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M muses on Twitter and Elon Musk via InfoWars
35 Plays2 years ago
Josh is sick with the novel coronavirus, so M fills in forty minutes talking about free speech, Elon Musk, and trying to remember whatever was the issue with Hunter Biden's laptop...
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hey! It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy!
Host Explains Josh's Absence
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello and welcome to a solo edition of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. Josh has the COVID, and thus is no longer with us. He's not dead. He's just not with us. Suffering from the brain frog. Brain frog? Maybe I've got the COVID. Suffering from the brain
00:00:48
Speaker
Fog, tried saying that three times fast with speech disfluency.
Josh's Debate Philosophy
00:00:52
Speaker
Josh is unable to record this week's conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre because like a proper philosopher, I just tapped the side of my head there to show wisdom, like a proper philosopher, Josh feels the need to be confiscamentous when engaging in philosophical work. He's no social psychologist, just wading into a debate without doing any background reading.
00:01:14
Speaker
No, Josh wants to be on the ball.
Musk's Twitter Takeover Hypothesis
00:01:17
Speaker
And so it's left to me to provide some kind of filler episode, and I thought it might be fun, not necessarily fun, but it might be interesting, probably will be interesting, to pop over to infowars.com and see what Alex Jones is saying, because I have a hypothesis.
00:01:35
Speaker
You see, if you're spending any time online, you'll be aware that Elon Musk is in the process of taking over Twitter and turning it into a private company. Insert pause here so I can submit my espresso.
00:01:53
Speaker
sound effect to make sure you know what's going on. And Jones has been talking a lot recently about how he's having conversations with big, important people. And he has this rhetorical trick. I'm actually not quite sure how to express it.
00:02:08
Speaker
where he'll say, oh, I'm talking with, you know, important people. I don't want to name names, but they're people like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk. And privately, they support everything I'm doing. Now, of course, if that's the case, and we also take it to be that Elon Musk is going to turn Twitter into his private fiefdom,
00:02:29
Speaker
then we should be seeing Alex Jones going, oh, well, you know, chickens are coming home to roost. Now I'm going to get back on Twitter. So let's go over to Infowars.com using the power of my incredibly clicky mechanical keyboard.
00:02:44
Speaker
and find out what's happening. So, loading up Infowars.com as we speak. Will this get through the VPN? Is the VPN even working? I should have tested this before I started recording the episode, but it is working. Infowars.com is loading.
00:03:01
Speaker
and okay so top headlines see the hilarious reason alex jones was banned from twitter don't think ah and there's a poll when will new twitter owner elon musk bring alex jones back okay so our options are this week within 90 days within six months or never
00:03:20
Speaker
I'm going to vote for never. And there are 24,316 votes, and 26% of those people who voted agree with me. Interesting enough, 27% say it's going to be this week, which indicates that they have no idea that
00:03:38
Speaker
Elon Musk has made the offer, but the offer will not be final in such time it's gone through the boards, it's gone through securities, all the vetting is done. It won't be until much later
Critique of Infowars Content
00:03:49
Speaker
on this year. So those of you voting for this week, you have no understanding of how business transactions work. Okay, what else have we got here? Ministry of Truth DHS Forms Disinformation Governments Board, headed by Russian collusion hoaxer. We'll take a look at that one in just a second.
00:04:07
Speaker
Musk. Ah, here we go. Musk condemns Twitter's Hunter Biden laptop censorship, suspending New York Post of a truthful story. Incredibly inappropriate. Got a bit of Putinism. Outbreaking Putin threatens all-out war if NATO continues to back Ukraine. Oh, Twitter's top lawyer breaks down in tears during Musk takeover meeting. There's a lot of Musk-related reporting going on.
00:04:33
Speaker
here Roger Stone the political cartoons that Josh had great fun trying to describe the last time we did our roundup these are these are not oh they're really fond of their Ben Garrison I mean really really fond of their Ben Garrison oh yeah Elon Musk took a gambit and what it means for the clique in power
00:05:04
Speaker
Anything else of particular? No, no, it's just mostly the usual racism. There's a piece here about someone whose house was burgled by an African migrant. Okay, so really, really focusing on the racism, Alex.
