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Book Review - Ethical Human Rights
27 Plays6 years ago
In this week’s episode Josh and Dr. M review and discuss “Ethical Human Rights,” a book by New Zealand activist Anthony Ravlich. “Ethical Human Rights” suggests the existence of a UN conspiracy to destroy the self-determination of the West? Is it good? Is it awful? Let us be the judge(s).
We also catch up on that alien autopsy film from 1995, talk a little about the latest Trump news, and discuss the ethics of bugging an consulate vs. murdering a journalist.
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Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously'
00:00:00
Speaker
I've got a brand new combine harvester. No you don't, you big liar. But you have got a new book. That is true. I do have a new book. Well, I'm the editor of a new book, which features articles by me and a host of other academics.
00:00:17
Speaker
Such as? Well, we're not here to blow their trumpets. Who were? Nevertheless, that's a bit vain, isn't it? Well, baby, it's all about the monetisation these days. SEOs don't like multiple authors. Yes, that's true. So what's this new book called? It's called Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously. It's published by Roman and Littlefield, and it's available now from Amazon, bookshops, libraries. You name it, if you've got money to spare, it's willing to take your dosh.
00:00:46
Speaker
Well, that's splendid. And, and, it's getting good reviews. Joe Askinsky, friend of the show, describes you as one of the most important social epistemologists studying conspiracy theories. Euharika says it is one of the bravest books known to me on the topic.
00:01:01
Speaker
Which reminds me, I do have to complete those pesky financial transactions. And Kathy Olmsted says, this provocative book gives us the tools we need to take conspiracy theory seriously. A wonderful person, Kathy. Just grand. So I guess this is the point where we say you should go and buy it, but then mumble about how expensive it is.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yes, that was the problem with my last book, but this one is a fair bit cheaper. For just 37 US dollars, you can buy a book that Steve Clark and he's an Oxford man says is required reading for anyone interested in the epistemology and ethics of conspiracy theories. Well, I'm convinced. So you'll be going out to buy a copy then, won't you? Hell no. I'm just going to pry your skull case open and digest the book via your delicious brain meats.
00:01:57
Speaker
Fair enough, here's my spoon. Spoon! The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr.
Hosts' Introduction
00:02:16
Speaker
M. Denton.
00:02:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. As you might expect, I am Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand, and sitting next to me, as no one ever expected, is Dr. M. Denthith.
00:02:31
Speaker
What? Sorry? Podcasts? Who? What? How? Why? Cameras? Lights? Oh wait, sorry. I wasn't prepared for this at all. Put down the hooch for goodness sake. I can't put down the hooch. The hooch is the reason it keeps me alive. I wish you wouldn't talk about my mother that way. But anyway, it's a new book, eh? Eh? I mean, it's not... Sorry, all I can think of is hoochie smoochie. We have mentioned this book before.
00:02:52
Speaker
We have. I don't actually have a physical copy yet, so at some point in the next few weeks when the copy arrives will be brandishing it in front of the camera. But yes, taking conspiracy theories is out. I actually thought the publication date was December. That was what I was told. They've actually published it.
00:03:08
Speaker
in November which is great for the Christmas rush you'll be able to go out and buy as many copies as you like which is five copies per person we made this deal when you started listening to this podcast all those years ago I know you don't remember that
00:03:22
Speaker
But you are obliged to buy at least five copies each. Maybe actually seven. I mean inflation. I mean for those of you who've been listening from the beginning, inflation is an effect. You have to buy 18 copies. The perfect stocking stuffer. Oh you can buy 18 copies. Your stocking is going to be so stuffed you won't be able to fit any other gifts in. So you don't have to buy any other gifts. Just by taking conspiracy theories seriously, it's recommended that all good bookshops and also bad bookshops
00:03:48
Speaker
Amazon, you name it. The dodgy ones, yeah. Those black market bookshops, you can give them to them. On the dark web. The dark web. Oochy-smoochy indeed. Now, that was it, wasn't it? That was the only bit of admin-y interesting stuff to say before we throw ourselves into
Overview of 'Ethical Human Rights' by Anthony Ravlich
00:04:07
Speaker
the episode. Until such time, we have to confront Josh's greatest fear.
