As a liberal who has lost all faith in the current iteration of the left, I have a few thoughts:
1. Describing all of the rioters in England as far right racists, or racist adjacent, is a way to discredit the legit concerns of the populace. He later goes on to describe this technique without realizing he just did the same thing. This is pretty elitist. I followed the riots pretty closely, and yes, some were racist, but they all had legitimate concerns that were being ignored. Ergo, mass riots.
2. I laughed out loud when he said that the left is far less likely to engage in mis/dis information. I used to believe that too about 10 years ago. Now I can’t even keep up with the number of stories that people on the right were chastised for and called right wing extremist for believing.
3. The right used to be the corporate, elite, warmongers. Now the left is. I don’t understand how any true blue leftist wouldn’t have questions when Dick Cheney, OF ALL PEOPLE, are suddenly supporting the democrats. No questions there??
I followed the riots pretty closely, living where they happened. I am desperate to know how looting shoe shops and bakeries is going to address any of this, let alone setting fire to hotels endangering the lives not only of the asylum seekers but also the staff. Particularly just over a month after an election when these people were heard, they just didn’t have the political weight to Result in any significant representation at a national level. If we are now arguing that losing an election means you can riot because you don’t get your own way then I don’t know where that leaves us.
Hey now! Just want to draw awareness that this type of criticism was off limits in the United States during approved riots of 2020.
It is fair criticism that only one side (however unmeritorious) has institutions fall down heavily upon it when behaving in the same way, while the other side gets puff pieces in the media and "scientists" write papers in peer-reviewed journals about how the applicable riots are net-on-net good due to the policies the rioters are advocating for.
Exactly! Even if you disagree with the rioters or riots in general, why is one side chastised and the other side praised? Seems a bit like a double standard, doesn’t it?
While that may be true generally (imperial college absolutely was publicly in favor of the riots), UK doesn't really influence US culture, for what it is worth.
It was bad when people on the left justified riots and it’s bad when people on the right justified them. Comparisons should be used to encourage better behaviour, not to justify worse behaviour on all sides - like some kind of terrible watched.
Oh I agree with this. But I am well aware that the next time a politically favored group starts rioting, institutions and the media are going to come out of the woodwork to defend said group with the strongest steelmanning of the rationale for such rioting.
I am just simply raising the point as a reminder that as soon as the next wave comes, attitudes will change. No one seems able to consistently say "actually, no, rioting and looting is never defensible".
I really try to be that person — but only privately. Truth is, I could tweet tomorrow that the riots in the UK were terrible, and I’d have no problem. But if I had criticized BLM riots, my reputation and work would be in trouble. It’s very frustrating.
So what. Even if you take it as given some level hypocrisy here in the coverage of the events by the mainstream media (which of course never includes the massive right wing media sphere for some reason), which fair enough there is argument to be made there, but it doesn't do anything to respond to the fact this riots were entirely an inappropriate reaction to a lot of false narratives in UK. It is worth highlighting the hypocrisy here in the desire to engage right wing apologetics while maximizing your rhetoric against left wing riots. This is empty what about isms. It should be easy to condemn this behavior on both sides and it does say something that you're compelled to engage in this what about ism when it comes to someone condemning right wing riots. It is like when right wing partisans want to bring 2020 riots every time someone tries to pin them down January 6th. Granted that is much less appropriate comparisons because two events have obviously important differences. Regardless it is bs rhetorical tactic.
It is a point worth raising if, for no other reason, than to remind people the frameworks recently used to analyze rioting and looting. In the States, we heard endless coverage here about how "oh well these businesses are insured" or "well *insert corporation* is still profitable and the magnitude here is immaterial" when the rioting was favored by the mainstream media's favored groups. Instead of "these people are taking advantage of unrest to vandalize and steal, and their positions should be discarded out of hand" we got endless coverage legitimizing and steelmanning the least-applicable reasons for the rioting observed.
"Whataboutisms" are not de facto inapplicable. In fact, comparing comparable events is objectively valuable. "Whataboutisms" are weakest when they dilute, confuse, and obfuscate the issue (e.g. "donald trump still doesn't accept that he lost in 2020" getting a response of "WHATABOUT Hunter Biden's cocaine usage??"). Here, instead, we are comparing like-for-like. Rioting, violence, looting and the like under the veil of a social/cultural political conflict.
I condemn the behavior in the UK. As we all should. But I want everyone condemning the behavior to accept that this *SHOULD BE* the standard, and the next time certain other political riots break out, we should not hand-wring and spend endless hours debating the merits of some underlying political statement.
I'm simply, in general, seeking accountability for the future, and drawing attention to the hypocrisy as observed.
First of I think you're confusing "endless coverage" of the very self selected outrage inducing cultural commentary you chose consume during that time and within subsequent years. Also it assumes this idea a of a singular establishment narrative that takes on a partisan lens, but completely misses the fact media system is more fracture than ever and that there is a huge right wing media system that routinely gets a ton of eyeballs and talked about this topic more than another media outlet in order to drum up outrage. But of course that doesn't count as establishment because why complicate a good narrative.
I take your point that what about ism has place when you're legitimately critiquing an obvious hypocrisy in someone's analysis. However, where was the obvious hypocrisy in the comment you were critiquing? How was 2020 riots relevant? It is entirely moving off of one topic to your preferred pet topic and trying run it through the lens of while now of course we can finally now talk about this now that is a right wing riot. Conveniently forgetting that right wing info sphere and certain heterodox podcast endlessly talking about 2020 riots for years now. As far as I can tell the uk riots, at least foriegn coverage goes, was blip in the news sphere comparatively. But people need to constantly to beat this narrative into their psyche of the left wing establishment trying to control the information systems.
I would draw your attention to August 2011 in the UK, when rioters on the other side were cracked down on incredibly heavily. I have no evidence that this will have changed in the meantime, fortunately mass national riots are not a feature often enough for statistically significant analysis to take place.
Yea. Not all rioters are politically motivated. Most are just criminals. None are operating in good conscience. You can’t make the world a better place by stealing TVs.
I find it odd how often people on the left and right apologize for rioters.
By living in a town that was expected to have riots, spreading from nearby towns where they definitely happened. By having multiple appointments across those two weeks cancelled, with small businesses being disrupted by these morons, and by having family members scared to go out in the evening in case they got caught up in it.
What were the legitimate concerns of the rioters? I am curious here because you are specifically saying that some "rioters" had legitimate concerns and I am genuinely interested to how you came to this conclusion. Also, in good faith, do lend the same grace to the BLM rioters? Or the Just Stop Oil folks?
Not who you're replying to but there is currently massive and unchecked immigration to the UK, which has exacerbated and already dire housing crisis. There is also (in my mind, legitimate) concern that the amount of unassimilated immigrants from MENA countries is fundamentally changing the nature of British society. And the crime, of course.
I tried to be clear. I didn't ask your concerns or ops concerns. I asked, specifically, why OP believed the *rioters* had legitimate concerns. Was some of this in mitigation at the sentencing? Did they post about the housing issues?
Imagine that this was 2020. The podcast was about BLM riots and somebody posted "the rioters who burned down that police station had legitimate concerns" and when pushed the poster responded that there was over policing of trivial crimes in poor neighbourhoods that were often black. Because this is how this reads to me. Do you think its a reasonable response? Do you think *any* poster saying that BLM rioters had legitimate concerns would have 10+ up votes here?
Your best bet would be to watch one of the interviews Jordan Peterson did w/Tommy Robinson, (one in July and one more recently) since Robinson is basically the key spokesperson for the "rioters" positions.
British citizens have suffered enormous outrages from problematic immigrants (not saying all immigrants are problematic); violent crime, Muslim rape and grooming gangs, other offenses, and their government does nothing, but will imprison people literally for making an anti-immigrant tweet. Robinson is returning to Britian to face charges for his reporting on the situation that will probably deal him another prison sentence.
This is totally different from the BLM situation here.
I urge you to do the research. Robinson is quite gripping, you won't be bored.
I'm very, very surprised to see Tommy Robinson recommended as a good source on anything.
He's not facing charges for his "reporting". He lost a defamation case against a Syrian refugee and, as part of that, he was ordered not to repeat the lies he was telling. He made a claim that this Syrian teenager, who had been filmed being violently assaulted at school, had committed violent attacks himself. Robinson failed to prove this in court.
Robinson is a thug and a fraudster. He's been convicted of mortgage fraud, assaulting an off-duty police officer, stalking, football violence, passport fraud and much more. Rather than helping in the grooming gangs, he was actually convicted of contempt for posting prejudicial statements that could have derailed the trial. The family of one of the grooming victims asked him to stay away from their town and he ignored their wishes. His links to Russia are well known.
Julie Bindel has been reporting on the grooming gangs story since 2007, years before Robinson blew in. Here is what she says: "To credit Tommy Robinson, with anything other than whipping up racial and ethnic tension is outrageous, and, at the very least, ignorant of the history and of the facts."
One of my husbands former colleagues, Steph Finnegan reported on his contempt case as well as having cover the trial Robinson was broadcasting on Facebook live. She got threats including rape threats from his lovely followers as well as making the first petition to the judge to lift the reporting restrictions on Robinson's contempt case which was then lifted.
Tommeh, the drug-addled, assaulting grifter - he looks half or fully coked-up on most of his ranting griftcasts - amazed anyone listens to Peterson still, he's long since fallen off his rocker. But yet they keep raking in the money, it's a fools game and they are lapping it up. Bindel is bang on.
I honestly don't see the difference. People who riot both for imagined and blown up grievances that contain a grain of truth. The motivations of the rioters really don't go deep. If Robinson is your spokesperson, something has gone very, very wrong.
You are misreading my comment, probably intentionally. If you would like a deeper grounding on thus topic, watch the interviews I recommend (and if you don't know who Robinson is I don't think you know much about this topic).
If you would prefer to be sparky, spare me. I am posting to you civilly and in good faith.
This is the third thread where I have been told to listen to Tommy Robinson if I want to understand the British psyche. I'm going to start telling Americans to listen to Robin DiAngelo if they want to understand American racism.
Tbf to Robin D’Angelo she may be a charlatan & a grifter but to my knowledge she doesn’t have multiple criminal convictions in relation to her work.
I’m not quite sure who a direct comparison is, Yaxley-Lennon isn’t quite a Nick Fuentes type (at least openly) but someone like Anne Coulter spouts off to the media.
You’d think the fact that he’s appears on Infowars multiple times which give a Barpod Primo pause for thought…clearly not.
Barpod isn’t the place I’d have expected to comes across a whole bunch of posts where people get really annoyed that anyone Jesse/Katie/Guest/Primo push back against what are essentially the UK version of cliched MAGA talking points.
There are loads of decent & thoughtful Primos of a conservative bent, but sadly there’s also a chunk of ring wing anti woke culture warriors and they’re no more interesting or credible than their lefty woke counterparts.
For some reason I just came across this response and I have to say that this is the most out of touch take imaginable. Do we think that any post touting the legitimacy of the BLM riots would get 10+ upvotes? No, I don’t. I think they would’ve gotten THOUSANDS of upvotes. Where have you been?
