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The Stopped Clock Effect (Back to the Conspiracy)
53 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M revisit episode 28 (and a few others) to (re)investigate cases where someone got it right about a conspiracy, only to then go on to have a career where they seem to always get it wrong...
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Transcript
Introduction and Shocking Statements
00:00:00
Speaker
And that's how he died, with an arse filled with eels. We turn now to a special report, where we take a look at some people who got it right, only to go on to get it wrong.
Podcast Hosts and Episode Exploration
00:00:10
Speaker
Josh, you're our special correspondent on this matter. Who are tonight's targets? Ah, well, Em, we're looking at the hosts of the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, and Episode 28. Named after those missing pages of the 9-11 report. Yes, and how often they got it right, but turned out to get it very wrong when it comes to David Icke.
00:00:27
Speaker
Wasn't he a guest on their podcast? Yes, he was, which makes the era we're highlighting tonight so egregious. This concerns the Jimmy Savile affair, correct? Does. In episode 28, Josh and Ian gave Ike credit for at least talking about Savile before it came out on the broader media that Savile wasn't just a pedophile, but also had a thing for corpses. But as our special report shows, there's no evidence Ike ever mentioned Savile at all prior to 2011.
00:00:52
Speaker
So Josh and Em dropped the ball on this? Very much so. And the consequences of this heinous act of erroneous podcasting? Nothing. It's a podcast, who cares?
Auckland Mayor's Opinion and Drew's Views
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, to quote the Mayor of Auckland, they sound like drongos. Next up, a new episode of Drew's Views where Drew asks whether Josh really did claim there's no caffeine black market. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton.
00:01:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and sitting right next to me so close I'm effectively wearing them. It's Dr. M.R.E.Xtenteth. It's true. I am the latest in fashion couture. Well, you always have been, really. That's true. If we're being honest. Which we're not. No, yeah.
Nostalgia and Conspiracy Theorists
00:01:48
Speaker
That might come into this episode a little bit, perhaps, as well. We're doing another back to the conspiracy. We're going back.
00:01:55
Speaker
back all the way back back back and to the left back to life back to reality back to november of 2014
00:02:03
Speaker
That's a long time ago. Almost nine years ago. I believe some people listening to this podcast weren't even born there. I assume, no, no. And I suppose before we actually say what we talked about in November 2014, episode 28, and then start talking about it again, we should play a little chime. A little jingle. Make it official. Have a bit of a dance along.
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, you're welcome to. Well, you can just imagine that you're just bugging along after I play this thing. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy. Now that is what I call arse movement.
00:02:46
Speaker
And I am notorious for boogying along with things. So, episode 28, November of 2014. A dark stain on this podcast. Well, it had its moments. So the point is, this was an episode, we decided to go with the theme of
00:03:05
Speaker
conspiracy theorists who got it right with one thing. But then went on to get it wrong with so many other things. So it's sort of, I mean, a little bit of a case of the stop clock being right twice a day. Although I think we called the episode a stopped clock. We did, which I thought was a gratuitously sexual pun and didn't need to be there at all. But it's back, so what can you do? A little bit on
00:03:31
Speaker
It reminds me a little bit of the... Look, because I'm talking about spigots, doesn't mean it has to be sexual. If you say so. I mean, ball cocks are an actual plumbing thing. Yeah, no, that's true, yep. No, they're copious.
Mel Gibson's Film and Ian Wishart's Career
00:03:43
Speaker
Spigot. Spigot does sound like it should be a dirty word, I guess, of Josh.
00:03:48
Speaker
You are such a spigot. Got it right in the spigot. But no, so apart from that, apart from the stop clock being right thingy, it reminds a little bit of the old Mel Gibson conspiracy theory film from back in the 90s, which I have to confess, for someone who has been doing a conspiracy theory related podcast for nine years almost, I've never seen the movie conspiracy theory.
00:04:12
Speaker
I don't feel a great loss. I mean it's a Mel Gibson joint and for that reason you don't need to revisit it or watch it. It's the reason why I'm not going to watch The Continental. I was hearing that. Yeah he's the main character in The Continental. Did not know that. Yeah and the producers are already getting stick for
00:04:33
Speaker
So why employ Mel Gibson? And they go, oh, well, you know, he's done some things in the past, but, you know, he's a really good actor and he has done some things in the past such as being a virulent anti-Semite. But the point is... But you haven't watched Conspiracy Theory. I haven't watched that, but I do know that the whole point is that he plays a massive conspiracy theorist when it turns out he's right about one of them and therefore gets targeted by Patrick Stewart? Yes. Patrick Stewart. Yes.
