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Patron Bonus Episode - Experts on Unnatural Holes discuss Zina Bash, ISS, and the silence of Steve Bannon
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Get a sneak peak at what the patrons get to hear for free this week, as we discuss the supposed white power hand symbol flashed by Zina Bash at the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, who drilled a hole in the ISS, and why we're not perturbed that Steve Bannon isn't getting a platform at the New Yorker Festival.
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Transcript
Introduction and Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to an exciting bit of bonus content for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Dr. M. R. X. Dentist, and I'm quite marvellous, and sitting beside me is someone who's almost as marvellous as me because he's got a master's degree in philosophy. It's Josh Addison!
Theme Music Update Discussion
00:00:20
Speaker
Give him a round of applause!
00:00:25
Speaker
We've got to sound more like covert masturbation, to be honest. What is the sound of... Yeah, anyway. Ah, we've got off to a good start. I feel... We've got off, yes. Do we need extra theme music or something for this? I am actually thinking about redoing the theme for the main thing and also doing a bit of a new theme for this thing too.
Indexing a Conspiracy Book: A Tedious Task
00:00:47
Speaker
there is over the next few weeks so I've actually only just finished indexing the book taking conspiracy theory seriously which is taken day after day up the day because of course written by multiple people everyone has different ideas as to what they want to have the index and muggins here is the one who has to go through and find all of the
00:01:08
Speaker
page numbers of where people have mentioned that concept in other chapters and it turns out that takes a really really long time and it's thoroughly boring work. So now that that's out of the way I've got time to pull out the old keyboard, have a bit of a tinkle and also play some tunes. Yeah it sounds like a good idea.
00:01:30
Speaker
But anyway, so, the new sections were getting a little bit long, especially last week when we had about three weeks to catch up on.
Reformatting News Segments
00:01:39
Speaker
And they were getting quite long to write, because as you'll be aware, they are scripted. And that requires sitting down and actually writing stuff up. And sometimes if you've got, say, eight interesting articles, you end up only writing a very little on each one. Well, sometimes what you really want to do is do a
00:01:58
Speaker
relative deep dive. We don't do a deep dive on the news segment, but a relative deep dive into a particular topic. So I thought, why don't we trim the news down, make it go as low fat as possible, and we'll go back to the old style of discussing the news we had in the early days of the podcast. We've just got a topic, and then we yatter about it, because yatter is a word. It's totally a word.
White Power Symbol Controversy
00:02:23
Speaker
So today, this very day, the 5th of September as we're recording, there was an interesting little nugget around the confirmation hearing of Judge Kavanaugh.
00:02:40
Speaker
Let's go to the point here. So during his confirmation hearing, people noticed that there was a woman standing behind one of the speakers, I think it was Judge Capena himself. It was indeed. Who appeared to be doing that white power symbol that looks very much like the okay hand symbol, but where the three raised fingers are meant to be a W for white and the circle and the index finger is meant to be the P for power or something.
00:03:06
Speaker
We've heard this sort of thing before. There was that famous photo of Steve Miller where they claimed he was doing a white power symbol. But at the time people were like, yeah, you've kind of just taken a single photo of a man in the action of adjusting his suit. And it so happens in this one frame, his hands were kind of in that position. So you're probably making something out of nothing there.
00:03:28
Speaker
But then there were the White House aides who had a photo of the podium in the White House doing the OK symbol towards the camera. It seems like an odd thing to do. Yeah, and people going, why are they doing that? But then it was OK. The ACLU came out and said, look, it's not a white power symbol. It was generated on 4chan. It's simply a joking thing to make liberals think white power symbols are everywhere.
00:03:53
Speaker
And then it turned out that white nationalists, white supremacists and Nazis picked up upon that and started using it in a non-ironic fashion. Being able to then point to this article going, well, look, it's been shown to be a joke. Can't you take a joke? Just because we're Nazis doing the symbol doesn't mean we're doing a white power symbol. Psych, we kind of are.
00:04:16
Speaker
So then we get to the case that happened today. Oh, Zena Bash. Yep, she was identified as Zena Bash, as many people said, not the name of a popular energy drink, but in fact the name of the former clerk of Judge Kevin Oz. And someone who works with Republican lawmakers. Yep.
00:04:35
Speaker
And so at first, there were shots of her. She's got her arms folded. This would be a time actually maybe when video would be good, but we're going audio only for this one. Her arms are folded and the one hand in front laying on top of the other arm, she appears to be making this weird symbol with her hands. And in the still pictures, I mean, it looked like a kind of an unnatural position to put your hands in. It looked like something you'd have to do deliberately.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then if you actually watch the full video clip, you can see in the background, there she is. She's sitting there, standing there with her arms folded. Then she gets, she looks down, she obviously gets a text message on her phone. She reads the text message and smiles, puts her phone away and then immediately crosses her arms and quite deliberately arranges her hands into that fashion, even sort of briefly looking down and adjusting the position of her fingers.
