah, and so this is a mass inoculation thing. | ||
| And so here's why the American system should answer this question easily. | ||
| When you have any sort of uncertainty or disagreement, yield to rights. | ||
| Yield to rights. | ||
| Allow people to say, no, let me just build out the argument, right? | ||
| So for me, for example, I'm 27. | ||
| I don't consider COVID to be a largely disproportionate risk to my way of life. | ||
| I don't know about this vaccine. | ||
| I have gotten other vaccines in my life. | ||
| So I want to be able to have the right to say no to that. | ||
| So the American system constitution, kind of like the tradition, is to be able to have people have nuance, preferences, and individualism. | ||
| When it comes to these sort of complex issues, not saying you can't go to a restaurant because we want you to take experimental medicine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, a couple of points on that. | ||
| First of all, if we're speaking to legal rights, the Supreme Court found over a century ago that when it came to vaccinations, this was a special exemption from some people's rights to determine their medical history. | ||
| I will agree with you that the courts are not on my side. | ||
| 1904 on that one. | ||
| And there's a reason why. | ||
| Because, of course, when you choose not to take the vaccine, you contribute to the removal of others' freedoms. | ||
| See, it's true, you do have a freedom to not or to take a vaccine, but I think other people should have the freedom to not grow up in a world ridden by plague. | ||
| And with the way this disease, COVID, mutates with time, as all diseases do, inevitably, if it continues to circle the world long enough, and this is an international problem, not just an American one, New strains will develop, which will slowly ebb at the effectiveness of this set of vaccines. | ||
| So it threatens all of us. | ||
| May I say one other thing? | ||
| Sorry, sorry. | ||
| With all of that being said, just to speak to VARs. | ||
| VARs is an incredibly effective system for locating and roughly attributing concerns related to the effects of drugs. | ||
| The problem is that there are several elements to this disease that make it really difficult to pinpoint anything specific. | ||
| The second, the two of which being A, Hundreds of millions of people vaccinated. | ||
| That is a huge range to pull data from. | ||
| And B, the, you know, propagandist fear campaign about an incredibly effective vaccine process that may lead people to misattribute the deaths that they experience to vaccines. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Just quick clarification. | ||
| Are you for mandating the COVID-19 vaccine? | ||
| Uh, the same way we have other vaccines, like school, travel, that kind of stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, like, what if someone wanted to go to a restaurant or a supermarket or a movie theater? | ||
| I think that, I mean, we don't have that for other vaccines, right? | ||
| Like, every time you go to a movie theater, you have a little card. | ||
| I understand that might be an effective panic measure, but long-term, my goal would be to integrate it into the same revenue of vaccines. | ||
| I think that's a more reasonable response than some politicians. | ||
| I'm just gonna be honest. | ||
| People are panicking, and they shouldn't. | ||
| People die. | ||
| I just want to make sure we weren't having like, you know, misunderstanding. | ||
| No, I think that's more of a reasonable answer. | ||
| I'm just curious just on the vaccine topic in general. | ||
| Are you concerned by like Dr. Malone coming out who literally invented the mRNA vaccine and says that there's a dangerous spike protein involved and he encourages people to think twice before getting it? | ||
| Does that move you at all? | ||
| Well, you're free to speak with your doctor. | ||
| When it comes to a world... No, Dr. Malone. | ||
| Just his specific commentary. | ||
| His specific commentary. | ||
| The guy who invented this type of vaccine. | ||
| Right, well, I'm not a PhD, and I doubt that he was directly involved in the production of these vaccines. | ||
| No, he literally invented this type of vaccine. | ||
| The mRNA, but with the, like, Johnson & Johnson, the Pfizer, the Moderna. | ||
| But he's very, very aware of this sort of accelerated implementation. | ||
| He's trying to call timeout and tell people, this is not like any other vaccine. | ||
| Does that worry you? | ||
| His claim is that it involves a spike protein. | ||
| It was rushed to market. | ||
| It's going to have side effects. | ||
| You don't understand it like I did. | ||
| I invented this and you got to think twice before mandating it or even taking it if you're under a certain age. | ||
| Does that bother you? | ||
| What makes the current retinue of vaccines that we take, the mRNA process, different from other mRNA vaccines? | ||
| It doesn't involve the spike protein. | ||
| According to him, the same composition as like the measles, mumps, rubella type vaccine or the chickenpox vaccine. | ||
| Well, those weren't mRNA. | ||
| The process wasn't developed back during the MMR vaccine. | ||
| Totally, but some of them are getting updated for the more mRNA-type technology, right? | ||
| If he wasn't involved in the production of these modern vaccines, how could he possibly have any comment on any of the rigors or tests that were done before him? | ||
| Because he invented this type of vaccine. | ||
| I'm just saying, does that bother you? | ||
| Do you think he's just like a fear propagandist? | ||
| No, he may well have concerns, but those are concerns that I would rather have addressed by the scientific community rather than, with respect to you and myself, YouTubers. | ||
| Well, no, I agree. | ||
| But the question is, which scientists, right? | ||
| So there's a lot of scientists speaking out against this. | ||
| Dr. Brett Weinstein, Dr. Malone. | ||
| What is Dr. Brett Weinstein's sexuality? | ||
| He's an evolutionary biologist, so he knows a little bit about how cellular function works. | ||
| That's not virology. | ||
| No, that is not virology. | ||
| That is a completely spurious association. | ||
| Do you trust Fauci more or Dr. Brett Weinstein? | ||
| It's not about Fauci. | ||
| It's about Fauci. | ||
| He's a virologist who's been wrong about everything. | ||
| It's about the global... Well, hold on. | ||
| He's smiling with glee here. | ||
| It's the global medical community in this regard. | ||
| You mean like the doctors? | ||
| WHO like no I'm not hold on wait a name behind it so wait he's very excited and right yeah | ||
| Let's know I just want to say it's not just about the WHO We are talking about a unified effort on the part of | ||
| virtually every country on earth to get a hold of the vaccines that us | ||
| Americans are privileged to have this isn't just some this isn't some like | ||
| Pharmaceutical dr. Fowchee push that wasn't broadly supported by any of the relevant experts in the mRNA field | ||
| Which is not huge because it's a very new development Internationally there is a demand for these vaccines. I | ||
| wanted to add just based on what you had said I can pull up Reuters | ||
| Their fact check is that vaccines are not, quote, cytotoxic. | ||
| They go on to mention that Robert Malone, and they show the Brett Weinstein podcast, they show the Post, the FDA was alerted months ago that the spike protein in the COVID vaccines are cytotoxic, toxic to cells. | ||
| The FDA did nothing. | ||
| Reuters says this is not true. | ||
| Now, the issue at hand is trust. | ||
| Like you mentioned, you said, do you trust Fauci or Weinstein? | ||
| I don't know if there is a fact-based argument if you have the doctors you trust and the doctors you trust or the organizations you trust. | ||
| It's a clash of who you believe, to be honest. | ||
| None of us have the credentials to just come up with these arguments on their own. | ||
| There will always be bias in who we choose to believe. | ||
| However, given the plurality of people seem to support the safety and the effectiveness of the vaccine and the fact that it doesn't take a virologist to notice that Over half a million Americans have died of COVID, more than the combined death tolls of every war since World War I combined, including the Second World War in Vietnam. | ||
| Those are things that I don't need to be a virologist to see. | ||
| Can I ask you a question though? | ||
| That's pretty bad. | ||
| One of the issues that's brought up frequently, especially on Twitter, is that many of these COVID deaths are died with COVID. | ||
| It's brought up where people would say something like it tends to be people who are over 70 or things like that. | ||
| I'm only bringing that up not to make the argument, but because you said, how would VAERS know if these are actually related to the vaccine? | ||
| I'd like to respond to that if I may. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So, COVID rarely, like, directly kills you. | ||
| Like age, it causes a breakdown in other vital functions that then their death can be attributed to such. | ||
| So, for example, of the many things that people die, it's not really COVID, it's just that COVID blanks their entire system internally and eventually something fails, something breaks, and they die. | ||
| There were people claiming that there were deaths being spuriously attributed to COVID-19 very early on in this pandemic, but thankfully we know that's not the case because if you take a look at the excess mortality numbers, the number of people who should die every year in the United States, because there's a very normal pattern, you know, normally with this many people in this country, we see an excess starting when COVID started that almost perfectly graphs on to the rising death waves of COVID. | ||
| I mean it perfectly tracks on to that. | ||
| I just want to say for you, Charlie, I think, you know, the issue I see here is for me, it's I can't trust or distrust. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, I think Brett Weinstein is a very smart guy and I don't think he's going to lie to me. | ||
| And these doctors are very smart people. | ||
| Then I see the government agencies that, you know, I don't always trust the government, to be completely honest. | ||
| I'm not a big fan. | ||
| But to believe that there's like a nefarious effort or anything like that, ultimately what it comes down to is, in my opinion, having a trusted medical professional that you can consult with. | ||
| Well, I totally agree. | ||
| And I think there could be an argument that if you're over the age of 70, that this vaccine might be a really good idea for you. | ||
| However, to mandate it for schools and for colleges, when these are highly complex medical decisions, that's where I'm going to push back against it. | ||
| Well, let me let me let me. | ||
| They are complex. | ||
| The Johnson and Johnson vaccine is not an mRNA vaccine, though. | ||
| Is that that's my understanding? | ||
| I don't want to speak out of turn. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I would love to be fact checked on that. | ||
| I'm not totally sure. | ||
| So I guess another question I have, what do you think of alternative type treatments, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin? | ||
| Why the push for mass inoculation? | ||
| Well, hydroxychloroquine studies have found it largely ineffective. | ||
| There was, I believe, a French study that stopped when people started dying of heart failure. | ||
| I think the only reason the right dies in this hill is because Trump mentioned it. | ||
| I don't think there'd be a push for it otherwise. | ||
| The vaccines are the effective way of getting mass populations inoculated. | ||
| And while it is true that most of the people who die are ancient, the fact remains that people experience long-term side effects from getting COVID even if they survive. | ||
| I know people who are in their 30s, and you know, me, a blistering 27 year old myself, I'm not especially worried, but I've heard them talk about how much harder it is for them to climb up flights of stairs. | ||
| I know that erectile dysfunction, fellas, is one of the listed potential side effects of getting COVID, even young, healthy, no other problems. | ||
| It is true that death is most comorbid with age and pre-existing conditions, but still, And that's not even to speak of the COVID variants. | ||
| I mean, right now you're on, what, Delta? | ||
| But if it keeps cycling around the world, let it go for another year. | ||
| Who knows how bad this could get? | ||
| So Johnson & Johnson is not an mRNA vaccine. | ||
| So there's an alternative to mRNA if you're concerned about it. | ||
| And there was some guidance with the nerve disease with that. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt. | ||
| I do think we kind of overlooked something really interesting, is that when did we mandate vaccinations in public schools? | ||
| Well, I know the Supreme Court case concerning this was in 1904, so I would know it would have to have been earlier than that. | ||
| I know that Washington even had his troops vaccinated, though, I forget. | ||
| For smallpox. | ||
| Smallpox, was it? | ||
| Which is pretty crazy to think about. | ||
| Inoculated, not vaccinated. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Well, I don't know what they did. | ||
| Hit people with a rock and then, like, pour liquid in them. | ||
| It was like a needle, I think. | ||
| And they would, like, prick you with the needle that had, like, a weakened sample or something. | ||
| And they would have had to forge that needle. | ||
| Like, with a blacksmith. | ||
| Isn't that crazy to think about? | ||
| Like, Washington's troops. | ||
| They still, I know, like someone pouring it and then like, you know, today it's just a machine that makes it. | ||
| It's just wild to think about. | ||
| Well, so, man, I think the real issue for the most part is just mandatory. | ||
| Well, I just also have another question. | ||
| Do you think that there might be any bad motives behind these four companies, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, considering they are big pharma? | ||
| And they pursue profits, which generally, as a libertarian socialist, you're skeptical of. | ||
| Do you think maybe they might have nefarious motives? | ||
| Oh, their intentions are reprehensible. | ||
| They have for many years made money off the backs of American deaths. | ||
| The opioid crisis is almost entirely attributable to them. | ||
| And the Sackler family. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, no moral love for these companies. | ||
| If this could be... And by the way, the mRNA process was developed through public funding. | ||
| It was, you know, an effort invested in by the collective good, something I'm generally supportive of. | ||
| When it comes to these companies themselves, and when I say, you know, go get your Pfizer vaccine, whatever, please do not mistake this or anything else that I say for an endorsement of the practices of these companies. | ||
| It is only through cruel twist of fate and the economic system we live in that they are the ones put in a position... | ||
| to handle this. | ||
| But it was the workers at those companies, not the CEOs who did the work. | ||
| I'm just curious, does that ever make you stop short and say, maybe they're trying to massively inoculate us on a vaccine that might not be as effective to try to pursue profit, not well-being? | ||
| Does that ever enter into your calculation? | ||
| It's a consideration you should take about anything produced by any company that's run for profit, which is Everything, you know, basically every need in American society, need, is tempered by the knowledge that there are people out there who are paid very large salaries to sell it to you. | ||
| This is the case for everything we do, everything we eat. | ||
| Every time you run down Main Street, or in my case, I guess, you know, the boulevards in Los Angeles, you're seeing the protracted efforts of a billion dollar industry to make sure you want things they're selling. | ||
| Could that be the case for COVID? | ||
| Undeniably, there is a profit incentive involved. | ||
| Oh my goodness, I'm sorry. | ||
| And there was probably a protected effort on the part of these companies to make sure they were the first, and they probably took every dirty advantage they could get. | ||
| But with the data available, I have to still, as much as I would say, hey, I would prefer eating McDonald's food to starvation, I have to say this is probably still something we should be doing. | ||
| It's been 20 minutes. | ||
| Do you want to make a final point? | ||
| Maybe you would starve instead. | ||
| I actually think this has been really constructive and not like that, you know, inflammatory. | ||
| I think that deep down you have this kind of, you know, urge that I'm already there where maybe they want this thing to go on for another decade to go make another hundred billion dollars and maybe the cheap drug of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin might work better than they might think. | ||
| I don't have that urge. | ||
| Sir, other studies would disagree with you earlier. | ||
| We could change the topic. | ||
| I just think it's... That was a healthy discourse. | ||
| Can I meet in the middle on that one? | ||
| On that very last one? | ||
| I do not trust the pharmaceutical industries, though the available evidence does seem to point to the effectiveness of the vaccines. | ||
| I say this. | ||
| Nationalize the pharma industry. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| It could be used for the collective good, and I would unironically actually trust it more in the hands of our ineffective, bloated government. | ||
| than I would the sociopaths who run it currently. | ||
| So I'll wrap this up by saying always talk to your doctor. | ||
| This is one of the biggest things, like YouTube is very strict on this especially, but I genuinely think this is the right answer. | ||
| If you're watching this, don't assume anyone here is right or wrong. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure there are people who think Charlie's made a bunch of good points and you have. | ||
| Ultimately, it's down between you and your doctor. | ||
| And I'll stress, you know, for whatever your opinion, Charlie, I understand. | ||
| Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin haven't been approved by the FDA, and so that's just another... We're just asking questions whether it works or not. | ||
| So that's why I think it's really important, because I think there are... I gotta be honest. | ||
| In regards to Ivermectin, people have been eating horse paste that they sell. | ||
| I looked up what the FDA says about it. | ||
| They say, do not do this. | ||
| And they actually give a very good reason. | ||
| They say, although people are claiming that, you know, if an animal can take it, someone else can, that's not true. | ||
| There are some things that dogs can't have that humans can. | ||
| So please talk to your doctor. | ||
| And I definitely hope We can continue having debates about this stuff because that was vastly important. | ||
| I'm really glad you guys were able to have that conversation. | ||
| I hadn't even heard of the horse pace thing. | ||
| That's horrifying. | ||
| Ivermectin is technically a drug for horses. | ||
| It's off-label use. | ||
| Yeah, it's a dewormer. | ||
| And so you can go to a tractor supply and they have them. | ||
| They have a sign that says, like, do not eat this. | ||
| And please don't. | ||
| Any drug for horses will burn a human out from the inside. | ||
| Those things are... They're titans. | ||
| So let's talk about the other big topic, Critical Race Theory. | ||
| You know, that's the one that I had a terrible answer, absolutely, when you asked me about it. | ||
| And it was because I think my approach to it was too surface-level cultural. | ||
| So the last time we had Vaush on, when you asked me about it, I couldn't give you a good answer. | ||
| And I think we can talk about what's happening in schools, the things they're teaching children, and I don't know if either of you has an opinion and wants to start off with... The floor is yours. | ||
| Yeah, so there are two CRTs. | ||
| There's the critical race theory that I know of, which is a highly esoteric, essentially elective class that you can take in some law schools that teaches you a variety of incredibly eclectic legal theories, some of which I like and some of which I think I disagree with. | ||
| And then there's the critical race theory that people like Christopher Rufo have been trying to push. | ||
| A sort of catch-all term to describe all anti-racism. | ||
| We see these anti-CRT bills being put through street legislators and a lot of them don't even mention critical race theory. | ||
