Podcasts about against democracy

All quotes, unless otherwise marked, are Tolkien's words as printed in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. All emphases mine. Machinery is Power is EvilWriting to his son Michael in the RAF:[here is] the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam [...] ---Outline:(00:17) Machinery is Power is Evil(03:45) On Atomic Bombs(04:17) On Magic and Machines(07:06) Speed as the root of evil(08:11) Altruism as the root of evil(09:13) Sauron as metaphor for the evil of reformers and science(10:32) On Language(12:04) The straightjacket of Modern English(15:56) Argent and Silver(16:32) A Fallen World(21:35) All stories are about the Fall(22:08) On his mother(22:50) Love, Marriage, and Sexuality(24:42) Courtly Love(27:00) Womens exceptional attunement(28:27) Men are polygamous; Christian marriage is self-denial(31:19) Sex as source of disorder(32:02) Honesty is best(33:02) On the Second World War(33:06) On Hitler(34:04) On aerial bombardment(34:46) On British communist-sympathizers, and the U.S.A as Saruman(35:52) Why he wrote the Legendarium(35:56) To express his feelings about the first World War(36:39) Because nobody else was writing the kinds of stories he wanted to read(38:23) To give England an epic of its own(39:51) To share a feeling of eucatastrophe(41:46) Against IQ tests(42:50) On Religion(43:30) Two interpretations of Tom Bombadil(43:35) Bombadil as Pacifist(45:13) Bombadil as Scientist(46:02) On Hobbies(46:27) On Journeys(48:02) On Torture(48:59) Against Communism(50:36) Against America(51:11) Against Democracy(51:35) On Money, Art, and Duty(54:03) On Death(55:02) On Childrens Literature(55:55) In Reluctant Support of Universities(56:46) Against being Photographed--- First published: November 25th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Democracy stands as one of humanity's most treasured institutions, but what if the very foundation it's built upon is less solid than we believe? What is an epistocracy and how could it work better as a form of government?Jason Brennan is a professor at Georgetown University and the author of several books. His latest work is titled Against Democracy.Jason and Greg discuss how voting, often romanticized as the pinnacle of civic duty, hides a twisted web of irrational loyalties and tribal instincts that can lead us astray. Jason explains the historical context of political discord and the role of expertise in an era where trusted figures become polarizing symbols. They scrutinize the influence of political factions and social signaling, the curious ways in which political interests align across different cultures, and whether deliberation in democracy genuinely elevates decision-making or merely intensifies division. Jason concludes by revealing the hidden trials and tribulations of pursuing a PhD, and the emphasis on research productivity over teaching, the financial realities of academic life, and the necessity of guidance for non-academic careers.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why don't voters admit their ignorance and defer to experts in policy matters?16:37: You're right that even in markets when we do a lot of delegation, however, we still have a kind of check on this, right? So, I know only the most basic plumbing. So if I have any big problem, I'm going to have to call the plumber in. But when the plumber leaves, I can tell if there's still a leak underneath the bathtub, right? It's like, well, the water is still dripping, so he must have done a bad job. I couldn't fix it myself, but I can check to see whether he fixed it. [17:09] We don't have that same ability when it comes to politics. If a person implements a policy, I put in the Cares Act; did that make things better? How would you know? How would you measure that? That takes expert ability, not just to sort of know what's happened in the past five years as a result of it, but to disentangle the effects of that policy from all the other confounding things. I mean, you and I see policy papers where people try to do this, and it's extremely difficult. So the average person doesn't know how to do that. They do, however, defer to experts in a way, but the experts they defer to are people like comedians on late-night TV who make fun of the other side.Politics as Social Signaling28:46: A lot of what we're doing with politics is this kind of signaling to one another: we're the right kind of person, we're good, we're virtuous, we're kind. Please like me, be my friend, etc. I think that's what's happening in politics. We're using our vote as a way of getting social benefits for ourselves.Why does Europe's political landscape look different?23:21: One of the reasons why I think political distances, or differences, are less pernicious in most of Europe than they are in the U.S. is partly because when you have proportional voting systems, you have more viable political parties. And as a result, it's like your neighbors are all going to be people at different parties. It's really hard for you to segregate yourself in terms of your work, where you live, whom you date, and whom you befriend, because there's just so much variation. So, you can't afford to make that the same kind of signal that you do in the U.S., we have a first-past-the-post voting system that predicts there's going to be two major parties, and I think we get this behavior as a result.In politics, you don't get the same kind of reward-punishment system that you get elsewhere15:42: When it comes to politics, there are only two major parties, and so you can afford and get rewarded for excluding a bunch of people and just playing along with your team. So I think the incentive structure of politics is worse than the incentive structure we have in most other aspects of our lives.Show Links:Recommended Resources:EpistocracyJeremy WaldronAlexis de TocquevilleVoltaireJean-Jacques RousseauThomas ChristianoJohn RawlsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Georgetown UniversityWikipedia PageProfile on PhilPeople.orgHis Work:Amazon Author PageBusiness Ethics for Better BehaviorAgainst Democracy: New PrefaceDemocracy: A Guided TourCracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher EducationGood Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in AcademiaPolitical Philosophy: An Introduction (Libertarianism.org Guides Book 1)Injustice for All: How Financial Incentives Corrupted and Can Fix the US Criminal Justice SystemLibertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know?Why Not Capitalism?When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State InjusticeWhy It's OK to Want to Be RichIn Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global PovertyA Brief History of Liberty (Brief Histories of Philosophy Book 1)Compulsory Voting: For and AgainstGoogle Scholar Page

Steven S. Gouveia é doutorado em Filosofia e é actualmente Investigador do Centro de Estudos Filosóficos e Humanísticos (CEFH) da Universidade Católica Portuguesa. A sua investigação abarca um leque muito amplo de temas, desde a Neurofilosofia da Mente, filosofia da Inteligência Artificial, Ética Aplicada e Epistocracia. Publicou recentemente o seu 13° livro (Thinking the New World: Conversations on A.I.) e tem vindo a organizar cursos online sobre vários temas que contam com a participação de pensadores como Noam Chomsky, Sir Roger Penrose (Nobel da Física) ou Peter Singer, entre outros. -> Apoie este projecto e faça parte da comunidade de mecenas do 45 Graus em: 45grauspodcast.com _______________ Indíce: (04:12) Limites (éticos) do humor (26:14) Ética do voto (e da abstenção) | Ética da Crença, W. K. Clifford | Joseph Schumpeter | Cientistas políticos que estudaram o tema: John Zaller, Robert Y. Shapiro |  Lottocracia (Alex Guerrero) | Convention citoyenne pour le climat (França) (1:09:23) Altruísmo Eficaz. Peter Singer (filósofo). Milionário que doou órgãos. Associação Make-A-Wish. Altruistic-careers.com Recomendações: Despolariza (podcast de Tomás Magalhães), Against Democracy (livro), de Jason Brennan, Paul Bloom. _______________ O que é Filosofia? O que é que caracteriza a Filosofia contemporânea enquanto área do saber? Na verdade, não é nada fácil dizer exactamente de que trata Filosofia, sem deixar coisas de fora ou ser demasiado abrangente.  A minha definição preferida é talvez aquela que diz que a Filosofia «é a busca por entender verdades fundamentais sobre nós próprios, o mundo em que vivemos e as nossas relações seja com o mundo seja uns com os outros». Por outras palavras, a Filosofia distingue-se das outras áreas do conhecimento não só por ter um foco incrivelmente amplo (não há tema que não seja passível de ser analisado filosoficamente), mas também --  sobretudo -- por tocar as bases do conhecimento, por descer e questionar os fundamentos do nosso saber e das nossas convicções. É por isso que os filósofos são peritos em fazer-nos perceber que há, muitas vezes, pressupostos errados nos nossos raciocínios e convicções de que nunca nos tínhamos apercebido, ou que não estamos a agir da maneira correcta.  Um dos campos da FIlosofia em que este tipo de reflexão pode gerar mais consequências para a maneira como agimos e nos comportamos em sociedade é a Ética (também chamada Filosofia Moral). E esse é precisamente o tema do livro do convidado deste episódio, Steven Gouveia [website do convidado]: Homo Ignarus: Ética Racional para um Mundo Irracional. Como o título indica, o livro parte da noção das várias falhas da mente humana (desde a nossa cognição limitada, aos vieses cognitivos e às emoções que se metem no caminho da razão), mas é também uma provocação (que se detecta logo pela capa) para a era, a vários títulos, irracional que vivemos, com a preponderância de fake news, apelos à emoção e ascensão de políticos populistas. Durante a nossa conversa, focamo-nos em três assuntos em que esta “ética racional” que Steven Gouveia propõe nos pode levar a pensar de maneira diferente; todos, de alguma forma, tocam em temas de episódios passados do podcast. _______________ Obrigado aos mecenas do podcast: Julie Piccini, Ana Raquel Guimarães Galaró family, José Luís Malaquias, Francisco Hermenegildo, Nuno Costa, Abílio Silva, Salvador Cunha, Bruno Heleno, António llms, Helena Monteiro, BFDC, Pedro Lima Ferreira, Miguel van Uden, João Ribeiro, Nuno e Ana, João Baltazar, Miguel Marques, Corto Lemos, Carlos Martins, Tiago Leite Tomás Costa, Rita Sá Marques, Geoffrey Marcelino, Luis, Maria Pimentel, Rui Amorim, RB, Pedro Frois Costa, Gabriel Sousa, Mário Lourenço, Filipe Bento Caires, Diogo Sampaio Viana, Tiago Taveira, Ricardo Leitão, Pedro B. Ribeiro, João Teixeira, Miguel Bastos, Isabel Moital, Arune Bhuralal, Isabel Oliveira, Ana Teresa Mota, Luís Costa, Francisco Fonseca, João Nelas, Tiago Queiroz, António Padilha, Rita Mateus, Daniel Correia, João Saro João Pereira Amorim, Sérgio Nunes, Telmo Gomes, André Morais, Antonio Loureiro, Beatriz Bagulho, Tiago Stock, Joaquim Manuel Jorge Borges, Gabriel Candal, Joaquim Ribeiro, Fábio Monteiro, João Barbosa, Tiago M Machado, Rita Sousa Pereira, Henrique Pedro, Cloé Leal de Magalhães, Francisco Moura, Rui Antunes7, Joel, Pedro L, João Diamantino, Nuno Lages, João Farinha, Henrique Vieira, André Abrantes, Hélder Moreira, José Losa, João Ferreira, Rui Vilao, Jorge Amorim, João Pereira, Goncalo Murteira Machado Monteiro, Luis Miguel da Silva Barbosa, Bruno Lamas, Carlos Silveira, Maria Francisca Couto, Alexandre Freitas, Afonso Martins, José Proença, Jose Pedroso, Telmo , Francisco Vasconcelos, Duarte , Luis Marques, Joana Margarida Alves Martins, Tiago Parente, Ana Moreira, António Queimadela, David Gil, Daniel Pais, Miguel Jacinto, Luís Santos, Bernardo Pimentel, Gonçalo de Paiva e Pona , Tiago Pedroso, Gonçalo Castro, Inês Inocêncio, Hugo Ramos, Pedro Bravo, António Mendes Silva, paulo matos, Luís Brandão, Tomás Saraiva, Ana Vitória Soares, Mestre88 , Nuno Malvar, Ana Rita Laureano, Manuel Botelho da Silva, Pedro Brito, Wedge, Bruno Amorim Inácio, Manuel Martins, Ana Sousa Amorim, Robertt, Miguel Palhas, Maria Oliveira, Cheila Bhuralal, Filipe Melo, Gil Batista Marinho, Cesar Correia, Salomé Afonso, Diogo Silva, Patrícia Esquível , Inês Patrão, Daniel Almeida, Paulo Ferreira, Macaco Quitado, Pedro Correia, Francisco Santos, Antonio Albuquerque, Renato Mendes, João Barbosa, Margarida Gonçalves, Andrea Grosso, João Pinho , João Crispim, Francisco Aguiar , João Diogo, João Diogo Silva, José Oliveira Pratas, João Moreira, Vasco Lima, Tomás Félix, Pedro Rebelo, Nuno Gonçalves, Pedro , Marta Baptista Coelho, Mariana Barosa, Francisco Arantes, João Raimundo, Mafalda Pratas, Tiago Pires, Luis Quelhas Valente, Vasco Sá Pinto, Jorge Soares, Pedro Miguel Pereira Vieira, Pedro F. Finisterra, Ricardo Santos _______________ Esta conversa foi editada por: Hugo Oliveira _______________ Bio: Steven S. Gouveia é Doutorado em (Neuro)Filosofia da Mente pela Universidade do Minho (Braga, Portugal). É actualmente Investigador do Centro de Estudos Filosóficos e Humanísticos da Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Projecto de Investigação UIDB/00683/2020 financiado pela FCT). Durante o seu doutoramento (Investigador FCT), foi investigador-visitante do Minds, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics do Royal Institute of Mental Health (PI: Georg Northoff), onde foi Investigador Pós-Doutoral (2021-2022). Foi Editor-Chefe do “Apeiron - Student Journal of Philosophy”. ​​​Publicou, como editor e autor, 12 livros (revisados por pares) sobre vários temas académicos. Alguns de seus interesses actuais são: Neurofilosofia da Mente e Ciência Cognitiva; Ética Aplicada (robôs sexuais; voto; ética animal; humor; nudges; alturísmo eficaz, etc.); Filosofia e Ética da Inteligência Artificial (na Medicina); Neurociência e Filosofia da Consciência e Processamento Preditivo; Teoria Democrática e Epistocracia. Por fim, para além da intensa produção autoral, proferiu inúmeras palestras em conferências académicas (ex: Ciência da Consciência 2019, Suiça), em eventos públicos (ex: Orador Principal do Philosophy Sharing Foundation, Malta; Forum Chipre 2022).

