The 23rd livestream from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in their continuing discussion surrounding the novel coronavirus. Link to the Q&A portion of this episode: https://youtu.be/TCawvThMpAcSupport the Show.
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| Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream, our 23rd. | |
| Prime once again. | |
| Wow, again Prime, that does feel, that feels alright. | |
| I'm sitting with Dr. Heather Hying, as always, and we are facing so many very heavy topics that we are going to try to grapple with. | |
| Together. | |
| Last time we started what I think is a very healthy tradition in light of how things are going in 2020, where instead of diving right into the ultra timely, ultra heavy material, we start with something amusing, a joke, an anecdote, something just to set the mood so that we all feel okay. | |
| So... | |
| With that, the floor is yours. | |
| Great. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| That's hilarious. | |
| I'm so amused. | |
| Alright. | |
| So, folks, actually this has been a lesson on a different topic. | |
| The lesson is marriage, as much as it gets a bad rap, people say it's just a piece of paper, why do I need the government to sanction my relationship? | |
| Marriage is a marvelous thing and among its best features are it makes it really complicated and expensive for someone to leave you. | |
| This is true. | |
| So complicated. | |
| So complicated. | |
| Presumably also so expensive. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I haven't checked, but that's what I've heard. | |
| Yeah, but just sort of thinking through all the steps that would be required. | |
| Let's just put it this way, Heather. | |
| However expensive you have heard divorce is, I think it's way worse than that. | |
| I'm sure it is. | |
| This is fabulous. | |
| Great. | |
| All right. | |
| So, we do have a lot going on. | |
| Good lord. | |
| Okay, it's only noon-thirty where we are. | |
| There's been no alcohol or drugs of any sort for a very long time. | |
| Not that we're aware of. | |
| Somebody could have drugged us. | |
| We don't know. | |
| It would have had to have been one of our children or our animals. | |
| I mean, I wouldn't put it past any of them. | |
| Okay, so we have things going on. | |
| We have an autonomous zone having been declared in the center of Seattle, which I would say would be absolutely beyond belief if we hadn't already seen this a block and a half from our own home at Evergreen in 2017. | |
| So that's going on. | |
| We have a shooting that has just taken place in Atlanta that is suddenly trending on Twitter. | |
| There's all sorts of things That need to be discussed and carefully and of course There's never any time to parse these things and figure out how to get into them in a way that everybody can get their footing So anyway, I think you have a sense of where we might we might begin with that material here Well, actually, what I've written up, what I want to start by showing us and I've written up isn't directly about either of those things, but it obviously speaks to the current moment. | |
| So, I think we're going to start by showing a video that you would point out to me. | |
| It's a bit over two minutes long, and then I have a little monologue, and then we'll launch into everything else. | |
| So, Zach, if you want to show the first video that I sent to you. | |
| We are all people. | |
| All of you are my family. | |
| All of you are my family. | |
| I love each and every one of you. | |
| I cry at night because I feel your pain. | |
| I feel the pain. | |
| I feel the pain of black people. | |
| I feel the pain of white people. | |
| I feel the pain of innocent cops. | |
| I feel the pain. | |
| We're all scared. | |
| Black, white, cop, doesn't matter. | |
| We're all scared. | |
| We're living in fear. | |
| You gotta stop living in fear. | |
| I am not your enemy. | |
| You are not my enemy. | |
| You have to share this land no matter what. | |
| By the end of the day, you have to share this land no matter what. | |
| I'm here for you. | |
| I'm here with you. | |
| I'm not aiming at none of you. | |
| I love all of y'all. | |
| I don't care if you 5'2". | |
| I don't care if you're a 7-footer. | |
| I don't care if you're dark-skinned. | |
| I don't care if you're light-skinned. | |
| I don't care if you're white. | |
| Masked or not, uniformed or not, you are my family, and I love you, and I respect you. | |
| And I want to understand y'all. | |
| I want to understand all of you. | |
| I want to. | |
| I deeply want to understand you. | |
| I would love to come to your house. | |
| I would love to meet your kids. | |
| I would love to meet your family. | |
| I would love to see the best side of everybody here. | |
| This is not the best side of everybody here. | |
| I would love to see the best side of everybody here. | |
| Then you can change the whole perspective of how you view someone. | |
| Because of their size. | |
| Because of how you see them in different lights. | |
| Someone might have a bad day and you say they're a bad person. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| We all got bad days. | |
| We all got bad days. | |
| We gotta stop judging people only on our bad days. | |
| Because we all have them, to some degree. | |
| How are you on your good days? | |
| Do you want to make a stand? | |
| Do you want to make a change? | |
| Because if we charge you and you charge us, what is that really doing? | |
| What is that really doing? | |
| Come on, what are you doing? | |
| What are you doing? | |
| Fuck you! | |
| Fuck you! | |
| What the fuck did he do? | |
| Are you fucking kidding me? | |
| Do what? | |
| Do what? | |
| What the fuck? | |
| Freedom of speech! | |
| No! | |
| What did he do to you? | |
| All right. | |
| So that video is one of a couple very much like it that we have now seen. | |
| And before you get to your comments about it, I just want to put a placeholder here and say, I not only want to talk about what that video means, but I want to talk about what role it is or isn't playing in our our discussion of the current moment. | |
| So we'll return to that later. | |
| All right. | |
| So in this video, we have people clearly using their First Amendment rights, and the response that I had, that Brett had, is, you know, why are they stopped? | |
| What is going on? | |
| What is that? | |
| And once again, I want to remind us of the First Amendment, as I did a couple of episodes ago in 20. | |
| It reads, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. | |
| Not only is speech explicitly protected in this beautiful sentence that moves us from the most private thing, the thoughts in our own head, to the most public, but so too is peaceful assembly and petition of the government for redress of grievances. | |
| One could argue, I believe, that these peaceful protesters, patently peaceful protesters, and that in particular the man who was speaking in the last clip was making an appeal to the government, or at least to agents of the government, And he is asking for redress, that is, resolution, in the form of asking for understanding. | |
| He is asking that we treat one another as human beings. | |
| Why was he hauled off? | |
| What possible justification could there be? | |
| I see none. | |
| So I'll return to that. | |
| That is one abomination that is happening now. | |
| Here is another one, no less important. | |
| But harder for most to grapple with. | |
| The mayor of Boston signed and promoted an executive order yesterday on June 12th, 2020, declaring, among other things, that, quote, whereas the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed, reaffirmed, and cast in sharp relief the emergency nature of these pre-existing inequities caused by systemic racism. | |