It’s only now, years later and after the fever dream has passed, do we openly acknowledge how fucked up all that was.
Not willing to break your streak of poor reading comprehension are you? No post *here* gets thousands of up votes.
I know you said you only just came across this response but did you some how only come across the second half of it? Joking, obviously you will ignore the first part and instead misread the second. It's perfectly in keeping with your general.... thing.
I apologize, I just reread your question. I’m not pro riot or pro violence in any of the scenarios mentioned above, but I do see how people can be pushed to a boiling point as well as how some people, as you mentioned, will just take advantage of a situation because they like to fuck shit up. However, what we continue to gloss over is how any movement that is anti globalist, like the anti immigration riots, is immediately condemned and called far right. You can have the same violent agitators, quite literally, at all three riots, but the BLM and JSO will be called mostly peaceful. Why is that?
Being able to understand someone without coming anywhere near agreeing with their conclusions is the first step in learning how to actually think about society.
I'm going to need some help here, you seem to be saying there's a direct causal relationship between the issues you specify and the riots. Is that correct?
No, there is not ‘massive and unchecked’ immigration to the U.K.
The immigration level fluctuates over time with peaks and troughs depending on economic and labour market conditions. Viewed over the long term the U.K. immigration levels are on par with most developed countries and is lower than some.
But actually there is. I don't know whether it's "unchecked", or whether it's on par with other economies, but UK immigration since 2020 could accurately be described as "massive". I don't think that suddenly makes Tommy Robinson a credible guy with well motivated opinions, or Nigel Farage less of a car salesman. Those guys were as they are many years ago, when immigration was much lower. They just don't like foreigners, they've made that very clear in their careers.
But the immigration numbers are huge at the moment, and that's likely to cause friction, as it has at many times in the past, in many places around the world.
You can’t describe anything as ‘massive’ in isolation - all such terms are relative, and can only be accurately judged against a baseline.
We lost of a lot of EU citizens because of Brexit and ended up with a labour shortage in a number of industries. A new influx of migrants to fill those vacancies is only to be expected (and was something that people warned the avid Brexiteers about!).
Look at the data. The net migration is extremely high, and the total population is increasing, albeit more slowly. I make it roughly a 10% population increase this century. I agree the reason for the recent surge is partly due to people from EU countries leaving, but it is an increase in net migration.
I agree this is an economic phenomenon partly driven by labour shortages. But I'm not at all sure those vacancies are actually being filled or that this situation is being well managed. Actually we are having (mild) trouble filling vacancies for scientists because of restrictive immigration policies. They still come despite the obstacles but who knows what the future will look like. These are people who have choices in where they go.
In other words, immigration is being mismanaged. I can't say how much of the unrest is caused by reasonable or unreasonable grievances, but I can believe that towns where housing is cheaper are being flooded by large numbers of culturally different people to the natives. It's not unreasonable to feel pissed off about that. We'd have to look at the data to see if these are genuinely productive people actually taking up jobs that natives are unwilling to fill. I don't know. I think the government ought to know but I'm not sure it does.
I looked it up. It is a complex picture. Unemployment is very high amongst asylum seekers and immigrants of MENA origin. However, these are a small proportion of total immigrants. In general the unemployment rate amongst immigrants is lower than UK born. Even those who are unemployed are less likely to claim benefits.
I watched a YouTuber who mostly video closed stores on high streets across Britain. If he has a political POV it’s hard to tell other than how neglected cities other than London are.
Anyway, he videoed a demonstration. A kid, maybe 10-12 years old walked along side the protesters and he was breaking windows on ground floor shops and homes as he walked along the crowd. Not one adult tried to stop him. Not one.
You ok? Cause it seems like you don’t really want to have an honest conversation with anyone. In fact, it kind of seems like you’re trying to start arguments with strangers because you don’t know how to get attention any other way. Maybe go outside for a while?
I think the confusion started when we failed to make the distinction between the rioters and the protesters at the beginning. To be fair, I don’t think the British guy in the episode made the distinction either, which helped start this long thread.
Okay, but the people setting out to get mardy on the streets of the UK did so in response to a UK citizen murdering children, not to make a grand statement about immigration. The protests here in Belfast were aimed directly at mosques and brown people specifically. The "legitimate concerns" crowd don't have a singular leg to stand on.
Because that’s the topic of conversation and I’m just writing what I know?
If you’re seeking an in-depth, peer-reviewed analysis of rioter motivations as regards to larger British concerns about immigration, maybe hit up a university sociology department and not a Substack comments section.
I think that there's some pretty clear difficulty with integration in the U.K., and in much of Europe as a whole. This is exacerbated by a perceived lack of consistency in the way events are delt with via the authorities. An example is the 1400 or so – predominantly white – young girls groomed by Asian men in Rotherham. The victims were repeatedly ignored by the authorities due to a concern at being viewed as racist. There’s the Adriana Grande concert that was bombed in Manchester which killed 22 kids. There was the 7/7 underground bombings. There were 4 Islamic terror attacks in 2017 alone. Between 850 and 1500 British born citizens left the U.K. to join ISIS. Compared to the continent though, the Brits have had it relatively good.
-The response to each of these events by those same authorities can be summed up by Norm MacDonald thus: “My biggest fear is that ISIS or some terrorist group like that would get ahold of a dirty bomb and explode it over a major city within the United States and kill tens of millions of people, because then the blowback against innocent Muslims would be absolutely terrible.”
The rioters went off of bad intel and acted foolishly. But to ignore the decades worth of context that led to such a blowup is disingenuous on the part of Mr. Williams. Sadly, this two dimensional thought pattern in a common one with people who have a pretty black and white view of the world.
And do you not see any black and white thinking in this post? You lose me with the "response from authorities" bit. This is always were things get black and white for the "let's understand the concerns" side. Shits complicated.
Take grooming. The grooming thing is complicated and has a lot of compounding factors, one of which is *absolutely* particular communities attitude towards women and girls but it is just *one* factor. The "police not wanting to be seen as racist" factor is miniscule. "Police not wanting to deal with a race riot for the sake of chavvy little slags" is much closer, which of course is its own problem but not the one that became a popular take. These were poor children from poor communities and that's not a coincidence. How much do you think the police would have cared about not being racist if it was Jemima being raped rather than Tracy?
All those things need talking about and dealing with and saying "the authorities *always* take this side because they care more about antiracism than anything else" is just as limiting as saying "most groomers are white so we shouldn't bother talking about it".
If we're being honest, I think people were more upset with the cultural aspect of the girls who were picked to be groomed. They were chosen specifically because they were poor girls who were not of the islamic faith. The US has worked so well as a melting pot because it's multiracial, but not especially multicultural. Peope in the UK perhaps feel a bit vexed that those who hold a different culture from their own didn't see their new neighbors as fellow citizens, but as lesser creatures that can be used like a sock a school boy masturbates into. They quite literally think of the kafir (re: their neighbors) in the same way as any supremicist does. I can see how people might be offended by that.
The common denominator was poverty and vulnerability. They were looking for easy victims no-one in authority cared about. The majority of them happened to be white because of the demographics of this country.
Sorry if this wasn't clear but I am a person in the UK so I don't need to wonder what my fellow Brits were saying, I heard it. Still I'm not sure what your point is. I am not talking about why people were upset I'm pointing out that these are complex issues. You say that Mr Williams is disingenuous for "black and white" thinking but have only reiterated the same, single, point and failed to engage with the rest of what I said.
"What were the legitimate concerns of the rioters? I am curious here because you are specifically saying that some "rioters" had legitimate concerns and I am genuinely interested to how you came to this conclusion"
Anyone who brings up ‘Asian grooming gangs’ is a racist who is not arguing in good faith.
I state that with confidence because they don’t care about white girls being raped by white men. Which is the overwhelming majority of cases - including some who are Tommy Robinson supporters. They only care about rape when it can be used to advance their racist agenda.
I care about any girls being raped by any men. And I think that Asian grooming gangs were atrocious and should have resulted in a huge reset of our approach to integration.
You see, those rapes had nothing to do with ‘integration’, and everything to do with a broken care system and police mysogyny. You don’t tackle that by harassing Asian people about ‘integration’.
You can’t stop women and girls being raped and exploited by changing the approach to ‘integration’, since the vast majority of them are victimised by born and bred, white, Brits. Many of whom are in positions of power in their community or their family.
So you just proved my point. You are only interested in this subject as a way of demonising immigration.
Rioting is not a good response to things like excess immigration. But it's worth noting that when there are riots over pet left wing causes we hear that "riots are the voice of the unheard."
Riots are not justified. But there are legitimate concerns about immigration, crime, and housing costs. And the establishment in the West appears mostly unwilling to reduce immigration.
The problem is many places need immigration. Many poor Northern towns are desperate to attract immigration, preferably mid earning families. A band 7 nurse with a spouse who is a carer. Perfect. They can buy one of the hideous new build houses they throwing up everywhere. They will bring money in rather than taking it out and they won't need social care because they are working age adults. The spouse can fill some gaps they desperately need in the labour market and keep the wages in social care down saving the council money. They'll spend money locally and pay sweet council tax then the council can improve infastructure and services and get more funding for education and health to meet the growing population.
Everyone's a winner.
Only from the other side they just built a hosting estate on your football pitch and nobody round here can afford a house there. And the school is already full and the road is full of potholes and your nans carers are always late and don't speak English. If you complain they call you racist.
Some of the Northern towns may want immigrants. Though I would bet not everyone in those towns does. But there are probably other towns which are getting excess immigrants that really don't want them.
And I think the governing elites (for lack of a better term) ignore or shit on the latter group you described. And I think there concerns are legitimate.
And I don't know if this is politically sustainable. You are seeing parties in Europe winning elections that couldn't before almost entirely on immigration.
If only fascists will control immigration eventually the public will vote for fascists.
>Though I would bet not everyone in those towns does.
Indeed, this was the point of the last paragraph of my post. This is a result of decades of decline and neglect of these communities.
>But there are probably other towns which are getting excess immigrants that really don't want them.
We have to be clear here that there is a difference between illegal and legal immigration. These towns all want legal immigration, desperately. No town wants to have to deal with illegal immigration. Its a huge strain on services for a population that cannot legally work and have no money to spend.
>And I think the governing elites (for lack of a better term) ignore or shit on the latter group you described. And I think there concerns are legitimate.
Of course they don't but that's capitalism baby, why do you think these towns ended up desperate for immigration in the first place? They can either have immigrants or move to London. Why should the south east pay for the north? What is the other option? What are the fascists going to do to save Blackpool?
To me this seems to be the neoliberal approach of just throwing more and more labor into the economy in hopes of goosing GDP and ignoring everything else. Including cultural and quality of life concerns
And illegal immigration just shouldn't (ideally) exist at all. Illegal immigrants should not get in or be deported as quickly as possible. In America a lot, perhaps most, of the immigration anger is against illegal immigration. We must have control.