00:05:00
Speaker
So that's what we're talking about. It was a very bad American accent. Oh, does he? Oh god, I've never seen him try an American accent. I really don't want to. No, I mean there's two reasons why you should watch that film. Okay, so we talked about a few people. Now the first one we talked about was a local example of local journalist Ian Wishart. Now in more recent times he has been the publisher of Investigate magazine. Is that still going?
00:05:26
Speaker
I actually meant to go and check because the last time I checked it was still going and I think the last time I checked and I mentioned it on the podcast, Investigate was doing an Investigate him, Investigate her flip magazine concept. So Investigate magazine is a magazine which traffics in right-wing political commentary and
00:05:49
Speaker
Right-wing conspiracy theories about why this country is going so badly under the socialist governments of both national and labor plus a little bit of Creation yeah racism vitamin C cures cancer. I think there's a bit of that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and The last time I checked investigate had worked out that both men and women read investigate But they hadn't worked out that the 1950s and 60s had passed us by because
00:06:19
Speaker
Investigate was published in a flipped format, so the first half is all for man. So it has conspiracy theories for man, it has advertising for man, it has boats for man. And then you turn the magazine
00:06:34
Speaker
upside down and around. And the second half of the magazine, which has its own separate cover, is investigate her. And it's the same stories, basically, but with a lot more bridal advertising going on. It's on one level delightfully quaint or another level disturbingly sexist. Well, I'm just just looking them up now. Apparently they ceased print publication in 2015 and announced that it would become a solely online publication.
00:07:04
Speaker
the radical redesign into his her form, but the whole thing is talking in past tense, so possibly they're not going anymore. But the point is, for the purposes of this episode, the point is that while that is what investigate became and what Ian Wishart's main output became, he was a noted
Wine Box Inquiry and Political Allegations
00:07:25
Speaker
legitimate, I guess, journalist in New Zealand for quite some time in print and television. Well, no, so he was mostly a TV journalist. He became a print journalist after the wine box inquiry. Yes, the wine box inquiry. So this is the thing. This was Ian Wishart's big story, which was real. It was an actual conspiratorial tongue. Well, as well get the story of the wine box.
00:07:53
Speaker
both sides claim victory as to whether there was a conspiracy or not. Well, yes. So this was a political story in the early 90s involving claims of fraud and all kinds of corruption and tax evasion within the serious office, as I recall.
00:08:11
Speaker
And also inland revenue. So the story goes a bit like this. In 1992, Winston Peters, who was formerly an MP for the National Party, goes on to found New Zealand first. But in 1992, he's been jettisoned from national, is having an independent parliamentary career and talking about forming his own party.
00:08:35
Speaker
And he claims in the House of Parliament that New Zealand rich listers are using the Cook Island as a kind of tax haven or shelter for their New Zealand income. And the Inland Revenue Department and the Serious Fraud Office both know about it, are facilitating it, and are also covering up this tax evasion slash sheltering.
00:09:00
Speaker
And this story becomes big enough news that various journalists around the country start to look into it. And Ian Wishart, who was a reporter who worked for Frontline, which was a current affairs show on TV3, he's asked to compile a report on it. And he comes into possession of the titular wine box, a box that once upon a time contained bottles of wine,
00:09:24
Speaker
which contained within it now a variety of different documents belonging I believe to Citibank and other related entities which seemed to indicate there were some very dodgy deals going on by rich listers using the Cook Islands as a tax base. Now he starts working on this report for TV3's front line
00:09:48
Speaker
He eventually gets jettison from Frontline for basically being a dog with a bone and spending all of his time on this report, which the producers don't think is going to go anywhere. He leaves TV3 and joins TVNZ, the other rival commercial broadcaster in this country.
00:10:06
Speaker
and continues work on that report. In 1993, he's about to produce the report and play it on whatever the current affairs program of the day was back in 1993, which was probably 60 minutes, but possibly not.
00:10:23
Speaker
and the broadcast gets shelved and Wishart claims it gets shelved because of political interference. He has an explosive story that's going to show that there's wide-scale corruption in the New Zealand bureaucracy and the government has basically stepped in and told the producers not to play the broadcast.