| In cases where race and ethnicity are known, the rate of reported COVID-19 cases for black Boston residents is 268.8 per 10,000, compared with 230,000 213.2 per 10,000 for Latinx Hispanic residents, and 89.8 per 10,000 for white residents." End quote. | |
| So let me begin by pointing out that the numbers cited in the executive order from the mayor of Boston looks dark. | |
| But not just for black people. | |
| They also look stark for Latino people. | |
| And yet we are not as a nation focused on Latino people. | |
| That is not apparently the moment, this is not apparently the moment for Latino people to speak or to expect a redress of grievances. | |
| It is also true that the numbers, absent statistical analysis, which would be simple to do if you had the actual data, are insufficient to claim unequal outcomes, although I grant that at first glance it certainly appears that Blacks and Latinos in Boston are suffering unequal outcomes compared to Whites, and we know that that conclusion is borne out by actual analysis from other places. | |
| There is racial disparity in health outcomes regarding COVID-19. | |
| But then, of course, it is also true that there is sex disparity in health outcomes regarding COVID-19. | |
| More men than women die of this disease. | |
| And we don't see the equivalent hypothesis that sex disparities in COVID-19 are due to historic and systemic misandry. | |
| Why? | |
| Well, in part because the idea that disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on men is due to misandry is patently ludicrous. | |
| There has been abundant historic sexism, just as there has been abundant historic racism, and not primarily against men or against white people. | |
| But I posit that we also don't hear that hypothesis, nor are we seeing differential outcomes by sex focused on right now, because it doesn't conform to one of our currently sanctioned narratives. | |
| Consider that if women were suffering from COVID-19 at higher rates than men, we likely would be hearing that it was due to sexism, and not as one hypothesis, but as the answer. | |
| The problem with compelled speech, then, should be obvious, especially with the First Amendment still shining at us, beacon-like, across the centuries. | |
| But, as Orwell illustrated in 1984, the power in compelling speech is that, in time, thought is compelled as well. | |
| Those who want to compel what you think may well start by compelling what you say. | |
| This, in a nutshell, is the problem with compelled speech. | |
| If we are all required to shout and proclaim hashtag Black Lives Matter at all times, meaning that we are constantly focused on race as THE explanatory factor in society, and similarly, if we are told constantly that all divergent outcomes between men and women in which women come out behind is due to sexism, we have arrived at compelled thought. | |
| Humans, I believe, have inherently scientific minds. | |
| Which means that we can propose multiple explanations for an observed phenomenon and try to distinguish between those explanations. | |
| All children do this. | |
| Many children have this intuitive scientific tinkering drilled out of them in school and by authority figures of all kinds. | |
| Looking for what is actually going on takes time, it's messy, and it will offend many of those who have arrived at a conclusion that they themselves like. | |
| They will try to stop the investigation. | |
| They may even try to tell you that it is racist to investigate. | |
| Compelled speech restricts scientific tendencies, and so leads to compelled thought. | |
| If the Overton window has shrunk so far that an observation of a pattern has only one allowable explanation, then we have neither freedom of speech nor of thought, and we have abandoned science. | |
| If the Overton window has shrunk so far that an observation of a pattern, such as disparities in health outcomes between black and white people with regard to COVID-19, has only one allowable explanation, historic and systemic racism, then not only do we have neither freedom of speech nor freedom of thought, but we also have little chance of actually figuring out what is going on. | |
| We also have little chance of actually fixing the problem unless the one officially sanctioned explanation happens to be fully explanatory for all observed patterns in all cases. | |
| I can guarantee that racism is not the only explanation for racial disparities in health outcomes. | |
| I can also guarantee that racism is insufficiently precise to be actionable, and this, in part, is the goal of the activists. | |
| It is presumably not the goal of the mayor of Boston. | |
| I want to believe that he is trying to do good and to do right by his people. | |
| But having a single vague explanation that can be wielded like a cudgel to simultaneously silence dissent and which cannot be operationalized, that is the route to totalitarianism. | |
| It is also, as James Lindsay has described, very much like the argument that any natural phenomenon which cannot currently be explained by science must only be explicable by God. | |
| This is known as the God of the gaps. | |
| God fills in where science can't. | |
| Today's activism has created a racism of the gaps. | |
| Racism fills in as the go-to explanation whenever any other explanation isn't immediately obvious, and sometimes even when it is. | |
| James, Lindsay again, on Twitter today said this. | |
| Racism of the gaps is an allusion to the God of the Gaps argument where many people will say the explanation for some unknown phenomenon. | |
| How did life start? | |
| Must be God. | |
| It's a bad argument, a filler. | |
| Why is there disparity? | |
| Must be systemic racism. | |
| What else could it be? | |
| So systemic racism is usually a way to say that complicated and unknown, or inconvenient and suppressed, reasons for differences in outcome must be racism in the vaguest sense. | |
| We see a difference, James Wright, don't need to find out real reasons, and that must be racism. | |
| It's fraudulent and culty, he finishes. | |
| I would say if we really want to be able to address grievances and make the world as honorable, equal, and fair for everyone as possible, we can't have compelled speech, and we can't have compelled thought. | |
| Racism of the gaps must stop, just as sexism of the gaps must stop. | |
| Racism, in particular and more precisely contemporary effects of historical racism, is very likely an explanation for many observed inequalities. | |
| And even a primary one in some cases. | |
| But if we are not allowed to consider alternative hypotheses, then we are doomed. | |
| We will not be allowed to discover what is true, and we will be buried in confusion and chaos. | |
| Finally, this week a UC Berkeley professor who remains anonymous sends a scathing letter to some of his colleagues, decrying the compelled speech taking over academia and the world. | |
| He is himself a person of color. | |
| His identity has been confirmed but not made public by one of the people who received the letter. | |
| And he too finds the cry of racism to explain every single difference in outcome between races a dishonest and untrue conclusion. | |
| He cannot stand that people who call themselves scholars and intellectuals are falling in line. | |
| Neither can I. We have all by now seen images of people kneeling, practically genuflecting in service of the new gods. | |
| Are there so many new converts in the world? | |
| Truly? | |
| As the Berkeley professor says in his letter, it's hard to know what kneeling means when you have to kneel to keep your job. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Racism of the gaps is right on the money. | |
