#77: How Facts are Made (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 77th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this 77th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode, we discuss this week’s verdict in the Chauvin trial; what is actually going on in Portland, and how local leadership is responding; and ...
Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live streaming from Portland, Why?
Because that's where we live stream from.
This is number 77 in our series of live streams.
I am here, of course, with Dr. Heather Hying.
Our seventh palindromic episode.
Seventh.
I had not put that together yet, which will not surprise you at all, but now that you say it, sure, 77.
Yeah.
So today, we do not have any ads today.
We have a few announcements, we're going to talk about where we're going, and then we'll launch into it.
We'll be talking a little bit about the Chauvin verdict, continue to talk about what's going on in Portland, A bit about journalism, a little story on some new proposed paid leave for employees that I have not shared with you, but you will be impressed by the audacity.
Shocked and amazed, maybe.
Shocked and amazed, yes.
But first, and I also want to begin with just a small personal announcement before we move in, but first, tomorrow is the monthly private Q&A at my Patreon.
Please consider joining us there.
It's every month, two-hour Q&A from 11am to 1pm Pacific, and we have a lot of fun with them.
It's a small enough group that joins us live.
We leave them up for anyone who's on the Patreon to watch later, but it's a small enough group that we can actually monitor the chat live and interact with it and do a little bit of follow-up in a way that, you know, we don't look at the chat for these.
So we encourage you to join us there.
And I guess before we see you again, I believe next week you will have had your first Patreon conversation of the month as well next Saturday, which is the... which one is your Saturday conversation?
Saturday conversation is the Coalition of the Reasonable.
And how reasonable, in fact, is that coalition?
Shockingly so.
Yeah, I'm not all that shocked actually.
A very non-random sample of highly reasonable people.
Exactly.
I find...
Almost everyone that we hear from and who is choosing to engage with us, either in a position to support us financially or not, is shockingly reasonable.
And I guess I'm less and less shocked by that as time goes on.
I guess it's just the disconnect between that and what we are told everyone sounds like in the rest of the world.
Yeah, it's one of the hopeful facts that were we to be able to convey it to people that showing up in the world in a particular way results in the world anteing up and delivering interaction after interaction that is highly reasonable.
If people understood what they were missing and that a small amount of faith, as it were, in treating people well and doing a thorough analysis and not listening too much to the haters results in a community emerging that is high quality.
Yeah.
People would be more inclined to behave that way.
It's like believing that beyond the event horizon of hot, fast dopamine hits, there's actually something better and more wonderful than the heat and the anger.
Yeah and in fact it's a little bit like every addiction that people have where something that delivers on the short term is blocking them from something much better on the long term and the problem is it's just very hard to look past the immediate.
Yeah that's right.
Um, so, um, I lost a friend this week and I'm not going to name him now and we're not going to talk about him much.
I may come back, I may come back to this.
I may speak about him later.
He asked that no public commemorations take place, but I am not certain that I need to honor those wishes of his because, um, and I know this will be difficult for, for many people to hear, but, um, because he took his own life.
And a family member of his shared a note that he had left for me in which he said that he hoped that I understand.
And I don't.
It's not that this came as a complete surprise.
So I had talked to him over the years and I had asked him over and over again that if he was thinking this to come to me.
He knew I would not understand and I don't.
I'm heartbroken and I'm also angry.
No good comes of such things.
And I was then moved to tears, actually, when someone anonymous to me on Twitter said, in response to your announcement of your and Geert's podcast, that you and I and Douglas Murray, quote, are significant reasons why I am still alive after this crazy year.
So I am, in this week in particular, just particularly grateful for that sentiment to be coming my way and to feel that we can do good even while some things, even things that we desperately want not to be true are out of our control.
So I wanted to share that because I am in a different mind frame obviously than I normally am and largely Brett is going to be on lead here today.
Yes, we will see how that goes, given my certain deficit of skills in the area of executive function and leading.
But anyway, yeah, it's a terrible turn of events.
I know that you did our friend a tremendous amount of good, obviously, in the end things went the way they did.
I also will just say, if we do decide to return to this, that there's a tough point that I think people miss, which is that the commemorative ceremonies that follow a death, especially one like this, are really about living, and the living are more or less entitled to navigate as makes sense.
So while I think it is important to try to honor people's wishes, when they leave the world, those wishes are not the only thing that matters, right?
People exist in a social context, And those of us who go on have to be able to figure out how to grapple with things and to the extent that someone's wishes are an obstacle to that because they were very focused on their own situation.
I think, you know, we have to be careful but there's a certain amount of license to navigate as needed and frankly I think In the question of this particular person who was very thoughtful and insightful, they would also understand, were they able to see it clearly?
Yeah, I think so.
And I guess just one more thing in light of that, for this episode I have put behind us...
We're getting instructions from our producer.
For this episode, I've just put behind us one of the boat replicas that he had given to our younger son.
So that's behind us today as a minor physical commemoration.
All right, so I think the first thing we are going to talk about is the Chauvin verdict, and I don't want to delve too deeply into the particulars.
Frankly, I think many people were absolutely glued to their screens looking at the details of the trial as they unfolded, and obviously people were tied up in many cases in rooting one way or the other.
For a verdict, but what I do want to talk about is the implications of what happened That is to say we have a conviction on three counts that Followed very short jury deliberation in which they apparently asked no questions and
And in a wider context that was frankly bizarre and quite jarring, in which Maxine Waters and the President both appeared to urge the jury toward a particular conclusion.
What I want to highlight is that this was exactly the fear that I expressed on Joe Rogan last year.
My concern was that we obviously have a very dangerous and volatile situation where we've had violent riots in the case of Portland.
We've had them months on end on a nightly basis ostensibly tied to this situation and what it reveals.
And the problem is that we obviously had the danger of renewed violence were the verdict to have been not guilty.
On the other hand, we have a standard in this country of reasonable doubt.
We have the burden on the state to prove its case, and the facts of this case were highly complex.
In effect, the state needed to prove that a reasonable officer knowing what Chauvin knew Would not have acted as Chauvin did They also needed to prove that George Floyd didn't die from other Conditions that just happened to occur during the the progress of this complex arrest and in both cases there are tremendous reasons for
So, in any case, without focusing too much on the details, the question is this.
Did this jury conclude what it concluded because of what was presented in court and because the arguments were persuasive where they needed to be?
Or did it conclude that for other reasons, such as a belief that some larger sort of justice required this answer, which, frankly, in the context of a sitting president urging a jury towards an apparent verdict and a member of Congress doing the same? in the context of a sitting president urging a jury This is very, very frightening.
And for those who haven't thought deeply about it, the issue in question is this.
The founders of the country created an environment in which the state had a tremendous burden that it needed to overcome in court for a reason.
Because the danger of the state not meeting such a burden left the state in an asymmetrically powerful position.
So in other words, it's not that the founders weren't aware that a preponderance of the evidence, meaning the evidence said more this than that, was available.
Because of course, that's what we have in civil trials.
But in criminal trials, they wanted to hobble the state and ensure that the state Had to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt in order to protect the rest of us from the state.
Now in this case, we have another factor, which is effectively mobs engaged in violence demanding an outcome.
And we have the state appearing to be persuaded by those mobs such that the executive saw fit to intervene in the decision-making process of jurors.
Whether or not Chauvin is actually guilty, he's obviously been convicted, so in a technical sense he is guilty.
Whether he was actually guilty and it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt in court in this venue is another question.
But the hazard of allowing a situation in which public violence persuades the state to put its thumb on the scales of a trial, a criminal trial, The danger of that is impossibly great.
