We Just Took A Dramatic Turn Toward Political Collapse, Could There Be A Second Civil War?
We Just Took A Dramatic Turn Toward Political Collapse. Many people have been saying that there will be come kind of escalating conflict between left and right, a second civil war, or however you want to describe it.Eric Weinstein, of intellectual dark web fame, recently tweeted a thread about how he feels the political world is coming apart and he won't make the same error of 2008 when the financial system took a massive hit.It seems with the dramatic escalation of censorship over the past few weeks and years we are dividing our society in two and that can only lead to one path. The far left social justice activists against the those who oppose them. The "right wing" seems to be a mix of varying ideologies and politics with libertarians, liberals, and conservatives mostly agreeing in their opposition to the regressive left. But the far left activists use powerful institutions to command power and silence opposition under the guise of social justice. Conservatives face bias on social platforms and a double standard in left wing media.If this continues than I think some kind of conflict is guaranteed, though what form it will take I am unsure of. We may already be in it.
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For the past couple years, I've said that the culture war, whatever you want to call it, is going to escalate.
And who knows?
People might look back in a hundred years, and this could be the dawn of a new civil war, as some people have called it.
The rhetoric has been flying around quite a bit.
Even recently, people have been talking about the potential for a second civil war.
I think that's a bit too hyperbolic.
I don't know what you could call what's happening, but maybe complete social upheaval?
Massive change?
Who knows.
There's a lot of people who go around saying empires only last a few hundred years.
I don't believe that's actually true, you know, but people talk about it.
I want to talk about some of the issues that I believe are causing and caused by this rapid transformation we're seeing in society.
We're seeing news media collapse, we're seeing the spread of new technology, social media is dramatically changing how things function, and it's resulting in this weird tribalism.
One of the things I want to highlight today specifically is how the media exists in two realities.
And they probably know, but don't seem to care.
And what ends up happening is then, you have the right and the left, however you want to break up the two larger factions, where they see the same screen with two different movies, to quote Scott Adams, or to paraphrase Scott Adams, which we'll go over that too.
But this, I want to talk about this because I saw this tweet from Eric Weinstein who said, In 2001, I began to believe that the financial world was coming apart and started giving talks.
But it didn't year after year.
Around 2005, I lost my conviction waiting.
He says, at Anan Talib, told me to stick it out, but I lost my nerve.
In 2019, I think the political world is coming apart.
And what exactly does that mean, the political world is coming apart?
Well, what's interesting about Eric Weinstein's tweet, and he does go on to elaborate, Is that in 2008, we know the financial world did face, we were hit by the Great Recession.
Something did happen and it was devastating to a lot of people.
We're still here.
The world carries on.
So I want to make sure that when we talk about whatever it is that's coming in the escalation of the culture war, a lot of people seem to think it's going to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland with like roving bands of zombies or something.
No, you know, 10 years will go by and we'll be back into whatever system we are.
But something is definitely coming.
And I believe that's what Eric Weinstein is trying to say when he says, in 2019, I think the political world is coming apart.
But I do want to make some important distinctions.
In finance, things will change, but so long as society is cohesive, it can rebound.
We've seen many depressions.
But when it comes to politics, these things kind of escalate to violence and things can be really dangerous.
But Eric Weinstein was asked, what does coming apart mean in this view?
And he said, The political world coming apart means an essentially complete inability to agree what happened, what is happening, and what must happen.
The two things that are still working well are maintenance, e.g.
the grid, banking, and traffic still work for now, and relative non-violence.
But I'll stop there and add a caveat as well.
I think you should say relative maintenance, because we have seen many people getting removed from public discourse, banned on YouTube, and censorship has dramatically escalated, as well as the double standards, which we'll get into, One of which, just to give you a reference, is The Daily Beast published the name of a man who made a meme, or allegedly made a meme, we don't even know if he did.
That was totally fine by journalism and Twitter standards.
James O'Keefe published the name of a woman who was censoring a conservative group on Pinterest.
His video on YouTube was removed for privacy violations and Twitter took down the tweet for privacy violations as well.
A clear double standard in that there are the aristocrats and the peasants.
Now I know that aristocrat-peasant isn't the perfect way to describe it.
There are certain groups that have technological and institutional control, and because of this, I would say maintenance is relatively working, but we are beginning to see cracks in the systems of banking.
I published a story about the journalist who reached out to several banks, and then ultimately, a day later or so, we saw one of the Proud Boys get his personal bank account shut down.
So the grid is under attack.
Will this escalate?
I personally believe it will.
And we've seen a dramatic escalation in the past few days with censorship.
After the Vox Adpocalypse, it's gotten way, way worse.
The issue is that it's a massive shock to the system.
If these things were happening very slowly, people probably wouldn't care.
But it's happening so damn fast, people are going to start freaking out.
But we'll see.
Let's read on.
Eric says milkshaking, for example, is a performative rehearsal for something else.
It's exploratory comic violence for now.
Organized intersectional jury nullification will soon be tried to take down the justice system.
It's a fast-acting cheap attack that cannot be easily countered.
Well, let's do this.
First, let's address the first point.
Milkshaking, for example, is a performative rehearsal for something else.
When you throw a milkshake at someone, what you're telling them is that they're exposed and they can do whatever they want to you.
Now, of course, there are many people saying it's just a milkshake, it's silly, they're trying to humiliate you.
But this also does expose the vulnerability.
That if these people want to go out and politic and talk to people, they are exposed.
And it can get dangerous.
And the rhetoric absolutely does escalate.
Recently, a comedian Joe Brand said something to the effect that milkshakes were pathetic and why weren't people getting battery acid.
I understand that that is meant to be a joke, right?
But I also think it's extremely reckless because there have been many other people who have made similar jokes who have been attacked and defamed for doing so and banned.
Now, Joe Brand is certainly getting it from conservatives right now.
Nigel Farage criticized her because the joke may have crossed the line.
Whether or not she actually wants someone to get badder acid and throw it is besides the point.
The rhetoric is taking the step.
Maybe it'll just be a joke.
Maybe it won't.
But it starts with milkshakes.
Milkshakes at first were a joke.
They were a meme.
Even Burger King got in on the joke.
But then we saw a wave of milkshakings happen.
And people started doing it.
And now we see the escalation of the joke.
Acid attacks are already a serious problem in the UK.
I don't think it's a good idea to even joke about this, because you are... It's a low... It's a step.
It's incremental.
But if you're a politician in the UK, you have to now be worried that they're joking about splashing acid on you.
The second point made by Eric Weinstein is intersectional during nullification.
Well, in this story from the New York Times, this man in Arizona helped some illegal immigrants.
He provided them shelter at his camp, is my understanding.
And a jury couldn't decide whether or not to convict him.
And so it was a mistrial.
I'm not saying this is a perfect example or anything like that.
Mistrials absolutely happen.
But jury nullification, for those that don't know, is when a juror decides not to convict because they feel that this person shouldn't be punished for what they did.
And therein lies the problem.
Did this man provide harbor and aid and shelter to an illegal immigrant?
I believe the answer to that question is 100% yes.
Everyone understands that.
The question then becomes for the jury whether or not he actually committed a crime in doing so.
And unfortunately, the jury could not agree.
The government put on its best case with the full force of countless resources, and 12 jurors could not agree with that case.
Mr. Warren read in a brief statement, The government's plan in the midst of this humanitarian crisis?
Policies to target undocumented people, refugees, and their families.
Prosecutions to criminalize humanitarian aid, kindness, and solidarity.
Politically loaded language that falls on one side of the political debate.
Was he aiding illegal immigrants entering the country?
Or was he providing humanitarian aid to refugees?
The way you frame it will change how someone views the same screen.
Again, to Scott Adams' point about two movies on the same screen.
So again, it's not a perfect example.
Well, I believe what Eric is getting at is that there will come a time where someone will say, I don't care if the person did or didn't do it.
I don't want the government to have power over this group.
And then we will see intersectional jury nullification.
Weinstein goes on to say, a rerun of 2008 or worse style crash would require skill, expertise, discretion, and will
to counter.
But most of all, trust and leadership.
Yet there's not one single figure who commands trust at the moment.
We put no one aside, no general or admiral, no one is above the fray.
In the end, when people do not command respect, they're replaced by things.
Anyone waving a gun will have our respect until we can disarm him.
Similarly, the bar of gold, the compromat video, the private key to the hard drive that was attacked with encryption, respect is transferred.
But this hasn't much ha- But this hasn't much happened yet.
Everything is still limping along.
But we are using our time before what is next in the oddest of ways.
Myself, most of all, I need to change that.
I'm going to try, at least this time around, uh, make up for 2008 be well.
Make up for 2008.
And I thought, what does Eric mean by this?
And he's a very smart guy.
He's not, you know, the herald of truth and knowledge, but he is a smart guy, and he does bring good insight and wisdom.
And I think what he's saying is, he lost his conviction in 2005 because nothing happened, but then sure enough, 2008 did happen.
There was a major financial crash, which was devastating.
We're still here.
Life carried on.
But it may be that we are in the wake of this problem.
Many of these young people, many people my age, millennials, following the financial crisis, struggle to find work, they went to school, their debt increased, and they still haven't necessarily recovered from this.
The economy is better than ever.
But that false start for many young people has left them saddled with debt.
In response, many of them turn to socialism, and they turn to far-left policy and agenda.
And this paves the way for a fracturing in the American psyche.
So let's do this.
Who knows what's going to happen?
I honestly don't.
But I do think we will see escalation.
That's all I can really predict is that things will get worse because it hasn't gotten to the point where people have actually said enough.
Even after Charlottesville, people have said, no, more, more, more, more.
And they use that rhetoric to incense and to increase.
We haven't seen a point at which both sides say, we can't do this anymore.
So I want to show some stories.