00:04:12
Speaker
Reading. Reading. Yes, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Reading gives you cancer. And in this case, actually, I think it's true. I've been feeling very poorly the last few days. You look a little cancerous. I was born in July, of course I look cancerous. It's my very nature as to be a cancerous growth on humanity. Oh, is that not a horoscope?
00:04:32
Speaker
I don't know what the horoscopes are, so I assume I had just accidentally forgotten that you were a cancer, but was that not a horror, was that not a... was that just people born in July are naturally a mass of tumors and pus? Anyway! Anyways, tumors and pus to one side. Let's get on with the book review. Let's break into our ethical human rights, or at least break out of them. I don't know, let's just break. We're breaking now.
00:05:00
Speaker
So Joshua, we've been doing our book club this week. We have. We've been looking at a book called ethical human rights by one Anthony Ravlich. Now I gave a description of this book last week, but I'll just give you the clip notes of the blurb in the kind of history on external I think they're intended to be read as.
00:05:20
Speaker
This book provides a new plan for the world, an ethical approach to human rights, development and globalisation, which is firmly based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and unlike the prevailing ideologies, has no human rights emissions.
00:05:35
Speaker
and the author's view so that the considerable majority of state leaderships can avoid accountability, many human rights are omitted from international law, but the author considers the UN and states cannot claim the Universal Declaration as its authority when it leaves out so many human rights, which he describes as a UN hidden, in scare quotes, collectivist agenda.
00:05:57
Speaker
Do you want me to keep going? Or was it? No, I think it does go on the blue. And also it doesn't even repeat itself. Which is a feature of this particular book, because Ethical Human Rights by one Anthony Revlich is a book which is somewhere in the vicinity of 268 pages in length.
00:06:14
Speaker
And a lot of it is repetitious, and not just repetitious as in it repeats the same points, it repeats the same paragraphs and core sentences throughout to the point where the first chapter, which is incredibly long, it's about 68 pages in length or so. Something like that.
00:06:32
Speaker
You actually do feel as if you're living in a kind of Nietzschean nightmare, because you keep reading the same paragraph again and again and again, all the same set of paragraphs again and again and again, to the point where you actually think you've scrolled backwards rather than forwards. So it's a very long book, but it actually doesn't need to be anywhere near as long as the author has intended.
00:06:55
Speaker
Yes. So, I mean, now, did you have access to the full copy of this book? Yes and no. So according to Anthony Revlich, the book is available for free online, produced by his public. It's also available as a physical copy in the world, but it's available through Google Books, basically. And Google Books has this thing where it kind of randomly decides which pages of a book you're going to be allowed to read at any particular point in time.
00:07:25
Speaker
So on the desktop, I had certain pages I could read. And on the tablet, I had other pages I could read. So I was able to look at the entire book. I said to use multiple devices to actually do it. Whereas I was looking only on a single device. And so I only just sort of got the edited highlights. And what highlights they were. Shall we summarize this book?
00:07:47
Speaker
I don't know if I can, to be honest. That blurb did a fairly good job of it, I think. It's very much a sort of a manifesto, I think you'd say. Based upon a conspiracy. By master outlets, yep. The notion is that in 2008, an event occurred at the behest of the United Nations, which brought about neoliberal absolutism. And we now live in a neoliberal absolute world
00:08:16
Speaker
where the West doesn't decline and the rest is a surgeon.
Ravlich's Libertarian Perspective and Critique of Neoliberalism
00:08:22
Speaker
A surgeon? Resurgent. Resurgent.
