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Critical Race Theory with Aaron Rabinowitz
28 Plays2 years ago
M talks with Aaron Rabinowitz (of "Embrace the Void" and "Philosophers in Space") about Critical Race Theory, a topic Josh seems to not be prepared for...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction and Previous Interview Reflection
00:00:00
Speaker
Look, I've listened back to the last interview with Aaron and I see how my loss of focus affected my usefulness. You were right to handle that one without me. I know. It's what I said at the time and I've been saying to you ever since.
00:00:15
Speaker
Was that what all those TMs were? Good thing I blocked you.
Staying Informed and Engaged
00:00:18
Speaker
Anyway, I want you to know that I've made the effort to be fully researched on the topics we'll be discussing today so I can take part without letting the side down. Fully researched? Fully, just all the research. Okay then, tell me what you know. With pleasure!
Cathode Ray Tubes in Television
00:00:33
Speaker
Invented in the late 1800s and made commercially available in the 1920s, a cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns emitting beams of electrons that are manipulated via magnetic or electrostatic deflection to display images on a phosphorescent screen, while used in televisions through the 20th century by the 2010s that had largely been replaced by- Yes, thank you, thank you, that's enough. You've researched the wrong CRT, haven't you?
00:00:58
Speaker
No, no, I thought you might try to trick me like that. So just to be sure, I researched the other CRT as well. Ah, all right. Go on then. Right. Corneal refractive therapy refers to the use of gas permeable contact lenses that temporarily reshape the cornea to reduce refractive errors such as myopia hyperopia and astigmatis.
00:01:21
Speaker
Chemoradiotherapy is a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy to treat cancer. Try again. Chinese remainder theorem? Closer but no. Catheter-related thrombosis. Gods above and gods below. Critical race theory. Hmm. Never heard of it. I guess I've got more reading to do. You'll wait for me to get back to you before you start the interview, right? Of course. Of course. Off you... Wait, wait. Did you say you blocked me before?
00:01:49
Speaker
Can't hear you. Researching. Well, for the best, I guess. For the best.
Welcome Aaron Rabinovich
00:01:59
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dent.
00:02:10
Speaker
Our guest this week is Aaron Rabinovich, who now has the honor of the fewest number of episodes between appearances. He's the host of Embrace the Void, co-host of Philosophers in Space, and is also a PhD student in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, specialising in secular moral education.
00:02:27
Speaker
Previously, I noted that we should pay no attention to rumours of him being a member of the Rosicrucians, at which point he claimed he was a Discordium. According to Malachips the Younger, they've never heard of him, which is pretty good evidence Aaron is a member. Malachips is a filthy liar, and I'm willing to debate him on this matter on a platform of his choice. Welcome back, Aaron. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. And yes, he is a filthy liar, except for all the things he says that are true.
00:02:55
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's the great thing about Discordianism is a lot of we choose our own truths along that path. And I've actually pulled out one of my two copies of the Principia Discordia from the show, just to prove I actually do have a copy with me in Juhai. It also has the notes on it from when I was briefly on Rhys Darby's podcast back in the day, talking about the link between the Principia Discordia
00:03:21
Speaker
and the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald because they both share as an author Kerry Thornley.
Illuminati Card Game and Personal Stories
00:03:28
Speaker
Interesting. And they're connected both via the Illuminati's trilogy, which makes ample references to both things. And of course, I'm sure somewhere in the Discordia, the Principia, they predict all of the events, even though the book, I think, comes after.
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, but yeah having a physical copy that's that's intense most of us these days just turned to the internet for our internet Religion based on memes so this this was published by Steve Jackson games after they bought back control of Illuminati the card game and it was printed in the venerable year Does not even have
00:04:12
Speaker
1994 is the new copyright on on the so it actually it's kind of from a period of time where it wasn't that easy to find stuff online. Mm hmm. Yeah, that's one of the best card games. Some of us are immensely old.
00:04:28
Speaker
yeah we are we are dating ourselves here so hard but yeah i played that card game in undergrad and it's one of the classics and i hope that the there's taught that means a kick-started digital version that may happen that i would be really excited about you're actually on the shelf behind me it's probably not particularly
00:04:45
Speaker
visible I have my complete copy of the Illuminati card game I bought all the expansions turns out it's a really heavy thing to transport around the world because the base game not that big but once you buy all the expansions it's bloody heavy I I'm questioning my life choices well yes yes I mean although a lot of
Transition to Critical Race Theory Discussion
00:05:07
Speaker
ground cover
00:05:07
Speaker
If they updated the game for the modern age, it would be interesting to see whether they would change any of the flavor text, because it's a little bit like when we talked about the Illuminalysis trilogy last time. It's a little bit dated and just a little bit sexist and a little bit racist. Yeah, and a little bit prescient. But yeah, they would definitely have to update it to some extent.
00:05:32
Speaker
I was also going to note, um, it shows up in the background, I think of quite a few video podcasts slash individuals, because I think knowledge fight, one of their guys has the cards in their background when they do their video Q and A's as well. I think it's, I feel like it's a card game that like, if you're in this space a lot, you have almost certainly played at least once.
00:05:55
Speaker
Oh yes, and I mean, it is a great game to play, especially with the hidden victory conditions, just suddenly going, if no one pays attention to what I'm doing, I could win in the next round. Please don't pay any attention to what I'm
Understanding CRT: Origins and Influences
00:06:10
Speaker
doing. Yeah, it actually plays quite well for being so entertaining as well. But we're not here to talk about card games, so maybe we should put a pin on that and talk about that at another time.
00:06:19
Speaker
We're here to talk about critical race theory and your recent contra-temps with Michael Shermer of the skeptic magazine fame. Now, critical race theory seems like a bit of a big buzzword in the US and to a slightly lesser extent the UK. But I suspect a lot of people outside of those countries don't know what critical race theory or CRT is. So first of all, what's a critical race and why are we theorizing about it?
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm I get a little nervous talking about this because I know you're in a country right now where if I make too many jokes about the conspiratorial nature of something, you could get shut down. But anyway, if you ask someone like James Lindsay, right, critical race theory is the tip of the communist Chinese spear to destroy Western civilization.
