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Soviet Pseudolinguistics
34 Plays5 years ago
Josh and M discuss Japhetic theory: another Soviet Pseudoscience promoted illegitimately by one Joseph Stalin...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dentith.
Dr. Dentith's Eye Injury
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison, as ever, sharing a sofa and who knows what else if Dr. M. R. X. Dentith. I don't know.
00:00:30
Speaker
Your eye is looking quite a bit better there, I have to say. Well, the makeup helps, but yes, I am in recovery mode. I am much better. That's the only thing that matters.
Modern Medical Techniques and Scars
00:00:40
Speaker
The problem with modern medical care, Joshua, the problem with modern medical care is that doctors are so much better at stitching these days. So you don't actually get visible scars if your doctor is doing a good job. Doing a good job. And unfortunately, I went to a good doctor. So it's a very unlikely first mistake.
00:01:01
Speaker
I was so disappointed. I got whacked by a thing last year that hit my brow and then my cheek and gave me a perfect line down there. But I didn't whack myself hard enough, unfortunately. No cool scar. It would have been a really good one if it had stayed in that spot. Well, yes, yes, now I know.
00:01:21
Speaker
Now,
5G Conspiracy Spinoff
00:01:22
Speaker
I understand this is no longer the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, it's the podcaster's guide to 5G technology, now that you're an expert in that field. It's true, I was in the spin-off this week, which for those of you who don't live in Aotearoa, New Zealand, is a... How would you describe the spin-off? Sort of an online magazine, sort of left-ish leaning, bit of entertainment, bit of news, bit of content... Do you want to say it's a website for the bourgeoisie, but anyway... Yeah, same thing.
00:01:49
Speaker
I was asked to pass comment on 5G conspiracy theories for a column by the ever-great Emily Wright. I wrote some responses. She used them. I am now an expert on 5G and 5G conspiracy theories. We should actually probably do the 5G conspiracy theory. We should actually, yeah. Because it's kind of... Give it up now, we're an expert.
00:02:09
Speaker
It's kind of becoming the new 1080 in New Zealand at least, isn't it? It very much is. The latest thing that everyone has... Although it is also the cell phones cause cancer of the 1990s. Right, yes, yes. Yeah, now that is something we should get into.
Soviet Linguistic Theories
00:02:23
Speaker
As long as we're getting into today, we're still on our pseudo-scientific... I was a little bit outraged, I have to say, when you first proposed this topic and sent me a link
00:02:34
Speaker
to geothethic theory, which is what we're going to be talking about. And I discovered it's a, we had a read through a Soviet linguistics theory and realized you've been holding out on me. We could have been talking linguistics for who knows how long. I like it. This podcast is the NCIS of podcasts. Now you might think that's a really weird thing to say about any podcast, but let me tell you about NCIS. It's the most popular show in the States, isn't it?
00:03:00
Speaker
It is. It's been going on now for 14, going on 15 years. This will be the 15th season. And despite the fact it's really old, they have been parceling out plot points and character development for the main characters, slowly but surely, over the course of a decade and a half.
00:03:23
Speaker
And that's what I'm doing with this podcast, Joshua. I am keeping some of the really, really creme de la creme conspiracy theories for the middle age of the podcast so that we still appear to be vital and essential to podcast listeners out there.
00:03:39
Speaker
Brilliant. But also at the same time, bumbling and incompetent as we have a bunch or a bunch of two actual updates and retractions today. And we've got a sting. Yeah. So let's use that sting to justify the update and the retractions. Um, updates and retractions.
00:04:02
Speaker
Right, so we have a correction, a piece this week. Who wants to go first?
Nazi Occult Interests
00:04:07
Speaker
I shall go first. Okay, please do. Because this is the embarrassing part. In last week's episode, we talked about Nazi pseudoscience and we talked about the occultic nature of much Nazi belief. We also put this belief down to one Heinrich Himmler. Now...