And what is absolutely shocking to me is that people do not seem to understand that the burden of the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of one's peers That is the thing that protects us.
This isn't about Chauvin.
This is about 350 million of us who are protected from the state's aggression by that counterintuitive innovation.
And my concern is that we are un-inventing it.
I'm sorry, I lost you at the end.
Which counterintuitive?
So I was going to make a point and I lost your logic at the very end.
Sorry about that.
My point is the idea that the state should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt is counterintuitive.
Right?
One would expect that the state would just have to prove that your guilt is more likely than not.
Well, so this actually reminds me of what I was talking about two episodes ago with regard to type 1 and type 2 errors with regard to medical and surgical interventions for children who declare themselves trans.
Right?
Which kind of error do we prefer?
Do we prefer to make false positives?
And in the case of criminal cases, it's, you know, do we prefer to falsely convict those who are innocent or do we prefer to falsely let off those who are actually guilty?
And what the founders of this country decided is that we absolutely 100% prefer to let off some people who are guilty rather than ever put an innocent person behind bars.
Yes, exactly.
They did.
It is before those terms, before those statistical terms ever existed, they made quite clear their logic and the idea was to prevent the tyranny of the state, which they were, of course, keenly aware of in light of what they had experienced.
With Great Britain.
The twist here is that we now have the danger of the tyranny of the state under the control of the mob.
Right.
And that is a truly frightening prospect that in effect what we, to the extent that this was not the correct verdict, that there was reasonable doubt on the basis that, for example, And just to be clear, I know you've said it, but when you say that this verdict may not have been correct, you are not actually saying anything about whether or not Chauvin is actually guilty.
You are saying that the evidence provided in the case does not appear to meet the standard.
Right, and it is almost... You may also be making that other point, but that is not the legal point.
I'm certainly not trying to make that point.
The point I'm trying to make is that, for example, we had evidence in the case of George Floyd having ingested substantial quantities of drugs that would have put him in jeopardy in light of his heart condition.
They might have put him in jeopardy absent a heart condition, but he clearly had a heart condition.
He had had COVID and was therefore compromised.
And he was being arrested and he was clearly panicking, which elevated his heart rate.
And so the question of whether or not he died as a result of what Chauvin did, or whether or not he died as a result of the situation triggering a heart condition to cause his heart to fail, is one in which it is hard to imagine how a jury of reasonable people would not have had at least some reasonable doubt about that question.
So, in light of the fact that they came back... So the question to be asked is, what other forces were in play?
Right.
What other forces were in play?
And in fact... And one of the forces is blatantly obvious, which is the threat of the mob to do damage.
The threat of the mob or the desire to do some kind of justice above and beyond what the jury's job was.
Who's to say?
But the problem is you cannot sacrifice an individual.
You can't say, well, Chauvin is one man and You know, riotous mobs could kill tens or hundreds.
We can't do that calculation.
We cannot allow ourselves to do that calculation because it isn't the ten or a hundred people who might be injured or killed in rioting that it's up against.
It's up against the protection of the 350 million of us who are insulated from governmental tyranny by this principle.
And so, you know, in essence, as counterintuitive as it is, that principle must stand irrespective of the cost of doing the right and legal thing in court.
You know, it was clear this was coming.
This is why I said it on Joe Rogan.
And I must say, it was one of the most uncomfortable things I have ever said in my life in the, you know, in the unfolding emergence of the facts of this case to say, actually, you know, as everybody was saying, this is clearly murder.
And I was saying, it's not so clearly murder.
This was complex.
What you need is a court.
And I'm concerned that a court will not be able to do its job in this case because of the larger threat of what will happen if it does.
And also, what you need as a court is not a statement that is partisan.
It's not a political statement.
It is a statement for democracy, regardless of where you stand, left, right, Democrat, Republican.
What you need as a court in order to make such decisions is actually what stands between us and anarchy.
Anarchy and tyranny, and in this case we may have both, conspiring together.
And, you know, yes, it is absolutely unpartisan.
In fact, the thing that keeps ringing in my ear is the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, right?
The reason that you protect this standard, even when it will free some guilty people, Right?
The reason that you protect this standard is because of the justifiable fear that we should all have of a government that isn't held to this standard.
Right?
And, you know, you don't know when it's going to be on your side versus on your enemy's side.
And so the point is... That's always the error of these partisan moves, isn't it?
It's always the error.
And, you know, as we watch the educational apparatus that is supposed to be upgrading all of our software come apart and engage in these petty games, I am in my mind constantly building a list of things that a proper curriculum should expose every single person to.
As we've been doing for decades.
Right, exactly.
You know, you just built a list of what should be, and one of the things is Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance.
You know, you need 45 minutes on… So what did you spell it out?
The Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance just essentially says you shouldn't make rules that you wouldn't want to live on the wrong side of, right?
You don't want to make a rule that you shouldn't be happy to face.
And so that puts a limit on the kinds of rules you create, and it frankly sidelines most of this partisan garbage because You may get an advantage from doing it on Wednesday and then on Friday you suffer the cost of it.
And, right, we don't want to live in that world, right?
We don't want, you know, to, for example, start increasing the number of people on the court to compensate for what the last administration did because the point is then the next administration will do it to you and what you'll have is a, you know... We're all Supreme Court justices now.
Right, we're all... Right, exactly.
That's the natural end point of that game.
It is.
It is because, in effect, it's a race to the bottom that all the smart people know you don't want to trigger, right?
So, in any case, I'm not sure where to go beyond that except to say that I think everyone who did watch this trial, if you paid any attention at all, You saw reasonable doubt, right?
It doesn't mean that you think that he wasn't in the end responsible for George Floyd's death, though a reasonable person could imagine easily that he wasn't.
That George Floyd had a heart attack as a result of an elevated heart rate and drugs that he had taken and that he died under Chauvin's knee for endogenous reasons rather than exogenous ones.
But That isn't the point.
The jury is instructed very specifically that the state must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt and they are supposed to exclude the consequences of saying one way or the other whether or not the state met that burden.
Very good.
I don't know about that.
It's just the way that I...
Acknowledge that you're finished, I guess.
It is very good that we have arrived at this moment.
Something like that.
In this conversation, anyway.
Okay.
We wanted to talk a little bit about Portland.
Is that right?
Portland, yes.
So, I've got a number of photographs that I want to show, but after, we have a few videos, short videos from our current mayor, Ted Wheeler, here in Portland.
And I don't know, maybe you introduce that, or we can just launch into the video.
Well, I mean, let's say Ted Wheeler has now been trending on Twitter.
Always interesting when Ted Wheeler is trending on Twitter.
He's trending on Twitter and this time, you know, I always click with some trepidation.
Right.
And in this case, I was actually Quite surprised and relieved to find that in effect what he has finally said, and as you pointed out in a conversation earlier, it's not the first time he's said something like this, but he has said it and then reneged on it, and in this case maybe he's finally grown aware, but what he's effectively said is that
Portland has a serious problem with anarchists that these are Lawbreakers who must be arrested And that is something that he has been very very timid about and so he has extended a state of emergency through the weekend and he has Instructed the police and I should point out that it are we gonna show the videos or not?
Yeah, I think we should.
I think we should show the videos.
I should point out that in Portland, we have the odd fact of our mayor also being our police commissioner, which means that what he says about what the police should do carries more weight than it might in some other city.
So, all right.
Zach, do you want to show the first?
They're not the same video.
They're two different videos.
