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Disappearances!
29 Plays6 years ago
This week Josh and M discuss mysterious (and sometimes) ominous disappearances, like that of Fan Bingbing and Meng Hongwei in China, and the suspected disappearance and murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey. We also catch up with Taylor Swift's political views, talk academic hoaxes, and pour scorn on a post "Do no evil" Google.
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
This week, on the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, Disappearances. Taylor Swift. Google Plus. And hoaxes.
Conspiracism Web Series
00:00:09
Speaker
All this and a lot- Hold on, you're not gonna plug your new web series? Conspiracism? Well, I would, but it doesn't seem to have worked the last two times. The people don't care, Josh. They just don't care. Well, I do. Go and very well watch it, I say. If you like this, you'll like that, and that is a money-back guarantee. Not a guarantee.
00:00:28
Speaker
But wait until you finish this episode. Yes, on with
Hosts Introduction & Setup
00:00:32
Speaker
the show. The show must go on. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting in tandem with Dr Emma Arixtentiff on a new sofa. How do you sit in tandem? I don't know, it's sitting on the same thing instead of in separate chairs now.
00:00:57
Speaker
I mean, everyone, I assume, always thought that one of us simply perched on the other one's lap as we... Which was true when we were just a podcast. When we were doing video, there was a lot of lap sitting going on. And not in a scandalous way, in a not-enough-cheers kind of way. In an efficiency way.
00:01:16
Speaker
It wasn't particularly efficient, though. And it was very, very painful. But we now have the whole sort of bench seat arrangement here. Yes, we've seen a bit of redecoration on the set of the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy. As you can see, we now have a sofa.
00:01:31
Speaker
I don't know why I said that. Was there French accent? Aesophore? Although now there is this space between us. Well there always was, but now there's sofa in the middle of it. I thought you'd rub the sofa case. Come to me, my darling sofa. Come to me. And of course this means nothing to people who are merely listening to the podcast.
00:01:49
Speaker
and not watching it in all its video glory on youtube but you're lost quite frankly yes you're missing out on our wonderful lighting arrangement setup thing magic shindig fan dang i'm just using words now i'm just using words yeah no stop it uh so at some point we will have brand new lapel mics and that will benefit the podcast listeners as well as the vodcast viewers yes because you'll tear the rustling of our clothes as we move around
Focus on Disappearances
00:02:15
Speaker
and think
00:02:15
Speaker
What are they doing physically in that same? If you work in the business world as I do, and possibly in the academic world as well, you'll have sat in on more than one phone conference with a person, hold it with the mouth thing just slightly too close to their nose. So whenever you're talking and they're listening, all you can hear is heavy breathing. The Darth Vader of meaning.
00:02:40
Speaker
So if you're lucky, you guys get a bit of that as well. But not right now. Luke, I want a Skype call. That is essentially... That is a close from the Empire Strikes Back.
00:02:53
Speaker
Anyway, we're going to talk about disappearances of people. Now, you know what you should be doing at this point in time? Disappearing in a puff of smoke. Yeah, you should do some kind of fade by taking a version of the shot when there's no one sitting here and just making us disappear. Well, I could. But then there's just going to play a chime and then we'll be back here. That would just be miraculous. Video magic. It's the prestige.
00:03:21
Speaker
Good film. Very good film. I was given a reason to think of Jonathan Creek the other day. Apparently there's a new one in there just a year or two ago. Yes, yes. I think, which I believe was actually the final Jonathan Creek. There's no talk of doing more.
Political Motivations in Disappearances
00:03:38
Speaker
But it was actually a term to form, because if you watch the TV series they did a few years back, they did six one-hour episodes, and it kind of just didn't work, because Jonathan had settled down, was living in a village with his wife and solving small-town mysteries. In case of no, Jonathan Creek is about solving intricate puzzles that are completely out of place. Yes, exactly.
00:04:02
Speaker
And this is the podcast's guide to the works of David Renwick, who is the writer of Jonathan Crete and One Foot in the Grave. You wouldn't associate those two shows, but they are in fact by the same pen person. Well, you've just blown my mind. And now we're going to blow your mind with some disappearances.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yes, disappearances, people disappearing. Now, our long-term listeners, if you can remember all the way back to episode 43, almost, almost 150 episodes ago. We're getting close to the magical 200. Magical 200, yeah. Back in episode 43, we talked about mysterious disappearances and we did the classics.