00:08:24
Speaker
Like, but doesn't research and kind of indicate they were they were they've searched well, then it's then it's urgent Surgeon the rest are rest rather than West are Surgeoned that just sounds weird. It's not a real word, but it gets the meaning across and they're imposing collectivism upon us which the UN is sponsoring to destroy self-determination and to make us into docile animals so
00:08:53
Speaker
I found it a little hard to categorise, politically at least. It has a very sort of libertarian bent, it's all about maximising freedom and self-determination and so on, but it's also quite sort of a plague on both your houses-ish when it comes to the
00:09:09
Speaker
prevailing political ideologies. It talks about neoliberalism which was sort of championed by the US and the rest of the West and then this neoliberal absolutism which has now sort of been forced on us by the UN and thinks they're both kind of equally bad and that neoliberal absolutism is trying to sort of finish the job that neoliberalism started. So he kind of seems to think that he and only he knows the one true way for
00:09:35
Speaker
Talking on to the political aspects of the book, as you say, there's a certain amount of what you might call small business libertarianism, which is involved here. So small business libertarianism is the kind of libertarianism that goes, look, individuals are important, but also recognises that corporations are bad.
00:09:55
Speaker
So small businesses are good, big business bad as opposed to say the pure libertarians who go corporations can do whatever they like because that's the way the market works. But actually I think the political theory it resembles the most is actually Social Credit. Now Social Credit was founded by C.H. Douglas in the middle of the 20th century.
00:10:21
Speaker
Douglas was, like Ravlich, someone who thinks the left-right distinction is meaningless, and basically left and right are exactly the same thing.
00:10:29
Speaker
Like social credit, Revolich talks about rights as being related to God's universal truth. So the underpinning of rights is essentially something to do with the divine. Like social credit, Revolich has a fetishization for the West, and as we'll talk later on in this review, kind of a bit of overt racism towards non-Western societies. And like social credit,
00:10:55
Speaker
there is someone to blame. So C.H. Douglas blamed the banks, which is why Social Credit has anti-Semitic associations, because the banks do appear to be Jewish banking families here, and Douglas was quite...
00:11:10
Speaker
anti-Jewish in a variety of different ways. Revolich isn't anti-Semitic, but he does think the UN is responsible for all the ills the West, not the rest, is seeing today. So he talks about two
00:11:26
Speaker
initiatives, if that's the right word, that came out of the UN. The first one being the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now that was like 48 or something, was it? 1948 was adopted just after the war. Just after World War II. And then as well as that there's this this covenant, which sounds a little bit sinister already. Now it should be pointed out he's a fan of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
00:11:50
Speaker
Is it a 1948 thing? I literally can't keep track of it to be honest. No, so he's a fan of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Oh, sorry. So his one is based on this. So his ethical human rights is kind of derived from the UN's Declaration of Human Rights. But it was the Covenant, which was brought in a lot later on. We just checked. 2008, I believe. 2008. Well, hold on.
00:12:19
Speaker
The Covenant itself was actually adopted by the UN in 1966. The Covenant we're talking about is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Now, this particular International Covenant was adopted by the UN because it was recognised as the UN went into the second half of the 20th century.
00:12:40
Speaker
that the universal declaration of human rights was very prestigious towards Western nations, but emerging nations who didn't have the same kind of cultural values or attachments that the West had were going, yeah, this talk of individualism isn't really kind of what we do. So the UN adopted a covenant on economic, social and cultural rights, so i.e. rights which have a collectivist nature,
00:13:07
Speaker
but it's never been enforceable. So it's something you can sign up to it, and there are lots of signatories to it, but it doesn't necessarily have been ratified by other countries. So in 2008 the UN put forward the optional protocol
00:13:24
Speaker
to basically bring in an enforcement mechanism so that countries that recognize the covenant would have a kind of fallback thing if they wanted to press on other countries which hadn't ratified the covenant that actually what you're doing in our nation states or to us are things which breach the UN Charter.