The first, we have this one which I already referenced.
The man who was... It was a mistrial.
Jurors couldn't decide.
We saw the issue of the battery acid joke.
Then we have this.
The battery acid joke... Now we're going to move into something I want to talk about in terms of the double standards and the two realities.
Count Dankula made a joke on YouTube just to a small group of like his 12 subscribers.
He got charged.
He got arrested.
He was convicted.
And they actually took the money from his bank account.
This woman made a joke that actually could be considered by some people offensive and a direct incitement to violence by saying, milkshakes are pathetic, where's the battery acid?
You know, it wasn't in that order.
She said something about... Maybe I have the quote, because I want to make sure I get it right.
But she said something about...
Let's move on.
This is a really good example of one screen in two movies.
milkshake when you can get some battery acids and then went on to say that's
just me I'm not going to do it but I think milkshakes are pathetic to me it
sounds like she's saying you're not doing enough but what not Dankula did
with making his dog do a silly trick was arrestable let's move on this is a
really good example of two screens I'm sorry one screen in two movies remember
when Jim Acosta allegedly grabbed or was grabbed by the White House aid
This is a really simple example I can think of in the past year where people couldn't even see the same reality.
We all saw the same video and no one knew what was real.
Did the aide grab the microphone from Acosta?
Or did Acosta chop the arm of the aide?
No one could agree.
I mean, obviously you had two sides.
One saying he did, one saying he didn't.
But there were people saying, you're absolutely wrong.
I don't understand.
Are you nuts?
He clearly hit her.
And then the other people saying, what are you talking about?
She's trying to yank the mic from him.
And I don't understand how you can actually, there's no way to describe that situation to people.
You will just have two sides saying, no, you are wrong, period.
And nothing will change my mind.
Now, this isn't that important.
I don't think it really matters all that much whether or not, you know, Acosta did or didn't put his arms on this woman.
Who cares?
But it's a really good example of how, even with video in front of you, no one will agree.
But let's move on.
Some other stories.
How about, as I mentioned earlier, the Daily Beast doxed a guy for posting a video of Nancy Pelosi.
This was acceptable.
In the media sphere, in journalism, they praised him for doing this.
They were saying good job to this, I believe his name is Kevin Polson, for publishing the story and finding out who this guy was.
It was a private citizen with no power who published a silly video of Nancy Pelosi and they said it was newsworthy.
But sure enough, what happens when James O'Keefe publishes an employee of a tech firm censoring a conservative group, which is newsworthy.
This is a massive multi-billion dollar corporation.
Well, YouTube deleted his video, and Twitter suspended his account.
Clearly, we have two realities forming, where even though we have the journalist class and whatever they represent, are fine with them using certain tactics and angry with other people.
The way that Will Chamberlain of Human Events described it is aristocrats and peasants.
And that's why he said Carlos Maza is allowed to incite violence, like the milkshaking thing, but you're not allowed to make fun of him.
Crowder is a peasant.
He's an outsider.
He's not in the media class.
So when he criticizes Maza, it's the worst of the worst offenses you could commit.
But when Maza says, go and throw milkshakes at people, not taken down by Twitter.
So let's do another little compare and contrast here.
James O'Keefe, investigative journalism.
We have uncovered Silicon Valley censorship.
Suspended.
Carlos Maza, take a milkshake and throw it at somebody.
Totally fine.
It's beyond just a double standard when it's the same circumstance.
It even goes to the point where Carlos Maza can advocate for admittedly low-tier violence, but still physical conflict.
And it's fine.
Twitter won't take it down.
This one might be my favorite.
Today, or yesterday, we saw this story published by Jared Holt.
Right-wing publications launder an anti-journalist smear campaign.
The problem?
Well, he's upset that Eoin Lenehan, who at one point was a troll on Twitter, published this crime web connection of various journalists and their connections to Antifa.
Now, I approached the story with a bit of a grain of salt and advised everyone else to do so as well, because basically what he did, apparently, excuse me, was he found that many people on Twitter had connections with Antifa accounts.
But that could just mean they're journalists tracking Antifa.
In fact, many of the interactions could have been negative.
One of these journalists could have said something like, I don't like you.
And the insinuation simply because they have interacted that there is a collaboration between the two is incorrect.
But I do think it's worth pointing out because I did highlight several of the journalists that I can confirm do work with Antifa.
So, you know, it is what it is.
The point is, The CJR, the Columbia Journalism Review, publishes this story of outrage that no one fact-checked this data set, the data set clearly isn't real, there's no proof, and Jared Holt was upset because he reached out to Quillette, and Quillette said they wouldn't answer an activist's questions.
They'd be willing to talk to a journalist.
And so, if they're going to publish this, they're essentially just another right-wing outlet laundering a smear campaign.
But what's really funny about it is that the Columbia Journalism Review quite literally did the exact same thing.
We talk about double standards a lot, and the reason I'm moving on to highlighting these stories is that I feel like this will absolutely precipitate some kind of escalation.
What do you think's gonna happen when conservatives see the evidence from James O'Keefe?
Yes, a whistleblower came out and said straight up, they are 100% censoring the pro-life conservative argument.
The evidence comes out, so Twitter and YouTube took his content down?
Well, what can you do?
It is a rapid development.
It's not something that happens slowly over time.
This is a massive shock very quickly.
The Columbia Journalism Review in 2018 ran fake news.
The Data & Society Alternative Influence Report had no data, no methodology, and it was quite literally just one woman who watched a bunch of YouTube videos and then drew lines between people.
The rigorousness of this research... I mean, in fact, there's none.
There's no research.
It's quite literally someone who watched random videos and, in the report, drew lines between me and people I've never met before.
And it actually said we collaborated, guested, or hosted.
But that was verifiably false.
I have never interacted with half the people she claimed I did.
What happens when Eowyn Lenihan actually does see connections between journalists and Antifa?
He jumps the gun on what it means, absolutely.
I absolutely will criticize the publication.
But at least there's some kind of methodology behind it.
And it wasn't just one random person making random lines with a marker or something.
The Columbia Journalism Review views the world in such a way that their standards are, we can smear you, you better not smear us.
Where do you think this goes?
I don't care about the idea of a power differential or whatever.
I just want to highlight, plain as day, there is a dramatic divide.
And it might not be left or right, I don't know how you describe it.
But there are at least two growing factions who do not see the same world.
Some who view they have a right to use certain tactics that others don't.
But regardless, the split is there.
It's not getting better, it is getting worse.
Is Eric Weinstein right?
I don't know.
But he thinks there's gonna be some kind of, you know, that...
That the political space is coming apart.
What does that mean?
I really don't know.
But I do think it's going to get bad.
People's livelihoods are already being affected.
Their YouTube channel is deleted.
Their income is stripped from them.
Their businesses were shut down by Chase.
More than one person.
Several people now.
So I'll do a quick reference on Scott Adams' comment.
Two movies on one screen.
I don't necessarily want to read through his entire post, but I definitely wanted to make sure I included his actual blog.
And I think there's no better example of what he's talking about than the Jim Acosta situation.
We all watched the same video, but we came to different conclusions.
And nothing, nothing will change that.
We'll move on now to some other points.
This is another good example of two realities that we're living in, and the elitism and the snootiness of whoever, whatever.
In this story from the Daily Wire, Ash Skow writes, Vox writer confused after Trump's tractor internet claims.
Iowa Senator sets the record straight.
So I'll point this out.
Aaron Rapport said, beyond parody, Fox Business cuts away from Trump's speech right after he laments, bizarrely, that tractors can't hook up to the internet.
Many people quoted this tweet.
You can see it's got 6,408 likes.
And they started talking all this smack about Donald Trump, acting like they were so smart and they understood exactly what was being said.
They will not have their minds changed no matter what.
They do not exist in the same sphere.
They are in a different reality.
What ends up happening is, well, let me just clarify, they're wrong.
Of course, Joni Ernst clarified, this may be news to folks in New York and D.C., but in Iowa, we know internet-connected farm equipment is critical for precision agriculture.
And it's one of the reasons why I'm working to improve rural broadband speeds and access.
Trump's comment was in no way beyond parody.
There's no real way to say that.
The tractors should be connecting to the internet.
Cars connect to the internet.
My car from 2012 connects to the internet.
They've had cell phones built into them for a long time.
The internet of things is very common.
Yet, we saw many people on the left running rampant with, I know better and nothing will change my mind.
And this narrative makes people double down when Trump clearly said something that makes complete sense to the rural community and many conservatives and anybody who wanted to just look into it.
This is normal.
What we're seeing here with this situation is not ridiculous in that people in cities and urban areas often do misunderstand each other.
But it's another example that I wanted to highlight.
And we'll go on because I now want to get to why I think we are getting to the point where something may be happening.
Something dangerous.
Maybe a civil war?
I don't know what you'd call it.
In this interview from Brigham Young, we have a researcher, excuse me, Let me make sure I get his name right.
It's Brigham Young Historian.
And his name is Silber.
I don't want to dig through here and find whatever.
We're not going to deal with that.
I just want to pull one quote, that's why.
Silber says, It would have to be something else to call this a civil war.
That would indicate a willingness on the part of the masses of people to engage in violence against their political enemies.
That happened in the 1860s, in part, because people had come to see their political opponents in extreme, even demonic ways, and found it impossible to find any middle ground.
Maybe our politics and culture are moving in that direction, but I don't see it yet.
Well, I would encourage Mr. Silbert to follow any of the rhetoric of the culture war over the past few years.
Some say it started with Gamergate.
It hasn't stopped.
It has only gotten worse over the past several years, and now at the point of mass censorship, where even an investigative journalist like O'Keefe, whether you like him or not, had his content taken down for privacy violations, but the Daily Beast was allowed to stay up.
Yes, there is a stark divide between people.
Notch, the game developer, Yep, the left is evil.