00:04:42
Speaker
We did Jimmy Hoffa, we did Lord Lucan, we did a couple of others as well. Famous, famous, people who famously disappeared in the conspiracy theories around exactly what happened to them. But there have been a couple of relatively high profile disappearances, and in some case reappearances, in the news lately. And we were sort of looking at them and thought, well, we could stick them in a news update, but there's probably enough to fill in the entire episode with. And it turns out there's been quite a number.
00:05:10
Speaker
of not just disappearances, but odd ends to people. That actually sounds a bit weird, really. Odd ends. If I had an odd end, I'd see the doctor. Surely we'd be giving on to the whole toadette.
00:05:26
Speaker
Donald Trump in a stream with his aria but that's another matter for another time possibly not this podcast maybe bonus content we might talk about Donald Trump's penis that's why you should subscribe to our patreon so you can hear us wax lyrical about Donald Trump's penis you know there's been a whole bunch of people who've disappeared or had untimely and suspicious deaths and it's the kind of thing that makes you go hmm and when people go hmm except that that hmm
00:05:56
Speaker
Conspiracy theories are bound to a bound, aren't they? Conspiracy theories and C&C Music Factory. But we're a conspiracy theory podcast, not a C&C Music Factory podcast. Although I'm now thinking maybe we should actually probably transfer our
00:06:16
Speaker
I had Bon-Mott, our way of doing things. Notice operandi. Yes, although they were a particularly good band. No, but anyway, so we're going to start in China.
Jamal Khashoggi Case
00:06:30
Speaker
We spent the last couple of episodes going on about Russia and we figured maybe we should take a break from making ourselves an enemy of that particular totalitarian state and make ourselves an enemy of a completely different totalitarian state.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yay! He is. So the first one that popped up was The Disappearance of Fan Bing Bing. Now you may not know the name. If you've seen the X-Men movie Days of Future Past,
00:06:58
Speaker
She played Blink, the character of Blink, the teleporty one in that, which was her first sort of big role in a Western film. She's a massive star in China. She apparently earned more money than it was Amy Adams and Charlize Theron were the two comparisons there.
00:07:17
Speaker
She's a big star. She is a celebrity. She has been in many, many films. She's a singer. She's a dancer. She's an actor. Massive social media following. And in June of this year, she disappeared. No word from her, no posts on social media, no sightings in public. And it didn't take long for people to ask, where has China's most popular actress gone?
00:07:41
Speaker
Which is a very good question. When has this actor disappeared too? Yes, so it happened around, it sort of coincided with the Chinese government deciding to crack down on sort of dodgy, well not dodgy, but unseemly financial goings on in the entertainment industry. They officially started cracking down on high salaries for actors.
00:08:10
Speaker
There were the Chinese regulators capped star pay at 40% of a TV show's entire production budget and 70% of the total pay to all actors in a film. We'd like to point out that the notion that they're capping at 40% of the entire budget of a TV show
00:08:29
Speaker
That's still a lot of money going to the stars. So, I mean, yes, I understand. Runaway costs and the like, but that's still going. You deserve to be paid a lot more than you probably actually deserve in the first place. You're being paid a lot more than you actually properly deserve, given that most people can actually get by
00:08:50
Speaker
If they're
Journalist Murders in the EU
00:08:51
Speaker
earning six-figure salaries on less than a six-figure salary, to be told. Call me a communist, not a Chinese communist. No, the other kind. Cuban communist, I don't know. Where do they still have communism these days? China, Cuba.
00:09:10
Speaker
April sun. Anyway, so there was a crackdown on actors' salaries and also a crackdown on tax evasion. And this was eventually once it became clear that she had actually disappeared from public life.
00:09:28
Speaker
People started saying maybe it was something to do with tax evasion because there was apparently a common-ish practice in the Chinese entertainment industry and the Western industry, as far as I know, to have what they called yin-yang contracts.
00:09:45
Speaker
where an artist would basically sign two different contracts and one in which they were paid a lower amount would be the contract used for tax reporting purposes and then there'd be another contract for a higher amount which would be what they actually get and so it was a way of
00:10:01
Speaker
minimizing their earnings and therefore minimizing the amount of tax they were liable for. And so apparently Fan Bingming had one or more of these types of contracts and apparently this ended up being what had got her on the bad side of the government. So the story goes that during her disappearance she was basically under house arrest in China.