00:10:45
Speaker
the fact they don't play the broadcast becomes news itself and the public demands to see the documentary they're not allowed to see so eventually in 1994 the broadcast is shown and this leads to a parliamentary commission to investigate the claims of corruption and tax evasion by rich listeners and
00:11:07
Speaker
The short version of it is the parliamentary inquiry seems to find that nothing wrong happened, but when that finding was appealed, the judge who looked at the commission report went, it's kind of interesting that you didn't find any wrongdoing because the transactions which were fraudulent
00:11:32
Speaker
you ruled as being out of bounds of the inquiry. The transactions you did look into, you're quite right. There's nothing wrong there. And this finding has allowed both sides to go, oh, look, we're vindicated. Ian Wishart has gone, well, look, they didn't look at the actual evidence of fraudulent transactions. So that shows I'm right. And the rich listeners are going, but they investigated the transactions and the judge said they were right. Nothing wrong happened there. So technically,
00:12:01
Speaker
legally, nothing bad happened.
Wishart's Rhetoric and Controversial Claims
00:12:05
Speaker
But also legally, the findings of the report are questionable. Yes. So, yeah, never had a 100% conclusive ending. But it did launch the career of Juan Winston Peters. It sure did. Yes, he was the guy who brought it all, but did odd things to the career of Juanian Wishart.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, so the reason why we talked about this in episode 28 is that Wishart does seem to have been right. There was something really dodgy going on. Maybe it wasn't quite as explosive a story as Wishart made it out to be. But it's fairly clear that rich listers were doing things to basically shelter their income in the Cook Islands, which is not technically an overseas jurisdiction, given it's part of the dominion of New Zealand.
00:12:54
Speaker
and indeed Parliament changed the laws after the inquiry to stop the kind of things that Ian Wishart was concerned were happening in the first place. Wishart then takes this, well I was right about this, and then launches an entire career via Investigate magazine as a print journalist investigating all of the other dodgy deals. Josh, what exciting topics has Ian Wishart exposed in the years subsequent?
00:13:22
Speaker
Well, a whole lot of once the Labour government under Helen Clark came in, there was a hell of a lot of anti-Clark stuff, in particular, the idea that she was a secret lesbian and that the country was being run by a secret cabal of lesbians. There was a bit of scientific stuff, like we said, a bit of intelligent design stuff, a bit of vitamin C stuff, a bit of what was then global warming
00:13:50
Speaker
conspiracy theory stuff. All of which are written down in books because Ed Wishart loves to write a book and there was a period of time when I was working on my PhD where I read all of the books that he wrote and I remember reading once a comment on Wishart and this was before his spiral into the publisher of Investigate magazine but he was talking about starting a magazine and one of his former producers went look
00:14:17
Speaker
wish out a great investigative journalist and a terrible prose writer, so I wish him the best of luck. And his prose writing has not got any better. Yeah, so that was our first case, back in old episode 28, of a person who was very definitely right about a thing, and did for a long time trade on the fact that they were very much right about a thing, in order to then write about a bunch of other stuff.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah and the thing is his investigations into anthropogenic global warming or global heating as we meant to call it today, his discussion about how Helen Clark's actually secretly a lesbian and is running the country as part of a lesbian cabal, his look into the health benefits of vitamin C which apparently can cure everything. Vitamin C
Film 'Spooked' and David Icke's Claims
00:15:06
Speaker
was the urine of today. So people who claim that urine cures everything. They're playing from the same playbook that vitamin C is the universal panacea. And his arguments for intelligence design versus evolution by natural selection are just very, very badly argued.
00:15:27
Speaker
And his arguments essentially are, my gut tells me that this really complicated theory, such as evolution by natural selection, or the idea that actually different illnesses need to be treated in different ways, my gut tells me that's too complicated an answer and I don't understand it, therefore,
00:15:46
Speaker
My gut was right about the wine box. My gut must be right about vitamin C, intelligent design, the like. My gut tells me that these theories are true. And that's basically the sum total of the way that he argues. But Josh, the real story here is the film Spooked.
00:16:07
Speaker
I have not seen the film spooked, I know it exists, directed by Jeff Murphy, a well-regarded New Zealand director, and who's directed Hollywood films and what have you, starring Cliff Curtis. A well-regarded New Zealand actor. He was the guy who was referred to as generically ethnic, wasn't he?
00:16:30
Speaker
given that the the he has the skin tone of a local Maori man which is close enough to play someone Hispanic or place you know he's he's when um when when Hollywood needed a generically brown person uh Cliff Curtis was one of the people they would call upon yeah no so the movie so have you seen the movie I have so it played
00:16:53
Speaker
at one of the 24-hour movie marathons, Antimson Rand. And I don't believe it had much of a theatrical release in this country. Given the film is resolutely New Zealand, I doubt it had much of a theatrical release elsewhere.