00:05:21
Speaker
Really, really focusing on the racism. Okay, let's look at the four articles that I've just pulled up.
Disinformation Governance Board Discussion
00:05:28
Speaker
So first one, Ministry of Truth, DHS Forms Disinformation Governance Board, headed by Russia Kaluzhinhokza. This is published by Jamie White. Now, back before I left with the China Coffee Break,
00:05:45
Speaker
I noted that Knowledge Fight was talking about how there was a Jamie White report up on infowars.com, and that excited me for a minute because there was a former party leader back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Jamie White, a philosopher who turned right-wing libertarian think tanky person. I think he was actually right-wing and libertarian before he joined the think tank, truth be told.
00:06:12
Speaker
He came back to Aotearoa New Zealand to run the Act Party, which is our quite white, quite white, yes, quite white, and quite right wing political party back home.
00:06:26
Speaker
And I thought maybe that this was the same Jamie White, but our Jamie White, the Jamie White of Aotearoa, New Zealand, is W-H-Y-T-E. This is Jamie White's spout as in the colour white. So, actual disinformation agent to helm government disinformation Ministry of Truth board aimed at policing free speech.
00:06:47
Speaker
So basically, Joe Biden's Department of Homeland Security has formed a disinformation governance board headed by a prominent Russia collusion hoaxer according to reports. Now, of course, according to reports here is going to be according to reports. Joe Biden's Department of Homeland Security has formed a disinformation governance board headed by a person. According to Infowars reporting, it's a thoroughly debunked Russia collusion hoaxer.
00:07:16
Speaker
So let's have a look. So they're quoting from Politico, and basically Nina Jankovic is going to hit this board as executive director. She was previously a fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship, and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. So she sounds like a good pick.
00:07:42
Speaker
But because she's a part-time professional at Syracuse University, she has been someone who... All right, so trying to actually have to read quite far down the report to find the bit where they're linking her to the Hillary Clinton contrived Russia collusion hoax against Donald Trump on Twitter in 2018.
00:08:07
Speaker
And basically, it's an academic who, like myself, has had questions about exactly how the investigation of the potential Russian interference in the previous US presidential election actually went out. And there's a whole bunch of Republican operatives
00:08:28
Speaker
who are skeptical of her claims because she's made claims against their beloved former leader, Donald J. Trump, and this is suddenly a rationale as to why she isn't suitable for this particular role.
00:08:44
Speaker
Now this just seems like standard political ideology stuff. This person who's been critical of a former leader has been appointed by the new leader to run a board which is going to be looking into disinformation claims. We have previously denied that disinformation even existed, so ipso facto, we don't think this board needs to exist. And the person who believes disinformation does exist, of course, must be the wrong person to run it.
00:09:10
Speaker
Indeed, they even quote good old Marjorie Taylor Green, which Infowars is now very, very keen on. Yes, they're very, very keen on their QAnon candidate, even though Alex Jones has been very critical of QAnon and very angry about QAnon proponents, but once they become right-wing operatives within the governmental structure, Alex Jones will cuddle up to them
00:09:38
Speaker
to their heart's content. It's actually very little to the story. And basically, some Republican operatives don't like the fact she's been appointed. It's her factor. She should not have been appointed. Admittedly, that's the standard of news we get from Fox, so I don't know why I'm so dismayed. It's the standard of news we get from infowars.com. Let's move on to the exciting stuff. This is the must stuff.
Elon Musk's Free Speech Absolutism Critique
00:10:03
Speaker
So,
00:10:05
Speaker
As predicted, Alex Jones is going in deep on supporting Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Indeed, we've got very weird imagery going on. So we have, I suppose I meant to... Maybe that's a picture of Hunter Biden. I actually don't know what Hunter Biden looks like.
00:10:29
Speaker
I'm sure I've seen pictures of Hunter Biden and just seen yet another white man in a position of privilege. So it's a picture of what I'm assuming is Hunter Biden looking slightly haunted and a picture of Elon Musk with glowing blue eyes.
00:10:48
Speaker
And I suppose that's meant to suggest that Elon Musk is coming after Hunter Biden. And basically, this is a report on people talking about the Hunter Biden story in the year of our Lord 2022. And Elon Musk saying suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.