| They mention stuff that's been boilerplate anti-racist theory for like two centuries. | ||
| That stuff really concerns me. | ||
| I think that academia is, to an extent, sacred. | ||
| Of course, all the good things in our society now were born in the halls of academia. | ||
| The Enlightenment, our democracy, the fair trial that we enjoy if we're arrested. | ||
| These were things that were originally considered to be the crackpot initiatives of academics, and only through the respect of those ideas have we arrived at, well, what we have today. | ||
| So, if there are problems within academia, I would have them solved in academia. | ||
| Not through the big hand of government reaching in and censoring everyone who says something that disagrees with some political party. | ||
| So, a point of clarification, you don't believe that critical race theory is in schools? | ||
| I think that maybe there are ideas which overlap with critical race theory, but there's always going to be overlap between academic ideas. | ||
| I mean, you know, I drank water, so did Hitler. | ||
| One of those type situations. | ||
| I think you're coming at it in good faith, where you're technically correct here that the super academic way of defining critical race theory is not being taught to fourth graders. | ||
| Right? | ||
| With that being said, it's almost like saying, you know, we're not teaching advanced geometry to fourth graders, but we are teaching them very basic math. | ||
| We'll get them the Euclidean geometry. | ||
| So the very basics of this are definitely in schools. | ||
| And there's many examples of this, right? | ||
| The National Education Association literally came out in their press release and said that they are going to push for, and their word was critical race theory, just so we're clear. | ||
| They use that term, right? | ||
| That's not Christopher Ruftho. | ||
| That's not James Lindsay, who are good friends of mine. | ||
| That's the National Education Association, right? | ||
| And I think they might even be talking about something different than the Delgado theory of critical race theory, right? | ||
| And so what I want to try to do here, Tim, is we can talk about critical race theory as an academic theory, or we could use a filler term like wokeism, which is more like racial justice, which I actually think would probably be, you know, we can call it racial justice and meet in the middle. | ||
| I mean, I really feel like there are probably four digit number of people in America who are studied on actual critical race theory, not including myself. | ||
| And I'm not even prepared to do that. | ||
| But I'm happy to talk about racial justice education and wokeism, which I think I think you guys actually agree in essence that the academic critical race theory is there's overlap with a component in schools but what we often hear is someone will say critical race theory is being taught to my kids and then someone will say cite one author of critical race theory that we've brought up in school and the issue is it's we refer to it as it's I believe it's called critical race praxis. | ||
| So this is something different than critical race theory. | ||
| It's being implemented in education. | ||
| But that's why you said wokeism. | ||
| I just think that discussion is so unhelpful when Joy Reid and Christopher Rufo are screaming at each other, and Joy Reid is saying like, it's not being taught anywhere, Christopher Rufo. | ||
| So yes, it is. | ||
| When in reality, they're both right. | ||
| They're just talking about two completely different things. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| No, I do. | ||
| And Christopher Rufo has admitted this is like a kind of tactic. | ||
| Critical race theory does sound spooky. | ||
| You know, I get a little shiver when I say it. | ||
| Whereas stuff like anti-racist theory or structural racism maybe compel a little bit more thought when discussed on. | ||
| It's kind of a moral panic that, in principle, I really disagree with. | ||
| But if you want to talk, I mean, we can call it wokeism if you want. | ||
| That's probably a more accurate term. | ||
| I will just say, to the point about Christopher Rufo, white supremacist is also used as a catch-all term in the other direction. | ||
| If we're talking, I mean, in academia, the term white supremacist is virtually never used. | ||
| It's sort of a common parlance. | ||
| What I will say, though, about to give credit to Christopher Ruffo is that this is all kind of downstream from the conversation that Marcuse and Delgado started. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Well, let's talk about it then. | ||
| But just one thing, though, since we're operating under the blanket wokeism, which is a really broad term, let's talk about, like, specific ideas. | ||
| Because I'm sure there are some of them that I can provide a good defense for, and some of them I might disagree with. | ||
| How about, like, black-only dormitories? | ||
| Generally, not a fan. | ||
| I don't think they're explicitly harmful in the same way that traditional segregation is, but I also think that it incentivizes bad types of socialization, where the way that you get a reprieve from the faults of society is to find comfort in people of your own race. | ||
| Maybe that incentivizes some bad stuff. | ||
| In my university we had safe spaces, but you know what they were? | ||
| They were like chilled, like, coffee break rooms behind, like, the... Where'd you go? | ||
| Latin. | ||
| I went to Humboldt State. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Right behind there. | ||
| And, like, anyone could go in there, whatever. | ||
| Just the only thing that they asked was that you not be, like, a dick. | ||
| But as long as you met that qualification, that was fine. | ||
| That, to me, that's a good safe space. | ||
| Maybe that works, you know? | ||
| I think I'm pretty in favor of that, yeah. | ||
| It's just an owed debt. | ||
| We said 40 acres and a mule. | ||
| I just I think this is actually really helpful. | ||
| So how about reparations for slavery? | ||
| I think I'm pretty in favor of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's make the argument just to know debt. | ||
| We said 40 acres and a mule. | ||
| We never paid it. | ||
| And unfortunately, the material reality for a lot of people who were slaves didn't change | ||
| that much after they were emancipated. | ||
| I mean, if you were a slave, and you're made free, that's a big step up, don't get me wrong, but you have nothing. | ||
| I mean, nothing! | ||
| And because of the way generational wealth transfers from father to son or mother to... either... | ||
| To anyone, to their children. | ||
| Yeah, caught me there. | ||
| Unfortunately, we still see the consequences of that borne out. | ||
| You can actually look county by county. | ||
| Where were slaves kept? | ||
| Which were the plantation counties? | ||
| And you see, oh, this group of black neighborhoods, that's where they settled after slavery ended. | ||
| It's like really immediate stuff. | ||
| And it's a debt owed that this nation never paid. | ||
| I don't necessarily agree on reparations, but I think we need to clarify what that ultimately means. | ||
| But I will say, I've long held the same position. | ||
| I actually worked on a documentary. | ||
| There's an issue of people who were enslaved, then they were released, and they were not given any means to actually develop and grow. | ||
| And so there's a generational wealth gap between people based on race for these historical reasons. | ||
| The challenge I see, I suppose, is You know, we've done a lot to amend the laws and change them. | ||
| For instance, you know, redlining and blockbusting have become become illegal. | ||
| And now we're dealing with an ultimately, I believe, is a class issue. | ||
| Of course, racism still exists. | ||
| But anyway, I digress on that point. | ||
| What I want to get to is specifically on reparations. | ||
| What do you view reparations as, more importantly? | ||
| So this is a big divide. | ||
| Some people think, like, cash payments. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of that. | ||
| It doesn't fix the problem, for one. | ||
| You can put money into that community, but there's been research done on how long a dollar stays in a black neighborhood as opposed to a white neighborhood. | ||
| And if a black neighborhood, all of the businesses are owned by, you know, corporate boards that are all majority white, eventually the money filters out and you get a very temporary boost in living situation. | ||
| Not much long-term structural change. | ||
| I'm a big fan of structural reparations, not based on race, but rather based on targeting neighborhoods that need it the most. | ||
| Some of these neighborhoods are, like, white, and I passed through some of them on my way out from Ronald Reagan Airport. | ||
| I can tell which parts of this country. | ||
| You can see it in the bones of the neighborhood. | ||
| And I think that a new, proper reparations project, a new deal, a new New Deal, even, would go a long way. | ||
| Well, so you're saying not even based on race? | ||
| I think that we should recognize that this is largely a racial project, because unfortunately poverty and race are really intertwined in this country. | ||
| But in terms of applying it, I think that it would be much more healthy if we treated it like a collective effort to bring up the lowest sort of echelon of our economic So I want to ask you, Charlie, would you agree with a program that was in, in, in how do I describe this? | ||
| The explained as reparations, but was not based on race, went to people based on class and neighborhood so that it could help Latinos and white people and Asians and everybody. | ||
| First of all, I'm against reparations. | ||
| I just don't like the word because it kind of implies this intergenerational type guilt or allowance that I kind of reject and I'm happy to build that out further. | ||
| Do I agree that the question is mostly class? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I think that Vaush is hitting on something and I think That you're saying that it's inherently racial. | ||
| I really want to explore that with you because I think that's interesting. | ||
| I think you're wrong, but I think that's interesting. | ||
| Where I think the racial thing is actually being used to distract people like you and I from actually talking about what's really happening here, which is a small group of people getting a lot richer while normal people get poor. | ||
| And I think the racial thing is being used as this distraction tool to throw smokescreen in the middle, while we're talking about something that we're never really going to have consensus on, when the true struggle right now is mainly economic. | ||
| Well, I think that applying reparations along racial lines runs into a bunch of really tough issues. | ||
| Which neighborhoods? | ||
| Do you go by, like, blood? | ||
| Like, can you prove your great-great-grandfather was a slave? | ||
| It gets very difficult very quickly. | ||
| Maybe that would be the most direct interpretation of generational reparations. | ||
| But in my mind, the reason why it's important to recognize the racial issue here is that the nature of class divides in this country is cut into racial policy prior to the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| The redlining that took place, lines which still remain not in law but in practice, led to very distinct... I mean, sometimes, you know, one side of the highway is nice and the other side of the highway... I mean, it legitimately... Can I just jump in real quick? | ||
| I'm from Chicago. | ||
| 47th Street was split by race. | ||
| No joke. | ||
| This is long-standing effects on the city, just to point out. | ||
| No, and I grew up in L.A. | ||
| and on either side of the 5, which cut through the city, I mean, or the 405, sorry. | ||
| Let me let me let me just interject something, too. | ||
| And I don't know if you're familiar. | ||
| We would act. | ||
| We were actually told that we would be arrested from from the south side of 47th. | ||
| If we cross 47th, we would get arrested because the cops would pull up and say, you don't live in this neighborhood. | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| I'm from the suburbs of Chicago. | ||
| I've heard stories like that. | ||
| I'm very clear to say I'm not from Chicago. | ||
| I grew up in Beverly Hills, which is close, though, to West Hollywood and Koreatown, and the lines are clear as day. | ||
| The reason I say that, though, about the racial project, is that because explicit discrimination is no longer in the law, we've pretty much wiped that out, with the exception of some, I guess, edge cases. | ||
| The project of systemic racism, or the existence of systemic racism, is something which is carried through class by inertia. | ||
| It isn't something you can explicitly legislate along anymore. | ||
| I mean, obviously, nobody's out there passing laws like, Black people can't do this. | ||
| That'd be silly. | ||
| But instead, the consequences of slavery, and of second-class citizenship for Black people, left unaddressed, a wound left to fester, that unfortunately can't really heal itself, inertially, unless we do something specific. | ||
| So the issue with that argument is that the more that we intervened in the black community, it actually had the opposite effect. | ||
| And Thomas Sowell probably has done the best research and literature on this. | ||
| You can laugh all you want. | ||
| He's got a lot of credentials. | ||
| No, I wasn't trying to besmirch. | ||
| He's a very thoughtful thinker. | ||
| He actually lived through this, right? | ||
| He lived through the black renaissance in the 40s and the 50s, where redlining was a legitimate problem. | ||
| So was yellow lining, by the way, against Italians and against Jews. | ||
| Nowhere nearly as bad, but there were other degrees of discrimination based on ethnicity and cultural background. | ||
| And the black community, especially, you know the area really well in the south of Chicago, right near the Chicago stockyards, the black community almost had this rallying cry where they were being discriminated against everywhere and they kind of collectivized their purchasing power and they saw their incomes increase actually at a higher rate than white Americans in the 40s and 50s and early 60s. | ||
| You've heard this argument many times, and you probably disagree with it, but it's just true, is that the moment that we all of a sudden de-emphasized fathers being in the home and subsidized fatherlessness, we saw all these other trends increase. | ||
| So, right before the Civil Rights Act passed, About 24% of black children were born without a father. | ||
| Now it's upwards of 70%. | ||
| You guys can look at the Washington Examiner. | ||
| It's 77%. | ||
| Let's say it's 65%. | ||
| So something has to explain that 40-point increase. | ||
| May I? | ||
| Yeah, just let me finish. | ||
| It's not necessarily that America got more racist. | ||
| It could be the cocaine thing, which is a common issue. | ||
| It could be operations of all these things. | ||
| But a 40-point increase, I would point to a culture of fatherlessness, really bad government-run public schools, and then subsidizing behavior that isn't good. | ||
| So, there are a few things that I can agree with you on. | ||
| First of all, having two people in your house to raise you is pretty much essential. | ||
| You absolutely need to. | ||
| Glad we agree. | ||
| This is undeniable. | ||
| While I don't believe in shaming single parents, even if their single parentedness is a product of bad decision making, it's still good. | ||
| In this economy, one parent, honestly. | ||
| But, with that being said, There has been research shown that the rate of black fatherlessness is somewhat over-exaggerated, in large part because that number only applies to married fathers, so husbands raising their children. | ||
| It turns out when you account for unmarried black couples taking care of their kids, the numbers actually rise to those just, I think, just below white couples. | ||
| I think there was an article on that, I don't know if I remember, saw it in Vice, but it tracks back to some really big study that was done back in 2016. | ||
| So that's one point. | ||
| But you are right. | ||
| There are perverse incentives. | ||
| For example, many welfare stipulations cut off with a shared income, which is only a few thousand dollars per year higher than the necessary cutoff for the single income. | ||
| Meaning that if you're a single mom, You can apply for the welfare just fine, but then if you get married or otherwise file jointly, you go above the cap for welfare. | ||
| This is a horribly designed program, undeniably, and it incentivizes bad destructive behavior. | ||
| The best thing that we can do, we restructure the welfare system in this country. | ||
| Welfare is good for us. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I don't benefit from it. | ||
| I don't think either of you benefit from it, I'm guessing. | ||
| But we do collectively downstream from the increased economic potential of people who now have the money to afford daycare, proper childcare, get an education. | ||
| In the long run, people in this country being richer enriches all of us. | ||
| It's a mutual project. | ||
| So we work on that. | ||
| We find out what works and what doesn't, which welfare programs function, which don't, which types of economic revitalization function and which don't. | ||
| I legitimately believe that if we apply this, This country has the bones to be just a permanent economic beacon on the hill, just like a shiny example to the rest of the world. | ||
| I agree with a lot of that. | ||
| The bigger issue with the racial thing is that when you put some of these factors in even to present data, it doesn't pan out on racial lines, right? | ||
| And this is where I think you'll agree, because you just said two parents in the home is a good thing, which we totally agree on. | ||
| I think that's the ideal. | ||
| Everything shows that that is something that we should push for. | ||
| Three parents, maybe. | ||
| Getting even better. | ||
| Oh yeah, polyamorous relationships. | ||
| Not a fan. | ||
| But I will say that if you look at the data from the government, that a white child being raised by a single mother is less likely to succeed by 10 independently picked metrics than a black child being raised by a mother and a father. | ||
| And so maybe it's less about the skin color and more about the removal of parents and specifically fathers in the homes. | ||
| Now if you want to talk about a domestic Marshall Plan to go put fathers back in the home regardless of skin color, I will sign up for that in a second. | ||
| With the right welfare, the right systems, I think people will Tend to their own families. | ||
| But that would then all of a sudden de-emphasize what you said earlier, where it says it needs to be on racial lines. | ||
| Where I say, no, no, it needs to be on nuclear family lines. | ||
| Well, no, I think that the neighborhood revitalization should just be on like a sort of class assessment. | ||
| I think that when we recognize this problem, though, there are so many trends when it comes to poverty that involve the discussion of race, you know? | ||
| And there are some which do not. | ||
| There are some types of poverty, some effects that are just ubiquitous and equally felt. | ||
| But with regards to, say, you know, black people, the fact that they couldn't get loans to purchase homes for a very long time. | ||
| I mean, there are people living who couldn't do this. | ||
| The fact that they didn't benefit from the Marshall Plan, if I remember correctly, after World War II. | ||
| The Marshall Plan was Europe. | ||
| You're talking about the G.I. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bill. | |
| Oh, sorry, the G.I. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bill. | |
| My apologies. | ||
| Let me just point out all these white guys sitting here having a debate over the black community, huh? | ||
| I just think that there is a lot of economic inequality, a lot of it's tied to race, but we don't need to turn this into some weird blood quantum issue where we go tracking down every black American and holding them under a microscope to see whether they get benefits. | ||
| We just need to tend to our own. | ||
| This is where we kind of got off critical race theory very quickly. | ||
| I forgot about that. | ||
| We're agreeing way too much, Tim. | ||
| Because this is one of the issues I see, right? | ||
| You see these conversations around... I don't know how you describe it because it's a variety of things. | ||
| Wokeism is typically a catch-all term for some kind of ideology that involves anti-racism, which involves critical race theory, critical race practice. | ||