00:13:46
Speaker
Right. OK. And this this this event in 2008, though, is that's where he claims things when the liberal absolutism was born. He talks about it being sort of done behind behind an iron curtain or something like that being done in secret. And always, as far as I could say, every single time he talks about the UN's hidden collectivist agenda and always has hidden in quote marks, which I think that's just the emphasis as opposed to when you put hidden in quote marks,
00:14:16
Speaker
Either you're abusing the use-mention distinction, or you're trying to say that something is hidden is not hidden at all, which isn't really helping your plotline. But so yes, apparently that this particular adoption of this optional protocol to the Covenant of the blah blah blah blah blah is what was specifically designed to force upon us this particularly sort of globalist collectivist agenda. And he doesn't like collectivism while I owe some. No, he does not.
00:14:47
Speaker
Now he talks about, and here was where I got a little bit mixed up again, possibly because I was reading an incomplete copy, that the problem with these human rights declarations, and I think he's referring to the one, the 2008, this International Covenant ones, is that they miss out certain human rights declarations. He often talks about omitted human rights. So what are the rights he thinks have been left out?
00:15:11
Speaker
So this is where things get confusing, because it's not entirely clear whether he's talking about omitted rights with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or whether he's talking about the omitted rights with respect to the optional protocol. Now he's talking about omitted rights with respect to the optional protocol. He's talking about the fact that there are rights in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Universal Declaration, which are not replicated in the optional protocol.
00:15:40
Speaker
But if that's the case, he simply doesn't understand the whole point of the Covenant, and then the optional protocol is it's a complementary thing. Nothing's meant to supersede the UDHR. It's meant to say there are certain things missing from the UDHR, which the Covenant then adds in, such as cultural rights and the like, at which point there's nothing actually being omitted there,
00:16:07
Speaker
It's basically like a jigsaw. We have one piece here, which is the UN, UDHR, and then the Covenant, and they fit together to create a bigger picture. Right. And it's just not clear with the way he writes as to whether he thinks there's some kind of omission in the original Declaration, which is ethical human rights in Compass, because Asie's so focused on the 2008 event,
00:16:34
Speaker
He really must mean there's something about the optional protocol, which has an enforcement mechanism for the covenant, which is the thing which actually omits the rights he's really concerned about.
Critique of New Zealand Policies and Statistics
00:16:44
Speaker
Yes, I mean, it has to be said right up top, this book is a little hard to follow. A little hard to follow. And the writing style is a little obtuse as well. As you say, there's a lot of repetition,
00:17:01
Speaker
It is very polemical, I guess is the word, in that he very, very often, the phrase earlier on when you went through the blurb, that first sentence, in the author's view, blah, blah, blah, blah, the blurb itself features paragraphs starting in the author's view three times. That's three out of five paragraphs.
00:17:25
Speaker
So the phrase, in my view, shows up a hell of a lot. So does from my observation. A lot of the evidence that he appeals to is just, this is my reckon, essentially. So the argument is a little shaky, for starters, and possibly gets further undermined by, well, we should say, from what I've seen, he talks a lot about the sort of stuff that you just said, the UN side of things and where all this came from.
00:17:55
Speaker
He then he has a few sort of examples one is in Bangladesh and the plight of the untouchables there Dalit people I think they called yes see the untouchable cast there and he also talks a lot about New Zealand now I believe mr. Avelich is resident in New Zealand I believe so all social media in indications indicate he's worked for the Department of Justice here and I think is even resident in the South Island of this country and
00:18:24
Speaker
Yep. So and so a large part of his book is talking about New Zealand as a bit of a case study, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. And it does seem that it seems to be quite a bit of cherry picking and so on. It's sort of at one point it talks about how New Zealand is the top or very near the top of lots of things like peacefulness and and
00:18:47
Speaker
contentment and things like that. But then he jumps on all the negative statistics about New Zealand. We do have a bad record with things like domestic violence, child poverty. Our suicide rate is not good. It is one of the worst. It's either the or the second highest youth suicide rate in the world.
00:19:05
Speaker
So all of those things are true of New Zealand, but he sort of very much jumps on the negative statistics as of to say, so while it may appear that things are good, actually things are bad, which did seem to be quite sort of cheery picking in a way.