00:04:26
Speaker
I say this with all due seriousness, but we apologise to the family of Heinrich Himmler for labelling him as an occultic lunatic. I'm pretty sure he was though, but not the specific occultic lunatic. The specific one we should have been talking about was Rudolf Hess. It was Rudolf Hess who was of course fascinated by the occult. It was Rudolf Hess who was summoned to Scotland by apparently Alistair Crowley. It was in fact Rudolf Hess we should have been mentioning.
00:04:53
Speaker
So apologies to the family of Heinrich Himmler. We should have been making fun of Hess instead. I mean, to be fair, Himmler was the one behind the Ananerba that we were talking about mostly last week. But the specific story about people being summoned to England by Alistair Crowley was very Hessian. Was in fact, it should have been Hessian. So thank you to Mike, astute listener who sent in that correction.
00:05:17
Speaker
who has forced us to apologise to the family of Heinrich Himmler. I hope you're happy now. I assume he is. So my turn. Now, a couple of weeks ago, we had our news article episode and the top story was the fun of the missing bodies in the Vatican Cemetery.
Vatican Cemetery Bones Correction
00:05:34
Speaker
Now, I got the wrong end of the stick a little bit when reading up one of these articles. It was sort of
00:05:40
Speaker
It talked about these oscuaries which they had found bones in which they were testing to be the princesses, but the way the article was read was written, and I assume it was like the Catholic times or something, so they probably assumed that its readers would know the fine details of Teutonic cemeteries in the Vatican, but I did not.
00:05:58
Speaker
So basically when they were talking about two princesses and finding two ossuaries, I had made the connection that they were little things, each of which containing the bones of a princess. I was completely wrong. What had actually been found, these two ossuaries were gigantic freaking vaults underneath one of these bits in the cemetery containing lots and lots and lots of bones. So when, as we talked about, they'd been doing a bunch of reconstructing of that area of the cemetery, that obviously basically gathered up all the bones and just dumped them in a pit.
00:06:28
Speaker
essentially as a nice pit from the sounds of things. A fancy pit. A fancy pit. A fancy bone. But a bone pit nonetheless. So rather than having two sets of bones that they're testing for DNA, they have thousands upon thousands of bones, which they're going to be sifting through for quite some time, I imagine, trying to figure out which bones belong with which. I know they talk about their fragments of bones as well, so obviously a bunch of them have broken into little pieces and so on.
00:06:54
Speaker
While I'd assumed it would be an easy task to find out whether or not the bones they had belonged to these princesses whose bodies had gone missing, possibly it will not be. That you can imagine a situation where they go, so we've found more than one potential match for a princess of that realm, because it turns out that maybe
00:07:15
Speaker
Their parents had been a little bit more fickle than we thought they were, because there are a lot of people with genetic matches here, and awful lot of people. And all that 17th century medieval noblery and breeding that I assume we're done.
00:07:31
Speaker
That's why they all had noses, apart from the ones who didn't. Anyway, so that was a good excuse to use the little sting, I thought. But we're at the end now of our updates and retractions. We have nothing more to retract.
Geophytic Theory in Soviet History
00:07:45
Speaker
So instead, let us return back to Soviet Russia and the fun of Soviet linguistics.
00:07:58
Speaker
So Joshua, you like linguistics. I do. You also like linguine. Ah, it's not bad. I prefer linguistics. You like vodka and Russian orthodoxy? No. Well, then this theory is not going to be fair. Well, it is a little bit, I think.
00:08:15
Speaker
We're talking about prophetic theory. This is kind of going to be a bit of a repeat of the Lysenko episode in that we're going to be looking at another wacky Soviet pseudoscientific theory that kind of found favor by being the right kind of science, by being nicely sort of communistic in nature. But it's an interesting story. I think it's an interesting story anyway, because I do like me some linguistics.
00:08:43
Speaker
So we should probably start by saying what it actually was. Jafetic theory was a linguistic theory promoted by a fellow. Now I've seen several articles and in each one they give him a different last letter of his name and some they call him Nicolas and some he's Nicolas and some he's Nicolay. I don't know if that's just the language of that region puts different letters on the end of your name and different
00:09:09
Speaker
Or just very bad transliterations. Or very bad transliterations, but we'll stick with Nicholas. Nicholas Yakovlevich Mar. He was a historian. He was a linguist in the early part of the 1900s.