From what I can tell, they have a lot of the same concerns about unchecked mass migration that we have in the US. Immigration is good, but if it’s unchecked to the point that we can’t absorb people fast enough then it’s harmful. In Britain, I see people complaining that there’s not enough housing, for example. That immigrants are being given free housing while the indigenous population is sent to the back of the queue. This is just one example, but people have a right to voice concern without being called racist. There’s also the complaint of two tier policing. The elite politicians would probably say that’s not happening. That they’re all crazy right wing nuts. But the people on the ground have a different story, and I’m more likely to believe them.
As far as BLM and JSO are concerned, I think I used to believe that they were righteous, and I honestly think that most participants feel they’re doing the right thing. However, here we are four years later and how many BLM chapter leaders have been charged with fraud? Where did the money go? Did anyone help clean up the neighborhoods after the riots, or was everyone stuck fending for themselves? Same with JSO. Who are the backers, and who’s profiting?
Sorry I specifically asked about the rioters. They didn't call anything out, they burned down a library. I'm on the ground, I personally know at least 4 people who rioted (although I have only seen one of them in the last year), I can 100% promise you that they would have rioted if the police shooting of a black man had kicked this off (which was the trigger for our last riots).
I think people who are removed from this have a completely warped view of it. It was mostly people who enjoy rioting and stealing, some were far right or far right adjacent but most just enjoy that kind of this. My evidence (apart from my first hand knowledge) is both the documentary edlvidence of theft and the trials. I am open to alternative evidence so please share it if you have it.
I think it’s interesting that this totally new user parachutes in, acts like a dickhead to people responding in good faith, and these and only these comments get liked by Dan Williams. Makes one wonder about who you are.
I'll stand up for My file here. She's not a new user, I've interacted with her for a long time. She gets particularly exercised about this topic leading to otherwise uncharacteristic slap fights, I think she called me a "bell end" last time this came up, lol.
British insults are so much cooler than ours. “Bell end” is great and of course “wanker” is just perfect in so many ways... Now that hipsters are culturally appropriating my “dipshit” I’m just lost for good insulting terms.
Or the threads on this episode regarding a conversation about disinformation has been hijacked by people making ill informed & factually inaccurate rants about UK immigration & the UK riots and My File objected (unsurprisingly).
If Jesse’s guest likes those posts, may be it’s because he too recognises in accuracies & mischaracterisations 🤷🏼♂️.
I’d be genuinely curious as to where some of these American posters have got their info from, but they seem very confident about something of which they have no first hand experience.
Yes, I noticed those likes too. But I think he just genuinely likes the (quite erroneous IMO) comments from My File. Does not improve my opinion of the guy.
I don't want to fight here, and I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to ask a loaded question. (I really like you, but for some reason this is what we fight about.)
Do you make a distinction between the rioters and the protestors? Like, the 60-year-old man who shows up to a protest because he's freaked out by sudden demographic change vs the thug who shows up because burning shit and intimidating people is fun for a certain type of person?
Of course, I do but I think yall accross the pond are missing huge bits of this story. For example a lot of the places that had the worse riots are not the places that are facing the large demographic shifts. This is a complex situation. Wolfstar made a terrific post in the midst of the riots about the combination of funding cuts, generally thuggery and anti-immigration sentiment (of varying legitimacy) that lit the fuse on this shit show.
I end up being a dick because I have Americans tellling me (a previously homeless Brit who works in the public sector) about how immigrants get "free housing" and jump the queue in front of locals. I have another one telling me Saint Tommy Robinson (a legit far right violent thug who made a 2 hour documentary full of lies about how a actual *child* deserved to be beaten and bullied) is a great guy who is being jailed for reporting on... something. It's incredibly frustrating.
Oh, I have no doubt Americans are missing enormous parts of this.
My general experience as an insulated American was to plop right into the middle of riot coverage with a preexisting distrust of media narratives and to say "Huh? What's happening? Who the hell is Tommy Robinson? Is he the villain everyone says or is he being maligned for wrongthink (I've come to think he's a legitimate chode after looking into it more, but that's the one where you and I came to blows.)
Anyway, just trying to tread lightly and learn more, but it's easy to step on a landmine in complicated issues. Carry on.
I have watched it. I have also watched both Tommy Robinsons documentaries. I have read the entire ruling from his most recent court case.
I urge you to broaden your horizons beyond youtube videos that reinforce your current view, then perhaps you wouldn't end up looking like a fucking idiot.
It's not easy to be lectured at about things you have direct experience of by people who do not. I thought Lana Diesel in particular was being quite arrogant and frustrating during the interaction above. Calling Dan a "Fucking idiot" is probably pushing it, but I can totally understand why.
I’m sure it sounds silly unless you’re the one who gets pushed down the waiting list for housing after you’ve been waiting for years. It all seems ludicrous until you’re the one clearly getting screwed over by the government.
Mate, you clearly don't have the slightest fucking clue how housing allocation works in the UK. What government? What housing? Where are these people waiting? How is the housing free? Can you answer *any* of these questions?
Lana I *am* a completely new poster "parachuting" in just to tell you that I really very strongly feel like it was you who was the problem in these interactions. You began by lecturing someone who knows much more about this topic than you do, and then you "didn't like their tone" when they understandably became very irritated by that. Although you keep saying it's My File who has a problem here, it is not. It is you.
Whoa there, why so angry??? You’re right, I don’t have a clue how housing works in the UK. But I very much know how it works to sign up for government housing in the US. It takes years.
Girl, didn’t you start this conversation? Put the damn phone down and go outside so you can interact with other humans! No one on here gives a shit about your bad attitude. It’s pitiful.
You seem to care deeply, so much so you have forgotten the most basic functions of the app and just insulted somebody you agree with. You may want to delete the post before she takes offence.
Also this thing about housing is extremely silly. It's a complex issue and the definition of "housing" is so broad its essentially unfalsifiable but to sum it up its almost certainly nonsense. Its such a huge issue I would need you to be more specific to explain why so feel free to link something.
Which isn't to say there aren't legitimate concerns around immigration but I think your regurgitation these talking points kind of demonstrates why the conversations are so difficult to have.
Yup. And did anyone clean up those neighborhoods (except insurance money we end up subsidizing).
I actually think balanced police reform is a necessity, and protests (though I don't personally care for them) are legitimately motivated. Looters and other destructive people could be shot as far as I care.
Just going to reiterate a point that I've made many times before, which is that when your soi-disant "concern" is "I dislike this group of people and attribute low morals/criminal tendencies/adverse social consequences to individual members of this group based on my perception of their group tendencies," that is literally the definition of racism. You do not have any purported right to voice racist concerns without being (accurately) called racist.
(In point of fact, in a country that enjoys free speech, you don't have a right to voice ANY concerns without being called racist, but I digress.)
Yes, what you describe there is the definition of racism. But here’s the million dollar question: is it possible for any group of people to complain about being utterly screwed over by their government and all the money laundering NGOs that love to virtue signal with complete disregard for the current residents WITHOUT being called racist and xenophobic? Because it’s definitely not just white people who are pissed. Look at Chicago, for example. What we have here is a class conflict, not a race conflict.
"Look at Chicago, for example." I can confirm that I have looked at the Chicago Wikipedia page, which confirms that it is the third-most populous city in the United States. Since it provides no support whatsoever for your arguments, however, what this tells me is that you are either incapable of supporting those arguments or feel you don't have to. Either way, you're not worth listening to.
I suppose I should have known that from the various chemtrails-level allusions to "NGOs" in the clouds, but whatever. Fool me once, etc etc. Not a poster's name I've seen before, but I know now that you are a conspiracist nutbag, and will engage with you accordingly.
Seriously?? Either you haven’t read a newspaper in the last five years so you have no clue how to engage in this debate, or you know I’m right but you don’t have a good response so you resort to vague insults to make you seem smarter than you are. This isn’t third grade. Everything I stated earlier is well documented and even reported by your basic nightly news on a regular basis. Either way, you never answered the question.
The BLM protesters absolutely had some legitimate concerns, and I assume many of the rioters shared those concerns.
I'd be astonished if you could find many people to say that the police are shooting about the right number of unarmed suspects. (Maybe some economists, but not normal people.)
Some police reform is needed and overdue. We all (I think) hate seeing genuine abuses of police power, though often what the media frames as abusive behavior by police is not.
And I am always unhappy to see police shoot a person who they mistake as having a weapon. Though some of these victims ought to have behaved more cooperatively (others were definitely victimized by bad cops).
US police kill about 1000 people a year, justified and unjustified. That's about 3 a day.
Did you see the recent footage of the knife slasher attack on X (posted a link below). Notice how fast it goes south and how the attacker keeps coming on after being shot.
I’m all ears to hear the ‘legitimate concerns’ of people who tried to burn children alive in a hotel, hurled bricks at cops & attacked Taxi drivers targeted for no apparent reason other than being non white & torched a community centre containing a library. 🤦🏽
And I’m sure you’re equally open to hearing the justification for groups of men walking around with machetes, or maybe the reasoning behind random knife attacks on complete strangers in the streets. Were those justified?
There are crazy, violent people of all stripes. Some of them like to take over protests and cause chaos just for the hell of it. And, Believe it or not, in some cases they are even paid to be agitators. Not saying that’s the case in England, but it’s happened multiple times in the US. We’ve had full congressional hearings about it. Why would they do that? Because as soon as it gets violent all legitimate concerns of the original protesters go out the window and all anyone talks about is the violence. Not only that, but becomes the justification for future crackdowns against dissent. It serves a purpose.
Yeah, that lens in your item 2 is slowly starting to crack for me as well. Maybe not as fast as it has for others, but I'm increasingly seeing how tendentious and skewed the news can be in both directions. An uncritical assertion that the left is less likely to engage in that just feels very circa-2010.
Aside the ludicrous broad brush cliche of your claim, can you point to any time where Jesse’s guest suggested anything that just wasn’t of the left was far right?
He suggested riots which involved attempts to burn down a hotel containing children & attacks on a Taxi driver were ‘far right’.
His description of the rioters as a mixture of the racist far right, people with a long history of violent anti social behaviour & people heavily influenced by drugs & alcohol is entirely born out by the evidence of actions, statements & past criminal history of those who ended up going for the courts.
You and others have them turned up to talk about these people’s ’legitimate concerns’.
I’m still waiting to discover not only what are these legitimate concerns are, but why I or anyone else needs to be listening carefully to someone who’s tried to burn children alive.
On #1, he was describing the rioters, not average joes who may have reasonable concerns. I’m often frustrated by the failure to recognize what people are worried about, but in this case I had no problem with him criticizing rioters
Well said! I wasn’t in the mood to finish after reading how the crime stats were juked (Wire fan) & not a peep from the left leaning journalists who essentially said any reporting on an uptick was fake news. So many stories like this!
Jesse would greatly benefit from a road trip with Batya!
Yes she's a bit dogmatic sometimes and engages in some broad generalizations. But she's correct in her overall analysis of the class cleavage in American society. To a GenXer, the complete absence of discussion about class in our elections is startling.
But I suppose what should we expect in a country where people who make $50k and people who make $250k are equally adamant in labeling themselves "middle class".
I find this last point the most infuriating. Like the Cheney’s have been SO CLEAR that the reason they support Kamala is specifically bc of the threat they feel Trump poses to democracy. Might i remind you they voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. The break only came after Liz Cheney served on the Jan 6 committee.