Do you want to show both of them, or do you want just the- Why not the one that you sent, Zach?
Okay, so hold on just a second, Zach, then.
In a slightly longer video from Coin6, which is a local CBS affiliate.
I think it's CBS.
Is CBS the one with the eye?
Yes.
Honestly, I went to their site.
I was like, I think this is CBS's logo.
There's nothing on the site that says CBS anywhere.
They just assume we know that that crazy, scary looking eye is CBS.
Anyway, it's a different topic.
One of the newscasters says, with regard to Antifas or the anarchists, I'm not even sure who now is claiming to be doing these things, they keep on making these announcements in advance, they're going to do these direct actions, right?
And so the newscaster says, in the past, events billed as direct action have ended with violence and destruction.
That's now showing up on the news.
Yep.
That is now showing up in the news, finally.
And now we have this shorter video, Zach, the one minute, four second one or so.
And I've extended the state of emergency through the weekend.
Our job is to unmask them, arrest them, and prosecute them.
I want to personally thank neighbors, family, friends, and others who have come forward with vital evidence People know who these criminals are.
They know what they're up to.
If you have any information, please contact the police.
Acting Chief Davis will provide specifics shortly.
I also want you to know that these people often arrive at their so-called direct actions in cars, and they're all dressed in all black.
If you see this, call the police.
If you can provide a license plate, If you can do so safely, that information can help later.
Together, we can make a stand.
We're doing what we can today.
I'm also asking for your help to make a stand and take our city back.
Thank you.
Okay, so, first of all I just want to address the elephant in the room as it were.
Actually that may turn out to be a better metaphor in this case than I had anticipated.
Are you sure it's not a donkey?
It is the elephant in the room in this case.
So I do not know whether or not we are having an impact on, for example, Ted Wheeler's understanding of what's going on.
I do know that this week I had a piece in UnHerd, which is a British publication, on what's going on in Portland and of the Absurd fact of local businesses putting signage in their window, which you have called Don't Hurt Me Walls, that appear to attempt to usher vandals on to harm someone else, right?
An obvious game theoretic hazard of the civilian authority, not only taking no stand, but hobbling the police and the enforcement of the law.
I do think that there is a strong chance.
We are constantly facing calls that we, you know, admit that the conservatives are right, that we acknowledge that we are conservatives or something like this.
And I I think this, we've never done this because we're not conservatives, and while the conservatives are in many cases defending principles that are traditionally liberal in this case, where liberals have abandoned them, the fact of those principles having been innovated by liberals is an important part of the story.
In any case, I just want to say, we don't know whether we're having an effect, but I think it is very important, and likely to be having an effect, that people who are local to Portland, who are not interested in mocking it as a terrible place, and people who are not interested in mocking liberalism itself, are saying, hey, actually, this is an untenable situation, and that the fact is, the violence itself
Has adjusted what people acknowledge.
You and I meet people all the time who say very standard things about their belief until we say non-standard things, at which point we get confessions about what they actually think, right?
Here in Portland.
And so, no doubt, Mayor Wheeler is getting some of the same... And many people show up in our email and comments and such as well from Portland.
Right.
Saying thank you for saying things that sound like the conversations happening within my home.
And so the mayor is surely not getting a proper representation of what the citizens of his city actually believe and want because everybody is so busy saying things designed to get the mob to move on to someone else that you get the wrong idea.
You get the idea that Portland is much more supportive of the violence than it actually is.
And so what I am hoping is that the ability That our position as unapologetic liberals who believe that coddling these violent anarchists is a terrible, terrible mistake, and say so repeatedly, that that is actually finally getting through, and that in part what may have happened here is that the mayor may be realizing
That there is more support for him doing the right thing than he has understood.
And while I'm very angry at all of the violence that has happened up till now, if he has finally understood this and he's going to stick to enforcing the law equally against all lawbreakers, then, you know, thank goodness.
And maybe, you know, maybe we've hit bottom.
Yeah, well, it's always a dangerous thing to imagine.
I don't know if, since we can never hear the videos that play, I'm not sure that it was clear hopefully to those just listening that that was in fact Ted Wheeler talking at a press conference about Saying specifically that our job is to unmask them, arrest them, and prosecute them, which is the strongest words that he's used.
And I took a walk around a Northwest neighborhood yesterday, not the Pearl District, adjacent to the Pearl District.
Although a neighborhood in which there has been a lot of damage as well, you know, to the point that, you know, some people are still saying, as I understand it, there's, you know, all the damage has been limited to one square block.
Like, you know, well, for a while in this last summer, they were certainly focusing on the federal building, but it was never restricted to that, and it certainly expanded its scope quite a lot to a few regular places and now regular neighborhoods.
But my sense yesterday, walking around, is that the facade on the street is now cracking as well.
That there were far fewer Don't Hurt Me walls on businesses.
There's a little bit of signage still up, the occasional Black Lives Matter sign and such, but none of these arrays of Don't Hurt Me walls, which have become the norm, which quickly became the norm as of early last summer, And what I do see is more indications of fatigue and questioning, and then these outposts and individual homes, really, of signage.
And so I just took some photos and we're going to walk through them and talk about them.
So Zach, don't put my screen up just yet until I find these.
And okay, so you can put my screen up now, Zach.
And for those of you who are on Twitter, I am I felt obligated to let Paul Krugman have it on Twitter yesterday because he claimed that it was basically a GOP fever dream that anything was happening in cities that was untoward over the last 10 months.
And so as part of the thread that I wrote in response to him yesterday, I put a couple of these images up.
So some of you will be familiar with these already.
So this is just a sticker on, I don't even remember what, something.
Um, in a neighborhood near downtown Portland says, New Portland sucks.
Now this could be, I could imagine the person who put this up meant one of two really different things, right?
They could be part of the sort of anarchist or woke or, you know, any number of groups over in that space who want, you know, more chaos and less law and order and more fear among ordinary citizens and such.
Um, or it could mean, um, it could be the same sense that I have.
You know, we're newcomers to Portland.
We've only been here for two and a half years.
Um, but, uh, actually as I said in that tweet thread, yeah, this, this new Portland does suck, and the new Democratic Party sucks, and this new national conversation and the new national culture that are becoming reified suck, and we can all do better, and we all deserve better.
Um, anything you want to add to that?
Yeah, I mean, I do think it's these structures and they urge us on to behavior that is itself appalling.
But I agree.
It's not us who sucks.
It's these structures.
You know, a corrupt Democratic Party that wants to cynically ride a woke wave, for example, leaves those of us who, you know, would ordinarily
Find a home in the Democratic Party absolutely homeless so You know that that is just a simple fact and I think Increasingly the failure of these institutions for several different reasons some of them economic some of them you know the political corruption and other such phenomena that that leaves us to erect alternatives, right?
There really is only one or maybe two choices.
You could recapture these things, which turns out to be very, very difficult for obvious reasons, or you could build around them.
And I agree.
I've also noticed I hadn't I think said anything about it but there is a an almost searching for new ways of shaping the conversation.
So there's been a mind numbing chorus of, you know, Black Lives Matter, for example.
And then there has been this sort of people trying to figure out how to signal.
Yes, I'm in principle on board with the idea of Black Lives Matter, but I'm not on board with the idea of, you know, violent riots or all white people are racist or any of those things.
So I don't know, maybe you maybe want to show your your next image.
Yeah, so I mean, this speaks to exactly the searching that you are talking about, that increasingly, you know, the graffiti, the tags that we're seeing, as of last summer, through the winter, through, you know, the first part of the spring, really were entirely single note.