00:17:10
Speaker
So Spooked is based upon Ian Wishart's first book, The Paradise Conspiracy. And The Paradise Conspiracy details his investigation of the wine box inquiry. It's actually part of a loose trilogy of books that Ian Wishart wrote about the wine box inquiry and the aftermath. And one of the stories in The Paradise Conspiracy
00:17:34
Speaker
deals with the accidental death of Paul White. So Paul White was a second-hand computer dealer who received a computer one day that contained within it city bank banking records and the claim was these banking records were part of the fraudulent transactions being made by rich listers.
00:17:57
Speaker
Paul White, as I say, died in a car accident. Ian Wishart has always maintained that this was an assassination. It wasn't an accident. Paul White was worried about his life. He then dies in a car accident. Wishart claims it's actually very easy to fake car accident. Who was the...
00:18:17
Speaker
person with the Clinton emails who also died in a car accident. Everyone assumes. Yeah, I can't remember the name here. It was really big two election cycles ago. And now we've forgotten who he is. And essentially The Death of Paul White is the same playbook. And so Spooked is based upon that single chapter in The Paradise Conspiracy.
00:18:42
Speaker
and is a dramatisation of the life of Paul White, except he's now called Mort Whitman. I'm assuming because the family of Paul White probably didn't want to see a dramatisation of their family members' death, which, with their Felicia Ozakar accident, being put forward as a government conspiracy. Yes, I can imagine. Weird film. Weird film.
00:19:06
Speaker
Very well. It's not based on the book Paradise Conspiracy, it's based upon one chapter in the book Paradise Conspiracy and it takes a lot of liberties with that chapter. A lot of liberties.
00:19:19
Speaker
Well, yes, taking a lot of liberties seems to be something of a theme. So perhaps we should move on to the next person we talked about back in November of 2014, which was, of course, David Icke. Now we don't, I'm assuming, need to tell you, give you much of an introduction of David Icke. He's a former professional footballer. And that's all you need to know. Former guest of this podcast. And a great believer in the healing power of crystals. And an anti-Semite. Well, yes, a bit of that too.
00:19:48
Speaker
So the thing about David Eich, now we all know David Eich says a lot of stuff and in the past has said stuff that seemed to be at the very least a bit different and we've said more recently that
00:20:07
Speaker
I personally find it depressing the fact that he just seems to be another right-wing grifter now, just doing all the same talking points as all the rest of them, whereas at least he used to do his own thing. But the reason why we spoke about him in this episode is, as we said right up the top, because of the Jimmy Savile thing. And David Icke had once Jimmy Savile died and all the stuff came out about all the horrible things he was up to in life, David Icke
00:20:32
Speaker
proclaimed loudly that, look, see, I'd always been telling people about David Icahn. I was right about David Icahn. I've been telling people many things about David Icahn. I've always been telling people things about Jimmy Savile and I was right. And so and then would use that as ammunition for, you know, I was right about Jimmy Savile. So you should listen to me when I'm talking about the royal family and all of the other other evil family, some of whom happen to be Jews, but it's got nothing to do with it.
00:21:00
Speaker
I mean they're alien shape, reptilian alien shapeshifters who just happen to be Jewish. That's the real problem. And it just happens that all the alien shapeshifting lizards are Jewish. So just because I hate alien shapeshifting reptiles, Josh, doesn't mean I hate Jewish people. It just happens to be that all of the alien reptilian shapeshifters are Jewish. But it's not actually his anti-Semitism that we want to knock him for today because
00:21:26
Speaker
Yes. So at the time we were like, right. Yes, he did say that. Now, I thought I'm pretty sure at the time we said maybe he can't take that much credit because the whole thing about the Jimmy Savile affair was that it was kind of this weird open secret that these rumors about the dodgy things he'd been getting up to had been around for a long time.
00:21:44
Speaker
And it was just a fact that he was, for some reason, untouchable, that nobody wanted to investigate him. And so it didn't come out and not helped by Britain's notorious libel laws. But so I'm sure it's, I'm quite sure that David Eich knew about this stuff earlier on, because lots of people did know. And he worked for the BBC. So after his
00:22:10
Speaker
football career ended due to injury. He became a sports reporter and a very well regarded sports reporter at the BBC. So our theory was, look, he probably knew about it because it was, as you said, an open secret in the halls of the BBC, and thus he probably had access to that information. So there would be good reasons to why he was right about Savile. Everyone else knew as well.