Right! Like they haven't suddenly become liberals. Look up Liz Cheney's actual voting record in Congress, there was no change after she became part of the J6 committee. She's as right-wing as she ever was. The difference in their behavior is that they, to their credit, have concluded that temporarily enduring a President with policy ideas with whom they disagree is preferable to enabling the permanent takeover of the government by people who propose to render their policy ideas irrelevant by eliminating the democratic means by which those views might translate into action.
In regard to the mis/disinformation I noticed he compared NYT vs Infowars. Wouldn't it make sense to compare similar outlets? No one would consider Infowars to be the NYT of the right.
I think it’s very fair to argue that both parties support war too easily. But the idea that now it’s the right who is anti war is too much. Including and especially Trump.
Absolutely comical to see the exact same arguments that are routinely lambasted when employed on the part of black communities get raucous reception when employed on behalf of rioting right-wing racists, who are, after all, merely responding to the horrible provocations of immigrants a. existing, and b. seeking to exercise rights under international law.
To point three - in the us, the conservative press has convinced the vast majority of conservatives that donald trump lost the election, a thing that did not happen.
There are many questions about why dick cheney is supporting democrats. The questions are more why he is one of the few conservatives with the balls to name that trump is a deranged demented fascist who is constantly shitting himself. And the answer is that the right is so ideologically captured that they all march in lockstep to whatever the party line is, a thing this interview seemed to argue didn't happen.
Man I struggled with this episode. In part because, of course I agree with Williams's underlying thesis and conclusion. However it is entirely spoken through the lens of like, a 2015 progressive who is somewhat skeptical of underlying assumptions in the modern environment. And I don't even think it deserves 70 minutes of talking through, and several underlying assumptions are just not even remotely persuasive to people who don't share the underlying priors of Jesse and Williams. For example, although Williams states "the NYT is almost never going to publish fake news in the technical sense of that term", while Apoorva Mandavilli consistently, pervasively, aggressively and wantonly promoted clear "fake news" in the NYT on covid. Absolutely insane corrections on obviously disprovable information (e.g. 900,000 pediatric hospitalizations later corrected to 62,000 in October 2021; 3% case fatality rate corrected to less than 1% in December 2022; daily covid death rate of 1,500 corrected to 1,500 per week in February 2024), and plenty of examples where corrections would have been warranted on things that were obviously wrong, but harder to disprove by literally just an exercise pointing to the CDC, etc. website. And to be clear, this is misinformation (disinformation?) that reached Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court in deciding cases at the highest levels of the judiciary.
You don't even need to tell independents (let alone conservatives) that there's no "vaccine" for "misinformation". It is clearly incorrect on its face. I appreciate the Jacob Blake reference in the episode, but one of the more egregious examples of clear misinformation in recent years is the "Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation" (which, to be clear, using the "proper" terms, was disinformation by the security experts, for those who obviously knew the FBI had the laptop in hand since December of 2019).
Misinformation is rampant -- it comes from all levels of society, whether its racists living in London or white collar professionals in DC -- but this is and has always been true. And the recent handwringing of leftists/progressives on the topic only highlights how out of touch they are with the misinformation they're consuming (implicitly presuming their media diets is free of misinformation, and that they must solve for the bad people who politically disagree with them). And of course this is true, see e.g. Ben Collins only ever fact checking political enemies.
I just can't get on board with engaging with the discussion at all. It's so dumb. But of course it needs to be done, when we have governmental entities mandating (EU) or pressuring under threat of regulation (the US) the censorship and monitoring of information deemed misinformation. It just exhausts me that we even need to do this exercise.
I have trouble with the one on one interviews. Jesse in particular doesn't challenge his guests much, so unless the guest is fascinating, I usually don't want a whole hour of whatever they've got to say.
Aw. Jesse is clearly very high in agreeableness and Katie is low in agreeableness. (The contrast is part of what makes their banter fun to listen to, IMO.) I’m not convinced he wants to be a Good Liberal; if he really did, he wouldn’t have made gender medicine his beat. I think it’s just that his setpoint is “get along with people,” especially one-on-one.
Agreed, though Katie doesn’t challenge them either because she agrees with everyone she invites on. Never mind disputing how many episodes Primos get for their money, we are at the point where we get 1.5 listenable episodes a month for free.
I always imagine Katie's episodes as Andy or Helen telling Katie about some Internet BS, and Jesse's as somebody telling Jesse about the book they wrote. The first one is a lot better.
Maybe Jesse could get Taylor on a one-on-one and break the comment system. ;)
If only it was just Andy and Helen on a rotating basis. Andy‘s voice is like having liquid chocolate poured into your ears, never get tired of him. And Helen is one of the smartest journalist working in the UK today.
More of them and less of the “show us on the imaginary doll where the wicked autogynophile committed literal violence” please.
Does Katie ever 'challenge' the string of UK radfem guests - Julie Bindel, Sarah Ditum, Helen Lewis, etc? I think there's plenty they write that's highly questionable, far more than Dan Williams. It's just that the sort of conservative feminist culture war issues they're pushing square with the priors of much of the audience here. Double standards abound!
I am not saying Dan Williams is questionable -- I agree with him after all!
I just don't really enjoy 70 minutes of discussion on a topic that I already agree with, spoken through a lens that exhausts me.
And to be honest, I thought Williams was fine! But Jesse was a little too uncritical throughout. The last thing i want to listen to is Williams advancing a position i agree with, and Jesse just walking that story line through the most milquetoast commentary throughout. And the great reveal was just "yeah, doesn't seem like there's a vaccine for misinformation"
I think rather the opposite, Jesse definitely pushes back more on guests than Katie does. Which makes sense, both Katie and Jesse pretty much only invite people they already like and already agree with.
It also means I'm letting my subscription lapse, the guest episodes are just not for me and now they've started taking over primo episodes too. Unfortunate.
Oh of course, I wasn't implying otherwise. I also don't think I want them to push back and turn it into a debate. On the other hand I don't like the guest episodes anyway so maybe I just don't care.
IIRC the only primo episode(s) that have been interview format are Katie’s split ep with Andy and his nerd friend. And those were released during what was nominally a vacation for K&J, plus the North Carolina disaster, so I didn’t hold it against Katie too much.
Honestly having just listened to it I struggled...to pay attention. The guy was boring, humorless, and not making any interesting points. Jesse seemed to zone out at times as well.
Re: fake news in the NYT: Jesse and Katie interviewed David Zweig at a point in the pandemic when I had my doubts about the CDC recommendations but wasn't sure where to find non-nuts discussing the weak evidence for, e.g., masking children. The NYT was not, as far as I can recall, publishing a lot of skeptical looks at the state of the evidence.
I gave (and give) them a lot of credit for that. Maybe Jesse just couldn't call the abysmal NYT COVID reporting circa 2021 to mind in the middle of this week's interview (?).
I am still generally disgruntled by Jesse's laissez faire attitude towards covid coverage. I couldn't tell you which episode of B&R it was, but there was one episode where they spent 5-10 minutes discussing a chart that was like: x axis exposure time, y axis mask quality; with respect to how long you need to be exposed next to someone with covid to catch covid (e.g. 1 minute next to maskless; 5 minutes next to cloth masks... etc).
That chart was entirely fabricated -- or if you prefer more polite words, driven by heuristics of (biased) scientists based on their directional sense of what might be right. Empirical evidence predating covid, through covid, and post covid have all consistently always said masking is ineffective to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses. The most robust evidence has always been clear on this. And I bang my head against the wall at Jesse for not taking the critical eye he has taken towards trans-care in the same way towards covid. But I also understand covid was traumatic to people and so looking to closely can be exhausting and defeating.
(but at the same time, if Jesse wants that easy way out, don't spend time in this episode talking about covid masking as a misinformation topic! Jesse is willfully uninformed or mal-informed, and so just leave it be and don't talk about it!)
I'm sure that there are journalists (David Zweig maybe) who are sending FOIA requests to get the emails and meeting minutes behind the decision to recommend and then mandate masks and I really want to see them. I really want to know if the CDC allowed itself to be bullied by masksforAll, or it if they realized that essential workers were going to have to go back to work and they figured that even thought hey wouldn't make people safe, at least they'd make people feel safe. I also want to see the documents about why the CDC and people like Fauci were so opposed to doing high quality trials on masks.
I kinda understand why the podcast doesn't want to do a deep dive into masking (they did a brief one a while ago). Highly educated liberals went deep into the mask hole and it's going to be embarrassing to admit that masking didn't really do much to prevent the spread of the virus given how many of them lost their shit whenever they saw an unmasked toddler. The pandemic was really traumatic but also a lot of people made complete asses of themselves and should be ashamed of their behavior. (Remember double masking.) Bringing it up means that a lot of people are going to be embarrassed. They might have to admit that the Trumpy uncle was right about something. Or that they defended blatantly cruel policies like toddler mask mandates. And if that's your social circle, that's going to make your social circle angry.
That said, I think it's still really important to go over the pandemic policies and clearly state what worked, what we still have no idea about, what didn't work and what was phenominally stupid/cruel. Covid clearly showed how even really educated people fall for misinformation when they're scared. IT's also really important to bring it up again so that in the next pandemic we don't make these same mistakes. Plus, a lot of the stuff that happened as part of the pandemic response was completely unethical and that kind of breech of ethics isn't something we can just shrug our shoulders and move on from.
Agree overwhelmingly with a lot of how you put it. I'd love to sit down and get lunch with Zweig and talk about these things.
>"I really want to know if the CDC allowed itself to be bullied by masksforAll, or it if they realized that essential workers were going to have to go back to work and they figured that even thought hey wouldn't make people safe, at least they'd make people feel safe"
So I definitely think it's more the latter than the former, but I don't think that tells the full story. I think what likely happened is that the generalist employees at the CDC convinced themselves that masking worked, and the specialists got cold feet when they saw how politically charged the topic became (and there was no way politically Fauci could change his recommendation AGAIN). And there was a confluence of a number of things coming together: (1) cocksure MBA/Startup types like "Hammer and Dance" Tomas Pueyo coming out of left field early-on telling people with the utmost confidence how to act when the responsible scientists were being cautious; (2) observational studies that lacked control groups conflating (what we can now clearly identify as) the seasonal decline of NYC covid in April with masking efforts, and confusing the causation of the decline of cases; (3) the empirical models that assumed fixed spread based on interactions confusing the whole effort -- I remember closely monitoring the IHME group's (Bill Gates's UW-funded group) model religiously in like April and May before ultimately concluding the empirical modeling was no better than dressed-up guesswork -- I still have a funny screenshot of Andrew Cuomo's daily briefing on April 11 showing the actual hospitalizations observed, compared to the models from McKinsey, Columbia and IHME being wildly off; (4) a few early low-quality (and arguably p-hacked, in the case of the Jena Germany mask study) studies that people prioritized over existing higher-quality masking studies because of a "well covid is novel and so all prior research is inapplicable" approach; and (5) wall-to-wall media attention perverting incentives across the board.