00:11:13
Speaker
So basically this is looking at previous reporting on the Hunter Biden story. So back in 2020 Twitter notoriously blocked links to the New York Post exclusive reporting on the Hunter laptop.
00:11:31
Speaker
which is still one of those stories where people are litigating it to this day, making what appear to be very, very, very strong claims based upon the activities of Hunter Biden in his business dealings, and then saying, oh, by the way, his father must be ultimately responsible for these dealings.
00:11:55
Speaker
Now, we can have our opinions on exactly whether Hunter Biden is a good person or a bad person, and we can have our opinions as to whether Joe Biden is a good president or a bad president. We even have opinions about the parenting relationship between Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. But it always seemed a bit of a stretch
00:12:16
Speaker
to then link Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine with Joe Biden's advocacy. And it's a stretch for the sheer fact that this was investigated by committee at the time. There was a question as to whether there was an inappropriate relationship between Joe Biden as a foreign policy expert
00:12:37
Speaker
at the time, vice president of the United States of America, engaging in foreign policy overseas in a nation state where his son was doing business. And the investigation seemed to quite clearly show that Joe Biden's affairs in the Ukraine were not overlapping with Hunter Biden's affairs in the Ukraine. But of course, any cent of the scandal is the kind of thing which gets litigated.
00:13:03
Speaker
in the political sphere. And it is true that maybe powerful people should ensure that their children don't get up to activities which are going to at least give the impression of embarrassing their powerful parents. So there was a New York Post story about this, which talked an awful lot about Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden's exploits linked to the stolen laptop.
00:13:33
Speaker
from memory, and I'd have to actually go back and look at the reporting at the time. Many of the issues about the story was about the chain of custody over the laptop, because it's one thing for reporters to get information, but it's another thing where they get information in ways which are clearly due to criminal action.
00:13:57
Speaker
Now, of course, there are going to be a whole bunch of exceptions there. So if someone stole the White House recordings in the Nixon regime, that showed that Nixon had plotted the Watergate break-in, so the missing minute, someone had managed to steal that material and get it out there, there probably would be.
00:14:19
Speaker
a case to be made in journalistic ethics saying even though the chain of custody of the evidence is bad, the badness of that chain of custody is overwhelmed by the necessity of the public good of publishing this material. But the problem with the Hunter Biden laptop story is it doesn't seem to break that particular threshold.
00:14:42
Speaker
in that no matter what we think about Hunter Biden's dad, Hunter Biden is still a private citizen. And indeed, what kind of gored people at the time the story came out was the double standard that was going on with respect to Republican politicians and people saying, oh, you can't bring up their children. You can't bring up their children. That's inappropriate. But as soon as you mention Obama's children, so when there was evidence of the
00:15:10
Speaker
Daughters of Michelle and Barack Obama using drugs is all bad parenting bad Parenting and when it turned out that there was evidence of Hunter Biden having some incredibly interesting sexual proclivities and also Dealing being a bad business person is always doesn't that tell us something about Joe Biden? So there was a double standard going on there as well
00:15:38
Speaker
But yes, the fact that Elon Musk still thinks that it was inappropriate for that story to be shut down, even though the actual rationale for the story being shut down was more of a question about journalistic ethics than it was about the content of the story per se, although they were concerned the story was being basically overhyped.
00:15:56
Speaker
and extended well beyond its usefulness. The fact that Musk is still going on about this is a grist for Alex Jones' mill that Musk is going to come in and make Twitter a better place for people like Alex Jones, and also grist for the mill of those of us who are now moving over to Mastodon,
00:16:16
Speaker
that Twitter might get a lot worse given the kind of free speech absolutism that Elon Musk seems to be enamored of, is the kind of free speech absolutism that philosophers have been arguing against for a long time, for the sheer fact that what we need is a fairly nuanced take on free speech, just for the sheer fact that absolutism does seem to have some fairly undesirable consequences.