https://youtu.be/DG99R2dB8eg The problem with political decisions isn't that most of us don't get our own way. It's also that these decisions are usually imposed on us against our will, by threats of violence...Democracy, as we practice it, is unjust. We expose innocent people to high degrees of risk because we put their fate in the hands of ignorant, misinformed, irrational, biased, and sometimes immoral decision makers. – Jason Brennan, Ph.D., Against Democracy (2016, Princeton University Press), pp. 230, 240. BitChute Archive Flote Spotify

Monday morning in Palm Beach Florida, Trump's Mar A Lago estate was raided by the FBI in search of “illegal classified documents” which were thought to be in his possession. In reality, this was just a *political* stunt by *politicians* in a *political organization*. Also, a video has recently surfaced of a woman in a Burger King yelling at a little girl telling her, ‘I hope you get sick and die.' With both stories, Christian conservatives need to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt, and we need to start assuming the worst. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Today on The Dominic Enyart Show, Roe has fallen. We're taking a look at the morality of the supreme court decision. We're also going back to an article by American Right to Life which debunks the notion that abortion is a “states' rights issue.” All of that and more, today- on The Dominic Enyart Show. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.) Read the article from American Right to Life below: So-called States' Rights and Abortion Some God-fearing pro-lifers claim that abortion is a "states' rights" matter. The claim is that the very principles of justice (i.e., God Himself) would have federal governments tolerate a state's decriminalization of murder generally, or decriminalization of murder for any particular group of victims. (Whether the victims would be Jews, Christians, or children, the principles remain the same.) But the abortion states' rights position is as immoral as Roe v. Wade itself. The federal government has no authority to decriminalize child killing and neither do the states. In America, as with slavery, so too with abortion, it was the states themselves and not the U.S. Supreme Court that launched our abortion holocaust. The historical revisionism of Ron Paul and others aside,  in the seven years before Roe v. Wade, 19 states were striking down their own laws banning abortion or otherwise explicitly permitting child killing to varying degrees. The state-sanctioned slaughter began in Mississippi in 1966. Prior to 1973, the states permitting abortion for various reasons were MS, CO, CA, OR, NC, NY, AK, HI, WA, FL, AL, AR, DE, GA, KS, MD, NM, SC, VA, and New York which allowed "elective" abortion on demand through six months. The Bible can help pro-lifers think through all of this. Adhering to the principles of justice presented in Scripture would benefit not only America but of course any nation at any time in history. Israel's 12 tribes are sufficiently similar to America's original 13 states to draw some lessons regarding "states' rights." For the Bible is not silent on the question of whether subdivisions of a national (federal) government have the authority to refrain from prosecuting the murder of the innocent. The Bible approves of local law enforcement, even local prosecution for murder (Deut. 21:1-9). But Scripture indicates that there is no local right to refrain from the prosecution of murder. - Negative Evidence: No Scripture says the king should tolerate tribes that permit murder. - Positive Evidence: The Book of Judges chapter 21 teaches that God does not recognize a local right to decide whether or not to prosecute murder. Rather, when one of the twelve tribes of Israel refused to prosecute the murder of a concubine, for that lawlessness, the rest of the nation was justly outraged and moved to action, and with God's endorsement, they lawfully used force to punish Benjamin including of course any local authorities and magistrates who "would not listen..." So all the men of Israel were gathered... united together as one man. Then the tribes of Israel sent men through all the tribe of Benjamin, saying, "What is this wickedness that has occurred among you? Now therefore, deliver up the men... that we may put them to death and remove the evil from Israel!" But the children of Benjamin would not listen to the voice of their brethren, the children of Israel. ... [So] The LORD defeated Benjamin before Israel. And the children of Israel destroyed that day twenty-five thousand one hundred Benjamites; all these drew the sword. Judges 20:11-13, 35 God's Word makes it clear that there is no "right" for a state to decriminalize murder nor to refuse to prosecute murder. As in Benjamin, such a "right" is tantamount to lawlessness. And such lawlessness, being manifestly destructive of all rights, cannot itself be an instance of any "right", state or otherwise. Righteous anger at any federal government does not validate perversion of justice. Those angered at a wicked federal government should exercise self-control to avoid claiming that the evil government can go ahead and look the other way and ignore crimes committed anywhere within its borders against the innocent. It's hard to image evangelical Christians being killed in Massachusetts rejecting protection from federal marshals; but it's easier to claim state supremacy when the blood is not one's own. Claiming that any subdivision of government, whether state, district, tribe, or province, should be tolerated even if it decriminalizes the shedding of innocent blood is an example of giving man's law supremacy over God. No true principle of justice, but only unrighteousness, would lead a nation to tolerate murder within its borders, whether of concubines (Israel), of Jews (Germany), or children (America). Another lesson from the Bible regards the head of Israel's "federal" government. Even though Ahab was not the one who ordered the killing of a man named Naboth, the Scriptures teach us that Ahab himself was guilty of murder (1 Kings 21:19). Why? By not prosecuting that murder, he became an accessory after the fact. Notice also that the pro-life emphasis that "judges don't make law" misses the mark. Hundreds of states and nations have enacted legislation condoning the killing of innocent children. This argument only makes sense when used opportunistically, to exploit some incidental public anger against the judiciary. But it is not a fundamental argument against child killing. If judges don't make laws, but legislators do, then legistlators will. In reality though, true law is discovered, not invented, by any governing official. Further, in the slightly askew phrase, "make law" is ambiguous. If a righteous judge in an evil nation asserts that a human being has the right to convert to Christianity, for example, he is not "making law", but recognizing basic human liberty given by God to every man. If a righteous judge in Germany had ruled against the killing of Jews, he would not have been therefore evil for "making law", but righteous for upholding the foundation of all human law, God's enduring command, Do not murder. Thus, "judges don't make law" is another attempt in a centuries-long series of seeking process solutions to fundamental moral questions. If you love any governing official, federal or otherwise, you will not lead him to ignore Solomon's warning from almost 3,000 years ago: Deliver those who are drawn toward death, and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, "Surely we did not know this," does not He who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, does He not know it? And will He not render to each man according to his deeds? - Proverbs 24:11-12 "The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits." -Leo Tolstoy widely attributed By Bob Enyart

https://youtu.be/_VXLOjD6708 The problem with political decisions isn't that most of us don't get our own way. It's also that these decisions are usually imposed on us against our will, by threats of violence... Democracy, as we practice it, is unjust. We expose innocent people to high degrees of risk because we put their fate in the hands of ignorant, misinformed, irrational, biased, and sometimes immoral decision makers. – Jason Brennan, Ph.D., Against Democracy (2016; New Jersey: Princeton University Press), pp. 240, 230. Jo Ann Skousen is currently associate editor of Forecasts & Strategies, she co-authored of several investment books, and is associate producer of FreedomFest. Buy tickets here for FreedomFest and the Anthem Film Festival, use code HORTON50 for $50 off at check out! BitChute Flote Archive

Today on The Dominic Enyart Show we discuss Elon Musk buying Twitter and what that could mean for the future of free speech in America. Also, Marjorie Taylor Greene is on trial for being an “insurrectionist.” That's both hilarious and sad, we're taking a look at her response to the cancel mob. Then finally, we talk for a while about process. The right worships process, whereas the left worships results. That must change. All that and more, today! Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Today on The Dominic Enyart Show, we're giving a brief recap of the HB22-1279 hearing before diving headfirst into Dominic's new Why I'm Wrong segment. Today he's tackling the accusation that he doesn't understand the 3/5's compromise. The listener (who we've named “Nah”) argues that the 3/5's compromise was a moral one. Dominic debunks that idea and encourages listeners to be wary of praising the founding fathers. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Today on The Dominic Enyart Show, Joe Biden gave a state of the union address, we'll talk about some of the problems and solutions with that. TDES went all of February without talking about Black History Month, we explain why. And Jeff Durbin's interaction at the HB22-1079 hearing. If you'd like to help keep us broadcasting, please visit our store or become a show sponsor. God bless you guys! Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