Layer in the political dimension of Ds on one side, Rs on the other, and we were doomed to end up losing our heads. Not to mention the stir-craziness of being isolated indoors on a near-constant basis. But I think the politics of it all is going to prevent us from ever fully having an account of the story (plus it would ruin people's careers and reputations -- especially the very people we would most need to take up the mantle of an investigation as a cause worth fighting for).
I heard #4 all the time and it is mind-bogglingly stupid. There were already four human coronaviruses. There are similarities between how all respiratory viruses transmit and for this one to be that different, it would hav had to defy the laws of physics.
For #1 and 2, I spent a lot of time explaining to highly educated people why RCTs were more likely to accurately measure an effect than the observational ones and it often didn't work. I'd get "but we don't know if the people in the RCTs did what they were supposed to do". Well, yeah, but with observational studies you have confounding factors which usually aren't a problem with RCTs and if you rely on people's self reports you have to worry about recall bias. There was definitely a lot of overconfidence - I think a lot of people assumed that having a college degree meant that they were equipped to evaluate scientific data when they really weren't. What was interesting was that I met plenty of people who did not have college degrees who could understand these concepts so I think it may be a personality thing.
I also agree with you that it's going to be nearly impossible to have a proper Covid commission because people's reputations and careers will go down the tubes. Some of the the European countries that were less polarized and crazy are trying to set up Commissions and it's entirely possible that on yet another issue of scientific importance, the US will be an outlier and our medical institutions' official positions will be regarded as crackpottery in places like Norway and France.
I am not arguing with you in the slightest. I am just trying to "assuming good faith" rationalize how things happened.
I agree our institutions failed. I was just trying to charitably advance their arguments (that I disagree with).
All said and done, it is a failure of our experts/institutions. And there is no path forward without reconciliation. Even if it is easier not to. But here we are. Just trying our best to move forward
"I think what likely happened is that the generalist employees at the CDC convinced themselves that masking worked."
This is exactly what happened with a well intentioned person I know who was working for the CDC at the time. It was a case of all my professional contacts are doing this + I live in Maryland + the people who are loudly protesting masks seem like Trump fanatics. (This individual is not lefty but definitely runs in highly degreed, anti-Trump circles, much as I do.)
Add to that the fact that people were busy doing their jobs and not looking at the masking data, and you get what we saw in 2021.
I think it was inexcusable but totally explicable.
I think you have a very good point about the political aspect to this. It would be a great subject for a social psychology paper; unfortunately psychologists are on team masks still work so even if the research gets done, the paper will have a hard time getting published.
"Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people)."
"Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people)."
"Evidence from RCTs of hand hygiene or face masks did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza, and limited evidence was available on other environmental measures."
See, for example, the World Health Organization in 2019:
(This direct download appears to have been taken down by the WHO, but I have the study as a PDF if you'd like me to send it to you)
"Ten RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, and there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza."
I find that a lot of the discussion around CoViD in general and masking in particular to be characterized by motivated reasoning, regardless of the particular opinions held by any given person.
I have, in fact, read them. It is my perception that the people who already had reason to believe that masks are a nuisance will overstate the negative findings of those studies, and that people who are convinced that masks work will emphasize their shortcomings and disregard them.
I think Jesse glossed over a key point of the exposure phenomena. It’s not just being online, it’s being online and the kind of person that seeks out crazy content.
If Jesse is inundated with crazy content, it’s because he seeks out crazy content.. the algorithm gives what the user wants.
Which is why it’s so disturbing to me that Insta is convinced I’m obsessed with hobby horsing, people who walk pigs with a switch and a death stare, and Christian remixes of popular music like Kendrick Lamar / revivals with people speaking in tongues.
Instagram is crazy. It saw I was interested in babies and baby wraps (wearing not eating), and so it deduced I would want to know about how I was a terrible mother who was doing everything wrong, all medicine was poison and immunisations are dangerous. I had to delete it after that.
Yup. It's amazing how much overlap there is between baby wearing and other crunchy stuff like not believing in the MMR vaccine and giving your kids essential oils for their colds.
I happen to like baby wearing because I hate dealing with strollers and shopping carts, but there's no algorithm catering to parents like me.
Yeah, exactly. It was all practical considerations for me. I wasn't a "concept parent" trying to be the platonic ideal of the natural mother. I just didn't want to wait for another bus because there was already a pram on it.
The algorithm thinks I like watching videos of cows and horses having their hooves cleaned. Which, I’ll be honest, it turns out I really do find utterly compelling. But how did it know?! I didn’t even know.
Same. There was a brief period of time last year when I was so sick of my job that I seriously considered reaching out to Nate the Hoof Guy about apprenticeship/training opportunities.
One account I had on Tik Tok or something got locked in to feeding me a never ending stream of disabled people dancing or singing or something. Like amputees, disfigured people, dwarves, flipper limbs...you name it.
I can only assume it fed me one once and I froze....stunned at what I was looking at and the algorithms was like "we got him. maximum engagement. this is the way".
Yeah, one of the reasons I HATE the podcast mini-genre of talking about what's wrong with the podcasters' Twitter is that my (private, anonymous) Twitter feed is just fine. I'm sure it helps to be a nobody, but it's probably also beneficial to aggressively unfollow everyone except the weirdos you actually enjoy reading.
That's a good point. I signed up for Twitter in 2020 because it was the only way to get up-to-date information on the release of a new motorcycle I was dying to hand over a non-refundable downpayment to secure. Since then I follow MotoGP and the various riders and teams that I like. I don't see the crazy shit everyone is always talking about.
After all these years, the algorithm still hasn’t figured me out and I’d love to keep it that way. C-sections? Montreal? Real housewives? Horror movies? All of this is currently showing in my instagram “suggested” posts, none of it is relevant for me, and I get to smugly appreciate the fact that the algorithm’s going to have to try quite a bit harder to understand me.
What I really liked about this episode is how philosophy really cuts through the noise and nonsense of politics, and I don't mean being political or having a political view, but thinking politically.
Williams was using very basic premises from late Wittgenstein and making an analysis that is almost trivial (and accurate!) about the faulty methods of sociolinguistic approaches to analyzing so-called fake news.
I walked away from this thinking more people should spend time studying philosophy, art, and literature rather than consuming political thought pieces--including the work Jesse and Katie do. Don't get me wrong, Jesse and Katie make entertaining content, but if you want to transcend the bullshit of the culture wars, you need to consume some real culture.
A resounding agree! Also, I think this should be explored in an individualistic way. I grew up in a 'group-think' family environment (a family member recently joked we, as a family, were like a 'cult' back then, and probably now in some ways). There would be stern looks of disapproval if you had a different opinion than the tribe (da family) and it terrified me enough to break from it for several years. Jesse's insight about tribes and truths was spot on. An interesting discussion would be on whether belonging is more important than truth/authentic expression, and the repercussions for those who choose either.
So while I've disagreed with some Blocked and Reported material in the past (usually nitpicks here or there), this is the first time I've been disappointed. I understand that the simplicity vs "it's complicated" narrative is catnip to Jesse, but in this conversation complexity itself is being used as a simplistic crutch.
The researchers working on inoculation theory as a means of countering disinformation do not have a simplistic linear model between false information and belief. There is plenty of recognition that humans are complex and dozens of factors play a role in shaping beliefs. But it is undeniable that information (and false information) do play some role in shaping beliefs. Also, this didn't spring into existence in 2016, or is merely one guy dusting off a theory from the 60s. There are dozens, if not hundreds, or researchers working on this topic (I know, cue the "there are dozens of us" Arrested Development meme). Even a brief glance at the literature will find meta-analyses of studies dating back to the 2010 and earlier. Yes it did start getting more media attention after 2016 (for obvious and valid reasons), and yes there have been some who have abused the misinformation lingo.
The fingerprints discussion is also disappointingly simplistic. The presence of the factors mentioned don't automatically mean disinformation is at play. Accurate information could have some or all of the fingerprints mentioned. But it is VASTLY more likely that disinformation will have many of those hallmarks. Similarly, it is possible that a piece of disinformation has none of those hallmarks. Yet that is overwhelmingly not the case. The fingerprints are merely a heuristic to identify when you should be far more skeptical of a claim that one otherwise would be. In a slightly different framing, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's not a simplistic on/off switch, it is a be careful warning. Further, the conversation does gloss over that while there is definitely a robust debate to be had about inoculating people to disinformation at an extremely broad level, there is basically no controversy that inoculation/prebunking works with specific false claims.
To use an admittedly simple analogy: There is a guy holding a lit match in front of a pile of wood doused with gasoline. The guy throws the match on the wood, and it bursts into flames. Inoculation researchers look at this and point at the lit match being tossed on the pile. What Dan and Jesse are doing here is the equivalent of "Well, there are plenty of complex reasons why the pile of wood was built, where the gasoline came from and who poured it, why the guy lit the match, who may have manufactured the match and/or lighter, so really this situation is to complicated and who is to say what really happened." And indeed, all that background might be terribly complex, but it doesn't change the reality that a match was lit and thrown, and that sparked the fire. Now maybe if the guy with the match wasn't there the pile would've caught on fire in another way, and a different pile would've reacted differently, but that doesn't mean nothing can be done about preventing said fire being lit here and now.
Without disinformation, the anti-vax movement wouldn't be nearly as prevalent. Same goes for the belief that the 2020 election was stolen (I know plenty of conservatives in my extended family and social network, the strength of their belief (based on false info) is not remotely equivalent to leftists who complain on a poll that they'd rather be obliterated by a meteor than have another Trump presidency). Same goes for denial of global warming largely resulting from human activities. One could also apply this to narratives about identity across the political spectrum. There has been a terminally online/elite counter-narrative that "oh, people don't really believe that. They are merely expressing their deep seated value system to appeal to others." This is annoyingly simplistic at best, and usually not true. People overwhelmingly genuinely hold their beliefs, which is obvious when talking with almost anyone IRL. Now some of those beliefs might have far less wiggle room than others. And people can and often do both, genuinely believe something and virtue signal with said belief. Also, I have yet to meet a person who goes "yeah, I don't actually genuinely believe such and such, I just want to be included in the group." I genuinely believe my ideas (some more than others), and everybody I've ever met seems to as well. The cognitive dissonance from not genuinely believing what I think/do would be much more than my brain could handle lol.
Further, the inoculation theory research holds valuable lessons regardless of where one is on the political spectrum. If you believe the other side(s) are full of shit, you can use inoculation and prebunking to help change minds. It is a tool that doesn't particularly care who wields it, though it will work substantially better if the accurate information actually is on your side.
Ironically, one of the comments here about recently reading "how the crime stats were juked" is a perfect example of the power of disinformation. The author of the recent claims that have swept right-wing media about the FBI stealth editing crime numbers to hide a crime increase is John Lott, a notorious fraud who has been caught fabricating data, lying under oath, and way back when pretending to be his own female student to heap praise on himself. He is also the main "researcher" behind the claim that guns make people safer, a conclusion rejected by the overwhelming majority of studies yet is believed by more than half the American public (which did not used to be the case, and is an excellent case study of the power of disinformation). The FBI case is no exception, where the FBI found FEWER crimes than they had originally reported in 2021 and 2022 combined. However, because there was a large crime revision down in 2021, and a more modest crime revision up in 2022, Lott turns that into thousands of additional crimes and murders being hidden. He also fails to notify the readers that the FBI revises its previous crime estimates every year, and in some years more than what they this past time. The FBI has never trumpeted this, but because it is an election year and Lott is Lott, it is turned into a conspiracy with multiple Republican Congressmen calling it election interference and Elon Musk's PAC blasting it out to millions.