00:19:22
Speaker
And he talks about basically, I mean, New Zealand does have, compared to other countries, you know, we're a very left-leaning country, we do like a bit of collectivism. We do, we do. There was an author, I can't remember the guy's name, but he was an American who now lives in New Zealand who wrote a book a few years ago contrasting New Zealand with America and his view, which seems to be borne out by others, is that
00:19:46
Speaker
The foundational value in America is freedom, whereas in New Zealand it's fairness. And in New Zealand we would rather curtail people's freedom somewhat in the name of making things more fair for everyone, whereas in America they would rather things be a bit unfair than people's freedoms be impinged.
00:20:07
Speaker
I think there's actually a fair characterization of the difference between the US and NZ. Yes, but Mr Avelich, I don't think she is that particular value. Well, he does have payons towards Americanisms. In that case, a big thing about one of the great things about Trump is the focus on America first and not globalism.
00:20:28
Speaker
And that was one of the more libertarian sounding things that jumped out at me. I don't think I actually excerpted it in our notes, but he does talk about New Zealand being, he doesn't actually use the word altruism, but there was a phrase along the lines of us having sort of obligations to help other countries, which he thinks should definitely become, or he thinks that the state's obligation should be to its citizens and its citizens alone, and that we should not have any obligation.
00:20:55
Speaker
To help other states. Can we talk about racism? Yeah, I think we it is a bit of an elephant in the room I have to say the very I sort of first skimmed through the excerpts on Google Books and the first sentence me that that actually jumped out to me while I was reading and
00:21:26
Speaker
That little, it is generally recognised that the great majority of Māori are of mixed descent. It's a total non sequitur, like has nothing to do with it, and is very much... And there's a dog whistle toward particular races in this country. Now for those of you overseas who might have slightly different relationships with your indigenous peoples, or come from a nation state where you are the indigenous people,
00:21:33
Speaker
was this one from page 123 of his book. He says,
00:21:46
Speaker
In Aetora, New Zealand, we used to have a system of blood quanta when it came to specifying whether you were Maori or not. So basically you'd be recognised as being Maori if you had sufficient ancestors who were Maori, i.e. you had the right blood quanta. There was enough.
00:22:04
Speaker
blood of Maoridom in your veins to make you qualify as being Maori and this was a western imposition for the recognition of Maori in this country because Maori go look if you can fuck a papa you can show that you are related to Maori in the past that's all you need to be Maori you simply have Maori ancestors they could be one generation back
00:22:33
Speaker
they could be eight generations back. If you've got them, you get to be Maori. So basically in this little sentence, revolved by talking about Maori of mixed descent, that's quite possibly true. Maori intermarried with Pākehā, Europeans, an awful lot during the colonial period.
00:22:58
Speaker
But that isn't how we recognise Maori-dum. We don't talk about you being half Maori, this half Maori, that you are Maori, or you're not Maori. So talking about mixed descent, is kind of dog whistle racism in this country? It is, especially because it often comes up when
00:23:15
Speaker
People will talk, you know, be complaining about, say, targeted assistance towards Maori or benefits or scholarships available. Yeah, but there are no real Maoris left. I mean, they've all had to bread with the Irish, English and the French. Exactly. That's the thing. There'll always be the kind of, well, there's no pure-blooded Maoris left, anyway. There's no, yeah, you do sound a bit like it.
00:23:33
Speaker
Which, that's a debatable claim, whether or not there are full-blooded Māori left in the world. There are certainly people who claim to be... Probably are in the... Ooh, ooh, ooh. Exactly. But as you say, that's kind of irrelevant. But it doesn't matter. It's an irrelevant claim. It doesn't really matter. And so as that section goes on,
00:23:53
Speaker
things become a little bit more dodgy. He makes it very clear, he starts talking about New Zealanders and Maori, and it seems quite clear that he considers the two to be separate things. When he says New Zealanders, he means European, New Zealanders of European descent. Here is a fun fact. When the Treaty of Waitake was signed, back in the early days of the development of New Zealanders, a modern colonised state,
00:24:20
Speaker
The term New Zealander referred exclusively to Māori, because it was the name of the country, they were the people of that...