00:07:10
Speaker
No, what is CRT? CRT is a collection of theories developed in the 70s and onward by theorists primarily of color who were interested in trying to understand why after the passage of race neutral laws, after the sort of requiring of
00:07:32
Speaker
you know, equal rights, voting rights acts, kind of stuff like that. Why was it the case that there was still substantial inequality between the races, essentially in America? And they develop a variety of theories that explain these sorts of issues, things like the concept of intersectionality, which had a moment in the sun during Gamergate or thereabouts, if you remember, Sargon of Akkad,
00:07:57
Speaker
likes to argue about intersectionality for a while, that was a bit of a precursor to the CRT moral panic, you have other theories, interest convergence is another one, these all sort of come together to basically explain, basically explain the concept of systemic racism, right? The idea that you can have a system that is nominally race neutral, and that none of the individuals in it are
00:08:23
Speaker
explicitly intending to cause harm to individuals based on their race or anything like that, and still have that system produce racially unjust outcomes for a variety of reasons, for a variety of ways. Examples would be things like,
00:08:40
Speaker
artificial intelligence can reproduce these things, but also redlining is a classic example. CRT is that, it starts in the law, it expands into fields like education, in education promotes things like talking more about the moral complexities of history as well as developing pedagogies that
00:09:08
Speaker
view individuals from marginalized communities as not being sort of deficient and in need of being corrected and saved from their marginalized communities, all these sorts of things. And now it's being sort of targeted as a catch-all term for, as Rufo put it, anything that scares Americans.
Key Figures in CRT Debate
00:09:29
Speaker
Okay, so we've got some name dropping here, which some people may need a bit of background on. So we've got James Lindsay, who most people I suspect who listen to this podcast will have heard of, but maybe we should talk a little bit about him. Saigon of a card, which I want to do the Star Wars line, that to name I haven't heard in a long time. And that he was really big.
00:09:52
Speaker
five, maybe 10 years ago, but does seem to have disappeared off the map to a large extent. And of course, Chris Rufo, who of course, we're going to be talking about quite a bit when we talk about your contra-temp with Michael Shermer, a name which a lot of Americans interested in the CRT debate probably know.
00:10:12
Speaker
but probably isn't that well-known outside of the United States. So let's start with the darling of the intellectual dark web, the smartest person in the room, one Dr. James Lindsay. Who is Dr. James Lindsay? Yes, the doctor of mathematics, James Lindsay.
00:10:32
Speaker
I am very curious to find out how, where you're living, if anyone ever talks about any of this stuff. I think it's probably the case that around here, in the non-Twitter world, probably a lot of people don't know who any of these people are, but I do think that CRT itself has become
00:10:50
Speaker
mainstream enough that people know the term. I've heard people arguing about it at dog parks, and I've heard people talking about it who have fairly blue collar backgrounds, if you want to make it a class kind of thing. So I do think that this is a widespread enough, mainstream enough moral panic that it's worth discussing. So who are these people, right? Dr. James Lindsay,
00:11:16
Speaker
is like a guy who starts out like trying to get famous for being an atheist and isn't good enough at it and then starts to complain a lot about woke things, by which I mean anything of the social justice-y variety.
00:11:35
Speaker
He publishes a series of hoaxes first the conceptual penis hoax, which was actually published in Shermer's skeptic magazine quote unquote that
00:11:50
Speaker
So that one is just him by himself and he publishes it in a pay to play journal and everybody basically, you know, makes fun of him for thinking that this proves anything about anything. But he claims that it proves that like gender theory is made up and fake and easily mocked, et cetera, et cetera.
00:12:09
Speaker
And then he does a second hoax that's more sort of robust, let's say, by very low standards, where him and Helen Pluckrose and Peter Bogosian, all individuals who nominally identify as liberal or classic liberal, as they like to call it to identify, to distinguish them from people who like have evolved their liberalism in the past hundred years, they make
00:12:34
Speaker
a bunch of papers and submit a bunch of them and a couple of them get published, some of them in not totally terrible journals and there's a lot more credulity towards that moral panic or towards that hoax.
00:12:50
Speaker
I would say they wildly overstate what they accomplished, what they proved, what the papers actually were in some cases. There's lots of issues that were not well addressed, I think, by people who should have taken a more skeptical approach. There was also lots of discussion of what are the legitimate concerns here having to do with the nature of academic publishing, which you and I both know has many, many problems.
00:13:17
Speaker
So yeah, that's, so Lindsay gets famous from that hoax and then basically pivots into far right Christian conspiracism, anti-governmental conspiracism. He basically pairs up with this guy, Michael O'Fallon, who's a white Christian. Well, he's technically half Cuban, but he, I would argue promotes white Christian nationalism on a website called Sovereign Nations.
00:13:41
Speaker
He's the guy who helps set up new discourses, which is James Lindsay's website. He's the guy who basically bankrolls and manages Lindsay's, you know, anti woke startup and, you know, promotes him to a bunch of conservative people and probably helps him get on the radar of folks like Chris Rufo, who is then a former, you know, employee of a branch of the Discovery Institute, which is the creationist folks who
00:14:09
Speaker
has done work like quote unquote documentaries about poor people and homeless people. And then basically Rufo gets famous by picking up this CRT stuff that Lindsay has been cultivating, let's say, and promotes it, puts it, he has like a particular leak where he leaks out information of like what's being used in
00:14:35
Speaker
training for government employees. And so he ends up on Fox News where he begs Donald Trump to do an executive order banning this kind of training. Trump watches Fox News, unfortunately, and actually listens and so has Rufo on, you know, to the White House where they actually passed this executive order. Like this is how this is how policy is made in our country. Let me explain. Like this is literally how it works.
00:15:00
Speaker
He goes, he gets this executive order made. This is all important because that executive order becomes the template for all of the laws banning divisive ideas, quote unquote, but essentially banning critical race theory and gender theory and queer theory and all these different theories in public schools and all sorts of play anywhere they can get it banned, essentially. So I would say those are like the major
00:15:24
Speaker
figures of this moral panic and how it got sort of wildly, wildly out of hand. And just to tie it back to the article, and you can follow up from there, you know, my concern in writing this article was to highlight that it wasn't just James Lindsay's desperate need to be seen as intelligent. It wasn't just Chris Rufo's whole
00:15:44
Speaker
horrifying, conservative willingness to do whatever in order to—I don't even know what his actual ends are beyond like boilerplate conservatism, but like his willingness to weaponize critical race theory. Like the larger problem is that there are a group of individuals who self-identify as moderate to progressive, who identify as skeptic,
00:16:06
Speaker
who have very large audiences and who like very credulously have reproduced large swaths of this moral panic because they themselves have like a giant blind spot around wokeness and think that like there is an existential problem in wokeness that needs to be quashed. And so they picked all of this stuff up, including people like Shermer. And then trying to present that article, I was turned down, let's say,
00:16:34
Speaker
in favor of something that would focus more on just Chris Rufo and leave out folks like James Lindsay who Shermer is still using as a resource. Now the article here is an article that was meant to be appearing in The Skeptic under the aegis of Edison. Michael Shermer got published in The Skeptic in the UK. I really do feel they should have different names for those magazines because it is very confusing.