While I know Dan Williams has responded to these rebuttals to his claims (responses which I don't find as persuasive as the rebuttals, but I want to mention they exist for transparency), I do find that these articles provide a much more sophisticated and nuanced picture than Williams presents, and I do hope Jesse at least reaches out to the some of the many scholars in the inoculation/prebunking field to provide that perspective:
Finally, I want to make clear that none of this is meant as claiming that Dan Williams is trying to deceive anyone, and I do think it is important for the disinformation field to have skeptics challenging it in a robust manner. I simply think the inoculation researchers have substantially better arguments and much more extensive research on their side. But further research could definitely prove them (and me by extension) wrong, and if it is wrong we definitely need to know. Same goes if it is correct. I just wish the conversation had extended the "it's complicated" and nuanced catch phrases more rigorously, and I hope that a future conversation with a leading academic in the field might provide the other side of the story.
I listened to the Studies Show episode on this subject and they very persuasively made the case for the entire field of inoculation/prebunking being complete nonsense. Your work notwithstanding.
I am new to this topic but it reminds me of bias training where the idea is if you are taught how bias exists and shown examples of it then you’ll be less biased. But there’s no evidence it actually works despite workplaces embracing the anti-bias training.
So I looked at reference (1) by van der Linden et al in the first of your links (the Psychology Today article.) I have come to have a very low opinion of the quality of most psychology research- probably even lower than Jesse’s- and he has written a book on the subject. So that’s my bias going in.
My first observation is that Jesse and his guest seem pretty much right on in their criticism of the ‘misinformation fingerprints’- they seem like a hopelessly broad and squishy set of criteria. It seems like one would have to search hard to find a news or commentary article- misinformation or not-that does not arguably match at least some of the fingerprints. Since these fingerprints are the practical basis of the inoculation theory, that seems like a very big problem.
Then there is the VERY big problem that the article defines examples of misinformation by using- who could have guessed- misinformation. As a specific example, it defines ‘climate misinformation’ by relying on the ‘97% of climate scientists agree’ claim. But this well known and widely cited claim is itself misinformation based on terrible and biased methodology. So the theory seems to lack a reliable criterion for actually determining what is or is not misinformation in the first place (as I believe Jesse and guest discussed.) That would mean that the inoculation method may be equally good at making people a little more skeptical of misinformation AND correct information.
So teaching subjects a bit of a critical thinking technique may make them slightly more skeptical readers. Not exactly revolutionary.
Well for starters the practical basis of inoculation theory is not the fingerprints. Inoculation theory predates the fingerprints by decades, and would exist perfectly well if one were to never mention them. They are a way to try to broaden the scope of inoculation to where it doesn't have to be deployed on a case by case basis, and is therefore necessarily broad. And yes, it is a form of "critical thinking technique," which does make it kind of ironic the scorn you heap on inoculation, but then it's common sense and "not exactly revolutionary" when called by a different name.
Ah yes, the "97% of climate scientists agree is debunked" piece of disinformation, based on a delightful combination of oil & gas funded "experts," disinfo factories like Cato, and cranks who aren't actually climate scientists. The critiques of the 97% paper were pathetically bad, and ripped to shreds not only by the authors, but other scientists as well. For a mere sampling:
But thank you for proving just how widespread and common disinformation is with that helpful example.
Finally, if one actually reads the literature on inoculation you'll find studies that examine the question of whether it makes people more skeptical of accurate information. This is a bit of debate on this within the field, but the evidence thus far indicates it largely does not, and there are ways to mitigate it when the effect does appear.
Was definitely not my intention to ‘heap scorn’ on the misinfo fingerprints inoculation theory or practice- misinformation is a real problem and it makes sense to study it from various angles. But when looking at the van der Linden paper I immediately saw some gnarly problems along the lines of what Jesse and his guest discussed. This was just my take and not any kind of condemnation of the work.
I actually think applied critical thinking techniques including possibly being aware of the kind of criteria in the fingerprints may be one of the best options available for dealing with the new media and information environment. But the theory seems to propose them as something more than critical thinking heuristics- as signatures by which misinformation can be at least somewhat reliably identified. This is where I see methodological problems.
So certainly a lot has been said about the 97% claim. I’ll just say that the study it ‘came from’ measured statements in research paper abstracts and did not in any way measure or intend to measure the personal beliefs of scientists on climate science. Yet everyone always says it found ‘97% of climate scientists believe…’ That is why I called it misinformation, bc the study doesn’t say anything of the sort. I only brought it up because van der Linden makes this same mistaken claim in his paper- ironically as part of his justification for classifying other people’s claims as misinformation. So I think it well illustrates problem of finding objective criteria for misinformation.
Anyhow, I enjoyed your posts and I think it’s good to have someone knowledgeable on here speaking up for the theory, bc Jesse and the guest didn’t seem to be fans.
Fair enough, and apologies if I was a tad heated. The simplifications of the entire field in the interview irked me, and I saw the 97% comment as a red flag of sorts.
I definitely agree that there is potential for inoculation theory to be too broad or misused, and I think it will be valuable going forward to make sure it doesn't overstep the evidence. I do fear though throwing out the entire field on the basis of "humans are too complicated," rather than a more nuanced approach of seeing what evidence is strongest in the field, which areas may be incorrect, and then figuring out what works best. There are just too many studies in this area with similar findings to lump this in with the replication crisis that has embarrassed so many others. There is something here of value, even if the exact contours are yet to be properly defined.
I also feel (after reading dozens upon dozens of these studies for a project I was working on a couple years ago) that inoculation theory is necessary but debatably might not be sufficient to change minds at sufficient scale outside the lab. As in, it is best used as one tool in a broader approach, rather than merely operating on its own.
My core belief on this is that ideas matter, whether true or false, and can shape a ton of behavior whether consciously or otherwise. They aren't the only factor by any stretch, but they are a relatively important one. Heck, and even as the 233 episodes of this podcast itself shows, dis/misinformation is rampant, otherwise Katie and Jesse wouldn't have nearly this much material.
On the 97%, I think a large part of the confusion/issue is the way media broadly covered it, which left out a decent portion of the nuance. That being said, the authors did also contact the authors of the studies to get their views, and that exercise also yielded 97%ish. And there have been follow-up studies backing it up in the 90-100% range. It's a rabbit-hole I went down back when the controversy first exploded, and is a reason I like to see the original claim, the critique, the rebuttal to the critique, and hopefully even a rebuttal to the rebuttal of the critique before drawing firm conclusions on something controversial that I don't have expertise in (which is basically everything outside gun violence stats, finance, and decimating people at board games like a total nerd lol).
Yeah, I thought I sensed a slight beleaguered tone in some of your comments. As if I could almost hear you saying ‘But Jesse, don’t you remember how you always used to say “It’s complicated”?’
Seriously , Katie’s and Jesse’s epistemic values are among the things I most like about them.
>Also, I have yet to meet a person who goes "yeah, I don't actually genuinely believe such and such, I just want to be included in the group."
I saw this happen during the 2020 Flloyd riots. My best friend felt pressured into posting the black square on instagram even though she didn't believe it. She wanted to be accepted by her peers at work. While I would never virtue signal like her even I keep quiet to make it look like I agree with everyone else when politics gets discussed.
Good point. Also I remember multiple street interviews where people were asked about their views during the Israel/ Palestine protests and a lot of them weren’t able to say what they believed. They said they didn’t really know enough about it and were just there to show support. I think a lot of younger people fall into this trap.
History is full of people who claimed to be healers, but it bears keeping in mind that many of them were using leeches. Evidence-based medicine is relatively new, severely limited, and immensely corrupt.
So that’s my frame of reference when considering other endeavors that haven’t even made it to that point of progress yet. I’ve yet to see anything that would suggest to me that any “misinformation researcher” is any better at figuring out the truth than the average person walking down the street in Paducah.
Yeah, I had this feeling that because of some weird premises, or because it would not solve the problem, it was bad research. Sometimes premises are weird, but weird things are true. Also, maybe it's being praised more than it should be, but research results sometimes are incremental. I just could not discern quite well if everything is really that bad or if they were being too rigorous with their expectations. (Even if the specific comment on the experimental design made it clearer one source of problems in the research)
I definitely get that. And my guess is in certain quarters there has been too much hype in the media. The studies themselves (which have been replicated extensively across multiple experiment types (both synthetic and real-world), so this isn't a replication crisis situation) don't show overwhelming shifts, just modest ones that are still statistically significant. It isn't a cure all, but nothing is. It is definitely reasonable to suggest as well that the fingerprints are overstretching or merely glorified critical thinking (and it is definitely something to see all the responses saying the equivalent of "critical thinking is bad" or "critical thinking doesn't work," by people who would almost certainly consider themselves critical thinkers, as well as those for whom the "too skeptical" label would almost certainly apply being concerned about this approach making people too skeptical of legitimate information).
I'm pretty convinced by the case that inoculation works at a case-by-case basis (dispelling a single myth, or a group of interconnected myths). I'm much less certain about the fingerprints being as effective, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if their effect turns out to be fairly small. I would be surprised if it turned out that critical thinking skills are actually bad though, or if people turn out to be incapable of changing their minds when new/accurate information is provided along with the inaccurate information being debunked.
At it's core, this is a debate between those who believe ideas matter and shape beliefs in some fashion, and those who don't. Confirmation bias is obviously real, as is pressure to conform with your chosen tribe. Those factors don't make inoculation or changing minds impossible -- or beyond the reach of accurate information -- it just means the approach needs to be tuned to not threaten a person's core values. We are undeniably emotional creatures, but that doesn't make facts or logical persuasion impossible. And the biggest irony is that those often arguing that ideas don't shape beliefs often hold that belief for others, but not for themselves. It is almost always some variation of, "Well I as an intellectual form my opinions based on the best available evidence and my own research, but these mere peasants nearby are purely driven by emotions, virtue signaling, and what others in their tribe tell them to believe." It is a bizarre form of elitism (that I am by no means accusing you of to be clear, it's just a lot of the other criticism I've seen). There is also a false dichotomy that seems to develop between something either have a precise outcome/measurement, or it is too complex to even attempt. Whereas in reality it is definitely possible to be vaguely right about something, even if the measurement is murky.
Jesse I love you man but these episodes where you bring some guy on who you agree with to talk about their book are boooring. Its just not your strong suit.
At least do what Katie does and have them prepare an “internet bullshit” segment too, in order to keep things interesting.
This might sound kind of shitty but I read that and the thought immediately popped into my head, basically raped my brain to be honest: “What IS Jessie’s strong suit?”
Now I don’t know if I need to call the police or get that thoughts phone number…
Katie is almost always great though. Alone, with Jessie, with guests. I guess he’s just a good sidekick? That feels bad though.
