Transcript

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

This quote by 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson is important to remember because some people value consistency over common sense, and it can lead them to holding absolutely insane views.

And one of those people is the liberal streamer Destiny.

In today's episode, I wanna talk about how Destiny's commitment to consistency reveals the fatal flaws in the positions he defends.

So, let's start with the statements he made last week on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

On X, Destiny wrote, Having a firearm means absolutely nothing if you don't spend time at the range practicing with it, implying that he wished the shooter had not missed Trump, which is a gross thing a scary number of Trump critics were saying.

But then Destiny doubled down on it by saying he wasn't bothered by another innocent person at the rally who was shot, namely Cory Comparatore, an ex-fire chief, husband, and father.

Destiny writes, A person in a crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor to this country caught a stray bullet.

I'm so sad.

Please.

And he made other posts mocking the man.

In fact, here's a very interesting post.

One user writes, You can't say Trump is Hitler one day, then wish him well the next day.

That's not how it works unless you're a lying corrupt POS. To which Destiny responds, Agree with this.

Be morally consistent and don't wish him well.

And that's Destiny's biggest problem.

When common sense and basic decency tells us, Wait, this is wrong.

I shouldn't say or do this, like mocking a shooting victim at a rally, Destiny is comfortable not listening to what our basic human decency would tell us.

Rather, he lets the consistency of his worldview carry him out to extreme ends.

Part of this, though, may be ragebaiting for attention, or it's the brain rot that comes from spending the majority of your waking life on the internet as a streamer.

But the desire to be consistent above all else is really what concerns me and I wanna talk about in this episode.

So, in this case, there are a lot of people who compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

The New Republic even depicted Trump as Hitler in their June 2024 issue, saying, He's damn close enough to fascism .

Trump was shot six days after this post, but Destiny would say if it's okay to celebrate the assassination of old Hitler, why wouldn't it be okay to celebrate the assassination of new Hitler, even if that act involved casualties among civilians who celebrated new Hitler?

it, the dude, um, the firefighter guy, uh, Trump, people that support him.

I just want you to know, okay?

Just in case you're confused or it seems like I'm, uh, you don't, whatever.

If one of you were in the crowd and you're a conservative fan of mine and you end up, you know, getting blown away or whatever the , I'm making fun of you the next day on Twitter.

I am, 100%.

First, I hate comparisons to Hitler.

They don't make the person more evil.

They just make Hitler less evil.

If everybody's Hitler, then Hitler must not have been that bad of a person.

Second, this criticism goes beyond Destiny.

I see a lot of people who dig their heels in and hold repugnant views because they feel that as long as they're consistent, then they aren't wrong, and other people even respect them simply because they're willing to be consistent and stick to their guns.

For example, I once attended a private lecture with the philosopher Peter Singer and a bunch of his fans at Arizona State University.

Peter Singer writes in one article, We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born, everything must be done to keep it alive.

The solution, however, is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same moral status as yours or mine.

The solution is the very opposite, to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth.

So, Peter Singer defends infanticide, but he's also an animal rights activist.

So, I asked him in that lecture if it was okay for my parents that they euthanize their incontinent dog.

Singer said it was permissible if the dog was a significant burden.

I then asked him if it would've been fine to euthanize my hypothetical mildly disabled newborn brother if he was just as much an inconvenience.

Singer hemmed and he hawed, but eventually, he admitted it would not be wrong to kill my hypothetical baby brother.

That's because, according to him, privileging humans over non-humans is a kind of racism called speciesism.

And so, newborn hu- human infants shouldn't be treated better than other non-human animals that have higher cognitive functions.

In Singer's book, Should the Baby Live?, he flatly admits that, quote, When we kill a newborn infant, there is no person whose life has begun.

Other attendees of the lecture were surprised not at what Singer said about infanticide, but at my criticism of it.

Several of them came up to me later and criticized me for my narrow-minded view that infants are worth more than non-human animals.

These are people who've lost the plot, and they smugly don't care because they read a bunch of academic journals, it makes them feel smart.

I'm reminded of what George Orwell said in his 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that.

No ordinary man could be such a fool.

A person can be consistently wrong just as he can be inconsistently wrong.