It was just this monotone, uh, in support of what turns out to be a divisive, hateful, um, series of actions.
And now we are seeing things like, who are we?
Right?
And then, you know, over same neighborhood, I happened to walk by a first floor, um, or ground floor apartment with a whole lot of stuff in the window.
So here's, here's one of the windows at some distance.
For those who are just listening rather than watching, I'll show close-ups of three of these, but several of the signs that we have become accustomed to, plus a whole lot of Hello Kitty figurines, which struck me as something I hadn't seen before.
Super ominous.
Well, I mean, you joke-ish, but I have been talking with some people elsewhere behind the scenes about the The connections between some of what we're seeing in some of these subcultures, including anime and the rise of some of this very, very physically disconnected social constructionist thinking.
So I'm not sure there isn't an important connection here.
No, I was only partially being ironic.
Hello Kitty, in some sense, I think because it is like, you know, Designed to be the opposite of threatening is actually a very good cloak for some other stuff, and I've also seen it used as sheep's clothing more or less.
Yeah.
So here we have a close-up of one of the things in the window.
White apathy, fragility, ignorance, and silence feeds into violent systems of oppression.
So I'm just showing these, I mean this was interesting because there's literally a crack in the window in front of this and it feels like this kind of message which for months and months and months in Portland and to some degree nationwide and to some degree internationally was the only note that we were allowed to publicly agree to if we wanted to be accepted in polite company or something.
And having literally the crack in the window in front of this Seems like a hopeful metaphor, maybe.
Here we have this hand-drawn picture of Hello Kitty literally saying, Black Lives Matter, and then I don't know what the thing in the puddle next to Hello Kitty is, but it's dream thinking, abolish the police.
I really don't know what's going on here.
Another crack in front of it.
And then then this defund the police with a cartoon image of a of a pig in military and police garb saying I'm just following orders and you know there's He's crushing BLM protesters underneath his giant piggy police feet.
And it says ACAB at the bottom.
All cops are bastards.
So, you know, this is the same rhetoric, right?
But again, this is one apartment that I'm seeing this in.
So let's just run through these before you want to riff on these.
Sure.
Next window over, same apartment, I think.
We have defund the police, share the bacon.
Queer Power, Black Power, Women Power, All Power to the People, and then Protect Black Trans Lives.
Here's a close-up of that one.
Just notable here, you know, Black Trans Lives Matter.
We spent some time talking about what the heck is trans doing and Black Lives Matter all of a sudden.
Last summer, but I believe, and I didn't actually spend as much time with this as I was hoping to, that there's literally one trans man on here and the rest are trans women and that's of course consistent with the idea that a lot of the
Politicking behind raising the rights and visibility of trans people is actually specifically about men who are declaring themselves women and very little in the opposite direction and there's something very important and deep there and we're not going to go there right now.
Defund and demilitarize and dismantle police, in case anyone was still confused about whether or not defund actually means these other things.
At least in some people's heads, yes, it actually 100% does.
Again, with some weird little like Hello Kitty-ish characters around the outside, as if to make this seem like it's all sunshine and flowers messaging.
And finally, sort of shades of Audre Lorde here, dismantle our house, build the new.
They do.
They want to dismantle what they're viewing as our house.
And they say they want to build the new, but I've literally never heard a policy proposal to that end.
I've never heard even a sentence to that end.
What will the new look like?
They're busy declaring themselves ungovernable, and they'll be satisfied with nothing.
There were Violent protests the night that Biden was elected, the night of the Chauvin verdict, you know, no outcome will suffice.
Yeah, I mean it's almost as bad as it is that there is not a single idea on the table that is credible.
It's even worse than that because what is said clearly tells us that the people who are so confidently telling us what we have to do to fix civilization either can't or won't think, right?
So, for example, the idea that we shouldn't call the police when one teenager is about to stab another because teenagers have been fighting with knives for, you know, forever, and I'm not even sure what the conclusion of that idea is supposed to be.
Is it okay that they've been fighting with knives?
Is, you know, how true is that?
Doesn't any reasonable situation prevent teenagers from fighting with knives?
I mean, it just, it's nonsense.
Yeah, it's nonsense.
But, you know, let us just say, again, I'm worried about the death of the counterintuitive, right?
So we've talked a lot across heterodox circles about the importance of nuance.
And this is really another facet of that same gem, which is the things that make the West great, right?
To the extent that they're intuitive, they don't require comment and everybody else has them as well.
To the extent that they are counterintuitive, then we have to hold not only the thing itself, but the explanation for why that thing works, right?
And so here you have a bunch of people engaging in another counterintuitive right, the right to say anything, right?
And I would protect their right to say anything up to the point where they are calling for engagement.
You know, the death of Andy Ngo or the murder of police.
And frankly, that reference to Bacon is right on the border, right?
But other than that, should they be able to say defund the police?
Yeah.
Should they be able to say abolish, dismantle?
Should they be able to say all white people are racist?
Hell yeah, they should be able to say all that garbage.
Doesn't make it true, but the point is their right to say that is the, you know, it comes along with our right to say, here's why that's garbage, right?
Here's why that is insane.
Here's why, if you believe those things, you don't belong anywhere near the levers of power because you're going to wreck the ship that all of us are depending on.
Um, so in any case, you know, the irony is that that, uh, the, uh, abolish the police movement is also very interested in dictating what can and cannot be said.
And, um, to bring this around to where we started, the really interesting thing they have been Very effective at policing speech right not by punishing those who speak right there only a certain amount successful at that but it's the thought for every person who speaks up and is punished there are a thousand who self-censor right and so this exploration of.
You know, well, OK, I am for that, but I'm not for this other stuff you're saying.
Right.
This attempt to parse the distinction between the the fraction of the message that does the heavy lifting and then the payload.
Right.
That exploration is about people waking up to the need to figure out how to say these things.
And I wish, frankly, they were being a hell of a lot more courageous about it.
But the fact that they're doing the exploration at all is hopeful.
And the fact that Mayor Wheeler is recognizing that in fact, you know what?
They're going to say shitty things about him, right?
But they're going to say shitty things about him anyway, right?
No matter what he does.
He cannot appease the mob who literally declares themselves, and I didn't find it, but there are a number of places.
In the social media feeds of the self-proclaimed anarchists saying, we are ungovernable.
And I believe they were marching with those signs literally the night that Biden was elected.
We are the ungovernable.
We are ungovernable.
You know, burn it all down.
Why would you try to appease people who say that?
Right.
Especially after they spent the entire summer pretending that the violence was about Trump.
Right?
And then the point is, some of us have been saying, no it isn't.
Well, they were pretending it was about, you know, and about police violence and all.
It wasn't just Trump, of course.
Well, I agree, but over the- But, I mean, in Portland, a lot of it was, you know, Trump sent in the feds, Trump's- Right.
And so the point is, cause and effect were inverted, and, you know, They're going to say terrible things about Mayor Wheeler no matter what, right?
We're going to say terrible things about Mayor Wheeler to the extent that Mayor Wheeler is a terrible mayor.
To the extent that he comes around and starts acting in Portland's interest, we'll say, you know what?
We're pissed off about what went before, but thank goodness we're headed in the right direction.
Like we always say to our children, it's about the future, man.
It's about the future.
Can we get it right from now on?
It's about the future, and so what did you learn?
Yeah, so this is interesting.
I should say, in passing, We have invited Mayor Wheeler on the program before.
Have we?
Have you?
I believe I have.
If I haven't, it's an oversight.