I think Katie is just much more organized and has actual plans and outlines for the shows. Especially with guests. Jesse loves to dig into things and gets obsessed with topics but isn’t as organized. Also Jesse has the best reactions and their bantz are much better than with anyone else. Also he’s earnest and caring.
Lasted about 20 minutes, it’s just dull dog. Jessie has an incredibly odd way of asking a question and then answering it after the guest has given about two sentences.
Unfortunately I think jesse is kinda like me - I’m the sort of prof who procrastinates playing video games / on social media and then 30 min before class is like “oh goddamn it what was I supposed to be talking about in 30 min” and rushes off to class/podcast
Usually it’s… fine. But when Jesse has Katie around to keep him on task he’s able to deliver better lol. my calendar is my lifeline.
To be fair, this one was a lot less boring than the last few. I even finished it! It might have been the guest’s pleasant British cadence, but I’d consider going back and listening to at least part again at some point.
I enjoyed the episode, but I definitely see why many Barpod listeners were bored by it. I subscribe Williams' substack. He's an interesting thinker, and I agree with most of his arguments against the misinformation Chicken Littles. I see why Jessie wanted to talk to him. Jesse's project of using science to critique sloppy, ideologically biased, scientific researchers is similar to Williams' project of critiquing sloppy, ideologically biased, misinformation researchers.
But Barpod didn't get popular for abstract criticism of intellectuals however interesting it is to me. It feeds on the banter between Jessie and Katie and on personal stories about people who get trapped in some kind of Woke BS. Some of Jessie's solo episodes are off-brand due to guests uncomfortable with the banter who don't have a personal story to tell. I haven't noticed that in any of Katie's solo episodes.
A timely story on why both sides should be wary of giving the government power over misinformation: The State of Florida has been trying to block some ads in favor of an pro abortion rights amendment, arguing that the ads contain false and dangerous misinformation. A federal judge just blocked their attempts to stop the ads, writing "It's the First Amendment, stupid."
There are a lot of politicians who should have "it's the first amendment, stupid" tattooed on their foreheads, but DeSantis is definitely near the top of that heap of idiots.
DeSantis seems pretty good at running the state - he got the covid shots out as well as anybody, he's good at responding to hurricanes, and the state seems to be doing well.
But he does not have any commitment at all to limiting state power, and is happy to throw his weight around. In some ways, that makes him more dangerous than of he were all around incompetent.
I don't want to be too mean but I think progressives fall for the idea of "MiSinForMaTiOn And DiSinForMaTiOn eXpeRTs" because it sounds nice, it's emotionally attractive. The problem is, you don't have to be a deep thinker to understand the problem with this thinking: who defines what is true and what is not true? The obvious answer is: those with power and influence.
We see this displayed in a really scary way with Tim Walz claiming that "misinformation and hate speech" aren't protected by the First Amendment. Of course, misinformation and hate speech are protected speech in the US, for a logical and important reason: what are misinformation and hate speech 🤷? I often say that "hate speech" doesn't exist, for all intents and purposes, because it cannot be defined, even in a general way. Everyone considers different ideas and speech to be "hateful."
There are two types of people who want misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech "experts" to be empowered with the ability to censor fellow citizens: those who understand this power and wish to use it, and those who think that "fighting misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech" is a noble goal and can be done fairly and safely. The latter is arguably more dangerous because good intentions of voters can help authoritarians wield tremendous power.
The other side of the problem is that there are some very heavily moneyed interests funding most of the outfits in the mis/dis/mal-information space. It has quickly become something of a cottage industry since 2017. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have done some good reporting on tracing the money and the influence networks behind what they termed the "Censorship Industrial Complex." Following the money and then looking at their hiring pipelines gets really interesting, especially when you start looking not just in the US but at all of these groups across the western world. Lots of shell companies and "former intelligence" on staff.
What I realized after digging deep into the subject is that the modern left's obsession with misinformation, disinformation, and "malinformation" is that those emotionally attractive sentiments were laundered into the public discourse by influential people and institutions as a necessary step in the expansion of this project.
Great interview! I've been getting increasingly sceptical of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over 'misinformation'. Those concerns always seem to end up as "my ideas are correct and anyone who disagrees must be a drooling Neanderthal who can't string a sentence together".
Unfortunately, a really quick way to get 30 million dollars is to start a 501c(3) that researchers and flags "misinformation." There's a lot of money looking for proxies to do information operation work. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If you follow the money in the anti-disinformation space, it begins to get scary. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have done some good reporting on that.
I don't always love the interview episodes, *cough* Aella *cough* but I found this one fascinating. I appreciated the analysis of both the misinformation and misinformation research.
Hey - A Jesse interview is eating yer broccoli / cauliflower salad; the Katie-Jesse tete-a-tetes is skipping straight to the desert, with a side of laughing gas. Fun, yes, but ya gots to eat yer veggies kids!
Something I'm curious about that was kind of hinted at in the episode was the impact of "epistemic psychopaths" like Musk and Trump vs the less individualized, daily drone of misinformation that is more common from the left.
My totally uninformed and uneducated guess is that if you can discredit a guy like Trump or the political musings of Musk, you can more easily decouple yourself from their misinformation. But when there's a media ecosystem built around every Respectable (tm) outlet having the Correct (tm) view on something, it's very hard to shake free of that. After all, it's Respectable and Correct, and all these well-educated people know that police are gunning down thousands of unarmed Black men in the street every year.
Well I finally listened to this and I thought it was great. Really interesting and probably a favourite episode. I wish I had listened before engaging in the comments because the criticism is completely bonkers, almost everything he is criticised for saying he straight up didn't say.
I realise this isn't helping my case that I am not a Dan Williams plant.
I would have liked it if it was Dan Williams on the Good Fight with Yasha Mounk. I just think he’s better at this type of interview than Jesse. I come to this pod for something a bit more irreverent than this episode delivered.
As a liberal who has lost all faith in the current iteration of the left, I have a few thoughts:
1. Describing all of the rioters in England as far right racists, or racist adjacent, is a way to discredit the legit concerns of the populace. He later goes on to describe this technique without realizing he just did the same thing. This is pretty elitist. I followed the riots pretty closely, and yes, some were racist, but they all had legitimate concerns that were being ignored. Ergo, mass riots.
2. I laughed out loud when he said that the left is far less likely to engage in mis/dis information. I used to believe that too about 10 years ago. Now I can’t even keep up with the number of stories that people on the right were chastised for and called right wing extremist for believing.
3. The right used to be the corporate, elite, warmongers. Now the left is. I don’t understand how any true blue leftist wouldn’t have questions when Dick Cheney, OF ALL PEOPLE, are suddenly supporting the democrats. No questions there??
I followed the riots pretty closely, living where they happened. I am desperate to know how looting shoe shops and bakeries is going to address any of this, let alone setting fire to hotels endangering the lives not only of the asylum seekers but also the staff. Particularly just over a month after an election when these people were heard, they just didn’t have the political weight to Result in any significant representation at a national level. If we are now arguing that losing an election means you can riot because you don’t get your own way then I don’t know where that leaves us.
Hey now! Just want to draw awareness that this type of criticism was off limits in the United States during approved riots of 2020.
It is fair criticism that only one side (however unmeritorious) has institutions fall down heavily upon it when behaving in the same way, while the other side gets puff pieces in the media and "scientists" write papers in peer-reviewed journals about how the applicable riots are net-on-net good due to the policies the rioters are advocating for.
Exactly! Even if you disagree with the rioters or riots in general, why is one side chastised and the other side praised? Seems a bit like a double standard, doesn’t it?
Because the left, broadly, is on control of the institutions and the culture and they decide what is and isn't acceptable
No-one here in the U.K. was praising the rioters in America.
Bollocks. The Guardian was all in on the approved US narrative.
While that may be true generally (imperial college absolutely was publicly in favor of the riots), UK doesn't really influence US culture, for what it is worth.
It was bad when people on the left justified riots and it’s bad when people on the right justified them. Comparisons should be used to encourage better behaviour, not to justify worse behaviour on all sides - like some kind of terrible watched.
Oh I agree with this. But I am well aware that the next time a politically favored group starts rioting, institutions and the media are going to come out of the woodwork to defend said group with the strongest steelmanning of the rationale for such rioting.
I am just simply raising the point as a reminder that as soon as the next wave comes, attitudes will change. No one seems able to consistently say "actually, no, rioting and looting is never defensible".
I really try to be that person — but only privately. Truth is, I could tweet tomorrow that the riots in the UK were terrible, and I’d have no problem. But if I had criticized BLM riots, my reputation and work would be in trouble. It’s very frustrating.
So what. Even if you take it as given some level hypocrisy here in the coverage of the events by the mainstream media (which of course never includes the massive right wing media sphere for some reason), which fair enough there is argument to be made there, but it doesn't do anything to respond to the fact this riots were entirely an inappropriate reaction to a lot of false narratives in UK. It is worth highlighting the hypocrisy here in the desire to engage right wing apologetics while maximizing your rhetoric against left wing riots. This is empty what about isms. It should be easy to condemn this behavior on both sides and it does say something that you're compelled to engage in this what about ism when it comes to someone condemning right wing riots. It is like when right wing partisans want to bring 2020 riots every time someone tries to pin them down January 6th. Granted that is much less appropriate comparisons because two events have obviously important differences. Regardless it is bs rhetorical tactic.
It is a point worth raising if, for no other reason, than to remind people the frameworks recently used to analyze rioting and looting. In the States, we heard endless coverage here about how "oh well these businesses are insured" or "well *insert corporation* is still profitable and the magnitude here is immaterial" when the rioting was favored by the mainstream media's favored groups. Instead of "these people are taking advantage of unrest to vandalize and steal, and their positions should be discarded out of hand" we got endless coverage legitimizing and steelmanning the least-applicable reasons for the rioting observed.
"Whataboutisms" are not de facto inapplicable. In fact, comparing comparable events is objectively valuable. "Whataboutisms" are weakest when they dilute, confuse, and obfuscate the issue (e.g. "donald trump still doesn't accept that he lost in 2020" getting a response of "WHATABOUT Hunter Biden's cocaine usage??"). Here, instead, we are comparing like-for-like. Rioting, violence, looting and the like under the veil of a social/cultural political conflict.
I condemn the behavior in the UK. As we all should. But I want everyone condemning the behavior to accept that this *SHOULD BE* the standard, and the next time certain other political riots break out, we should not hand-wring and spend endless hours debating the merits of some underlying political statement.
I'm simply, in general, seeking accountability for the future, and drawing attention to the hypocrisy as observed.
First of I think you're confusing "endless coverage" of the very self selected outrage inducing cultural commentary you chose consume during that time and within subsequent years. Also it assumes this idea a of a singular establishment narrative that takes on a partisan lens, but completely misses the fact media system is more fracture than ever and that there is a huge right wing media system that routinely gets a ton of eyeballs and talked about this topic more than another media outlet in order to drum up outrage. But of course that doesn't count as establishment because why complicate a good narrative.