| And you're seeing in schools specific curriculums where they say to kids like, We had a book here. | ||
| We had a book brought to us by one of these parents who's been going to these schools. | ||
| And it was an anti-racist curriculum workbook where it asked children why they thought that black children felt bad about their skin color. | ||
| Now, I take issue with those things. | ||
| They had another book where it was a little girl yelling at her mother saying, you're lying to me about race. | ||
| And then there was a whiteness contract with a devil tale coming out of it. | ||
| Okay, I saw that one. | ||
| Yeah, these are in schools. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So that, the whiteness devil tail thing, I saw that. | ||
| That's indefensible. | ||
| I'm not going to stand with that. | ||
| With regards to that, what was it? | ||
| The, why do you think black folk feel bad about their skin? | ||
| And I'll be careful because I'm, I don't have the book in front of me. | ||
| It was something to this effect. | ||
| It was a bunch of questions where I would ask you things like that and then ask you to answer. | ||
| You know, how, what have you done to make someone based on their skin color behave or whatever? | ||
| And things of that nature. | ||
| It's, I think these are conversations that are worth having. | ||
| I wonder, with regards to what you're saying, do you know what grade level these were at? | ||
| I think she mentioned the woman, it was Azra? | ||
| Yeah, Azra. | ||
| I think fourth grade. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I heard. | ||
| But I gotta be honest, the anti-racist one didn't have any pictures or anything. | ||
| It was just questions. | ||
| And I think she mentioned it was in a third grade. | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| What was the book called about the whiteness contract? | ||
| The one you said was indefensible. | ||
| That one was like a little girl who looked to be about eight years old. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that online. | ||
| Can I ask a question? | ||
| So let's go to just piece... Yeah, sure. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Ibram X. Kendi, who's kind of one of the... | ||
| Archangels of the wokeism movement. | ||
| Beloved figure in the minds of conservatives and liberals. | ||
| So Ibram X. Kendi, and I'm paraphrasing, and you guys could pick up the quote, is that we need discrimination today because there was discrimination yesterday. | ||
| That's the essence of the quote, right, Tim? | ||
| Yeah, he said the only solution for past discrimination is present discrimination, and the only solution for present discrimination is future discrimination. | ||
| So I find that to be reprehensible. | ||
| Let's say you. | ||
| I think it's misguided in large part because I don't believe... If there was some god who could just distribute all resources in a perfectly, you know, ordained way and did so at the snap of a finger, then maybe that would be a decent argument. | ||
| In the real world, we have to go through politics, and any kind of discriminatory treatment under any circumstances, no matter how well-intentioned, is going to have adverse effects. | ||
| So, with regard to what he said, there's a very charitable interpretation. | ||
| And that charitable interpretation is, discriminatory practices in the past necessitate favorable practices today. | ||
| A way of bringing people up. | ||
| My reparations argument, I mean the poor in this country have always had it bad. | ||
| At least worse than they could otherwise. | ||
| That is essentially a version of that argument. | ||
| Preferable treatment towards the poor. | ||
| We do this with welfare. | ||
| Because there are systemic barriers keeping them from full participation. | ||
| Along racial lines? | ||
| I don't even know what that would look like. | ||
| I don't even know how that would look good. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of affirmative action. | ||
| He wrote an amendment, right, called the Anti-Racist Amendment to the Constitution. | ||
| It's not being considered anytime soon. | ||
| Where it would be preference. | ||
| You'll see, Biden will get it. | ||
| Based on skin color, that there would be some sort of accommodation based just by the melanin content in your skin. | ||
| Yeah, there is one thing I want to say though, and this is common in upper academia, and I know Ibram sometimes gets brought into non-academic discussions, which I don't consider myself an academic, so I'm including myself in that. | ||
| But sometimes I think these are fun to discuss, these ideas. | ||
| What I noticed, at least in some of the classes that I took, the higher end classes, you know, was that sometimes when you were presented ideas they were presented not to have you agree with them, but rather to incentivize the greatest discussion. | ||
| For example, I wasn't an economist, but I did learn about Karl Marx. | ||
| Now, not many professors are actual Marxists, unfortunately. | ||
| So when Marx was brought up in that context, it wasn't like, here's what you need to know, here's what you should believe. | ||
| It was more, here are some ideas, radical and agreeable, what do you think about them? | ||
| And when I look at what Kendi has written, I think, I don't often agree with some of the more radical propositions, but I do enjoy the process. | ||
| And I don't think that's something which should warrant the state intervening to cut out those discussions. | ||
| I think that's a brutish response. | ||
| That's a great segue, if I could go. | ||
| So the next question then is, should we be teaching first and second and third graders to be hyper-conscious aware of race all the time? | ||
| I think that's destructive. | ||
| I think it goes against the American promise of e pluribus unum, of caring more about character than skin color. | ||
| And yes, Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| was a mixed bag when it came to this stuff. | ||
| He's a cool guy. | ||
| But he was a very radical socialist in some regard, but he really hit it perfectly when he said that this was the ideal of the American system. | ||
| Do you see any downsides to getting third graders caring about the color of people's skin all the time? | ||
| Well, I think depending on their environment, they might already, whether they know it or not, in very implicit and subtle ways, we know from tests done, for example, on like little, little kids, like four-year-olds or whatever, that some elements of implicit racial bias already infect their thinking. | ||
| Now, that isn't a moral judgment. | ||
| We're all flawed beings. | ||
| We live and we die. | ||
| We all have biases. | ||
| That is just a part of life. | ||
| But I think conversations about those things can be valuable. | ||
| I don't believe we live in a colorblind world, so teaching people that we do can often lead them to remain ignorant to evident problems. | ||
| Now, to what extent would you be comfortable bringing a racial consciousness to third graders? | ||
| For me? | ||
| Very little to none. | ||
| Don't care about it, de-emphasize it, look at the spirit, the soul, the conduct, and the character of the human being. | ||
| Their skin color means nothing. | ||
| Not saying that you should start to emphasize, organize what people look like, because therefore it means something that we're going to tell you. | ||
| A great example is that this is the textbook definition of stereotyping, right? | ||
| Is that if you see a black person, you don't know their history. | ||
| You don't know if they're the son of a Nigerian billionaire, you don't know if they're an immigrant from Turks and Caicos, and you don't know if they're the ninth generation descendant of slaves, right? | ||
| There's been two million blacks that have come to America legally through the immigration process since 1980. | ||
| So this sort of hyper fixation on race, and I want to keep on getting back to this because I'm just curious, is do you think this is actually helpful when there actually might be stuff that 90% of the country agrees on? | ||
| Do you think this actually might be a smokescreen tactic? | ||
| Well, it really depends on what's being taught. | ||
| So here are some things I obviously don't want taught. | ||
| One group is better than another, of course, you know. | ||
| Black people are like this, white people are like this. | ||
| That is being taught in some schools. | ||
| There are some schools that do that, and while I would look to see their curriculum mended, I don't, again, I just don't want to implicitly agree with like a state ban. | ||
| I would see adjustments done. | ||
| But, there are some things that I think could be done well, for example. | ||
| Say you're teaching about very basic early history, you know? | ||
| This is where I wanted to get to. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| This is important. | ||
| So, here are some things about America's founding that I like. | ||
| One of the first practical liberal democracies, glory of the republic, folks had nice hair back then. | ||
| Not democracy, but a republic, that's okay. | ||
| Right, well, I mean, you know, they're not mutually exclusive, and we of course did more to fulfill the promise of a democracy with time. | ||
| But obviously, when America was founded, it was a slave state. | ||
| One in every six people in America at that time was human property. | ||
| Can I ask you a question? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| How many states had abolished slavery by the time the Constitution was ratified? | ||
| Well, I don't know the exact number. | ||
| 9 out of 13. | ||
| That's not a slave country. | ||
| Well then you could say it was a confederacy with portions that were slave states. | ||
| I think that's better said. | ||
| 9 out of 13 had already abolished. | ||
| There was a sunset moratorium for slavery in the Constitution. | ||
| Vermont abolished slavery in 1777. | ||
| We were on the way to eradication! | ||
| We were not a slave country. | ||
| We were on the way, but then like 80 years later it was still happening. | ||
| So the question is why, right? | ||
| That's a really important question. | ||
| Economics, I imagine. | ||
| Well, yeah, so Cottingen and John C. Calhoun. | ||
| Happy to go through that. | ||
| There was actually a grievance in the Declaration of Independence, specifically that the crown had enslaved people. | ||
| The first draft. | ||
| In the first draft from Thomas Jefferson, that the crown had enslaved people who had done nothing to offend the crown, brought them to the states, and then were then offering them the freedom that was stolen from them to wage war against the colonists who had grievances. | ||
| It's an effective strategy. | ||
| The Union did it too. | ||
| They promised the slaves and they moved southward. | ||
| Jefferson took that out. | ||
| And he did it because they felt, and this is according to historians, that without, I think it was South Carolina and Georgia, they would not have been able to win the Revolutionary War. | ||
| And so they had to remove that, hoping they would stay in. | ||
| Now, the reality is, let me just, I'll just say one more point. | ||
| They thought they were going to lose anyway. | ||
| They really did. | ||
| They didn't think they could go up against the greatest empire in the world at the time. | ||
| So it's kind of unfortunate, I think. | ||
| An important factor here is that I believe it was the British Empire, actually 1833, had abolished slavery in all of its territories. | ||
| And it took the U.S. | ||
| a little bit longer to do so. | ||
| But I want to make sure I stress, this issue for the start of the country was contentious. | ||
| And ultimately led to violence, because from the beginning, as Charlie pointed out, most of the states had already abolished this, so it was like people were ready to fight from the beginning. | ||
| Well, I just want to say to that, my understanding of the founding of America isn't as simplistic as the founding fathers were evil because X or Y. I recognize, of course, that there are incredible complexities to those issues. | ||
| And also, I'm not a historian. | ||
| There are probably tons of things out there I don't even know that might change my opinion in the future. | ||
| But, with that being said, while I recognize there were fine-bodied, hearted, and souled Americans who recognized slavery was a moral aberration from the get-go, one in every six Americans was owned. | ||
| And while that may have been constraining to some of the states, it was still ultimately under the purview of the federal government to make decisions with regards to the legality and constitutionality of that. | ||
| Now, some people, they get really defensive when this conversation comes up. | ||
| I'm not saying you guys, but some people they do. | ||
| And I think it's because they think I'm assigning some kind of moral worth to them now, or to the country now, or making some kind of broad prescriptive statement. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| The only thing I'm saying is, when you're teaching history to a bunch of kids, you know, you have to teach it all. | ||
| At least you have to teach the basic pointers. | ||
| And for black Americans, the history of this country has been less than favorable. | ||
| So I think that in the context of that discussion, saying, And to this day, we still have some problems with race. | ||
| There are some legacies of slavery that still affect black people, and we're working on it today. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| That's a kind of racialization that I'm in favor of, because it doesn't encourage stereotyping, it doesn't encourage discrimination, it just encourages a base awareness of some serious problems. | ||
| So, but that's not happening, right? | ||
| Is that largely what we're seeing through school districts like Chicago and in Washington, D.C. | ||
| and the entire California school system representing 10,000 schools and 6 million students. | ||
| I've seen the documents on those. | ||
| Yeah, is that it doesn't have that kind of nuance and complexity that you just presented, right? | ||
| Where it's, let me just say this, is that part of the kind of archangel triumphant of the woke-ism coalition is Nicole Hannah-Jones, Robin D'Angelo, and Ibram X. Kendi. | ||
| And Nicole Hannah-Jones in particular, right, the author of the 1619 Project, she heretically says that America was founded on slavery, right? | ||
| I'd be okay with that. | ||
| But it's just not true. | ||
| It depends on what you mean by founded. | ||
| She defines this. | ||
| She says the Founding Fathers were in favor of it. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| George Washington wasn't. | ||
| John Adams wasn't. | ||
| John Quincy Adams wasn't. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson even signed a moratorium on new slaves coming into the United States. | ||
| Ben Franklin chaired an anti-slavery convention in 1775. | ||
| None of these guys were writing expositionally how wonderful slavery was. | ||
| Well, this isn't being taught to third graders, right? | ||
| The 1619 Project is a little New York op-ed. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| See, that's where you're wrong. | ||
| The 1619 Project is being implemented as school district curriculum in thousands of school districts across the country. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's not just like a podcast. | ||
| This is curriculum. | ||
| There are principles of the 1619 Project that I think are defensible. | ||
| First of all, we as Americans tend to think of the founding of our country as its legal founding. | ||
| But the legal founding of the United States didn't really mean much for a slave. | ||
| I mean, it really didn't matter that much for the peasantry of the time, no matter what. | ||
| See, that's where I disagree. | ||
| So when was the first state to abolish slavery? | ||
| Vermont in 1777. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they were inspired by the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| Things started to change in that year. | ||
| Right, but the slaves that then continued to be slaves would have been in the states that didn't make that choice, right? | ||
| Which were largely in southern states. | ||
| Well, that's what I mean. | ||
| Sorry, I didn't mean to miss out on the particulars there. | ||
| The only point that I'm making is that depending on whose lineage you follow, depending on the narrative that you tell, this is a very postmodern idea. | ||
| And I would like to consider myself charitable to postmodernism, the idea that there are many ways you can describe the human experience. | ||
| Which I think we all believe to some extent. | ||
| Depending on who you follow, you get very different ideas on what America is, when America was founded, not in a legal sense, but in a conceptual sense, and who today holds the birthrights to which they were entitled. | ||
| And these conversations should be had. | ||
| They're worthwhile conversations to have. | ||
| I've seen some of the curriculums in these schools. | ||
| I find some of them a little bit objectionable. | ||
| But to be perfectly clear, I found school curriculums objectionable for ages. | ||
| About half of Americans believe in the lost cause myth, the idea that the North started | ||
| the Civil War and it was over like states' rights or whatever. | ||
| That's believed by a large number of Americans. | ||
| there are textbooks put out by Pearson in Texas that have narratives in them that are... | ||
| There is some truth to that, by the way. | ||
| Just so we're clear. | ||
| There's... | ||
| It is a... | ||
| I'm happy to go through Civil War history about that, but yeah. | ||
| I just want to say, I have long had problems with many of the ways | ||
| children are taught concepts in this country. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| None of them have made me want to get my state legislators to just outright ban all of these ideas. | ||
| Well, so let me... I'll make two points. | ||
| First, the 1619 Project is in schools. | ||
| Newsweek reports U.S. | ||
| schools have openly taught the 1619 Project for months. | ||
| This is back in September. | ||
| We've got education next. | ||
| The 1619 Project enters classrooms. | ||
| We have the Pulitzer Center. | ||
| The 1619 Project curriculum. | ||
| Here you will find resources for teaching 1619 in your schools. | ||
| And I don't know if I have one more source, right? | ||
| Then we move to the... Do they read the full thing in class? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's pretty dense reading. | ||
| They do it. | ||
| And then lawmakers push to ban 1619 from schools. | ||
| So it's there. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And so let me tell you why people like myself are pushing for the bans of the 1619 project, is that first of all, it's just not true. | ||
| It is not even charitably, in the most charitable reading, to use a word that you used, even remotely fair to the ethos or the founding of the country. | ||
| It doesn't go to original source documents. | ||
| It doesn't go to quotations. | ||
| And it meanders through generalizations and a very heavy emphasis on emotion. | ||
| Can I ask something though? | ||
| Sure, go ahead. | ||
| Is this not being presented as an alternate perspective, as opposed to replacing the entirety of our curriculum? | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| And this is an important thing, which is what is education, right? | ||
| So is education where we're supposed to, for 3rd, 4th, and 5th, and 6th graders, open up every single bad idea that's ever been discovered and have kids choose? | ||
| Or are we trying to lead them towards something? | ||
| Moral. | ||
| We want to make them moral. | ||
| better developed character, lead them towards trying to find objective truth. | ||
| Moral. We want to make them moral. | ||
| I agree. And so the question is what is good? What is evil? | ||
| Well, we don't know a line is crooked unless we have a straight line to compare it to. | ||
| Well, you know what I think on this, don't you? | ||
| I actually don't. | ||
| The narrative we've told about the founding of this country has for a long time been deeply whitewashed. | ||
| We talk about the founding fathers like they're heroes, and there is heroism in their lives, no denying that. | ||
| And we often gloss over many of the horrors of this country. | ||
| There are things that we've done, for example, that we would use as an incentive to forever despise other countries that nobody's even thought about. | ||