Just because all your beliefs fit together into a whole worldview doesn't mean they're true.

If they also don't correspond to reality, including moral realities like the moral law, then they're false, even if someone personally doesn't see anything wrong with what they believe.

That's why when I debated Destiny in my previous two encounters, my goal wasn't to change his mind.

My goal was to show other people the price they have to pay in order to buy into his worldview.

And since nearly everyone isn't willing to pay that price, that means they're less likely to buy into his moral positions because they lead to such repugnant conclusions.

For example, in our first encounter on abortion, Destiny defended his view that a being cannot be harmed if it never becomes conscious.

Therefore, it's fine to abort a pre-conscious fetus.

Then I asked him about whether it would be permissible to create human beings, infants and toddlers, who were never conscious for horrible purposes.

So, I have a few questions then.

Uh, would it be wrong to cause a healthy fetus to become permanently unconscious?

No.

Okay.

Uh, so would it be wrong to cause this permanent unconsciousness to use Let's say you could keep growing the fetus into a older, uh, body, to use it for organ harvesting, maybe as a kind of sex doll even?

Uh, as long as it never became conscious or didn't have the Never became conscious?

Correct.

Okay.

Related question, but we'll circle back soon.

What are your thoughts on fake child pornography using AI or virtual images?

Oh.

Um, fake child pornography.

Um, I'm not going to have a strong opinion on the, on the action itself, it's gonna be consequential in nature in terms of like what are the impacts of doing it.

So say you create a bunch and people stop actually abusing children, I'd probably be in favor of it.

Um, say you create a bunch and it leads to an increased harm of children, I'd probably be opposed to it.

So you don't You have a practical objection, not an in principle objection?

No, there wouldn't be like a No.

Yeah.

Okay.

Uh, so then it circles back.

So let's say we had people who took fetuses, made them permanently unconscious, and made them infant toddler or child sex dolls.

So we have, you know So we have unconscious, um, infants and toddlers, they were never conscious.

They're used as child sex dolls.

Uh, your only objection to that practice would be if it caused more pedophilia among other conscious

Correction.

Yeah, 'cause I would say there's no- no person is being harmed there.

Okay.

So, child sex dolls, uh, could be on the table.

Okay.

And in my second debate with Destiny and pornographer Jasmine Jaffar on the subject of pornography, I showed their view of sexual ethics leads to the repugnant conclusion that bestiality isn't wrong.

For example, many people say sex is just about consent, and animals can't consent, so that's why bestiality is wrong.

But we eat animals without their consent.

We even employ animals to work in the police department, like in K-9 units, something that normally requires consent among human beings.

If we can do that to animals, well then why not engage in less harmful, non-penetrative sexual acts with animals, for example?

All this, normal people find to be disgusting.

But once again, Destiny has to bite the bullet in order to keep his sexual ethics consistent.

You're saying that sex with animals is not as bad as killing them?

What do you mean?

Did you just say that killing them is worse?

I think killing animals is It depends, right?

It depends what you think- Wait, say that one more time- What do you want me to say?

just the way you said it.

Wait, like what?

Did you say killing animals is worse than sex with them?

No, I'm saying sometimes

Anyway, you're gonna bite the bullet.

Yes, I think probably generally, yeah.

Why?

What's the next question?

How could you possibly flip that?

Do you disagree?

Do you think that having sex with an animal is-

Uh-

is worse than killing it?

Yes, yes it is worse because- For who?

For who?

Because animals are non-rational beings that we can eat.

There's nothing immoral about that.

Sex is for human beings, and I'm sorry, you guys just can't see that- Okay, wait, so you think that the sex So you think the se- 'Cause we're not religious.

So you think that the sex-

It's not about religion.

It's about nature

No, you're not saying.

You're an insane person.

If you want to learn more about how to engage academics and others who defend this perversion, check out the link in the description below.

But also, several commenters noted that this is one of the few times I've lost my composure when debating someone.

And they said the response was well deserved.

I agree.

There is a place for philosophical discourse, but sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade, because you've arrived at the metaphysical foundation of your worldview.

You've arrived at a self-evident truth that the other person must simply be morally blind if they can't accept it or see it.

I'm reminded of what Saint Paul said in Romans 1, They became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools.

In exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.

The idea that our moral reasoning can be grounded in self-evident moral truths is also affirmed by many atheists, so this isn't just a religious belief.

The atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong writes, We could never get started on everyday moral reasoning about any moral problem without relying on moral intuitions.

Even philosophers and others who officially disdain moral intuitions often appeal to moral intuitions when refuting opponents or supporting their own views.

The most sophisticated and complex arguments regularly come down to, 'But surely that is immoral?' Hence, without some move like this, there would be no way to construct and justify any substantive moral theory.

And here's Destiny with atheist Alex O'Connor explaining how his rejection of moral facts, in really any form of objective morality, means he can't consider anything to be objectively wrong.

He can't even say one side in World War II was right and the other was wrong.

Do you think there's a sense in which you could say either side is right in that conflict?

I mean, imagining, for example, some version of- of World War II where the- the- the fighting was based on some fundamental value conflict about what you're allowed to do to other human beings.

Violent conflict.

Is there a sense in which we can say th- that one side is correct there, or do we just have to say that what we're witnessing is might makes right?

I feel like to say one side is correct, um, I feel like you would have to be able to ultimately resolve some moral statement down to some truth value.

There would have to be some-

Mm-hmm

moral facts to speak of, and I don't Or I'm kind of cocked.

I don't really believe in stuff like that, um, so I wouldn't be able to say at the end of the day that, like, it's right to not want to enslave somebody, or it's right to not want to murder somebody.

Um, I don't know if I believe that any of those moral statements ultimately reduce to some fact of the matter, so no, I don't know if I could ever say there's a right or wrong side in- in any given conflict like that.

There's just the values that I purport to have, and hopefully other people around me have them.

And if some people are so incompatible and we can't find common grounds on it, then at some point it's probably gonna come to, yeah, some- some sort of violent conflict to resolve the difference.

But then Destiny seems to contradict himself, because he's more than happy to affirm the evil of those involved in the October 7th attacks on Israel, and offers moral criticism of Israel as well.

You do believe that, like, you know, that, uh, what are they called?

That Hamas are evil incarnate?

people who are part of ISIS?

Uh, I believe it's a pretty evil organization.

A lot of the people that belong to it are horrible human beings, yeah, of course.

So, I think when-

Okay

the IDF or when Israel kills people, when it's not justified, I think that's a really bad thing.

I don't think that should ever happen.

One reason Destiny is so popular is because he has a unique, or more properly speaking, idiosyncratic worldview.

It's one that's so unique it brings him into conflict with conservatives and fellow liberals.

So, as a result, people see him as being more authentic rather than just being a stooge, a defender of one political side of the spectrum or the other.

In some respects, Destiny embodies what Emerson wrote about in his poem Self-Reliance, where Emerson said, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

In that essay, Emerson criticizes people who just want to conform or be consistent to what others think or what's a popular viewpoint.

Be true to yourself was Emerson's preferred motto.

But while we shouldn't blindly follow the crowd, Emerson put too much faith in just having a consistent individual worldview.

Emerson rejected Christianity, and he embraced a form of Unitarianism and even quasi-pantheism.

For him, God was suffused in everything, and human nature was fundamentally good.

In his 1841 essay, Spiritual Laws, Emerson wrote, Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like.

These never presented a practical difficulty to any man, never darkened across any man's road who did not go out of his way to seek them.

But sin is real, and being true to oneself or being internally consistent isn't the highest good for one who is enslaved to sin.

You can end up being internally inconsistent but being an awful human being who says awful things on the internet unrepentantly.

Only God is the highest good, because when it comes to human beings, the Prophet Jeremiah said, The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt.

Who can understand it?

I also like how the 1930s crime fighter The Shadow would put it, Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Consistency is important because truth can't contradict truth.

We should always strive for a consistent worldview, but we should be more concerned about the origin of our beliefs and their ultimate metaphysical foundation, i.e., the divine foundation of reality that grounds and guides everything.

We should c- be more concerned with that than with whether we can get all of our beliefs to fit together, common sense and basic human decency be damned.

So, I hope this episode was helpful for you all.

And if you wanna watch clips from my other engagements with Destiny, be sure to check out the links below.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.