I meant to.
But I believe I have.
I'm going to invite him again if he would like to talk about what is in the interest of Portland, what is the future of liberalism, any of these things.
That would be wonderful.
I think it would be great to have him.
I would also say to Paul Krugman, What you tweeted yesterday, which Heather rightly took you to task, she was not alone in doing so, but rightly took you to task for, indicates that you have completely lost sight of what is actually taking place in certain parts of the country, like, for example, Portland, where yes, actually violent mobs have taken to actually damaging the city and threatening citizens regularly.
I mean, it's evidence of either a willful blindness or lying or, again, a kind of this innumeracy which, for God's sake, a Nobel laureate in economics should not be guilty of.
But like, I took a run and nothing bad happened to me, therefore nothing bad happens in that part of the city ever.
Sort of logic.
And I don't know if he took any runs, whatever, but I've seen that kind of logic from other journalists.
Like, well, I was out in that place that they say is dangerous and nothing happened.
That's the same.
It's the same logic as mostly peaceful.
It is.
On the other hand, I mean, first of all, this one is so easy to falsify, and Krugman ended up looking so dumb for having said this, that I don't think it could be anything.
It's not a numeracy, right?
It can't be a numeracy.
It can't be lying, because it would be so stupid to engage in this kind of lying.
It has to be, look, dude, your filter bubble is actually preventing you from actually knowing what's going on, and it's at a level that is dangerous.
No, I think there's an adjacent hypothesis which is going to sound very similar, but it's actually different.
Your filter bubble is preventing you from voicing what is going on, and maybe it's preventing you from seeing it, but even if you can see it, you shall not say it.
And so there are some number of people in that filter bubble that Krugman presumably shares with, you know, a whole lot of other big name, powerful journalists and thinkers and all, who actually can begin to see, can see what is going on, but they will be ostracized.
They will be shunned if, you know, if they say it.
And, you know, we see the same kind of filter bubble and, you know, it's the gated institutional narrative that your brother so named, the djinn, Over in, you know, origins of COVID space.
And in actually the trans rights activists are not speaking for most trans people space.
And you know, a lot of these things were, you know, a number of us are like, actually, no, and sorry, you can't fire me.
I don't work for you.
Right.
But a lot of people, you know, have jobs, have employers, and don't feel like they can say anything.
So that's, you know, the vast majority of Americans.
And really, it's incumbent on people like Krugman and the other trendsetters Who do kind of-ish have employers but actually could say anything that they need to, that they feel is true, to look outside the damn filter bubble and to say what is true.
And to never make these claims that are so easily falsifiable.
My God.
All right.
So, you know, I agree that there are at least two adjacent explanations in here and that the right explanation is liable to be somewhere in this neighborhood.
I do think, surely, Paul Krugman discovered something in him having tweeted what he did.
He tweeted that conservatives are all under the false impression that violent mobs have been damaging major cities, and this happens to have happened without the notice of the people who live in those cities.
So, Paul, you fucked up.
We live in Portland.
It has happened here.
We have been Absolutely steadfast and careful in not exaggerating what has happened here.
The violence has been relentless, but it has been concentrated on narrow parts of the city, so there is regular violence.
It is not the city as a whole on fire or anything like that, but it has happened.
We have noticed.
Although it's also true that homicides and fatal car crashes are way up this year, and that's less concentrated.
Who exactly is to blame?
Well, the move that has been somewhat successful to defund the police and to defund particular branches of policing ...are in part to blame for that, and the reason that the City Council was able to move forward with that move was largely because of mob support for an anarchic branch of BLM.
Absolutely.
I should point out that Paul can also look up the fact that Antifa broke into the mayor's own building and lit a fire in his lobby despite the fact that there were families inhabiting the building upstairs.
This is not fiction.
It's not symbolic.
It's not hard to find if you look for it.
So, two things.
I would say one, Paul, you should come on the program and you should talk to us.
It's the right thing to do, having discovered that somehow, whatever it is that you're doing to source information on how things are going in places like Portland has somehow caused you to miss the salient pieces of information.
And you'll get a fair shake if you come on Dark Horse.
I would also suggest, actually, the more I think about it, I would like people, if they haven't encountered the piece that I wrote for UnHerd, to check it out.
We will link it in the description here.
And it discusses a number of things, including the predicament of those of us citizens who would like a functional The city in which we didn't feel like we had to be armed, but have had to reluctantly purchase arms because it was clear that we couldn't rely on the protection of the police with the mayor's office hobbling them.
And I would say that that piece also ends on an important note about what could be true of a place like Portland if it decided to make, to not make the same mistakes as LA and New York and Seattle and these other cities.
Or just, I mean really, and we've talked about this before, but The West Coast has suffered very similar fate, the big West Coast cities have suffered similar fates due to, frankly, similar ideological underpinnings becoming dominant in those cities.
San Diego less so, San Diego is a bit of an outlier here.
But LA, San Francisco, Seattle, why, when looking at those other major cities on the West Coast, would you say, you know, okay, yeah, Portland, let's try the same?
And, you know, we're clearly there.
Portland is smaller, and it's less far along in terms of its economic development.
And why wouldn't we aspire to be the shining jewel that Seattle and San Francisco and LA have been in parts?
I don't know what all we could be amazing at, but it is a beautiful city with an extraordinary Populous.
And we're encouraging a tiny band of anarchists to set the narrative.
Yeah, who are destroying the tax base and will therefore mean that the city will be hobbled in doing what it needs to do for its citizens.
And frankly, all of the oppressed people that liberals of this stripe have given so much lip service would be better served by actually governing the city in a way that it was economically vibrant.
So in any case, you should check out that article.
It deals with this and it deals with the very uncomfortable question of whether or not what has happened in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland is that the tension that makes things so good, the tension where liberals try to solve problems and conservatives hold their feet to the fire and focus on the potential unintended consequences,
That has failed and it is the unopposed and therefore uninvestigated kind of liberalism that we're seeing that is the hazard.
You know, you're hearing this from liberals.
This is not an indictment of the idea of progress.
This is a recognition that you need people to hold your feet to the fire or terrible ideas end up as policy.
Yeah.
And, you know, it is a truism in modern American politics that cities trend blue and the rural areas trend red.
But, you know, New York, I think, is going to look different from the West Coast cities because it is more diverse politically.
The East Coast and the major cities in the middle of the country and on the Gulf Coast There is more pushback and the West Coast has a kind of homogeneity, a lack of diversity, actually, in its ideological underpinnings, that meant that as this thing started to ascend, there were very few people in any position of power who actually were on the right.
Or those of us on the left who, you know, maybe took a little longer to see it than people on the right would have because it came shrouded in stuff that sounded like it was coming from the left, to say, now hold on a minute.
You know, that's, that is not going to end well.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, in any case, we'll see where this goes.
I mean, it could go a lot of places.
I certainly did not expect to see Mayor Wheeler take a stand yesterday, so maybe that's a hopeful sign and hopefully he'll stick to it and take us up on our offer to come visit Dark Horse.
Yeah, that would be great.
Here's just a note about State of journalism.
This is from last Sunday's New York Times, the very top of the Sunday Review, which is, you know, to my reading, we still get this.
We still get this hard copy of the Sunday New York Times.
And I always take crap from people when I admit that, and you have no responsibility for it.
Well, we get it for exercise purposes.
We don't have birds.
What?
We don't have birds.
No, no, no.
Exercise.
Exercise?
Yes.
Rolling our eyes.
I see.
I'm crossing our teeth.
Wow.