00:24:30
Speaker
country, and yet over time it's transitioned to mean anyone who comes here. So I find it amusing as well. There are New Zealanders and there are Maori, in the case of, yeah, what's upon a time, they were exactly one and the same. But anyway. So I mean, you get, here's a quote from page 125, a couple of pages later.
00:24:52
Speaker
He's talking about, he's not too fond of the Treaty of Waitangi and thinks we should be getting rid of the sort of tribalist, what he calls tribalist Māori collectivist type influence. He says, also in my view, it would also, sorry, I thought I'd read that wrong, but then I realized no, he'd written it long. Also in my view, it would also give the long suffering ordinary New Zealanders hope that Māori tribalism will not be a burden in perpetuity.
00:25:18
Speaker
A bit later, however, in my opinion, New Zealanders have partly themselves to blame because I consider they are too soft in their dealings with Maori, who, while they may not like it, would respect a tougher approach. Sounds very colonial there. And then you'll notice, you know, New Zealanders and their dealings with Maori, they're quite separate. And he continues, for instance, I consider Maori constitutional aspirations to include a collectivist treaty of Waitangi in a constitution amounts to cultural warfare, and New Zealanders need to protect their Western culture, which emphasizes individual rights.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's more. There's quite a bit of defending of racism and sexism, as you should be allowed to say whatever you like and people who are snowflakes about you being sexist or racist should just shut up.
00:26:02
Speaker
he does make the really quite extraordinary claim that the West is traditionally more creative. Not quite sure. That's code for culturally superior. Sure. And also goes on quite some length the claim that white men are being discriminated against. Well that old classic. Because he's kind of against affirmative action. He's all for making sure that the poor, the destitute and the marginalized
00:26:32
Speaker
get there a lot, but not at the cost of other people in society. So no affirmative action. Yes, there is a lot of that old, this sort of thing where you hear people say that we shouldn't be
00:26:45
Speaker
We shouldn't be giving aid to the poor because that just traps them in the poverty cycle and it takes away their independence and their self-determination and their drive to better themselves and so on and so forth. But we're running low on time, I think, and this has been fairly sort of political, but as we'd head, it is conspiratorial.
UN Protocol and Neoliberal Absolutism Conspiracy Theory
00:27:04
Speaker
So we should look at the conspiracy angle before we close things out. So the conspiracy basically is the UN changed the world in 2008.
00:27:13
Speaker
and no one is talking about it and no one is talking about it because media and the government are complicit in this wholesale change of our society from neoliberalism to neoliberal absolutism. And the author goes so far to say he's probably the only person who's ever spotted this drastic change and no one is listening to him. Even claims that there's been some sort of a media blackout
00:27:43
Speaker
Indeed. And admittedly, because and his claim there's media blackout is based upon the fact he's written other books, and no one's taken any notice. All of them. At all. Yes. So, admittedly, if you thought you'd discovered a grand truth,
00:27:59
Speaker
you presented it to the world in a presumably as badly written book as the previous one, and no one took any notice of it, you would assume there was a media blackout about this really, really drastic truth you've tried to reveal.
00:28:15
Speaker
Yes, so I mean, to sum up, I was not impressed by this book. It doesn't sound like you were either. Oh, I'm definitely giving everyone copies of this for Christmas. I'm not giving them giving them taking conspiracy theories seriously. No, no, this is the book everyone gets for Christmas. No, I went in thinking it would actually be better than Morningstar's Tale. I thought there'd be more to grapple with. But it was... Morningstar's Tale was more entertaining. Yeah, this is...
