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A Filler Episode
26 Plays5 years ago
An episode that is not an episode: Josh fills you in what happened years ago, and M discusses what they are working on right now.
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Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
http://episto.org/
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http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
You can contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Scheduling Conflicts
00:00:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison, but unfortunately Dr. M.R.X.Tenteth is nowhere to be seen at the current point in time. We don't have a proper episode for you this week, basically. Due to scheduling conflicts, we've not been able to get together to record. I am busy all of the week. M is busy all of the weekend. Such are the dynamic and wacky lives that we live.
00:00:44
Speaker
So this is just a little bit of a placeholder to keep you going until we can get together and record ourselves a proper episode.
Placeholder Segment and Episode Recap
00:00:50
Speaker
What I thought I'd do to fill a little bit of time is just do the Previously On section, which we've been trialing out this year. So I guess we should play the little chime now, Em? Can you arrange that? Previously on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy...
00:01:11
Speaker
Right, so, where are we? The date as I'm recording this is the 37th of February. In 2015, around this time, we were 36 episodes into the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and already sick to death of false flag conspiracy theories. Basically because they seemed to show up absolutely everywhere in response to absolutely anything.
00:01:36
Speaker
I had already at that stage started calling them the lupus of conspiracy theories in reference to good old house. I had hoped that that phrase would sort of take the conspiracy theory world by storm and spread around everywhere, but it looks like I'm the only one who uses it still.
00:01:51
Speaker
And since House has been off the air for about six or seven years now, it's probably not going to catch on anytime soon. But that particular episode, we had come across an article on Infowars, I believe it was, that had 42 examples of admitted false flag attacks. And we thought we'd have a look through them and found that there were some genuine false flags in the air.
00:02:13
Speaker
By our count, about 13 of the 42 were genuine actual false flag incidents, mostly happening in wartime, which is sort of the origin of the false flag tactic, really. There were a bunch of them that either weren't false flags at all, or were sort of people had uncovered plans for false flag incidents that never actually eventuated. They were just things that people had talked about.
00:02:41
Speaker
So it was interesting to look at and we found the list kind of undermined itself a little bit while it did have a bunch of examples of real false flag incidents. It also had a bunch of ones that were really really reaching and just ended up making itself look a little bit more desperate than it needed to be. But that's false flags for you.
00:02:56
Speaker
Around this time in 2016, Em was off in residence in Romania, and the episode that we gave was Em giving a recap of the Balkan PR Awards. As I recall, Em was invited to be a speaker there because having philosophers come and talk about conspiracy theories is something they do over in Europe, where that sort of stuff is valued.
00:03:20
Speaker
So that was just a little bit of a report on the comings and goings and the Balkan PR Awards. 2017, I think this is one of those cases where what we're finding when doing looking back at old episodes, one problem is that you try to look at what happened on this date two or three or four years ago to discover that this date is almost exactly in between the dates of recording for two other episodes. So this one
00:03:49
Speaker
was kind of in the middle of two, closest to the death of Kim Yong-nam, which we talked about, but I'm pretty sure we mentioned that last week in the previously one, because this is what I'm talking about. Sometimes it gets a bit mixed up. So we'll skip past that,
Critique of Jordan Peterson's Theories
00:04:03
Speaker
because we've already mentioned it. And finally, this time in 2018, we were talking about Jordan Peterson, that wacky scamp who's just done a number of talking appearances here in New Zealand.
00:04:17
Speaker
As part of one of his many world tours, at the time, I think this being the first time we talked about him, I might have heard his name at that point, but hadn't really gone any further into it. And so obviously he's of interest to us because where he talks about sort of the whole social justice warrior thing and the socialist left,
00:04:39
Speaker
being involved in some sort of a plot to undermine all of, well, not necessarily a plot to undermine all of civilization, but a plot to further their views and agendas, which Mr. Peterson believes will end, or Dr. Peterson, I should say,
00:04:54
Speaker
believes will result in the end of civilization. And I think I can speak for Em and myself here and say that neither of us is really on board with Dr. Peterson's message.