00:16:59
Speaker
when someone doesn't really like one of them but thinks the other is better. But before we circle into that discussion, so use the term moral panic here. I think it's useful to kind of talk about exactly what's going on there, because your initial description of critical race theory
00:17:16
Speaker
for someone who would be described as woke in many places. Well, I mean, that just seems like we're talking about systemic racism and the way in which we need to talk through the fact that systemic racism can continue to persist. Even if the laws are neutral, the structure of your society can still enable racism to exist well after the fact. You don't need racist laws to live in a racist society.
00:17:42
Speaker
And that seems like a fairly sensible position, one which is evidenced by the world in which we live. And yet, when people talk about critical race theory in the US, and I said to a lesser extent in the UK, it seems to be as if
00:17:57
Speaker
This is the worst possible discussion we could possibly have, and that somehow it's not really about systemic racism, it's about something else. And as you've said, there's a kind of moral panic around critical race theory discourse.
00:18:14
Speaker
Why has this become, and I realize this is a huge question, why has this become such a big issue in the United States? Why is talking about systemic racism a bad thing? Yeah, and you know, you say it's a big question. I also apologize for my gigantic
00:18:33
Speaker
answers, I always get a lot of crap from my editor about like, these all of these articles need to be shorter, and especially this one needed to be like way shorter, but because of the way it worked out, it ended up being multiple articles together. But part of it is also that it is just really hard to explain all of this stuff in a succinct way. There's just so many details that you have to tie together, that it's, you know, I always end up feeling like the conspiracy theorist myself, right, just throw in red yarn all over the place.
00:19:00
Speaker
Let me also just note, since you brought up the name confusion there, it's important to mention, I think, because I prefer The Skeptic, the UK version run by Merseyside skeptics who are awesome, progressive, genuinely progressive individuals. That one actually started in 1987. So that one is the longer running one, whereas The Skeptic, as far as I can tell, the first issue is in 1992.
00:19:27
Speaker
So if we're going to complain to anybody about whose name could have been different, perhaps it would be the American version, the Shermer version. Anyway, I think this once again proves that George II was right. Those American colonies needed to be crushed because they keep stealing the best of our society and the best of our ideas and the best of our magazine names.
00:19:50
Speaker
God bless the German monarchy. It would have helped if you could have maybe curtailed a little bit of the American exceptionalism and rugged individualism, but sadly no.
Societal Reluctance to Address Historical Injustices
00:20:04
Speaker
I actually suspect the easiest thing to do would be to go back in time and just not colonize North America. That actually might solve a lot of issues.
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, I just can't imagine it happening. There's a horrifying kind of inevitability to that colonialism for me. But you're right, it's totally contingent on so many things that could have just not happened, and that would have been better for everyone. And that brings us back to your question of why is it hard to talk about this stuff? It's because
00:20:29
Speaker
our society is built on blood and suffering and like the ongoing denial of that blood and suffering is sort of key to our economic and psychological health and well-being I guess is the way the short answer to your very large question. There are other reasons too. It would be sometimes this you know like stuff that gets labeled CRT and stuff that gets associated with and sometimes stuff that actually is
00:20:55
Speaker
in some ways connected to it, I think has some flaws, right? One of which is it trends too far into white, navel-gazing psychoanalysis. So I'm thinking of some versions of like the Robin DiAngelo kind of stuff.
00:21:10
Speaker
though I think D'Angelo's white fragility itself is a plausible thesis. I think there's plenty of evidence that it exists. I think an over fixation on what's going on inside the heads of white people subliminally or subconsciously or whatever is not a useful direction, generally speaking, to go in. And it's understandable, I think, why it has produced these complaints of like a Kafka trap where I can't prove that I'm not
00:21:39
Speaker
secretly racist in some way, when it has been, I think, inappropriately applied. Now, I think that stuff is contrary to the core insights of CRT, which is that, like, it doesn't matter what's going on inside the heads of white people, right? Racism can persist whether or not those people are subconsciously racist or consciously racist, right? The problem is the system is perpetuating, you know, past injustices. The system is
00:22:08
Speaker
creating spaces where harms are caused without any intentionality whatsoever. So I think, so there are a couple of reasons that it's hard, right? One of them is that we have a bunch of well-poisoners, people whose goal in life is to make this a harder conversation to have than it needs to be, right? And those could be people like Chris Rufo, who makes a living off of making this an impossible conversation, people like James Lindsay.
00:22:34
Speaker
It can be, you know, politicians who benefit from ginning up fear about critical race theory. Obviously, there's lots of benefits to be had there. And I think they have successfully done a pretty decent job of like, creating a negative brand on to which they can sort of, you know, attack and target people. Other reasons would be there's just a general discomfort, like people
00:23:02
Speaker
We are, in America, taught a very, very sanitized version of our own history as people from other cultures can, to some degrees, understand the British. I think this is another reason, like, if you're looking for other places where this is going to go poorly, it's going to be in, like, the UK, for example, where unpacking colonialism is not going to go great. You know, Americans don't want to talk about the history of slavery. We don't want to talk about reparations. We don't want to talk about
00:23:28
Speaker
you know, the stealing of land from indigenous people. We don't want to talk about ongoing, you know, gender inequality. We don't want to talk about any of these sorts of things at this point. And a lot of the purpose of critical theory is to put all of that stuff as front and center as possible. And what you get is the same thing you got when folks like MLK were, you know, agitating, which is why are you ginning up conflict? Why do you make conflict where there isn't any? And I think he has the right response that, like,
00:23:56
Speaker
There's a problem here and the problem is we've never addressed in any substantial way our history of racism as a country.
Systemic Racism and Sexism Explained
00:24:04
Speaker
And if we continue to not address it, we're going to continue to have a, it seems like a minority white supremacist party that is going to continue to run moral panics as a way to maintain enough governmental control to prevent any kind of social progress.
00:24:22
Speaker
Yes, this always reminds me of the work that goes on about enduring sexism in our society, which of course is intertwined with the ongoing racism, with the idea that one of the issues we have with gender equality in the workplace is that if you increase the number of women in a room, even if it's well below 50%, a lot of men will go, oh, well, there's a lot of women here. So it turns out that
00:24:51
Speaker
Even if you don't think you're sexist, you can be in a situation where seeing more women in a workplace makes you go, oh, there's something strange going on here, which kind of talks to the institutionalized notion of sexism we have. And I think part of the issue we get when we start talking about critical race theory here
00:25:14
Speaker
is that for a very long period of time, we've taken both sexism and racism by their kind of dictionary definition. You are sexist if you don't like women. You are racist if you show a personal animosity towards people from outside your, and to use horrible terminology, racial kind.
00:25:37
Speaker
Part of the issue that has kind of been put forward, particularly by Indigenous scholars around the world, is that this kind of definition of racism doesn't actually capture what it's like to experience racism within the world. And that many things which are racist are not animated by people going, I hate you, in the same way that many things which are sexist are not animated by misogynists.