Mar's Japhetic Theory
00:09:24
Speaker
By all accounts, he was quite a good one. He was a noted expert. He was from Georgia, basically, around that area. I think Georgian was his native tongue, and he was quite an expert in the history of the Georgian language.
00:09:40
Speaker
But then he started to branch out. He came up with this idea that there was a family of languages called Japhetic languages. This is named after Japheth, one of Noah's sons in the Bible, because you have Semitic peoples and Semitic languages. That comes from Shem. There was also apparently, there used to be
00:09:59
Speaker
a family of languages called Hamitic after another son Ham, although supposedly that categorization no longer applies, people don't think that's a real one. So we just sort of have the term Semitic, but he proposed this idea of Jaffetic as companions to Semitic and Hamitic languages.
00:10:17
Speaker
And specifically, he thought that prophetic languages were a family of languages that included the, what are called, Cartvelian languages, which are languages kind of from the Caucasus region around where he was, which included Georgian and a bunch of other ones, and also a bunch of Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic and so on, which are found in the Middle East.
00:10:37
Speaker
And straight away that that does seem a little bit odd that we've got we've got sort of north caucasus region and Middle East region Which is actually should actually be like that I suppose if I'm I'm holding for the podcast This is I'm holding my hands up in what I assume are the roughly the relative positions of those two areas of the world probably completely wrong But anyway, you're about to do something like I'm about to throw that out to pounce at the camera. Yes What I put the point is though
00:11:03
Speaker
There's a bit of a gap in between. In fact, there's quite a gap in between the two. So it does seem a little bit odd right off the bat that you'd want to claim that you have this family of languages that appear to be localised to two quite separate areas of the world. But nevertheless...
00:11:18
Speaker
That's what he thought. He thought he could prove this, I don't know. And his theories kind of grew from there. He talked about the idea that all the languages in the world could be descended from a single proto-language and that they were sort of strata. I think he was a bit of an archaeologist himself who was sort of thinking in slightly archaeological terms. We'd have these strata of languages with sort of the older proto-languages deeper down and then the more recent ones up and up and up.
00:11:48
Speaker
Thanks.
00:11:48
Speaker
sort of a strata below the modern day languages of those two areas, given that they sort of came from this one family. And then from there, he sort of went to say that these language strata also corresponded to social strata and that certain social classes were more related to certain language strata. And that's where Stalin and the socialists and the communists started to stand up and pay attention because they were very much into their class consciousness and what have you.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yes, and indeed this is where the imaging of Lysenkoism becomes so obvious, in that Lysenkoism became popular because Stalin liked Lysenko and Lysenko's theories. In the same respect, Stalin liked Ma and Ma's theories, so by having endorsement basically by the chairperson of the committee,
00:12:44
Speaker
these things became the orthodox science of the realm. Although, what's interesting about geophysics, as opposed to lysincoism, is that lysincoism dies after stardom. The geophitic theory, not so much.
Mar vs. German Linguistic Theories
00:13:01
Speaker
Yes, yes, we'll get to that in just a minute. So I mean it's interesting as a little sort of side note in a call back to last week's episode about Nazi pseudoscience. Apparently Ma was quite sort of passionate in his beliefs and was quite strongly opposed to a bunch of German linguists at the time who from the sounds of things were
00:13:22
Speaker
were sort of embarking on a similar project to the Ananiaba. While they, the Ananiaba, were looking for archaeological proof of sort of the lineage of the Germanic people, these linguists were looking for linguistic proof trying to trace the languages back to sort of show this same sort of lineage they were after.