Listener Feedback Request
00:05:10
Speaker
It's become the cliche that anytime someone criticizes Jordan Peterson, one of his followers will insist that unless you've sort of read every book he's written, listened to every podcast he's spoken on, watched every video on YouTube, you don't fully understand his message and therefore you're just taking him out of context and anything you say about him is wrong. I have not read all of his books. I've read reviews of his books. I've seen snatches of his interviews. I've seen the occasional interview with him.
00:05:18
Speaker
I will
00:05:36
Speaker
So if you want to say that I don't fully understand him and are taking him fully out of context, then be my guest. But certainly the impression I get is that the Jordan Peterson... Well, there are the Jordan Peterson talks in the Jordan Peterson interviews. The interviews seem to be a lot more political, but his talks, which appear to be more focused on the topics of his books,
00:05:57
Speaker
seem to be more along the lines of his sort of giving his advice in his 12 Rules and Stuff, which from what I have seen involves a lot of sort of complicated, ahistorical, basically flat-out false gobbledygook
00:06:13
Speaker
followed by a good sensible piece of advice which has the effect that the elaborate nonsense beforehand makes the revelation of this fairly common sense thing look impressive and the fairly common sense thing coming at the end makes the nonsense that came beforehand sound less like nonsense because it's capped off with something perfectly sensible. So I think personally
00:06:37
Speaker
I think you would be better off just copying down the 12 rules he says, following them and actually ignoring anything else he has to say about them. Interesting. I think it was just yesterday I was looking on Twitter and somebody said they've come to the realization that Jordan Peterson is the Gwyneth Pultrow of incels.
00:06:56
Speaker
And I think that's possibly the most true thing anyone said about him. So there you go. And that was 2018, and now it's 2019, and now is now. So that concludes our little wee look back at what was happening previously on the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy. Is this a good thing, guys? Any feedback would be appreciated. We sort of thought it could be a fun thing to do since we're in our fifth year of the podcast now.
00:07:23
Speaker
It'd be interesting to look back at the various things we've covered and what was going on in the world of conspiracy theories at any time, but if this is not striking a chord with you guys, please get in touch and let us know what you'd like to hear more and or less of on this podcast. So I believe that's all I have to say today, just to give you something to listen to while you wait for us to come up with a proper episode. Next week's episode, assuming we do manage to get together next week, should be an interesting one.
Preview of Future Episodes
00:07:50
Speaker
We're going to be looking back at
00:07:52
Speaker
Some of the more interesting experiments or at least theories back in the 70s that the governments were up to when the various MK Ultra stuff was going on and people were actually taking psychic phenomena seriously. Your homework for this week is to either watch Akira, the classic Japanese animation, or go and read the comics, but they're a lot longer and more elaborate.
00:08:18
Speaker
And also go and read, find the first issue of Global Frequency by Warren Ellis, or even better, no actually I think the going is probably better, but almost just as good, see if you can find the pilot to the Global Frequency television series which was produced, never picked up but then leaked online and everybody thought it was very good.
00:08:42
Speaker
See if you can track those down. Basically because I have looked at the beginnings of our notes for next week's episode and I can see fairly early on it's going to get derailed into just talking about fun pop culture and those are probably the two pieces of pop culture that we will be most closely referencing. So it would be nice if you know what we end up rabbiting on about. I mean I know we might actually stick on topic. Miracles have been known to happen but chances are not that good.
00:09:12
Speaker
How long have I been recording for? Nine and a half minutes.
Correction on PR Award's Location
00:09:15
Speaker
Okay, yes, ten minutes I think of this ought to be all you can stand, so I will leave you now unless M would like to tack any last-minute statements onto the end of this. Goodbye, and we'll talk to you next week.
00:09:32
Speaker
I do have some commentary, in part because I have to make a correction. In an earlier segment, i.e. the last segment, Josh got the timeline of when I became resident in Romania completely wrong, and also got the location of the PR award I attended completely wrong as well.