| One I read recently, for example, was that we did mass chemical bathings, and I believe it was sterilizations of Hispanic people at the beginning of the 20th century, moving up past the southern border, because there were like these militias forming in towns near the border, and they just did it because they had the de facto support of the local government as a way of discouraging their movement up. | ||
| Now, the numbers involved in that are significant, and I feel like, while that's maybe not great for fourth graders, There could be more work done to talk about the faults with this country in addition to eulogizing its largely white leaders. | ||
| The question is, what's the goal though, right? | ||
| Is the goal to try to have young people graduate by the time of high school to be skeptical, apprehensive, and not very proud of the country? | ||
| Or eventually tell a true and patriotic story where you have people graduating that are thankful and have gratitude? | ||
| That's the purpose of education when it comes through. | ||
| Gratitude is not the purpose of education. | ||
| Well, I think gratitude's a moral necessity. | ||
| No, you should be grateful for the people in your life, but I will never be grateful to the state. | ||
| I'm not that much of a collectivist. | ||
| Hold on, not a state. | ||
| Are you not thankful that you live in America? | ||
| I'm thankful of the things that make my life easier. | ||
| I was born white to well-off parents, and today I enjoy many of the benefits of having really responsible and attentive parents. | ||
| Are you thankful you have constitutional rights that are protected by government, given to you by God? | ||
| But do you know how those constitutional rights came about? | ||
| They were fought for by whiny bitches like me who were never satisfied with what they were already given. | ||
| They were granted by God, protected in the Constitution in 1787. | ||
| They were fought for by whiny, same as the 14th and 15th Amendments, everything that's come since, we fought for them and it is discontentedness that leads us to fight. | ||
| Are you thankful for those people then? | ||
| I'm thankful for their efforts. | ||
| As am I. There is some gratitude. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| I'm grateful to them. | ||
| But patriotism... I'm grateful to what people in America do. | ||
| But America's a concept. | ||
| It's been used to do a lot of good and a lot of harm. | ||
| It's a home. | ||
| Well, a home can be a... I mean, in the broadest sense. | ||
| But I know what my home is. | ||
| I know where my family lives. | ||
| And I'm loyal to them. | ||
| When it comes to this country, though, this is a political and economic bloc, and I have only one concern, and it's that the people in this country live the best lives possible. | ||
| Also outside the country, but, you know, I live here. | ||
| This is my backyard. | ||
| And when I want people graduating, you know, from high school, I don't want them to feel this sense of contentedness. | ||
| Contentedness is the death of activism for all that's good. | ||
| And activists have always been—you're an activist in your own way, as am I—have always been the forerunners for good. | ||
| They've done a lot of damage, too. | ||
| Sure, they have. | ||
| But we make the world move. | ||
| And I want to get people, I want to get kids interested in the flaws in this country because that teaches them to grow up and care about them so hard they fix them. | ||
| This is a great piece of disagreement. | ||
| We have clarity, not agreement, which is obviously what we want, where I think that we should try to be developing and graduating kids with strong character that want to appreciate and protect a country and to try to be active against forces that wish to deconstruct | ||
| it. | ||
| Your goal, and we're just not going to persuade each other, is that you want to try to graduate activists that know the | ||
| flaws and are willing to mobilize to try to fix them | ||
| or to undo whatever system might be effectuating. Is that fair? | ||
| As long as it's responsible and effective, yeah. | ||
| There are ways to do progressive—of course I'm a progressive, | ||
| so I'll say it's good by default—but there are ways to do it poorly. | ||
| I disagree with people in love constantly, either over issues of actual concept or issues of optics or issues of engagement. | ||
| I always find something to disagree with people on. | ||
| It's very fun living. | ||
| But, with all that being said, I have to wonder, is it not the prerogative, and I'm not assigning this to you, of tyrants to make sure that the children who graduate from their schools find no fault in the nations they're taught to love? | ||
| See, I never said no fault, but you could be thankful for something, and you can have a holistic view of something, and understand that there were stumbles, and there were missteps, while also being pretty freaking proud of that something. | ||
| How exceptional this project is! | ||
| What if there are current problems, like today, you know? | ||
| We should talk about those. | ||
| Like we already talked about fatherlessness, government overreach. | ||
| Tim, you want to interject? | ||
| I think it's interesting to me. | ||
| You're from the suburbs of Chicago. | ||
| You grew up in Beverly Hills. | ||
| Somebody commented, I think it was on Twitter, they said that when they went to school, they weren't taught about Black Wall Street or the Tulsa bombings and things like that. | ||
| And that's proof or that shows that our schools are not teaching. | ||
| And I was like, I was taught all those things. | ||
| You know, we were taught about the Trail of Tears. | ||
| We were taught about westward expansion. | ||
| We were taught about the violation of treaties. | ||
| I was taught a lot as well. | ||
| Yeah, we were taught a lot about that. | ||
| When we learn history, what we're really learning is a story. | ||
| I think it's called historiography. | ||
| Obviously, when we're just looking at the facts of history, I mean, what is it? | ||
| Data and sheets, you know? | ||
| Wrote transcriptions of things people have said? | ||
| Nobody teaches that. | ||
| You teach the story. | ||
| And the story we've told for a long time has bowled over a lot of problems I think we should work to fix. | ||
| Do we want people to be thankful? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So we agree on that? | ||
| Good. | ||
| I don't want to stop teaching kids that there are undeniable things they should be happy for. | ||
| For example, every day that I worked before I was a YouTuber, you know, I thanked union activists back during the turn of the 20th | ||
| century who gave us the five-day work week, the 40-hour work week, who ensured that we had | ||
| proper standards for lunch breaks and what have you in this. | ||
| And they fought and they were whiny and I'm sure a lot of them had really bad ideas besides | ||
| the worker activism. | ||
| But we all benefited from that. | ||
| Do you ever think that as an activist, as a progressive, a libertarian socialist, is | ||
| there ever a point where the activism actually does much more harm than good and the preservation | ||
| of what already exists actually should be desirable? | ||
| I would say that's the case with black separatists. | ||
| There are some people in this country, not all of them are black of course, but who believe that the racial problems between white and black Americans are irreparable, and that the best solution would be for black Americans to leave, or at the very least to form separate enclaves within this country. | ||
| And that's nothing new, just so you know. | ||
| Oh no, it's a very old... I don't think that's what Charlie asked. | ||
| He asked you if there... Do you want to rephrase it? | ||
| Oh, sorry if I misunderstood. | ||
| You were in the general area, but I guess the question is, A heavy emphasis on activism for activism's sakes. | ||
| Mobilizing for grievances. | ||
| What if actually what we have as a constitutional order is actually pretty awesome? | ||
| Let me ask. | ||
| Do you think there are systems in place in the United States that are worth defending? | ||
| That's a better way to word it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you believe that there are systems in place in the United States that we should defend and preserve? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, there are ideas. | ||
| For example, the concept of democracy, the concept of fair representation, the idea that anybody could have a chance if they make it here. | ||
| These are ideas that I think are almost sacrosanct. | ||
| I mean, I think they're almost existentially worthwhile. | ||
| Now, to what extent did this country live up to those promises? | ||
| In some ways, it does so better than most other countries. | ||
| Sometimes any other country. | ||
| In other ways, it could do better. | ||
| Income mobility here, which is the measure for how effectively this country manages its meritocratic systems, you know, is higher in some European countries than it is here. | ||
| The idea remains valuable to me, but I can't help but think, maybe we could make it better. | ||
| If making it better entails some highly destructive process that involves tearing down everything we've ever known and such, then I mean, eventually you have to do a risk-reward-benefit, right? | ||
| But I am as well. | ||
| What I'm trying to caution you about is that the people pushing CRT or wokeism, they don't | ||
| have the same sort of nuance that you do. | ||
| These are revolutionaries that want to tear down the system. | ||
| But I am as well. | ||
| I just think that everything has its time. | ||
| You just had kind of a little bit more of a moderate answer. | ||
|
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Maybe. | |
| But how often do actual critical race theorists come on, like, all of the talk show circuits that end up... I mean, we've had some. | ||
| I mean, Joy Reid advocated for it, but the actual scholars... Well, hold on. | ||
| They're running Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, they're running the United States military, they're running... How many? | ||
| They're assigning these ideas. | ||
| Again, wokeism, let's use that. | ||
| No, you mean... No, with Robin DiAngelo and the federal... White fragility. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of her largely because I think her language incites a lot of negative discourse. | ||
| I think that it's bad for publication. | ||
| Maybe good in an academic setting. | ||
| So not good to teach generals that? | ||
| For some random people at like a business? | ||
| Absolutely not, no. | ||
| Generals in the military. | ||
| Oh yeah, sure, no. | ||
| Because that's what's happening. | ||
| Well the big problem that I have, but keep in mind, that's not wokeists running these things. | ||
| What happens is this, and put pretty simply, the majority of Americans, broadly, are progressive on these issues. | ||
| Support BLM, all these sort of broad cultural markers. | ||
| So, corporations and other large entities think, we need to avoid a cancellation, we need to appeal to the business interests of this country, we need to do something to ingratiate ourselves to the majority opinion. | ||
| So oftentimes, and they've done this for decades by the way, is they find some consultants, they pay them $300,000. | ||
| Like Robin DiAngelo. | ||
| Like Robin DiAngelo. | ||
| To come on over there and Robin DiAngelo's job, first and foremost, is to convince everyone who hires her that she was worth that money. | ||
| So is she going to come over there and write like a PowerPoint like, don't be racist. | ||
| Like, come on, you know, it could be cool. | ||
| No, she has to go all out. | ||
| And what you get are these cringy, like the Coca-Cola PowerPoint where you get, look, some of the things there are defensible. | ||
| Does systemic racism exist? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Should we be aware of the concept of like implicit bias? | ||
| Yeah, fine. | ||
| That's just normal human things, I think. | ||
| But some of the language in there really made it seem like she wanted white people to feel a little bit bad. | ||
| And I don't want white people to feel bad. | ||
| I don't want anyone to feel guilty over who they are. | ||
| What percentage of this country do you think supports Black Lives Matter? | ||
| Um, well, I know that at its peak after George Floyd's murder, it was something like 71%. | ||
| I think since then it's trended downwards. | ||
| Is it gone below 50? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, well, it depends on where you go. | ||
| I use Civics. | ||
| They have 237,458 responses from April 1st, 2018 to August 2nd, 2021. | ||
| I think they do a pretty good job, but there's always, I know, a challenge with polls and whether they, you know, their system. | ||
| The peak support was 53% after the death of George Floyd, and opposition actually declined fairly steadily. | ||
| There was no major spike in opposition. | ||
| There was a major spike in support after the death of George Floyd. | ||
| However, There was a rapid escalation of opposition. | ||
| According to Civics, current support for Black Lives Matter is 45% and opposition is 42%. | ||
| Those numbers are really different from us. | ||
| I might have looked at Pew Research. | ||
| I couldn't tell about the methodology, which is more valid. | ||
| Well, and it's actually, CRT, the filler word, is very unpopular. | ||
| So I would look at it differently. | ||
| I think these corporations have been infiltrated by highly motivated activists, which you've said the education system, the goal should be to create activists that have really bad ideas. | ||
| and I think they're putting America on a trajectory that I think you are even concerned about. | ||
| Because you said that there are some sacrosanct ideas, right? The sacrosanct ideas are general | ||
| fair representation. Wokeism does not believe in that. Well, no, that's not true. | ||
| I would say... I mean, I don't know what you mean by wokeism, but I think that there are plenty of progressives... Well, you defined it, which is that idea of judging people based on skin color, discrimination, now... I would say that what I've advocated for represents the super majority of progressive opinions, and what we're largely seeing is a couple of really bad examples being brought to the limelight because they're most objectionable. | ||
| Sure, to be fair though, I mean, you might have these very, very, like, well-thought-out views of things. | ||
| You could say, oh, that's indefensible, of course, I don't want to be unreasonable. | ||
| But when you get Mark Milley coming out and talking about white rage as a blanket... Oh, I thought his speech was lovely. | ||
| It reminded me of those old, like, Chinese philosopher generals. | ||
| But you have people quitting the military over this stuff because they feel like they're... I've actually spoken with people who retired because they've been discriminated against on racial lines they don't like. | ||
| One guy I met said he was planning a lifelong career in the military and immediately got out because they implemented these policies of white racial trainings. | ||
| They were told that the symbols of America are no longer allowed to be displayed in private because they're extremists. | ||
| In the military? | ||
| In the military, yes. | ||
| Well, I can't speak to any of that. | ||
| I haven't looked into the particulars of that. | ||
| The only thing I want to say is that it feels like with Robin DiAngelo, we've seen this | ||
| pattern for decades now. | ||
| I don't think it has anything to do with infiltration. | ||
| I think it's the big ups, the CEOs, the project managers, whatever, they know there's some | ||
| broader political, social, cultural trend happening, and they think, who's someone we | ||
| could get? | ||
| And if you look up racial sensitivity training on Google or anywhere else, some names are | ||
| going to pop up, and we know which one comes up first, and they just hire that person, | ||
| because they've got money and they need to spend it before the end of the quarter so | ||
| so their budget doesn't get cut. | ||
| Do you think that it should be... How's the right way to phrase this? | ||
| If a corporation were to tell, say, white employees that they had inherent characteristics based on their race, or that they should undergo some kind of course or class based on their race, should businesses be allowed to do that? | ||
| Um, you mean legally or like morally? | ||
| Both, you know? | ||
| Um, I suppose legally if they want to. | ||
| I can understand people being upset over it. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with racial sensitivity training and concept. | ||
| The problem is that it's almost always done by this consultant class of like upper middle class, like wasps who are really, really intent on getting their own milquetoast veil of progressivism pushed down the throats of whoever they can have paid to listen to them. | ||
| Um, if it's a good course, everyone should be able to hear it. | ||
| Wouldn't that violate the Civil Rights Act though? | ||
| It might. | ||
| I guess I would defer entirely to law. | ||
| If it turns out to be unconstitutional, then he at it. | ||
| I just want to say though that while we are fixating on bad behaviors here, and there's | ||
| nothing wrong with that, I do maintain my insistence that I think the vast majority | ||
| of progressives would agree with what I have to say. | ||
| Though keep in mind there are always going to be a mix of good and bad ideas with good | ||
| Even the Civil Rights Act, or the Civil Rights Movement, which we all know and love today, you know, can't deny it. | ||
| There were plenty of people acting there whose ideas I disagreed with. | ||
| Malcolm X, when he had his Black Separatist phase, though he amended that before he died. | ||
| There are even ideas of Martin Luther King's that I maybe could question if I spoke with him. | ||
| He wrote a book after the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| Where do we go from here? | ||
| Chaos or something. | ||
| Chaos or something good. | ||
| And he said a lot of stuff about the responsibility for white people to not make amends, but to educate themselves on the experience of black suffering so that we no longer just integrate. | ||
| We truly assimilate. | ||
| We know. | ||
| We're a collective bond. | ||
| There's always going to be some disagreement. | ||
| Is the movement valid? | ||
| To me, a movement which recognizes the racial discrimination, the systemic racism that exists, that there are problems we have yet to overcome. | ||
| This is a movement worth defending. | ||
| I just want to make some data points real quick, and then Charlie, you can come in. | ||
| Man. | ||
| So first, the one thing I wanted to highlight, let me actually pull this up, is that net support, which is support versus opposition, before George Floyd died for Black Lives Matter in this country was 16% net support. | ||
| As of today, according to Civics, it's 3%. | ||
| That brings it all the way back to 2018, to August 16th. | ||
| Now, one of the things I think is really important to note is the severe tribalism and hyperpolarization in this country. | ||
| So if we look at support for Black Lives Matter among Democrats, 86%. | ||
| Support or opposition for Black Lives Matter among Republicans, 86%. | ||
| Opposition, mere image. | ||
| You take a look at independents— We have more alike than we may think, huh? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You take a look at the independents, though, people who don't align, and I would say, what is the date, around May 1st, there was an inversion, and now the majority of independents oppose Black Lives Matter 44% to 39%. | ||
| That's not surprising to me, given that there's been very little in the way of optical... I'm sorry, you haven't spoken in a while. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| I just wanted to make those data points, just to clarify some things. | ||
| I wanted this to be more of a discussion than a debate, so I think it's actually really helpful. | ||
| Are you concerned when certain judges or people running for DA say that accommodations on sentencing should be made on race? | ||
| Does that bother you? | ||
| Who said that? | ||
| I've never heard that before. | ||
| Well, people in law schools have been saying it. | ||
| Well, I mean, students have always been. | ||
| The Kim Fox in Chicago has heavily implied that communities of color need to be accommodated for in sentencing. | ||
| And they've all but done this by just getting rid of the bail laws that we've seen altogether, right? | ||
| Decriminalizing shoplifting, all that. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Oh, I'm totally okay with that. | ||
| We lock way too many people up, just flat out. | ||