00:26:04
Speaker
they're animated by the kind of structural system in which you live. But
00:26:09
Speaker
Accepting that and going, well, we need to change our societal structures is something which is both A, hard, and B, it's kind of invisible to the dominant part of the society in the first place. And it certainly is in no way disadvantaging them. Well, there's this theory that if you change the structures, somehow that 75% of men in the boardroom
00:26:36
Speaker
25% of those men are now threatened by the idea there might be a quality happening there. Yeah, it is a big problem. And the dictionary definition thing we should first note, and I talked about this in a previous article, there's arguments about what is the actual
00:26:53
Speaker
Let's just back up, right? I think probably neither you nor I are going to be hugely prescriptivist about definitions for the most part, except when it comes to the term conspiracy theory, in which case you are extremely prescriptivist. I'm more of a stipulator, I think, for the terms of a debate, we use a particular definition. If other people want to use that term in different ways outside of academic debate, that's fine. They're wrong, but they're allowed to do it.
00:27:22
Speaker
That's right. You're a weak prescriptivist, let's say. You don't do philosophy via dictionary because dictionaries tend to just be descriptions of how people use terms, which is often incoherent or
00:27:39
Speaker
You know, internally contradictory. Part of the goal of doing philosophy is to unpack these concepts beyond what's being done in a dictionary and in theory, hopefully promote illuminating insights as a result of unpacking those kinds of concepts. So there is no, I would argue, one true definition of racism. There are multiple kinds of racism.
00:28:01
Speaker
that are useful to us as a concept. We don't actually use racism. They're useful in the sense that it's useful to talk about psychological racism. It's useful to talk about people who are explicitly
00:28:16
Speaker
racist, like white nationalists who, you know, like, what is their motivating structure? Is there racism driven by something else? Or is it just genuine, you know, like, that's their motivating force? Those are all, I think, valuable kinds of questions. Then there's systemic racism, as we've talked about, and I think it's very valuable to talk about systems that produce racist consequences in the same way that like the white supremacists would like them to, but without any actual like white supremacists involved in the project.
00:28:47
Speaker
You see both of those in dictionaries these days because they have sort of updated based on modern usage. And a lot of folks who were using the argument via dictionary are now angry and think that this is proof that the woke conspiracism has taken over Webster's and whatnot. But yes, second thing I wanted to point to your comments about the like,
00:29:09
Speaker
gender and race. This is a really important point because one of the key concepts I mentioned earlier in critical race theory is intersectionality. This is important for several reasons. First of all, I think it's a true theory. I think it's true. So the theory goes
00:29:26
Speaker
how someone's outcomes, how things go for them in life, is going to be impacted not by their separate pieces of their identity and isolation like your race versus your gender versus your religion versus your nationality, etc. It's going to be the result of those things intersecting in the individual
00:29:45
Speaker
in a way that may have distinct implications that are separate from any individual feature. The classic example that was used in the original formulation that is given is you have a rule that requires a certain quota of women in a workplace and a certain quota of people of color in a workplace, let's say.
00:30:12
Speaker
because they don't take into account intersectionality, the company meets those quotas by hiring white women and black men, right, for example. And what ends up happening then is that black women, because of the intersection of their gender and their race, are not getting equal employment in this particular situation, right? So that's an example of intersectionality. Another one is classic. One would be, you know,
00:30:42
Speaker
illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants who are also individuals of color are at higher likelihood of experiencing and who are women are at higher likelihood of experiencing sexual assault because they are likely to be working in positions like cleaning where they're going to potentially be alone in spaces with
00:31:04
Speaker
individuals, they have less recourse because their undocumented status makes them less likely to go to the police so they become higher targets, et cetera. So this is a really, really important concept for making policies that actually help real individuals that aren't sort of easily avoided, easily loophole, or just aren't effective with regard to those kinds of individuals.
00:31:31
Speaker
Your third point there about people who believe in some of these things but not in a malicious kind of way is also, I think, kind of important. There's a growing—and this is actually true, I think, of a lot of the moderates who have mainstreamed this moral panic.
00:31:48
Speaker
I think a lot of them buy into a kind of scientism discourse that makes them really susceptible to the kind of like Charles Murray's of the world who come at them with a bunch of facts about IQ and they come away with this idea like, hey, maybe races really are things that actually exist. And like, there's a reasonable explanation for, you know, why it is that some races will just never do as well as other races because of genetics or something like that.
00:32:17
Speaker
And like, at least we should have that conversation and we should have it in our serious, you know, big person pants voices. Those, I think all of these things come together, right, to create, as you were saying, the situation where it's very hard to change any of this.
Moderates and the CRT Moral Panic
00:32:35
Speaker
Those people are less likely to be willing to acknowledge the structural problems, the
00:32:42
Speaker
You know they're they're less likely to get pushback from their communities and they end up just creating a sort of reinforcement space where you'll believe that these things are obviously true and when they encounter people who kind of are aghast at their promotion of these ideas, they
00:33:01
Speaker
take that as further evidence that they are the important truth seekers in society rather than they've been sort of taken for a ride and are now doubling down on that ride. That brings us quite nicely on to one of the biggest fans of science and using data and skull measurement to understand the world, one Dr. Michael Schirmer of the Skeptic magazine in the United States.
00:33:25
Speaker
who recently was complaining on Twitter that he could find people who could critique critical race theory in the pages of his magazine, but couldn't find any serious scholar or academic who was willing to defend the theory in those pages. And you very briefly, you stood up and you went, I, I shall be the champion you require to explain what CRT is.
00:33:51
Speaker
first of all why did you want to volunteer to be in the pages of these of the skeptic us and b how did that go yeah why do i do anything um yeah it was partly because
00:34:10
Speaker
the yeah someone sent me the tweet and there's language in the tweet where he specifically is like they won't defend their theories not they won't defend them in my paper my article or journal whatever like like it was this kind of language that I think you see in a lot of
00:34:28
Speaker
critiques of everyone these days, but especially of the woke, which is that, you know, the woke won't debate essentially that they won't argue for their positions, which I just, I find absurd on its face, given how much argument has happened in the past few years about these topics.
00:34:43
Speaker
in so many, many, many places. But I also think that it's an example of this kind of reproducing of the language of folks like Rufo and Lindsay, where the real implication is they can't defend it because it's not defensible and it's not defensible because it is this kind of absurd thing that we want to mischaracterize it as.
00:35:03
Speaker
Um, so I emailed Shermer and was like, I am willing to defend critical race theory in your magazine. I.
00:35:15
Speaker
sent him a couple of articles that I had done on the topic. He and his editor liked one that I had done for Arc Digi about how we shouldn't abandon the term critical race theory because the moral panickers have sort of poisoned the concept and that we should stand by teaching critical race theory in schools and kind of explaining a little bit of why I think there was some confusion caused by some of the people who defended
00:35:45
Speaker
critical race theory in general who didn't think that it actually was in schools when it is in the form of things like culturally relevant pedagogy. I think it was an honest mistake on their part that has been widely mischaracterized as duplicitous because of course it does.