00:28:43
Speaker
It's a book which is actually quite thin on content, so here's a central claim of conspiracy about the UN plot of 2008. It makes arguments that there's something fundamentally wrong with our human rights framework, although it's never entirely clear
00:29:00
Speaker
what betters in part because he keeps on referring back to a previous book he's written. The book also makes this weird thing where halfway through chapter one he goes you know he might want to read chapter four first because that will explain the basis of what I'm discussing here. Okay so that's just bad structuring.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yes, I mean, apart from the dodgy politics, it's just not well argued. As we said, there's a lot of anecdotes, a lot of anecdotal evidence, a lot of, in my opinion, in my view, from my observation, there's, it's very, not a lot of objectivity, I suppose, in a book that's claiming to be an objective summary of the text.
00:29:41
Speaker
somewhat indicates that there's not much to the argument at all, because the author has to keep on reiterating the same claims they made a page ago, which indicates that they're quite desperate to make you believe something, but they don't have much in the way of evidence to actually show why you should believe it.
00:30:01
Speaker
So there you go. For the second week in a row, we've read a book that we don't really think either of any of you should read and that either of us should have read, really. Yes, we should go back in time and not read these books and produce two completely different episodes. Yes, but until we get our hands on that working time machine any day now. Any day. But that's relevant. Yesterday, who knows? What's the joke? What do we want? Time working time travel. When do we want it? That's irrelevant.
00:30:31
Speaker
Anyway, so until Fortune favours us and we're able to go back and undo the mistakes of our past, we should probably look to the recent past and do the news. That makes sense. As a segue?
News on Conspiracy-Related Topics
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah. I like it. Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
00:30:55
Speaker
This week's news is brought to you by my new web series, Conspiratism. Look for it on YouTube, it's Conspiratastic. But before you do, here are some Reddit headlines. Someone deleted potential Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 evidence from the internet? Hold up, that actually is in our wheelhouse. What's the story?
00:31:16
Speaker
Well, the short story is someone clicked a link on Reddit, which led to a 404 page. That's actually not much of a story. The Reddit phone app, for example, sometimes doesn't like certain links and fails to resolve them. But the actual story it links to concerns someone called Ty, who on Twitter claimed to get an answer phone message linked to the disappearance of MH370, which, the message says, suggests alien involvement.
00:31:46
Speaker
Creepy. Yes, creepy as in, creepy pasta it seems. It has all the hallmarks of that kind of horror story told via social media or blog posts. Or, and this seems equally likely, a hoax being played on time. Still, MH370 news is podcaster's guide to the conspiracy news. But, well, talking of news we cover a lot, one day, one day we hope we won't have to bring you either Donald J. Trump news or Robert Mueller news. But today's not that day.
00:32:15
Speaker
Jerome Corsi, who we've mentioned in earlier episodes, he's an associate of Roger Stone and an early proponent of Barack Obama was born in Kenya, theories, has claimed that not only is he going to be indicted by Mueller, but he's going to die in prison.
00:32:32
Speaker
cause of it.
00:32:47
Speaker
Interestingly, you stole my bit there, so you can do even more. That's something contradictory is likely to revolve around the timing of the Democratic Party email links and when Corsi knew about them. As NBC News has reported, it seems Corsi knew about the leaks before the public did, and it seems he might have informed Stone, an associate of Trump,
00:33:06
Speaker
at about the same time. The implication being that this means the Trump election team would have known about the leak before it became public, something they have denied. Thus we have another layer to the conspiracy. Or alleged conspiracy. True. Which may or may not be coming to a head.
00:33:29
Speaker
sources seem to think that Mueller is just about ready to make his report, which might be a timely thing to do, given Trump's new acting Attorney General does not seem to be the kind of person who will let the inquiry go on for much longer. Be that as it may, how about some alien autopsy news? Oh please! Well,
Discussion on 1995 Alien Autopsy Film Authenticity
00:33:52
Speaker
You may remember that time all the way back in 1995 when the Fox Network showed a documentary about footage of an alien autopsy, which was supposedly filmed in good old Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947. The footage was eventually revealed to be a hoax,
00:34:07
Speaker
Although the hoaxes, one Ray Santilli and Gary Shufield, claimed that there had been a real autopsy film, but due to a series of hilarious mishaps, including owing money to some bad people, the original footage had been all but lost, and thus a fake copy had to be substituted in its place. This is the basis of a rather interesting British comedy called Alien Autopsy, which starred UK celebrities Ant and Dec, and which I saw in Wales back in 2007.