| That's what we're seeing. | |
| And this actually dovetails very well with what I think the secondary meaning of that video that we saw is. | |
| So, I would like to back us up slightly and put something on the table. | |
| So, late last night as I was trying to get one of our cats to come in, I went for a walk with the dog. | |
| And I was listening to Sam Harris' most recent podcast episode on the meaning of this moment. | |
| And there was a lot in it. | |
| It's really well done and I recommend it. | |
| The purpose of the piece is largely to do something that I've advocated many times. | |
| I've said in order to have, in order to make compassionate policy, you have to do a dispassionate analysis, right? | |
| It feels counterintuitive. | |
| But anyway, he does a very good job of going through The statistics that accompany use of lethal force by police and what it has to say about the presence or absence of racism. | |
| And it's really, it's remarkably careful. | |
| But the place he starts is someplace that I think a lot of us have landed in independently. | |
| He alleges That we are actually losing our minds, and that this has something to do with the Internet. | |
| And we've talked about this, and anyway, I think all people who are trying to grapple with the meaning of the moment are landing on this formulation. | |
| But the question is, okay, we're losing our minds, but can we say anything more about it? | |
| And the reason that that video of that apparently peaceful protester being hauled off, I mean, hauled out of a crowd specifically because he's the one talking, that really looks like an egregious violation of his First Amendment rights. | |
| And it's not the only video that looks like this. | |
| But what struck me most was that I had not seen them. | |
| Right, I came to that video because Sam Harris said something on his Twitter feed about what is the meaning of these videos in which apparently peaceful protesters are aggressed by the police and I thought I haven't seen those videos I've seen videos in which the police are very aggressive, but I also know that the protesters are being very aggressive What's he talking about? | |
| And so I went looking and I found videos on Camille Foster's Twitter feed and I looked at them and they were exactly as described and I thought This is so relevant at this moment that the fact that I am not running into it is telling us something. | |
| And I think what it's telling us is that Twitter's algorithm, whatever it is, thinks I'm a conservative because I say a lot of things about what isn't right over on the left, and it has misunderstood me. | |
| And also it thinks that if you are conservative, which you're not, but that if you were conservative, you would be uninterested in seeing things that confound your current views. | |
| Right. | |
| Or maybe even to say that it thinks is the mistake. | |
| Because what it is doing, I would suggest, Is it is simply feeding people that which confirms what they already believe. | |
| And so here's my very simple contention about some large fraction of what is taking place at the moment. | |
| Everybody is plugged into an apparatus that is sitting in between us the way conversation used to. | |
| And what it is doing is it is feeding us things that confirm what we actually believe. | |
| Much of which is real. | |
| But that in effect, people, smart scientific people who know very well that the right way to think carefully is to be falsificationist, to look for things that disconfirm your beliefs, are being fed an overwhelmingly verificationist message. | |
| And that is causing everybody to be dead sure they know what's going on when very few of us have any clue. | |
| And one thing that is so different about this moment than the moment of 20 years ago or 40 years ago is that we had editors and people have complained about editors and the move towards social media is seen by some as a populist revolution in which anyone can have voice. | |
| But if you want to watch Fox News and also want to watch CNN, you know something about the editorial biases of those networks, and you can choose to watch both, and you know that you are going to get still skewed, still edited, still presumably biased, but versions of the biases and edits of those respective networks. | |
| Whereas, on Twitter, if you follow a wide variety of people, as you and I do, you follow, I follow Camille Foster, and Sam Harris, and boy, there's so many other people who, once you found this, I went looking, there are many people Who I follow, and I don't follow thousands of people specifically so that I can see what these people are saying. | |
| There are many people whom you and I follow who have been posting these videos, and neither of us were seeing them. | |
| That tells us that this is not the same as being able to go and decide, I'm going to read the New York Times, and I'm going to read the Wall Street Journal, I'm going to watch CNN, and I'm going to watch Fox. | |
| It's not the same thing. | |
| We have had Our choice taken away, but we are being given the appearance that we have more choice than ever. | |
| We have the sense that we are correcting for this, but you have no idea how quickly you have to swim upstream to counteract the algorithm. | |
| And so, this is having an absolutely bewildering effect on us, I think. | |
| And for me, the iconic instance of this is Dave Chappelle's new video, right? | |
| So I have not seen it yet. | |
| So it's titled 8 minutes and 46 seconds is what Derek Chauvin's knee spent on George Floyd's neck. | |
| And this piece is not really a comedy piece. | |
| And you know, Chappelle talks about that. | |
| I must say, I know you share my feelings about this, but I think Chappelle is... | |
| He's a genius, and his genius extends to many different things. | |
| He's figured out a way to be authentic, but to look through the eyes of someone else and allow them to see the authenticity of something that they are predisposed not to see. | |
| So anyway, there's no shortage of love and gratitude for what he's delivered. | |
| This piece that he's put out, very popular piece, retweeted by Joe Rogan, very enthusiastically, Barry Weiss, I think, who is punishing us for something, I don't know what, but in any case, the Chappelle piece is wrong. | |
| And it's wrong completely authentically. | |
| And so anyway, in some sense... So you're speaking, presumably many of the people watching have seen it, or you guys have the luxury of stepping aside and watching, and I don't at the moment. | |
| What is wrong about it? | |
| And I'm asking that not because I've seen it and don't see anything wrong, but because I actually don't know what's in it. | |
| What's wrong with that is that it doesn't take into account what Sam Harris painstakingly goes through, which is that our intuitions about what is going on have very little to do with what the data suggests is going on. | |
| And so the point is, Now, I want to be very careful that people do not misinterpret what I'm saying. | |
| I think there's something very real about this moment and this protest. | |
| And one of the things that's driving me crazy is that the message is so wrong, the focus is so wrong, that we do not understand that the tremendous frustration that is boiling over in our streets and frankly threatening the Republic and maybe more, That that frustration is simply being delivered with a false set of labels, and so we don't even know how to interpret it. | |
| So my point to you is that Chappelle looks at the protest, and he says, effectively, you're goddamn right. | |
| Right? | |
| Of course people are angry. | |
| Of course they're angry. | |