00:10:24
Speaker
being given a fairly stern talking to by the government. And so she showed up again three months later, basically full of contrition, giving statements about how sorry she was for how she'd let down the government and the public. And apparently also had to pay around $200 million, $900 million, which was a combination of back taxes, fines for not paying her taxes, and late fees on the fines.
00:10:54
Speaker
So she... 200 million sounds like a lot of money. It does sound like a lot of money. And yet often when people are paying these fines, they're not being made bankrupt by paying the 200 million. I'm assuming that's US? That was the figure given in a New Zealand Herald article, so I think that... I don't know what the Chinese exchange rate is. I assume it was New Zealand dollars that are talking about.
00:11:17
Speaker
That depends on whether they were copy-pasting an article from the US or not, really. Because, unfortunately, we have dollars. They have dollars. They're not the same. A shitload of money, anyway. It is, yeah. It's $200 million if it's New Zealand dollars or a million dollars. And I'm assuming that she probably hasn't lost her actual wealth. Well, no, I mean, again, most popular actress in China, as far as I'm aware. So, I believe she can afford it, but it's still, it's not pocket change.
00:11:46
Speaker
Now, this is a... I mean, it's a sinister thing disappearing for three months because the government is keeping you under house arrest. But of course, this isn't as sinister a disappearance as some, is it? No. This is the kind of disappearance where you disappear and people end up having conspiracy theories of, oh, what's she done that the Chinese government has made her disappear? But then you get slightly more political disappearances, which are
00:12:16
Speaker
A lot more sinister. Yes, yes you do. So, I mean, in the case of Fan Bing Bing, I mean, there was a political element to it. I mean, a lot of people suggested that this was the government making an example of her, showing that no one is above the law. Doesn't matter how famous you are, doesn't matter how many followers you have on Instagram. Doesn't matter who you appeared in a Hollywood film. You're not above the law in China, dammit. Those swanky US celebrities, maybe they can get away with stuff, but not here in China.
00:12:47
Speaker
But you could almost say they've graduated a little bit. You're saying first class. From disappearing celebrities to now they've disappeared, one Ming Hong Wei, who was at the time he disappeared the president of Interpol. The Chinese branch of Interpol.
00:13:10
Speaker
I mean, that's not nothing. That's frickin' multiple. Yeah. So this is actually a fairly big story here, because
00:13:20
Speaker
Not only was he the president of Interpol China branch, but also a member of the Communist Party in China. Now, the Chinese government has been for quite some time trying to get members of the party into senior positions worldwide, in part so that China has prestige, and also so that China has kind of diplomatic ability to discuss issues where in the past they might just be told you'll be doing this.
00:13:50
Speaker
when a member of your party is also a high-ranking member of Interpol, you're in a situation where you can start dictating policy. But the downside to this is that, of course, the problem about being the president of Interpol and investigating crimes that are going on in China of a global, let's say, interdimensional nature, I don't think Interpol deals with interdimensional stuff yet. Not as far as you know.
00:14:17
Speaker
is that you might actually end up pissing off certain members of the party. And because your service is to the party first and your job second, you can be made to disappear until such time that contritioners show them and you reappear and go, what I did was wrong and the party is showing that actually they have control over you.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yes, so that has not happened yet. Not yet, because this disappearance occurred last week, or the week before that. End of September, so we're approaching, but it's I think two weeks ago now, the week before that. So at the end of September, I think he's based in France, or at least that's where his wife was, but he traveled back to China and then
00:15:03
Speaker
contact was lost with him.
Western Government Conspiracies?
00:15:05
Speaker
The last text his wife received was simply a text of a knife emoji, which she took to be a sign of danger that he was in some sort of trouble. And then, yeah, nothing was heard from him. Now, Fan Bing Bing is not as well known in the West. She's been in the one, the X-Men film, she was in the extra scenes they shot for the Chinese cut of Iron Man 3.
00:15:32
Speaker
because that interestingly is a thing that happens now that China is such a big market, certain American films have been actually inserting extra scenes. And I've been waiting for a chance to talk about this. There's even a Mr Bean film that's only ever been shown in China. Is there? Yeah. I mean, it's not technically a Mr Bean film, it's a film about Chinese comedians
00:15:54
Speaker
interacting with Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean. So he's a major part as a Mr Bean character, as the Mr Bean character, that's only ever been shown in China. Bizarre. Yeah. So not only do you get extra scenes in films for the Chinese market, sometimes you get entire films for the Chinese market. Which reminds me, I shouldn't go see the third Johnny English film.
