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The Final Filler Episode(?)
26 Plays1 year ago
M talks about whether they should talk about Alex Jones' sex life...
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Transcript
Auckland Floods Impact Co-host Josh
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another interstitial episode of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, Sans Josh. We had hoped, when I say we, I hoped, although I think Josh hoped as well, that this week would see a return to a normal episode. But you might be aware that A, Josh has been away, and B, we had massive flooding in Auckland over the last week.
00:00:24
Speaker
And so Josh has returned home to find that his house, which is a metre above the ground, also was ankle deep in water at some point, and that's not very good for electronics. Electronics? Electronics. Electronics. It's neither good for electronics, nor is it good for electronics.
00:00:46
Speaker
So once again, you're left with me. And frankly, I don't really have that much to say.
Relevance of Investigating Alex Jones' Personal Life
00:00:53
Speaker
Other than there's been a development on the Alex Jones front, and it's a little bit hard to know what we should say about it.
00:01:04
Speaker
So the Southern Poverty Law Center has been doing an investigation into Alex Jones, and I found out about this due to a discussion of the investigation on Knowledge Fight, where one of the Dan said, look, I've been involved in these investigations, I was in a room with Alex Jones over a month ago,
00:01:24
Speaker
and I'm not very comfortable with the reporting that's come out consequently, such that I've removed my name from those reports. And that's because the investigation into Alex Jones, which looks at some of the leaked text messages about Alex Jones,
00:01:43
Speaker
The first part of the report, and we are assuming there's going to be more than just this initial story at the SPLC, concerns Alex Jones' personal life, and as Dan points out, we can criticise Jones for his spreading of unwarranted concerns.
00:02:02
Speaker
conspiracy theories, we can criticise Jones for reporting disinformation and misinforming his listeners, but do we actually need to get into the weeds of Alex Jones' personal life, including his infidelity?
00:02:19
Speaker
with his ex-wife, and also the fact that he has shared pornographic images with his ex-wife, which seem to go against Alex Jones' stance both on pornography generally, and his stance on LGBTQI issues.
Hypocrisy in Public vs. Private Behavior
00:02:38
Speaker
And
00:02:40
Speaker
I, like Dan, am a little bit conflicted by this report, because on one level, showing Alex Jones to be a hypocrite, so sending dick pics when he's against homosexuality, and allegations by his ex-wife that he may or may not be bisexual,
00:02:58
Speaker
as has been pointed out by numerous commentators, we only have half of the messages here, the messages that were sent by Alex Jones, and we're also missing a lot of the context around those messages with respect to how Alex Jones and his ex-wife used to talk to one another. So it's quite possible that what looks like allegations of bisexuality may in fact just be memes or
00:03:25
Speaker
play within a kind of discourse that those two got involved in. But at the same time, it does look like Alex Jones may have engaged in a little bit of hypocrisy, at least with respect to how damaging pornography is.
00:03:41
Speaker
to people if Alex Jones is sending pornographic materials himself to his ex-wife back when they were married. Not he's sending pornographic material to his ex-wife. He was sending pornographic material to his then-wife, who is now his ex-wife. Temporal ordering sometimes gets very, very confusing. And if you're watching me explain this, you'd see a lot of hand gestures as I try to kind of weave some kind of narrative out of the story.
00:04:10
Speaker
And so on one level, the hypocrisy really does seem like it's newsworthy. It is the kind of thing that we should be interested in.
Can Hypocrites Advocate Truth?
00:04:18
Speaker
But at the same time, the hypocrisy isn't really salient with respect to the kind of damage, the kind of unwarranted conspiracy theories that Alex Jones promotes does.
00:04:34
Speaker
Hypocrisy is a tricky thing. As I was taught when I was doing ethics back at the University of Auckland, hypocrites can be right. There's a long history of people engaging in hypocrisy by advocating things they will not do themselves, but they're advocating the right thing. The classic example in the literature tends to be the chain-smoking doctor who recommends to his patient as he's lighting up, it was a man in these examples,
00:05:04
Speaker
recommends to his patient as he's lighting up another cigarette that they should never start smoking or the alcoholic who tries to persuade a family member to not start drinking. Sometimes you can be a hypocrite and you can also be correct. You can know that your own behavior is damaging and you recommend that other people don't engage in that behavior.
00:05:29
Speaker
And sometimes hypocrites will be known and that they will actively act in a way that you know about, but they recommend that other people don't act in that way. And sometimes hypocrites are deeply ashamed of their own behavior, so they hide it, but they still recommend that people don't engage in this deleterious behavior.
00:05:51
Speaker
So it's possible that Alex Jones is a hypocrite and he might still be right. I'm not going to wade into the debates about pornography because pornography is a very tricky subject and that we should be sex positive but we also don't want to engage in any kind of exploitative activities of sex workers and that of course gets quite tricky with the way that pornography is created and also disseminated and also pirated.