| And he talks about some of these cases that we've seen on video that just seem so upsetting. | |
| Right? | |
| But the problem is that those cases are, at best, anecdotes. | |
| And of course, even if those cases are exactly what we think they are. | |
| The fact that those cases may not be disproportionate suggests that race may not be playing the role that we think it's playing. | |
| And does that mean that black people are not perceiving some sort of substantial obstacle that is blocking progress that I would argue has stalled progress? | |
| No, they are detecting something. | |
| And when you see somebody do something egregious on videotape, and you feel this force holding you back, and you put two and two together, and you say, those two things are the same thing, right? | |
| You may not be right. | |
| It may be that those things have nothing to do with each other. | |
| As I have said before, the visceral anecdote will always be more powerful than the dispassionate statistic. | |
| Right. | |
| And if we can take a non-racial example, I said in my talk, How the Magic Trick is Done, that a woman who's walking down the street who takes some look that I give her to be full of some kind of meaning that she finds creepy, doesn't know whether it was actually a creepy look that a woman who's walking down the street who takes some look I just awkward and I gave the guy who walked down the street next to her the same weird look, right? | |
| You can't tell if all you have is an edit. | |
| And so what we have is an inherently an inherently biased set It is much more interesting in some sense when the thing matches some narrative about some very powerful force of racism that is alive and well in the U.S. | |
| And you know what? | |
| There is a force of racism that is alive and well in the U.S., but it's small, right? | |
| Most people are not encountering it every day. | |
| The number of You know one of the things that Sam reveals is that actually in 2019 the number of police shootings Was at an all-time low the number of killings by police in Los Angeles in 2019 was at an all-time low And so there's something there's some question about are we moving in the right direction are these things racially biased? | |
| These are questions that are addressed by tools that we know now. | |
| Here's the crazy thing. | |
| What did we see this last week? | |
| Those very tools are under attack. | |
| Shut down STEM. | |
| Why is shut down STEM marching with some cartoonish presentation of the role racism is playing in America? | |
| Because if you have the tools, then you can test the claim. | |
| So those who are advancing false claims have an interest in shutting down those tools, shutting down any claim that has been demonstrated with them, any doubt that has been Well, this emerges in part. | |
| I don't have the quote. | |
| I will paraphrase it, and hopefully I don't butcher it. | |
| But the Audre Lorde quotation from, I think it will have been the 1970s, in which she says, you can't tear down the master's house with the master's tools. | |
| A ridiculous and disempowering message, actually, as so much of the material and the messaging coming across the transom from these movements, these so-called anti-racist movements, are often actually disempowering for exactly the populations whom they are purporting to try to raise up. | |
| Right. | |
| And to the extent that – so my claim about Chappelle would be that he is Uh, he would present the story as it really is if he could see it, but he is also subject to a world of algorithms that have categorized him some way. | |
| And so, uh, somehow I think he's missed the point, but he's still Dave Chappelle. | |
| So in some sense, um, as much as I hate to see him present something that I think is incorrect, it's also hopeful because being Dave Chappelle, he's capable of seeing it, right? | |
| And so what would be amazing is if there was a dialogue in which the point was, okay, Dave, we heard what you have to say, here's the counterpoint. | |
| That would be a remarkable dialogue. - Yeah, no, it certainly would. | |
| And this is going to seem wrong, but I feel like responding with an anecdote. | |
| But I think the point here is that here's one of my interactions with the police from when I was in high school, in the mid to late 80s, 87 maybe. | |
| Um, when I was newly driving, and my point here is going to be, um, I got to see, I got to see firsthand, um, that there was disparity, at least for a couple of police officers in LA in the 80s, between how they treated, um, a black person versus, uh, versus a bunch of white people. | |
| And it stuck with me, and this has been one of the things that I have told you, I've only said it publicly once actually before now, but my point ultimately is things have gotten a lot better since then, and the way to assess that claim is through the statistics, the very statistics that you say that Sam Harris was going through in his most recent Podcast, yeah. | |
| It's a short little anecdote. | |
| I'm driving in my 10-year-old car on Sunset Boulevard, on the curvy part of Sunset Boulevard in West LA, where the speed limit is 35, but if you enjoy driving and if you're breaking the law, you might go 50. | |
| I come around a curve and someone else is doing the same thing. | |
| It's the middle of the day, And it's the only time this ever happened. | |
| Pretty quickly, four of us in a pack of cars are driving stupidly fast on Sunset. | |
| And we come around one curve, and there's a cop waiting, as cops often were, in a car. | |
| Turns on his siren, pulls out behind us, directs us into the next side street, and pulls us all over, as he should have. | |
| We were being irresponsible. | |
| None of us knew each other. | |
| Spontaneous street racing. | |
| Spontaneous street racing, right. | |
| None of us knew each other. | |
| None of us were driving fancy or expensive cars. | |
| None of us knew until the moment that he forced us all over, as he should have done. | |
| It was a white cop with a white guy with a white cop sitting next to him, got out of the car, and he ordered all of us out of the car, barking equally at each of us. | |
| And we got out, and I was the only person in my car, and I'm white, and there were a couple of people in each of two of the other cars, and they were white, and the fourth car had a young black man in it. | |
| And the cop proceeded to speak very gently and politely to me, and to the other white people in the other cars, and quite differently, quite aggressively, at quite a lot of volume to this young black man. | |
| And the fact is, in this case, we had all been behaving exactly the same way. | |
| We were all guilty of exactly the same crime, right? | |
| And as far as I can tell, the outcome of this is that he let us all off with a warning. | |
| So the formal legal outcome was it was equivalent for everyone. | |
| But the fact is that one of four items in this case, one of four drivers doing exactly the same thing, got singled out for treatment on the basis of what? | |
| There was only one thing that I could see that was different about him, and it was his skin color. | |
| That would have been, I think, 1986, 1987, and that was an anecdote, and I had no access to the statistics at that time, but I understood in my gut that there was something about driving while black that was real that would never be true for me. | |
| Question is, to what extent have police improved, and has it become ever less acceptable to be racist in American society in the years since then? | |
| Yes, and so, you know, I think Driving While Black registered with a lot of us. | |