00:34:37
Speaker
Everything about that sentence invites more questions. Anyway, now, now, the person who was behind the fake autopsy film, Spheros Melaris, has spoken out. In the form of a one-man show in London's West End. Where Melaris claims he was shown by Santilli a bad fake alien autopsy film, and upon seeing it, offered to help him make a more convincing fake. That is, Santilli's claim the 1995 film was a remake of a better original.
00:35:07
Speaker
Isn't that always the way, though? Well, except when it comes to John Carpenter's The Thing. Ooh, The Thing. What a wonderful film. And The House on Haunted Hill. But we're really getting a bit off topic there. Indeed, indeed, yes. So, according to Malaris, everything Santilli said is false. Malaris simply created a more convincing fake. Although not that convincing.
00:35:30
Speaker
Nah. This, of course, muddies the waters. Last year, Santilli presented the world with some grainy photos from what were supposedly the few surviving frames of the supposed original film, which may or may not show alien corpses. So, whether or not you think the US military is hiding alien corpses at Roswell, or Santilli, Shufeld, and Malaris are covering up their own activity, the ufological world is still waiting for some definitive proof we either are or are not alone.
00:36:00
Speaker
Finally, an update on murder.
Khashoggi Murder Recording and Saudi Pressure
00:36:03
Speaker
Yes, Canadian intelligence apparently has heard an audio recording of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. You'll recall that when we first talked about the cover-up several episodes ago, there was a story going around that the murder had been recorded on Khashoggi's Apple Watch.
00:36:24
Speaker
Now, at the time this was poo-pooed a little bit. Not the idea that there was a recording, but rather the whole Apple Watch aspect of the tale. Given the technological hoops that would have to have been jumped through to get the watch to record the dismemberment, or the alleged dismemberment, the suspicion was that the watch story was a cover for something not quite as sinister as a murder, but just as diplomatically problematic. That is, the idea that Turkey was bugging the Saudi consulate.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yes, it turns out bugging the sovereign soil of an ally is considered bad form even in cases where it would expose a murder. You don't really want to admit to bugging someone's embassy or consulate. But it seems that however it was obtained, the recording does exist and thus is putting even more pressure on Saudi Arabia
00:37:12
Speaker
to admit to what exactly happened, especially since Saudi Arabia's ever-shifting story isn't clear on exactly who, why or how. The fact the recording has not been made public suggests that Turkey is hoping Saudi Arabian authorities will be so scared as to its content that they will admit to everything in order to ensure no future surprises.
00:37:36
Speaker
Yes, up until now, Saudi Arabian officials probably felt the whole recording story might be a bluff, perhaps? But if sexpot and all-star Justin Trudeau has confirmed its existence, and we know Canadians are genetically incapable of lying, then presumably it's not up to Saudi Arabia to stop covering up what really happened.
00:37:55
Speaker
Otherwise, they might disappoint Justin, and we can't have that now, can we? Good Lord, no.
Closing Remarks and Contact Info
00:38:02
Speaker
Now, if you give us just a few of your hard-earned dollars a month, you can listen to the following bits of news and news-related content in our patron-only extra episode. Yes, we'll be talking about voter fraud, Kiwi styles, 11 votes, one man, it's taxation with over-representation, baby.
00:38:22
Speaker
Also, I'll be talking about the podcast Slow Burn, whose first season deals with the development of the Watergate scandal as it happened at the time. The comparisons with the Russian collusion scandal are... striking. But for now, we must bid you adieu. Until next week, keep your swatches synchronised. Not a problem.
00:38:53
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster'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 campaign. 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.
00:39:54
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.