00:09:50
Speaker
When I went to Latvia, which is a Baltic state, not a Balkan state, I was still resident in Auckland. I went to Romania in the middle of the year afterwards. And it was the Baltic PR Awards rather than the Balkan PR Awards. This kind of agnosticism about the geography of Eastern Europe is the kind of thing that gets Westerners in trouble. You're on notice, Josh Addison. You are on notice.
Media Reaction to Jordan Peterson in NZ
00:10:20
Speaker
But more importantly, I want to talk about the five minute hate or the lack of the five minute hate on Jordan Peterson when he came to visit this country earlier this month. Or if you're not listening to this in any kind of real time and shame on you in February of 2019, because there were predictions that there was going to be a liberal media outrage about Jordan Peterson and the country.
00:10:49
Speaker
and there really wasn't. He was interviewed on a variety of different radio stations and on TV here and got very little in the way of acclaim, all very little in the way of actual pushback. There was some aji-baji about Peterson going on on Twitter, but by and large the cheerleader for Jordan Peterson, one Sean Plunkett,
00:11:13
Speaker
A broadcaster who, if you look him up on the internet, wears a rather striking rendition of an alternative New Zealand flag in a press photo, has been the only person who's actually been trained to get Jordan Peterson's message out there, and also the only person who's been trained to enrage the libs about Jordan Peterson. It turns out that maybe we learnt a lesson when Stephen Molyneux and Lauren Southern came to visit,
00:11:40
Speaker
late last year and realized that actually the best way to deny someone a voice is often just not to talk about them. Which gets you into really interesting debate about the way the liberal society is meant to work with some people saying we must debate all bad ideas in public and other people saying actually no sometimes the best way to deal with a bad idea is to not give it any air time. You don't have to
00:12:07
Speaker
repress it by actively speaking out against it, sometimes simply go praise the good behaviour and ignore the bad. So I thought that was actually quite fascinating. Jordan Peterson, not Peter Jordanson, came to visit and very little actually happened.
00:12:28
Speaker
although I am told he had a very interesting interview on ABC over in Australia where he was forced to sit down in a room with a transgender person.
00:12:39
Speaker
which is the kind of person that Jordan Peterson claims doesn't even exist. That must have been cognitively quite difficult for Jordan Peterson, and I don't feel sorry for him in any way, shape or form. Finally, in lieu of doing the actual news, because one of the things which is interesting slash frustrating about our new policy of the Trumpatorium, not talking about Donald Trump,
Academic Work on Conspiracy Theories
00:13:04
Speaker
Although that may have to come to a brief end in a few weeks time if the Mueller report really does come out. And whether it gets suppressed or isn't suppressed, there's a whole conspiracy theory here as to whether the Attorney General will actually publish all or only some of or not even any of the report.
00:13:25
Speaker
but we might talk about that when the report comes out. One of the problems of the Trumpatorium is that an awful lot of the prominent conspiracy theory news that we find at the moment relates to Donald Trump, or it relates to Robert Mueller, or it relates to the Russia collusion scandal, etc, etc. There is other conspiracy theory news out there, but it's harder to find because of the noise of Donald Trump.
00:13:52
Speaker
So rather than give you an update on the news, we'll save that for next week because it gives me a bit of a backlog to work through. And instead I'm going to talk to you about work I'm doing at the moment because I'm doing work on conspiracy theory and maybe I should talk about that. So I'm currently in the process of writing three chapters and one journal article. So these are commissioned pieces.
00:14:18
Speaker
One chapter is for a book about conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe, particularly former Soviet Bloc countries. It turns out that having spent time in Romania, I am now considered to be a bit of an expert on Eastern European conspiracy theories.