| We got it, that there was a different experience and that this was something so universally shared by black people that even though white people were unlikely to encounter it directly, we inferred that something, there was something we could not see, a force we could not see. | |
| This is exactly the opposite of what will happen in a world where the algorithms feed you that which you expect or want to hear. | |
| And so we are now watching a movement that, and I saw a remarkable footage of the protests in Paris, this is spreading, this is now a global phenomenon that is ostensibly reacting to a systematic pattern of lethal violence that is racially motivated amongst police that is not reflected in the data. | |
| Right? | |
| That is a frightening prospect for two reasons. | |
| So can you spell that out a little bit more? | |
| I haven't seen what's going on in Paris. | |
| I'd like to know exactly what... I'd like you to just maybe even just say that in different words. | |
| What I think is taking place is that there is something deeply wrong. | |
| You can feel it in this Dave Chappelle piece, right? | |
| Dave Chappelle has had it. | |
| He is sick and tired of being told there isn't a problem, and he has landed In the wrong spot, because the message is so overwhelming that you can see the problem in lethal violence by white cops against black citizens, right? | |
| That he is now, he just simply didn't check it. | |
| He didn't go falsificationist, right? | |
| If he had, what he would find is that the data do not reflect this pattern. | |
| That it is true that blacks are disproportionately killed by cops, but not disproportionately relative to their disproportionate share of crime. | |
| Now the discussion I want to have is what is that disparity in crime about? | |
| And I think a lot of people, including a lot of frankly sophisticated white thinkers, believe that this has something to do with black people being different. | |
| I don't believe that that's where this is coming from. | |
| So what I said on Twitter the other day was that The patterns that we are seeing have very little to do with modern racism and have a lot to do with past racism and that this is different for two populations as I've said elsewhere. | |
| Black population and the Indian population in the U.S. | |
| have a special situation. | |
| Other populations deal with racism. | |
| There's a level of ambient racism. | |
| It doesn't prevent them from succeeding. | |
| These two populations have a special obstacle that they face. | |
| And so what we are seeing... And distinct from one another. | |
| Quite distinct, but they share a feature. | |
| In both of these cases, there was a systematic effort to erase the on-board culture, to neutralize the on-board culture, because that on-board culture was dangerous to the role that white people, that European people needed these populations to play. | |
| So just at the most surface level, the explicit taking of Native American children and putting them into white schools, basically re-educating them so they would forget anything that they had known in their home culture, and putting newly enslaved Africans who had been brought over, obviously against their will, | |
| Into groups of people with whom they did not share a culture or a language so that they could not communicate and they could not effectively keep almost anything of the culture from which they'd been stolen. | |
| Right. | |
| The breaking apart of families, right, the mixing of people who were from different, had different traditions to begin with so that everything starts out as a pidgin and then becomes a creole, but it's not, it's nobody's original culture. | |
| No one saying says that historic racism hasn't been a remarkable force throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. | |
| But it's not even, this is racism with a special mechanism, right? | |
| This special mechanism takes the cultural program that people have A, disrupts the connection with the thing to which it's evolved. | |
| So in some sense, black people and Indians were removed from what you and I would technically call the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for their culture, right? | |
| So your culture matches your environment. | |
| You remove people from their environment either by transporting them across an ocean in a ship or by putting them on a reservation and taking them off their ancestral lands. | |
| Right? | |
| Already they have a new problem, right? | |
| Their culture is not adapted to the place they've just landed. | |
| And then you go through systematic process of disrupting that culture further in order to make people compliant and docile and unable to resist and all of those things. | |
| And then something happens. | |
| There's an awakening. | |
| This is wrong. | |
| Maybe you stop doing it, but you don't fix the problem, right? | |
| And so, anyway. | |
| I believe that those things echo through to this moment in a most profound way and that it is resulting in the detection in these populations that something is wrong. | |
| It's no secret in these populations that something is very seriously wrong. | |
| But the question is, what do you say? | |
| If the problem is subtle, right? | |
| If the problem is one of somebody busted my software and then they loaded some software Works somewhat for me, but it also works for them, right? | |
| And now I have a problem most people don't have because I have to disentangle those two forces, right? | |
| So you're talking about human software now? | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Okay, so let's maybe back up and make that super clear because I was thinking computers until the end of that sentence. | |
| No, no. | |
| Yeah, I mean computers were Very rare until the 20th century. | |
| That's how I understand it too. | |
| But in any case, so there is a real problem, but I think the point I'm getting at is it's not that it isn't a serious problem. | |
| It's every bit as serious as people perceive, but it isn't housed in these simple things. | |
| What's the problem with being black? | |
| It's that, you know, you're in danger of being slaughtered on any given day by a police officer. | |
| No. | |
| For one thing, we can check that. | |
| We can check it with the tools of STEM. | |
| Right? | |
| Why are we shutting down STEM? | |
| Because you can check it with the tools of STEM, and... And because there's only one explanation allowed. | |
| Because we have compelled speech, which moves us into compelled thought. | |
| Right. | |
| And you must destroy STEM in order to not have people say, actually, there are a lot of possible explanations. | |
| Let's figure out which one is true. | |
| Let's figure it out. | |
| Yep. | |
| So that raises the question then of what is taking place. | |
| So the tough thing, I think if you're being fed some analog of what I'm seeing, right? | |
| The temptation is just to say, well, okay. | |
| This movement is phony. | |
| The claims are wrong. | |
| This is jeopardizing the Republic. | |
| Let's just shut it down, right? | |
| And there's no awareness that the claims are wrong. | |
| In my opinion, the named movements that are at the head of this thing are illegitimate. | |
| They are pushing a phony story, and they are pushing the most absurd remedies I can imagine. | |
| I mean, the idea that we are talking about abolishing the police? | |
| And you've got, maybe this is where you're going, but you've got a video that you're going to have Zach show with another one of these proposed remedies. | |
| Oh, we can go with a number of these things. | |
| Maybe we should, in fact. | |
| Hey, Zach, can you put up the New York Times piece here? | |
| So first of all, we have been in endless arguments. | |
| We hear people say, defund the police, abolish the police. | |
| Hold on a second. | |