| So, like, murder out the next day? | ||
| No, not murder. | ||
| You said shoplifting. | ||
| Well, I'm just saying, the bail reform laws in New Mexico and California have been a disaster. | ||
| Here's actually a really great point. | ||
| It's a tough one for me. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I think we lock way too many people up. | ||
| I err on the side of liberty. | ||
| Innocent until proven guilty. | ||
| To take a working class individual who is accused of shoplifting before he's even been proven of guilt, lock him up for several months, he loses his job. | ||
| However, what do we see in San Francisco? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Well, I've read a lot on recidivism. | ||
| down because when you don't stop the crime you get I guess a lot of crime. | ||
| Yeah it's a tough issue. I don't know I wanted to you know let you guys. I think | ||
| we'll totally disagree on this you first. Maybe well I've read a lot on recidivism. | ||
| We have a fairly high recidivism rate in this country because really the thing | ||
| that causes crime more than anything else it's not actually poverty it's | ||
| income inequality. When poor people and rich people share the same space it | ||
| leads to a lot of problems. | ||
| All poor people together in a neighborhood, what is there to steal? | ||
| Poor people and rich people together in a neighborhood, there you go. | ||
| You have very clean targets. | ||
| And what's more, there are other forms of criminality that only really fully express themselves in the types of neighborhoods that have a really strong mix of wealthy and poor. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| Because, again, from where I grew up, I lived on the border of a lot of low-income communities. | ||
| Now, Beverly Hills, safest place you could be. | ||
| 3 a.m., you want to take a jog, go for it. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| Maybe? | ||
| Oh, I haven't been there in like five years. | ||
| You'd be surprised, man. | ||
| I'll say this. | ||
| Good luck walking Rodeo Drive now. | ||
| Well, okay, Hurston, I don't want to walk Rodeo Drive during the daylight, okay? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| After Garcon has had his work in LA, it's a disaster. | ||
| Violent crime is down since the 90s. | ||
| We've had a bit of an upswing. | ||
| It's up massive in the last year. | ||
| Well, COVID's led to a lot of really weird exigent factors. | ||
| Defunding the police. | ||
| We haven't defunded the police anywhere. | ||
| Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, they've all cut police budgets. | ||
| 260 departments, I think it was reported last year, had stripped their funding from the police. | ||
| Sorry, when you said defund, I meant the anarchist vision of community policing. | ||
| When it comes to police funds being stripped, there is a conversation to be had about the relationship between that and crime, but the crime increase seems to be all countrywide, so I don't know if I'd be leaning more towards that being a COVID thing and people being restless and angry and, I don't know, aggressive. | ||
| The thing that I'm trying to say, though, is when I grew up in Beverly Hills, really, really safe, free from violent crime, I could walk half a mile, though, and the area between rich and poor were the areas where people had barred windows. | ||
| Every. | ||
| Time. | ||
| So, when it comes to criminality, there are things that we can address, very fundamentally, that will help everyone. | ||
| I'm sure there are restructures to bail laws that we could do. | ||
| I don't know the particulars. | ||
| It's not my field. | ||
| I've also read stuff on recidivism. | ||
| Apparently, murder actually has a very low default recidivist rate, because usually it's done under a very specific set of heated conditions that don't actually speak to a person's character, which makes you wonder a lot about, like, moral worth and what really drives a person to do that sort of thing. | ||
| I think it's something we should look at critically, though I don't have any really strong data-based arguments. | ||
| The last thing I want to say, because it's the first point that you brought up, is racial responses to the criminal justice system. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't forget. | ||
| I'm actually going to triple down on this one, okay? | ||
| Not only do I think that we should aggressively look at the ways our sentencing laws affect and discriminate between black and white people, and Hispanic and Asian, I think we should do the same between men and women. | ||
| Because as much as black people are shafted by the criminal justice system, men are even more. | ||
| If you take a look at the disproportionate rates of sentencing, relative levels of implicit bias in the jury, women get off with way more than men do. | ||
| So I mean, maybe it's something we can all agree on. | ||
| We're guys, I think. | ||
| Well, so the issue, though, is that when you remove race, it's just a matter of income or wealth. | ||
| For example, if LeBron James goes in front of a jury, he's going to have the best lawyers. | ||
| And obviously that's an extreme example, right? | ||
| But O.J. | ||
| Simpson had an all-star team. | ||
| And so the problem is that... Obama. | ||
| He would also have good lawyers. | ||
| OJ Simpson? | ||
| You don't have Obama as a lawyer. | ||
| Kardashian and Dershowitz. | ||
| I would just like to interject that Obama extrajudicially assassinated people and nobody did anything about it. | ||
| That's black privilege. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a joke. | |
| But I think that there's an implication in your argument that I want to challenge, which is that just because you're poor doesn't mean you commit crimes. | ||
| I think that's an insult to poor people. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so I think that if you automatically assume that, now there are data trends to suggest that, but instead it should be the question of what are we trying to structurally do or through incentives to either punish the people that are committing crimes and lift people out of that current level. | ||
| So I think it's a good talking point, but I don't think it's totally true to say we have too many people in prison. | ||
| I think we have the wrong people in prison. | ||
| Let me tell you why. | ||
| We have more than like any other country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Let me tell you why. | ||
| The average rapist serves four years in prison and they're very likely to rape again. | ||
| totally different. Hey, look, if you look, if you want funding | ||
| that goes to police departments to go towards actually looking at | ||
| the rape kits that they take well, well over to a bin 250,000 untested rape kits in the tri-state area in New | ||
| York City, 250,000. Right. So our criminal justice system, you | ||
| could say it had nefarious intentions. | ||
| I'll be neutral on that. | ||
| It was very heavy on drugs, obviously, in the 80s and 90s. | ||
| But generally, though, you cited the number. | ||
| You said violent crime's been down since the 90s. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| It's because we were tough on crime in the 80s, and we had a massive campaign against it, and we had the most peaceful decade in American history. | ||
| Well, there were a few factors. | ||
| The viability of broken windows policing has been challenged substantially, but there are | ||
| admittedly some benefits. | ||
| The argument that I would make is that what you're really doing is you're forestalling | ||
| the problem. | ||
| There are socioeconomic conditions that increase criminality, not because it makes people worse | ||
| people, but just because oftentimes crime isn't some direct indicator of poor moral | ||
| conduct. | ||
| Oftentimes it is a crime of necessity, or it is a crime born of the discontent and the | ||
| I gotta challenge you on that. | ||
| What would be a crime and necessity today with the welfare state that we have? | ||
| What would possibly be a crime and necessity? | ||
| I know for, I can at least speak to personal experience, that I knew some people involved in, like they said, they would sometimes peddle drugs. | ||
| And they did it because, while they may have been accounted for by the welfare state, their parents' medical bills weren't. | ||
| Not sufficiently, not even close. | ||
| Stuff like that. | ||
| Now, maybe legally, if that person got arrested, the law says they have to be, I could never morally condemn them. | ||
| They were trying to save their mom, man. | ||
| But I gotta push back on that. | ||
| I mean, for sure it's anecdotal, but... It is, so it's not like a data point. | ||
| I never understood this, having grown up on the South Side. | ||
| Seeing people sell drugs is not the fastest and easiest way to make money for someone who's desperate. | ||
| I mean, no joke. | ||
| Plasma sales? | ||
| What would you say? | ||
| I made $140 per hour playing guitar in front of a baseball field. | ||
| Now, I understand not everyone can play guitar. | ||
| Or skateboard. | ||
| Or skateboard. | ||
| I knew a guy who said he just bought t-shirts. | ||
| He went and bought bulk t-shirts. | ||
| So, the people who are selling drugs, they gotta buy the drugs first, or they get a loan, and you can do the same thing with socks. | ||
| And then people go on the side of the road and sell socks. | ||
| I think the choice of committing a crime was a choice. | ||
| Well, it is... Well, hold on. | ||
| It is always a choice, but what we're really talking about is the limits of determinism here. | ||
| How much do we choose the things we do? | ||
| You can make an argument that it's all... I mean, you're religious, of course, so you wouldn't have this argument, but... I wouldn't have anything close to this argument. | ||
| Right. | ||
| From a secular perspective, you can make the argument that at the end of the day, the things we do are driven entirely by the chemical reactions in our brain, and therefore, everything that we do from start to finish is just a combination of random molecular patterns and blah blah. | ||
| We don't live our lives like that. | ||
| Obviously, I make a choice to get dressed every day. | ||
| We know how this works in practice, but in practice, we are also the product of our environment. | ||
| And the fact that, for example, having a single parent while growing up is a pretty strong criminal indicator is a suggestion that, I mean, is it an indicator of a person's inherent moral worth that they were born with a single parent? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| So that statistical difference has to be accounted for by the inevitable fact that environmental differences can lead to harsh outcomes. | ||
| The question is, though, do you then create a set of lack of enforcement to say that we're actually not going to enforce looting, where you had An entire article in National Public Radio, not saying you believe this, that says the case for looting, right? | ||
| San Francisco's basically employed this, $900 or less, they're not going to prosecute you, right? | ||
| Videos of them stealing entire Walgreens, right? | ||
| Not an exaggeration. | ||
| And then you have, and just one other data point just because of COVID, Europe's crime rates did not increase. | ||
| Ours did. | ||
| And we had a massive defund police, almost kind of, we're going to be relaxed on criminality type movement. | ||
| And this is the question, right? | ||
| Which is how many excuses or accommodations are we going to give for crime? | ||
| Well, we're not, and I'm just, just to finish is that my perspective obviously is very little to none. | ||
| Crime's a necessity. | ||
| I could think of one, maybe two examples where I would make a moral claim of a crime and necessity, and that would be a revenge crime. | ||
| If someone murdered your wife or your kid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Necessity? | ||
| I'm not saying necessity. | ||
| I'm saying like a moral accommodation where I could say I could see where they came from. | ||
| Not necessity. | ||
| Let me rephrase that. | ||
| But the idea that in the welfare state that we have, with the private philanthropy kind of generosity we have, that shoplifting and arson and looting No, I've gotten stolen from in San Francisco before. | ||
| It was a very fun experience. | ||
| I don't know why you pointed at me when you said that. | ||
| I have never mugged Barbara Boston. | ||
| I'm saying that as an example. | ||
| It was you! | ||
| Yeah, I don't mean to. | ||
| I don't think it was me. | ||
| Was that you in San Francisco? | ||
| Where were you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I've gotten stolen from in San Francisco before. | ||
| It was a very fun experience. | ||
| That was back before YouTube, too, so I couldn't afford to replace anything. | ||
| Okay, a lot to respond to here. | ||
| Emil Durkheim, cool guy, dead now, thought that crime was sociologically useful because it shows you where the antagonisms are between people's wants and the state's desires. | ||
| So crime takes place where there's an agitation between what people are being compelled to | ||
| do by whatever their own behavior their desires and what the state will allow you to do. | ||
| So for example during a food shortage you know we can take like Ireland during the potato | ||
| famine there were to put it lightly quite a few cases of theft during that time because | ||
| people needed food they would do anything for it. | ||
| So the crime of theft in that instance becomes a sociological indicator of a social need | ||
| that isn't being met. | ||
| Now, today, of course, we do have, admittedly, a fairly weak but existent welfare state. | ||
| It's rather strong. | ||
| Very generous. | ||
| Eh, it's a little baby welfare state. | ||
| Multi-trillions of dollars every year. | ||
| Yeah, multi-trillion. | ||
| For America? | ||
| I will say quadrillions. | ||
| You get $70,000 in value a year. | ||
| That's plenty. | ||
| I want a UBI. | ||
| We can go way harder. | ||
| We do have UBI. | ||
| We just implemented it with the stimulus. | ||
| No, we did not. | ||
| Oh, wait, hold on. | ||
| Yes, the child tax credits. | ||
| Well, no, that's really good. | ||
| People got cash checks. | ||
| We have UBI now. | ||
| Well, it's not a longstanding program. | ||
| I'll admit that, but we've tried UBI and crime went up. | ||
| Well, hold on. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Wait, wait. | ||
| I need to reject the spurious. | ||
| We send checks. | ||
| People commit crimes. | ||
| Hold on, this is a spurious correlation, okay? | ||
| First of all, you will not be able to find any analysis that attributes the increase in crime to people getting their stimulus checks. | ||
| No, actually, I'm saying it's the opposite. | ||
| The argument you're making is that if people have a sociological need, they won't commit the crime. | ||
| So people got money and they still committed crimes. | ||
| Yeah, but it doesn't always, like, correspond one-to-one like that. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| The reason why people needed money is because they weren't getting any money from their jobs because they couldn't work their jobs. | ||
| So people were still in a worse position than they were otherwise. | ||
| Well, they also got unemployment. | ||
| Remember, very generous unemployment. | ||
| The unemployment started pretty generous. | ||
| Plus $600 to $800, right? | ||
| I think it was a week or a month, right? | ||
| It was very generous. | ||
| It's still currently $300. | ||
| And not everyone is applicable for unemployment. | ||
| There are a lot of conditions there that can make that difficult. | ||
| No, they were very generous. | ||
| They didn't turn anyone down during the lockdown. | ||
| We're being very spurious with our relations right now. | ||
| Well, we're very wonky. | ||
| I'm sorry I interrupted you. | ||
| Oh god, where was I? | ||
| Something about some dead guy about how crime is helpful. | ||
| I love dead white guys. | ||
| I actually don't know if Durkheim was white. | ||
| So, I'm not pro-crime, not pro-criminal here. | ||
| I'm pro-leniency only insofar as I believe it helps to lower our recidivism. | ||
| Sometimes it finds that it does. | ||
| For example, you're in prison for 20 years, what do you know? | ||
| You know the inside of a jail cell. | ||
| The environment in prison is very bad at encouraging people to get their life together when they get out. | ||
| That's why so many people They get out of prison, they have six months on the street before they're back in. | ||
| Sometimes it's because they want to go back in. | ||
| Prison's all they know. | ||
| They did a movie about that. | ||
| Shawshank Redemption? | ||
| And it was a good movie. | ||
| It was a great movie. | ||
| Yeah, which only serves my point. | ||
| But with regards to being lax on crime or whatever, there are a couple of things I think we should all agree to, okay? | ||
| First of all—well, maybe we wouldn't. | ||
| Drugs is bad. | ||
| We need to stop locking people up for weed. | ||
| Just flat out. | ||
| I think that drugs in general should be treated like a medical issue. | ||
| Portugal did that. | ||
| They decriminalized all drugs. | ||
| So— There's conflicting data on Portugal, but fine. | ||
| It's pretty promising. | ||
| So you take like heroin. | ||
| Nobody wants to be on heroin, okay? | ||
| If you're on heroin in the fleeting moments you have in between your little sessions, you know something's up. | ||
| So you treat that like a medical issue. | ||
| Say, hey, we have government offices. | ||
| You want to come by. | ||
| That helps. | ||
| Far fewer overdose deaths. | ||
| And those people, they go ahead, they become socially productive. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| No crime. | ||
| They contribute to the economy. | ||
| It just works better than locking them up. | ||
| I wanted to say something you mentioned with UBI, you mentioned with the unemployment, the stimulus. | ||
| First of all, we've actually had a really hard time hiring for specific work, like labor stuff, because nobody wants to work. | ||
| And no joke, I've been having conversations every other day. | ||
| Can we find some people? | ||
| And it's like, we can't find anybody. | ||
| We got signs up and down all throughout the area where it's like, come in, open interviews. | ||
| We had over 800 flights canceled due to staffing shortages. | ||
| And now we're facing fuel shortages because of the trucker shortage. | ||
| We're looking at this unemployment stimulus thing where they're doing the $300 bonus. | ||
| Now they're doing the child tax credit, which won't be for everybody. | ||
| And we're seeing a correlation with massive job openings and people not taking these jobs. | ||
| I think it's phenomenal. | ||
| Finally, the bargaining power is in the hands of the workers, more so. | ||
| But it's broken. | ||
| The flights are shutting down. | ||
| Nobody wants the jobs, even when they do increase the salaries. | ||
| So it's true, the flights are an issue. | ||
| But here's what they don't tell you in the news briefs. | ||
| So stock buybacks, something that many companies now do because of their decriminalization, The airline companies have spent an anomalous amount of their profits each year on stock buybacks to enrich their CEOs and shareholders rather than on hiring more pilots. | ||
| It seems the issue here is this is a simple supply-demand issue. | ||
| People need to raise their wages. | ||
| You see these news stories from time to time where it's like, I raised my wage to 15 an hour and people showed up and it's like, Yeah, that is how economics works. | ||
| We had John Schnatter, Papa John on the show, and he told us a story about a pizzeria where they were paying $35 an hour to some of their pizza cooks or bakers because that was a line. | ||
| He kept trying to find people, nobody would do it, he kept raising wages, finally he settled on $35 an hour. | ||
| That means pizzas are gonna basically more than double because the wage they're paying before was like 15 and now they're over double what they were paying in labor. | ||
| Their labor costs go up. | ||
| They have no choice but to charge substantially more for pizza. | ||
| In the short term, within a month or so, that might have an impact on those pizza makers. | ||
| But the ripple effect is going to slam into everybody. | ||
| All of a sudden, the contractor can't afford to take his family out for dinner, he can't afford to buy the food he wants, because the base level costs are going to start going up. | ||
| Then the landlords aren't going to be able to hire the maintenance crews to fix the buildings. | ||
| The landlords are on fixed pricing, which they can't change, which then results in a brick wall, a collapse. | ||