00:14:35
Speaker
This is particularly intriguing to me because two of the editors of this book are Romanian and they got me to give a talk on Romanian conspiracy theories at a conference in Europe. It is rather interesting being a New Zealander
00:14:51
Speaker
talking about Romanian conspiracy theories with two experts of Romanian conspiracy theories sitting in the room and being ever so petrified that maybe you don't understand Romanian politics as well as you think you do. So I'm writing a paper called Conspiracy Theory Theory, Epistemology in Eastern Europe,
00:15:11
Speaker
It's a largely theoretical paper with only some discussion of conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe, and only some discussion of conspiracy theories in Romania.
00:15:22
Speaker
But it's basically looking at how we define what counts as both a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, and then putting forward the hypothesis that unlike Western Europe, the history of conspiracy in Eastern Europe is so massive and so all-embracing and pervasive, that attitudes towards conspiracy theory differ there,
00:15:47
Speaker
which is probably more a sociological or psychological point than is a epistemological point, but also the sheer fact that it influences the way we talk about evidence for conspiracy. In Western Europe, conspiracies have been less common than in Eastern Europe, which is not to say they are uncommon, just that compared to Eastern Europe, they are less common.
00:16:11
Speaker
And thus the kind of evidential considerations you have when you're talking about conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe actually do differ because of our priors with respect to those of us from the West. And that's not just Western Europe, that's the US, that's Australasia, bits of the world which aren't former Soviet block republics or countries.
00:16:42
Speaker
The other chapter, one of the other two chapters I'm writing on, is called Fun with Alex Jones and David Icke, How Weird Conspiracy Theories and Full Mouth Theories About Conspiracy Theory. And this is a...
00:16:56
Speaker
chapter for a book called making fun of slash with conspiracy theories which is basically looking at how we can actually talk about conspiracy theories in a fun way as opposed to the serious way that most of the literature treats it.
00:17:13
Speaker
which does not say we're making fun of conspiracy theories necessarily. It's actually harking back to a point that Brian Keeley made in a conference back in 2015, which was, well, you know, often when we talk about conspiracy theories, we end up being really serious. But some of these conspiracy theories are actually fun to talk about. Why don't we actually have fun with conspiracy theories from time to time?
00:17:41
Speaker
And I'm looking at the kind of interesting way in which we often characterise conspiracy theorists as being your Alex Jones or your David Icke. And also looking at questions about how sincere the supposed exemplars of conspiracy theorising are, particularly looking at the way that Alex Jones'
00:18:05
Speaker
has been somewhat smeared by his own lawyer when his lawyer in court, when Alex Jones was being sued for custody, actually said that Alex Jones is a performance artist. Something which Alex Jones then denied on air
00:18:24
Speaker
But of course as people say, he would say that, wouldn't he? He's a performance artist. So looking at questions like that, how does sincerity come into it? And should we be using these people as exemplars in the first place anyway?
Conspiracy Themes in Films
00:18:41
Speaker
Now, the third chapter I'm working on is for a book called Conspiracy and Philosophy, and it's called From Alien Chapshifting Lizards to the Dodgy-Dosseer, the Conspiracist and the Conspiracy Theorist. And in part, this is a new attempt to look at the problem of conspiracism, which is a paper I had published in argumenta last year.
00:19:04
Speaker
but also taking some of the stuff I didn't include in that article but I had extensive notes on and kind of doing a much more general audience approach to talking about the problem of conspiracism and whether indeed conspiracism is a problem that needs to be solved or is it a problem that's been basically invented by conspiracy theory scholars who have a pejorative gloss on what conspiracy theory means.
00:19:34
Speaker
and it allows me to do a little bit of discussion of pop culture because I'm talking about the character Jerry Fletcher who is played by Mel Gibson in the film Conspiracy Theory and the character Brill played by Gene Hackman in the film Enemy of the State and what was remarkable about that was I thought there was a kind of a 10-year difference between conspiracy theory and enemy of the state and it turns out they're largely contemporaneous and yet in many respects
00:20:04
Speaker
Conspiracy Theory the film feels like a much older rendition of the story than Enemy of the State does. Enemy of the State feels more modern and that might be because it has a much more modern style with Will Smith than Conspiracy Theory does with Mel Gibson, a person who of course is associated with a large number of conspiracy theories as well.