00:36:03
Speaker
So yeah, I reached out, he said, you know, it looks like you could do this thing. And then it sort of became a weird series of pivots where it was like, we actually have a piece explaining the history of CRT chapter of a book, which I later found out.
00:36:19
Speaker
would be the book, uh, Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, the individuals who I referred to earlier in the moral and the like hoax panicky stuff. Yeah, so I should point out this would be a chapter which ostensibly would be describing the history of CRT, but from the position of CRT is bad. Yeah, and Cynical Theories is the most like cleaned up version of their shtick. So it
00:36:47
Speaker
you know, tries to be like by the book, here's just the way it is, non-polemic kind of thing. So in that sense, Richard Dawkins really liked it. And Richard Dawkins endorses something, it must be, I was about to say very good, but I couldn't say that with a straight face.
00:37:05
Speaker
No, I did an episode of Embrace the Void with Sam Hoadley Brill, who did a review of the book. I read parts of the book for that one as well. I do not think it is a good book. I think it is an on ramp to a bunch of conspiracism. And this chapter is like
00:37:23
Speaker
a description of CRT. It is not a generous description by his own account. Shermer acknowledges that it is leaning critical, but that was the one that he was going to use for some reason instead of using like a chapter from a critical race theory book that actually, you know, is arguing, explaining the theory. But what he wanted was, in his words, a sort of
00:37:45
Speaker
full-throated attack on extremism and moral panic around critical race theory, specifically going after Chris Rufo. And also, he suggested, why not also attack extremists who have defended some of these views? And the example he gave was particularly silly, I thought, which was just like
00:38:06
Speaker
Scientific America complaining about the lack of diversity in stem and like explaining Sort of factors that go into that along the like, you know stem pipeline as it were So I started trying to put that together and I felt like that framing was problematic I felt like it didn't act accurately convey the way like the problem of the moral panic because partly because I feel like
00:38:37
Speaker
Rufo and Lindsay are known entities at this point, should be known entities at this point. I know he said earlier, people don't know who they are, but when you learn about them, it's not hard to learn about who they are at this point. It takes three seconds to find out what level of extremists I would say they are, even if you're sympathetic to them. It's not complicated. But what is less clear, I think, is the way that folks like Shermer, Rogan,
00:39:03
Speaker
um these sort of idw types the intellectual dark web have promoted versions of these arguments sometimes promoted lindsay directly other times indirectly but essentially sort of continued to promote this material so i wrote back to shermer and i was like
00:39:19
Speaker
I feel like it would be more useful to talk about the moderates in this conflict so that it isn't just, and I explained that I think it's very easy psychologically for folks to create a mindset where the moral panic is a war between two extremes and us moderates in the middle are just innocent bystanders in the crossfire in all of this. And that lets you kind of off the hook, whereas I think people should be on the hook for their
00:39:48
Speaker
mainstreaming of a sort of conspiracy riddled moral panic, including people like Shermer. And so I said, I think it would be good to talk about that. And he actually wrote back and was like, that sounds like a great novel approach.
Challenges in Writing About CRT
00:40:01
Speaker
And he in that email sort of expressed that he personally feels sort of gaslit, feels sort of suckered in sometimes by this moral panic stuff.
00:40:10
Speaker
So I wrote an article in which I used him as a case in point for how getting suckered into this stuff can be really harmful and problematic. And I think that was we made the mistake. So listen to this podcast may well be aware that I wrote an article for the skeptic. Oh,
00:40:28
Speaker
a long time ago now, back in the annals of history before we even thought that Trump would ever have a political career. Looking at the notion of reductionism, because Schumer had critiqued Freeman Dyson. Freeman Dyson is an anti-reductionist. Schumer is kind of an arch-reductionist.
00:40:48
Speaker
I thought that Schirmer's complaint about what Dyson said was kind of wrong-headed, and that even though I'm not necessarily in agreement with Freeman Dyson, that if you're an anti-reductionist, that allows you to say ghosts exist. I do think that you can't use science to explain everything. There's some phenomena in the world which is just
00:41:10
Speaker
not applicable to scientific explanation. And so I used Shermer as an example to motivate the debate as to how we should need to understand between say, ontological reductionism, epistemic reductionism, and the different kinds of reductionism we can engage in. And
00:41:27
Speaker
shurma a first of all told me you need to remove me as the example so he doesn't like the idea that people critique him and then he set on the article for over a year and it obviously we're not we're not going to publish it anyway at which point my PhD supervisor at the time when
00:41:45
Speaker
I think he kind of has to because, you know, you've you've lost the chance to put it elsewhere a year later. It's just not it's not salient a year later. So we kind of actually emotionally blackmailed Sherma into printing the piece eventually. But yes, I think I think using him as an example, I don't get the idea
00:42:05
Speaker
He likes the idea that he might say the occasional stupid thing. Yeah, like I'm not I'm not gonna psychologize what's going on there. They went with a different piece. I'll be curious to see what that piece looks like. I think it will probably be.
00:42:24
Speaker
a fairly sort of paint-by-numbers defense of systemic racism, and if that's what they really desperately felt like their people needed to read, fine. I think that's like an information deficit mindset that is not a useful approach to skepticism a lot of the time these days. But I also think that they were just very inconsistent in their description of what they wanted and wanted me to talk about in general.
00:42:49
Speaker
So like at some points they were like, we want to talk about, you know, like once I sent the article in, had some back and forth with Shermer, he sent it to his editor. His editor responded, we want you to talk about the ideas. This is pointless. We want to talk about the ideas, not the people. But like I said, in their original request, they wanted me to talk specifically about the people and the relation, the political sort of ramifications, right? The way that this moral panic has implications because of
00:43:16
Speaker
you know, radicalizing of individual stuff like that. So they clearly thought that like people mattered to some extent enough to talk about Rufo. But then it becomes this whole, why are we talking about these specific people? Oh, well, this person, you know, he actually literally tried to argue with me that James Lindsay is a nobody and doesn't matter, even though he's using him as a resource in the same magazine.
00:43:39
Speaker
which I feel like if you're using somebody in a magazine, criticizing that person makes perfect sense, right? Like that should be key to the conversation. So yeah, I don't think they were consistent. Whatever their actual reasoning is, I think they jumped around a bunch in a way that wasn't coherent. I also think that like Shermer himself claimed that, well, nobody would care what I think about CRT and then was later, you know, like on podcast talking about CRT all the time. So clearly he thinks that like,
00:44:09
Speaker
it's worth him talking about it. So I think it's worth criticizing his approaches to it. So luckily, the piece ended up in the skeptic. And people can sort of read and decide for themselves which parts they feel like are useful or not. So
00:44:26
Speaker
there was a little bit of litigation of this debate on twitter where shermer arguably made false representations about you and the situation with the article wasn't there yeah so the way this went he
00:44:45
Speaker
So after the whole thing kind of fell apart and you said they were going to go with somebody else, I commented on Twitter just that they had gone in a different direction and that I was sort of confused or frustrated by the shift from language from.