| I just want to say, what we're having right now is an unprecedented economic shock. | ||
| For a year, nobody worked. | ||
| Or very few people worked. | ||
| And people got used to staying at home. | ||
| And as the government should, it should have done more. | ||
| But as the government should, it took care of them. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| We have to ride this out. | ||
| What are government funds for but riding us out through common crises? | ||
| Better this than war. | ||
| And now, people are returning to work, and they're realizing, work sucks. | ||
| Work sucks everywhere. | ||
| But in this country, compared to maybe some of our equally developed contemporaries, work really sucks. | ||
| The work culture, our rate of over-productivity, Americans more than any other developed country, by the way, we push our workers hard. | ||
| And you have favorable employment numbers, but you don't have favorable Underemployment numbers. | ||
| There are a lot of people who have jobs but they have like two to three part-time jobs. | ||
| They don't get their schedule for the next month until like two weeks before the end of the current one. | ||
| They're constantly worrying about whether or not they're gonna make their shifts line up to get enough hours to get the money they need to pay down their student debt along with their rent and everything. | ||
| It sucks and it's untenable and we are in an era of unprecedented record profits for CEOs. | ||
| So yes, I think the solution to this, and it'll be a rough one, that's for sure, is we should normalize higher wages. | ||
| Maybe the solution to $15 an hour was never a federal mandate. | ||
| Maybe it was the inevitable economic necessity of incentivizing workers. | ||
| Hard to disagree with a lot of that. | ||
| I will say that the lockdowns were way too harsh and intense. | ||
| I will say there is a Fifth Amendment argument to be made, though, that if the government forces you to not work, then you should be able to get something in return. | ||
| The government cannot take something from you constitutionally and not pay you for it. | ||
| That's the eminent domain argument, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which was one of the best arguments for the stimulus package. | ||
| I just think the lockdowns were far too severe and far too intense and really infringed Tabula Rasa. | ||
| people's liberties and abilities to be able to take risks. | ||
| I want to go a different direction. | ||
| I just want to ask you a question. | ||
| It's just more kind of about human nature. | ||
| Do you think human beings are naturally good or naturally bad as human nature? | ||
| To be a little rosa, I really think we are blank slate. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I mean, maybe there's some inclination. | ||
| We're hardwired to be social. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| We're also, at least to some extent, hardwired to be self-serving. | ||
| The best society merges those two. | ||
| The best interest for you is the best interest for everyone. | ||
| The social contract from now until we die... So which? | ||
| Locke's, Rousseau's, or Hobbes? | ||
| Which social contract? | ||
| I guess I would just say the ubiquitous philosophical term more so than anything specific. | ||
| Well, because they all wrote on those terms, right? | ||
| And they totally disagreed with that. | ||
| They all thought different things of humans. | ||
| They all thought... Hobbes was at a very dark view, Rousseau very positive, Locke was more neutral. | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| Socialists tend to think that human beings are fundamentally positive, but I reject that. | ||
| That's why I'm curious, because you see way too cynical for that. | ||
| Well, the implicit suggestion to that, to me, is that socialists think their system would only work if everyone was nice, and I don't believe that. | ||
| I think that the best economic systems will work when everyone is an absolute POS. | ||
| Just a dirty, horrible human being. | ||
| It's very Hobbesian of you. | ||
| And you can incentivize them. | ||
| Well, but it should. | ||
| Maybe humans are amazing, but the best systems should survive human greed. | ||
| I want to ask you a very simple and general question. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Those are the worst ones to answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Do you think some people are better than other people? | ||
| Can I add a bit of nuance to that answer? | ||
| Answer however you want. | ||
| I think that some people have been developed to be more moral and of better character. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I didn't, I didn't mean moral. | ||
| Just better, like, like, like they're taller? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Oh, um. | ||
| But I think, you know, your interpretation of the question is part of the answer. | ||
| By any metric, there will always be people who are better than others. | ||
| Always, perhaps by some combination of environment and genetics. | ||
| I just hope that we can all ride along by each other. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I think, you know, I mentioned this before the show. | ||
| If you were to ask anybody on the left or the right, you know, what did you want? | ||
| It'd be like for everyone to prosper, for people to be successful, to pull people out of poverty, things like that. | ||
| I guess the issue is disagreeing on how we get there. | ||
| Well, I think we want, I'm not sure if we want the same thing. | ||
| I want more of a preservation and conservation of what we already have. | ||
| Do you want socialism? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Slight ideological disagreement. | ||
| Come on, come on. | ||
| I mean, we don't need to play the word games. | ||
| Why do you want to preserve? | ||
| I think that we have something beautiful, unique, and exceptional. | ||
| And I take the more Hobbesian view of human nature, which is we're brutish and nasty and awful and cruel. | ||
| And the fact we've been able to build something decent and civil is pretty remarkable. | ||
| Are you saying that we have a good system? | ||
| A great system. | ||
| And people thrive from the system? | ||
| I think people flourish and thrive. | ||
| I think that a rights-based system is naturally the best way to govern. | ||
| Do you want people to be stripped of their rights, imprisoned, brutalized, impoverished? | ||
| Of course not, no. | ||
| I mean, the sacrificing of rights is something that usually has to be earned negatively, like murdering somebody. | ||
| So this is what I mean, because I think I could ask you the same question, you know. | ||
| Do you want people to be brutalized, impoverished, imprisoned? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Taken their rights away. | ||
| But I would never want to grow complacent. | ||
| You're both familiar with the Marxian theory of dialectic materialism, correct? | ||
| You mean Hegel's theory? | ||
| No, he had the dialectic and we built on it, you know? | ||
| I'd love to get into the Marx thing, because I'm super fascinated by it. | ||
| No, well, I just want to say, you know, the theory, I mean, put simply, I guess, is that human society, the human project, it evolves as a product of antagonism, grinding antagonism between people in Marxian view. | ||
| It's very Hegelian, yeah. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, he was a student of Hegel. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He was part of this. | ||
| He was the young Hegelian. | ||
| He won the argument. | ||
| Well, no, I'm not. | ||
| Well, you're not. | ||
| I'm just saying, like, he would get mad at you if you said he was Hegelian influence, but I don't think I would. | ||
| Hegel was a smart guy. | ||
| I just can't read his work because... The phenomenology of spirit is impossible to read. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I was worried you're going to make fun of me. | ||
| I just want to say it's really hard. | ||
| He made the very simple complex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just want to say, sorry, sorry. | ||
| I just want to the project of humans moving forward. | ||
| I think that antagonism fuels it, but in the best way, not antagonism, like war, but antagonism in the sense that we, we look at our ideas, our values, and we challenged. | ||
| So I just want to say something we disagree on. | ||
| I don't think human humanity is a project. | ||
| Do you think we're headed towards something better than what we have today? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I think that we're actually, we're probably engaging in the second law of thermodynamics currently. | ||
| That we're untangling. | ||
| We're going to chaos, not order. | ||
| See, this to me, this is the thing, and I'm not trying to patronize, conservatives have been shown to be more fearful on average, and I think if they thought that way it would be very warranted. | ||
| But some fears are legitimate. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| Winston Churchill's fears about the evil Germans were legitimate. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Fear is not always illegitimate. | ||
| And there are elements of this. | ||
| I think, though, that if society is to collapse, it would probably be from climate change more so than like the... Oh, come on. | ||
| You don't believe that. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| We'll see it. | ||
| Assuming COVID doesn't get you, we'll live to see some pretty severe... We see it right now. | ||
| You know what my problem is? | ||
| You're like, I see all the news, I see all the arguments about climate change, and I'm like, I understand them. | ||
| And then you get Obama buying beachfront property, you get the celebrities flying in airplanes, and I'm like, how am I supposed to trust any of these people? | ||
| Gotta get Bernie. | ||
| Guy rode the train to work. | ||
| He didn't have to do that. | ||
| Bernie's the man. | ||
| True revolutionary. | ||
| Oh, just to finish the point, I'm sorry, because I kept getting sidetracked. | ||
| The idea of the human project is super interesting to me, because that's a collision point we're going to have. | ||
| I'd like to think... I mean, people have always said this is the best it gets. | ||
| You know, the Postmaster General back in... Was it the Postmaster General? | ||
| Was it the Patent Office? | ||
| No, the Patent Office, 1900. | ||
| All the patents have been made. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I'm not saying it's the best it's been... I'm not saying improvement is not possible. | ||
| Maybe we can make little improvements, but when I... I try to put myself in the shoes of men past, you know? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Somebody in feudal China. | ||
| And to them, what I live in today would have been incomprehensible to them in every imaginable sense, every conceivable way. | ||
| But their arguments for the permanence of society then would have been better than mine today, because they would have lived in a stable, feudal society for millennia. | ||
| And today, I now am here using technology that would have been alien to humans 20 years ago. | ||
| I think about, like, the culture revolution, the cultural revolution. | ||
| I think about the revolution in Russia. | ||
| And you mentioned that conservatives tend to be more fearful, and I think there's history that shows us things can go bad. | ||
| You can have something that's good, not great, could probably be better, and then end up with an unchecked movement that results in millions dead. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 20 to 40 million, I think, in the cultural revolution. | ||
| We had Lily Tong Williams on the other night, and she's telling us these stories are scary. | ||
| Always hindsight, right? | ||
| Because people thought this about every major event in social progress in America's history as well. | ||
| The breakup, the confederacy, the civil war, the fight to abolish slavery, sure. | ||
| You know, suffrage for women, yes. | ||
| The Civil Rights Act, yes. | ||
| Gay marriage, yes. | ||
| Every time we make a step forward, I don't... You're probably anti-gay marriage, right? | ||
| Because... I'm pro-traditional marriage. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Anti-gay marriage. | ||
| Pro-tradition. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| One man, one woman. | ||
| Every time we take a step forward. | ||
| Well, we agreed on the three-parent household before. | ||
| Oh, you disagreed on polyamory, actually. | ||
| That was 50% more efficient than the previous method. | ||
| That's not actually a study, is it? | ||
| And 10 times more chaotic and way more perverse. | ||
| I'm not actually citing anything. | ||
| It's possibly not a linear growth pattern with parents in the household. | ||
| It's actually exponential. | ||
| It just goes up forever. | ||
| Albert Einstein had 12 parents. | ||
| By the time you hit 12 parents, should the children just a god, by the way? | ||
| Sorry, it always feels like everyone argues like this is the best it gets and any future steps would be treacherous, but then we always make that next step. | ||
| I don't know if America is going to be around forever. | ||
| We're a young country and countries far older than ours have fallen in the lifetime of America. | ||
| So I can't look at what we have today or the people that I live with or the values that I believe in and assign to them a feeling of permanence, but I can say this. | ||
| I fear stagnation and every country that has ever set itself upon stagnation has always died. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| Every country always seeks to better itself and maybe that road to betterment leads to ruin, but the path of stagnation is always ruinous. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Our culture has stagnated severely. | ||
| One thing I always bring up is like Christmas music written in the 50s. | ||
| We still play it nonstop over and over again. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Movies have become repetitive, redundant reboots. | ||
| It's devolved from where we had these interesting pieces of art to just regurgitated crap over and over again. | ||
| Can I just take some exception with your argument? | ||
| First of all, there is this kind of revisionist belief that somehow conservatives, in the traditional sense, were against some of those social movements, which is just not true. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying you'd be a confederate, and I'm not even getting to the party switching thing, but there is a direct lineage between hyper-focusing on racial politics in the 1860s and the 1920s and some of the people on the American left that are just completely obsessed with American racial politics. | ||
| It's equality versus hierarchy, right? | ||
| But what do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, back then, the slave owners wouldn't have been like, I'm really obsessed with race or equality. | ||
| You know, now, I mean, obsession with race can be pernicious in many ways, but I think there's a pretty big difference between being obsessed with the idea of racial equality and being obsessed with racial domination. | ||
| I think it's equally as pernicious, just they don't have the power to implement it. | ||
| But we kind of already did that whole discussion. | ||
| Do you think I'd do that? | ||
| No, I don't think you would. | ||
| I mean, I don't know you well enough. | ||
| You seem rather decent. | ||
| I try my best. | ||
| But like, I wouldn't give power to Nikole Hannah-Jones. | ||
| I don't know who that is. | ||
| She founded the 1619 Project. | ||
| Oh, I just read the thing. | ||
| We have a constitution to prevent us against people like that. | ||
| What I'm saying though is that, for example, I'm not against social change. | ||
| I mean, I'd love to abolish abortion, for example. | ||
| I'd love to put fathers back in the home. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| So conservatives are not necessarily always saying, no, we don't want to improve. | ||
| We want to stagnate. | ||
| We want the correct form of social change. | ||
| So let me ask this then. | ||
| Let's get to the core of it then. | ||
| What values are you looking to maximize? | ||
| Not just like morality, because that could be the same thing or different things to anyone. | ||
| But if you were to look at a society and were asked to assess its worth, what metrics would you look towards? | ||
| Its ability to defend those that can't defend themselves. | ||
| Charity, generosity, integrity. | ||
| Faith to your creator the ability to pass down good and moral values to the next generation | ||
| One that believes in work and one that believes in the cause of the nation above the self | ||
| All right. I've got a I think that's a fairly collectivist point that last one though, wouldn't it be? | ||
| Well got the nation above itself. I'm Stalin? | ||
| You could call it collectivist, but I wouldn't say the state. | ||
| I'd say the idea of the nation, right? | ||
| So there's two different things, and those are conflated sometimes by libertarian socialist types, which is a walking contradiction. | ||
| I'd love to ask you about that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But it's kind of just being like a Christian atheist, right? | ||
| I might answer it when you're done, by the way, because I think my follow-up... | ||
| Yeah, but the state is a creation of the people. | ||
| The people are the country. | ||
| That's why our constitution, the preamble, says we the people, not we the federal government, right? | ||
| So the people are the nation. | ||
| And so that's why I differentiate between the two. | ||
| Do you have a loyalty? | ||
| Do you have a belief that you want to create something bigger than yourselves? | ||
| I think that's a moral good. | ||
| To me, and I mean this without meaning to hyperbolize, but to me it's always strung rather fascist. | ||
| The myth of the common man, the people, the Volk, you know? | ||
| The idea that there is a state, and Germany was a state of course, but Hitler didn't really appeal to the state. | ||
| It was the concept of the fatherland that he really hit on. | ||
| And the people were a beating heart of the fatherland. | ||
| They were an instrumental organ. | ||
| And to me, the problem with this is that when you get down to it, this thought process, this mentality, it drives men to do terrible, terrible things. | ||
| Because interpersonally, all of the chemical effects of empathy kick in. | ||
| I look at you, I see you. | ||
| But you start bringing in concepts like the nation, the fatherland, and it becomes very easy to convince people to compel themselves towards courses that they would otherwise not. | ||
| I'm not calling you a fascist. | ||
| use a 1930s reference earlier, so congratulations. | ||
| I'm not calling you a fascist. | ||
| I'm only saying that... | ||
| No, I know, you did do the correct, I didn't mean to hyperbolize, but there's other nations | ||
| today that have those values that we would never call fascist, like Japan. | ||
| Japan has very strict immigration. | ||
| Well I think Korea is actually a better example, to be honest. | ||
| I really don't like either of those countries for the reasons that I've described. | ||
| You don't like Korea? | ||
| I think they're both deeply conservative countries. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| They're wonderful. | ||
| And I think they do so in part because there's a degree of anti-individualism in the subservience they all expect of the common good. | ||
| Now, it's funny, I feel like our roles are being reversed a little bit here. | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| The common good isn't something I appeal to. | ||
| For me, the value I want to maximize... No, I just appeal to the good. | ||
| The good. | ||
| Sure, the good. | ||
| Which is two different things. | ||
| ...is freedom. | ||
| That's what I care about most. | ||
| And that's what libertarian socialism is about. | ||
| There are many types of freedoms, positive and negative. | ||
| If I might indulge very briefly, like, is a man thrown to a lawless desert without food, water, or clothing free? | ||
| Really asking. | ||
| So probably no. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| He's free to die. | ||
| But that's an extreme example, not applicable in modern wealthy America or any Western nation. | ||
| But it's a philosophical base. | ||
| It's also a Rousseauian argument. | ||
| Man's born free and he, you know, spends the rest of his life in chains. | ||
| It's just anti-commercial in nature. | ||