00:05:24
Speaker
It looks a hell of a lot more deliberate than, say, the Steve Miller photo or anything like that. Yes, and so things get complex here because, as people have pointed out, Zena Bash was not born in the US, although she is a US citizen.
00:05:43
Speaker
She's the descendant of Holocaust survivors on one side, and Mexicans on the other. Yes, has Hispanic children. So it doesn't seem like the poster child for white power or white supremacy, but on the other side does appear to get a message
00:06:01
Speaker
which she reacts to by quite deliberately arranging her hands in front of camera. The suspicion being she got a message from someone watching the theme saying, you are aware you're in shot.
00:06:14
Speaker
and then seems to have been of the opinion, well, if I'm in shock, I should readjust myself ever so slightly. I shall put this rather unnatural pose to use. It's very, very confusing. And it's kind of still a breaking story. So we actually don't know what explanations are going to come forward. I imagine there'll be people all over social media digging for
00:06:39
Speaker
to this particular point in time to see if they can make some kind of connection. Her husband, who is an attorney, has come out in defence saying there's no way that Xena can be racist.
00:06:51
Speaker
there's just a whole lot of very confusing things going on here but it does look an awful light or an awful light and that looks awfully like dog whistle racism from an outside perspective or at the very least an attempt to wind up the libs to to stick something out there deliberately to to get people enraged and have a bit of a laugh at them
00:07:14
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know. It seems a lot weird, but there does seem to be something to it, unlike some of the earlier cases. What that something is, we kind of just don't
Parkland Victim's Father and Kavanaugh Controversy
00:07:24
Speaker
know. And sticking with the Kavanagh hearing, of course, the other big bit of news that occurred today was one of the fathers of someone who died in the Parkland shootings came up to Kavanagh at the end of one of his rounds of questions.
00:07:41
Speaker
introduced himself and said, my child died in the Parkland shootings, at which point Cavanagh immediately turned on his heel and walked away. And the White House is now claiming that someone who was unknown tried to approach Brett Cavanagh, but was deflected at last minute, except we've got the actual video feed that shows him going up, tapping Cavanagh on the shoulder,
00:08:07
Speaker
introducing himself talking with Kavanaugh and then Kavanaugh walking away. So the White House is very unsuccessfully trying to cover up a bit of a PR blunder where someone is completely heartless towards the survivor of a shooting. Sorry.
00:08:24
Speaker
the father of someone who died in a shooting. I suppose technically he survived the heartbreak of his child dying in a shooting. I rescued that entirely. It is fine. Flawless. Yes, I model less conspiratorial, more just plain scandal. He's a dick. Yeah.
ISS Sabotage Theories
00:08:42
Speaker
So moving on, International Space Station.
00:08:45
Speaker
has a hole in it. It's got a hole in it. Well, not anymore. They fixed it. But, yeah, so apparently a week or so ago, people on the International Space Station noticed that the air pressure was starting to drop and eventually they found a small hole had been drilled in the side of the International Space Station. Well, no, initially they thought the hole might be a micro new vehicle or wear and tear, but then they actually looked at the hole and realized that it had been deliberately drilled.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yes, if you look at the photograph now, I have expertly used a drill before in my life and I know that if you don't quite get it right the first time that the head of the drill will sort of judder along the surface that you're trying to drill, making a bunch of little marks, which look exactly like some of the marks next to this hole in this side of the International Space Station. It very definitely appears to have been made by a person wielding a drill.
00:09:35
Speaker
Now, I am an expert driller, but I'm also someone who spent time on space station. So I know a unnatural hole when I see it. That's quite a sentence, right? I'm an expert driller and I know an unnatural hole when I see it. I should have just gone with that. It's even better. That's your effort. New and unnatural hole.
00:09:58
Speaker
Anyway. But yes, so the point is now, of course, who would be sticking hot? People have pointed out it was easy to fix, but had it not been fixed, they would have run out of air on the International Space Station in something like 18 days, I think. And the thing is, it's the International Space Station. It's on a high traffic location. No, no. There's a very limited number of suspects and people are really going
00:10:26
Speaker
Why did they do it? Is this intentional sabotage by someone on board the ISIS? Is it? No, that's ISIS. Oh, you're right. This is the ISS. ISIS is not the International Space Station. They're the other ones. They're the terrorist guys. I've been sending money to the wrong organization for a while now. That's quite awkward.
00:10:51
Speaker
So yeah, so is it deliberate? One hypothesis being put forward, is that due to the immense mental pressure you have when you're up in space, someone might have done it either inadvertently or as a kind of prolonged suicide attempt? Or possibly as an attempt to get the astint cut short if it became no longer possible for
00:11:10
Speaker
people to stay on the International Space Station. But intentional sabotage is of course the basis of so many action films and frankly it sounds as if we are heading off to the beginning of a great 80s straight to VHS space station film. Probably starring Paul Weller. Probably. Who's a musician. I mean Peter Weller. Who is just, who has a art degree.