Most on the left are not evil.
They just think they're stuck there.
Thinking they're stuck there also applies to the right, which will turn that evil to in time there are no sides.
The idea that the left has become evil or is evil has been getting worse.
And they actually say the same thing about Trump, but to a more absurd degree, referring to Trump supporters as a certain group of people from World War II that don't really exist anymore.
They call everyone in the middle, far right.
And then sure enough, you see people who are moderate and to the right, conservative, calling the left evil.
Not everybody, not all the time.
But I'm highlighting this because this was a year ago.
It's only getting worse.
And I ask you, what do you think will happen when Trump wins a second term?
Because he will.
Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide.
It's from March.
Economic models point to a Trump blowout in 2020, but a faltering economy or giant scandal could change everything.
And the story goes through several predictive models saying Trump is poised to win.
I will say with the rapid escalation of censorship, it may backfire.
It may actually help Trump.
It's one thing when you slowly censor people and people question whether or not it's happening.
But what we've seen over the past week has been one of the most dramatic escalations in censorship I've seen in the past several years.
This can go two ways.
Without Trump's main supporters and biggest voices online, yeah, he might lose.
However, the high-profile takedowns might actually scare people.
Political correctness is not a fun thing.
And we've seen even Bill Maher criticize it.
I've only got a couple more references I want to point out.
The other one is just something I've mentioned in the past few videos I've done, of the dramatic escalation and rapid development of intersectional ideology.
The people who are fomenting the political collapse, whatever you want to call it, whatever it is, I don't know.
Something is happening, we can all see it, and it's not getting better.
It's just getting worse, and fast.
And that's just, you know, it's getting worse and it's getting faster.
It's getting worse and it's getting worse faster than before.
The last thing I'll add to this is that many people might say that this is, it's been referred to me as inside baseball.
You know, a lot of people don't know what's going on.
There's someone I follow by the name of AmandaTheJedi.
She's a Twitch streamer, smaller YouTuber, 27,000 subs.
She does YouTube content, movies, entertainment, games, sometimes political stuff, but not really.
She recently made a comment on the YouTube smear against YouTubers, in which they implied Philip DeFranco was part of the pipeline to the far right.
And when I saw her tweeting about this, I said, when you get smaller YouTubers who are not in the culture war tweeting about this, we can see it's expanding.
It's pulling in more people.
Beyond that, we saw a couple months ago, Rick and Morty creator, Justin Roiland, tweet about this university woman.
He said, extremism is bad no matter what ideology you adopt.
However, while I would agree with Justin Roiland, he's clearly on one side of the culture war on this issue.
Because the professor was talking about something having to do with, you know, I don't know, what is it, whiteness?
She says, when I hear a white person say this, I'm thinking, this is a dangerous white person, this is a white person who is going to need to deny my reality, or something like that.
That is intersectional ideology that is dominating the extreme left.
Justin Roiland came out opposing that.
Justin Roiland makes a TV show about a scientist and his grandson going on wacky adventures.
Justin Roiland is not a culture warrior.
He's not political.
He makes jokes.
But even Justin Roiland has been pulled into this.
The point I'm trying to make with all of this video is that, you know, when I saw Eric Weinstein's tweet about something happening, I completely agree.
I don't know what it'll be like, how bad it will be, or what will come after, but it is going to happen.
Imagine, I guess if you were to take Eric's word for it, something like the financial crisis.
A dramatic upheaval that negatively impacts people for a couple years, and we eventually move on with things being a little different.
But I want to make sure I stress to Eric's point, I don't think millennials have actually recovered.
I don't.
The economy is doing well, but millennials aren't getting married, they're not having families, and they're living at home.
These are remnants of the financial collapse.
It has not been resolved. And what's happening from these kids living
at home with no families and nothing to do, they're turning to socialism and far-left ideology,
saying the world is unfair, they did everything right, and it's still not enough. And I think
that's why it's primarily millennials who are pushing this and Gen Z is actually kind of flipping the
other direction. It's because millennials came of age at a time when the economy was
destroyed. And so now they're looking at the system as corrupt, indefensible, and in need of change. I
don't think we're actually out of the the financial collapses woods yet.
I think it's entirely possible that in a hundred years they say, you know, whatever period we're in right now started when the financial collapse happened.
Oh, the Great Recession.
In 2008, I remember trying to apply for a job, a dishwasher.
I was, you know, high school dropout, broke, and I needed whatever money I can get.
And I went to this small, hole-in-the-wall little restaurant, and the guy in front of me with his resume was wearing a suit.
He was in his 30s, and he had lost his job, and he was going to take anything.
Many of these jobs saw an opportunity to hire overqualified people, or more qualified people, as opposed to someone like me.
And that put me off on a bad track.
I ended up being homeless on and off.
Ultimately, I pulled myself out, but most people didn't.
Most of my friends live with their parents, and they're entering their 30s.
I'm not exaggerating.
I know a lot of people who live in apartments in big cities, but they're loaded with student loan debt, they can't find good work, and they're making trash wages.
The economy may be doing really, really well, and maybe things will recover from here.
But I think the Trump derangement syndrome is going to end with people not caring whether the economy is good or not.
They're already angry.
They've adopted this ideology.
It's escalating extremely quickly.
And it's gonna come somewhere.
It's gonna come to something.
I think we'll see violence.
I think we're gonna see businesses being destroyed.
I don't think the culture war ends with us just slowly forgetting about it.
I could be wrong.
I'll leave it there.
Long video.
Let me know what you think, and we'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Mines at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
More videos coming up.
YouTube.com slash TimCastNews at 6 p.m.
I'll see you there.
It's time for Sweden to admit explosions are a national emergency.
Take a look at this here photo.
When I went to Sweden in 2017, there was just before, like a couple months I think, a grenade attack on a balcony which killed an eight-year-old tourist.
I think that's what happened.
It's been a while.
But I do have a list of the grenade attacks over at Wikipedia.
So this is a story published by Quillette.
And this may be a surprise to many people, but yes, Sweden has an increasing, an ever-increasing grenade attack and bomb problem.
Look at this.
This photo.
For those that are watching the podcast, or listening to the podcast, we've got two buildings with their balconies just ripped to shreds from some kind of explosion.
So let's read a little bit of this and then I actually want to look at a more in-depth view on what's going on because of course there will be accusations of bias with Quillette, but I actually have the Wikipedia here for the article which pulls quotes from mainstream reliable sources talking about how, and here we go, quote, it's widely known that gang members are mainly first and second generation immigrants and yet politicians in government and opposition seem particularly concerned that violence in immigrant suburbs is a PR problem.
A threat to the image of Sweden.
I can actually comment on a lot of this, though I haven't been to Sweden in a very long time.
But before we get started, head over to TimCast.com slash Dunnit if you'd like to support my work there.
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Quillette writes, The bomb exploded shortly after 9 a.m.
Friday in a blast that ripped through two apartment buildings and could be heard for miles.
25 people suffered cuts and bruises and 250 apartments were damaged.
An nearby kindergarten was evacuated.
Hospitals jumped into disaster mode.
Photos from the scene show rows of demolished balconies and shattered windows.
It was, excuse me, it was absolutely incredible that no one was severely injured, a police spokesperson said.
It is the new kind of news we usually associate with war zones, but this bombing took place in Linköping, a peaceful university town in southern Sweden.
Remarkably, it was not the only explosion in the country that day.
Another seemingly unrelated blast was reported in a parking lot in the city of Gothenburg.
Earlier in the morning, three explosions had been reported in Malmö since Tuesday morning.
Okay, three explosions have been reported in Malmö since Tuesday morning.
As of this writing, no arrests have been made.
Sweden has experienced a sharp rise in explosions in recent years,
predominantly related to conflicts between warring criminal gangs.
The use of explosives in the Nordic country is now at a level that is unique in the world for a state not at war, according to police.
So let's... I was trying to figure out, how can you frame that properly?
You can't say that Sweden is the grenade attack capital of the world, because grenade attacks in war zones are worse.
But for anything outside of a war zone, Sweden takes the cake.
Particularly per capita, I'm not entirely sure.
Because the U.S.
is huge, I actually don't think we have grenade attacks like this in the U.S.
Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure if someone threw a grenade at somebody else it'd be major news.
Like, yeah.
So.
They say.
In response, the government issued a first-ever amnesty for explosives in the fall of 2018.
Well, why don't they just make grenades illegal?
Problem solved, right?
I'm kidding.
Allowing people in possession of such weapons to hand them over to police with immunity.
But this didn't stem the tide.
Some 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone.
An average of more than one every other day.
And an increase over the same period in 2018.
A year that saw a record number of more than three blasts per week.
Good lord, look at this chart.
So a lot of people ask me... People have no sense of time, okay?
I was in Sweden in 2017.
I was there early 2017.
Which means we were looking back mostly at 2016.
And yes, we did talk about grenade attacks.
Particularly being in Malmo, there were four.
And we did talk about them.
We can see then Gothenburg was... I believe Gothenburg was where the...
8 year old was living when the grenade went off and took the child's life.
I could be wrong on that story because it has been a long time.
But anyway, the point is, people say, I thought you said things weren't so bad, Tim, yadda yadda yadda.
And it's really funny because there's no real way to kind of approach news without being attacked by somebody.
We went to Sweden, and we said, the right is wrong, it's not as bad as everyone's claiming it is, but the left is wrong too, they're acting like literally nothing is happening.
The reality is, there has been a steady increase in violent crime, especially in Malmo, over the past several years.
But, you know, you have a lot of people acting like it's a war zone.
And so the way I describe it is, you know, I'm from Chicago.
Chicago had something like, what, I don't know, 800 deaths from gun crime.
Gangs and other weird, like, social infighting.