00:22:35
Speaker
But the thing is, now who was it who brought this to our attention? That is a really good question. Probably something we should have looked up specifically for this episode. The main has just gone right through my head. But it was pointed out sometime after this that if you go back and look through all of David Eich's works
Public Figures and Misconduct Rumors
00:22:57
Speaker
You can't actually find him talking about Jimmy Savile any time pre-Jimmy Savile's death. So I'm sure, like I say, I'm sure he probably did talk about it to people, but he never put it down anywhere. He never went on the record, as it were.
00:23:14
Speaker
with his talk about Jimmy Savile, so that actually seems to be more a bit of, seems to be very self-serving of him, I guess, just in trying to say, look, I was right about Savile, so I'm right about everything else, because it suits him, suits his rhetorical purposes, but doesn't actually seem to be 100% the truth. Now, and there's a similarity here with
00:23:40
Speaker
Alex Jones and Jeffrey Epstein. So Alex Jones has done the Savile thing. He said, look, when Epstein got arrested the second time, I've been talking about Epstein for ages. I've always been talking about Epstein. I've been talking about how the pedophiles and the democratic system have been running the system. I've been talking about Epstein forever. And people have gone back in Alex Jones' broadcasts and gone, well, if you were talking about Epstein, you weren't talking about it.
00:24:09
Speaker
on your broadcasts, because you only start talking about Epstein after he's arrested. Not beforehand, only after everyone else knows. And he's backported, oh but I've always talked about this. But it turns out, no, there's no recording of Alex Jones
00:24:27
Speaker
mentioning Epstein as a pedophile or a groomer. There's the occasional reference to Epstein in just general broadcasts, but never as a kind of salacious crumb of, I'm telling you this guy is bad, it's just not there. And Alex Jones' broadcasts, we've got a lot of archives. So for someone who is always talking about Epstein, it's kind of unusual that it's never recorded on tape.
00:24:53
Speaker
So at the time the David Icke stuff led into an interesting discussion about the numerous cases of Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby, photographer Terry Richardson, rapper R. Kelly, all these people who had reputations, there were all the stories about them, and yet it took a very, very long time, indeed in the case of Jimmy Savile, took until after his death, for anything to actually get done about it.
00:25:22
Speaker
There's a bit of a question there. Is that a conspiracy, the result of a conspiracy, or is it just sort of what we might call a polite fiction or something? We have that concept of the polite fiction being a thing that everybody knows is true, but everybody pretends isn't true, or vice versa.
00:25:45
Speaker
to get along, just so society can function nicely. Because it seemed quite bizarre, things like R. Kelly was always the one who got me. I remember back in the 90s, I remember Chris Rock hosting the MTV Music Awards, making jokes about R. Kelly, how R. Kelly likes, it's a specific joke about how they need to keep R. Kelly away from the Olsen twins.
00:26:07
Speaker
And it was, ah, Kelly likes them young. And it was like, yes, no, he does. He likes them. He likes them illegally young. Yeah. Why why is nothing more Kevin Spacey being another one who people that family guy notoriously made jokes about Kevin Spacey. But nothing actually became of it. And for some like it was just one of those weirdly things about how
00:26:32
Speaker
Now, you can never actually put your finger on when something goes viral, exactly why. It just seems to happen. But in the Bill Cosby case, you've got Hannibal Beres, again, made jokes about him, the same way people made jokes about R. Kelly and others. And for some reason, when he made jokes about Bill Cosby being a rapist, it stuck that time and investigations actually happened. But it just seemed very weird the way this stuff can go on and on and on.
00:26:56
Speaker
And yet, people, I mean, the other thing I talked about at the time was on an episode of Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop, following the Jimmy Savile's death and all that stuff. There's a clip of him talking about how, yes, the thing is that, yes, everybody had heard, but nobody knew, nobody actually knew that he was doing all these things. And it seemed a case of, yeah, but
00:27:19
Speaker
like you're a journalist, like investigative journalists exist, law enforcement exists, any of them could have... Yeah, but British label law also makes it very difficult to broach the question. Now the person who told us about this was Will Banyan. Right, there we go. Credit where credit is due.
00:27:41
Speaker
That was our second big example of a person who was right about one thing and used that as ammunition to bolster their other views, but now it turns out that that actually wasn't the best example we could have used.
Naomi Wolf's Controversial Claims
00:27:57
Speaker
Which actually does bring us onto an interesting topic here of people who may have been accidentally right. Because recently we talked about Naomi Wolf. We did. Who has turned into quite the character.