00:11:38
Speaker
I think some people had suggested maybe it was something that had been maybe it had been there for quite a while but had been patched over you know like maybe it was a hole that was made when that part was being made back here on earth before it was shipped up to the station and maybe there'd been a patch hastily put on it which fell off or something but that doesn't
00:11:58
Speaker
seems super likely and it seems to be a recent thing. Given how perilous life is on a space station and given how they keep these things maintained, that's the kind of thing that you would
00:12:15
Speaker
hope they would already know about if there's a section of the space station which has a mechanical flaw due to a hole in it which has been patched. That's the kind of thing they ought to know to make sure that that doesn't become a problem in the future. So anyway, I'm sure in a couple of years time we can expect a raft of hole in the space station science fiction movies to come out, but until then
00:12:39
Speaker
Don't know that there's much more to say. So just remember, I'm an expert in unnatural holes. Entirely. So what
Steve Bannon's Invitation Sparks Backlash
00:12:47
Speaker
was the last one? Oh, Steve Bannon. Yeah. Steve Bannon being up to, or not being up to, as it turns out. So it turns out that I think it's David Rolnick, who is the editor of New Yorker, has been trying to get a interview or some kind of discussion with Steve Bannon for quite some time.
00:13:05
Speaker
and it's kind of failed to ever eventuate and New Yorker runs a kind of literary festival every year and so the editor of the New Yorker thought it'd be really really good to headline Steve Bannon in conversation with David Rumnick who I'm just going to maintain as the editor of the New Yorker even if he's not and this got announced and the backlash against it was
00:13:32
Speaker
pretty total and that people started pulling out of the festival going yeah I don't really want to be on the same poster as defending racism Steve Bannon racist Steve Bannon
00:13:47
Speaker
Hannon, one of the people who pulled out was, of course, Jim Carrey, who's quite famous for being an anti-vaxxer. So you can imagine some people going, yeah, I don't want to be on your poster either. But yes, lots of people pulled out. The New Yorker went, oh, this is pretty terrible. Members of the staff of the New Yorker were going, yeah, we don't know why you'd want Steve O'Bannon. Steve Bannon. O'Bannon, that's the Irish Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon's had a platform.
00:14:16
Speaker
And David Relmnick is going, oh, I wasn't aware this was such a problem. I thought it'd be great to have him on stage or I could ask him the hard questions. And people are going, you don't need to give a platform to fascists. We actually already know what they're going to say and what they say.
00:14:40
Speaker
There's not any point debating people because not so you're going to go, so, uh, Steve. So you're a bit of a fascist, right? Yes. And do you think we should have a white ethnostate? Could you just stop? Oh, of course, you know, no, you wouldn't, they'd hit me that way. It's going to be, no, I do believe that white people deserve to have their own nation. There's no real give or take in this debate. It's an ideology. In fact, it's not even an ideology, it's a power grab.
00:15:08
Speaker
It's not something which is kind of up for a civilised discussion. No, I mean, as we've talked about with the likes of the Southern and Molyneux visit here in New Zealand, if you've ever seen these sorts of debates in the past, even when bloody Tomi Lahren was on The Daily Show, did you see that one?
00:15:27
Speaker
Oh, yes. Yeah. That was an embarrassing interview. It was because there is no debate. You ask them a question and they machine gun rattle off a whole bunch of their white supremacist type claims, giving you no time whatsoever to rebut them and most of the time not even engaging with the question you asked them in the first place.
00:15:51
Speaker
So, yeah, I think any claims to want to debate in the first place are fairly disingenuous, and I don't think anything good would come of them at all, based on actual past history and instances where that sort of stuff's been attempted. Yeah. So, yeah, people seem to be
00:16:10
Speaker
Well, half the internet is up in arms. Malcolm Gladwell has been making analogies with McCarthy era, indicating that McCarthyism ended when people had a reasonable discussion with McCarthy about what he was up to, and people were going, Malcolm, you don't seem to know anything about that bit of history at all, because that's not what happened. McCarthyism didn't end because someone pointed out to McCarthy
00:16:40
Speaker
Deers are a bit weird. McCarthyism ended when basically McCarthy was getting rid of his friends as well as his enemies. Yes, I think people have blamed a little bit on Aaron Salkin. Did he actually do good night and good luck?
00:16:58
Speaker
Is that the sort of spoken on? I think it was, that was the film about him. But certainly his style of drama where sort of, you know, the right person makes a dramatic speech and everything changes on the spot has infected somewhat people's idea of how the world works. Well, it's kind of the epistemic ideal that we should be able to engage in robust, reasonable debate with people of all types. And once we do that, what we're going to find is that people will
00:17:27
Speaker
Honestly and sincerely engage in a discussion and that would change their mind and the world would change for the better, which as an epistemologist I think would be a wonderful state for fears.