00:16:21
Speaker
Because apparently the re- Oh, there's a third. Just came out. The last time I think of it, there was another one in between. I was only aware of the first. See, the first is terrible. The second's actually not terrible if you watch it on a long-haul flight from one destination to another. Because it's actually the kind of perfect watch on a plane film. It passes the time, and it's moderately funny. But apparently the third film is just moderately bad. It's a shame.
00:16:50
Speaker
But at any rate, so the point is that Fan Bingbing has not known enormously outside of China. And inside of China, the government can pretty much control the information. But when you're the head of Interpol... Different story. Yeah. Now, the Chinese government has admitted that they do have... Yes. So they were forced to actually... In custody.
00:17:12
Speaker
But that's basically all they've said at this stage, isn't it? That he is in custody, he's done something. Bribery, I believe, was the charge. He's been detained on charges of accepting bribes or something like that. But you've very little detail. And the suspicion is that...
00:17:28
Speaker
He may not have accepted bribes, but that is the kind of thing which is sufficient to be put into custody in China and is also against the Chinese Communist Party rules, and thus would give them reason to do whatever they're doing to him at this particular point in time.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yes. So very soon after China issued their statement saying that they had him in custody, Interpol then released a statement saying that he had resigned as president of the Chinese branch of Interpol. And even
Recent Conspiracy Theories
00:18:02
Speaker
that, I don't know if it was a case of
00:18:06
Speaker
he was allowed to get in touch with them to say actually I resign or if China had just said oh by the way he says he resigns I don't know there but yeah so at the moment he is still very much in limbo and again I mean it seems like it's a case of someone being made an example of showing that you know that the government can get to anyone essentially no one's no one's above the law
00:18:29
Speaker
and also like the crackdown on film budgets and tax evasion. Supposedly this is part of a campaigner to stamp out corruption and like, but I mean who knows if that's actually the real reason or if it's just him getting on the wrong side of the Communist Party.
00:18:49
Speaker
Well, yes, and of course, these are the kind of questions that go, hmm, which is why people end up going, the stories which are told by these people after the fact are covering up the actual political machinations going on in the background, whether it be an actor being made an example, or the Chinese head of Interpol,
00:19:13
Speaker
being made to show that the party is more important than your other political affiliations. So we'll be interested to see. I mean, Fan Bing Bing released this statement where she said things such as,
00:19:30
Speaker
Throughout these days of my cooperation with the Taxation Authority's investigation of my accounts as well as my companies, I have realized that, as a public figure, I should have observed the law setting a good example for society and the industry. I shouldn't have lost my ability to govern myself in the face of economic interests, leading myself to break the law." A bit further down, she says, without the great policies of the party, that being the Communist Party that would charge China, and the country without the love of the people, there would be no fan bing bing, so it was very much
00:20:01
Speaker
towing the party line sort of a thing. So it'll be interesting to see if Ming Hongwei is released or if they hope we'll all forget about him. Probably less the case. When you're the head of the interval. Yeah. Or whether he'll come out with a similar, sorry I've wronged the government and I must atone towards them and the Chinese people.
00:20:25
Speaker
Whether it'll be, yep, I done bad. Anyway, back to my life at Interpol, where I will coincidentally not be pursuing crimes in China nearly as efficiently as I was before, who knows. It's still very much up in the air. Which leads us, I guess, to the most recent, I think, and possibly most ominous disappearing that's happened recently, being the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.
00:20:53
Speaker
Yes, so this is a interesting story for a lot of reasons, actually. One, no one's entirely sure what's happened apart from the fact that someone's disappeared and rumours are rife. They've been murdered and their body dismembered. But also for the sheer fact that he's an American citizen.
00:21:16
Speaker
who died in Turkey, but technically, if he is dead, on Saudi soil. So it's very complex. This man, he's a Saudi writer, he's been very
00:21:33
Speaker
critical apparently of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Academic Integrity Debate
00:21:39
Speaker
He was last seen visiting, as you say, the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Apparently he's planning to get remarried and so he had to go to the Saudi consulate to get evidence, documentation proving his previous divorce so that he could then get remarried to his Turkish fiance.
00:21:58
Speaker
So he went inside, surrendered his cellphone, as is normal, I think, for going into concerts a lot of the time. His fiancé waited outside for him for 11 hours, at which point, having heard nothing from him, she went to the police, I believe in Turkey.