| And we're always, when we say abolish the police, do you realize that there's not a neighborhood in America where that would not be a catastrophe? | |
| No matter how bad your police are, there's no place where removing them would be a net gain for the people who live there. | |
| And then we're told, so actually I've come up with a name for this. | |
| Ezra Kleinification of language, right? | |
| So Ezra Klein takes something like kill all men and he says, well, that's not really what they mean. | |
| So in this case, we've got, you know, abolish the police and then he, you know, somebody is going to come in and they're going to Ezra Kleinify the thing up and tell us that that doesn't mean abolish the police, that it means something else like reform them or, you know, demilitarize them or something like that. | |
| But then We find out in the New York Times, actually, lo and behold, we were right all along. | |
| Okay, you can now put it up. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Okay. | |
| Yes, we literally mean abolish the police. | |
| Okay. | |
| I knew that. | |
| You knew that. | |
| Because we've actually had the police abolished on us. | |
| Temporarily. | |
| The New York Times, under its new leadership, has gone ahead and given us the evidence that we were looking for. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Well, I mean, you know, in a sense they have done us a service because they've, you know, and this is one of the arguments that those of us who are fiercely in favor of maintaining free speech even for abhorrent perspectives have said, which is when somebody is advancing something truly awful, you want to hear what they have to say. | |
| You don't want to shut it down because that actually prevents us from being fully horrified. | |
| So this article in the New York Times actually says, look, we're talking about literally abolishing the police. | |
| They can't be reformed. | |
| It doesn't anywhere mention the net effect question. | |
| Or what they propose with regard to law and order instead. | |
| Oh, well, they have lots of lovely proposals, but my point is, were this the least bit reasonable, then the point is, we are going to provide this mechanism that makes the police unnecessary, and then we're going to abolish the police. | |
| That's not the point. | |
| Somehow, these people are either so confused or so disingenuous that they're actually advocating we abolish the police first. | |
| Right? | |
| Madness! | |
| This could not possibly be a dumber idea. | |
| And you and I have seen this in person. | |
| We have had the police withdrawn from a riot where they were shouting my name, and they were apparently hunting for me, one car to the next, and the police were withdrawn from the situation. | |
| We saw people inside of 24 hours of that order battered by student protesters, student on student violence with weapons for the crime of disagreeing. | |
| We saw the whole thing unfold. | |
| And the fact is, it's happening again. | |
| It's happening in the center of Seattle. | |
| And, you know, I mean, on the one hand, I'm kind of pissed off because I feel like we lived it. | |
| So that other people don't have to, and yet we're doing it again. | |
| But all right, Zach, can you show this? | |
| Yeah, to some degree, the stuff that's going on in Seattle is squarely in Governor Inslee's court. | |
| Like, that goes on his ledger. | |
| Because he did nothing when Evergreen happened, and he's doing nothing now. | |
| He didn't even mention it when Evergreen happened. | |
| He went radio silent and was radio silent, I believe, for years. | |
| Never mentioned Evergreen. | |
| This was happening eight miles from his office. | |
| Even after we went to his office with your students, asked for an audience, got instead two of his aides, aides on civil rights and aides on higher ed. | |
| Yep. | |
| Spent two hours talking to them. | |
| We're told that we get a response. | |
| No response. | |
| No response. | |
| Never responded. | |
| And then when he was asked about... So he's still, somehow, he's still the governor of Washington. | |
| Anyway, he was asked about the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle and he responded that he didn't know about it. | |
| Right? | |
| Which is an amazing, amazing claim. | |
| But anyway, we should talk about what the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone actually means. | |
| But let's just say that at the very least there's a battle over interpretation. | |
| You've got lots of people claiming that the autonomous zone is chaos, it's anarchy, run amok as anarchy will, and that it's chaos. | |
| And then you have other people claiming that it's being misportrayed and it's actually a lovely place and it's demonstrating everything it needs to demonstrate. | |
| Basically the police shut down their precinct and walked away. | |
| You can see this as it was happening. | |
| I didn't know what the hell was going on. | |
| I was watching aerial footage of the police taking their computers and things out of this building. | |
| It's like, what are they about to do? | |
| Um, but all right. | |
| Yeah, Zach, will you show us, uh, that video from, uh... Uh, wait, which one? | |
| The, uh... The one on the grass? | |
| No, the other one. | |
| Okay. | |
| Um, seems kind of fit with it, I guess. | |
| Like me, when I walk around anywhere, I sweat like I have a glandular problem. | |
| It's a horrifying condition, I promise you. | |
| Nevertheless, so this is where we are. | |
| If you might recall, again I'll tell the story to remind you. | |
| We were standing right over here by this fuck Trump sign when they threw the fucking grenades at us. | |
| And that was the fucking thing. | |
| And so here it is. | |
| This is just another wall of our art, our expression of our feelings. | |
| Hey! | |
| Thief! | |
| Stop a thief! | |
| Thief! | |
| Thief! | |
| Alright, so that remarkable piece of video, I mean it starts out with him showing that in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone they support the arts. | |
| And so there was a beautiful mural there. | |
| I noticed a lot of sentiments were clearly expressed. | |
| And repeated for greater artistic expression. | |
| Shoot. | |
| Shoot. | |
| All of the police did it say. | |
| That was good. | |
| Uh, fuck 12. | |
| This is one of my... Can you imagine how screwed we'd be if they got rid of 12? | |
| I mean, we're already in an awkward relationship with 13. | |
| They're going to get rid of 12 now? | |
| All right. | |
| Um, by the way, fuck 12 is about... What is it? | |
| Uh, it's the letters of the alphabet. | |
| bet. | |
| 12 is... | |
| Yes, 1312 is ACAB and 12 is the police. | |
| So, in any case, the person shooting this mural is obviously relieved of his camera, at which point he suddenly remembers that Law & Order actually has a positive effect as well as a negative one. | |
| So that's a remarkable thing. | |
| But lots of things are going on in the Capitol Hill autonomous zone, including apparently extortion from the business owners. | |
| They're being forced to tithe, effectively pay protection to have their businesses not damaged. | |
| But let's talk about the larger issue. | |
| Okay, because what's really going on here, I think, now we don't know why it is that the police walked away from this neighborhood when they did, but it was clearly planned. | |
| My guess would be that they walked away in hopes that the protesters would do, would run amok, and that that would therefore explain to the world why the police needed to crack down. | |