So this is Sunday.
What even does it say?
Actually, I have a hard copy here.
See, I actually do have it.
Sunday, April 18th, the very top of the Sunday Review.
It says, With a quote that's actually unattributed, like I presume it's in this front, this article that is titled Minnesota, America.
But the quote at the very top without attribution is, my great grandparents joined in the great migration to land in Minneapolis.
And over the years, we've all seen how neighbors choose to ignore the suffering of those who don't look like them.
So, I didn't go to journalism school.
I was in journalism in high school.
I don't really know what it is that journalists are supposed to be doing by the book or actually have thought deeply about exactly what their job is supposed to be, but I know that the best journalism that I've seen
He goes and collects individual stories from people as a way to either build a story or to add color to a story that they've already got, and then either uses those stories to build an analysis, or better, goes and finds analysis that other people have done and uses the stories to basically tie together the analysis.
In this quote, what we have is an individual, presumably, this sounds like some rando living in Minneapolis, right, who a journalist has gone and stuck a mic in their face, been like, to what do you attribute the causes of societal ills?
There's a no personal story here except my great-grandparents joined in the Great Migration, so it sounds like this is a lived experience sort of story.
And lived experience, as much as it's taken a lot of flack lately, cannot be the basis for an underpinning of an understanding of reality.
But it is what all of us know, so it's not that it's a flawed way of understanding the world.
Unless you take it as the only way of understanding the world.
So here's the beginning of a story.
But then, and over the years we've all seen how neighbors choose to ignore the suffering of those who don't look like them.
That is a claim that requires substantial evidence.
And frankly, I was, I think in the wake of the Chauvin verdict, Gavin Newsom, I believe, I hope I get this right, tweeted that there's no way what happened to him would have happened to, what happened to Floyd would have happened to Newsom because of his white skin.
And our friend Camille Foster is like, I know enough about this case to know that's No, no and no.
As much as this verdict has, you talked about a lot of the things that are true about that verdict, there is nothing in that has to do with race.
There's a style of thinking that explains the kind of journalism you're talking about, explains Governor Newsom's odd statement.
That's the governor of California.
And so much of the rest of this.
I have a position.
For some reason I take it as essentially God-given, right?
It is the right position.
Vaccines are safe, for example.
Therefore, everything that points in that direction is true, and everything that points in the other direction is false, right?
And, you know, it's like the logic... It's brand loyalty for ideology.
Yes, but it's the logic of a third grader.
Right?
It's the logic of a third grader that just feels entitled to the facts and, you know, the world will be shaped around these simple distinctions that the person is drawing.
And the frightening thing is that We are being governed by people who now increasingly think this way.
And I don't think that they inherently think this way.
I don't think these, you know, I mean, it's amazing how many people we know in the heterodoxy world have some version of smart yet idiot, which I think is Nassim Taleb's version of it.
That's his phrasing.
Right.
And the point is, I'm not saying they don't have mental horsepower to think.
I'm just saying they say stupid shit all the time, and that is an indictment of whatever it is that they're doing instead of thinking, right?
So, we are living in a world between, you know, governmental authorities and journalists and university professors and tech moguls.
We're all of these people seem to feel that they are entitled to be right and that anything that points in another direction is inherently cheating and that they have the right to silence it or chastise it or whatever it is that they do and the point is look.
That can't work.
That's like setting a really good course and then putting on blinders and imagining you're going to end up where you go.
You've got to be able to deal dynamically with the discovery that you were slightly off or that the wind put you somewhere where you didn't know that you were.
And this is madness.
This is not how we can govern ourselves.
This is the recipe for taking everything that works and wrecking it.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
You haven't seen this.
This announcement, hold on Zach, was made on Twitter, boy I guess that's April 23rd, that's yesterday, and it already has 186,000 likes.
Wow, that sounds very likable.
Yes, so likable.
So Zach, you can just show it very briefly, then give me my screen back.
What's that?
I don't know how to pronounce her name.
Gloria Dlamini Liebenberg says, My husband and I have introduced paid menstrual leave for our female employees.
This makes me so happy as a woman.
So, some women experience debilitating menstrual cramps and do indeed find it difficult to work for some days each month.
And those women, I've known some of them, do find it unnerving to have to request sick days, especially on those days.
It's not all women.
I really don't think it's a majority of women and in fact at a different moment perhaps we can talk about actually what menstruation and all of the things associated with it mean in light of our post-industrial context and what it actually looks like in pre-industrial context and what therefore we might be doing to alleviate
A lot of this pain and agony for so many women who live in the weird world, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries.
So it's not even close to a majority of women, even in the weird world.
Furthermore, most women, I believe, would prefer privacy to having a monthly leave in which their absence is therefore understood by their employer and all of their colleagues to be about this being that time of the month for them.
This smacks to me of menstrual huts, of for instance the Hadza in I think it's West Africa and a few other hunter-gatherer cultures in which women are effectively ostracized while they are While they're menstruating and it's a way of publicly marking them in terms of where they are in their cycles, which is a way for men to control fertility of women.
And obviously that's not the motivation here.
It's not the motivation isn't to control the fertility of female workers, but it does, it feels exactly like that to me.
And, and, you know, it'll allow people who are keeping track to know when a woman is late, Maybe when she's entering menopause, when things get less regular?
This seems a little less than desirable for an employer and all the colleagues to know.
So, you know, if this had emerged from a conservative, obviously this would be laughable, right?
It'd be just insane, justly ridiculed.
It would be incredible outrage.
You're gonna do what now?
But I think also, you know, maybe the way to approach this as a way to make it clear that this is just a terrible policy.
And, you know, and it can't last.
Like, it's just, it's no company that's doing this.
Any company that does this, the women are going to start costing more, and then they're going to start hiring men more because the women cost more.
And then there's going to be complaints that they aren't hiring enough women.
And, you know, it's just, you know, down this road, nothing good will come.
But, you know, we do have, and I think it's necessary that we have things like pregnancy leave.
And there are real barriers to female success in career tracks that require, you know, hard-paced, hard-charging work exactly during your reproductive years.
During which time, pregnancy and early motherhood may render you less able or less willing to be hard-charging in the same way.
And so, at least in academia, the world that we know the best, there have been some moves to, for instance, stop the tenure clock for a year or two, such that your publication record during the time when you were perhaps Perhaps having a kid does not count against you in the same way that it would.
It's not a perfect solution, but you can't make it the same, right?
Men and women are not the same.
And this will always be a problem.
There is no easy solution.
But I was just thinking that If time off for menstruation is to be a thing, given that women menstruate and men don't, yeah, you heard it here first.
That's actually true.
In the name of equity, I think, then following this business's lead, it's also true across cultures, across time, that men have shorter lifespans than women.
And therefore, we should mandate earlier retirement for men to allow for the same average period of lifespan that's post-work, so in order to provide equitable post-retirement work.
Oh, this is such a dangerous line of thinking, because of course that limits male earning potential, so you would have to pay them more to earn the same amount in a shorter period of time, given that our lives are accelerated.
Yeah, this is really terrible stuff.
It's awful.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, it's preposterous.
And, you know, it's another wonderful demonstration of the need for Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance thinking.
Of course, if, you know, as you suggest in here, as you hint at, if it is true that women deserve time off for menstrual symptoms, and there's no difference between men and women, then men also do, right?
And so the point is, you can just see how if you begin to play with these conclusions, the real point is, Here are some people we would like to give an advantage to, and here's some logic we cobbled together to explain why they get the advantage.