00:28:14
Speaker
post the pandemic. Post the pandemic, the pandemic's all going on during the pandemic where in the episode we covered her, we covered some of her more interesting tweets on the notion that children have lost the ability to smile due to the pandemic, that Apple is working on time travel technology,
00:28:34
Speaker
There's a lot of very interesting claims in there. And the word lessitude. Oh yes, lessitude. Well, I use lessitude a lot for quite some time. And as we kind of covered in our discussion of Naomi Wolf,
00:28:49
Speaker
the book that she's most famous for, well actually I think she actually might be more famous for Outrages now due to the outrageous claims in Outrages, but the book that she came to prominence for, The Beauty Myth, which was taken to be this, you know, stunning expose of the way that beauty is being manufactured and then used as a kind of system of control for women over the course of the 20th century. Many people have now gone back and went
00:29:19
Speaker
kind of scholarship that she's been pinged for now, we're seeing the issues in that scholarship in the original work. And essentially people are going, look, the message of the book was so important that we ended up kind of overlooking the shoddy research that supported it.
00:29:39
Speaker
And unfortunately, this then allowed her to write subsequent books with shoddy research. And the message of those books started to diverge from what we wanted to hear. And that was the point we went, oh.
00:29:54
Speaker
She's not a very good researcher after all. I have studied the beauty myth. I studied it back at university in the late 1990s. But I'm not familiar with her subsequent work apart from her more recent Twitter catalog. Which is probably a novel in itself. It sure is. So tell me then about her other books.
00:30:18
Speaker
So after the beauty myth, she wrote the end of America, which I think has the subtitle, a message from an American patriot. And that deals with the rise of American imperialism post 9-11. So it looks at how America has become this kind of expansionary military force post the
00:30:40
Speaker
September 11th attacks and how this is leading to tyranny and fascism within the United States. Something which he seems to support now as opposed to was again back in 2004.
00:30:53
Speaker
She wrote a book called Misconceptions about childbirth and motherhood. I actually have not read that one, so I have no actual background for this. She kind of did an updated version of The Beauty Myth with fire with fire, looking at feminism in the 21st century. I wasn't even aware this book was released when I was doing this. Oh, there's another Naomi Wolf book I haven't read. And then there's Outrages. And this is the book that came out
00:31:23
Speaker
two years ago now. It was originally printed in the UK and it deals with the Victorian era and the treatment of homosexuality. And this book came to prominence because Naomi Wolf, this is the result of her PhD work. She did a PhD through Oxford, I believe. And the book is based upon her PhD thesis.
00:31:48
Speaker
So she's interviewed on BBC One by Matthew Sweetman, who's a historian, who also happens to be an expert about Doctor Who, but that's another matter entirely. And he questions her about one of the claims in the book, where she talks about how Victorian homosexual men were being executed by the state left, right and center for sodomy.
00:32:13
Speaker
And her proof for this is, you find all of these people who go through the court for consensual sex with other men, and the judgement is written down as death recorded. You go, look, they were executed. And Sweetman goes,
00:32:28
Speaker
No, actually, that's not what that means. That was a convenient Victorian term to say, look, technically, the consequence of the crime you've committed is execution. We're not doing that anymore. We're just going to state people the fine. But we have to follow the letter of the law and write down that you're dead.
00:32:52
Speaker
So it was a way of going, we're not performing executions for this crime anymore. It is the consequent of what you've done. So to get around it, we'll just put death recorded. And she went, oh.
00:33:05
Speaker
I wasn't aware of that. And Sweetman was going, I mean, this is a PhD work. Surely someone would have told you this. And she went, oh, it's OK. When the book gets printed in the United States, I'll put in a correction. And then when the book got printed in the United States, she just doubled down and went, well, I think it's disputable as to whether that's the right interpretation. And every legal scholar and historian in the UK, apart from apparently the
00:33:33
Speaker
committee which gave her her PhD was going, there's no dispute or contentiousness about this. We know from the legal text this is what was happening at the time. And that kind of then spoke to her
00:33:48
Speaker
an ability to update her theories in the light of evidence, which turned out to be exactly what was happening on Twitter, where she would make outrageous claims. People would then go, actually, I don't think that's right. And she would just double down and say, no, no, it definitely is right. Definitely is right. Even if I'm wrong, I'm definitely right.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah, so possibly another case of a person who was, like you say, she has said some right and true stuff. And yes, the message of the beauty myth, the overall message of it, I think is still agreed with and is an important message, even though some of the work that got her there was not up to scratch.