00:16:44
Speaker
such as allowing Holocaust deniers and racists to do their thing in the public sphere without there being a kind of accountability mechanism. This reminds me of a discussion I had which is kind of related to this and probably explains my view better than what I just said with a journalist back home a few years ago where I mooted that if
00:17:10
Speaker
particular opinion pieces continued to be published by one of our major newspapers back home, I would be less inclined to buy the newspaper. I was going, look, these newspapers publish material that I find abhorrent and do not enjoy. I don't like the idea that my money is going towards funding the publication of these opinion pieces, since these opinion piecewriters are being paid to produce these columns. So I feel that
00:17:39
Speaker
as an individual, one action I can take is to show my disgruntlement by no longer purchasing the newspaper in question. And one of the journalists at this newspaper was going, oh, but you can't do that. I mean, what about all the good journalism that occurs there? And I was going, well, yeah, I recognize there's good journalism occurring in the newspaper, but I cannot
00:18:01
Speaker
bring myself to financially support that at the cost of also supporting the abhorrent opinion pieces that are occurring in the paper. And essentially his argument was, I'm obliged to buy newspapers.
00:18:16
Speaker
And I was going, no, no, that's not how the free speech thing works. He's going, but people should be free to express their opinions. I was going, yeah, I should be free to be able to express my dissatisfaction against those opinions. And it seems that Musk's approach towards free speech absolutism
00:18:38
Speaker
is that people should be allowed to say whatever they like without consequence. And that's the worry with this particular species of free speech absolutism. It's a form of free speech that says people should be allowed to speak
00:18:54
Speaker
But somehow also elides the idea that people should be allowed to speak against that speech, because apparently anything which is seen to go well, maybe you shouldn't say that, is taken to be censorious, as opposed to people using their free speech to counter speech they don't like.
00:19:15
Speaker
And this is the worry about Musk and Co. is that they want people to be able to speak, but they don't want people to be able to then express criticism of that speech, because that criticism is taken as being, well, you're against free speech if you criticize what I say.
00:19:31
Speaker
which is why we need a more nuanced take on free speech in public discourse, which kind of matches the discussion that's been going on about free speech in the academic discourse, particularly in philosophy. For quite some time now, I mean, go back and look at the work of Karl Popper, who of course wrote on the conspiracy theory of society. He also talked about the idea that
00:19:55
Speaker
There's a certain degree of intolerance we should have towards bad speech because tolerating all speech actually leads to very perverse outcomes. This is the paradox of tolerance. But we're kind of getting off the topic of Alex Jones here, although we are on the topic of Elon Musk. So yes, Elon Musk is still skeptical that it was inappropriate to wait and see about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
00:20:25
Speaker
All right, well, that's one story. Let's see what else we have here. Twitter's top lawyer breaks down in tears during Musk takeover meeting.
Twitter's Internal Reactions
00:20:34
Speaker
So this is basically Twitter's top lawyer reportedly broke down in tears during a virtual meeting with the company's policy and legal teams to discuss the ramification of Elon Musk's purchase of the social media platform. My espresso will have gone cold now. I'll just finish it off. Yeah, that was cold.
00:20:55
Speaker
So apparently she cried as she expressed concerns about how the company could change and acknowledged there was a significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk's leadership. This, so basically they say, oh, it's a woman. She was emotional. How dare she be a lawyer for Twitter. But I mean, if you look at the way that Musk has
00:21:21
Speaker
has run other companies. So you look at the racism scandal that's currently going on with Tesla, where Musk has been shown to have said to people, you just basically have to tolerate the fact that people are going to be racist towards you in our workplace. And you look at the way in which Musk ran SpaceX during the pandemic, requiring people come to work at the height of the pandemic when there were stay at home orders going on.
00:21:51
Speaker
If you look at the way that Musk deals with individuals who criticise him, so for someone who's a free speech absolutist, he is someone who's really called for people on Twitter to have their views shut down whenever they criticise him, or he'll just call people pedophiles because apparently that's a South African thing that only people like Musk know about.
00:22:12
Speaker
I can understand how people in senior positions at Twitter are going, this does not seem like a good move for the company, given we know what the work culture in Musk's other companies look like. So the new story here is, oh, woman is hysterical.
00:22:31
Speaker
But really, it's more of a case of lawyer reacts to, if this person's going to be our CEO, we know what his companies look like. We don't want our company to look like that in two to three years time. And indeed, there are some stories going around, and I don't know whether these have been verified, they were being talked about on Twitter.