And when you live in Chicago, and you see all of that, and then someone tells you Sweden has a massive increase in crime, your perception is based on where you live, so you imagine your place where you live, and then crime being worse.
When in reality, Sweden has crime, but it's like, I think Malmö had like 13 murders in the year, which is way, way less than Chicago did.
Granted, They also had like a tenth of the population.
So even if you scaled it up by 10, it's still a lot less than Chicago.
The issue isn't whether or not there's too much, too little, or whatever the issue is.
The issue is the scaling.
And that's what I tell people.
Listen.
If you live in a place where there was one murder, and then the next year there's 13, you'll start freaking out.
Because you're hearing it every month.
And now look at this chart.
2018, massive spike.
In the past 10 years, there have been 116 detonated grenades, it would seem.
So yes, I will state, you know, no problem.
2016 definitely seemed to be the peak.
And things have been going down since then.
But for 2019, it sounds like we're going to be on track for an increase of some sort.
In 2018, there weren't any attacks in Malma.
But now, and again, I don't know if they have any yet, but they say this, and I read this, but they say, 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone.
On average of more than one every other day.
So take a look at this.
The total hand grenades going from 2018 and back is 116.
As of right now, in the first three months of 2019, they are on track to what?
Quadruple?
Quadruple a 10-year record for grenade attacks.
Look, so look at this.
In Stockholm, in all of 10 years, it was only 46.
And Sweden's already had 50.
There was another really crazy thing that happened when we were in Sweden.
It was that the police actually issued a statement saying that there were roving gangs of Moroccan teenagers gang assaulting women.
And so I guess, you know, the main reason I want to bring this up is because it sounds like it's worse than it's ever been.
Let's read a little bit more and then I'll jump over to the Wikipedia.
There's been a corresponding marked escalation in gang-related shootings, which increasingly take place in broad daylight.
Sweden had 45 deadly shootings in what police refer to as criminal environments last year, which is an increase by a factor of 10 in one generation.
In contrast, neighboring Norway has less than three.
Deadly shootings per capita in Sweden are now considerably higher than the European average and systemic witness intimidation paired with a code of silence in the country's socio-economically weak immigrant areas has made this type of crime difficult for the Swedish legal system to tackle.
I want to stress something.
A lot of people said to me, crime has been going down across the board in Europe, but it's been going down slower in Sweden.
And when it comes to statistics and data, there's a lot of important factors that are omitted because people just don't see them.
One important factor in all crime everywhere, as to why we're seeing lethal crime going down dramatically, Yes.
I kid you not.
It's not that people aren't trying to kill other people.
advent of ubiquitous cell phone usage resulted in less lethal crime. It sounds strange, doesn't
it? But let me explain it. It's not that people aren't trying to kill other people. It's that
you're substantially more likely to survive. But what ends up happening is people look
at charts and they say murder rate down and they go, wow, murder is way down. That must
mean people aren't killing each other as much anymore. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Technically,
More or less, we don't know.
What we do know is people are less likely to die.
For the simple reason that when people are shot or stabbed, they can immediately call emergency services.
Before cell phones, you'd have to run and try and find a phone, and that's precious time.
And someone could bleed out.
So now people... And that's just one example.
There's probably a ton of other examples which can explain uptrends and downtrends and who knows what.
It could possibly be that there aren't more grenade attacks.
They're just now reporting them.
Who knows?
It makes statistics really, really hard to track.
But I can say this.
Sweden, according to many politicians, and I talked to several politicians who told me this, and this is what blows my mind, the politicians told me this, the left wing Swedish politicians said, when they first brought in many Somali migrants and refugees, and people from Syria, Afghanistan, et cetera, Lebanon, They just let them go wherever they wanted.
And what happened was communities formed that there was no incentive for these migrants to integrate.
This created huge problems for the youth.
So here's what was explained to me by basically everybody.
They said left, right, center, whatever.
They were all saying basically the same thing.
You have these Somali migrants who come to Sweden and they have kids.
But because they live in their own neighborhoods, their own little enclaves, they don't interact with greater Sweden as a whole.
So something happens then when the children of these immigrants who were born in Sweden and are Swedish citizens are treated like foreigners, they can't interact with Sweden.
There's no social cohesion at all.
And it's Sweden's fault.
So now, this is two years ago, they have a new program where they're spreading people out and they're assigning places for them to go, which will help people actually integrate in Swedish society.
Sweden, I was told by several people, many white people, is notoriously racist.
And what I mean by that, or what they explain to me is, it's not racist as in like, you know, how they would describe the far right or anything like that.
It's this elitist, snooty, bite-swa type racism.
Where they act like they're super elite and better than you, and it's a soft bigotry of low expectations, but they still don't want you in their cafes, right?
The idea being, they talk about how wonderful and how nice they are for letting all these people in, and then push them into a ghetto, and say, look at all the people we brought in from these poor countries, we're such good people.
And then those people are poor and hungry, and they're not allowed- they struggle to find work, they struggle for education, they're treated like foreigners in the country they were born in, the children of these migrants, and the Swedish people act like they're, you know, all high and mighty, and this results in the obvious.
One of the biggest problems, one of the most annoying things I have with Race realists, and the racists in this regard, is that they're like, see, the Somalians are coming here.
That proves blah blah blah blah blah.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
What this proves is that Sweden, a wealthy society that exports weapons to make their money, took a bunch of poor refugees, crammed them into a ghetto, and offered them very little, and said, you're on your own.
And then the people in Sweden, these regressive Baizua, Baizua means like, for those that aren't familiar, it's a Chinese word, That refers to people who care more about their appearance and pretend to be for social justice.
There's a longer explanation.
But they basically talk about how they're, oh, we're all for helping these people.
Yes, then stop cramming them in ghettos and basically creating these pockets of poverty.
If there's one thing we know is true, it's that poverty breeds crime.
And if you create these areas where you force these people into these ghettos, and then they struggle to find work, they can't pay their rent, so they turn to crime, you can't then turn around and get all racist about it.
Certainly, traits can be inherited.
I'm not a scientist on this matter.
I'm not a scientist, especially not a biologist.
But I've read a lot about this, and there's a lot of intelligent people who I respect in this capacity.
But it really frustrates me when, regardless of what your thoughts are on, you know, the people from wherever, there's one thing that's simple, and it's that Sweden is not doing... Okay, hold on, let me stop.
They may have been changing this, you know, over the past few years to rectify this problem.
But I want to make sure I stress, the problems we're seeing with grenade attacks specifically, as they mention in this Wikipedia article, that it is gang members who are mainly first and second generation immigrants, and they're being ignored, Why don't you just be honest about it?
You know, one of the reasons is a lot of people told me that they were scared of, like, perpetuating racism or whatever, and it's like, dude, if you were honest, you wouldn't have to worry about it.
Perhaps you can tell people how you took neighborhoods, put everybody in there at once, and then what do you think people are gonna do?
They talk to each other in their native tongue, and because of this, it's harder for them to learn the language, they don't integrate, they don't make friends, they have no connections to the outside society, so they reject it.
I don't blame them.
It's like someone lets you in the house and then puts you in the basement and says, you're on your own.
It's like, well, dude, don't be surprised if they're going to go to the kitchen and take some of your food if they're hungry, right?
I'm not trying to justify any of the crime or the gang violence by no means.
I'm trying to talk about how this is a systemic problem of faux social justice.
And this is why I get so frustrated by many people on the left in this regard.
And they're emboldening the far right, the alt-right, whatever you want to call it.
Because on the surface, it's really easy to point to the migrants and refugees and
say, aha, they're a refugee, therefore that proves it.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
They're doing the right thing now by spreading people out.
That way the people will be in the community, they'll get the education they
deserve, and you can't just push people out.
So he's got a long way to go, and terrifyingly, it sounds like in the first
three months of this year, things are worse than they've ever been.
More so than any other, you know, year before it.
And we're gonna keep hearing about this.
And you're gonna hear both sides pulling as hard as they can to prove one thing or another.
Actually, I'd be willing to bet the left doesn't talk about it at all.
Let's point to California.
This is a perfect example of why I point the finger at corruption in the Democratic Party.
I don't think the issue is entirely Democrat or Liberal policy, although I certainly think it's fair.
To point to it on the surface and say, well, look, if you did it, it didn't work, maybe there's a problem you should look into.
That's why I'm kind of a, that's why I'm a moderate, leaning a little to the left.
I have no problem pointing to somebody who enacted a policy that failed.
One of the problems of government is that the programs don't die when they fail, and they should.
Businesses, they don't work, they fail.
Government, don't work, they just ask for more money and put a bandaid on it.
That doesn't mean government is always bad, it doesn't mean it can't work.
We definitely need a lot of these programs, and they can do good things.
The problem is, you get these politicians who put on a, you know, a fake smile, And they talk about, we're gonna do all these great things to help people.
You get them elected, and then what happens in California?
Okay, we got a housing bill.
We got a bunch of homeless people.
And they go, yeah, not in my backyard.
Ah, and there it is.
See, here's the thing.
Democrats like campaigning on emotion.
And it's really easy to manipulate people's emotions.
I'm not saying Republicans don't campaign in a motion.
But Democrats really, really go for the, ah, the poor, the poor marginalized babies.
And Republicans are much, much more callous.
Not trying to say that to be disrespectful.
But you go to CPAC and what do they say?
Personal responsibility.
It's your responsibility.
And that is, to a certain extent, more callous than what the Democrats are doing.
So I have respect for the real Democrats, like the real people on the left who are saying, I really do want to help.
What's the right way to do it?
And both sides know the old idiom, If you teach a man to fish, you'll feed him for the rest of
his life.
And that's what's not being done.
So the real solution for me, it's like, hey, we could do a government program to fix all
these problems, but there's nuance and it's complicated.
It's not black or white.
You can't just throw people into a ghetto and be like, problem solved.