00:20:28
Speaker
Finally, I am working on an article. Once again, this is a commission piece called When Aught and How Should We Investigate Conspiracy Theories, a Philosopher's Perspective. This is for a special issue of a journal, which is looking at theoretical perspectives on conspiracy theory, largely from the perspective of
00:20:51
Speaker
ought we to debunk all conspiracy theories, or should we take some of them seriously? The actual general schema of the pieces is meant to watch your perspective about debunking conspiracy theories or not debunking them. How is your approach actually shaped by the discipline you belong to? Do you use particular big examples in your work?
00:21:16
Speaker
Are you worried about the political, economic, social, historical or cultural context in which conspiracy theories operate? And how would you go about investigating and debunking or not debunking such theories? And what strategies could we propose as a way of engaging with examples of conspiratorial thinking?
00:21:39
Speaker
Now this has been put forward by a group of editors who are somewhat sympathetic to the notion that conspiracy theory has a pejorative gloss which it doesn't deserve, but the request for papers was written in such a way that we're going to get people from both sides of the coins, or as I call them the generalists, those who believe that conspiracy theories are generally unwarranted, or at least are psychologically problematic to believe, and the particularists, which is the philosophers,
00:22:09
Speaker
and some sociologists who go, no, you have to engage in conspiracy theories on the actual evidence. And this is going to be an interesting paper to write because it's not just me talking about philosophy, it's also me talking about my particular approach to dealing with conspiracy theory.
Podcast's Role in Research and Updates
00:22:27
Speaker
And of course, part of that is this podcast. Because one of the things which is great about doing the podcast is that for me as a researcher in conspiracy theory, it means I kind of have to keep up to date.
00:22:42
Speaker
with the wonderful plethora of different conspiracy theories out there. If I wasn't doing the podcast, I probably wouldn't be so well rounded when it comes to the variety of different examples I can use, because
00:22:59
Speaker
When you deal with conspiracy theories, whether you're sympathetic towards them or not, it can get a bit overwhelming, especially since a lot of them require a lot of work to unpack, to work out what's the central claim, what does the claim of conspiracy actually look like, how do we deal with these claims, what kind of evidence should we be looking for, who are the experts, who are the self-appointed experts who may have no actual expertise, et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:26
Speaker
And so you can get really bogged down by looking at a specific example and a whole bunch of other contemporary things just slip past you really quickly.
00:23:34
Speaker
But doing the podcast, you basically have to be doing a survey of conspiracy theories every single week to find new examples or updates to old examples. And so part of my approach to dealing with conspiracy theories and my approach to which ones do I think are plausible versus those which I think are implausible
00:23:57
Speaker
is informed by the kind of research work that this podcast requires me to do, and for Josh to do, week in, week out. So that's going to be fun. And that's basically 10 minutes of me jabbering on about stuff that I'm doing, which is all rather fun and exciting, so hopefully that gives you your podcast this week. There won't be a Patreon bonus episode this week because, well,
00:24:24
Speaker
We'll be doing more of that next week when we record our proper episode about the Stargate program and other things with dubious names sometimes used by
00:24:37
Speaker
people in Hollywood, and I was just thinking Stargate, you have Stargate SG-1, Skywalker, you had Skywalker Ranch, where some of the psychic experiments occurred, and of course you've got Luke Skywalker, you've got Skywalker Digital, which is one of the Lucasfilm sound things. There's a whole bunch of references to conspiracy theories encoded into the Hollywood landscape.
00:25:00
Speaker
which does make me think that at some point in time, we probably should do a discussion about Illuminati symbology in music videos and in Hollywood. I think we've touched upon this from time to time, but I don't think we've ever actually done an entire episode to it. So with one hand over my eye, I'm going to say goodbye for now.
00:25:30
Speaker
you
00:25:36
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:26:38
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December was a night.