00:22:15
Speaker
So, Turkey's been investigating and they haven't released anything officially official, have they? But there have been a lot of leaks and information coming out. Yes, and it's important to note that the initial position by the Saudis was to claim he'd never been to the consulate at all, which of course was then contradicted by the girlfriend, saying,
00:22:38
Speaker
kind of saw him walk inside. And indeed security camera footage I believe captured him walking inside and no footage has been found of him leaving.
00:22:47
Speaker
So the information coming out of Turkey from the investigation that's been going on suggests that they believe he was killed in the embassy and his body was then taken somewhere else and disposed of. So there's been a lot of talk of apparently 15 Saudi nationals flew in from Riyadh on that day
00:23:11
Speaker
and then flew out again that very day.
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00:23:14
Speaker
There were two teams, apparently one of a nine-person team who checked into a hotel, went to the consulate before Khashoggi went in, and then a six-person team who showed up later, the implication being one of them was the taking the body away team and the other one was the cleaning up the mess team or something like that.
00:23:36
Speaker
And so the situation is very much evolving. This afternoon I read a paper, a news article in the paper which suggested that they had sort of tracked the flights that these Saudi nationals had taken, tracked them from Riyadh to Istanbul, from Istanbul Airport to the Consulate and back again, had tracked a
00:24:00
Speaker
for convoy tractor convoy of diplomatic vehicles from the consulate to I believe the basement of the the head of the consulates house or something like that
00:24:15
Speaker
So there's been a lot of, if these things are true, of course, because I don't think the statements have been made officially, but it's all looking very dodgy. And then America has started to come into play as well. Well, yes, because he's a US citizen. And America and the US have an interesting diplomatic relationship.
00:24:36
Speaker
Sorry, America and the US. At the moment, that's actually kind of true. But Saudi Arabia and the US have an interesting diplomatic relationship. So the Trump administration, of course, has been actually quite pally with Saudi Arabia for the last year and a bit. And now people are going if a US citizen went into a consulate and was murdered in the consulate,
00:25:06
Speaker
That's a diplomatic stouch, where if you kill a member of the opposing team, and someone who belongs to a different country, then that's not, I mean, killing people is bad. I think we all agree, killing people is bad.
00:25:24
Speaker
Killing people on diplomatic ground is also really, really bad. That's extra super bad, yes. Killing someone from a different nation state on diplomatic ground. That's super bad. I mean, the first thing was bad enough, but now you've just made it really, really bad because you've created a diplomatic incident. And so the question now is, is the Trump administration going to follow this up or not? And that's
00:25:51
Speaker
A really quite interesting question, given how pally the Trump administration has been with Saudi Arabia thus far. Yes, especially Jared Kushner apparently is quite pally with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who's apparently referred to as MBS a lot of the time. That's how chummy they are. They've got a little three-letter acronym
00:26:16
Speaker
And so apparently the Crown Prince has been calling the White House on more than one occasion basically asking to speak with Kushner as well as other people and wanting to, I don't think it's known specifically, but to the suggestion has been that he wants to either know what, be clued in on what the US is planning to do about this or to seek to influence them in some way. I'm not sure there's a specific act in America whose name I've forgotten and I didn't put down in my notes.
00:26:45
Speaker
which a bunch of senators have invoked, which is basically, if something dodgy has happened overseas, we're required to look into it, or something like that. So that has been invoked, but I don't think the president's followed up on it yet. So things are still very much up in the air. Nothing's been proved, things look very dodgy, and the politics around it all get murkier and murkier by the moment.
00:27:12
Speaker
Yep, it's really quite fascinating and of course leaves a whole bunch of conspiracy theories because the reason why
00:27:21
Speaker
was likely killed, is due to the kind of journalistic investigations he was engaging in. And the worry now, as we're seeing with these disappearances and these probable murders, is that a lot of authoritarian states are flexing their muscle, because the historic don't do this openly thing,
00:27:45
Speaker
seems to be kind of disappearing from politics at the moment. We seem to be in a global state where people can go, we can just get away with making people disappear and murdering them on our ground because we know the big powers aren't going to do anything about it.
00:28:06
Speaker
And that brings us to our final disappearance of the episode, which we've gone the full scale from disappeared and released, to disappeared and probably going to be released, to disappeared and probably not going to be seen again, to disappeared and now unfortunately we know was indeed killed. We talk about the Bulgarian journalist, Victoria Maranova.