00:34:34
Speaker
And she's gone from that to basically thinking she's right about everything and saying stuff because we can say all sorts of stuff.
Alex Jones and Ken Ring's Predictions
00:34:52
Speaker
So is now associating with the heterodox and associating with the worst of the heterodox.
00:35:00
Speaker
So yes, an interesting example. Now, what's there more you wanted to say about Alex Jones? Epstein is not the only thing that he's... He claims to be right about a lot of stuff. Yeah, and this is once again a plug for the podcast Knowledge Fight. So there is kind of a feeling amongst people who work in the conspiracy theory theory world that Alex Jones today is, to put in scare quotes, a crazy person.
00:35:28
Speaker
But Alex Jones, in his early careers, so late 90s, early 2000s, where he really did seem to be a stepping aside from a left-right paradigm, just being a libertarian, being worried about government encroachment on civil rights, that he was a more sensible person in the early days, and he just basically swallowed his own pig urine.
00:35:49
Speaker
and now has become the person he is today. And as the hosts of Knowledge Fight, Dan and Dan, have pointed out, if you go back to 2004, Alex Jones, which is meant to be kind of the glory days of Alex Jones when he was more sensible, he's doing exactly the same thing. He's less religious then, but he's still making the same types of claims he's making today based upon poor evidence,
00:36:16
Speaker
and having neo-Nazis on his show and just ignoring the whole neo-Nazi aspect of what they're saying and pretending they're just being reasonable centrists about things. And so this kind of theory that Alex Jones has got worse is technically true. Alex Jones today is a lot worse than he was back in 2004 because his reach is bigger and he's more explosive when he's on air.
00:36:46
Speaker
But he's not, he hasn't actually started making more outrageous claims than he did in the past. He's always been making these outrageous claims based upon virtually no reading of the source material whatsoever. He's just a bigger name now. So he seems worse, but actually he's no, well, he is worse than he was, but he was pretty bad to start with. I think that's what I'm trying to say. You know, that sounds about right.
00:37:14
Speaker
Now we did, I don't know if we actually made it clear, the Alex Jones Naomi Wolf stuff is new. When we did this episode before, we were mostly talking about Ed Wishart, David Eigen, and also local earthquake predictor Ken Ring, who hasn't really done much interesting. Yeah, he was kind of big in 2011 around the Christchurch earthquakes, because he claims that he can use the moon to predict earthquakes. I think as we pointed out at the time,
00:37:43
Speaker
he has this system whereby he can predict an earthquake within three days of an earthquake occurring, which he takes to be a very amazing success rate. As most geologists in this country will say, there are
00:38:00
Speaker
constant earthquakes in this country all the time, being able to say you can predict an earthquake within three days isn't really saying much because you can predict an earthquake within three days with no theory whatsoever because there's going to be an earthquake in this country every three days.
00:38:19
Speaker
especially around Christchurch because it's really really tectonically unstable. So not really much else to say about him. We did have another new edition here. I see you've added Noam Chomsky who I think maybe could also, it just occurs to me now, you could possibly lump him in with Richard Dawkins as well as academics who said some good influential stuff early on and then they've become quite conspiratorial.
Chomsky's Influence and Political Activism
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah, the Chomsky thing has become
00:38:47
Speaker
interesting because he's now teaching one of those master classes which get advertised on Twitter and Facebook where you know the Steve Martin master class where he will teach you to be funny which is an unusual thing because Steve Martin's not very funny these days although only murders in the building is pretty good but his most recent movie work has not been great. He made two of those Pink Panther films. Did he? Yeah.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I'm sure what to do with that. And so Chomsky is teaching a masterclass on fighting disinformation. And this is weird because Chomsky is an apologist for the Syrian regime.
00:39:32
Speaker
feels that the West is to blame for the invasion of Ukraine and seems to be someone who swallows quite a lot of disinformation that's coming out from the Kremlin. And this is kind of one of these things where a lot of people have a high esteem for Chomsky
00:39:52
Speaker
Because of this early work, particularly around the notion of institutional analysis with the idea that, look, sometimes institutions are not designed to conspire, but rather the nature of their large organizational structure or lack of structure means they act in malign ways.
00:40:13
Speaker
And also he was very influential in 2001 to 2003 with his arguments against American imperialism because of what was going on in Iraq and in the aftermath of 9-11. And so people point to that early work. He was on the money about that stuff, so he's probably on the money about this stuff.