00:17:39
Speaker
But as someone who's also aware of human psychology, that's not how things work. Not generally, no. No. I mean, it would be great if people responded to arguments and evidence and changed their mind. And that's what people should do. But unfortunately, we have to live in a world where people aren't good epistemologists. People aren't even good psychologists. In fact, to take a leaf out of Thomas Hobbes, people just ain't good. What we need is Leviathan to come and crush them.
00:18:10
Speaker
Leviathan is the Catholic Church. And a Peter Weller movie. The Catholic Church is a Peter Weller movie? Yes, but also Leviathan. Yes, that is true. There's a part of me that quite likes Leviathan.
00:18:24
Speaker
Haven't seen it in a very long time. 90s monster movie Leviathan. Look it up. And it's this treat. And it came out in around about the same time as The Abisted and James Cameron. James Cameron. Yeah. And unfortunately, The Abyss is kind of not as... I actually don't think The Abyss is as good story-wise, although Leviathan from memory is just a fairly bog-standard monster film. Deep Star Six is actually, I think, a slightly more interesting film in that respect. But The Abyss's special effects are kind of...
00:18:53
Speaker
They were AAA in Hollywood. Well, Deepstar Six and Leviathan were... We're going to emulate the underwater scenes by putting people on a smoke-filled set and make them move really slowly and hope you don't see the wires. Ooh, yes, yes. Good times, good times.
00:19:11
Speaker
I think that's all we wanted to talk about for now. It was. Let's bring our little bonus section to a close. This will go out freely into the public and disseminate itself with wide abandon. It will, it will. But if you like what you heard and you'd like to hear more and you're not currently a patron, become one.
Podcast Support and Funding
00:19:33
Speaker
Yep, for one dollar a month, although we would encourage you to spend slightly more, say two or three, you'll get access to this content and you'll help us improve the podcast and the video recordings by updating our equipment because we have ordered some fairly fancy lights coming from China in the next fortnight, which is going to improve the light setup we've got. For example, there are some halogen bulbs right over in the corner there.
00:20:02
Speaker
they're kind of burning my eyes every time I look towards Josh or the camera. Get rid of that pronto. And it's going to allow for some other things to go on as well. So there's some interesting content coming up and you'll get to hear about it on these patron bonus update special update extravaganzas uploaded to the internet available online
00:20:26
Speaker
And if you don't donate, then eventually you're just going to have to start listening to ads for fucking Squarespace. It's quite disturbing. So there's a YouTube series I watch, which is the Eurogamer YouTube series, Eurogamer being a fairly prominent computer gaming magazine, and obviously the whole relying on
00:20:50
Speaker
content playing before a video is no longer working out because what used to be videos with no sponsorship inside the videos now has sponsorship spots and it's really jarring because also blue apron meals
00:21:10
Speaker
Male chimp, I think we saw a thing. Yeah, haven't had so much in male chimp these days. It's always squeeze space. Online mattress. And Harry's for your decent shave. Josh, we need to get you a sponsorship of, yeah, the Dollar Shave Chimp. I'm still thinking of chimps. The Dollar Shave Chimp. We will shave your chimp for a dollar.
00:21:32
Speaker
I like it now. That's a business model. If there is someone out there who needs to have an advertising spot for shaving chimps for a dollar, we will take a cut price advertising thing for that because we are happy to endure. In fact, I am happy to be flown to country of your choice to shave a chimp for your advertising campaign. And I realize it's animal cruelty and I'm a vegan, but I'm willing to do it.
00:22:02
Speaker
Animal that needs cooling down. So when you see the hot there, it's going, a really hot chimp, you know, a really, really sexy chimp who just needs a bit of a shave. Sexy chimp. Yep, sexy chimp. So we are open to advertising sexy chimps, shave chimps for a dollar and also dollar shave chubs. But the patronage accounts are just fine as well, if you want to do that, probably easier.
00:22:32
Speaker
yeah and you can either look to patreon and look for conspiracism.patreon.com or just look actually i think just look up just look up conspiracism or just even look up my name dr m r x dent earth on patreon you'll find our account there you could go through the podbean system currently we have one subscriber
00:22:55
Speaker
slash patron on the Podbean system. Everyone else is using Patreon. It would be quite convenient to have things kind of located in one particular space, because otherwise getting the money out of various accounts just ends up having transaction fees and the like. But please, however you can support us, please do.
00:23:16
Speaker
So with that we shall bring this bonus content to a close and talk to you all next week in one way or another secretly or just plain mundanely like some sort of filthy peasant. And I'm off to shave a chimp for a dollar. Goodbye. Goodbye.