00:22:55
Speaker
a day or so ago about how there are people openly celebrating the idea that transphobia is something that can come back to Twitter in a big way. So there are legitimate concerns about what might happen to the platform and what might happen to the workplace that platform is produced on, which is one of the reasons why I've resurrected my Mastodon account.
00:23:19
Speaker
So I might just slowly move away from using Twitter and do most of my tooting, not tweeting, over at scholar.social. Although I'm having a problem migrating my account, I think I may have broken this system inadvertently, although I don't know how, and it's very hard to get IT support for mastodon instances. But we'll see what's going on.
00:23:47
Speaker
Alright, our final story is Elon Musk's Twitter gambit and what it means to the clique in power.
Libertarian Perspectives on Musk's Acquisition
00:23:54
Speaker
Oh, this is on Mises.org article, which has been resynticated to infowars.com, which means it will be very libertarian, but it's probably also the slightly higher standard of writing than an infowars article written by people at infowars itself.
00:24:10
Speaker
So the reason Elon Musk take over Twitter has the usual suspects in our frenzy, and contrary to what progressives may claim, Twitter has not been the town hall for democracy, but rather an enforce of awokeness, political fealty, and obedience to official state dictates and narratives. So basically what the Mises Institute wants is for it to be that far.
00:24:34
Speaker
for the Republican because I imagine they'll want it to be an enforcer for anti-wokeness political fealty to the president who's Republican and obedience's official state dictates and narratives as put forward by the Republican Party. And we have yet another picture of Elon Musk who looks like he's orgasming in a suit.
00:24:57
Speaker
I imagine he does that all the time. So Elon Musk's bid to take over Twitter and turn it into a private company has apparently been successful, so at least this article recognises that it's still possible it won't go through. I mean, it seems very likely it will, but there are some checks that have to go on before it'll get approved, and it is possible
00:25:16
Speaker
things could change in the interim. Indeed, the people who ruined Tumblr made Tumblr very, very unprofitable. Talking about how they can make Twitter unprofitable, or at least more unprofitable, Twitter's yet to turn a profit, make it even more unprofitable before Musk even gets to own it properly. So basically give him a poison pill.
00:25:42
Speaker
although arguably Twitter has been a poison pill for quite some time. I love Twitter and I also think it's truly, truly despicable. It's a love-hate relationship. So yeah, this is just a basic libertarian take on what it means for Twitter with the idea that it's been
00:26:04
Speaker
theory very woke and ipso facto must be in control of it will reign that wokeness back i have to say as someone who would be described as being woke by the meisters institute and indeed i would probably self describe myself as being very very woke as a genderqueer person
00:26:24
Speaker
I don't see Twitter as being a particularly liberal paradise, in that I see transphobia and racism on the platform all the time, and I see it being a platform where the rich and the powerful do not get treated the same way as the hoi polloi, in that it seems the rich and the powerful get to say whatever they like on Twitter,
00:26:49
Speaker
and at no point get sanctioned, but you attack one transphobe with just a mild ribbing and you'll get 24 to 48 hours of timeout. So if you're big and powerful,
00:27:05
Speaker
Go ahead with your transphobiouses twitter, but if you've got a small following, it turns out you mock one transphobe, and it's time out for one or two days.
00:27:20
Speaker
This probably speaks to one of the partisan divides we have in our society, in that on the woke side, people see Twitter as being actually pretty much a hellscape, and on the reactionary side, people seem to view Twitter as a hellscape as well, because they're not allowed to say whatever they like. And that's often because the people who are concerned about
00:27:45
Speaker
the consequences of saying whatever they like are not the rich and the powerful. And so the disgruntled sides on both sides of the extremist aisle both see Twitter as being very bad, which allows people like the Mises Institute to then play on the perception of what Twitter is like, as opposed to possibly the reality. And there's quite a lot of study in
00:28:10
Speaker
well, various academic disciplines, so communication studies, rhetoric, sociology, and the like, about the actual landscape of Twitter itself. And it turns out that both the, and I'm going to use periodic terms here, the extreme work side and the extreme reactionary side have a view of Twitter, which doesn't really resemble what it looks like to an ordinary user.