00:28:29
Speaker
So she was, I don't have it written down, where was she found? In Rus, which I've actually been to. Back in the day when I was living in Romania, and Romania being the neighbour to Bulgaria, to get from Bucharest to Sofia by bus, you have to go through the border town of Rus. So I've been through Rus. I committed no murders in Rus. Well that's good to know.
00:28:59
Speaker
Um, that she...
00:29:02
Speaker
She was found to have been raped and murdered, which by itself, obviously, is bad enough. But it's something of a pattern in that she is the third journalist who's been critical of the EU to die in the last year. Yes. And so she was quite critical of Bulgaria. And Bulgaria, like Romania and Hungary, have interesting governments with slightly corrupt policies.
00:29:31
Speaker
And she had just started a brand new kind of current affairs style show, where her first and what turned out to be her last broadcast was investigating potential corruption in Hungary with respect to EU funding. And then she had this been Ruth's where she strangled, raped and killed.
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah, so I see critical of the EU before. I should have said critical in the EU of the government. So like this, we also have Daphne Karuna Galiza, who is a Maltese journalist, who again also had been known to expose corruption. She was murdered by a car bombing in October of last year. And Jan Kuchiak, a 27-year-old reporter with the Slovakian website Aktuwali,
00:30:25
Speaker
I assume that's how it's pronounced on SK. He was shot dead along with his fiancee in an attack linked to his reporting on tax evasion, and that was in February of this year. So we're starting to see... I guess a slightly dodgy pattern, I imagine. Yes, I mean, on their own, these deaths... I mean, car bombing agents seem to be suspicious. That's not something that just happens. Unfortunately, rape and murder still occur.
00:30:54
Speaker
and other forms of tragic deaths occur. But when there's three journalists, all of whom have been investigating corruption in their government with respect to the EU, you do start to see a pattern. And when you start to see a pattern, you end up going,
00:31:13
Speaker
Are these politically motivated hip jobs? Well, indeed. And that sort of brings us to, I guess, the conspiracy theory angle, because we haven't explicitly talked to conspiracy theories yet this episode, but I think it's kind of been implied right the way along when people who are in some way critical of or have
00:31:32
Speaker
in some way made themselves an enemy of a government and they disappear, it's no real stretch to start thinking that perhaps some sort of governmental conspiracy is behind it. And especially, especially, when we're talking about states that veer towards the autocratic and totalitarian, veer to say? Yes. Fortunately, when it comes to places like China or Russia or Romania or Hungary or Bulgaria,
00:32:01
Speaker
These are nation-states where politics is somewhat dirty, and people in power don't like to be criticized. And so you have situations where you might want to make examples of people.
00:32:16
Speaker
And you might make examples of them by making them disappear as we get with the Chinese example, or you might dismember a body as you find out with the Saudi Arabian example. But these all appear, at least on the face of it, to be examples of governments doing things, but then
00:32:38
Speaker
I'm not actually saying they're doing it openly. Well, no. I mean, the official Saudi position, for instance, is that Mr Khashoggi, they don't know. It's been very much, oh gosh, we are as keen to get to the bottom of this as you are. They obviously admit nothing other than once they were forced to admit he did enter the building once the security footage came out. But yeah, there's been full denial there.
00:33:04
Speaker
I don't believe anyone from the Chinese government came out and said we arrested Fan Bingbing and gave her a good talking to because we didn't like what she's been doing or because we wanted to make an example of her, but she did disappear for a while and then she did come out
00:33:24
Speaker
full of contrition and it's a nice thing. She's really, really anti-tax evasion now, wouldn't it? Actually, that is good. People should not. But quite possibly putting people under house arrest to compel them to make that statement is not the most ideal way of doing things. And I suppose also,
00:33:43
Speaker
If we're talking about dodgy states doing dodgy stuff, that's one thing. But then what about the less dodgy states? Does the fact that this happens elsewhere, could that lead us to be more suspicious of governments, say, in the Western world, where we like to think of ourselves as being a little more democratic and open?
00:34:02
Speaker
Well, yes, I mean, people do point out that there are mysterious journalistic deaths in the US all the time. And people end up going, well, you know, maybe it was a carjacking accident or maybe it was drunk driving, but also maybe it was the CIA getting rid of someone that the president at the time did not like. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
00:34:31
Speaker
Yes, I mean, it was the US that introduced us to the term extraordinary rendition in the wake of 9-11 and the War and Terror and all that, although of course that was taking foreign nationals to their black sites somewhere else, wasn't it? Yes, although people from the state discovered that they were trying to find legal rationales as to why they might be able to to their own people by declaring them to say as enemy combatants and thus robbing them of their nationhood.