00:45:00
Speaker
you know, this is an innovative approach to discussing the issue, to this is a pointless approach to discussing the issue. I hadn't expected there to be anything more about it from their side of things. And then, like, the next day, you know, I didn't tag Sherman in any of that. The next day, he tweets at me randomly or in retweet, too, that I remember.
00:45:26
Speaker
basically being like, that isn't, you know, what happened. We asked you for a critique of Rufo's material and you refused to provide it. Why can't you just critique something like, you know, he puts up an example of Rufo's garbage Twitter memes.
00:45:45
Speaker
And yeah, I thought that was a misrepresentation because I was actively in the process of incorporating some more Rufo. I already included what I thought were sufficient critiques of Rufo's analysis, but I was including specifically a breakdown of one of the many ridiculous things that he sent me about Rufo and the moral panic stuff.
00:46:09
Speaker
when they pulled the plug on the article so it wasn't the case that I had refused to give them those critiques I had just argued that I didn't think it was particularly essential to debunk Chris Rufo's Twitter feed just like I don't think it would be like super valuable
00:46:27
Speaker
to debunk Alex Jones's Twitter feed if he still had one. Except, you know, unless your knowledge fight, like that's your specific, you know, like beat, that's your job. I think Rufo has generally been thoroughly debunked in a bunch of very large publications. And like he actually literally just tweeted out that this is what he was doing. So I thought it was pretty silly that we needed to continue to act like his
00:46:50
Speaker
concerns were genuine in any kind of way, but I was still doing it because that's what they asked for and I wanted to get the other stuff into the magazine and so I was willing to make that adjustment. I just wasn't willing to cut the stuff about Shermer and they were not willing to accept that, it seemed like.
00:47:07
Speaker
Um, so yeah, I thought that was inaccurate. I released the enough of the emails to make it clear. I thought that like, this was not an accurate portrayal of our engagements. I don't like to release emails because I don't, you know, I prefer that that sort of, because I think, you know, so people will look at that and think, Oh, well, this is not a person I can trust to send messages to. And the reality is you can totally trust me to send, you know, sending messages as long as you don't then turn around and misrepresent me on Twitter. Um.
00:47:36
Speaker
So yeah, unfortunately, it was not sufficient. There were some other individuals who self identify as skeptics who also promoted a bunch of misinformation about me and the exchange while I was in the process of getting the article properly edited and published over at the skeptic.
00:47:56
Speaker
Um, when I did get it published and I put it out and I sort of, you know, it has an explainer about why I think what he was saying was inaccurate. There was no corrections. There was no pushback. There was no response for the most part from pretty much anyone who had been involved in the like promoting of his misinformation on Twitter. So yeah, I think that's unfortunate. I'm not surprised of course, I think.
00:48:21
Speaker
people you know move on to stuff very the next thing very quickly on twitter myself included in a lot of occasions except for moral panics when obviously i talk about it too much and so that's the problem in the other direction um but yeah i think um you know shermer said that if i published it somewhere else he would respond i don't expect him to actually respond i don't expect any corrections or any introspection about any of this for the most part um i think
00:48:48
Speaker
I did it in the hope that it would be possible to talk to a community that I think needs to hear some pushback to their softer, gentler conspiracism, but that's hard to get access to sometimes.
00:49:03
Speaker
Yes, it does seem from the way the correspondence went down and the way you've described how the articles initially pitched to you, that there was very much a both sides need to be represented in this debate. And as you've pointed out, Rufo's been very explicit about his political ideology and goals with talk around CRT. He's talked about the idea
00:49:28
Speaker
that they need to make critical race theory into a buzzword that can be applied as a pejorative to basically anything I use in the American sense, and I put air quotes around this, liberals want. And so it seems it seems a bit weird given this is, I mean, this isn't just, you know, leaked correspondence we think might belong to Rufo. This is Rufo on his public Twitter feed actually saying the quiet part out loud.
00:49:56
Speaker
It seems weird all these years later to go, well, we should probably still give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I know he says he's doing it for political ends, but, you know, right. What if what if he's not? And there's a like there's a Steel Bot version of these things that I can put forward that I like, I understand.
Valid Critiques of CRT and Educational Implications
00:50:15
Speaker
And I think I had included it in the original article sufficiently, which is, you know, genuine concerns about
00:50:23
Speaker
either problems or criticisms of critical race theory, like specifically the theories, which there are criticisms of that are fair, just like every other theory in the universe. There are really good Marxist critiques of critical race theory that I think have been integrated into it by more modern critical race theorists, which then of course makes them communists, which then just fuels the conspiracism all the more. But there's also critiques of like the application of this stuff in
00:50:51
Speaker
various kinds of training in education it's not always done perfectly turns out some educational initiatives are terrible and like poorly applied what a shocker and like those are reasonable concerns i don't think
00:51:08
Speaker
I don't think scientific America is a reasonable point of serious concern because I think they're doing a pretty good job as hard as one can as hard as this job is to like balance discussing these things in the modern period not because of
00:51:24
Speaker
the woke won't let you say XYZ but because these are very very complex issues and it's why whenever anyone you know I think worthwhile talks about them there's a lot of pausing and ah's and um's I think and stuff because you really want to be careful when you are talking about these issues but at the same time there's so much to say so you're trying to get through so much of it so quickly and that's another thing is that like the word count they set for this was like two thousand words max
00:51:52
Speaker
which is not enough time to discuss much of anything. As I pointed out in the article, debunking one meme by Chris Rufo takes about 500 words to get it like to really understand every piece of it. I don't think that was the most useful, like most productive use of that particular space and time. So I wrote them a 2000 word piece that I think was valuable and they, you know, wanted more in it and they wouldn't expand the word limit. And so I've ended up with
00:52:21
Speaker
a long piece over at the skeptic that I think is valuable and I think ties the whole, ties a lot of it together quite effectively and doesn't do this kind of both-siderism thing, right? It explains, look, you know, there's a theory called critical race theory. It's real. It's in schools. It's mostly a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing. It is completely unjustified, the level of freaking out that is happening around it. And here's why people like Shermer,
00:52:49
Speaker
who claim to be the skeptic adults in the room have just like credulously bought into this panic throughout and continue to do so while, you know, nominally critiquing folks like Chris Rufo.