| I think the protesters Realized that they had an opportunity on their hands and that opportunity involves if they can just restrain their impulses in this instance and if they can behave themselves it will demonstrate to the world that they are correct that you can just remove the police and everything will be fine and then suddenly that plan will start spreading at which point absolute mayhem is going to break out. | |
| Now, they're not doing a great job because, of course, the problem with trying to maintain your discipline when the police have been withdrawn is that it creates a power vacuum and bad people will take advantage of a power vacuum. | |
| So what we have is Raz Simone having come in and he is patrolling the thing with weapons and harassing people. | |
| And so it's becoming exactly like Evergreen. | |
| I mean, it's really Evergreen 2.0 at greater scale with worse weapons. | |
| And, you know, I'd still say I'm I'm a little bit impressed that it hasn't broken down worse faster. | |
| But this is really where we are. | |
| We're in a battle over interpretations of what is taking place. | |
| If they can maintain message discipline so that the world sees basically, you know, a Kumbaya phenomenon going on there, the world will misunderstand and may attempt to duplicate the success that is demonstrated In the Capitol Hill autonomous zone elsewhere and it is other autonomous zones are now being set up. | |
| I believe in Portland one is being set up And actually Let's just cut to the chase What is this all really about? | |
| So I'm gonna make a claim my claim is going to be and I said this back whenever green happened that the real plan is Actually, let me step back. | |
| This is two things that have come together, okay? | |
| This movement that we are seeing is two things come together. | |
| One of them is Occupy 2.0. | |
| And although we participated in Occupy, by Occupy 2.0, I don't mean anything that I would remotely sign on to, okay? | |
| Occupy started out as a complaint about the bias in our system. | |
| It started out as a complaint about too big to fail, which was used as an excuse to bail out the people who had caused the problem. | |
| You know, the TARP program, etc. | |
| But it morphed into an anarchist nightmare. | |
| It became foolish. | |
| It lost its way. | |
| This is now the 2.0 version of that anarchist nightmare. | |
| And it is fused together with Black Lives Matter. | |
| Black Lives Matter, which is, according to its slogan, a good match for something important. | |
| Black lives are undervalued. | |
| And I believe that is true. | |
| We can see that based on the failure to invest in black communities. | |
| But, these two things have come together. | |
| An economic complaint about a rigged system that morphed into an anarchist nightmare, and an actual complaint about real bias that is hard to put your finger on against black people that has now become an excuse for all sorts of other things. | |
| And the plan that is unfolding is actually this. | |
| Reparations at all times in every venue, right? | |
| Every interaction is going to have a reparation in it and the reparation is first and foremost about blacks, but it's really about the intersectional You will receive reparations on the basis of where you fall intersectionally and as you have pointed out | |
| There are very real trans people who face very real obstacles in life But trans is the one place where you can opt in to intersectional points So you have this movement proposing reparations everywhere and the reparations everywhere is a very frightening prospect because a you can't an actual reparations program, which I wouldn't favor but nonetheless is at least a coherent proposal and That would be done with society deciding to take resources and distribute them in a particular way. | |
| If it happens in every interaction, it is the absolute destruction of meritocracy. | |
| So, let's take a look at that other... End of relationship. | |
| Of everything. | |
| It's the inversion of decency. | |
| It is just... So, let's see that other video. | |
| Okay. | |
| I want you to find by the time you leave This autonomous zone, I want you to give $10 to one African American person from this autonomous zone. | |
| And if you find that's difficult, if you find it's hard for you to give $10 to people of color, to black people especially, you have to think really critically about in the future, are you going to actually give up power and land And capital when you have it. | |
| If you have a hard time giving up $10, you gotta think about, are you really down with this struggle? | |
| Are you really down with the movement? | |
| Because if that is a challenge for you, then I'm unsure if you're in the right place. | |
| So find an African American person. | |
| The white people, I see you. | |
| I see every single one of you. | |
| And I remember your faces. | |
| You find that African American person and you give them $10. | |
| Cash app, Venmo, $10 in your pocket. | |
| That's my challenge to you. | |
| Do it! | |
| All right, so that video contains a lot. | |
| One thing is the reaction of people when they are actually asked to hand over money individually is much less enthusiastic than when they are trying to force other people to do it. | |
| So that's not surprising at all from a game theoretic perspective. | |
| I think we really need to just understand that the proposals are so insane, so dangerous, that we have to not take them seriously. | |
| We have to understand that even if the movement is motivated by actual frustration about really, really important things, that the presentation is... | |
| Basically threatening to scuttle the entire operation for no reason. | |
| So imagine for a second what the world would look like if this movement succeeds in advancing its vision. | |
| What does law and order look like going forward under the, you know, the world after the police have been disbanded? | |
| Can you show the proposals, the demands that were issued from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone? | |
| I sent it to you. | |
| Well, we can talk about what they were. | |
| So the demands, the long list of demands. | |
| Signature move. | |
| Signature move, long list of demands. | |
| Often, I haven't seen this list yet, but often at the top of the list is a demand to be able to take as much time as you want to make further demands. | |
| Yes, the wish to... I want as many wishes as I can have. | |
| Right, right. | |
| I'm not sure if that one is in here or not. | |
| They may have just forgotten it. | |
| But they reserve the right to make such a demand in the future, I'm sure. | |
| But on this list... Yeah, you can put it up. | |
| So, scroll down. | |
| At the top of the list... Boy, I can't. | |
| Can you get it on the other screen? | |
| So I can read just the, okay, yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| So it says, um, given the historical moment, we will begin with our demands pertaining to the justice system. | |
| The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. | |
| We do not request reform. | |
| We demand abolition. | |
| Oh, so the police and the court system, it's literally both law and order that they, that they demand abolition. | |
| Believe me, it is both law and order. | |
| And, um, they also, Demand further down if you scroll down. | |
| There's a highlight up. | |
| There's the highlight we demand Retrial of all people of color currently serving a prison sentence for violent crime by a jury of their peers in their community So they would like to retry all people of color. | |
| So this is the first time I'm seeing this. | |
| Are they demanding a retrial for people of color who are serving sentences for nonviolent crime or just those who are serving sentences for violent crime? | |
| I mean, that's an extraordinary demand right there. | |