* Ten Objections: Bob gave National Sales Tax author Ken Hoagland the first eight objections below to the FairTax, a National 22% Sales Tax (and he kept the last two objections for this list):1. No Right of Conscription: The government does not have the right to force a businessman to become a tax collector, something that millions rightfully hate. Hoagland Reply: Just like Neal Boortz and other FairTax leaders over the last twenty years on BEL, Hoagland could not give a defense for this. And of course, excusing an injustice by saying we already do this is simply an admission that the proponent has no answer. (Boortz said he'd look into this point, and four years later, he's still looking into it.)2. The FairTax Continues Confiscatory Taxation: The FairTax Solution's own description admits, "The FairTax produces the same amount of revenue" as the current oppressive tax system. Bob Enyart argues that the biggest problem with taxes in America is the horrendous amount of money taken. Regardless of how it is taken and of where the money comes from, giving absurdly vast tax revenues to a bloated socialist government is like giving heroin to an addict. Ken agreed with that lesser point, but he missed Bob's bigger point. "You're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic when you change the method of confiscatory taxation but continue to rob the country of trillions of dollars." Hoagland Reply (this is the best BEL could make of it; listen to the show to get Ken's exact words): Ken justified the government's over-taxation throughout a man's life as a defense for the confiscatory amount of taxes raised by his own FairTax Solution. The argument appears convoluted and seems to go like this: Because the government has taken so much from a worker for fifty years, we propose continuing to take this money from everyone so that the government can pay us all back for the money it has taken from us all our lives. Huh? Bob responds to that: Valid tax reform would both cut the amount of taxes and remove injustices in the collection system (see 1 above). 3. Fraud Enticement to Strangers: A sales tax entices millions of strangers, who briefly meet, to conspire together to defraud the government, fueling an illicit underground economy with far more interactions between individuals. Why? Because we all buy and sell from a hundred times more people than we employ. This systemic encouragement for strangers to conspire to defraud the government makes a terrible impression on the children who grow up around such transactions and it generally undermines respect for government itself. Hoagland Reply: Disagreed that the buying and selling relationship will give opportunity to more people to defraud the government than the employment relationship does. (Ken probably misunderstood the point.)  Listener's comment: "From what I have seen in Canada, Bob Enyart is right on the money. This 22% tax seems downright socialist, and the scheme is filled with other pitfalls. Our 7% to 15% sales taxes in Canada has created a vast underground economy. Bob is right when he says that a sales tax will encourage strangers to conspire to commit tax fraud. Since the implementation of the 7% Goods and Services Act Revenue Canada doubled the number of auditors it employed. Also, in communities that are close to the boarder, a number of Canadians do their shopping in the United States to avoid our 15% sales tax. This has caused our customs service to become more concerned with the collection of the 7% GST than securing the border." 4. Start-up Impediment: A sales tax makes it far more difficult to enter into business, especially for the poor, the young, and those with less business capability. Not only do they have to meet all the demands of operating a competitive and profitable business, but the government forces them, for each transaction, to calculate a sales tax, to collect the tax, to segregate those funds, to resist temptation to use those funds in emergencies, to remit those funds, and to keep records of all those transactions. Hoagland Reply: The current system is bad, to which Bob replied, "Of course it's bad, so let's not fix it with something else that's bad."5. Vastly Greater Transaction Cost: There are a billion sales transactions per day, but vastly fewer income tax transactions, which means that there is a far greater transaction cost to a sales tax than to an income tax. So the cost of processing 400 billion sales tax transactions per year is more than processing perhaps four billion income tax transactions per year. Hoagland Reply: The current system is bad, to which Bob replied, "Ken, your arguments are sounding to me like the man once a week beats a woman and says, "I used to beat you twice a week. What are you complaining about?"6. Conflict of Economic Interest: Government will obsessively encourage spending and borrowing, rather than increased incomes, saving and investment. Hoagland: Bob raised this at the end of the show so Ken had no time to reply. Neal Boortz said this was a valid argument.7. To Not Tax the Poor Hurts Them: Families earning under $30,000 annually should be able to walk down the street with their heads held high. However, the Fair Tax completely exempts those earning less than $27,000 from paying any tax, and so they will not have ownership in our society. The poor need to pay the same percent, as they will with a flat income tax, the same as everyone else, especially to build their own self respect. Hoagland Reply: The poor won't be exempted because everyone gets the "prebate" which is a monthly government check to a hundred million households to give everyone the amount of money that a "poor" family would pay monthly in taxes. Bob replied that this "prebate" was calculated specifically so that those with incomes under $27,000 would pay no taxes, so as with most of Bob's questions, Ken was not answering the question nor the objection, but just repeating details or changing the subject and not being responsive. Those making $25,000 a year need to pay taxes also.8. You Don't Need a Sales Tax to Eliminate the IRS: A flat income tax does not require a tax collection agency. People can simply remit their taxes, just as a hundred million households currently pay their rent, utilities, cable bills, etc., and as businesses under an unjust sales tax would remit taxes. People are people, whether they own a business or not. Just do away with the IRS. Hoagland Reply: Ken didn't really have time to respond to this. Two Bonus Points :)9. It's the UnFair Tax: Paying a 22% sales tax on new goods is grossly unfair comparing the middle class to the poor and the super wealthy, with the unfair burden falling on the middle class, as it generally does with all creative economic proposals. With the "FairTax", the lower class pays no taxes. The super rich, who easily spend only a small percent of their income get taxed only on that small percent of their income. Whereas, the middle class gets taxed on approximately half of its income, all of which they spend just to survive.10. God Did It: The Scriptures record God's solution to the problem of equitably and efficiently collecting revenue from the entire population for a centralized fund. God implemented a flat income tax of ten percent to fund the operations of the priesthood. * Bob's Assessment of Ken Hoagland: Human beings have limitations on our ability to quickly comprehend and respond to arguments. Clearly, Ken Hoagland, like anyone else, would have a hard time responding to substantive objections like the ones above while hearing them in a quick radio interview. However, this is the third leader in the FairTax movement that Bob has interviewed, and it has become obvious that, to their credit, not one of them will say that the government has the right to force a man to become a tax collector. Debate over. Bob Enyart wins, and the national sales tax loses. These debates illustrate a specific, and then a general observation: Specifically, these FairTax leaders have not considered these substantive objections to their proposal and they are not comfortable thinking in terms of right and wrong, but rather, they use moral relativism: we're already doing this, etc. The general observation is that authors, talk show hosts, political activists, and the population at large has generally lost the ability to think in terms of right and wrong.* Listen to Bob and Neal Boortz: Hear also Bob's FairTax debate with national spokesman and libertarian talk show host Neal Boortz. On air Boortz said he thought he did well in answering Bob's objections and promised the audience that he would link to his debate on KGOV from his own website. Neal Boortz broke his promise and to this date he has not kept his word and has not linked to his debate with Bob. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Frank Furedi är en av de mer inspirerande tänkarna jag stött på. Hans formella titel är professor emeritus i sociologi vid universitetet i Kent i Storbritannien där han också bor. Men han har varit en otroligt produktiv offentlig intellektuell under lång tid. Jag har säkert räknat fel och missat någon bok men vad jag se har han skrivit 25 böcker sedan 1986. Hans senaste bok heter Democracy under siege (Zero books 2020) som kom ut i oktober förra året. I den visar han hur motståndet mot demokrati har en lång historia. Förr brukade filosofer och andra vara öppet föraktfulla mot folket – eller “pöbeln” – och vara helt ärliga med att demokrati var något de betraktade som farligt. I dag har detta blivit ofint, och därför kommer föraktet till uttryck på andra sätt, genom omskrivningar. Man attackerar inte demokratin rakt på, utan varnar i stället för populism. Etablissemanget har drabbats av vad Furedi kallar för demokratipanik, vilket får dem att försöka begränsa medborgarnas inflytande på olika sätt. Man avpolitiserar frågor, för över deras avgörande till experter, låter teknokrater sköta mer och mer. Och den som protesterar kallas farlig, extrem eller populist. Det som pågår är en dragkamp mellan torget och tornet, mellan folket och etablissemanget, mellan en förskansad elit som vill behålla makten och folket som vill att demokrati ska vara mer än en procedur för att välja samma gamla klägg, för att låna Håkan Juholts ord, om och om igen. Nedan kan du läsa samtalet i en något nedkortad version.Welcome Frank Furedi to Rak höger!– It's a pleasure to talk to you.I came across your work for the first time when I read Therapy Culture, a book that came out in 2003. I read it a couple of years later and it blew my mind. There was especially one example in your book where you go through how many times we mention terms like “stress” and “anxiety” and how we are continuously changing our way to describe hardship in a therapeutic language and I realized I'd been doing that for my whole life. I had to rethink how I describe myself. I think you brought up a mining crisis in Wales. When it happened, people didn't seem that traumatized. But then the media went back with their therapeutic language, and they sort of reinvented the trauma of the miners because a lot of children died. Of course, it was an awful catastrophe. Could you summarize the thesis of Therapy Culture? I think it's an interesting thesis and I think it was prescient.– I think what I was trying to deal with was the fact that what it means to be a human being has been gradually reshaped by the discipline of psychology. Psychology is okay in a clinical setting but when it becomes something that is used to define who we are, how we think, then the way we experience the world alters fundamentally. So, for example, I always remember when my son came home from school at the age of seven, and he was using words like “I'm stressed, I'm depressed”. He sounded like a little Freud and I'm sure he didn't know what those words meant. But the very fact that the teachers were talking about being traumatized and being stressed in such a casual kind of way, meant that young children were already encouraged to become extremely inward-looking. And instead of engaging with the external world and having a sense of their strength. They were always being reminded of their weaknesses, their powerlessness. And that's why the title of the book is Therapy culture -Cultivating Vulnerability. Because what we're doing is we're almost encouraging people to become conscious of how weak and powerless we are and therefore how important it is that you and I are insulated from the pains of everyday life from distress, from the normal prompt of rejection, which is inevitable, from the pressures that are kind of placed upon us. The look is an exploration of the meaning of this cultural turn, everyday human behavior, and the western setting.You saw a trend that has just accelerated, you were ahead of the curve there. It was 15 years later that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff came out with The Coddling of the American Mind where they see that the vulnerability of American students is exploding on college campuses. The coddling is that you are encouraged to see yourself as vulnerable and behave as if you are vulnerable. Greg Lukianoff had struggled with clinical depression, and what had helped him was cognitive behavioral therapy where you try to become less vulnerable. He saw that our culture is doing the exact opposite, but you saw these trends 15 years earlier. I think it was when I read your book that I realized, and maybe I'm a late bloomer or not so smart, but it was the first time that I realized that the word “stress” is not a neutral way to describe something. It's actually a cultural word to describe a phenomenon. It's not a natural state. Do you think that the trend that you saw then has accelerated as I described it? How do you view it now?– The way that I see it is that language is very useful because almost all the words that we use in the English language, I don't know about Swedish or other languages, are fundamentally altered. We are using words now routinely that would have been unthinkable in the past. For example, the word “vulnerable” was never used as a psychological word until the 1980s. Until that point, it was used as a description of physical entities, when you talked about the vulnerability of bridges or buildings. The first time it was used was concerning babies in 1978-79 by some psychiatrist and then it just exploded. When I wrote my book, at the turn of the 21st century, it was already in the mainstream but today, in 2021, the psychological turn has acquired such a powerful momentum, that it has become the defining medium through which western society interprets its cultural experience, its political experience. The boundary between what is our inner life and what is our outer life has gone completely, the two are entirely the same. In that sense, we become so accustomed to it that we don't even notice that there's anything unusual about defining normal problems of life such as distress or pain, which is a normal part of our life, through a psychological diagnosis.There has been a trend to take the psychological terms, the therapeutic language, and project them onto history. For example, you can say “How many of the Roman legionaries had PTSD?” You can go back and give a psychiatric diagnosis to historical figures to explain their ideas or their behaviors. We are replacing an older language and older frame of analysis with this therapeutic frame of analysis.– Yeah, it's got an imperialistic ambition, it wants to spread everywhere. And we have a situation where the past is continually being rewritten as if the people in the 14th or 12th century had already become familiar with Freud, or with Jung. The best example for me is if you look at the decolonization movement in Britain, you have a situation where a lot of students at Oxford University complain about the fact that when they a statute, they get traumatized by it. I think that's something that tells us that in a sense the use of psychology, the boundary between the present and the past has been continually eroded. It's almost as if we read history backward through the language of psychology.I think this is still one of the best books on this subject, even though it predated social media and college identity politics. I really recommend listeners to read Therapy Culture, because it's really, really good. But you have written a new book which has the title Democracy Under Siege. In this book, you explain how the idea of democracy has been challenged historically, but since the19th century, you don't challenge it formally anymore. You don't say “I'm against democracy”. You say that you are against populism or that you are for liberal constraints on democracy. Do you agree with that summary, and could you elaborate on which way democracy is under siege today?– Well, I wrote the book because I noticed that if you go into a bookshop, before covid, in New York or London, and you look at the nonfiction section, there are loads and loads of books with the title “Against Democracy”, with titles that suggest that there's something wrong with democracy. They're quite explicit in raising suspicions about it. And I noticed that even people who pay lip service to democracy, continually put limitations on it. This became very evident to me when I was doing a speaking tour in Europe on the subject of populism, and I kind of shocked the audience because they couldn't imagine that a sociology professor would have something positive to say about populism. This is in Amsterdam and a guy puts up his hand and says “Are you saying that democracy is good in and of itself? I said “Yes”. I said “Even if the people that I want to get elected, get defeated, I still would rather have a democratic process and society, even if I lose. Rather than somehow manipulate things in such a way that the guy that I like becomes prime minister”. I said “To me, democracy is something that's about living a particular kind of life. Democracy is something you live rather than something that's given to you on a piece of paper” and the audience just erupted. They couldn't believe how anybody could say that democracy is more than just a method for getting people elected, that is a valuable thing in and of itself. I looked around and I realized that everywhere I went, people, were using the expression “I believe in democracy, but…” It's what came after the “but”, that was important. What came after the “but” was “I don't believe in democracy. I don't think that we can trust the people. I think that experts should have more of a say, in how we deal with this and that problem” or they would say that “there are educated people who are more sensitive and understand what needs to be done than these millions of ignorant individuals”. When you scratch the surface, you find that the arguments they were using against democracy were rehashed, those arguments were already used in ancient Athens by the oligarchy against the demo. So, I find this important, particularly at the time of covid when there was such contempt for the democratic process and all of a sudden everybody was saying that “now is not the time for political debate, no is the time for the experts to tell us what needs to be done”.I think the example of covid is very interesting. You live in Great Britain and I in Sweden, so we have had different experiences because the countries have dealt differently with covid. But one thing that I noticed in Sweden is the experts at Folkhälsomyndigheten, they were the ones in charge. We had some public debate, but in the beginning, you were almost labeled a traitor if you challenged the expert government agency. You had to be subservient, loyal, and quiet, that was your role as a citizen. And those who did not conform to that were very heavily criticized. It didn't just pertain to citizens in the public sphere but also scientists. There were differing views among scientists, and they were not crackpots. These were some of our most-cited scientists in the field, they were experts in epidemiology and associated sciences. But there was no way for them to be heard because of the government agency and they were frowned upon and ridiculed. They weren't put in jail or anything but the social stigma for them was very high. A lot of people who were caught on the wrong side of the argument had a new view of how our democracy works. We should obey and we should not question authority. I think this highlights some of the themes in your book as well. Many people and authority figures say that they like democracy but what they say is that they like the legitimacy that comes with being elected, but they don't like when the citizens raise their voices at other times.– I think that's true, and it was more or less the same situation in Britain and Sweden. It's very strange because I do believe in the expertise. For example, if I have a problem with my heart, I'll go to the best surgeon that I can possibly find, and if I want to know something about how the planet work, I go and talk to a scientist. But there's a difference between the exercise of legitimate expertise concerning their particular domain and the experts, having the role of being political authorities, where they assume the political role of telling us how to live our lives. Moreover, tell us that there is only one way of going forward, that whatever they say about how we live our lives is beyond discussion and beyond debate and I think that's where their anti-democratic ethos comes out. I'm happy to listen to what they're saying. But at end of the day, I'm not a child, you're not a child. We are in a position to discuss, argue, debate, find some ways of making up your mind. We listen to different experts because they don't always agree. When you have a pandemic, one thing we learned from the history of disasters is that very often it's through the specific context within which people live where they can exercise their common sense, where the community can work out what is the best way forward? That is usually the most effective way of limiting the damage that a particular pandemic or disaster causes. I think in that sense there was a very real anti-democratic turn. In Britain, for example, they used the word “covid deniers” and a covid denier wasn't somebody that necessarily said that covid doesn't exist. I mean, I think it exists, I think it's a big problem and I certainly don't want to get it. But the reason why they used the term covid deniers was that it signals that it meant the same thing as a holocaust denier. It was just as bad as denying that the Holocaust existed. There's a kind of a rhetorical trick as a way of stigmatizing and isolating people who raise doubts about these kinds of questions. And as a result of that, what has happened is that a wrong debate was created, and worse still: a lot of people that were stigmatized, that were pushed out from the public conversation, then went to the other extreme. You had a situation where people who felt that they weren't being listened to, began to listen to a lot of these crazy theories, QAnon ideas, and that covid didn't exist. It created a situation where rather than us coming together and struggling to come up with solutions, we created these parallel universes where people felt scared to open their mouths and raise their criticism and self-censorship. It's probably a greater threat to democracy than real censorship.When I read political science in the early 2000s, one definition of populism was that you give simple answers to complex questions, and I then thought that was a great definition, but I don't think that anymore. What you described in the book very well is that it's a charge that's leveled against people who want more influence over politics or who want to re-politicize issues. You show that issues have been depoliticized or technocraticized to take away the possibility from citizens to influence certain issues. When they want to take control or influence those issues and exert their political influence to do that, they are labeled populists. Is that a fair summary of what you say?– It is. I think what I'm trying to argue is that, at the moment, the political establishment in Europe prefers what I call an insulated form of democracy. They insulate their institutions from public pressure, and they call public pressure populism. And the way they insulate is by outsourcing political decision-making to technocratic bodies like the EU, the IMF, or to certain scientific bodies who get to decide a growing proportion of the decisions that are taken. They're quite political. For example, you and I don't have any influence over financial policy anymore. We don't have any influence over the setting of interest rates. We don't have any influence in the way that certain trade policies are decided that affect farmers and employers and all the rest of us. All those things are taken out of our hands. More recently, that has gone into other domains of life, because by medicalizing our lives, by turning ordinary social problems into medical ones, we become even more deprived of debating and discussing and influencing. For me, what populism represents in the 21st century is a demand for voice, a demand to be heard, a demand to be part of the conversation. That's why they are stigmatized. That's why populism is seen as a form of fluoride fascism, it's always announced in a language that's very unrestrained, and which is entirely an attempt to pathologize populism because the last thing you want is a situation where millions and millions of people feel confident enough to raise questions and demand to be part of the discussion.This brings us back to the therapeutic language because you also bring up in your book how you psychologize the people you call populists or the supporters of populism. You give them psychological traits to describe them as sick or dysfunctional in some ways. Then you don't have to deal with them as equals, but rather as people who you must treat in some way. Perhaps it's fitting that Donald Trump received this treatment because he is a very special person, but the psychologists in the United States, they broke their own code of honor that one should not psychologize the president or the presidential candidate, but they made an exception for Donald Trump. They were not treating him as a political figure, but rather as a rambling lunatic. That translated in how you view the voters for such a character and how you view the voters for these right-wing populists, but also a segment of the population that you don't treat as political actors, but rather as some deplorables, if you want to use Hillary Clinton's term.– Yeah, this became very clear in Britain at the time of Brexit, where people that wanted to leave the European Union were described in very unflattering, psychological terms as people that were authoritarian and insecure. A lot of psychological labels were used that suggest that the people that were supporting Brexit were not only psychologically ill but also morally inferior. You have to remember that one of the important things about psychology is that it serves as a medium through which moral judgments are often conveyed. So many make a diagnosis of somebody as someone who's suffering, having an authoritarian personality. That's not just simply a psychological label, it's also a sign of moral inferiority. When you explore how populism itself has been described and very actively discussed by different teams of psychologists, they always use a language that suggests that these people are not as intelligent as people on the other side. That comes up all the time. All these studies suggest that somehow these individuals are emotionally illiterate whilst people who are against populism are more sophisticated emotionally, they claim that they are more able to deal with complex ideas than these simpletons. What psychology does, and the way that it's used, as a political weapon, is it spares people from the burden of having to argue politically. Because what's the point of arguing politically with simple people or those who are psychologically ill who suffer from horrible authoritarian-related diseases, you don't argue with them, you treat them. In many ways that as a Hungarian, as somebody born in Hungary in the Stalinist period, that very much reminds me of the way that they would be treating dissidents. They would send them to centers where psychiatrists would deal with them in very similar ways. Maybe a little bit harsher because you don't get sent to asylums that we did in the Soviet Union, but the impulse of using psychology to destroy you, your political reputation, was very much the same. There's a liberal, I'm not going to name him, but he's one of the most prominent liberal journalist thinkers here in Sweden. During a talk or a debate, he said that “The reason that populists hate us liberals is because we were better than them in school. And do you know what? We're still better than you are in school”. It's saying that it's a question of IQ. I'm not doubting that he's a smart guy, but I do think that he underestimates his opponents and it's very condescending. You also bring up that rationality and reason are used as a preserve for a certain class of people, and you trace this back through history that you have this philosopher class who can reason, able to tackle complex issues, and who can be rational. The masses, the public, they aren't able, and they are dangerous so you should not give them too much responsibility because that can go awry.– Yeah, I mean ever since the Greeks when they used to argue that demagogues could easily sway the masses, they were too stupid to think for themselves, to the point at which when mass reading began and they used to argue that we shouldn't give books to ordinary people because they would misinterpret them, all the way to arguing that advertisers on television are so strong and the people are so easily manipulated that these poor fools go out and buy everything that they are told, to now where we argue that social media can encourage people to do the opposite of what is in their interest. There's always the assumption that there are these forces above us, the media, which can manipulate the people who haven't got the capacity, to think for themselves. There are very few important philosophers in the western tradition that challenge this. One of the first political thinkers that questioned this kind of representation was Niccolo Machiavelli. He wrote about what he called “the wisdom of the masses”, and he made the point that although the prince can be very smart and very intelligent, like your friend, the liberal thinker in Sweden, at the end of the day, the wisdom of the masses far outweighs the wisdom of that individual. Because the collective experience of people, who see what everyday life is like, provides valuable insights about the way that the world works. As it happens, from history, the really smart people are not necessarily the ones that are on top. They are people who try to struggle to better themselves and to make their own made from below and that's why you will find that in most European countries, the ruling establishment gets refreshed time and time again by the smart people from below. It's the experience of being part of the people and forcing yourself to understand that but to make your way out of that, it becomes something else. That to me is the most important vehicle, the medium, for really gaining that wisdom and intelligence. It's not the smart liberal of smart experts but it's a more complex dynamic that we're talking about.There's a book by Martin Gurri called The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. It has a similar theme to your book and one of the things that he says, is that because of social media and the internet, the establishment in a lot of countries, they are losing their power to control the information. If we take covid for example, if it were 30 years ago, perhaps when the experts said that “this is the way to do it”, people would have had a hard time getting other kinds of information. But now you see how other countries are dealing with it and you see that there is a lot of disagreement within the expert community, all over the world, and you can immediately access that. You have the Swedish experts and the government agency. They are more easily challenged by facts from other experts or viewpoints, and you can contrast how Sweden is dealing with it or Great Britain with how Australia, New Zealand, or the United States. The establishment feels much more under threat today. One of the ways that they're dealing with it is to insulate themselves more. One incident that's famous in Great Britain is when Gordon Brown around some election was talking to regular people and an old lady voiced her concern about immigration, and then he got into his car and he forgot to switch his mic off and he said: “Who put me in front of that bigoted woman”. I think Gordon Brown expressed something that's expressed in secret. You have to control the contact with the public because you're afraid of the challenges from the public. If you go back 100 years, you had mass movements and the politicians were the figureheads of mass movements to a larger degree. Now they are more afraid of the public, they're afraid of the voters. One thing you notice on Twitter with journalists is that they sort of brag about the hate they receive from readers, or the stupid readers and they take screenshots of the stupidity of ordinary readers. It's something you can see in the establishment. I came out with a book called Genusdoktrinen (or The Gender Doctrine) together with Anna-Karin Wyndham. Because it was not vetted through a peer-review process, they had internal seminars in gender studies about our book, but they didn't invite us because we were outsiders. So you have this outsider-insider dynamic that Martin Gurri brings up in his book, that there is a heightened conflict between the establishment and the public.– In my new book that comes out next month, I talk about this. I'm trying to understand what it is that binds together the kind of people you're describing. Unlike in previous times, it's not a public ideology. It's not liberalism, it's not conservatism, it's not socialism. Those things barely exist. In my book, I call it an ideology without a name. It's a core where they know exactly know what the problems are. They more or less react in the same kind of way. When you have a dinner party in Silicon Valley, the guy from Netflix and the guy from Apple and the politician from Washington, all can be more or less reliant to respond to a political problem in the same kind of way. This sensibility, “We are different from them”, a sense of distinction is best expressed in the English language by the term “awareness”. “We are here to raise your awareness”. When they say that, what they mean is “We want you to think the way we think because we know better than you do what is in your interest and what's in everybody else's interest”. It's a situation where their public face is always “I'm going to raise your awareness”, but their private face is talking in a very contemptuous way about ordinary people. In their minds, these people are scum and white trash. They're people who are by definition racist or homophobic. They're not worth talking to or taken seriously. Therefore, their strategy at the moment, to strengthen their position, is to bypass the people and to go into the schools where you have very young children, five, six seven, eight-year-olds and directly tried to socialize them, almost indoctrinate them. This is something that you can already see signs of in Sweden, a long time ago in the interwar period. Then the social democratic government, the Myrdals, people began to introduce this kind of education in the nurseries and primary education. But that was nothing compared to what you're getting now, and I think that's the way that they're trying to create a base of support to overcome the isolation that the experience.They lowered the age for mandatory schooling in Sweden, to six years old. Perhaps it's no surprise that the liberal party and left-wing parties want to lower it even further. Some are discussing, should we lower it to two years old, three years old for mandatory schooling because you have to start early if you're going to be able to influence their minds. And you have to separate the child from the family so the old way of thinking that the parents who are not educated enough in the ways of thinking, or they belong to an older mindset, should not influence their children too much because then they won't have this new mindset we need them to have.– This is my issue at the moment because in many respects the big political battle in our societies is over how we socialize children. It's not just about bringing kids up, it's what kind of world we want to live in. I'm much older than you are but already 10, 15 years ago, when my son was in school, we used to laugh about it because my wife and I would debrief him about what he was learning. We used to say “This is what the Furedis think, this is what they think in school”. So, about every issue we would give a different point of view because that was the way we felt. We could make sure that he remained on our side rather than on the side of the stuff that they were getting from their teachers to almost subvert the educational process because he was getting so much, really horrible stuff that he was being taught. That was 15 years ago, now, it's far worse. Now, you have systematic programs of indoctrination in British schools where for example, just yesterday, the Scottish government introduced a program of making white children feel guilty about being white. They're learning about white fragility, they're learning about the importance of understanding that they have a privilege that dominates our whole life. And if a five, six-year-old child happens to say “I don't agree”, they will shoot that child down. I've got lots of examples of parents who say, their seven-year-old girl, started crying when she was being made feeling guilty for being white. And the teacher just treats her like a mature adult and starts getting involved in an argument. That's the kind of world that we live in. What begins in the nurseries and schools can be directly connected to the way that different types of establishments are attempting to stabilize their own rule and create a degree of legitimacy for themselves.This will play out in all societies. What you have in the United States, for example. Christopher Rufo is organizing the resistance towards critical race theory, that if you're white you should be aware of your privilege and your position of power and be made to feel guilty. If you're black, then you should be afraid because, at any time, the cops can come and kill you. That's an actual example where a biracial child, viewed as black, came home to his parents and he was afraid. He was scared of his grandparents on his mother's side who was white because he thought they were racists. So he was very conflicted, and that's like a seven-year-old. They have introduced laws in some states in the United States and Christopher Rufo helped with the legislation to fight this. Parents all over the United States are organizing to try to get those theories away from their schools but it's an ongoing struggle. It's not evident which side will win. When the printing press came around and that enabled the protestant awakening that you could translate the Bible, and you could produce the Bible in local languages, and you could put the Bible in the hand of ordinary people, and you did not have to have the priest to tell you what was in the Bible. You could read the Bible for yourself and make up your mind. This was fought by the Catholic church. This is a very simplified version of history but now we have something similar where people don't have to rely on one or two-state channels on TV, one or two or three big newspapers. They don't trust authority blindly anymore and they can make up their minds. And then you have the establishment reacting by labeling what they find as abhorrent or morally dubious. They label that as populist and they fight that and they have to fight that to stay in power. I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but on the ground level, I think this is an ongoing struggle between the populists on the left and on the right against the establishment.– Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in what you say. I mean, the unfortunate thing is, is that when you have the protestant awakening and in places like Denmark and Sweden, through the Lutheran Church, they actually encouraged people to learn how to read and they gave people the Bible and they trusted them to read the Bible. Then, you had a powerful movement that was for the good in terms of its impact upon cultural, moral, and political life. At the moment, unfortunately, what we have is a similar war being fought out, but the resources and the powers are on the wrong side. People like me and others are continually forced to react rather than initiate. And that's almost the very opposite to what happened with the protestant awakening where they were the ones that had the momentum. Now, what I call the culture war is being fought out on a terrain, not of our own making and we don't have yet a sufficiently serious mature movement to be able to hold the fort. We have our groups of individuals here and they're reacting. And unfortunately, history shows that when you react it's never as powerful as when you initiate. For me, the key thing then becomes “How can we initiate the movement?” That's why Brexit was so important because with Brexit you had an example of people themselves initiating a movement. A movement that was seen as a joke, that was treated with contempt but had sufficient momentum to be able to withstand all the powerful pressures from everywhere to continue on and win. The Brexit movement left a legacy. Britain is no longer what it was because there are a lot of people around who before would have never imagined that they had a role to play in public life, who now take a different view. What we need now does not have to be Brexit or leaving the European Union, it's got to be a movement where people have got the confidence to be able to take matters into their own hands and to follow their intuition and their instinct. I think that's not to me, seems to be the challenge of our times.For the first time in our political history in Sweden, the Prime Minister had a vote of no confidence and was forced out of office. Then he came back. What happened was that the left-wing party, the former communist party, made good of a threat that they had made, “If you introduce market rates in the housing market, then we will give a no-confidence vote”. When they made similar threats historically, the social democrats have always been able to think that, okay, but they must choose if it's better with the social democrats in power or with the right-wing government in power. And the left-wing party has always been sort of subservient to the social democrats. But now a new generation has taken over the left-wing party and they united with the right-wing opposition and ousted the Prime Minister. Then he had to make some deals with the left-wing party to be able to come back. The establishment is still there, but it was sort of a moment where a lot of people, even on the right-wing, felt reinvigorated which is sort of strange because of course a lot of people on the right have less in common with the left-wing party and their leadership than they do with the social democrats, but they politicized an issue that the social democrats and their liberal collaborators said that “This is not a political issue. This is just an expert issue for the market”. And the left-wing party said that “No, we won't accept that. If you do that, that's a red line” and they made good on the threat. A lot of issues are framed as forces of nature, this is not something that we can do anything about, this is just something that we must accept. And then the left-wing party said “No, we won't accept it”. And of course, they were labeled populists by a lot of people and maybe they were but then I would say that's something good.– What you are saying is that now, the conventional distinction between left and right, are not as obvious as they were in the past. We live in a very fluid situation where the inner coherence of both sides of the ideological spectrum, has somehow become more diffuse. And therefore, at the end of the day, the question becomes where you stand in this kind of conflict that we have between society, the public, and the different kinds of institutions that have been created since the post-war period. They can only exist if democracy is constrained. To that extent, what happened in Sweden, that moment is not unlike what happened with the yellow vest movement in France and elsewhere, where often you find yourself with very strange allies, people that you never imagined anything in common with. Because at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, you have to make a decision, what's more important: Democracy or being very pragmatic and realistic, and just carrying on the same way.I'm going to let you go soon. But you mentioned that you're coming out with a new book, what's the title of that book? And what's the main thesis of the book?It's called 100 Years of Identity Crisis. The culture War Over Socialization. The book is an attempt by me to explain the origins of the culture wars, that we experience, which began about a hundred years ago and to trace how it evolved to the present day. What I argue in the book is that contrary to what people think, the big conflicts about race, gender, the nation, sovereignty, about all these issues that we've been discussing, are conflicts that are worked out in the first instance, in the area of socialization. Because it's through socialization that a society determines, what it thinks is good and what it thinks it's bad, the values that we live by are the ones that are transmitted to young people. One of the things that I point out, is that over the last five generations, the values that are dominant today have become normalized. The values that used to be countercultural in the 1960s are now the dominant norms and it's people like you and me, who for example stand up for any of the enlightenment values and stand up for many of the games of western civilization. People like you and me are the countercultural, because in many ways, what we're arguing goes against the grain of the dominant culture. So the book tries to explain how it began, what it really means, and the issues at stake.I'm really looking forward to reading that one as well. Thank you so much, Frank Furedi for being a part of this podcast!– Thank you very much, Ivar!Utgivaren ansvarar inte för kommentarsfältet. (Myndigheten för press, radio och tv (MPRT) vill att jag skriver ovanstående för att visa att det inte är jag, utan den som kommenterar, som ansvarar för innehållet i det som skrivs i kommentarsfältet.) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ivararpi.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Fibwick and Broletariat discuss the two anti-capital articles, “Against Democracy” and “Walking The Dog”. We discuss the nature of principle vs tactics in decision making process for communists, and Fibwick's understanding of The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky JOIN THE BOOKCLUB https://discord.gg/SYVz4Zg7jh Our publication https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/ Walking The Dog https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/walking-the-dog/ Against Democracy https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/against-democracy/ Join the bookclub for Mike's Articles https://discord.gg/SYVz4Zg7jh John Reed's 10 Days That Shook The World https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1919/10days/10days/