Yeah, because 10, 20 years later, those kids go out and they say, I can't get school.
I can't get work.
What am I supposed to do?
And then they resent the Swedish government.
And they say, you know what?
We're not part of your society.
And it's the fault of the lazy politicians who kick the can down the road and act like they've done something.
Someone walks up and says, hey, there's litter on the ground.
And they kick it and say, what litter?
Yeah, you didn't get rid of the litter.
You just kicked it down the road for other people to deal with later.
And that's the problem.
You really want to help these people.
Education, integration, language programs.
It's more than just taking them in.
And this is what Sweden is now dealing with.
So you know what?
My information on Sweden is a couple years outdated.
They may have started implementing a lot of programs.
I don't want to just drag them over what they're doing now because I'm not entirely familiar with what they're doing now, but what I can say is...
When I was there in 2017, we were talking to, I believe it was the mayor of Sototalia, who said, yes, they're now spreading people out so they can integrate better and get better access to resources, and we can prevent these problems.
And that is respectable.
That is wonderful.
And that's what they should be doing.
But now they're gonna have to reckon with their faux social justice.
Letting people in and putting them in ghettos is not helping anybody.
And this is why I can throw it back to the American immigration crisis, the southern border.
Listen.
The left doesn't understand this.
If you just let people in, what you see in Sweden is what we get here.
People need access to society.
They need access to resources.
They need to be placed in positions where the economy can handle it.
And this is what blows my mind.
They're like, oh no, defund ICE.
We shouldn't do all these things.
Do you have any idea what would happen if we weren't helping those people trying to come in and stopping too many?
Here's what I always say.
Everybody in the world is welcome here in the U.S.
so long as they all follow the legal process.
You know why?
Because then we can make sure growth works in a way that makes sense.
Now, obviously, I think at a certain point it just wouldn't work.
Like, I don't literally think 7 plus 8 billion people are going to be able to fit in the U.S.
What I'm saying is, everybody needs to go through a process so that we can say, okay, we don't want you to be poor, we don't want you to be sick, and we don't want you in a ghetto.
That's what will happen if we do nothing.
So let's take your name down, figure out where you need to go, and what you need so we can help you properly.
Otherwise, it's gonna be bad for everybody.
And there you go!
There's Sweden.
I'll leave it there.
I could rant on this for another half an hour, but I'll leave it.
Thanks for watching.
I'll have more stories next story at 1 p.m.
on this channel, and I'll see you then.
Jordan Peterson has barely announced his new social media platform, and he's already getting dragged by the media.
I did a simple Google search of Jordan Peterson, and I just got a wave of hit pieces, so I just picked two.
This one was sent to me by a friend, but I picked another one.
I thought it was funny.
So, for those that aren't familiar, Jordan Peterson has a new platform called ThinkSpot.
I wouldn't call it an anti-censorship platform, which that's what The Guardian is billing it as.
It's just a social media site.
And Jordan said he's only going to take things down if there's a court order.
Now, I personally disagree with that.
I think it's a really bad idea.
We'll see how it gets implemented.
But we can talk about this and the couple of smear pieces that are basically just calling it all the worst things in the book.
And they're claiming he will censor people, so... You know, it's unsurprising that the media jumped on this and tried to smear Jordan as the worst of the worst before we even know what the platform is because it doesn't yet exist.
Right?
You can go to the site, and it's like, put in your email...
Before we get started with this article, head over to TimCast.com slash donate if you'd like to support my work.
There is a monthly donation option, a crypto option, and a physical address.
But of course, just like and comment on the video because the engagement really helps.
And if you haven't already, subscribe for more videos and share the link because that's basically the best thing you can do.
From The Guardian, Jordan Peterson launches anti-censorship site ThinkSpot.
Right-wing academic enlists failed UKIP MEP candidate Carl Benjamin to test subscription-only platform.
What is this article supposed— God, this news is so awful.
Jordan Peterson, the controversial academic, has launched a new anti-censorship website that will only take down offensive content if specifically ordered to by a U.S.
court.
A psychology professor from Toronto said that Carl Benjamin, the failed UKIP MEP candidate— Why is this even being brought up?
Why is Sargon relevant to the story?
Sure.
Peterson has a cult following among right-wingers and moderate centrists, because that's actually his core base, for controversial views about identity politics, and has become a hate figure for many on the left, sure.
Earlier this year, the University of Cambridge rescinded an offer of visiting fellowship to Peterson after backlash from staff and students.
Peterson said he hoped the site would be a censorship-free alternative to Patreon, an online membership service that already makes the Canadian $80,000 per month.
However, please, due to your research, Peterson left Patreon.
I'm pretty sure he left a long time ago, didn't he?
This is from last year.
This is a year-old article.
Yeah, Reuben and Peterson left Patreon.
I mean, unless I missed something.
But sure, Guardian.
Great fact-checking.
He said it'll be a subscription service, and so that's partly what makes it a replacement for Patreon to some degree, because we want to be able to monetize Creator.
That's great.
The terms of service for the new site take an extreme position on free speech.
Peterson said, once you're on our platform, we won't take you down unless we're ordered by a U.S.
court of law.
That's basically the idea.
So we're trying to make an anti-censorship platform.
So sure, okay, we can call it anti-censorship platform.
But I want to address that point immediately.
I think Jordan Peterson is straight up wrong.
Listen.
I have no problem with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, whoever, removing something that is a direct incitement, a call to violence, doxing somebody, there is a line.
It's just that the line isn't someone's bad opinion, right?
If you're actually going to directly take action against somebody, that should be stopped.
Publishing someone's private information should be a bannable offense, right?
And so this is why I think the free speech argument is interesting, and I am not a free speech absolutist.
I believe that people with awful opinions should be allowed to share them.
I believe that people with good opinions... I think it's wrong for companies trying to remove this because it results in an inverse circumstance.
You know, you take all these people and they create a parallel web.
So look at this, for instance.
What happens when you start censoring people?
Well, then other people make other sites and some people will say, hey, that's the free market working.
Sure.
That's fine.
Like I can, I'm fine with that.
Except what's disconcerting is when all of the really bad people are put in the same place as the only kind of bad people.
Twitter should allow the pot smoke.
You know, it's well, let me put it better.
If you have someone who's an unrepentant racist saying really horrifying things, and Twitter says, we're gonna get rid of him, puts him on a site, and then some other dude says something that's kind of offensive joke, and then puts him in the same room, congratulations, you're doing wrong, it's bad.
However, I'll just stress one more time before we read on.
I don't have a problem with any of these sites saying that was a direct incitement to violence.
I think the bigger issue is they need warning systems, clearer rules, opinions should be allowed, even if they're nasty, and if you've got a problem with it, block somebody.
Plain and simple.
Now apparently, it's being alleged that Jordan Peterson's platform will shadow ban unpopular
opinions.
I don't know what they mean by that, but I will say that a lot of the hit pieces against Jordan Peterson in
this capacity have been saying things like he's reinventing Gab or
something, and it's like what?
Jordan Peterson's a professor.
He's gonna allow opinions.
I kind of think, yeah, it might devolve into a nonsense field, but, you know, whatever, you know, conspiracies, that's what I mean by that.
It's like a lot of conspiracies and the dregs of all the other platforms will start coming to Jordan, but maybe it'll be better.
We'll see, right?
The platform hasn't come out yet.
I don't know exactly what it's gonna do, but I love all the smears.
So before we look into whether or not it'll actually censor people, They do mention in this article that Peterson said they've got, you know, a few people like James Altucher, Joko Willink, Michael Shermer, and Carl Benjamin.
So they naturally have gone after Carl Benjamin.
Peterson called for more testers on the site on his Twitter account.
Comments on the site would be voted on by users on a thumbs-up or thumbs-down basis.
If your ratio of down votes to up votes falls below 50-50, then your comments will be hidden.
So is that what they mean by shadowbanning unpopular opinions?
It's quite literally what Reddit does.
He said there were still problems on the site to iron out, but added, it would be nice to have a censorship-free platform if we could figure out how to do that.
Well, the Intelligencer over at NYMAG had a glorious smear, calling it all the worst things in the book.
This story's titled, Jordan Peterson's Online Platform Will Shadowban Unpopular Opinions.
It says, uh, the Canadian academic whom I think I could absolutely describe as... Let's make this bigger.
Yes, we're gonna do it.
Jordan Peterson, listen.
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whom I think I could absolutely describe as a dingus supreme... What?
Is there an opinion thing on this?
There's no opinion?
Is this a news website?
It's verified.
Has a new idea for an online platform.
This is very important to Peterson because he and his largely alt-right fanbase need a safe space online to share controversial opinions and practice free thought.
So Peterson is launching ThinkSpot, a self-described as a collaborative community where individuals can explore and exchange ideas in a thoughtful and respectful manner.
The platform is an intellectual playground for censorship-free discourse.
It will also shadow ban users.
And what's he linking to?
The Guardian or something a bit?
His largely alt-right fanbase.
This is like just straight-up fake news.
I don't even know how else to put it.
The alt-right hates Jordan Peterson.
He targets them frequently.
They absolutely detest him.
He calls them collectivists.
And they don't like him for it!
Sure, intelligence or right fake news.
So they say, the grand idea of ThinkSpot, as far as I can tell, is that it's a place for people who know how to be racist and sexist in a more dog-whistly way, not in the more direct way you might see on Twitter.
Or on Gab, the platform for people who are somehow too racist for Twitter.
Yeah.
Jordan Peterson tweeted that per the Joe Rogan podcast this week, I'm backing a new platform, yada yada.
On his podcast this week, speaking with guest Joe Rogan, Peterson outlined how he planned to keep ThinkSpot from spiraling out of control.
A minimum word count.
If minimum comment length is 50 words, you're gonna have to put a little thought into it, Peterson said.