But the problem is it's Lego, and you could take those same garbagey arguments and establish them to prioritize anybody.
Right.
There are differences.
There are differences.
Here's the way that we can frame these differences as a burden that needs to be eradicated.
Or, frankly, the insane proposal to allow men to retire earlier in order to pursue an equitable outcome with regard to post-retirement years is just trying to make the burden show up in the other column.
We can play this game all we want, and it doesn't make it any more humane or reasonable.
No, and the irony of it, right, is if you did play this game, right, if you really began to remake Civilization as we are doing based on these nonsense conclusions that exist in isolation and, you know, steadfastly ignore the thing that would be on the other side of it, if you just simply uninvented all of the counterintuitive stuff that makes Civilization work,
And you employed it, you would create all of the failures that are so intolerable and you would end up reinventing it on the other side, right?
I mean, if you survive to do it, right?
The danger is, of course, that by hobbling ourselves, we don't exist in the vacuum and we can't afford to go insane for 20 years with, you know.
China hovering outside looking to poach, you know, opportunity or whatever.
So we don't get that luxury, but were we to do it?
Effectively, it would be like a lesson in why that counterintuitive stuff is so important.
And, you know, you can almost imagine the reinvention of all of it.
And, you know, how everybody would suddenly be aware of the importance of these things.
And really, it's like, can we just skip to that part?
Can we skip to the part where we remind ourselves why these things are so important?
and why ultimately you cannot do better than, for example, a colorblind society.
You cannot do better than a meritocracy in which people have equal access.
And I'm not saying that that's what we have, but I am saying in terms of a goal, that's it.
Yeah.
You will not exceed it, right?
So, yeah, we're- Yeah, we've got some system that has the potential to be functional.
And, you know, how functional it is and where we are in the process is what the good faith people are disagreeing on.
We're going to get push here, push there, a little bit of push.
But we are being asked to say nope.
We're going all the way over here, right?
And that's because we've been all the way over here in the past, you know, like in 1950s Alabama and before the Civil War and, you know, all of these things.
And, you know, this kind of arc in society, which we're going from extreme to extreme, does not leave a society after very many swings of that pendulum, whereas a relatively tight swing with adjustments with the ability for constant pushback against a trend towards extremism on any side can allow for progress, and history suggests that it does do exactly that.
Yeah, and you know in some sense you can reduce the entire thing to a battle between those who wish to fix what's wrong with the system.
And all reasonable people recognize that it doesn't reach that which it aspires to do.
But it's a battle between the people who want to fix what's wrong and those who want to uninvent it on the basis of what is claimed to be wrong.
And the fact is the people who want to uninvent it don't know what they're talking about.
They can't tell you where we're headed, they can't tell you how we would get there, and they don't appear to have even the basic skills to analyze where you need a counterintuitive conclusion, and we just don't have time for them to learn it by destroying what we've got and having to rediscover it all.
Yeah.
There's one more thing that I thought we might say something about, but maybe it's not worth going there.
Do you have anything about this story?
I think so.
I'm not wearing my glasses, so I can't quite see it.
Okay, well we're not going to go there then.
Okay.
What else do you have?
Yeah, we've got one more thing.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the podcast that I did with Garrett VandenBosch and what has befallen it over in Facebook space.
Before you do that, let me say that I have listened to part of it, I intend to listen to all of it, and that I have seen a request for us to discuss some of what you talk about there, and we're just not prepared to do that yet.
Yeah, we're not going to revisit the content, but let's just catch people up on what we're talking about.
So I released a podcast with Garrett VandenBush, who is By training, he is a doctor of veterinary medicine.
He's also got professional academic experience in vaccine creation and immunology.
In any case, he made quite a stir by releasing an argument that the current vaccine campaign was in danger of creating escape mutants that could make the pandemic far worse rather than better.
And I had him on the podcast and I made a decision To attempt to make the underlying immunobiology clear in this podcast so that people could evaluate his argument.
The fact of his argument created quite a stir, but I wanted people to understand why he's making the argument, what the scientific claim is based on, so that they could then compare it to alternative claims.
You really treated it like a classroom.
You gave a primer on immunobiology.
Yeah, and I think, you know, I wasn't sure about that decision, but I think it worked quite well and lots of people have had lots of feedback from people who appreciated being able to look into the underlying questions.
In any case, I wasn't sure what would happen to it on YouTube.
YouTube has, I think, left it intact and it has done well on YouTube.
Facebook, on the other hand, Has taken to appending a warning to anybody who attempts to post it, and clearly based on the number of people who end up liking it, they are obscuring it from almost everyone.
Actually, Zach, do you want to put up the warning that they have?
Okay, so this is the warning that you get if you attempt to post my podcast.
You need to read it so that people who are listening... I'm trying to see it.
It says...
Yeah, if you would.
This is Zachary, our producer son.
It says, from independent fact-checkers about this notice, independent fact-checkers say this information is missing context and could mislead people.
Learn more about how Facebook works with independent fact-checkers to stop the spread of false information.
So if you click through on the what says fact check mass vaccinations and COVID-19 pandemic does not dot dot dot if you click through on that.
Zach can you show the site?
So it goes to a independent quote-unquote independent fact-checking site Yep.
Um...
So, okay, so I guess you can see it here now.
What this is, is this Lead Stories site having supposedly fact-checked Garrett VandenBush's argument and deploying counter-arguments.
And Facebook has decided to declare that this site is objective, and in fact the URL for this declares Uh, this declares what Vandenbush has advanced as a hoax, which is preposterous, I must tell you.
As I said in my podcast.
So I don't, I've never, I don't know anything about this site.
This is the first time I've ever seen it.
Would we?
I've never seen it either.
I don't know, and all I can say is that Facebook is using this as an official source, and if you scroll down, scroll down through it, keep going, keep going, keep going, There you go.
Look, they've got a clickbait video that claims to debunk Garrett Vandenbush's argument.
I have watched this video.
Now, the video makes some interesting arguments, right?
Um, they are in no way higher quality than what Garrett is deploying, right?
In effect, what Facebook has done is it has taken counter arguments and decided that they are correct because they go in the direction of something Facebook wants to claim, which is that these vaccines are safe.
This goes right to the point we were making previously where Well, so just there's two distinct points.
The vaccines are safe in isolation and it is safe to widely vaccinate during a pandemic.
Those are two, because as I understand it, Garrett actually thinks that under the right conditions, in fact, the thought experiment that you provide is if COVID had been restricted to Eurasia and North America, for instance, North and South America were yet unexposed to COVID, mass vaccination of exactly these vaccines in North and South America right now would be safe by his estimation.
Right so my point is that what Facebook is doing is it is deciding to find are there any experts or people that we can claim are experts who disagree with this and then if there are which there always will be then we are going to declare them right and therefore declare this other thing not only incorrect but a hoax right because that's what the URL says it's a hoax which is nonsense and so
It's a little hard for me to know even where to start with this.
Hoax is a strange new accusation, too.
I mean, obviously there have been charges of hoaxiness forever, but it feels to me like that's rising in power as an accusation that gets leveled.
So, you know, the epithets racist, transphobe, anti-vaxxer, But hoax is, like, next-level fake news.
Like, maybe Geert doesn't even exist.
Maybe he doesn't really believe this.
Maybe he's not really, you know, like... I feel like hoax is being... the term hoax is being weaponized here in a new way as well.
It's being weaponized, and I think that the purpose of it is that to the extent that you can do anything that invokes the idea of hoax, right?