00:06:19
Speaker
Because even if you think that pornography is fine, you might think that people stealing pornographic material for their own particular fun, and thus not adequately compensating the people who are producing it, is itself a bad thing. Which is why, you know, I need to sidestep the pornographic debate there, because it's a lot more complicated than I think many people think when it comes to the ethics of pornography.
Does Alex Jones Spread Disinformation Knowingly?
00:06:45
Speaker
But nonetheless, this story is out there now, and so aspects of Alex Jones' private life have been made public on the internet. And some of it is stuff which we kind of expected, some of it is stuff which has been long rumoured, but the question remains, is it salient to Alex Jones' The Conspiracy Theorist? Insert brackets, unwarranted.
00:07:11
Speaker
And I think like Dan from Knowledge Fight, I'm of the opinion that this isn't really the story we should be leading with. You might think this is a story that you then add on to a discussion of the kind of things that Alex Jones promotes.
00:07:30
Speaker
and the kind of stories that people want to read, or those of us in the disinformation space at least, want to read about Alex Jones, is a, is Alex Jones composimentous when it comes to disseminating disinformation? So is he himself
00:07:47
Speaker
disinformed by others and thus acting as a misinformation agent, misinforming other people? Or is he knowingly lying to his audience in order to sell food supplements and other things which are SEO targeted? Because that's the operative question here. Is Alex Jones a dupe? And thus in some respect,
00:08:12
Speaker
not really blameworthy in the same way that we would say that a disinformation agent is responsible for what they're putting out there in the world. And we have to leave a whole bunch of societal stuff in the background as to what makes people the kind of disinformation or misinformation agents that they turn out to be.
00:08:34
Speaker
And those are the kind of stories that those of us in the disinformation space, and I count myself amongst people who are interested in researching disinformation, even though I don't have the bad view that many people have, that there's so much misinformation out there and we're awash in a post-truth reality. I'm still interested in both warranted and unwarranted conspiracy theories, because unwarranted conspiracy theories can lead to misinformation of things.
00:09:04
Speaker
We want to focus on what does Alex Jones know about his business? And is his business spreading disinformation? Or is his business based upon the spreading of misinformation? And that's a much more interesting story. And that was the kind of story I think Dan from Knowledge Fight
00:09:24
Speaker
was actually interested in telling. And that's why he's retracted himself from the discussion about Alex Jones's personal life.
Focus: Personal Lives vs. Actions of Conspiracy Theorists
00:09:35
Speaker
Because even though it's titillating, it's interesting, it's not salient to Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist per se, it's kind of an epi-phenomena of Alex Jones's worldviews, and also B,
00:09:50
Speaker
we're kind of getting into the dirty politics aspect of attacking Jones' character with respect to his Piccadillos, rather than the thing which we actually take to be problematic about his behaviour, which is the misinformation divide about what he's doing with the promotion of unwarranted conspiracy theories on infowars.com.
00:10:15
Speaker
So you might want to go to the SPLC website and look at the story. There's certainly no stopping you. But at the same time, I share the kind of trepidation about these kinds of stories that Dan does, even though
00:10:32
Speaker
as someone who's also interested in the character of particular type of conspiracy theorists, or as Jaron Harabam calls them, conspiracy entrepreneurs, people who are in the business of promoting conspiracy theories for some kind of gain, whether it be financial or political.
00:10:55
Speaker
we are interested in the characteristics of those people, and so this is information which is kind of interesting, and yet kind of also not the kind of thing, and I've said kind of a lot now, that perhaps, and I'm just putting more caveats in, kind of, perhaps, maybe, circumstances, etc., etc., it's not necessarily clear that this should be in the public domain.
Podcast's Resilience Amid Natural Disasters
00:11:22
Speaker
So that's basically my update for this week. Hopefully next week things will go back to normal. I'm not entirely sure that it's going to.
00:11:34
Speaker
who knows how Josh's situation is going to be. Who knows what my situation will be. You'll be aware that the microphones sound ever so slightly different this week due to circumstances. So we'll see what happens in a week's time. But the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy with Josh is coming back. Well,
00:11:55
Speaker
as long as we survive the next storm up in Auckland. But it is coming back. There's going to be more Josh. There'll be just as much me as usual. We've got Back to the Conspiracies coming up. We've got Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatres coming up. We've got episodes on topics we haven't covered before. We'll be talking about whether Ancient Rome even existed in an upcoming episode. So we are trekking along.
00:12:22
Speaker
the natural disaster that occurred in Auckland earlier this week late last week kind of has put a bit of pressure on one of the co-hosts and they're getting themselves back to speed and Josh if you're listening good luck getting those those chip boards leveled you know what I mean you know what I mean so yes I will just leave you with two words
00:12:52
Speaker
Belgium biscuit.