Three messages in the weekend's BEL Mailbag. Later in the show, Bob shares the results of a book search by Valerie in Texas, one of our associate producers, who helped to falsify the last bit of alleged evidence for a quote about Noah's Ark from a long-time Nat'l Geographic editor (and son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell). Then, with great excitement, Bob shares the latest bullet added to rsr.org/evidence for the short-lived history of mankind, an observation based on Abraham marrying his sister Sarah without violating any taboo and without fear of inbred harm to any children. The show begins though with, "My name is Mark Carroll. I'm a long time listener from Idaho. The company I work for recently adopted a new covid policy which discriminates against those who haven't had the covid vaccine. I filed for a religious accommodation based on the fact that the vaccines are made with or developed with aborted babies' cloned cells. I believe like you do Bob that we're all created in God's image and that no man has the right to murder a baby and cannibalize it for their own utilitarian purposes. I want nothing to do with the slaughter of the innocent. My HR representative denied my request and then threatened me with a company-wide vaccine mandate. I am asking for your assistance in bringing this to the public's attention.  We have 110 people working here and many of them feel the same way I do. Please contact me. I can provide more information and would greatly appreciate any help offered." REPLY: "Mark, so sorry you are going through this. My own mom, Connie, just was effectively uninvited from visiting her family in New Jersey this weekend. Oh well! So, can I interview you about your situation on Tuesday? Thanks so much for writing! In Christ, Bob Enyart" REPLY: "I would love to be on your show but cannot due to fear of retaliation from the company. I just don't know what to do or where to go. I've been working there for 18 years. I've been praying a lot asking God for guidance. I thank you for your response. Again, I'm a long-time listener." - Mankind's 900-year lifespan suddenly decreased after the flood in a non-random exponential decay when the previous equilibrium rapidly fell to today's life expectancy. - Like for Eve's children and countless of their descendants, Abraham could be blessed marrying his own sister (Sarah was his half-sister). God didn't prohibit sibling marriage until Moses (three generations beyond the Lifespan graph, right). Even though the human genome had been deteriorating since the Fall, it wasn't until the Exodus that that procreation by close relatives became dangerous for their offspring. For both parents, by then, would likely possess some of the same damaged genes. Day-age and other old-earth camps tend to reject the global flood. Many of the advocates of such things hold to a chronology that has human beings existing for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years before Abraham. Thus if there were no global flood and mankind had existed for eons, sibling marriage would have become dangerous tens or hundreds of thousands of years before Moses. Abraham's relationship, rather than being presented matter-of-factly as it is, would generate fear of inbred harm to his descendants. Sibling marriage would have been taboo long before any flood. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Don't play the short game and don't win a battle at the cost of the war. Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips is a hero. His ADF Christian-liberties attorneys are fools, sending the message that the law compels 99.9% of all professionals to promote homosexuality if paid to do so, as long as they're not among the 0.1% who are artists or speech vendors. Hence, by their shortsighted "artistic/free speech" defense, a printer or a house painter can be compelled to use their labors to promote homos. Bob also shared a canceled rock star's fabulous quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Live Not By Lies, that an artist, etc., shouldn't be proud of his "progressive" views, but instead, "Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and kept warm." Then Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett (when partnered with Neil Gorsuch aka the Braugh, Abett & Nuch) voting to uphold socialist Obamacare just affirms BEL's 30-years and running Republican Judicial kgov.com/Crisis warning. And finally, Bob promo'd a radio segment for later this week about the conservative WND's "best argument", which is actually an anti-argument, for why people need guns. (Hint: God gives us authority to arm ourselves for self-defense, not to be able to take down fighter jets. And see AmericanRTL.org/vigilante-worksheet.) Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Bob Enyart interviews Laura Baigert, the journalist who broke the story that an Atlanta election official admitted some missing "chain of custody" documentation for mail-in ballots. Since the Star News published the story, Georgia Public Broadcasting claims to have received the custody documentation and analyzed (with miraculous speed) the 1500+ files, concluding that none of the relevant records are missing. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Black man shoots BLM activist Sasha Johnson in the head. Apparently, no harm no foul, for it's racist even to report black-on-black crime. Bob Enyart also discusses why the Apostle Paul included the obvious statements about government in Romans 13, and it was to prevent a BLM-type syndrome from metastasizing within the church. Finally, we're hoping audience-favorite caller Johnnie from Compton will return to BEL within a week to discuss growing up black in a BLM George Floyd world.  Today's Resource: Paul's Epistle to the Romans Romans, the greatest theological treatise ever written, answers: Is there proof for God’s existence? What can be known of God apart from the Bible? Are men born with a knowledge of God? Are men basically good or basically evil? What role will a man's conscience play on Judgment Day? Why does God condemn sexual immorality including homosexuality? Why do we blame Adam more than Eve? Who is Jesus Christ? Is there any hope for the man who has never heard the Gospel? Did God's choosing of Israel actually benefit the Jews? Is the world still under the law? Are Christians under the law? Why did God give Abraham two covenants, the first of grace, and the second of works?  Get all three parts of Bob's study on Paul's epistle to the Romans, available as an MP3-CD set, or as an audio download!  Secondary Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