00:40:37
Speaker
But it doesn't seem that Chomsky's very much on the money these days. It was always weird to me because back in the mid to late 90s, I was at university studying philosophy and linguistics. And of course, Chomsky made his name in linguistics before he moved into the more political sphere. And hearing about, here's all these theories of Chomsky, and then also the other stuff. And then suddenly realizing, oh, it's the same guy. Yeah. That's weird.
00:41:05
Speaker
his theories on language acquisition were super, I believe they've been revised a bit these days because pretty much all academic work, it's rare for anything in academia to survive several decades. So I believe Chomsky's linguistic theories are still relatively popular amongst American linguists and not very popular amongst linguists in the rest of the world.
00:41:32
Speaker
Yeah, as I recall, it was essentially, actually, it's irrelevant to anything you're talking about. Now, he had theories about exactly sort of the human propensity for language and how it develops within humans. And the notion of there being an actual language unit of the brain, which has a basic grammar encoded into it.
00:41:49
Speaker
And people are going, that's great. But the language sets he used to come up with this theory all share common characteristics. The problem is once you start looking at languages more globally, the universal grammar doesn't apply. But anyway, this is not a podcast about linguistics. If you want a podcast about linguistics, I would recommend Lingthusiasm.
Podcast Recommendations and Conclusion
00:42:15
Speaker
Which is a very interesting podcast. That sounds like a drug. Is your back feeling sore? We recommend Lingthusiasm. Ask your doctor if you can get Lingthusiasm for your spinal pain. But instead it's actually a very interesting podcast with two linguists who are enthusiastic about linguistics. Are they Lingthusiastic? They are indeed Lingthusiastic. I don't even understand how that portmanteau came about.
00:42:42
Speaker
Ah, well it did, so all I can say is do it. Apparently, but I think based upon the name alone I will not be listening. Well then, that's your loss quite frankly. I don't even know how I'd spell it to search for it in a podcast app. Anyway, I think the fact that we're getting sidetracked into the naming of linguistics podcasts is... Actually first, we might be at the end of things. Well no, one thing which I've always found fascinating about Chomsky as a political philosopher
00:43:10
Speaker
is he's not regarded as being a very good political theorist by political philosophers. He kind of ends up being the political philosopher for non philosophers.
00:43:22
Speaker
And it's one of those interesting things where he had a career defining act in linguistics with the language model, universal grammar stuff, which he then kind of leaves behind. So Chomsky doesn't do much linguistics these days at all. He moves on to being a public intellectual and engaging in political philosophy. He's really successful at that. And yet he's not a particularly well studied person in philosophy.
00:43:52
Speaker
I just find that interesting. Yes, yeah. What do you call it? Popular. It's not pop science because it's pop philosophy. Here's a new portmanteau for you. Quickly trademark that. It's our new podcast.
00:44:10
Speaker
Poop philosophy? No, no, I can't say it. Oh well, fine. It'll just be median. So, while I go off and write the intro for my new podcast, Pop philosophy, we should probably bring this one to an end. We should, but we do have a bonus episode to record.
00:44:29
Speaker
It's our bonus episode. This week, we'll talk a bit about what Trump's up to, a bit about what RFK—we haven't actually talked much about RFK Jr. in this podcast, and I'm thinking we need two more at the moment, given the sort of stuff he's been up to. And a bit of—a bit more amateur ripperology.
00:44:49
Speaker
which pops up every now and then in the news. Yeah, so apparently Jack, the identity of Jack the Ripper has been discovered again. Again. Again. I mean, at this stage, all of Victorian London is going to be Jack the Ripper now. It was like the, which is the Agatha Christie one? Murder mystery, where it turns out everyone did it. Murder on the Orange Express. Oh, that was the Orange Express, yes, yeah. Well, they see the trailer for A Haunting Invenous, the next Kenneth Branagh has a moustache.
00:45:15
Speaker
Agatha Christie adaptation is out. It's based upon one of the lesser regarded Poirot novels which for some reason now is set in Venice.
00:45:31
Speaker
Just because. Kenneth Brenner's going to do what Kenneth Brenner does. Well, that's always been the case. If there is to be a moral for this episode, it's A, people have and continue to trade on past instances where they're correct to bolster their current opinions and B, Kenneth Brenner does what Kenneth Brenner does. Yeah, that's true. So no comment on that.
00:45:56
Speaker
No, none, none, none required. So with those morals ringing in your ears, I think it's time to leave you to go about your day. And I'm going to do that by saying goodbye. I'm going to bring back a classic, Lassitude. Memories.
00:46:41
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.