Even if you're being a troll, you'll be a quasi-witty troll.
I may be a little more skeptical at Peterson and Rogan's crowd, the one that spend hours at a time watching men yell into a microphone on YouTube.
Hey, that's what I'm doing!
I'm not yelling, though.
We'll have trouble coming up with 50 words to fill space.
Oh, no, man.
You know my videos have, like, 3,000 to 4,000 words per video?
So, well, not all of them.
The 20-minute ones.
The ones that are, like, 10 minutes are, like, 2,000 to 2,500 words.
Even weirder was Peterson's reveal that the site will hide downvoted comments.
Like Reddit does?
They have a score threshold, and if it has too many downvotes, then it gets blocked and you have to open it.
If you're ratioed to upvotes, we read that part.
Shadowbanning used to mean that a user's posts would remain visible to the user but were otherwise entirely hidden from the website.
It's a way of getting people to leave on their own by removing the feedback loop of getting reactions from other users.
But a sloppily worded Vice News article about Twitter from last year has muddied the definition.
Sure.
The report pointed out that certain members of the GOP weren't showing up in Twitter's auto-suggest function.
Everywhere else on the site, though, these accounts were visible, and users could see their posts.
Vice erroneously labeled this process shadowbanning.
But it is.
What is this opinion?
This is nonsense.
And, you know, New York Mag, I'm just so fed up with all of the fake news.
I've got a really big fake news story coming up in the next segment for you guys.
For the podcast, it'll probably be the first segment, because things are getting spooky.
Really creepy.
I've got a bunch of just stories that are completely, like, the media does one thing and then lies another.
It's basically complete inconsistency within the media.
So, I'm just reading this and it's mind-numbingly just garbage.
It wasn't really shadowbanning.
By hiding their account from autosearch, that's not shadowbanning.
What?
In reality, Twitter was doing the type of quality control that nearly all websites practiced.
Gating certain users a little bit more.
That's literally shadowbanning, dude!
Based on feedback and signals from other users.
ThinkSpot, by Peterson's own admission, appears to function the same way.
And?
The issue here is whether the rules are biased, or whether or not they're clear.
Not whether or not a site like Reddit can have you downvote someone's post or comment, and then they don't appear anymore.
You know what, I have no idea what ThinkSpot's gonna be, but I just thought it was funny that before literally anything- but before anything has actually happened, they're rushing out the gate full speed to get those hit pieces out.
And they're just contradictory and nonsensical and, you know what, there it is.
But are any of you surprised that Jordan Peterson's already being smeared?
No, of course not.
It's just par for the course, and that's kind of why ThinkSpot's probably important.
Though I disagree with Peterson's opinion on how he's going to run the rules court order, while I can respect that in some capacity, I think if someone makes a direct threat of violence or doxxes you, you can get rid of them.
Absolutely.
But you know what?
Where the line is, is an opinion, I suppose.
We just saw James O'Keefe get suspended from- Project Veritas got suspended for a privacy complaint.
To me, that's absurd.
So... You know what?
Hey.
Welcome to the free market.
They're a private platform, they can do whatever they want.
And sure enough, the Intelligencer from New York Mag will write complete nonsense, and the Guardian's gonna try and smear him for talking to Carl Benjamin.
The next segment's gonna be a lot longer, and a lot more... I don't know.
Crazy.
Whatever.
I'll see you there.
Jim Acosta can't get no break.
I got two stories pulled up, and I could have pulled up more, where the press is not too happy with Mr. Jim Acosta.
The first story we have here from The Guardian.
The enemy of the people review.
CNN's Jim Acosta takes Trump's bait again.
They say his book is revealing on both sides of the battle.
They're not all bad.
I don't want to make it seem like they're just bashing Jim Acosta relentlessly, but they're pretty critical of him.
The other story from NPR, they have a rather neutral title.
But they go into detail about, um, where's the point I want to bring up?
That basically, he rants as though he's a rival athlete on the other side, and that the book is basically him just rehashing all of his old battles.
It would seem like Jim Acosta wrote a book to get the final word.
And it seems like the press isn't too interested in, or at least these outlets, promoting his book.
Or at least they're critical of it, whatever.
I mean, look, I'm not saying you shouldn't read his book.
Maybe you should.
But they talk about how he's cheering, how he, you know, we beat Trump and things like that.
Journalists shouldn't do this kind of, you know, shouldn't be engaged in this kind of behavior.
But let's read.
And we'll start with The Guardian, Acosta taking Trump's bait, and what that means.
Maybe it's positive, I don't know.
But before we get started, head over to TimCast.com slash donate if you'd like to support my work.
There is a monthly donation option, crypto, a physical address, but of course, the best thing you can do is just like and comment on the video, share and subscribe, the engagement really helps.
From The Guardian.
They say, in Donald Trump's self-manufactured reality, disdain for journalists and affinity for autocrats are among few constants.
By the same measure, the president craves the adulation of the press the way a junkie hankers for a wake-up fix.
Trump denounces the New York Times as failing and the enemy of the people, but yearns for Maggie Haberman's approval.
No mommy issues there.
Enter CNN's Jim Acosta, Trump's on-air sparring partner.
Yeah, no, Jim Acosta may want to think that, but Jim Acosta is just a grandstanding loudmouth.
With a book entitled, dot dot dot, The Enemy of the People.
Trump's presidency is about trashing constitutionally imposed checks and balances, dumping on the First Amendment, sating the cravings of social conservatives, and race baiting.
Acosta's brand is about getting into Trump's face and under his skin.
Acosta cops to grandstanding, showboating, and on occasion, opting for the bait.
For such efforts, the White House stripped Acosta of his press pass, which was restored after a successful legal challenge.
They say his book sheds real light on the West Wing funhouse, and it explains how the enemy of the people emerged as a mainstay of Trump's lexicon.
Blame it on Stephen Bannon.
Acosta also catches Jared Kushner, the first son-in-law, lying through his teeth from the get-go.
So again, I want to stress that it's not like they're just putting reviews out saying Jim Acosta is bad, because of course they wouldn't.
But I think it's really important to highlight how this book from Jim Acosta is him taking the bait.
Absolutely taking the bait.
And I guess it took him this long to read it?
But Acosta is, in my opinion, just trying to generate press attention off of Trump's back.
He is akin to the reaction channels on YouTube, right?
If you're not familiar with what these are, people will watch someone else's video and then comment on those videos and react to them.
There's also a phenomenon on YouTube where you have these YouTubers who are obsessed with other YouTubers instead of bigger issues like the president and CNN.
Well, I certainly will be critical of Jim Acosta.
He's on CNN with a million, he's got a million plus followers, I don't even know how many followers he has, but he's a big newsworthy personality.
He's done this off of the back of legit journalism and by just fighting with Trump.
Is Jim Acosta newsworthy?
No.
Jim Acosta is using Trump to inflate himself, and that's why I think it's important to point out that's what he is.
I do think, you know, I don't want to read through the whole review.
Let's wrap up what The Guardian says.
Things will get worse before they get worse.
Sure, whatever.
They're not even talking about a cost at the end.
But let's talk about what NPR says.
Because I find NPR's commentary really, really interesting.
And I just pressed the wrong button.
There we go.
So in this story, it's, again, not completely negative.
Here's what they say from NPR.
As the most visible reporter to regularly spar with the president, CNN White House correspondent
Jim Acosta is a disputed icon.
The president has called him rude, terrible, and fake news.
To many on the right, he represents deep media bias.
Yes.
To some on the left, he represents media pushback against Trump's frequent lies.
In his daily life, he is subject to near constant abuse, insults, and threats, along with some
praise and a lot of selfie requests.
Yes, that's what he did and why he did it.
He wanted to make himself famous.
However, they say, More telling, perhaps, than either the praise or the insults is a friendly interaction Acosta recounts in his new book, The Enemy of the People.
Acosta was covering a Trump rally in South Carolina in 2018 when a Trump supporter came into the press pen and asked to borrow a chair.
Acosta offered his, they had a pleasant chat, and the man mentioned how odd it was to see Acosta reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the Star Spangled Banner.
I thought to myself, yes.
I know the pledge and the national anthem.
I'm an American, Acosta writes.
But the moment spoke volumes.
Members of the press have been so savaged by Trump and his propagandists in the media that journalists seem almost foreign or anti-American to his supporters.
This is actually really interesting outside of the general criticism they have for him, in that you can see how he views the world through this weird lens of nonsense.
They actually live in this weird world where he thinks it's a bunch of propaganda and just crazy insanity.
Two worlds, right?
They say, the enemy of the people would have been a good place to ask why Trump has succeeded in this project.
But Acosta used it as an opportunity to re-litigate his spats with the White House rather than to meaningfully interrogate the cultural shift that left huge numbers of people despising and fearing the press.
Thank you, NPR.
In his most famous confrontation with the president, Acosta refused to cede the microphone to another reporter during a press briefing.
An intern tried to take it, Acosta held onto it, and the White House revoked his automatic access, while also publicizing a doctored video suggesting he had somehow pushed or hit the intern.
Full stop!
It says he had not.
Not true!
My god.
I don't want to relitigate this.
But in the video, what I think happened is, she grabs the mic, and he pushes her.
He's not hitting her, he's not shoving her, he was moving her, he was kind of pushing her arm away, but she was holding on, so it made a jerking motion.
Now you've got people on both sides saying he did or he didn't, and it's like, dude, a doctored video, oh my god.
This is like, how we recover from this world of like, two people living on two different planets, I have no idea.
They say a legal battle for access followed, and Acosta's past was restored.
The enemy of the people gives his side of the fight, along with the history of his other interactions with the president, and how he has come to believe in fighting fire with fire.
In The Enemy of the People, Acosta sounds less like a reporter than a rival athlete.
We beat Trump, he remembers shouting after the lawsuit.