If Black Lives Matter (A.K.A. Burn Loot Murder) activists are actually afraid of the police, they have an odd way of showing it. Today, D. Enyart echoes a few points from Matt Walsh about BLM before going on a beautiful rant against teachers in America and shares a few stories about his interaction in the public schools. Follow Dominic on Parler, Instagram and YouTube! Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Political division and polarization in America have reached a fever pitch. Civic discourse has become a landscape nearly devoid of the intellectual virtues.  And in the midst of this, we still make our decisions in a largely democratic fashion where hardly anyone actually is informed on any important topics.  Could these negative phenomena be the result of a more systemic problem in how we govern ourselves - that is, is democracy itself to blame? Our guest Dr. Jason Brennan, professor at Georgetown University, explores alternatives to democracy that may in fact produce more of the good results we actually care about.  We discuss the traditional reasons democracy has been praised and supported, and examine ways it falls short, and notable alternatives to it.  We closely look at epistocracy, or rule by the knowers, that perhaps the most informed among us should have the greatest say in policy. For a more detailed treatment, check out Jason's book Against Democracy anywhere books are sold. Stay Curious!

Using the NBA's LeBron James and Steph Curry as the figures in his morality tale, Bob discusses the conservatives ill-equipped "process" approach to a moral question. Then Bob draws from Jordan Peterson 2019 audio and the 1841 classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", to explain and condemn the current covid, BLM, socialist, and fake news madness. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Chair and professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at the McDonough School of Business. He specializes in political philosophy and applied ethics. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0:00 – Quote from “Against Democracy” 0:44 – What is political philosophy, and why should people care? 1:32 – What is the moral parity thesis? 3:24 – The constrained vision – limited knowledge 7:50 – What about peaceful change and reform? 10:04 – What is government? 12:03 – Authority and legitimacy 14:25 – Why do smart, well-intended people disagree? 19:43 – Positive vs. Negative rights 20:55 – What does “pro tanto” mean? 22:40 – Social contract theory 28:13 – Why are the vast majority ignorant about politics? 33:40 – Should we still value democracy as inherently moral? 36:30 – Moral limits of markets 44:07 – Without appealing to ‘god', why is murder wrong? 50:08 – A Political Philosopher hosts the POTUS debate! 52:00 – Does morality only exist in a social setting? 54:26 – Most important thing you learned from the works of…… 54:26 – Michael Huemer 56:25 – Bryan Caplan 58:07 – John Hasnas 59:08 – John Tomasi 1:00:32 – David Schmidtz ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you find value in the content, please consider donating to my PayPal KeithKnight590@gmail.com LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone:b BitChute: KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone https://www.bitchute.com/channel/keithknightdonttreadonanyone/ Minds: https://www.minds.com/KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone/ MeWe: mewe.com/i/keithknight25 Flote: https://flote.app/VoluntaryistKeith Gab: https://gab.com/Voluntarykeith Twitter: @an_capitalist The Libertarian Institute: https://libertarianinstitute.org/dont-tread-on-anyone/ One Great Work Network: https://www.onegreatworknetwork.com/keith-knight

If you're joining us from the KLTT broadcast, start at 28:30, and if you're looking for the normal Theology Thursday broadcast, that can be found here.   On our Monday program titled with the state's contradictory term, "Required Guidelines", we aired the ten-minute call from the local health department lodging a "mask complaint" against Denver Bible Church. Today, Bob reads the letter by Brad Bergford, one of our attorneys, to the Jeffco Department of Health. On today's program, as listed at kgov.com/about, Bob outlines BEL's government resources including: God’s criminal justice system, God's form of government, our proposed Constitution for America and its Biblical Apologetic, the political spectrums and their charts (see below), gun rights, taxation, the emancipation proclamation, immigration and illegal immigration, terrorism, the Bible’s command for Christians to judge, on patents, and on the New Testament’s support for capital punishment. And we're $2050 toward our $50,000 telethon goal. Please help if you can at store.kgov.com or call us at 1-800-8Enyart. Aslo consider purchasing...   Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)   * Popular Conservative and Liberal/Leftist Political Spectrums are Wrong: (from kgov.com/political-spectrum) Because you've made it to a web page like this one, that tells us that regardless of your perspective, you'll enjoy looking at these three contrasting spectrum charts, liberal (economics & extremes), conservative (size), and true (based upon authority flow). First, the left-wing view... Next, the typical and uninsightful conservative view... And finally, the correct understanding of the political spectrum, which is based on the direction of the flow of authority...      