00:13:39
Speaker
He was apparently very, very much opposed to them. Among other things, he thought they overemphasized the Christian influence in European language and history and significantly underemphasized the Muslim influence from North Africa and the Middle East and so on. And he was possibly a little bit on the money there. And in the same respect that
00:14:01
Speaker
We talked last week about how the cultural diffusion angle the Germans had at that time, trying to find some kind of global source to justify Aryan supremacy in the way that Ma is doing the same thing linguistically to show that there's a tight relationship between his region of the world and another important region of the world. This continues to this day. So you've got so many linguistics when it comes to people who claim that, say, the Celts got here.
00:14:31
Speaker
because when it turns out when you actually investigate the Celtic New Zealand thesis, it turns out the count's got here because Greek and Egyptian navigators got here. There's a kind of disconnect here between Egypt, Greece and Celtic England, but that gets left to one side. And they'll go, well, the proof positive of that is that the Egyptian word for sun is ra. The Polynesian word for sun is ra.
00:14:59
Speaker
must be the same language, or at least share the same language root. Although, as any linguist with their salt will point out, the problem with linguistics and comparative linguistics is that actually the human mouth is only capable of making a very small selection of sounds.
00:15:17
Speaker
And very simple terms, or simple words for things, tend to actually have a high degree of resemblance across languages because we tend to use very simple sounds for everyday things. So it's actually not unusual that two completely
00:15:33
Speaker
unrelated cultures would share the same word for something which was so central to their lives, the sun. And I mean, even just statistically, we've called out that comparison because it's striking to us, but there have been tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of different languages across the world and across history. So the fact that you can find two of them that are completely unrelated but haven't used the same term is just sort of, you know, as well within the realms of statistics.
00:16:02
Speaker
But that's because humans are bad at estimating probabilities. Well, we are. I mean, a note on the idea of sort of proto languages and going back.
The Speculative Nature of Proto-Languages
00:16:13
Speaker
As I understand it, there is a genuine project in linguistics to try and sort of reconstruct the proto languages when it's clear that you have a family of languages that all come from a common source.
00:16:23
Speaker
And you have some idea of how those languages have changed over time. You can then sort of extrapolate backwards and try and sort of work out with the language that these ones will descend it from. Must have sounded a bit like this. We know that these sounds changed in this way and these word forms changed in this way. So if we sort of work the change backwards and then keep going.
00:16:44
Speaker
We can have an idea of some sort of proto-Indo-European language or something, but there is a lot of educated guesswork involved. There's a lot of, well, probably assuming this, and if we assume that nothing happened in between and so on, so it is all quite dodgy. And it's also the absolute best we can do is basically go back one generation into the past.
00:17:09
Speaker
There's just no way of going any further than that. You can take existing languages, maybe work back from there, but then that's so hypothetical that even going another layer back. And so if you want to talk about how long a human's been around, a couple of hundred thousand years talking at least, and yet recorded history is maybe a few thousand,
00:17:28
Speaker
So, yeah, when it comes to talk of proto-languages, if anyone tries to tell you that we know the common language from which all other ones evolved, they're telling you pork pies. Although, it didn't stop, say, the ancient Egyptians from trying to work out what they first left. Well, yes, I think it's a common...
00:17:45
Speaker
And I mean, there's a famous story about that, although I think the story itself is actually largely apocryphal, and actually is found in a lot of different cultures, but the idea of putting children in a tower, and they just leave them alone to see what language they will naturally speak, and they come back several years later, and the children are making these kind of guttural bah.
00:18:08
Speaker
like sounds. Oh, that sounds a lot like insert language here. So Babylonian, Sumerian. We've discovered the first languages and then someone looks out the window and goes, what's that down there? Are those sheep? Yes, yes, I have heard that story before and we are almost certainly apocryphal, but it probably does illustrate an interesting point. But I mean, it also speaks to the fact that cats
00:18:36
Speaker
by and large don't make noises, except around humans, because they've kind of learnt that we communicate not through the laying of sense and rubbing ourselves against furniture the entire time. We do it by making noise and cats are clear enough to go, hmm, noisemaking is obviously pretty important. I'm going to screech a lot from now on.