00:53:02
Speaker
Yes, it does seem it seems that the time for taking Rufo seriously is well past the time for actually expressing an appropriate degree of skepticism towards this moral panic is also actually well past. We probably should have been doing this years ago. It's kind of disturbing that there are certain reactionary figures
00:53:23
Speaker
in the US in particular, who continue to go, well, but what if there is something to it after all? It does make me think about the whole flower gang issue going on in Finland at the monument. Flower gang isn't a euphemism for drugs, but what if it is? What if it is? That's what liberals don't want you to ask. What if it is a euphemism for drugs that nobody knows about?
00:53:49
Speaker
Yeah, I call this cheap talk skepticism. It's the kind of skepticism that like you see on television where they just, you know, just asking questions is the classic example of cheap talk skepticism, right? I'm not making the claim. I'm just, I think it would be worth it if some people had a conversation about this thing in a way that might harm certain people, but absolutely won't harm me in any way. And I will look good for suggesting it.
00:54:13
Speaker
The classic case is the racial IQ thing. I'm not saying that different races have different IQs, but I do think that we should seriously investigate it. The thing is, we actually already have. There's a reason why we're skeptical of these claims. There's been past investigation. You simply can't go, I'm just asking questions.
00:54:37
Speaker
When you're doing, I'm just asking questions, you've got to have that in the context of the wider debate. And it seems that that's what's being ignored here, particularly by the skeptic US. I hate the fact we have to keep on going. The skeptic UK, the skeptic US just changed the name. Right. I agree.
00:54:56
Speaker
It's the example that I often come to, because I mentioned Charles Murray earlier, and another individual who I think has often credulously promoted various woke moral panics is Sam Harris.
Context in Debates and Public Discourse
00:55:12
Speaker
You know, there's the really, really, really, really important argument that happens between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein about
00:55:20
Speaker
Harris's episode with Charles Murray, where he, you know, really credulously platforms the like, he calls it like the forbidden knowledge about, you know, what's in the bell curve and stuff like that. And Klein shows up with like a wealth of understanding about Murray's entire political project as a libertarian, his goals of like, undercutting the arguments in favor of
00:55:47
Speaker
attempts to close the achievement gap between races because he believes that there really isn't much left to be done because it's the result of things like IQ and stuff. And Harris's response is basically he doesn't care. He doesn't seem to express even curiosity about the larger context, and he considers it a kind of virtue. I think that a lot of these folks think
00:56:12
Speaker
bringing that stuff in is a kind of they will call it an ad hominem and you know as philosophers we hate that because that's not an ad hominem it's context but they see context as effectively taking us away from the beautiful platonic ideas that exist i guess somewhere separate from those contexts um whereas i think like to understand
00:56:34
Speaker
any of this stuff you have to understand the cultural and political worlds in which these arguments are taking place or like or none of it makes any sense right it all becomes very incoherent it only makes sense when you recognize that like there are agendas here of individual and group nature that most individuals here who are identifying as
00:56:58
Speaker
you know, kind of post tribal or post, you know, group oriented or some of the most in group oriented people I've interacted with, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right? All comes together. Yes. Context, it turns out, is the monarch of any situation. You kind of need to have context to understand why sometimes certain questions really should be off the board. Yeah. But there's no reason to platform a debate around Holocaust denial. And I don't think Shermer would actually defend that.
00:57:28
Speaker
At least not yet. And so like, yeah, it depends on the context, the day, the audience, I assume. But like, yeah, I think there's not not all questions need to be asked, maybe at some, you know, and I will always use the CDC metaphor here. In my philosophy class, I will have an argument about most anything ethically speaking, right? If one of my students wants to have an argument,
00:57:52
Speaker
Like, I often prod them about consensual cannibalism just to mess with them. And if they want to argue about why isn't it OK for someone to sell themselves into slavery, I think that's an argument that we should have in a philosophical classroom where the argument is behind glass walls and whatnot. But you don't take anthrax out in public and just like start studying it right out like street epistemology style, right? And that's what some of these ideas are, right?
00:58:21
Speaker
critical race theory, you can talk about how every single word in there is a trigger word for white Christian America, and you can talk about the way that Rufo has taken that, and like a biological weapons master has, you know, weaponized that, aerosolized that in a way that
00:58:41
Speaker
is really really harmful and dangerous and these guys are wandering around it like it is a curiosity like it you know it's just not taking it seriously enough and i think.
00:58:56
Speaker
I would argue hiding their power levels to some extent, right? I think folks like Shermer are much more in the bag for these theories than they are willing to acknowledge. And they will say, I believe systemic racism is real. I believe some of these problems are real. And then turn around and say, oh, but you can't call it racism just because at every step of a person's life, they're being impacted by their race. That's just calling everything racism. And that's an unfalsifiable theory.
00:59:25
Speaker
That's just bad arguments. Like this is just a series of bad arguments. And I don't think that they, I don't think that he's dumb. Like, I don't think these people are bad at arguing. I just think that like, when they hit a blind spot, they become susceptible to very bad arguments and then back them up with other bad arguments.
00:59:42
Speaker
Yeah, when you were talking about the use of examples in the classroom, there's a nice classic example of that in politics back in Aotearoa, New Zealand. So our libertarian-esque party act, which used to stand for the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, they had a philosopher as a party leader about 15 years ago by the name.
01:00:09
Speaker
by the name of Jamie White, a libertarian, did his PhD at the University of Auckland, went off to do work in the UK, came back to lead the party. And he got ousted from the party because he had a regular opinion piece slot in the New Zealand Herald. And in one of those pieces, he decided to argue that actually
01:00:30
Speaker
incest isn't actually all that bad, philosophically speaking. And as philosophers pointed out, this is a debate that we have in seminars and classrooms. This is normal for us. Because it turns out that actually the prohibition against incest is really interesting.
01:00:49
Speaker
It turns out biologically incest for at least one or two generations isn't actually that bad. And we tend to worry about incest in the kind of long-term power relationship thing. What you don't do is have that debate in the national newspaper.
01:01:07
Speaker
once you're trying to get your party into a coalition with the governing party. Sure, have that conversation behind closed doors, but you're not going to be taken seriously as a party leader if you're known as, oh yeah, you're the incest guy. You must be really into incest. I saw you arguing about that in the paper.
01:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, as the consensual cannibalism guy, I get what you're talking about.
Philosophical Discussions on Controversy
01:01:31
Speaker
I recently was chatting with Delahunty about this Shermer stuff as well, and it was a call-in show, and one of the folks called in was like, they were suggesting that I should run for office, and I couldn't convey in the strong enough terms how hilariously bad an idea that would be. How like three seconds of digging into anything about me would just be a disaster for
01:01:54
Speaker
Everyone involved because yeah ethicists job is to like is to do the thing that these guys claim they want people to be doing more of which is talking about really dangerous potentially really impactful ideas ethics like
01:02:11
Speaker
You know, to talk a little bit about sort of the background concerns here, part of the thing that the anti-woke hate about the woke is that moralizing can be powerful as a psychological tool and that if you can convince people to believe something ethically, you can convince them to do
01:02:28
Speaker
potentially very unethical things, right? What they miss is that they too are a moral theory and have become sort of radicalized in their own particular moral persuasion and are causing a bunch of harm in that direction as a result. And I think they've overestimated the severity and degree of
01:02:49
Speaker
of extremism when it comes to woke moralizing. But yeah, it's definitely the case that ethics, in particular philosophy more broadly, is asking often potentially very damaging questions, very upsetting questions. And it's good that we do that.