Later, he writes, the Trump people had clearly gotten spanked.
The tone throughout is jocular and self-congratulatory.
Describing a Trump confrontation, he writes that another reporter was the real hero of the news conference for defending Acosta.
Something you only say if you believe you are, in fact, the apparent and obvious hero.
Oh, that's a really, really good dig!
By him saying the real hero was this person, he actually thinks people view him as a hero.
God, man, this guy is awful!
I don't believe reporters are supposed to be the story.
That's how I was trained.
But at that press conference, I had faced a choice.
Do we just absorb Trump's attacks?
Yes!
Please?
Or do we push back and stand up for ourselves?
This feels like an artificial distinction.
Interesting.
Reporters become part of the story when the president attacks them.
But in between absorbing abuse and hitting back is another option.
Fighting for access, challenging the president on lies, and reporting the facts the way you would with any other story.
Acosta seems to believe that the attacks give him special dispensation to offer his personal opinions, and that doing so is even an act of bravery or public service.
Wow!
NPR!
Woo!
Spot on.
Spot on.
There is a difference between saying that Trump encouraged violence against protesters and referring to the toxic Trump effect in our national discourse.
I agree with that.
I don't think, I think, you know, Trump changed the way the debates happen, for sure.
Or between saying that Sarah Sanders often attacks the press for accurate reporting, and Sarah Sanders said some of the vilest, most un-American stuff that has ever been said in the White House briefing room.
Opinion.
Oh, they've actually broken up the opinion versus fact, I see.
In other words, Acosta has become a commentator, not a reporter!
I was gonna yell, but the microphone's right in front of me, so I'm not gonna yell in your ears, but thank you, NPR!
I wouldn't do that to Islam, I wouldn't do that to Christianity, I wouldn't do that to social justice activists, and I wouldn't do that to Trump supporters.
It's insane.
journalists. An angry Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs, Acosta explained to
CNN, and other Democratic targets. Yes, you can't blame one, you can't take one
crazy guy and then condemn everybody. I wouldn't do that to Islam, I wouldn't do
that to Christianity, I wouldn't do that to social justice activists, and I
wouldn't do that to Trump supporters. It's insane.
Double standards, please. And other Democratic targets was clearly a slip of
CNN is not affiliated with any party.
Acosta meant perceived Democratic targets.
But the mistake is nonetheless telling.
Acosta has allowed Trump to set the terms of engagement, Trump paints the media as the opposition, and Acosta has accepted the mantle without wondering what he might be giving up in return.
He doesn't care what he's giving up!
He's a bad person and he's not a journalist.
This is most apparent when he uses Trump's tactics to justify his own combativeness.
I don't recall Trump ever apologizing for his behavior, and why should he?
Hey, if they can do it, my thought was, why can't we?
Ah, great.
Thank you, Acosta.
You know what?
You don't see me getting a White House press pass and going down and doing the same thing.
Why?
Because I understand what I'm doing here.
I understand I'm commenting and giving my opinion.
And if I ever did go down, I would ask some basic questions, and I'd be done with it.
You can see my reporting on Subverse.
It's pretty dry.
You can see the reporting I do on my main channel when I did the story about the left-wing activist's email to Chase Bank.
I keep it dry on purpose, and I try to be tempered and rather tepid.
Jim Acosta says, well, if he's doing it, why can't I?
Oh, because we're not in second grade, dude.
He writes at another.
But I can think of a lot of reasons, starting with the use of the words we and they.
Wow, NPR, who wrote this?
I'm gonna give you a special, um, Annalisa Quinn?
Outstanding.
Thank you for calling out Jim Acosta for what he is.
You can like what he does, that's fine, but to call him a journalist is just absurd.
He is a commentator, not a reporter, and he is putting himself in this.
Enough.
Stick around, I got some more segments coming up in a few moments, and I will see you shortly.
Over the past few days, I have been tracking the Oberlin-Gibson lawsuit and Oberlin's resounding defeat.
They have to pay $11 million.
Well, we've got an update.
I don't know how big it is.
We've got a lot to go through.
There was a call for a mistrial.
Denied.
The verdict stands.
And we are currently awaiting the verdict on punitive damages.
So I probably will cover this tomorrow because I don't know how long it's gonna take until we get a ruling.
I'm gonna bet right now, and I could be wrong, Oberlin is going to be paying out the wazoo.
For those that don't know the story, There's a bakery called Gibson's.
There were three, I believe it was three young African-American students were caught shoplifting.
Something like that.
The bakery was accused of racial profiling, and the college facilitated protests against them, defaming them.
They were sued, and they lost.
The woke University of Oberlin tried reframing the debate after losing, saying, oh, it was just, you know, we were protecting free speech.
No, no, no, no, no.
Administrators for the college were actually handing out the flyers.
Big difference.
Here's what we'll do.
We're going to take a look at this.
We've got this story here.
It's not yet been updated, but we're awaiting the verdict on punitive damages, which could be huge.
So by the time I get to the end of this video, I'm going to refresh.
Maybe we'll have some breaking news.
If not, I'll cover it tomorrow.
But I want to talk about them losing their appeal and getting their motion for a mistrial denied and what this means.
Before we get started, go to TimCast.com slash donate if you'd like to support my work.
It is more important than ever, guys.
Censorship is hitting everybody.
A YouTube channel's got deleted today. I don't know a whole lot about what's going on, but yeah.
If my YouTube channels get deleted, it's basically over, so...
TimCast.com slash donate.
And like, comment, share, subscribe, because while I'm here, I could use your support.
They say, from Legal Insurrection, $11 million verdict for Gibson's Bakery stands.
Judge denies Oberlin College motion for mistrial.
Also, court rules jury cannot see College Blast email criticizing the jurors, and that the jury will get to decide whether to authorize the court to award attorney's fees to the plaintiffs, which could add millions.
This is important context because the other day, legal insurrection criticized Oberlin Oberlin put out an email taking no blame for defaming this bakery.
This bakery has been around from 1885.
And Legal Insurrection's opinion was, this will prejudice the jury against you.
You're nuts!
Why would you do this?
So now apparently the judge is saying, no, no, no, no, no.
They're not going to see it.
But let's read.
With a compensatory damages verdict of $11.2 million having been rendered last Friday, the parties in Gibson Bakery v. Oberlin College are now into the punitive damages phase.
But in a civil trial that has gone on much longer than expected, the jury never saw the courtroom today as the judge had to rule on about a half dozen motions filed by Oberlin College.
The motion sought to restrict the information the jury could hear in the punitive phase, which could add up to an extra $22.4 million to the verdict the jury gave last week against the college and its Dean of Students, Meredith Raimondo.
The motions were all filed at the last minute, and Gibson's attorney, Lee Plakas, was quite angry with the tactics, calling it a total disregard for the jury, who gets called into court again to sit it out for another day.
There was plenty of time to file these and decided without having the jury called in, but Oberlin College thinks the jury sitting and waiting is not a problem for them.
Oberlin, what are you doing?
But the jury won't see the email.
In what might be construed as a victory for the defendants, Judge John R. Miraldi ruled that in deciding a punitive amount, if any, the jury cannot be presented with an email blasted out to alums immediately after the verdict last week.
Part of the email by Danica Thomas-Varner, Oberlin College's Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary, sent to thousands of alumni in the United States and around the world said the following.
We're disappointed with the verdict and regret that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented.
Neither Oberlin College nor Dean Meredith Raimondo defamed a local business or its owners, and they never endorsed statements made by others.
Rather, the college and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students' freedom of speech was protected, and that the students' demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student protest.
However, the jury said no, and they're coming out.
The jury basically said, you defamed them.
Then they immediately put out an email saying, no we didn't, Jerry's wrong.
The Gibson lawyers wanted to not only present the jury with the email as evidence of malice, but to also bring in Varner to testify via subpoena to the jury in the punitive phase.
However, the judge ruled the jury would get neither the email nor the testimony of the general counsel.
And I think that's actually kind of fair because the goal is, were the initial actions malicious?
It's not the same thing as malicious, but was there malice and should they pay punitive damages?
What they sent after the fact is outside of the context of what they did.
Owen Rarick, an attorney for the Gimsons, argued that the email was valid because the jury will be deciding based on the deterrence and punishment they will exact on the school, and that this email is directly relevant to the issue of malice, and the jury can determine the amount awarded to prevent future malicious conduct.
Lee Plakis added that Oberlin College just doesn't get it and doesn't accept that anyone else's decisions is right except their own.
Which, in my opinion, I kind of agree with.
Oberlin needs to be shown that they are not above the jury here.
The defense claimed in its court motion that the email was not relevant and would needlessly inflame the jury.
Judge John R. Miraldi held that this was a letter sent by the Oberlin General Counsel after the verdict.
We are talking about the actions of the defendants that demonstrated malice.
What we will use is only what was litigated in court.
And I can understand that, too.
So these are really interesting arguments.
So what do you think?
We'll read more, but you can comment.
Do you think it makes more sense to say this is proof they have this in their mind, or should we keep the facts of the case to what happened during the case?
However, there was a motion for a mistrial denied.
A mistrial?
In addition to his ruling that the email could not be admitted, the judge ruled favorably for the Gibson team in most of the other mostly procedural matters.
The Oberlin College lawyers claimed the court had not separated the compensatory damages in the verdict between the Gibson family members and their business, and thus, in their argument, the jury could not figure out the punishment phase with such wrongful jury instructions from the court.
Oberlin College attorney Ronald D. Holman called the lack of a proper breakdown of damages proclaimed by claim was, for Oberlin College, an incurable legal quagmire.
That line drew some giggles from the packed courtroom, especially from friends of the Gibson family who have been in this Ohio courtroom since early May.
The judge ruled against the motion for a mistrial.
Huge victory.