00:19:00
Speaker
Anyway, returning to your prophetic language theories. And away from cats. And away from cats for now. So it all sort of, it tied in nicely with a lot of Stalin's ideas about nationality and language's relationship to it.
Stalin's Linguistic and Socioeconomic Theories
00:19:15
Speaker
And I have to be honest, reading through articles about this, I got a little bit lost. You'll be surprised to hear that the intricacies of Stalin's socialist theory eluded me a little bit. But there's a lot of talk of
00:19:28
Speaker
of national identities, whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing, how things should work, whether it would be good for all nationalities to come together, or whether or not they should, you know, cultural areas should retain their identity and uniqueness and so on. And quite frankly, it seems to seesaw between the two a lot of time.
00:19:47
Speaker
Well, I mean, it kind of fits in with the notion of Soviet or social realism, which takes it that class is a real thing, but not necessarily other things associated with class. So in theory, if you get everyone to speak the same language,
00:20:05
Speaker
then you can kind of unify them in a class-based society, and thus, ethnicity doesn't matter. Except that of course sometimes it does, because someone like Stalin, who comes from a particular region of the world, wants his particular origin space to still be important, and so there's a certain amount of what we might call
00:20:28
Speaker
inconsistency when a despot is running a country and making things up as he goes along. As we saw with Lysenkoism and we're going to see with prophetic theory, endorsing something doesn't make it true, but it does fit an agenda.
00:20:44
Speaker
Part of Ma's theories was that languages tended to fuse together into a single communist, nice communisty language. Apparently, now this is where the class consciousness comes in. Apparently there was a campaign in the 20s and 30s to actually, what's the word, not introduce, mandate.
00:21:07
Speaker
that's not quite the word either, but specifically specify which alphabets certain ethnicities should be using for their languages, so that supposedly smaller ethnicities were encouraged to adopt a Latin alphabet of the kind that we use, replacing the Cyrillic alphabets that they use and which the other larger ethnicities use, and I think that was possibly part of, you know, related to the idea of different classes relating to different
00:21:34
Speaker
language strata and trying to sort of separate them more clearly but It does get a little bit funny. It's I mean to be fair language and politics do intersect I mean that there's a lot of a lot of sort of the the identity politics side of things and and you know The the policing of language as some would say it in the freedom of speech and that all you can't say that sort of I know it's but entirely apart from that
00:21:59
Speaker
language and nationality are sort of closely tied. As we see with France. Yeah, I mean they particularly get into it with the, what is it called, the Académie Francaise or whatever. The 100 Immortals.
00:22:15
Speaker
similarly in French Canada as well, but all across the world there's this line that I remember I heard a lot when I was doing linguistics at university. They'd say, a language is a dialect with guns, which I believe is a simplification of an earlier quote, which is, a language is a dialect with an army and navy. But what they mean is that
00:22:37
Speaker
A lot of the time, whether you have two separate languages or two dialects of the same language depends on whether or not the speakers of those languages wish to identify themselves as separate or together. So you get all over Europe and I assume all over the rest of
Language and Nationality Politics
00:22:52
Speaker
the world as well. You often get places where you'll have two neighbouring regions
00:22:55
Speaker
And the languages that they speak certainly sound very similar to a third party, and yet Dale says, oh, no, no, we've got completely separate languages. What's that guy doing? I had no idea what he can even, I can't even understand the guy because they want to remain separate. And then you get places like China, say, where there are a bunch of different families of languages, some of which are very, very dissimilar to the point of mutual unintelligibility. But it suits China to say that they're all, you know, it's all one language because they want to be all one country.
00:23:24
Speaker
Like Stalin's not completely talking out of his arse when he wants to tie the concepts of language and nationality together, it's just exactly how he does it.
00:23:34
Speaker
Now, actually, there's a nice Romanian example here. So Romanian is taken to be the last Latin-derived language that's still spoken to this day. But what's interesting about this is it's a lot more Latin now than it was 130 years ago. 130 years ago, the language had a lot more Slav in it and sounded a lot more Slavic.