| Well, no, but it's, it's a base philosophical argument because it's true. | ||
| They're lawless. | ||
| There's nothing preventing him from doing anything in that environment, but he has no ability to act on his desires. | ||
| But do you know what he does have? | ||
| Consciousness. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| So that's a natural rights doctrine that I will defend. | ||
| Well, I mean, I like consciousness, too. | ||
| The only point that I'm getting at is when it comes to people's freedom and the ability for people to protect their freedom, this is what I care about. | ||
| It's what Marx cared about. | ||
| If you actually read what he wrote... I have. | ||
| I've read Das Kapital. | ||
| I've read the Manifesto. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| He was right about some things. | ||
| Then you know. | ||
| But not everything. | ||
| He didn't talk about equality. | ||
| He didn't write on equality. | ||
| He wrote on freedom because he believed that society was a very complex, interlocking network of systems that in some ways liberated men and in other ways enslaved them. | ||
| But do you know what he got wrong? | ||
| He got wrong that sometimes people can be free for other devices that they are not able to regulate. | ||
| They can be free not from alcoholism, drug addiction, some sort of You know, any other sort of perverse addiction. | ||
| The idea of freedom is a very libertarian view of freedom. | ||
| But I agree with that, though. | ||
| No, I know you do. | ||
| The greatest society... I say that... Okay, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, sorry. | |
| Just the greatest society is one where a man is born and there are as few things as possible preventing him from doing whatever he wants for the rest of his life. | ||
| I totally disagree. | ||
| So long as, of course, he doesn't deprive others of the ability to do the same. | ||
| So I think that's a miserable society. | ||
| Freedom? | ||
| No, that's not freedom. | ||
| That's licentiousness or degeneracy. | ||
| That's chaos. | ||
| What is degeneracy? | ||
| I like men. | ||
| How about pedophilia? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You said whatever he wants. | ||
| Is pedophilia a freedom voucher? | ||
| As long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. | ||
| I'm sure you could believe I would believe that. | ||
| So there are limits on freedom is what you're saying. | ||
| It's not this Wild West campaign. | ||
| So where do you get those limits from? | ||
| Well, obviously you would probably have to have a pretty complex interlocking legal system to determine what we agree upon is like a Reasonable limits we can place on people's behavior. | ||
| We have that now, to an extent. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| So, like, pedophilia, bad. | ||
| That would be a bad thing. | ||
| Okay, kidnapping? | ||
| That would be a bad thing. | ||
| Rape? | ||
| That would be a bad thing. | ||
| Why do you think those things are bad? | ||
| I think they're bad because you're stripping other people of the ability to do that which they will. | ||
| With all those examples, you're inflicting harm on a person. | ||
| How about dealing drugs? | ||
| I think that dealing drugs is a person's freedom, as is taking a person's. | ||
| What about dealing drugs to kids? | ||
| Dealing drugs to kids. | ||
| I think I would disagree with that probably because I think there's something exceptional about addictive substances and children. | ||
| That being said, I think a lot of stuff would apply to children specifically. | ||
| Contract law. | ||
| Kids can't sign contracts. | ||
| But there's nothing wrong with contracts. | ||
| Do you see what I'm getting at? | ||
| Eventually you do agree that a conservative framework is necessary. | ||
| But I don't think that's a conservative framework. | ||
| Because there are other things I care about that you would always disagree with. | ||
| Like collective ownership of the means of production. | ||
| Yeah, I totally disagree. | ||
| Which I think private property and freedom are linked together. | ||
| Which would give workers the most freedom possible. | ||
| We've definitely gone along because it was just so fantastic. | ||
| It feels like it's been five minutes. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Ian, you've collected a bunch of 50. | ||
| So. | ||
| So. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm gonna use the restroom. | ||
| Is that OK? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Go do it. | ||
| Take like 100 seconds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm kind of interested what you think about. | ||
| I think humans are inherently destructive by nature and that if you took a human and put them in a room with a bunch of small animals and plants over time, his hunger purely because of hunger, ultimately. | ||
| He would destroy and consume all of those animals and all of those plants. | ||
| And then if you put another human in there, one of those would eventually destroy and consume the other human. | ||
| I do think that we are, um, maybe inherently expansionist. | ||
| Um, I think that might be a defining trait of our species. | ||
| It's the, I mean, we conquered the world and God willing, we survive a thousand years from now we'll conquer the stars and that's unique to us. | ||
| Other animals don't do that. | ||
| I don't know if that's a good thing. | ||
| Maybe everything would have been better. | ||
| They do this. | ||
| Every animal does. | ||
| The issue is that- Build spaceships? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Expand. | ||
| Expansion. | ||
| Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But- Not build spaceships. | ||
| That'd be cool, though. | ||
| You know, with all of them taken off. | ||
| Over time, the limits of their abilities constrain them to a given area, a given population. | ||
| But we clearly haven't been kept in that way. | ||
| We're too smart. | ||
| Intelligence has separated us from the equilibrium. | ||
| A lion, you know, chasing a gazelle. | ||
| The gazelle, you know, runs faster. | ||
| The lion has to run faster. | ||
| The zebras and the stripes are confusing. | ||
| Some get away, some don't. | ||
| There's a natural adaptation process. | ||
| We know what evolution is. | ||
| But humans, we adapt instantly. | ||
| We are like, hey, that bird's flying. | ||
| I got an arrow. | ||
| And we have, and there are, I just want to say, we're talking about evolution. | ||
| Oh, yeah, non-controversial topic. | ||
| No, no, well, in a non-controversial way, believe it or not, you'll have to catch the behind-the-scenes release. | ||
| I just want to say that I don't have much optimism for the human condition. | ||
| I'm not like a huge optimist about this. | ||
| We are, I think, very potentially destructive. | ||
| I just think that we also experience, or we're better receptive to reward incentives than any other thing. | ||
| Uh, Ian's got a bunch of questions. | ||
| So everybody who's super chatted, we were having Ian, we mentioned in the beginning, go through and try and find really good questions. | ||
| A lot of people are saying really awesome things. | ||
| I want to read one that's not a question real quickly. | ||
| It's from Adam Schrader who said, so far this whole conversation reminds me of friendly bar discussions 10 years ago. | ||
| I miss that world. | ||
| Thank you Vosh and Charlie for being excellent. | ||
| Thank you, Tim, for steel manning. | ||
| You all have leader demeanors. | ||
| I know a lot of people disagree with each other, especially in the chat. | ||
| Not everyone gets along, but I think it's a fantastic conversation. | ||
| Thank you, Tim. | ||
| Thank you, Charlie. | ||
| Ian's got some questions. | ||
| Let me bring them to you. | ||
| And then afterwards, if we still have time permitting, I would like to do the member segment and then personally be more involved than I've been for the most part. | ||
| Sorry, we've been... Well, no, that was kind of the point. | ||
| Back to arm wrestling. | ||
| There's a million things. | ||
| I'm like... And I did interject. | ||
| You guys know I did. | ||
| You can just toggle to the right to go through all of them. | ||
| Thanks Ian. | ||
| These are some pretty good ones. | ||
| Ian's pulled some super chats. | ||
| M asks, please ask each guest if they agree or disagree with the statement, abortion breaks the non-aggression principle and why. | ||
| Obviously, yeah. | ||
| I think abortion is immoral and we should do our best to eradicate it. | ||
| I don't really believe in the NAP. | ||
| I understand people's discomfort with abortion. | ||
| I think that unfortunately it's a legal necessity as a byproduct of some very compelling personhood arguments I've heard in the past, which I would have to read up on again before reciting. | ||
| Can I ask a question? | ||
| When do you think life begins? | ||
| I don't know what life is. | ||
| You have life right now. | ||
| When did your life begin? | ||
| I don't remember the first six months of my life. | ||
| I genuinely don't. | ||
| Looking at the development of a human life, when would you say that begins? | ||
| I know when human bodies develop. | ||
| The genuine answer that I have is that I think that it's always going to be dictated somewhat by intuition. | ||
| The intuitive answer from me is life begins at birth. | ||
| That's my intuitive. | ||
| If you asked me, like, that's what feels right, but I'm sympathetic to other perspectives. | ||
| What about when DNA form is formed? | ||
| Well, that would be a conception, right? | ||
| Or at least right after. | ||
| Well, that's not what obviously that's not the metric that I would look at. | ||
| How about heartbeat? | ||
| That's six weeks? | ||
| No, as early as six weeks could be as early as two as late as six weeks early as 25 days. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, these are interesting metrics. | ||
| I just I think that my my understanding of consciousness is more of an emergent property of experience more so than it is I would have to reread. | ||
| It's been a while since I've read up on this. | ||
| You know what I love? | ||
| You said, when do you think life begins? | ||
| That was your question? | ||
| I love how framing changes everything. | ||
| Watch. | ||
| Ask Mino. | ||
| Tim, when does life begin? | ||
| I think it was when proteins formed and started self-replicating in the primordial. | ||
| Oh, you mean conception. | ||
| You see, it's interesting how framing changes everything. | ||
| To me, it's more, I guess, for me, because like any cell in our body is alive. | ||
| There is life and DNA and any bit of skin off my fingertip. | ||
| I wasn't meaning to poke at you or anything. | ||
| No, no, I know. | ||
| When is a life worthy of protection begin? | ||
| That's a difficult question. | ||
| That's a better way to word it. | ||
| To me, that has to be a legal question because protection has to be orbited by an entity and it can't be. | ||
| And for me, that would probably be at birth. | ||
| I've heard people make convincing philosophical arguments that there are times after birth when you're not even a person, and I've heard people make convincing arguments for conception. | ||
| But if you're talking about a legal entity, the birth thing seems to be the line that's the easiest to distinguish. | ||
| And there are other legal concerns as well. | ||
| But this is an issue that I think I'm... While I always support a pro-choice argument, the philosophy behind it is something I'm a little more... | ||
| So, is it more on the size of the being, or the level of development of the being, or the environment of the being, or the degree of dependency? | ||
| Which one do you think, out of those things, is the reason why you say birth? | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| I think the degree of dependency is legally worthwhile, but for consciousness, I think it's more about it being an emergent property of experience. | ||
| So is it okay then if we just basically pull the plug on all the people that are kind of comatose and cucumbers on machines? | ||
| They really don't have self-consciousness and they're very dependent. | ||
| Well, I mean, legally we do believe that because if you have... Oh, it's very tricky in the courts. | ||
| It is, but it's not the same as murdering a person. | ||
| If there's conservatorship over a person who's brain dead, there are instances where you will be allowed to pull the plug. | ||
| This is... You can't do so without an arbiter, though. | ||
| You can't just call in and say, just pull the plug. | ||
| That is murder. | ||
| Well, yeah, you can just yank it, of course. | ||
| You have to get approval and process. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it does indicate that legally and morally there is ambiguity with regards to the relationship between right and left. | ||
| No, but it shows that there's an arbiter, though. | ||
| That you have to go through a system of checks. | ||
| I didn't mean the derail attempt. | ||
| Sorry, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I want to make sure we can get to as many questions as possible. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Camilla Mamani says, WTF, a libertarian socialist, is like a meat eater vegan. | ||
| Um, libertarianism was actually a left-leaning ideology. | ||
| It was co-opted in the early 20th centuries by capitalists, but actually before that, libertarianism was exclusively in the purview of socialists, and I believe what they believed. | ||
| That freedom is the greatest human good, as long as it doesn't infringe upon others, and that the best way to achieve that freedom is through democracy. | ||
| We have political democracy, flawed as it is. | ||
| Economic democracy is something we should also strive for. | ||
| I'll tell you this, left-libertarian quadrant is the hardest quadrant to be in. | ||
| You have the only persuasion tactics. | ||
| If you're a left-libertarian, which exists, you're basically saying, I like socialism, now I have to convince people that it's the right thing and they'll agree with me, and people just won't. | ||
| I find left-libertarians less threatening to the American way of life. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| Because you have a general distaste for authoritarianism. | ||
| Well, for what it's worth. | ||
| The right has money. | ||
| They're like, well, you won't agree with me, but I can give you money! | ||
| And they're like, yeah. | ||
| The left does, too. | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| No, I just want to say, for what it's worth, there are some people who call themselves socialists who I actually think would agree probably more with you than with me. | ||
| Like people who support China, for example. | ||
| China's not socialist. | ||
| It's a rampant capitalist state. | ||
| It's a cronyist state, is really what it is. | ||
| Right, well, I mean, whatever you want to call it, it's certainly not what I want, you know? | ||
| So there are people who defend that, and I can't help but think, like, okay, these are conservative, what would you call them, traditionalist social positions. | ||
| Uh, and you defend, you know, a strong state with a strong common will towards the betterment of the state and a free market. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, maybe that'll be, what would they call that? | ||
| The Red Brown Alliance? | ||
| No, I'm joking. | ||
| In a way. | ||
| So I've got, I've got a question for Charlie. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I'm not familiar. | ||
| Are you familiar with Alden's theory? | ||
| No. | ||
| You're not? | ||
| Oh, okay, then I guess I won't answer that question then. | ||
| All right, then the next question would be for both of you is, what is the single biggest political issue for each of you? | ||
| And Charlie, if you want to answer first. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. | ||
| I'm sorry, for 2022. | ||
| Oh, like, I could take that any way, I guess, right? | ||
| You know, what should Republicans run on, I guess? | ||
| Or like, what is the biggest issue? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| And it's, I'd say the way we do elections in our country is definitely up there. | ||
| Big tech is massive. | ||
| Immigration is huge. | ||
| But I think even something more fundamental that I was trying, I think we almost achieved it tonight, which is that we're about to tear this country apart. | ||
| And I think dialogue is something that is so beautiful and is so complex and almost spiritual in nature that if we don't have dialogue with people that you fundamentally disagree with, Then there's really not a middle ground until you start ripping each other apart, and I'm really afraid of that. | ||
| What's your, uh... Yeah, what's the biggest issue of 2022? | ||
| I agree that the political rift is almost insurmountable seeming. | ||
| The last time we had won this bad was pre-civil war and we didn't really fix it. | ||
| We just had a civil war and people were still mad after so I hope that doesn't happen. | ||
| I don't think we're going to have a civil war by the way. | ||
| There are some people, I think that at the end of the day there's a big difference between the problems we're told to care about and the problems we're willing to fight about. | ||
| And I'm not entirely sure if I know where those lines are but I know there's a difference. | ||
| With regards to what I'd care about, for me it has to be climate change. | ||
| I know a lot of people roll their eyes at this stuff, but, like, you can take a look at the polar ice caps, you can take a look at the weather disasters we've been having, increasing both in frequency and intensity. | ||
| This isn't like a, like, look, think of it this way, okay? | ||
| I believe in American industry, alright? | ||
| It's a little too late for us to be first-comers, but if we really wanted to, we could subsidize the hell out of green energy. | ||
| You think we're doing it now? | ||
| Triple that, okay? | ||
| Really lay the groundwork. | ||
| In 20 years, we'll be selling the rest of the world the energy they'll need to survive. | ||
| You know what really breaks my heart is the video I made before the actual Green New Deal talking about how we needed a Green New Deal and then AOC's Green New Deal was like equity and college and healthcare and then the botched FAQ and I was like, I'm talking about why are we spending money on war when we could be researching green technologies and more efficient energy, thorium salt reactors, things like that, get fusion to ignite Instead, we get this, like, racial equity garbage bill. | ||
| This is- I had this- I- I- Well, I- I do like the Reno Deal. | ||
| Um, but I had this problem, too, with that Teachers Union Board, the one that affirmed CRT, said they're gonna spread- The National Education Association. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was also a union, but- Or maybe it was two. | ||
| NEA. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, yeah. | |
| It's the largest teacher union in the country. | ||
| Because they- And first of all, what they said wasn't CRT, but I'll take that up with them if I ever- They did use the words. | ||
| They did. | ||
| And still, they got that wrong, so if I ever argue with them- Because they made a critical race praxis. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They mean what we've been taught. | ||
| Woke-ism. | ||
| Yeah, I just, man, it's because the theory is cool, you know, it's, you wouldn't agree with it, but it's interesting. | ||
| I want to say something. | ||
| I do not think it's cool. | ||
| And I think the theory is awesome. | ||
| It's like the theory of communism. | ||
| We should have a class, a philosophy class where you learn about critical race theory, teaching it in practice to children is a different idea. | ||
| So I actually, in response to my absolute failure in giving you the adequate response in our last conversation, did pull up Critical Race Theory by Kimberly Crenshaw and actually read what she was talking about. | ||
| And I think the idea of the oppressed versus oppressor in race is a horrible thing when we're trying to get away from that. | ||
| And I had a conversation with an actual racist recently. | ||
| And the ideas to me are absolutely nonsensical to base things on race. | ||
| Coming from an actual racist who was advocating for the same things in that book, I was like, so you're happy with this stuff? | ||
| Like, well, no, because the wrong side's in charge. | ||
| And then I had to explain to them, like, I do not see the world the way you do. | ||
| And he says, well, that's the trouble with race mixing. | ||
| And that's, no, but that's exactly, this is what I see when I talk to, when I talk to people who are in favor of critical race theories, core ideology, and white nationalists, they tell me the same garbage in different ways. | ||