00:28:34
Speaker
But at the same time, they can launder those perceptions to then create outrage and further disgruntlement. So yeah, this is a basic article here about how it might be great that Musk's commitment to free speech has raised the hackles of the establishment gatekeepers who ironically figure free speech as a threat to democracy.
00:28:59
Speaker
I think you'll find the establishment gatekeepers here, which is a pejorosa term, are concerned about the free speech absolutists, as I talked beforehand, as opposed to free speech itself, but that's the kind of
00:29:16
Speaker
I would go slippery and shoddy, so I went for sloddy. The kind of sloddy thinking we kind of associate with libertarians. I do wonder, do any libertarians listen to this podcast, given that Josh and I make fun of libertarians all the time? I mean, it's possible you do.
00:29:37
Speaker
Do you? I don't know. Maybe we should spend more time trash-talking libertarians. There's actually some very interesting stuff about the libertarian-to-fash pipeline. So there's the wellness-to-fash pipeline, which has been talked about a lot, where people who are into alternative medicine and other alternative modalities have been very quickly captured by certain anti-vax anti-government
00:30:07
Speaker
So as I've seen in the pandemic, yoga teachers attending protests where there are nooses and anti-Semitic slogans being shouted continuously. But there's also a fairly good pipeline, evidentially, of libertarians becoming fascist reactionaries.
00:30:28
Speaker
And that, I mean, the greatest example appears to be Adrian Vermeel, who we've talked about on this podcast in The Path with respect to the paper that he co-authored with Cass Sunstein. He identifies as a libertarian. He now thinks that democracy is a bad idea because democracy basically allows people with ideas that are contrary
00:30:49
Speaker
to Adrian Vermeule's libertarian views, to occasionally have power. And he considers that to be a consequence which is too extreme for a society, and thus feels that we should get rid of democracy. In which case, yeah, that's your libertarian ideals, have basically convinced you that voting is bad, and that we should have fascist dictators. And I'm sure that's going to work out really, really well for everyone.
00:31:17
Speaker
So we get an attack on human rights groups, we get an attack on... Oh, so here the New York Times is being attacked, so previously the article's going, New York Post is great, and now we've got the New York Times, though. Now that's a trashy magazine.
00:31:35
Speaker
and relentless smears on Musk. I mean, I don't think you need to smear Musk. I think you just need to report what Musk does. It is kind of interesting. I remember, I'm fairly sure I've talked about this on the podcast before,
00:31:53
Speaker
Ten years ago, I wouldn't say I would have been a Musk fan, but I was going, oh, Tesla's great. He's talking about bringing in better solar power for houses. He's doing some really interesting stuff in the space race. Musk seems like he might be advocating technologies that could be beneficial to humankind going forward.
00:32:20
Speaker
And then he became a public figure. So he went from being a business person operating background to being a public figure who opined on things, and it turns out that his opinions were terrible. I mean, there's another similar example in the gaming community. So Marcus Notch, who came up with Minecraft, when Notch was only talking about games,
00:32:44
Speaker
so Minecraft and then the successor game he was trying to make and then gave up upon which was going to be a space sim where you fly from one planet to another and you might have to reprogram your computer if things break down on board it looked actually fairly interesting once he stopped being a programmer per se and started being I'm rich I'm just going to talk about things people went oh we quite liked you when you didn't express opinions
00:33:13
Speaker
But now we've discovered that you might be clever when it comes to programming, which is the notch thing, or clever when it comes to buying out companies, which is the musk thing, since we have to remind ourselves that Musk didn't actually create the companies that he owns. He bought into them or took them over, as he's doing with Twitter now.
00:33:36
Speaker
And turns out you might be clever in this thing, but politically and socially, I think you're a bit of an asshole.
Musk's Public Opinions and Reputation
00:33:43
Speaker
So you don't really need to smear musk. You just need to report things that musk says, and they kind of stand on their own. I mean, this is the man who, when people said, we don't think your submarine is going to be able to get those people out of the cave, went, oh, you're just a pedo guy.
00:34:01
Speaker
Just a pedo guy. That's not a good reaction to people having legitimate concerns about how your very large submarine is not going to be able to go through a small underwater channel in a cave.
00:34:20
Speaker
So... oh, and then the article just ends. So, basically, human rights groups and media organisations have been smearing masks by simply reporting what they say, and basically, they're wrong-headed. Is there anything to this?