00:23:57
Speaker
the people at the time wanted to distinguish themselves from their Slavic-speaking neighbours, so they engaged in a programme to basically emphasise the Latin in Romanian and try to remove a lot of the loanwords. And it was a very successful project. Romanian was re-Latinised, which is, as most linguists would point out,
00:24:22
Speaker
kind of unheard of. Normally, government edicts to change a language or preserve it doesn't work because people simply speak the language they want to. There has to be buy-in. And that's the problem with the French example. The French government is going to great lengths to stop loanwords from being used in everyday French. It just isn't working. You can insist for official documentation
00:24:51
Speaker
But what you can't do is stop people from referring to burgers as burgers, whether they contain meat or entirely made of vegetables, when they go to the supermarket. Yeah, I mean, that was again, from my distant memories of linguistic lectures, that the French example was held up in contrast to the Kohangaraio organization in New Zealand, which was very much grassroots. And so that was very successful. That did sort of revitalise the Maori language to an extent.
00:25:21
Speaker
because it came from the people, and it had by and from the start, whereas French it's being imposed from the top. But I assume the people were on board with what the government was doing. So, how well did this gifetic theory actually work in Soviet Russia?
Mar's Rise Under Stalin
00:25:40
Speaker
Well, I mean, in terms of its popularity and how especially Mr Ma got on, we see a lot of similarity with what happened to Lysenko, where Lysenko was given, what did they make him? The head of...
00:25:53
Speaker
the agricultural sciences and the institute thereof. So Ma, he managed the National Library of Russia. He managed the Jaffetic Institute of the Academy of Sciences from 1921 until he died in 1934. He was elected vice president of the Soviet Academy of the Sciences in 1930. So again, we see a person promoting a theory that finds favor with Stalin, finds quite a lot of success.
00:26:20
Speaker
Now, as you said before, Lysenkoism kind of fell out of favour after Stalin was out of the picture. Jafetic theory fell out of favour after Ma was out of the picture, but not Stalin.
Decline of Mar's Theories
00:26:32
Speaker
So apparently Stalin himself ended up basically disowning this theory. So there was, I mean, there's disagree-, it wasn't like, from what I gather, it wasn't quite like with Lysenko where you were not allowed to criticise or disagree. There was still disagreement in linguistic circles.
00:26:49
Speaker
and eventually proponents or opponents rather of Mars theories kind of got Stalin's ear from the sound of things and eventually in 1950 there was now they always say an anti-Marist article signed by Joseph Stalin so I don't know if that means Stalin himself actually wrote it. He certainly put his name on it but I don't know if it was one of these
00:27:13
Speaker
It very strongly suggested that Stalin would sign anything that went across his table. So a paper came out criticising Mahrism and Jafetic theory and Stalin's name was on it and so just like that, Jafetic theory was out. And it's interesting to see actually that on the paper itself, there's a quote here,
00:27:38
Speaker
Enya Ma introduced into linguistics another and also incorrect and non-Marxist formula regarding the class character of language and got himself into a muddle and put linguistics into a muddle. Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula, which is contrary to the whole course of the history of peoples and languages. So now it's anti-Marxist, his theory, which originally was so nicely communistic that it found favor.
00:28:03
Speaker
It just goes to show how the winds of things can change and do stuff. Now, what's the conspiracy angle here? Well, it's kind of the same as Lysenko,
Political Influence on Science
00:28:14
Speaker
really. You have a theory which is being promoted for political reasons, not because it's necessarily good science. The politics precedes the science when we would hope it was the other way around. Matamata climate change and so on and so forth.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yes, actually, because that's the point I want to make. Once again, as I said with the Lysenkoism thing, people go, oh, this is an obvious thing that was wrong with communism. Look at how it abuses science for political gain.
00:28:48
Speaker
These are problems we find with capitalism as well. Clean coal, the thing that Donald Trump goes on about all the time. Something that's been promoted by the conservatives, aka the Republicans, in the US.