If democracy is so great why does it keep producing such terrible results? Nick Cohen of The Observer talks to Georgetown University political philosopher Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy, about what it means when sweeping democratic mandates arise from underinformed voters. Do people really vote on the basis of policy or simply to be part of the gang? Should you have to pass a test before you can vote? Would Jason criticise our system in front of a Belorussian protestor? And what can Iron Maiden teach us about what's wrong with democracy?“A key problem is, the average voter basically knows nothing about politics…”“For most people, the act of voting is a little like kicking your dog because you've had a bad day at work.”“The average citizen in a democracy is much more authoritarian than the societies they live in. What's checking them is the elites.” “Why is it so good to live in liberal democracies? Is it because they're democracies – or because they're liberal?”“Voters aren't stupid. It's more a question of, Is it even worth my while for me to know this stuff?” Presented by Nick Cohen. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofrenijevic. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After a week of chaos caused by his own actions, President Trump signed the COVID relief bill along with the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress with bipartisan support. But his rash actions only compounded the grief and anguish of millions caused by months of delays in congress. Georgetown University professor Jason Brennan asserts in his book, Against Democracy, that incompetent elected leaders are the only possible result when the electorate, itself, is incompetent. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles looks at the implications of Professor Brennan’s assertion and also why those same supposedly incompetent people have created an economic miracle in America’s free market economy.

The new year approaches, marking an end to a truly unexpected trip around the sun. This week, On the Media reflects on our 2020 coverage, from the pandemic to the global uprising to the rise of the anti-majoritarian right.  With excerpts from: The Virality of Virality, January 31, 2020 Epidemic Voyeurs No More, February 28, 2020 Infectious Diseases Show Societies Who They Really Are, March 6, 2020 Why The Toilet Paper Shortage Makes More Sense Than You Think, April 10, 2020 Is The Pandemic Making Us Numb To One Another's Pain?, December 11, 2020 Is This 'Unrest' or an 'Uprising'?, June 5, 2020 Why Activists Are Demanding That Cities "Defund the Police", June 12, 2020 Movements, Sanitized In Hindsight, June 19, 2020 Imprecision 2020, November 5, 2020 They Prepared for War With Antifa. Antifa Never Came., June 12, 2020 With #SaveTheChildren Rallies, QAnon Sneaks Into The Offline World, August 26, 2020 The Ancient Heresy That Helps Us Understand QAnon, November 20, 2020 The Right's Long History of Ignoring the Will of the People, November 6, 2020 Against Democracy, October 9, 2020

* Cartoon Justice: Bob’s  guest host Doug McBurney brings you the disgusting story of New Yorker cartoonist Danny Shanahan and the child porn on his computer. * A Premier Sex Harassment Organization: Hear how sexual harassment and gross immorality is the coin of the realm in the highest reaches of power at the FBI. * Protestant Gym: Listen in to a blistering review of evangelical obeisance to the anti-Christian dictates of power mad COVID tyrants, especially when compared to the courage of Belmawr NJ gym owners Frank Trumbetti and Ian Smith. * To Live & Die in LA: LA Mayor Eric Garcetti steps over the bodies of the tens of thousands of innocent children murdered during his tenure to proclaim COVID as the “greatest threat to life” LA has ever seen. * The Dead Zone: Your host elaborates on his shopping/mask encounter while flagrantly defying the stay at home order, and how the violation became a means to plant a seed in the brain-dead mind of a clerk at the auto parts store. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

This special edition of Real Science Radio brings to our creation/evolution listeners Bob Enyart Live's recent interview of Joe Oltmann, the Denver businessman who set out to expose Antifa journalists and ended up finding Dominion Voting Systems' heavy Antifa connection. Attorney Sidney Powell mentions Joe Oltmann in her election lawsuits filed in federal courts in Georgia and Michigan including that, "Dominion altered its website [by removing Eric Coomer] after Colorado resident Joe Oltmann disclosed" Coomer's relationship with "domestic terrorist organization Antifa." A prosecutor presents means, motive, and opportunity in a criminal case. A few weeks ago RSR interviewed a top data security analyst on the atrocious security flaws in Dominion Voting Systems. That presented the means. Then, opportunity was everywhere as documented even by media reports and especially hundreds of eye-witness affidavits. Today's program demonstrates the motive behind Dominion's role in the extensive 2020 election fraud. Also, Bob gives an update on the latest victory in his federal lawsuit against the State of Colorado for their unjust coronavirus restrictions (including describing the state's 10-Circuit filing that lists churches next to trash collectors). Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

This special edition of Real Science Radio brings to our creation/evolution listeners Bob Enyart Live's recent interview of Joe Oltmann, the Denver businessman who set out to expose Antifa journalists and ended up finding Dominion Voting Systems' heavy Antifa connection. Attorney Sidney Powell mentions Joe Oltmann in her election lawsuits filed in federal courts in Georgia and Michigan including that, "Dominion altered its website [by removing Eric Coomer] after Colorado resident Joe Oltmann disclosed" Coomer's relationship with "domestic terrorist organization Antifa." A prosecutor presents means, motive, and opportunity in a criminal case. A few weeks ago RSR interviewed a top data security analyst on the atrocious security flaws in Dominion Voting Systems. That presented the means. Then, opportunity was everywhere as documented even by media reports and especially hundreds of eye-witness affidavits. Today's program demonstrates the motive behind Dominion's role in the extensive 2020 election fraud. Also, Bob gives an update on the latest victory in his federal lawsuit against the State of Colorado for their unjust coronavirus restrictions (including describing the state's 10-Circuit filing that lists churches next to trash collectors). Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

  Thirty-five shoppers in Costco, yesterday, all without masks. How'd that happen? Bob Enyart and Nathan from Ohio discuss what happened in a local Costco. The guys discuss the downside to fighting the coronavirus with onerous regulations. And then their conversation turns to the "working retreat" this past weekend in Winter Park up in the Rocky Mountains where ten men met to work on promoting the Christian doctrine that the future is not settled but open because God is alive, eternally free, and inexhaustibly creative. Although this undeniable truth is virtual heresy to many Calvinist and Arminian theologians, regardless, open theists affirm the obvious, that God is able to think new thoughts. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Bob Enyart interviews Joe Oltmann, the successful businessman who set out to expose Antifa journalists and ended up exposing Dominion Voting Systems' heavy Antifa connection. Famed attorney Sidney Powell mentions Joe Oltmann by name in her election lawsuits filed in federal courts in Georgia and Michigan including that, "Dominion altered its website [by removing Coomer] after Colorado resident Joe Oltmann disclosed" Eric Coomer's relationship with "domestic terrorist organization Antifa." A prosecutor presents means, motive, and opportunity in a criminal case. Two weeks ago we interviewed a top data security analyst on the atrocious security flaws in Dominion Voting Systems. That presented the means. Then, opportunity was everywhere as documented even by media reports and especially hundreds of eye-witness affidavits. Today's program demonstrates motive behind Dominion's role in the extensive 2020 election fraud.   Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Professor of sociology at the University of Kent https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Under-Siege-Dont-Them/dp/1789046289/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Democracy+Under+Siege&qid=1606774616&s=books&sr=1-1 -- 0:16 - What is Democracy, and why is it moral? 1:54 - Is mass ignorance an argument against democracy? 4:09 - “Democracy is mob rule” 5:17 - “How can you delegate rights you don't have?” 7:25 - Rational ignorance - Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter 10:36 - Against Democracy by Jason Brennan 12:49 - Democracy blurs potential “class-consciousness” 16:13 - The problem is not nobility, but the double standard of statism 18:33 - Owners v. temporary caretakers 22:04 - Popularity contests result in perversions of truth, justice, & beauty 24:13 - Do government schools bias the minds of the citizens in favor of the government? 27:33 - “Democracy makes accountability impossible” 30:31 - Do you support world democracy? 33:01 - Voluntary democracy v. involuntary democracy - Worker cooperatives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives 34:57 - Are “American values” unique? 38:00 - Double standards when it comes to the west 41:49 - How can I become an informed voter / democratic participant 45:11 - Major takeaways from the work of Edward Bernays 47:14 - The thesis of How Fear Works 50:17 - Book recommendations to think logically with regards to fear? 53:10 - Final message about democracy

Interview with Jason Brennan, author of The Ethics of Voting and Against Democracy, on why we don't have a duty to vote, and it might even be a mistake for some of us to vote.

Bob Enyart reports, BEL style, on the lawsuits exposing widespread election fraud. How do I hate thee, let me count the ways. When the Democrats push us to defend the Republicans, we hate them even more! Bob first reads his reply to Misty, a Canadian pro-abortion leftist, who was incensed after learning that Bob despised her. (And though Bob does not have exhaustive foreknowledge, in truth, he despised her even before he had ever heard of her.) Then we aired the 15-second Fox News clip of devil anchor Sandra Smith reversing the We Report, You Decide to We Report You Shut Your Face. And just before alleging election fraud, in the extreme, against the Democrats, Bob explained why he really hates the Democrats for pushing him to defend the Republicans, when the righteous indignation of the Republicans against the Dems for not following the Constitution is itself completely fraudulent. (That is, the Republicans UTTERLY REJECT and themselves ignore the Constitution, especially at Articles vi and xiii.) Bob then gets to the 2020 election fraud as per decades of systematic Democrat corruption. * VeggieTales in 2008 Predicted the 2020 Election: * The Constitution is Unconstitutional: From kgov.com/unconstitutional... America has three primary founding documents, the Declaration and its two Constitutions, the Articles of Confederation from 1781 and the current U.S. Constitution from 1789. The current Constitution is itself unconstitutional, having violated the preamble, Article VI, Article XIII, and the postscript of the Articles of Confederation (1781). The Articles of Confederation Nov. 15, 1777 ratified 1 March 1781 Preamble: Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Article I. The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America". Article XIII. Every State shall abide by the determination of the United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State. Article VI. … No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purposes for which the same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue. Postscript: And that the Articles thereof shall be inviolably observed by the States we respectively represent, and that the Union shall be perpetual. Ratification: Agreed to by Congress 15 November 1777 In force after ratification by Maryland, 1 March 1781. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)  

Bob Enyart shares an encouraging story about a homosexual who we have prayed for and witnessed to, on and off, over the last 30 years of this broadcast. First though, Bob psychoanalyzes CNN to get behind their lies and into their heads. And then... speaking of CNN, regarding election fraud, Bob explains how it is that there are no consequences to the campaign, the candidate, and the party for stealing votes. And finally, for those who don't mind wasting just a bit of time, like by rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, Bob discusses under what circumstances such cheating should result, as in sports, in forfeiting the race. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Bevelyn in Denver 2018In D.C. last night our dear friend Bevelyn Beatty and others went to the aid of a man they feared was about to be attacked by three youths. The Black Lives Matter teenagers turned on the good Samaritans and they stabbed Bevelyn three times. Blood was everywhere and in the hospital Beatty learned that they pierced her liver and that she had a collapsed lung. Please pray for Bevelyn, for her attackers, and for our nation. * Hero Broadcasts: - Bevelyn of Chaz; Bevelyn of Edmee fame; Bevelyn of Ken & Joe fame - Two (Awesome) Black Gals Get Ken Scott Charged with a Crime - Jo Scott on Edmee & Bevelyn & the Ironic MacArthur Win - Bevelyn in the Hospital Stabbed in Brutal DC Attack Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Bob Enyart shares Pastor John Piper's four criticisms of Donald Trump, the reasons he gave for why he will not vote for him. And he had already laid out his case against Joe Biden's immorality and socialism. So there you have it. Except that Bob then compares Piper's four to BEL's half-a-dozen Trump bullets laying out the far more serious case regarding Donald Trump. By the end of the program Bob realized he would have to postpone until tomorrow his summary of The Sexual Holocaust, the message of one of BEL's geneticist heroes, Dr. John Sanford, still working hard but retired from Cornell University. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

After last week's Ginsburg, Barrett, & Billy Graham all meet the DOCTA, and Wednesday's important but weakly titled, The DOCTA at the Debate, today Bob leaves no room for doubt. The DOCTA was at the debate! And, the prognosis is bad. Very bad. Trump was basically asked, point blank, Aren't you trying to end abortion? And his obviously sincere and honest answer was, No, of course not. Why would you even say that? Hear from the debate the brief audio clip for yourself. It airs at the very beginning of today's program. And then you may want to check out AmericanRTL.org/constitution and kgov.com/republican-judicial-crisis. Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

Bob Enyart says, "We told you so." He reads our July 2005 press release warning Christian leaders to drop their support for the known child-killer John Roberts. Now, after promoting the aggressive homosexual agenda, and Obamacare, and wildly expanding immoral and insane transexual "rights", today he open voted in favor of the abortionist. Seems like of a hundred conservative talk shows and another hundred pro-life Christian organizations, only BEL warned Christians back in 2005 of what John Roberts said in his 2003 D.C. Circuit Court confirmation hearing, that: “Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land. ... There's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.” Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.) * Hollywood Star Ashley Johnson in ID Film post-show note: Super successful actress Ashley Johnson (The Help, The Avengers, lead voice actor in the top video games), also appeared in Alleged about about the Scopes Monkey Trial produced and written by long-time RSR friend Fred Foote. Just click to watch Alleged for free on Prime Video or to get the DVD!