| If it stands alone without a demand for retrial of people who actually were found guilty of committing nonviolent crime, If I remember correctly, they effectively... Oh, we've got marijuana-related offenses... Yeah, they demand that a certain number of people be just simply released, which, you know, in the case of marijuana, non-violent marijuana offenses, I'd be all for that. | |
| But in any case, they are proposing... I mean, imagine how this would look, okay? | |
| You start retrying people of color who are currently serving a prison sentence for violent crime, right? | |
| How fair do we think these trials would be? | |
| They have no chance of being fair right now. | |
| Well, they have no chance of being fair right now. | |
| There's certainly going to be a bias in favor of assuming that... That there was so much bias in the first trial that it should probably be overturned. | |
| Right. | |
| But it also, you know... | |
| They effectively, I mean elsewhere I've seen just the advocacy for the complete abolition of the prison system. | |
| So we're talking about A, turning a lot of very dangerous people loose, actually dangerous people who in many cases may be psychopathic, may not be in any way recoverable, right? | |
| So at the same time you're talking about eliminating the police, so the mechanism that would disincentivize those people from harassing Murdering everybody, you know, anybody who resists, but they also might generate themselves effectively an army. | |
| In other words, given the tenor of the moment, I would imagine that your chances of being exonerated in a retrial would have a lot to do with whether or not you said the right kinds of things about the movement and its necessity. | |
| So, okay, you can take that down now, Zach. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, anyway, the basic point, I guess, is the proposals are not | |
| If they were advanced in a brainstorming session about how civilization might be remade, they would be immediately shot down on the basis that they are not tenable, and the people who advanced such terrible, dangerous ideas would lose credibility in an honest brainstorming session about civilization. | |
| And the fact that we don't have the power to do that has to do Only with the social incentives surrounding this moment. | |
| Right? | |
| Anything that points in one direction is considered not only legitimate, but obvious and important. | |
| And anything that goes in the other direction is presumed to be null and void and the result of pure racism. | |
| It's such a simple game. | |
| So obviously gameable. | |
| And yet, those of us who are saying just that are, because we are all within this game that we never wanted to play, so easily accused of by simply saying that we must be doing so by reason of racism. | |
| All you have to do is cloak something in the language of Black Lives Matter or Shut Down STEM or whatever it is, whatever the tagline is at the moment, and you can get away with almost anything else. | |
| You can slip in almost anything else as long as it fits generally under that guise. | |
| And anything that runs counter, you are not allowed to investigate, to think about, to consider. | |
| So then the question is, I find us in a very dangerous predicament, which is, okay, we're beginning to figure out, we're beginning to be able to discuss just how preposterous the movement is, which does not mean that the fuel that is driving it isn't based on something very important. | |
| The frustration about an economic system that is rigged against many people. | |
| It's rigged against millennials, through debt, it's rigged against certain populations based on where you are born and grow up, what kind of schools are there. | |
| The frustration is real. | |
| It is bewildering to everybody. | |
| It seems to be that either you land on the I'm in favor of these protests side and therefore I accept their discussion of what has taken place and what should happen now or I reject these protests and I don't believe that this is unfair. | |
| I believe civilization is pretty fair and I'm not listening. | |
| The right position is in the space that has not existed until now, or has struggled to exist and so far failed to get a foothold. | |
| Which is, how can we discuss the actual problem without embracing this lunacy? | |
| And it is lunacy. | |
| The idea of removing the police is, that is basically a gun to the head of the republic. | |
| So, I think Sam did an excellent job of extending the Overton window, statistically speaking, so that we can look at the claim of lethal police violence and whether or not it appears to be racially motivated. | |
| Eric put out a very interesting essay at the beginning of his most recent portal. | |
| I haven't listened to the whole thing, so I can't recommend the whole episode yet, because I never do that if I haven't listened. | |
| But anyway, the essay at the beginning is quite excellent. | |
| His essay? | |
| Yeah, it's about something he talked about when he was on the Dark Horse Podcast several days ago, the culture of meritocracy inside the black community, which is a very interesting topic. | |
| These are forays into the no man's land that exists between the two wrong perspectives. | |
| Civilization is fair and civilization is so biased that we have to pull the plug on it, right? | |
| The forays are really important. | |
| We have to figure out how to discuss these things. | |
| We have to figure out how to protect people who do discuss these things. | |
| Even when they're wrong, they have to be protected so that they have the ability to explore without being immediately blown up for making an error, right? | |
| And I think the iconic example is Dave Chappelle. | |
| I mean, I sort of feel like it's great that an honest broker Who does get the frustration clearly, right? | |
| He clearly gets the real problem and who has gained the trust of so many people. | |
| If he can be compelled that actually there is a way that the story does add up that isn't one of these two other versions, that will be, uh, that will be a huge gain for all of us. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, we're at about an hour. | |
| We're at about an hour. | |
| Is that where we're at for now? | |
| I think that's where we're at for now. | |
| Okay, so we wanted to say a couple of things about changes that are afoot. | |
| We are going to, as usual, answer Super Chat questions that came in this time on the YouTube livestream, and also those that come in on the following one in the Q&A that we will do starting in about 15 minutes. | |
| We have also added to my Patreon a couple of tiers, such that we're trying to basically establish a way to show support, to have membership in the Dark Horse livestreams. | |
| So, and we haven't posted this on yours yet, but we will do so, that at the $5 a month level, you will have access to a private livestream that we will do, in which we answer questions that are not otherwise If you're out there and at the $11 a month or more level, you will have priority asking such questions that we then answer. | |
| We'll do these once a month, private live streams to people who are interested in hearing more from us. | |
| Alright, I have one more thing and then we will take our break and return to do the Q&A. | |
| The one more thing is, I want to make perfectly clear, A. Dave Chappelle, you'd be absolutely welcome to come talk to us about this. | |
| The second thing is, Dave Chappelle, I think you've got this one somewhat wrong. | |
| But that doesn't make me right. | |
| I'd be equally up to have you compel me that I've got it wrong. | |
| So, one way or the other, I think the important thing is that the discussion happen. | |
| Alright everybody, we will see you in about 15 minutes. |