00:34:59
Speaker
So I mean, yes, it's the sort of thing that can make us naturally suspicious of governments and the sort of thing which can make us not want to dismiss conspiracy theories completely out of hand when we hear about this sort of stuff. But also it makes you think that maybe we shouldn't be doing a podcast talking about what China is doing to dissidents or what Saudi Arabia is doing to dissidents or what Russia does to dissidents if we ever want to travel to Saudi Arabia, Russia or China.
00:35:48
Speaker
Breaking Breaking Conspiracy Theories in the News
00:35:56
Speaker
Welcome to the news! This week's Reddit headlines from Our Conspiracy and Our Conspiracy Theory are... Kanye West is being paid by the GOP... CIA document confirms Ariasi is a hologram... Is the US government brainwashing the nation to slowly build a galactic army? Galactic, not galactic. Sorry. And Banksy is not a single person.
00:36:21
Speaker
But enough of the internet. We start with Tay Tay News and the fact white supremacists are having to shake it off with their fascination with Taylor Swift. Yes, Taylor Swift came out all political last week endorsing the Democrats and pissing off the white supremacists and Aryans everywhere, which sounds a little odd until you get a bit of backstory. Several years ago, alt-right trolls decided to own the libs.
00:36:47
Speaker
by making out that Taylor Swift was one of their own. They spent months and months creating memes of Taylor Swift images which carried white supremacist slogans and viewpoints. Andrew Aglin of the Daily Stormer was at the forefront of this memetic movement, describing Swift as the Aryan goddess Taylor Swift, Nazi avatar of the white European people.
00:37:10
Speaker
Now, remember, this was a white supremacist plot to own the Louboutins. Swift was not a white supremacist, had not said white supremacist things, and presumably was not agreeable to the whole Fandango. But now she's publicly supported the Democrats and said she would never vote for someone who wasn't in support of all Americans. The white supremacists who, remember, made this all up as a joke,
00:37:34
Speaker
By now angry, she is not the Arian-Erian goddess they made her out to be. Andrew Egglin is possibly the most annoyed of the bunch, having written a thousand word diatribe where he states...
00:37:47
Speaker
Taylor Swift is not an Aryan goddess. That was a viral marketing campaign to make the media look retarded and to make us look clever. Swift is just another stupid whore like all women. Charming fellow. But also, how much of Taylor Swift's image as a probable conservative was marketing and how much of it was actually a reflection of a direction that she personally wanted to go in?
00:38:10
Speaker
which, as various Antifa-related websites have pointed out in the reporting of this, indicates Anglin drank his own Kool-Aid. He's both at pains to point out the whole Aryan goddess thing was made up, and at Swift somehow having never espoused those views has still resolved from them.
00:38:29
Speaker
Meanwhile, Republicans have revealed themselves to be dinosaurs in response to Swift's endorsement of the Democrats, claiming that her fanbase of 13-year-old girls can't vote, so it doesn't matter.
00:38:41
Speaker
Except Swift has been a charting artist now since 2004, which means her 13 year old fans then are now well above voting age. Seems Republicans really are stuck in the past. Well I guess they are the kind of people who still listen to CDs and thus haven't heard any of her new work via the streaming services. Worse, they probably collect vinyl.
00:39:03
Speaker
Oh dear. Oh very dear. Yes, meanwhile, Google! Still doing evil. Yes, a minor story but also a big one. Google, that company which famously removed the requirement to not do evil from their charter, had a massive data breach and didn't tell anyone about it because they feared regulatory punishment. Google+, the social network Google started and people are still surprised actually exists,
00:39:28
Speaker
had a security flaw where businesses using the API could harvest quite a lot of private information of individual users. Google discovered the flaw while working on identifying security issues in their own software. However, Google decided against publicizing the data breach because they weren't sure any data had ever actually been leaked.
00:39:48
Speaker
Now, by not sure, Google means that as they only keep logs of activity for two weeks, no one had harvested any data in that two-week window. That doesn't say data wasn't harvested previously, just that it hasn't been harvested now. Add to this that Google had been very proactive in publicising the security issues of non-Google products. This means it's a bit rich for Google to decide to not admit to their own failings. But their legal team thought the US government might push back.