Then what you are effectively doing is saying, if you listen to, in this case, Gerrit VandenBosch, and he seems to make sense to you, that's because you're being taken, right?
So it is a very different style of argument than this is incorrect because, which we can evaluate.
In the case of the claim of hoax, what they're effectively doing is saying that to the extent that you think you have evaluated it, you're a sucker, right?
And so what that will cause is anybody who sees the claim that something is a hoax, especially coming through something as, you know, big and important as Facebook, will simply not get anywhere near it because they don't want to be a sucker.
We know you're busy.
We've saved you some time here.
You don't need to go there at all.
Right.
But here's my point.
This podcast and I think... Which is yours with Garrett.
Mine with Garrett.
Our listeners should seek it out and they should listen to it.
And what you will hear are two people who have relevant expertise and insight having a discussion in which they bend over backwards to make clear why the logic is what it is.
Right?
There's nothing hoaxy about this.
Could it be wrong?
Sure.
Now, I'm very careful in it to say I don't know whether Garrett is right, but I do know that he is making sense.
Right?
That is something I am in a position to evaluate.
He is making sense.
So, What do you do with the fact of Facebook deciding to simply search for some claimed expert that disagrees with this and then decide, oh, because there's an expert who disagrees, this is now missing context, or it's a hoax, or it's incorrect, or whatever their conclusion is.
The point is that's nonsense.
That's not how analysis functions.
That's not how we discover what is true.
And of course, we are again in the position where if we played this game long enough and we did enough harm by allowing Facebook to decide, you know, how facts are made or whatever it is, And we would ultimately discover that we needed to liberate people to have arguments in which they disagree and the medium through which they are disagreeing does not intervene and declare these people right and those people unforgivable and whatever it is.
We would rediscover the need for things like Universities and salons and freedom to advance counterintuitive claims and not suffer a social penalty for it.
These are the things that we would rediscover if we ran this experiment to its logical conclusion and we're not going to get a chance to because what we are in effect doing is signing over our sense-making capacity to entities like Facebook that don't have the basis to make these kinds of decisions.
Right?
biologists.
And frankly, as a biologist, I can say this is difficult material, right?
It's a struggle no matter who you are, no matter how much you know.
Nobody knows enough to say this is true and that is false, right?
It has to unfold in the form of a discussion in which arguments are advanced and then they are honed as a result of counter arguments.
And then we ultimately discover what our best guess as to what's going to happen in this case is.
And the idea that Facebook thinks otherwise is frankly insane.
And all I can say is get over your goddamn selves.
You aren't that smart.
You aren't that well-informed and you're going to have to let the adults talk.
All right.
I'm off my soapbox.
Thanks.
Good.
Not good that you're off it, but that was good.
I'm off it for now.
I'm keeping the soapbox in case I got to get back up there and say some other stuff.
You know I use it sometimes.
Yeah, I do.
I do.
You know that.
I know that I know how to use the soapbox when needed.
I said, do you know that I use it sometimes?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry.
Thumbnail for this week?
Thumbnail for this week.
Hey, Zach, do you want to put up those?
So I did some... Yeah, just any order will do.
All right.
That, someone on Twitter thought that that was... That is awesome, but we didn't talk about that this week.
We talked about that last week.
What's going on here for the people just listening?
This is the mother coyote howling at you and me who are standing next to the den where her two kits are housed and hoping to drive us off.
So that she can, it turns out, move them, which she did.
And last week we showed some video of her grabbing one of the kits and running off to wherever her new den might be.
I mean, that is a beautiful photograph, but I think a lot of people wanted an update this week and we haven't provided one.
And especially that given that we can't really use this as a thumbnail for this week's episode.
We will not use this as a thumbnail.
Perhaps we can promise that we will give an update next week.
Sure, sure.
I must say, the reason that showed up here was that I was going through the camera, the pictures on the camera and discovered that I had gotten that.
I didn't have any idea that I had captured that image, but it's beautiful.
All right.
Here we have a well, officially, it's a great blue heron.
I would say it's a pretty good blue heron down at the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.
This!
I thought this was amazing.
This, it turns out, I am essentially certain, is a golden eagle.
Well, we'll certainly hear from people if anyone thinks it's not.
Yeah.
But I believe I looked at that picture close up, and that was my best guess, but I'm not totally good with the raptors, so.
Yeah, it's a Very, very large animal.
It's clearly not a bald eagle.
I think it almost has to be a golden eagle.
But anyway, beautiful creature.
I did none of the correction of the photograph I should have done.
But anyway, there it is.
A gorgeous creature that's right here in Portland.
Golden eagle could be our, you know, could be our thumbnail for this week.
Working towards a An excellent future.
And you know, it's not, it's not our national bird, but it's closely related.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a, it's a good and honorable bird.
All right, here we have a Nutria.
I got quite close to down at, at Oak's Bottom.
This is an invasive semi-aquatic rodent that we've talked about a little bit.
And there he is eyeing me suspiciously.
And here he is swimming in front of a Mallard.
That's definitely a neutrino.
Yep.
Well, we'll find out if it's not, but the three possibilities are... It looked beaverish from here, but I'm not looking that... I can't see it very clearly.
A lot of beaver tails all wrong, but they do look very similar when they're swimming.
Okay, next one.
Now this one, this is no thumbnail, but I want help on this one.
So there's an interesting phenomenon... I think it's a crocodile.
It's an interesting phenomenon down at this wildlife refuge.
Can you show it on the big screen, Zach?
Thank you.
The Wildlife Refuge has a rather large beaver pond as the central water feature, and as I was sidling up to a snag getting that picture of the great blue heron,
I was effectively had water on three sides of me and it was in the evening during the golden hour and these fish were engaging in this flopping behavior which actually when you and I and Toby were down at the refuge we saw this flopping behavior but there was something else going on here which was I'm standing with these fish around me
And the flopping behavior actually at some moments appears to be coordinated, right?
So I would get flopped.
I was just going to say, you know how in some populations of terciops, of dolphins, they will group hunt fish and cycle and circle them into tight coils before they go in for the kill.
So maybe you were a target.
They were hunting me?
That's possible.
I won't rule it out.
But anyway, What I was watching was every so often a bunch of them would seem to startle simultaneously.
So there'd be three or four fish in different places and then they would suddenly all create a stir.
And I'm certainly someone who is an expert, either an ichthyologist or an angler, is going to know what creature this is.
Obviously freshwater beaver pond It has a connection to the Willamette River.
The chat thinks it's likely to be a carp.
Say again?
The chat thinks it's likely to be a carp.
A carp?
Oh, I find that unlikely.
Well, a lot of the chat thinks that.
If it's a carp, then somebody must have put it there, right?
That's quite possible.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's interesting.
And it's even possible, I suppose, that given that this is a managed wildland, that a carp has been put in for some purpose, like controlling mosquitoes or I don't know what.
But anyway, it didn't strike me as any animal that I recognize.
That's a large animal, I should point out.
That animal is probably... Yeah, why don't you put in like a quarter for scale?
A foot and a half.
Well, I did, it just sank.
Yeah, well, I mean, I tried.
That's why they were startling.
You kept hitting them with quarters.
With quarters, that's it.
They thought it was a drinking game.
All right, so I guess that's it in terms of photographs for this week.
Cool.
Okay, well, that's it for us for this week.
For those of you listening, we're going to take a 15-minute break, then be back with our live Q&A, as is our want, answering questions you have posed during this super chat this hour and next.
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You almost boxed yourself in at a terrific clip, and then you said, right, and I just thought, very professionally done.
Thank you.
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