00:29:04
Speaker
a kind of magical substance which allows you to burn coal but not burn the planet at the same time. It's a politically useful thesis with very little grounding in actual science. Turns out politicians utilize theories like this all the time
00:29:26
Speaker
to get to the grassroots activism that keeps them afloat.
Corporate Cover-ups in Science
00:29:31
Speaker
And I mean you don't need to look at, you don't need to get into tinfoil hat theory when you're talking about these sorts of conspiracies. We know, we have documented evidence that say petroleum companies knew about global warming decades in advance of it becoming into the public eye. Or tobacco companies.
00:29:48
Speaker
It is, yeah. ... knew about the link between smoking and lung cancer for decades before it had been forced to admit it in front of, I about to say, the White House, which I think was more Congress, but before august bodies. Yes.
00:30:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, this is basically the same thing we see today. I believe at the time, when Stalin snapped his fingers and prophetic theory was gone, in the West people would say, look at that, there's your old bloody Stalin, that's your socialism for you. The guy at the top,
00:30:23
Speaker
just says the word and suddenly science changes completely.
Impact of Stalin's Decisions on Science
00:30:26
Speaker
I mean, in this instance he was right, basically. Geophatic theory does appear to be complete nonsense, but it still certainly raised eyebrows the way the official science of a country could just turn on a dime simply because the fellow at the top said so.
00:30:41
Speaker
That's Stalin, one of the world's greatest linguists. That's what I'm taking from that. Well, I assume, yes. So, I mean, we're kind of at the end of it again. We kind of ended in the same place as we did with the Lysenko one. It's interesting to look at the kind of ideas people come up with, but it's part of a pattern, I guess, of science as rather pseudoscience, in this case pseudolinguistics, as propaganda. I mean, there's
00:31:08
Speaker
In the case of linguistics, there's less of a hard science, I suppose, than evolution or something like that. There is a lot of... languages are much more... There'll be some linguists out there who'll be very disappointed by your saying that.
00:31:23
Speaker
There's a lot of mathematics to linguistics and hard data and so on, but languages are much more malleable. They're not laws of nature. There are lots of laws of linguistics we can come up with to explain the things we see, but there are always distinctions and exceptions and so on and so forth. So you have more wiggle room to come up with pseudoscientific bollocks, I suppose, when it comes to linguistics. But pseudoscientific bollocks are still pseudoscientific bollocks, and that's all I have to say on the matter.
00:31:53
Speaker
And I agree. Now, for those of you who aren't patrons, this will be the end of the episode.
Podcast Conclusion
00:32:01
Speaker
But for those of you who are patrons, there's exciting bonus content coming up in the Patreon bonus special, where I'll be talking about a roundtable which I appeared in, but didn't say much in.
00:32:18
Speaker
We'll have a little bit of a discussion about possible Chinese government interference with the workings at AUT. Or is it? I think it is. The majestic 12 documents, which have been doing the rounds recently, may have been the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. Those wacky Russians. And finally, a final update on the whale oil blog.
00:32:44
Speaker
But if you want to know more, you'll have to tune in to the Patron bonus episode. And if you want to tune in to the Painus... Painus? Bonus? Bonus, Painus? Painus Botron? The Painus Patron bonus episode. The bonus patron episode, not the Painus Botron, which I think was Secretary General of the United Nations for a while. Botron. I am Botron. The Patron bonus episode. I am Bolt and Robot.
00:33:09
Speaker
to access one of those things, you will need to be a patron. And if you are, thank you very much. And if you are a Botron or Hail Botron. Please do not destroy us, yes. And if you'd like to be a patron, then you can. Frankly, we were not going to stop you at all and would indeed encourage you to do so by directing you towards our Patronage campaign on Patreon or the native Patronage campaign at Podbean.com where this podcast is hosted. But that's enough naked capitalism.
00:33:39
Speaker
Or is it? We do have a lot of communism to balance out for the rest of this episode. But I think that's all I can stand. Frankly, I think there's only one more thing to say. All hail Botron. All hail Botron. All hail.
00:34:00
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:35:01
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.