Today's public service pandemic program is brought to you by Crawford Broadcasting continuing Real Science Radio's series on how we got here, to this pandemic and shut down, why now and never before, and on today's program,  simple test that you can administer at home, for whether or not you, yourself, are correct if you claim that you would never have shut down the economy. And secondly, beginning at 15 minutes into today's program, what are the relevant just principles of governance that governments should adhere to when considering whether or not to battle a disease.Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

(The transcript of today's important program appears just below and you may want to check out next week's Part 2.) Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart takes lessons from the founder of the discipline of praxeology, as it's been called by Ludwig von Mises, the past leader of the Austrian School of Economics. Taking brilliant insights from von Mises, and working them within the context of a biblical Christian worldview, gives stunning insights into why, just now and unlike ever before, the world has shut down to fight a pandemic. Good for the mind. Great for the soul.   Today's Resource: God's Principles of Government. Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.) * Transcript of Today's Program:  As a public service for the COVID-19 pandemic and brought to you by the Crawford family of radio stations, welcoming new RSR listeners in Portland and San Francisco, today we'll present an overview of the coronavirus pandemic. How we got here, where we are at, and what this global experience portends for the future. And we'll rebut a few conspiracy theories and hopefully mitigate some misplaced anger. Real Science Radio has long run as a weekly Bible-based science program out of Denver and during the pandemic its been made available to various Crawford Broadcasting stations. Today, we include the soft science of praxeology, as Ludwig von Mises called it. Von Mises was the recognized leader of what is called the Austrian School, or the more conservative school, of Economics. For RSR to understand what a virus is and how it spreads requires interviewing scientists, like we've done in this series. Audience favorite molecular biologist Kevin Anderson, and world renowned scientists like biochemist Michael Behe and synthetic chemist James Tour and his nanoprobe device, remember that from last week, like a guided missile, seeks out pathogens, attaches and drills into them at three million RPMs, three million revolutions per minute, to destroy them! Yes, many brilliant scientists including those among the most successful in the world, like Dr. James Tour, reject secular origins and trust in Jesus Christ as savior and in the Scriptures as God's Word. But if you want to understand how the world, including our own government, got to this point of near-global extended quarantine, vast economic shut down, and millions of jobs lost, and likely, tens of thousands of failed businesses with employers who will no longer and never again provide jobs for others, these questions fall into the domain, not only of economics, but into the larger realm, of what Von Mises called praxeology, for the study of Human Action. Hence, Mises' masterpiece, which I highly recommend though it was quite a slog to get through it, at a thousand pages, his magnum opus, titled, Human Action. The mass shut down as an early response to a growing worldwide outbreak was bound to happen, eventually. Like a Calvinist who gets a broken leg and, by his theology, believed that this was decreed from eternity past, breaks his leg and says, "Boy, I'm glad that's over with", right, believing that it was unavoidable. Well, about this COVID pandemic, I'm not making any kind of theological argument; not at all. I'm making a praxeological argument, that eventually in human history, a shutdown like this was unavoidably coming, and now that it's here, we can say, once we emerge from it: Glad that's over with. I'll explain why such a shut down was inevitable; and for whatever reasons this started, as we've said on air for, what, two months now, the cure may be worse than the disease. Because, even with the relatively high death toll, we'll lose what, about the same number of people we lost in the Vietnam War, albeit mostly the elderly and those also dying from underlying conditions. Regardless though, and with the world losing a quarter of a million people, eventually, or more, during this, what could be possibly just the first wave of SARS-CoV-2, this coronavirus, the number of people who die from the economic shutdown could potentially dwarf the number of people killed by the disease. Now if that happens, of course that is devastating, but like we'll discuss, a global pandemic-based shutdown has been coming at us for a while and the larger questions, even than whether the cure kills more people than the disease, is What are the principles of morality, justice, and authority, by which governments should make decisions and take actions. Also, from some of the crisis within the crisis, we'll see that we can blame ABC's Shark Tank, including Mark Cuban, Kevin O'Leary Mr. Wonderful, and Daymond John, and the rest, for their vastly overstated claim that an entrepreneur is a fool if, regardless of his reasons, if he does not outsource his production jobs, and move manufacturing overseas. So there's a lot on our plate. As far as economics being a subdiscipline within praxeology, or the study of all human action, which overlaps of course with the field of psychology, we've all heard the observation that movement in the stock market follows greed and fear, and of course, therefore, understanding the financial pages often puts you smack-dab in the middle of psychology. Buy low and sell high. As Warren Buffet said decades ago if you want to make money off the Dow, you need to be fearful when everyone else is greedy and greedy when everyone else is fearful. Back on March 16th, a month ago, the title of our broadcast was, Buy. Buy. Buy. If You Can Buy Stock, Buy! Our live show broadcasts on the most powerful Christian radio station in America, Crawford's AM 670 KLTT out of Denver, and it happens to air at Easter Time, 5 p.m. By then the market is closed, and we always consider those listening via streaming around the country regarding our live program. So that day and over the next five trading days, the market was at its lowest point since the coronavirus hit; the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 large U.S. businesses, had been hovering for two months mostly over 29,000 and flirting with 30,000, and then it dropped precipitously to, what, around 20,000, and even below, so almost a 30% pandemic-related drop. We just heard from one of our listeners in Alaska. He said that in listening to the program for decades, he had never heard us give a buy or sell recommendation; we don't do that. And up there in Fairbanks, he had been out of the market. So he transferred a lot of money in, and by the time he bought, within a few days of that program, he couldn't have timed it better and he's ecstatic. So, as praxeologists, the study of human behavior, we Bible-based Christians should be the best around, because you understand an automobile better when you understand how it was made. And you understand people better when you understand how we were made, and if you notice who is following the manufacturers recommended maintenance plan, and who is ignoring it. After all, this very program is brought to you by God, maker of heaven and earth and other fine products! So, I said that this government-imposed shutdown has been coming at us for sometime. Why is that? As we discuss in our Principles of Governance seminars and broadcasts, which are indexed in our archives, when you are trying to understand government behavior, and even, the principles by which governments should operate, use the analogy of a family. Afterall, the dispensation of human government, as many theologians call it, began when God instituted the death penalty, in contrast to what He did before the flood, the global flood, when He prohibited the death penalty. And yet, just as He changed the rules about eating animals, for likewise very deliberate and important reasons, He changed, 180 degrees reversal, His prohibition against execution to mandating it, in Genesis 9, for every convicted murderer. Now this command was given to Noah, as the head of his household, and that established the authority for human government, first through patriarchies, then tribes, then villages, to city states, and their daughter villages, their suburbs, to nations, and finally, even to empires. To simplify the rules of governance, including foreign policy, you can do what Von Mises so often recommended, and use a thought experiment. Consider a group of families that suddenly find themselves living in a frontier where there is no established governmental authority. You can confidently figure out, especially if you have a reasonable biblical understanding, both the way families should behave in such a circumstance, within their own homes, and toward one another, and you can figure out how they are likely to behave, within their own homes, and as they interact with one another. And this will give you tremendous insight into how governments should function, and how they are likely to function. So, the proper extent and the just functions of government authority; how nations should interact with one another and how they will likely interact. So this shutdown approach to a flu-like pandemic has never happened before [that is, the extent of the shutdown, throughout most of the economy, and the nation, and much of the world]. But its been a longtime coming because of the world's growing prosperity. Wealthy nations do things, and face problems, the scope of which mankind has never faced before. Here's a minor example. Wealthy nations are fat nations. Obesity was mostly an American problem at first, at a global level. Not because we were less disciplined, but because tens of millions of us could afford, including many who didn't even have a job, we bought all the junk food, ice cream, and candy we could shove in our face. Then as the rest of the world caught up, guess what happened? They got fat too. Turns out the media was wrong. It wasn't because Americans cared less about our health. It wasn't that Europeans were more health conscious; they're just far less wealthy than we are. The same problem with male delayed adolescence with millions of young men spending a decade or more caring mostly about playing video games, and watching pornography in their parents' basement, and not getting married until their 30s. Prosperity, obsessively violent adrenaline-pumping games, decriminalized sexual entertainment, and now add to all that increasingly decriminalized marijuana, and it's all-but destroying a generation. And many of these problems, including the wondrous yet pernicious problem of widespread wealth, has never before been dealt with on such a vast demographic scale. With a lousy job you can make more than enough money to watch porn, play video games, get high, and eat junk food, until you're 28 years old, and beyond. Bty the way, today is April 20th, that's 4/20, when a few million potheads go out of their way to make sure that they're high today. So please, urge those you know to not smoke pot, and Google: Negative effects of marijuana, or just go to our website, rsr.org/pot where we've worked with some of the world's leading experts on the terrible mental health, physical and moral health problems associated with cannabis. But back to the wealth crisis, and this is all to understand why, and why now, governments have shut down our economies to fight the coronavirus. Vast national wealth also brings with it predictable challenges. Those who say that the masses are not wealthy, relatively speaking, don't remember the past. What would a well-off family do if they thought that a growing epidemic had a good chance of killing one of their kids? I've asked that exact question to a dozen successful parents over the last two months. They've told me what we all know they would say. That they would go to any length they could, if they really thought that there was a good chance that one of their kids might pick up an infection that had a likely chance of killing them. For example, some folks said things like, we'd move to Tonga, you know in the South Pacific, for the duration of the pestilence. We'd hunker down and not leave the house until the plague had passed. We'd send our kids to live with their grandparents in Siberia. Literally. In other words, if you can afford it, you would go to extraordinary lengths, even if you couldn't really afford it, and it might bankrupt you, you would do above and beyond anything you had previously imagined, if you thought one of your kids might die, and you had some chance of saving them. Poorer families, on the other hand, can't even think in such terms. Compare what Bill Gates would do to protect his family, wife Melinda, and his kids, his son Rory, and daughters Jennifer and Phoebe? Yes, he's a pro-abortion, moral monster. He did help much of the world out of poverty, and for that, he deserves his wealth, however he's an all-but-declared enemy of biblical morality. In the 1980s I worked for him in Redmond Washington. He once flamed me, as we'd say back then, with an angry email of two screens worth of text, from Bill Gates; I didn't even read the whole thing. I was busy. And as I've too often mentioned, I had dinner at his home back when he was still a bachelor, before he had even bought much furniture. There wasn't even a table and chairs for us to eat at. It was funny. Anyway, if he had to, he'd buy the whole Hawaiian island of Lanai, which in fact he [temporarily shut down] about a decade after I worked for him, for his wedding. He'd spend billions to buy an entire island if he though it would protect his kids. What would a typical family, say, in Kenya do? If there's a plague coming across Africa and it's headed right for their family. What would a typical family in Kenya do? The answer is, they'd wait for it. There's virtually nothing that they could do. Or that they would think they could do. Epidemiologists for decades have been telling governments and the public how to slow down or even stop the spread of an infectious disease. Until now though, nations didn't have the wealth, or at least, they didn't think they had the wealth, to follow their advice. Go back a century to the Spanish flu, 1918, a quarter of the world's population was infected, about 500 million people, and estimates vary of the death toll, but all recognize it as one of the deadliest events pandemics in history. So let's take the smallest estimate, of about one percent of the world population, so that if you were alive then, if you personally knew 200 people, two of them would be killed by the plague. Careful estimates range up to 5% of the world's population, or one out of every 20 people, dying. So go back a hundred years, go back, to let's say, London, in 1850. What if they had a plague like that. When ]you think of their current deaths in the United Kingdom, they're approaching what, 17,000 deaths. Well London back, 150 years ago, they had a population of what, two and a half million people. If they tried to quarantine, lock down the city, let alone the whole country, for six weeks, two months, three months. Within the first six weeks, half the population of London would be dead. You'd have a million people starve to death. If it were in winter they'd freeze to death. So it is prosperity that has enabled governments to think, at some point, it's been coming for a long time at some point, that they could implement what epidemiologists were telling them for decades now, that they could do to stop people from dying. Now these scientists, they are important and they have valid insights, but they're not inerrant, and they're not praxeologists, right, they're not economists, and so they're not good at estimating how many people will be killed by their cure, for the opposite of an increased standard living, what we call economic decline, that kills people. Instead of living, and living better, they live worse, and they die. And that happens both when wealth increases, especially rapidly, and when, including rapidly, it decreases. Remember that China's scientists, twice, earlier this century, unintentionally allowed the SARS virus to escape from the Chinese Institute of Virology. Now that's not in Wuhan, but in Beijing. But they did a pretty good job, compared to what they did with this coronavirus, of slowing and stopping the spread. It's like the sailor who gets a commendation for securing a loose canon, and then has to walk the plank, because he's the one who let it get loose in the first place. About 800 people did end up dying, but China began by quarantining all 200 staffers from the lab, for weeks in a nearby hotel which they locked down; and they took other measures. Most of the dead were in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and a few dozen in Singapore and even Canada. So, epidemiologists, some of whom are both helpful, and guilty, do have some valid ideas of how to slow down, or possibly even stop, the spread of a disease. You can expect a wealthy nation to behave like a wealthy family, including in a crisis. Add to that, our governing leaders who have virtually no knowledge, or concern, for what God says about the just function of government. And you can be sure that leaders will not know where the proper boundaries of their authority lie. And you can also be sure that those who are angry at their government, including some in this audience right now, whether they hate the government or are just angry at it, many of them will themselves, have very little knowledge of what God says about how governments should function, or know how to apply valid principles of governance during a pandemic. If we replaced any number of our leaders, with, say, the same number of our Christian leaders, do you think the final death toll would be lower than it will be under the current regime? Or, how about this. Do you think that fewer people would be angry at their decisions, than are currently angered? One rule we have here at Real Science Radio is, don't get angry at people for doing things that we ourselves couldn't do any better. Some governing leaders hate their own people. In addition to abortion, by which they have dismembered and otherwise killed millions of their own youngest boys and girls, in addition to that, some have slaughtered millions of their own, I could put it the way Antonin Scalia put it.  They have slaughtered millions of their own walking-around-people. Now he put it that thoughtlessly. A few years back I had the honor of giving a presentation, it's now on YouTube, against theistic evolution, on the beautiful campus in Malibu, of Pepperdine University. And there, former justice Antonin Scalia said, and Christians think that he was pro-life, he said that if Congress passed a law banning abortion, he would strike it down. Why? Because he'd rather people fight over killing the unborn at the local level. Now that's absurd. Anyway, not all leaders hate their own people, or at least, say, their walking-around people. Another Austrian conservative author, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in his brilliant work, Leftism Revisited. that some leaders actually think of their citizens the same way that a father thinks of his children. By the way, his is another great book, and at a mere 500 pages, it's still quite the slog; boy, these Austrians really know how to write! If you want to watch your nation go broke faster, see what happens when millionaires end up in charge. The Clintons went from donating Bill's underwear, literally, it's on their old tax returns, and taking a deduction for each pair, they went from that, to controlling a two-billion dollar foundation. For like the Bible says about Judas, explicitly, the Bible says that Judas didn't actually care about the poor, but he said he did because he would take money designated for the poor, he'd take the money for himself. That's a perfect summary of socialist politicians. It's something, that very thing in fact, is in the headlines, describing Pope Francis in the Vatican, right now! Taking the money from all over the world, that Catholics put in their poor boxes. I was raised Catholic, I was an altar boy for a couple years. And in the back of every church in the vestibule there's a little box and it says, For the poor. Poor people put their money in it for other poor people. It turns out that the Pope has been spending that very money on his own budget. Wow. So wealthy politicians and those who become wealthy in office, they're especially inclined to have a socialist  mindset. Like right now, giving a thousand dollar check to everybody, to a hundred million of us, whether you need it or not. And "printing" money, put printing in quotes, printing trillions of dollars, so we can spread that around also, in a socialist hope of reducing the lethality of the quarantine cure. We don't need a conspiracy to figure out how this started. Mental illness is widespread, including among Christians, with paranoia, the susceptibility to conspiracy theory, being one of the easiest symptoms to diagnose your health issue. Now, regarding the crisis within the crisis, China produces much of our most vital pharmaceuticals, medicines, emergency medical supplies, and even much of the equipment, not to mention so much of everything else. And while I've always loved Shark Tank, I've also been critical of them for a couple reasons. One is that routinely they will skewer an entrepreneur who wants to manufacture in America. To them, a hundred times over, it mattered nothing that they could be weakening America, or taking away jobs that American business owners wanted to give to their neighbors. And so that mindset, profit is great; and greed will blind you to bigger issues, including matters of national security and economic health. Don't get me wrong. The cheaper provider, doing the same job, is almost always the wisest choice, except that, manufacturing your widget, often, is not the entire consideration, and they've always presented it as though it were. I've always openly and aggressively hated the Chinese communist government. Our church has even gone to protest their communist leader a decade ago when he came to Colorado Springs. And I've hated the idea that instead of always condemning them and pushing for the liberation of their 1.4 billion people that Donald Trump was always talking about getting a better "deal" from the Chinese, that is, from their slave labor. And I've always said the opposite whenever Trump would praise their president. So I don't think I'm inclined to err on their behalf. But they did not intentionally infect the world. They're nothing if not deliberate, long-term players. This was a combination of hubris and incompetence. Yes, they shut down Wuhan flights within China, in fact, they shut down the whole Hubei province from travel to the rest of the country. Let's dig in and add some accuracy to this story that's overlooked by the enraged right. And our goal is to think through the conspiracy theory now widely circulating especially among Christians, that China had some kind of plan to infect the world. So, when did they shut down Hubei, including Wuhan air travel within China? Let's see my notes here. That was January 23rd. Now the whole province has about half a dozen airports, and only one international, the Wuhan International Airport. So they were all closed to fights outside of Hubei province. And by the way, the Wuhan airport stayed closed for about ten weeks, until April 8th. So January 23rd till April 8th. In mid January, quite a bit was already going on, publicly, worldwide even, before they closed down those flights. On January 11th, China made their first nationwide announcement of the illness, which means of course that's when it became widely known about, around the world. Its state media reported the illness in Wuhan. Then, and this is easier to recall for Americans, ten days later, on January 21st, we had our first [publicly known] case here. It was, as you'll recall, in the state of Washington. The world was on the lookout for this virus. By then it had just shown up in Japan, South Korea and Thailand. Then two days later, on that January 23rd date, China closed off Wuhan by canceling planes and trains leaving the city. They suspended all public transportation in the city and apparently, throughout the province, buses, subways and even ferries were closed down. By this point, it was known publicly that at least 17 people had died and about 600 were infected, including then also in Taiwan. Then, and this is where the conspiracy theorists get energized, apparently, based on public reports we have of a February 4th announcement, China's Civil Aviation Administration ordered local airlines to keep operating international flights to countries that HAD NOT imposed restrictions on inbound travel to China. So that's been reported including by Reuters news agency, that's an extremely biased leftist source, but one that nonetheless, frequently does report the basic dates and facts correctly. People are angry, including people who have lost jobs, and businesses even, and see no way of financially recovering. They don't need us to pile on and give them a boogeymen to be enraged at. China has plenty of guilt for what we know that they've done to cover up the crisis, mistreat, and even disappear their own doctors, journalists, and experts. So why would China continue flights to the rest of the world, according to conspiracy theorists, and then according to a rational assessment. Well the conspiracy claims that they had an intentional plan to infect the world to give them an economic advantage. That seems absurd on its face. We'll talk about why. The claim continues like this. If the rest of the world is reeling from a pandemic, then China will have an economic advantage because they won't be reeling, except they were infected themselves, for starters, and they've lied about their numbers, which have apparently been much greater than they've publicized. On its face that theory seems absurd and will be believed by people who are inclined to paranoia and looking for an outlet for their fear and their anger, someone to blame, and especially because they think that this extreme accusation against China somehow helps their own favorite politician. Okay then, what's the rational assessment? First, it completely discounts the conspiracy claim, because China, again, is nothing if not a deliberate, long-term player. To gain some kind of supposed short-term economic advantage, they would be sacrificing decades of prosperity, when they've had a hundred million people just barely climbing out of poverty. They'd have to give all that up, and go backwards. For clearly, intentionally spreading a disease to the rest of the world is not something that could be hidden, especially after the Wuhan outbreak had become known worldwide. They would enrage more than a hundred countries, and infect and devastate even their allies, like Iran. They would become a global pariah, which they have become anyway, apart from the conspiracy theories. This was not a biological weapon engineered in a lab. The scientific evidence strongly refutes that claim. And this was not intentionally spread to the world, so they could take some kind of economic advantage. The world would be highly motivated to reduce, some countries cut off, all trade with China. And that trade is exactly what has been bringing them out of 70 years of communism-induced poverty. It is that trade that has built up their military. It is that trade that has enabled them to create the technology to control almost a billion and a half people. And they know that. Trade has been vital for their already struggling economy. For them to hatch this scheme would mean that they were willing to sacrifice decades of increasing prosperity, for, what? For nothing. Because their trade would collapse. Instead, it was what we see in tyrants generally. It was hubris, and incompetence. By the uncontrolled arrogance of the left, especially of communist tyrants, but even of the Nancy Pelosis and Hillary Clintons of the world. They put themselves up on pedestals, as though there were gods. And when you look at their policies, they do seem to think that they are gods, passing legislation that appear to, attempt to defy the very laws of nature itself, and certainly, that would defy human nature. So a communist leader thinks that what he says is law. And that even nature itself will obey him. So they lie about an outbreak as it inexorably explodes to where the whole world knows that they lied. And then in their incompetence and hubris, they hoard medical supplies for themselves violating even their own manufacturing commitments to the world. And they shut down travel within China. But again, in hubris, think, well if countries are still flying here, we're not going to shut down flights back to those countries. That's their decision. [Of course, based even just on the number of planes available in any fleet or nation, no airline or country, including China, could sustain continuing to send flights out of their country unless those same planes were first flying into their country. So the countries that planes were flying into, out of China, were the same countries that continued of their own volition, and with some recklessness, to fly planes into China.] Those countries, they know that there's an outbreak here, and if they're so stupid to fly here, then fine. Whatever business and help they bring along, on those flights, we could use it. And their problems, are their problems. So, we're out of time. We'll finish this on our next RSR COVID show. And until then, to forward this Crawford-sponsored public service program to a friend, just go online to rsr.org. That's r-s-r dot o-r-g. This is Bob Enyart for my co-host Fred Williams and Real Science Radio, may God bless you