| I have always been a firm supporter of the idea that the ideas should be what's criticized, not like the people who make them. | ||
| Sometimes, for example, people will make fun of me because I talk on class issues and I'm from Beverly Hills and I accept the jibing. | ||
| You know, it's fine. | ||
| But I think anyone can speak in this stuff. | ||
| To be fair, this is idpol and everyone does it to an extent. | ||
| Candace Owens will deflect criticisms of racism by saying she's black. | ||
| We've all seen people do this. | ||
| The only thing I wanted to say, because I have to move back like six points here, is | ||
| that with regards to the teachers board you spoke on and the Green New Deal, I sometimes | ||
| feel like the left is a little bit bad when it comes to mixing all their causes. | ||
| If they, speaking of separatism, if they kept things a little bit more stringent, a little | ||
| more focused, maybe they could get people to agree on some of it. | ||
| But if every push for climate change is also every other progressive note, and every push for racial equality is every other progressive note, it feels like it's like an all-or-nothing package, and I think that can put some people off. | ||
| I wanted to, uh, just clarify quickly, uh, and to inject my, uh, idpol, as you mentioned, you know, Candace Owens would do it, I would, and a lot of people are always mentioning, you know, Tim Poole mentions he's mixed race, and I'm like, maybe that's why you'll understand when people are writing, like, whiteness this, and people of color that, I'm like, I don't, I don't exist in that world, because I've been discriminated against by, by all of these people. | ||
| And when that person said to me, you know, the perils of race mixing, he's talking about me personally, saying, I don't understand the tribalist worldview of racialists and identitarians, because I've never experienced what it means to be in a racial tribe. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I think he's right. | ||
| And that's why I love the classical liberal view of opposition to racism, judging people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. | ||
| Because I see this world that's being built critical of whiteness, that includes me, but then it's always the negative. | ||
| Every experience I've ever had, be it from white nationalists or from critical race theorists, is that you are bad for whatever reason. | ||
| I do not want to live in a world where race is the predetermined policymaker or factor on these things. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| for the progressives to come out right now and claim civil rights and say we did all these things and then tell me I now face a detriment. | ||
| I'm like, you know what man, my grandparents, civil rights activists, race mixers, my actual parents also mix in races and stuff and I'm like I have to, I can now look at the progressives who are putting a detriment on my life and insulting me no matter what I do and the white nationalists who vandalized my home as a child and it's the world that you're taking credit for that you're trying now to put a detriment For people like me. | ||
| It could be a matter of perception as well. | ||
| I've read a lot of academic critiques of whiteness, which isn't white people. | ||
| That's not true at all. | ||
| Well, it's an academic term to describe affectations associated with white people culturally, more so than the actual act of being white. | ||
| But black and brown literally means black and brown. | ||
| If there was a critique of blackness, what would you think of that? | ||
| Well, if it was an academic term used in that way, then I would think of it the same way. | ||
| But since there isn't such a term, I would have to be critical. | ||
| Look, regardless of the etymology of the term, in concept, it's meant to be like... You know the term toxic masculinity? | ||
| Yeah, I've heard it once or twice. | ||
| A couple times, you know. | ||
| When I read stuff like that, it's interesting stuff, you know. | ||
| I don't think of this, all men are bad, all masculinity is bad. | ||
| It's more of a salient critique of certain cultural trends. | ||
| Now, the problem that I have is essentialism. | ||
| Some people will take this, on both the left and the right, and they'll think of it as an individual critique, which it should never be used as. | ||
| If I were to say something like, imagine I'm reading MLK back in 1953, you know? | ||
| MLK had some things to say about white people back during his era. | ||
| He would say that, you know, the whites of this era are unconcerned with the plight of black people, except he didn't say black people. | ||
| And this is a non-essentialist critique. | ||
| He didn't believe in racial essentialism. | ||
| He wouldn't go up to an individual white person and judge them negatively for that. | ||
| But he understood that as a cultural trend, this is indeed a pattern he recognized. | ||
| So massive group stereotyping. | ||
| Well, massive group stereotyping that's been done by every civil rights movement to have ever existed. | ||
| Maybe the issue isn't the stereotyping so much as the way it's being applied and used. | ||
| If the stereotyping is, I notice there's a big difference in abolitionist thoughts between white and black people in Southern America in 1852. | ||
| Maybe that's the kind of stereotyping that can be used for good. | ||
| Also, stereotyping by definition is assuming characteristics of an individual because of their part of a group. | ||
| Close to what MLK was saying when he said white liberals. | ||
| You wouldn't apply it to an individual, though. | ||
| I mean, I've made comments about groups, people who play League of Legends. | ||
| Degenerates, the lot of them. | ||
| But I know people who play League of Legends, and when I talk about people who play League of Legends, I'm not talking about them. | ||
| I'm talking about people who play League of Legends. | ||
| So I want to ask you about the climate change thing. | ||
| What do you think is a bigger threat, climate change or China? | ||
| To the world or to America? | ||
| To you, the world, America. | ||
| I think it's still climate change. | ||
| I think China's probably going to replace us as the dominant power. | ||
| I'm not really happy about that because we're more democratic than they are in terms of our political structure. | ||
| If they had a better democracy, I might favor them over us because I don't really care about national allegiances. | ||
| But we are more democratic than them. | ||
| The climate change thing is an issue that will affect us all, though. | ||
| The big one's going to be climate refugees. | ||
| There are a lot of low-lying coastal communities that are going to be inhospitable to life in about 40 years, and they're going to move out into populated areas, and there's going to be border conflicts and war. | ||
| It's going to be tough. | ||
| We're not going to be able to get to every single Super Chatter question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm so sorry. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's no big deal because I think it's more important that you guys are having these arguments. | ||
| So I'm not going to interrupt you when you're actually debating the ideas. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| But a lot of people did Super Chat. | ||
| Just know that you guys, Super Chats are greatly appreciated. | ||
| There's a whole lot of them. | ||
| We love you. | ||
| You guys rock. | ||
| But I've got one, um, critical for you, Vosh. | ||
| Come here. | ||
| Nasho Nabo says, Vosh is a black person who grew up in majority white areas. | ||
| Those conversations are very demoralizing to be a part of. | ||
| I don't doubt your intentions, but it's best to speak to people affected by your ideas before trying to implement them as our white savior. | ||
| I don't appreciate the white savior critique because that's just the opposite end of idpol, isn't it? | ||
| Saying that I'm less inclined to talk about these issues because I'm white. | ||
| That's the opposite thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| I think it addressed the idea. | ||
| I agree with that too. | ||
| But with regards to the implementation here. | ||
| Obviously, like, social problems like this, addressing them is going to be contentious no matter what. | ||
| I don't know if there's a way to do this, to fix any problem, even the most obvious problems. | ||
| Today we think slavery, obviously that's bad, but clearly there was some disagreement. | ||
| With issues like this, there's going to be disagreement. | ||
| I don't know if there's a perfect way to handle it. | ||
| Anything is going to mix people up. | ||
| I have to balance that concern with the hope that in the future people become more accepting of these issues. | ||
| A good example of that would be gender stuff, for example. | ||
| If you look at it generationally, from boomers to Gen Z, Gen Z people are like 30 times as likely to know a person who identifies as trans or non-binary or whatever. | ||
| And for that reason, conversations on those subjects have become significantly easier just because people have been exposed to the concept. | ||
| Maybe in time this will be easier. | ||
| Maybe I'll fail. | ||
| We'll all fail and it won't be. | ||
| But I am sorry that these conversations are difficult. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| Well, I got to be honest, the overwhelming majority of the Super Chats are just saying thank you for having a conversation. | ||
| Those are the overwhelming majority ones that I copied. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I was looking at it. | ||
| I thought you had all the questions. | ||
| I was like, OK, I can see everyone very excited. | ||
| That's why I read the first one. | ||
| And some people have pointed out that in a conversational format, you are both less less derisive and divisive in your arguments. | ||
| I try to be nice in my streams. | ||
| So here's an interesting and kind of specific question. | ||
| Joshua Alley asks, should courts decide cases based on rule of law and precedence | ||
| or decide each case based entirely on rationality and morality? | ||
| No, go ahead. Yeah, it needs to be a balance. | ||
| Precedence definitely matters, especially in the American system. | ||
| And the idea of the whole third branch of government really kind of came into question with Marbury versus Madison, with the first Supreme Court Justice of the United States, John Jay, I believe, who was one of the co-authors of the Federalist Papers. | ||
| Precedent is important, but it's not everything. | ||
| And this is a super important thing that conservatives need to talk more about, which I think you would agree with, Vaush, is that precedents can be really bad. | ||
| Dred Scott was awful precedent. | ||
| It was really bad. | ||
| It was seven Democrat U.S. | ||
| Supreme Court justices, two Democrats, that said black people were not people. | ||
| And that precedent was in law, basically, for many decades until it was eventually reversed, largely because of the Brown v. Board of Education. | ||
| But precedent also is helpful so that you don't turn the courts into another legislative branch, right? | ||
| So the courts are supposed to be very unique and they're supposed to be deliberative, process-oriented, say no to more cases than they say yes to. | ||
| And so the question is, where do you strike that balance? | ||
| Um, Alexander Hamilton predicted that it would be mostly based on public opinion, that judges are still people too, and they're going to look to public opinion. | ||
| This goes to more of a democratic argument than a Republic style argument. | ||
| I will defend precedent more than overturning, but I definitely think the court has gone wrong in a variety of different decisions in the last 60 years. | ||
| And I think that what happens is you have very activist decisions and then they decide not to look at it again under a conservative belief of precedent. | ||
| I think I would lean more towards precedent though, or sorry, as well, though maybe for a different reason. | ||
| I think it's because we need accountability. | ||
| The problem is if judicial decisions are entirely at the discretion of the judge, it becomes very difficult to correct legal trends through anything other than appoint better judges, which can be an incredibly long-standing process, and even then it's what, a crapshoot? | ||
| I mean, you don't know everyone's opinion on everything. | ||
| That being said, I do think that to an extent judges are legislators. | ||
| This is actually a critical legal theory perspective which fed into CRT. | ||
| The idea that within the bounds of discretion, judges will almost always side with the political biases they have. | ||
| And that's not like a dig on any side, that's just what we are. | ||
| That judges who identify as liberal or conservative will overwhelmingly side with each other in the plurality of cases. | ||
| Because our biases do inform us. | ||
| I think that we have to recognize that's a reality, but we do have to constrain the process through judicial precedent, or otherwise it's just throwing darts at a wall. | ||
| I just want to point out, one of the Super Chats noted that we were trending. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| On Twitter or on YouTube? | ||
| On Twitter, but it says, content creator Vosh Debates with radio talk show host Charlie Kirk on Twitch. | ||
| Oh, are we on Twitch? | ||
| We're on Twitch! | ||
| We're on YouTube! | ||
| I just thought it was funny that it was wrong. | ||
| At least we're trending. | ||
| But it's like, it's like, how did you get that wrong? | ||
| Unless somebody's like screen grabbing. | ||
| It's the Twitter. | ||
| Hey, listen, after the, uh, the Twitter, uh, trending title descriptor had to spend like six weeks in a row describing everything that happened with those Minecraft YouTubers. | ||
| I feel like this is a, they're, they're a little bit off their game. | ||
| Maybe, maybe somebody's restreaming it on Twitch or whatever, you know? | ||
| It's just copyright infringement. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| I know that, I know that Shu did a, uh, like a stream commentating on us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Maybe that was on Twitch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So, uh, we got one from Dylan Perrick. | ||
| He says, do you guys think philosophy could be taught instead of, uh, of CRT, like Plato's allegory and the cave? | ||
| In my opinion, stuff like this helps people better understand one another individually. | ||
| I'm hugely in favor of more theoretical classes being taught to high schoolers. | ||
| Philosophy, sociology, and I don't know what the modern equivalent of finances or home ec would be, but something like that. | ||
| Kids graduate, they don't know anything about anything when it comes to managing their finances. | ||
| We agree. | ||
| Because that will destroy them if they don't. | ||
| Why don't we teach them that? | ||
| Philosophy, everyone should be learned on. | ||
| Just flat out. | ||
| I think that's a moral necessity. | ||
| And when it comes to sociology, I'm not even talking, like, left-leaning inclinations on that. | ||
| I mean, like, the basic ability to read, like, statistical information on what's going on, because for the rest of their lives, they're gonna be asked to vote based on political information they don't have the education to understand. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, philosophy comes from a Greek word, love of wisdom, philosophos, and we definitely don't have that right now in our country. | ||
| And yeah, I'm a big fan of teaching. | ||
| I just want to teach it correctly. | ||
| I'd say a lot less Nietzsche and Kant and Hume and a lot more Aristotle and Locke and Aquinas and Augustine. | ||
| And I think the problem is, though, if philosophy, if left un... if not... so Plato would say this. | ||
| So Plato would say, I'm not going to teach philosophy until you could do advanced Euclidean geometry. | ||
| It was his rule. | ||
| Now, why would he have that rule? | ||
| He's like, if you can't think rationally and be able to determine good ideas from bad ideas in the imperial, I'm not going to even get close to teaching you about the Allegory of the Cave or the ship or Plato's Republic or the forms. | ||
| So I think there's actually something to that, that if you introduce philosophy too early, you can create kind of one-liner philosophers that think they understand the entire world. | ||
| And it really goes to that expression, the more I know, the more I realize how little I knew when I thought I knew it all. | ||
| That's the kind of that idea of daring to know. | ||
| The corollary is true, too. | ||
| You know, the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, many of them said they cultivated inspiration from religion and from philosophy. | ||
| Completely outside the bound of physics, but it got their brain a-joggin', you know? | ||
| So I'd love to talk to you about religion, and just, like, where you think that fits into a functioning society. | ||
| We should definitely talk about religion. | ||
| This would be really, really interesting. | ||
| Why don't we do this? | ||
| We'll move to the members only segment. | ||
| We'll focus on religion. | ||
| And for everybody who super chatted, I know I really wish I could get to every single question and comment, but when you guys, we ask a question and you guys have that debate, that's the point of this. | ||
| So, you know, I try to do as many as we could. | ||
| I do like talking. | ||
| I just thought it was better to let you guys talk instead of constantly trying to just cut off the actual discussion and the flow of things, so my apologies to everybody who superchatted, but if you go to TimCast.com, become a member, we are going to now have another conversation, which I don't believe will be up by 11 p.m. | ||
| this time, because debating religion, I absolutely love the religious conversations we've had on this show on TimCast.com, so it'll be at TimCast.com. | ||
| smash that like button subscribe to this channel share the show with your friends and Do you guys want to shout you can follow us at Tim cast IRL? | ||
| You can follow me at Tim cast do you guys want to mention any social media stuff? | ||
| If you guys could subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the bell, we'd be blessed by that. | ||
| And also check out Rumble.com so you don't get censored. | ||
| R-U-M-B-L-E.com. | ||
| My name is Vosh and I'm on YouTube. | ||
| That's V-A-U-S-H. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Get your vaccination and vote Biden for more censorship to add, to expand upon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Talk to your doctor about what's right for you. | |
| Don't take medical opinions from people on the internet. | ||
| Talk to your doctor about voting for Biden. | ||
| Hey, depending on where you live, your doctor might say no. | ||
| I love you guys. | ||
| Thank you for coming. | ||
| This is great, man. | ||
| In a lot of the Super Chats, people were pointing out, like, you don't even have to agree with anyone here. | ||
| Just the fact that we're having conversation is, like, the spirit of freedom. | ||
| I really loved it when you're, like, naming the philosophers, and then you're like, oh, that was fun. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| The extra segment? | ||
| Just wait. | ||
| Oh man, I'm stoked. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not read up on religious theory. | ||
| Five proofs of God, you better be ready to go through the super chat. | ||
| Alright, Lydia? | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm also here in the corner. | ||
| This is a wonderful conversation. | ||
| I agree with that super chat. | ||
| I was actually at the bar earlier today and enjoying conversations that somebody just picked up somebody else. | ||
| It's like, you know what? | ||
| He's right. | ||
| And I love it. | ||
| I love being able to just have this kind of conversation. | ||
| I really miss that about our society. | ||
| So here's what I want to do. | ||
| I really want to dive in and question socialism, and we'll start with talking about religion, and then so go to TimCast.com. | ||
| Members-only segment will be up when it's up, because we're not going to go forever, but we'll probably have a good conversation. | ||
| So thanks for hanging out for the live version, and we'll see you all in an hour or so over at TimCast.com. | ||
| Again, sincere thanks to everybody who hung out. | ||
| Smash that like button on your way out, and we'll see you soon. |
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