But attorney fees could be in play.
The court also ruled, the jury could designate whether the court could award attorney's fees.
As we understand the procedure, the jury will get to determine whether to give the judge the power to award the Gibson's attorney's fees.
If the jury so authorizes, the amount will be up to the judge.
It's unclear to us whether the judge could award the amount of the contingent fee, which presumably is the basis on which the plaintiff's lawyer took the case.
Because if so, that could add many millions to the ultimate judgment.
Even at an hourly rate, it still would be substantial.
They say what's next?
The evidence presented tomorrow will be by the plaintiffs about how Oberlin College acted with malice.
The attorneys would not tip their hand as to what evidence of malice might be, but did indicate that they would focus on evidence already presented to the jury in the trial.
One would suspect the jury might see the email again tomorrow from Oberlin College Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo, where she wrote to colleagues in relation to criticism of the college's handling of the matter, quote, F him.
I'd say unleash the students if I wasn't convinced this needs to be put behind us.
But when you have a dude who defends and says, this will affect everyone, therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Woohoo!
I get chills.
And the other woman says, but think of the children.
Sorry.
So, uh, there it is.
The big updates here.
The verdict stands.
Mistrial denied.
And the punitive damages are coming soon.
I will have an update for you, probably first thing at 10am tomorrow morning.
But until then, I have another segment coming up for you in just a few minutes, so stick around and I will see you soon.
Well, they'll tell you it doesn't happen, but apparently it does.
In this story from the BBC, Amazon sued over Alexa child recordings in the US.
Because apparently, Alexa is actually recording you.
And I've got one over there staring at me, and it just turned on because I said its name.
And it's gonna keep turning on.
But it's okay, I turned the volume down.
So, I've often asked if I'm being recorded, and it always says, like, no, I don't do that.
Yet we keep hearing these weird stories where it does.
Like this one.
Today, let's take a look at what's going on with this lawsuit over the recordings of children.
Creepy much?
Yes.
And, uh, we have the story from the BBC.
Before we get started, TimCast.com.
If you'd like to support my work, there's a crypto option, a PayPal option, a physical address, but of course, You can just comment, like, share the video, and subscribe.
The interaction on YouTube really, really does help, but let's skip to the news.
Amazon is being sued over its smart assistance recordings of children.
Two U.S.
cases allege the firm lacks consent to create voice prints that could let it keep track of a youngster's use of Alexa-enabling devices, and thus build up a fast level of detail about the child's life.
Amazon has said it only stores data once a device owner has given it permission to do so.
And it says parents can delete a child's profile and recordings.
Why did it make them in the first place?
Lawyers involved in the cases are seeking damages for the two plaintiffs involved, as well as others who are being invited to join the class action lawsuit in nine states, where it claimed Amazon is in breach of privacy laws.
Amazon said in January, more than 100 million devices featuring Alexa had been sold worldwide, ranging from its own Echo speakers to third-party products including headphones, fridges, and televisions.
It's about time I rehashed an old story I covered several years ago.
Did you know that your voice assistant doesn't know what you're saying?
The server does.
Let me explain to you how these devices work, or at least how they worked a few years ago.
When you talk to your Android phone, your iPhone, your Amazon device, your Google device, here's what happens.
You talk, it records you, sends it to another company, the company does an analysis, and then tells Alexa basically the text of what you said so it can do the inquiry.
That's how you can search for things and ask for things, that's how you can find things.
It doesn't just know what you're saying.
It has to break it down and it uses the internet to do so.
But something interesting then happens when you realize you use a wake word to turn it on.
If you have to say the name of the device to activate it, how does it know you're talking unless it's always on?
And how does it decipher what you're saying to know that you said the wake word?
Let me just clarify this for you.
It's entirely possible that they have some data stored in these devices that know exactly what the wake word sounds like no matter who you are, but I think that's kind of absurd.
What's actually happening is that it's listening to literally everything you say and sending it to their servers, and then as soon as the wake word is heard, they tell the device to turn itself on.
There were some devices back in the day where you would have to record yourself saying the word several times.
That is when you know it's an internally activated device.
It is still always listening to you, but likely not sending your recordings off to someone else.
However, I would have to make the assumption that, based on my general understanding, everything you say is recorded and sent to a third party, and their computer listens to it, and then tells the device when it was activated.
This includes voice-to-text, like when you're talking to your phone.
So yeah.
This may have changed, but I did, like, a report on this several years ago, going through the terms of service of Apple to explain they actually have you agree to send everything you say to a third party.
Everything I'm saying right now.
Again, let me clarify.
When I say the wake word for my silly little device, right, how does it know I said it?
The voice text has to be translated by a third party.
They may have changed it.
Let's read on.
They say in the BBC, how Alexa works.
Software on enabled devices listens out for a wake word, which can be set to be the name, Amazon, or computer.
If it is detected, audio captured just prior to the wake word, as well as what was said immediately afterwards, is transmitted to Amazon's computer servers for processing.
So it may not be that everything you say is sent over to their server, but let me just remind you.
Audio captured just prior to the wake word.
That means it is always on, okay?
Because mistakes are sometimes made, recordings can be transmitted when the wake word is not actually used.
Really.
The recordings are stored, allowing Amazon to use them to create a model of a user's voice characteristics to help the service learn to adapt to quirks in the different ways different people make requests, as well as to provide tailored responses to different users in the home.
Personally, I record everything I'm saying.
Like, everything I'm saying is being recorded and uploaded to the internet, so I'm not really concerned if they're listening either.
They're welcome to go to my YouTube channel and listen to me talk too.
Yes, hey.
They say, registered users can prevent this from happening by withdrawing consent.
They also have the option to actively train the system to better recognize their voice
by repeating a series of phrases.
Hey, as I explained.
Human operators sometimes listen to the clips to tag them in order to help the machine learning
system involved become more accurate.
Users can delete stored utterances via an app or via Amazon's website, but not through the device itself.
In addition, they can ask Alexa to delete the last recording or the last day's worth of recordings via voice command.
I just tried that before I started.
It didn't work.
She told me she didn't know what I was talking about.
Two class action cases are being pursued.
One filed in Los Angeles on behalf of an 8-year-old boy, and the other in Seattle on behalf of a 10-year-old girl.
The children are said to have used Alexa to tell jokes, play music, recognize movie references, solve maths problems, and answer trivia questions.
Yes, I'm reading it verbatim.
In both cases, the children had interacted with Echo Dot speakers in their homes.
And in both cases, the parents claimed they had never agreed for their child's voice to be recorded.
The complaints say, Alexa devices could have been designed to only send a digital query, rather than a voice recording to Amazon servers.
Although processing the audio locally would have disadvantages such as potentially driving up the cost of the devices involved and making it harder for Amazon to deploy updates to its voice recognition tech.
Alternatively, it is suggested that Amazon could automatically overwrite the recordings shortly after they have been processed.
Although this might affect the smart assistant's ability to deliver personalized replies.
Even if neither of these options were adopted, the plaintiffs suggest that more could be done to ensure children and others were aware of what's going on.
Hey, it's not just about kids, man!
I get it.
Nobody wants their kids recorded, right?
That's freaky.
But why would any of us get recorded?
I've repeatedly asked.
And she tells me she doesn't.
Which is a lie.
They use tricky language.
At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so, the complaints state.
Neither the children nor the parents have consented to the children's interactions being permanently recorded.
The next section reads, Amazon has referred reporters to a blog it published last month about a subscription service designed to help parents manage their children's use of Alexa.
It notes that parents can review and delete their offspring's voice recordings at any time via an app or the firm's website.
In addition, it says they can contact the firm and request the deletion of their child's voice profile and any personal information associated with it.
The BBC also quizzed the executive in charge of Alexa about the matter last week at the firm's re-MARS conference before the complaints had been filed.
David Limp said the firm only profiled under 13s if parents had agreed to its terms of service.
If they're 13 and below, the parent opts in for them.
And that's the game they play!
They send you this big, ridiculous contract, and they say, do you agree to our terms?
And most people just click yes, and they know it!
I gotta say, there's still some responsibility on the users.
But man, when every single service we're using has some ridiculous end-user agreement, we can't read through everything and hire a lawyer to use an app.
I think something should be done for this, and they should simplify these things, but I don't know, you know, in the end.
You have to verify through a parent that the parent themselves has given consent for the child.
And we do that by verifying an actual credit card number.
But what if the kid turns it on and plugs it in and sets it up?
I didn't have to fill out any forms or anything.
I just turned the app on and it connected.
So what if a kid does it?
They don't know who the kid is.
They say if you don't do that, then we do not keep any of the data for the child and we wouldn't ever do that.
He added that only about 1% of utterances were ever checked by its staff and even then, those involved would not be shown the user's name or address.
However.
He acknowledged that Amazon could do more to flag that people, rather than just automated checks, were involved in reviewing the recordings.
At present, Alexa's privacy notice says that past voice requests are used to improve its services, but does not explicitly say they are listened to by humans.
I think it's fair feedback, Mr. Limp said.
If people don't think we're being as transparent on that, we have no issue being more transparent.
There was an issue.
Where something happened like somebody's private recordings of their voice was sent to a random person.
Because as it turned out, as much as I like to say they don't record, they do and it is held somewhere.
And now we're seeing it again.
And now they're saying, oh, but you agreed to it.
You gotta log in to delete your voice.
So let this be a warning to all of you who have these silly little devices.
If you're using a phone, if you press the voice to text option, which most people do, I'm sure Trump does, they record that.
They keep that.
To what extent?
I don't know.
Maybe it's rare, but it is happening.
And now we're seeing that Alexa's being sued in two different class action suits because the device was recording children.
Let me know what you think.
We'll leave the story there.
Thanks for hanging out.
Stick around.
More segments to come starting tomorrow at 10 a.m.