00:40:17
Speaker
and introduce regulatory frameworks if they admitted the accounts of some half a million users. Of course, keeping data breaches like this secret is precisely why regulatory frameworks are important, and which is also why companies like Google don't want to admit to security issues in the first place.
00:40:38
Speaker
Yes, now this is in some respects a minor issue. Half a million users is small change compared to, say, the likes of Twitter and Facebook, and the data that was publicly available via the API was of limited use. But it's proof positive once again that corporations cover things up because they care more about shareholders than consumers. Conspiracies actually are common when it comes to protecting your profit margin.
00:41:03
Speaker
which is why we promote full-strength communism on the show. Might as well give all the power to the devils you know, rather than the so-called corporate angels. Yeah. Finally, grievance studies and an academic cover-up to promote social constructivism. If you're an academic, what's all this about?
00:41:22
Speaker
Well, three academics, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, spent a year writing fake papers and submitting them to journals in order to show that a certain element of the academic world is host to what they call
00:41:56
Speaker
So this is a more contemporary socal hoax.
00:42:00
Speaker
Yes, it's also a sequel to an earlier hoax by Lindsay and Bogosium where they got a paper published in a pay-to-print journal. At the time they said that that proved the social sciences were infected by bunkum theories, but as people pointed out, getting a paper published in an outlet which doesn't do peer review and does require you to pay for the pleasure doesn't really tell us much of anything. So then does this hoax show anything, and what's the conspiracy angle?
00:42:29
Speaker
Well, the conspiracy angle is simply that the hoaxes believe the social sciences have been taken over by social constructivism, the idea that all truths are constructed and thus social. They're reading of social constructivism, not mine. And academics are unwilling to A, challenge such constructivism, let alone admit to its prevalence.
00:42:51
Speaker
Basically a cover-up by academics of an agenda in the university system to blame issues on white man and European culture. As to whether the hoax actually shows what they think it shows, no.
00:43:05
Speaker
Well, aside from worries about whether they actually chose the best journals in the so-called fields they were taking aim at or not, the process of writing and revising those papers turned out to be the biggest problem. You see, in order to write those papers, the hoaxes had to read and copy the style and arguments they were trying to debunk.
00:43:23
Speaker
So the fact that they think they wrote shoddy papers doesn't mean that their papers were bad. You can call this the devil's advocate issue of academia. Most of us are trained to be able to give a spirited defence of positions we disagree with because to show an opponent's position is bad requires being able to adequately describe it. The hoaxes might well disagree with the paper's conclusions, but people knowledgeable in the domains of the journals the hoaxes have published in
00:43:52
Speaker
said the published papers were not obviously terrible and sometimes actually plausible. Awkward. Add to this peer review itself. Aside from some monstrous academics, most of us who peer review papers want authors to succeed and get into print. So we tend to offer constructive feedback even on papers we think aren't very good. The anyway for an author to improve us through such feedback.
00:44:17
Speaker
So the fact the hoaxes say that their supposedly terrible papers got good feedback, which apparently shows the system is booked, doesn't show that at all. At best it shows that reviewers are polite even in the face of terrible arguments. So this hoax doesn't sound too convincing then?
00:44:35
Speaker
No, it's a mess, frankly, and says more about both the hoaxes and their supporters than it does the field of so-called grief and studies. The fact that people are willing to automatically jump on a report and say, I knew it, without asking does this show what it claims to show, is a little embarrassing for the skeptics of identity politics and the like.
00:44:57
Speaker
Well, human nature and all. And talking about human nature, greed. Yes, greed and the lust for filthy lucre means that if you want more news updates this week, you'll need to subscribe to our patreon to hear more. This week's bonus episode features talk of Simon Bridges and the endless leak inquiry here in Aotearoa.
00:45:15
Speaker
how people are now very confused over Brett Kavanaugh's position on the US Supreme Court bench and skepticism over that shredded Banksy print. But until then, it's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from him. You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:45:34
Speaker
It is written, researched and performed by Josh Addison, aka monkeyfluids, and MRXtenteth, aka Conspiracism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean and Stitcher.
00:45:54
Speaker
It can also be watched on YouTube. Just search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or, if you happen to be technophobic, consult the auguries. You can support the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy via our Patreon page, as listed in the podcast description, or just by searching for us on Patreon.
00:46:17
Speaker
You can also support us via the Podbean Patronage system, if that is more your style. You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com, or find us on Facebook. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.