Holy hell, January is already done, and Spike consoles himself with a deep discussion about the nature of the state, democracy and our moral duty to resist with Georgetown Professor Jason Brennan, author of When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice. Jason's Website: http://jasonfbrennan.com When All Else Fails on Amazon: https://amazon.com/dp/0691181713/ When All Else Fails on Facebook: https://fb.com/whenallelsefailsbook/ Against Democracy on Amazon: https://amazon.com/dp/0691178496/ Intro & Outro Music: JoDavi (http://fb.com/JoDaviMusic) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/muddiedwaters/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/muddiedwaters/support

Churchill famously called democracy "the worst system of government, except for all the others that have been tried." Could we do better? On this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia chats with professor Jason Brennan, author of the book "Against Democracy," about his case for why democracy is flawed -- philosophically, morally, and empirically.

My guest today is Jason Brennan of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He is the author of Against Democracy, which is our topic for this episode. The first chapter is available on the publisher's website. John Stuart Mill believed that getting more people involved in politics would make them smarter, more concerned for the common good, better educated, and nobler. In the intervening century and a half, we've gathered much more data on Mill's hypothesis, and the results don't look good: The test results are now in. They are, I will hold, largely negative. I think Mill would agree. Most common forms of political engagement not only fail to educate or ennoble us but also tend to stultify and corrupt us." (p. 2) Diana Mutz performed a study that found that people's belief that their political adversaries were evil and stupid predicted high political engagement. Many studies show similar results, where politics seems to exacerbate our biases along with our meanness and contempt for the other side. Jason splits democratic citizens into three broad categories: Hobbits, hooligans, and Vulcans. Hobbits are your average non-voter. They don't care or know much about politics, and they're happy to just live their normal lives without thinking about politics. Hooligans are your typical political partisans. They are the die-hard sports fans of their preferred party. They are typically well-informed, but the information they consume is extremely biased towards their own side. They cannot pass an ideological Turing test. Vulcans are people who see clearly through the morass of politics, understanding the arguments from both sides and possessing the social scientific knowledge necessary to select the best options. And just like the Vulcans from Star Trek, they're completely fictional! Or at least they're very rare. While most of us like to think of ourselves as Vulcans, we're probably more like hooligans. What if the Knowledgeable Chose our Policies? Jason's preferred alternative to democracy is epistocracy, a system where more knowledgeable people have more control over politics. There are many forms this could take. One way of instituting epistocracy is to impose a basic knowledge test on voters. While an econ 101 test would be desirable, it might raise objections from people who view economics as an ideological discipline. But there are many ideologically neutral facts that a voter really ought to know. For instance, someone who doesn't know which party currently holds power probably doesn't have enough information to decide which party is most fit to govern. You could then restrict votes to only the people who pass the test, or you could weight votes from knowledgeable people more heavily. Another option is the "enfranchisement lottery" where a random subset of the population (perhaps a few thousand) are selected to vote, but only if they undergo exercises to build their competence as voters. This is somewhat similar to how a jury trial works, where a legal decision is left to a random group of citizens, but only once they have received extensive instruction from a judge, lawyers, expert witnesses, etc. Finally, you can set up a hybrid system with democratic and epistocratic elements. For instance, you could have a democratic body decide policy while an epistocratic body retains a veto. The Supreme Court functions in this way, since it grants a group of highly educated judges the power to overturn democratically supported laws. Democracy is Not an End in Itself Jason encourages his fellow philosophers to think more like social scientists. While philosophers tend to view democracy as an end in itself, social scientists are more interested in whether it has good outcomes. Does democracy promote economic growth more than other systems? Are fewer people persecuted under democracy than under other systems? Are people happier in a democratic system than they would be in an alternative system? These are the sorts of questions we should be asking about our system of government.  

Most Americans believe that democracy is the most just, fair, and equal form of government we’ve come up with thus far. Is that overselling it? Does democracy produce the results we need? Can anything be done about voter ignorance?What is the symbolic value of the right to vote? Is political participation good for us as individuals and as a society? What would a better system look like?Show Notes and Further ReadingJason Brennan’s newest book is Against Democracy (2016).Brennan is also the lecturer for one of our Libertarianism.org Guides, An Introduction to Political Philosophy. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.