00:34:41
Speaker
Oh, having said, it'll be a better written piece than a standard in-the-wars piece, I have to say this is... this is not great at all. And with Twitter as operated as a political state apparatus, a propaganda, censorship, and disinformation agent for the state. The state defined by Henry Haslett as the clique in power. So, one thing we can
00:35:07
Speaker
dispute that definition, that the state is the clique in power. I mean, often the state is the clique in power, but actually given the role that corporations play in the US and in a lot of Western nations now.
00:35:23
Speaker
you actually have the state being separate from the clique in power with clique in power having influence over the state but the state being the democratically voted for apparatus and the civil service that goes with it so that's a side note there
00:35:39
Speaker
But Twitter has operated as a political state apparatus. I mean, it's a public company. Don't think it's controlled by the government. Except, of course, by using their schloddy, I'm going to use that term again, definition.
00:35:55
Speaker
They're going, oh, but we don't have to say it's controlled by the government. If we say the state is to click in power, then the rich liberal elites who are said to run Twitter, though I should point out that Jack Dorsey is a libertarian, so I wouldn't say he's a liberal elite with that kind of capital L, liberalism. Oh, that makes it a state apparatus there. But note
00:36:20
Speaker
They said political state, apparatus. Now, political state and the state are going to be slightly different ideas even under this definition of clique and power. But I'm talking probably too much as a philosopher here for what is a simple sentence in what is a article designed as rhetoric to basically get other libertarians to go, yes, Musk will take
Twitter as a Political Tool Debate
00:36:40
Speaker
control. Everything will be better under Musk. Anyway, it just ends with allowing one of these major assets to fall into the wrong hands. They've put wrong there in scare quotes.
00:36:49
Speaker
jeopardizes those functions, that's the political state apparatus, and casts a new doubt on the regime, that's the Clinton powers, ability to squash dissent and control the population.
00:37:02
Speaker
I mean, Twitter's big. I mean, Facebook doesn't quite have the reach it used to. But Twitter's still only used by a very small fraction of the world. So I don't know how well social media works to control the population. Indeed, when the Musk news came out,
00:37:23
Speaker
I was thinking about all the philosophers I know who aren't on Twitter, which is a lot of them. Indeed, if you look at the philosophers who write on conspiracy theory, there's Pet Stokes, myself,
00:37:41
Speaker
Neil Levy. So David Coady doesn't have a Twitter account. Lee Basham doesn't have a Twitter account. Charles Pigdon doesn't have a Twitter account. Brian Elkely doesn't have a Twitter account, although these people do have Twitter accounts. They're doing little Twitter stuff, so probably talking about their diversions behind the scenes with their close friends, which is a perfectly legitimate use of Twitter. But I'm talking about public accounts here, and also potentially smearing the good name of friends there.
00:38:10
Speaker
I've got no problem with sexual possession. You do what you do. I do what I do. Kinks for everyone, I say. Kinks, kinks, kinks. And listen to the kinks.
00:38:21
Speaker
Some good music there. But most of the philosophers I know in the field of conspiracy theory theory aren't using Twitter. And actually it's quite interesting. I don't know that many of the new generation of conspiracy theory... So Keith Harris, he has a Twitter account. I don't know that many of the other people who are the new... Oh, MetShield also has a Twitter account.
00:38:43
Speaker
But most of the old guard don't, and actually I don't even think most of the new guard do. Maybe they'll take Mastodon account up. So, I mean on one respect, as someone who uses Twitter a lot, I'm dismayed by the fact it could get a lot worse under Musk. At the same time, the people I'm mentioning who don't seem to have Twitter accounts
00:39:07
Speaker
their lives do not seem any worse for the lack of Twitter. In fact, in some respects, I think their lives might be slightly better, because Twitter's a... it's an attention-grabbing procrastination tool that I waste too much time on. Basically, this has turned out to be a discussion of me and Twitter, using Alex Jones as a... as a proxy to get me to Elon Musk, to then go, maybe I should just give up on social media entirely.
00:39:36
Speaker
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. It's only one thing to say to that. Durango!
00:39:46
Speaker
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00:40:10
Speaker
you