01:03:12
Speaker
We do it in environments where we have people are aware that that's what's coming, right? And you don't just sort of do it like out in public. And like you said, you don't do it when you're like running for big public office, which is why I will never be running for public office. But it's important. I think what these folks miss is that
01:03:33
Speaker
you have a really high responsibility if you're doing that to go in with a bunch of information, right? If I'm going to teach people about, you know, if I'm like running a class at the CDC and I'm teaching weaponized anthrax, I'd better, you know, know my my anthrax, right? And these guys are like wandering into like, like, you know, like a child is wandered into a theater and does knows nothing about Rufo and Murray and these folks and they start publishing stuff and then they have to like,
01:03:59
Speaker
semi-walk things back, and then they get criticized for walking them back, and it just becomes this cycle that they end up spiraling in the wrong direction. And so, yeah, there's a really high responsibility, I think, to come in well-informed on these issues, but most content creators are not able to or willing to do that, I think, unfortunately. Yeah, sometimes you actually need to talk to the experts and not rely on the person with the loudest voice in the room.
01:04:29
Speaker
Yeah.
Engaging with Experts and Avoiding Moral Panics
01:04:30
Speaker
And not just credulously promote that person and then try to go find some experts after you've promoted the moral panic for months at a time. Like part of the reason the experts don't want to publish in your journal is that they reasonably or your magazines, they reasonably infer that like your magazine has promoted this panic and will likely be using their content in a way that will not actually substantively push back on the panic bowl instead contribute further to it because that does appear to be your project.
01:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, often the entreaty to why won't you publish in my magazine is not to further the critical voice. It's to go, look, my magazines vary in partial. I mean, yes, I promote these things, but look, occasionally I also publish a few articles that critique them. Look how balanced my treatment is. Aren't I so sensible? Right. And the only reason I don't publish more of those is because for some reason I can't get more people to publish them.
01:05:25
Speaker
And maybe it's partly because none of the people who I socialize with or have on my podcasts are in that persuasion because woke individuals are not welcome in anti-woke communities because y'all are an exclusive in-group.
01:05:39
Speaker
Yeah. Sad times, sad times. Well, thank you, Aaron. That has been a great discussion. And also thank you for putting up with some of the vagrates of my internet connection. Hopefully it won't be obvious to the listener, but we had a few outages along the way.
01:06:00
Speaker
which meant that Aaron had to sit there very patiently waiting for me to come back online as I was furiously trying to get the VPN to do anything to acknowledge that there's an outside world. Aaron, is there anything you want to promote or bring to people's attention?
01:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm used to being silenced whenever we're trying to promote this kind of information. So I assume that it was Shermer getting in contact with some individuals to short circuit our conversation there, blah, blah, blah, the disk, whatever.
01:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, and if you want to hear more about how horribly silenced I am and canceled I have been, I have two podcasts as a cishet male.
Promoting Aaron's Podcasts and Recommendations
01:06:41
Speaker
I have Philosophers in Space and Embrace the Void. Embrace the Void, I have interviews, sometimes arguments with people on a wide range of philosophical topics, often culture war stuff, sometimes moral panic stuff, sometimes conspiracism stuff.
01:06:56
Speaker
Um, we had a fun chat recently, for example, and over on philosophers in space, I get together with Thomas Smith from serious inquiries. And we talk about pieces of science fiction and the philosophy that they make us think about.
01:07:12
Speaker
And that's a lot of fun. And then you can find me at I'm going to be very careful here, the capital T, the skeptic, the UK one, not the Shermer one consistently. I there was a while there where I would just always said that and was like, you know, I have to highlight that because people often get worried that I mean the Shermer one. And I was also going to be worried that I was now going to have to add in a caveat that I do have one article in there, but it's explicitly critical of the magazine and Shermer, but that
01:07:40
Speaker
never ended up being the case. So I can continue to just say, yeah, at the skeptic UK magazine, and also come hang out in follow me on Twitter at a TV pod where I get in arguments with people like Shermer apparently, and then come hang out in the philosophers in space Facebook group where there are lots of cool people who don't believe in anti woke nonsense.
01:08:03
Speaker
Excellent. I want to heartily recommend Philosophers in Space because your recent three-part series on Consider Phoebus, the first culture novel by Ian M. Banks, was not just a great discussion of a book, which apparently I remember nothing of whatsoever, but it actually caused me to go back and reread it. It's always been my least favorite culture novel, and on rereading
01:08:31
Speaker
It still is my least favorite culture novel, but I have a different appreciation of what Banks was trying to do with that first book now. But it's astounding how little of it I remember. It's like reading a book for the first time, but the thing is, I know I've read it. I've got a physical copy of it back home with a broken spine.
01:08:53
Speaker
I read it twice for the episode and the second time a lot more of it stuck. The first time I felt like, I think almost deliberately because it really is a kind of anti-narrative. It's a critique of war narratives and so it deliberately kind of doesn't hang together.
01:09:10
Speaker
in almost like a narrative sense, you know? And so I think there is that kind of weird forgetability to it. It also, to me, reads like, you know, season one of something great, where it's like they got the pieces, but they haven't quite got them all together yet. And then you have book two, Player of Games, which I think is one of the best pieces of literature ever written.
01:09:31
Speaker
So, you know, player of games, accession and use of weapons are my favorite three culture novels. And if you're going to get into the culture, read player of games first, because it is almost the perfect into introductory text. It tells you everything you need to know about culture, culture, citizens and special circumstances, which is not a euphemism. Special circumstances is a real. Well, it is, but it is precisely. It's.
01:10:00
Speaker
You can tell Ian in Banks grew up in the UK because that's where euphemisms of that type end up becoming the official way you refer to things anyway. Yeah, the culture is the radical transhumanist utopia that all proper progressives I think should be angling towards. And yeah, Player of Games gives us a picture of that actual society, whereas the first book kind of gives us the view from the outside.
01:10:26
Speaker
And I really think that like that negative space is much easier to appreciate once you have that like player of games core to it. But we're going to go in order through the rest of the books now. So we will we will get to all of the good things in good time. Yes, I am. I am looking forward to it. Thank you, Aaron. It has once again been a pleasure. Thank you as well. And good luck with them. Yes, always them.
01:10:55
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M. R. X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, nothing is real.
01:11:24
Speaker
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