I take your point that what about ism has place when you're legitimately critiquing an obvious hypocrisy in someone's analysis. However, where was the obvious hypocrisy in the comment you were critiquing? How was 2020 riots relevant? It is entirely moving off of one topic to your preferred pet topic and trying run it through the lens of while now of course we can finally now talk about this now that is a right wing riot. Conveniently forgetting that right wing info sphere and certain heterodox podcast endlessly talking about 2020 riots for years now. As far as I can tell the uk riots, at least foriegn coverage goes, was blip in the news sphere comparatively. But people need to constantly to beat this narrative into their psyche of the left wing establishment trying to control the information systems.
I would draw your attention to August 2011 in the UK, when rioters on the other side were cracked down on incredibly heavily. I have no evidence that this will have changed in the meantime, fortunately mass national riots are not a feature often enough for statistically significant analysis to take place.
Yea. Not all rioters are politically motivated. Most are just criminals. None are operating in good conscience. You can’t make the world a better place by stealing TVs.
I find it odd how often people on the left and right apologize for rioters.
Yeah but immigration! Two-tier Keir!!!!
How did you follow the riots?
By living in a town that was expected to have riots, spreading from nearby towns where they definitely happened. By having multiple appointments across those two weeks cancelled, with small businesses being disrupted by these morons, and by having family members scared to go out in the evening in case they got caught up in it.
What were the legitimate concerns of the rioters? I am curious here because you are specifically saying that some "rioters" had legitimate concerns and I am genuinely interested to how you came to this conclusion. Also, in good faith, do lend the same grace to the BLM rioters? Or the Just Stop Oil folks?
Not who you're replying to but there is currently massive and unchecked immigration to the UK, which has exacerbated and already dire housing crisis. There is also (in my mind, legitimate) concern that the amount of unassimilated immigrants from MENA countries is fundamentally changing the nature of British society. And the crime, of course.
I tried to be clear. I didn't ask your concerns or ops concerns. I asked, specifically, why OP believed the *rioters* had legitimate concerns. Was some of this in mitigation at the sentencing? Did they post about the housing issues?
Imagine that this was 2020. The podcast was about BLM riots and somebody posted "the rioters who burned down that police station had legitimate concerns" and when pushed the poster responded that there was over policing of trivial crimes in poor neighbourhoods that were often black. Because this is how this reads to me. Do you think its a reasonable response? Do you think *any* poster saying that BLM rioters had legitimate concerns would have 10+ up votes here?
Your best bet would be to watch one of the interviews Jordan Peterson did w/Tommy Robinson, (one in July and one more recently) since Robinson is basically the key spokesperson for the "rioters" positions.
British citizens have suffered enormous outrages from problematic immigrants (not saying all immigrants are problematic); violent crime, Muslim rape and grooming gangs, other offenses, and their government does nothing, but will imprison people literally for making an anti-immigrant tweet. Robinson is returning to Britian to face charges for his reporting on the situation that will probably deal him another prison sentence.
This is totally different from the BLM situation here.
I urge you to do the research. Robinson is quite gripping, you won't be bored.
I'm very, very surprised to see Tommy Robinson recommended as a good source on anything.
He's not facing charges for his "reporting". He lost a defamation case against a Syrian refugee and, as part of that, he was ordered not to repeat the lies he was telling. He made a claim that this Syrian teenager, who had been filmed being violently assaulted at school, had committed violent attacks himself. Robinson failed to prove this in court.
Robinson is a thug and a fraudster. He's been convicted of mortgage fraud, assaulting an off-duty police officer, stalking, football violence, passport fraud and much more. Rather than helping in the grooming gangs, he was actually convicted of contempt for posting prejudicial statements that could have derailed the trial. The family of one of the grooming victims asked him to stay away from their town and he ignored their wishes. His links to Russia are well known.
Julie Bindel has been reporting on the grooming gangs story since 2007, years before Robinson blew in. Here is what she says: "To credit Tommy Robinson, with anything other than whipping up racial and ethnic tension is outrageous, and, at the very least, ignorant of the history and of the facts."
https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/grooming-gangs-the-rape-and-pimping
One of my husbands former colleagues, Steph Finnegan reported on his contempt case as well as having cover the trial Robinson was broadcasting on Facebook live. She got threats including rape threats from his lovely followers as well as making the first petition to the judge to lift the reporting restrictions on Robinson's contempt case which was then lifted.
Tommeh, the drug-addled, assaulting grifter - he looks half or fully coked-up on most of his ranting griftcasts - amazed anyone listens to Peterson still, he's long since fallen off his rocker. But yet they keep raking in the money, it's a fools game and they are lapping it up. Bindel is bang on.
I honestly don't see the difference. People who riot both for imagined and blown up grievances that contain a grain of truth. The motivations of the rioters really don't go deep. If Robinson is your spokesperson, something has gone very, very wrong.
Gosh, this Robinson guy sounds amazing! And he is facing jail for a tweet? That's awful! What did the tweet he is being jailed for say?
You are misreading my comment, probably intentionally. If you would like a deeper grounding on thus topic, watch the interviews I recommend (and if you don't know who Robinson is I don't think you know much about this topic).
If you would prefer to be sparky, spare me. I am posting to you civilly and in good faith.
I don’t like the tone you’re using here. It’s weird and passive-aggressive and feels like you’re trying to pick a fight. Not gonna engage further.
"If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Seems to come to mind for some reason here.
Topics like these bring weird pro-rioters out of the woodwork.
This is the third thread where I have been told to listen to Tommy Robinson if I want to understand the British psyche. I'm going to start telling Americans to listen to Robin DiAngelo if they want to understand American racism.
Tbf to Robin D’Angelo she may be a charlatan & a grifter but to my knowledge she doesn’t have multiple criminal convictions in relation to her work.
I’m not quite sure who a direct comparison is, Yaxley-Lennon isn’t quite a Nick Fuentes type (at least openly) but someone like Anne Coulter spouts off to the media.
You’d think the fact that he’s appears on Infowars multiple times which give a Barpod Primo pause for thought…clearly not.
Barpod isn’t the place I’d have expected to comes across a whole bunch of posts where people get really annoyed that anyone Jesse/Katie/Guest/Primo push back against what are essentially the UK version of cliched MAGA talking points.
There are loads of decent & thoughtful Primos of a conservative bent, but sadly there’s also a chunk of ring wing anti woke culture warriors and they’re no more interesting or credible than their lefty woke counterparts.
For some reason I just came across this response and I have to say that this is the most out of touch take imaginable. Do we think that any post touting the legitimacy of the BLM riots would get 10+ upvotes? No, I don’t. I think they would’ve gotten THOUSANDS of upvotes. Where have you been?
It’s only now, years later and after the fever dream has passed, do we openly acknowledge how fucked up all that was.
Not willing to break your streak of poor reading comprehension are you? No post *here* gets thousands of up votes.
I know you said you only just came across this response but did you some how only come across the second half of it? Joking, obviously you will ignore the first part and instead misread the second. It's perfectly in keeping with your general.... thing.
I apologize, I just reread your question. I’m not pro riot or pro violence in any of the scenarios mentioned above, but I do see how people can be pushed to a boiling point as well as how some people, as you mentioned, will just take advantage of a situation because they like to fuck shit up. However, what we continue to gloss over is how any movement that is anti globalist, like the anti immigration riots, is immediately condemned and called far right. You can have the same violent agitators, quite literally, at all three riots, but the BLM and JSO will be called mostly peaceful. Why is that?
Agreed. The British riots are quite understandable given the years of outraged poured upon them by immigrants and their corrupt government.
Please do tell us what the outrages are that means I should understand people trying to burn children alive in a hotel?
Being able to understand someone without coming anywhere near agreeing with their conclusions is the first step in learning how to actually think about society.
I'm going to need some help here, you seem to be saying there's a direct causal relationship between the issues you specify and the riots. Is that correct?
The BLM riots in the US were basically celebrated as "mostly peaceful" even as things burned down on camera.
Then where there are (awful and not justified) right wing riots all hell breaks loose in the media and they want them crushed.
You do realise there’s not some kind of media borg mind.
If you have specific examples of people who’ve condemned the British riots & celebrated the BLM fine, but who is this ‘they’.
It is worth noting how depressingly often the vast majority of mainstream American media acts exactly like a Borg mind.
No, there is not ‘massive and unchecked’ immigration to the U.K.
The immigration level fluctuates over time with peaks and troughs depending on economic and labour market conditions. Viewed over the long term the U.K. immigration levels are on par with most developed countries and is lower than some.
But actually there is. I don't know whether it's "unchecked", or whether it's on par with other economies, but UK immigration since 2020 could accurately be described as "massive". I don't think that suddenly makes Tommy Robinson a credible guy with well motivated opinions, or Nigel Farage less of a car salesman. Those guys were as they are many years ago, when immigration was much lower. They just don't like foreigners, they've made that very clear in their careers.
But the immigration numbers are huge at the moment, and that's likely to cause friction, as it has at many times in the past, in many places around the world.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingjune2023
You can’t describe anything as ‘massive’ in isolation - all such terms are relative, and can only be accurately judged against a baseline.
We lost of a lot of EU citizens because of Brexit and ended up with a labour shortage in a number of industries. A new influx of migrants to fill those vacancies is only to be expected (and was something that people warned the avid Brexiteers about!).
Look at the data. The net migration is extremely high, and the total population is increasing, albeit more slowly. I make it roughly a 10% population increase this century. I agree the reason for the recent surge is partly due to people from EU countries leaving, but it is an increase in net migration.
I agree this is an economic phenomenon partly driven by labour shortages. But I'm not at all sure those vacancies are actually being filled or that this situation is being well managed. Actually we are having (mild) trouble filling vacancies for scientists because of restrictive immigration policies. They still come despite the obstacles but who knows what the future will look like. These are people who have choices in where they go.
In other words, immigration is being mismanaged. I can't say how much of the unrest is caused by reasonable or unreasonable grievances, but I can believe that towns where housing is cheaper are being flooded by large numbers of culturally different people to the natives. It's not unreasonable to feel pissed off about that. We'd have to look at the data to see if these are genuinely productive people actually taking up jobs that natives are unwilling to fill. I don't know. I think the government ought to know but I'm not sure it does.
I looked it up. It is a complex picture. Unemployment is very high amongst asylum seekers and immigrants of MENA origin. However, these are a small proportion of total immigrants. In general the unemployment rate amongst immigrants is lower than UK born. Even those who are unemployed are less likely to claim benefits.
But it is complicated data:
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/
I watched a YouTuber who mostly video closed stores on high streets across Britain. If he has a political POV it’s hard to tell other than how neglected cities other than London are.
Anyway, he videoed a demonstration. A kid, maybe 10-12 years old walked along side the protesters and he was breaking windows on ground floor shops and homes as he walked along the crowd. Not one adult tried to stop him. Not one.
You ok? Cause it seems like you don’t really want to have an honest conversation with anyone. In fact, it kind of seems like you’re trying to start arguments with strangers because you don’t know how to get attention any other way. Maybe go outside for a while?
You’re responding to me, not “My file” who I agree seems to have other issues going on right now.
It is hard to tell who a person is responding to.
And yes, "My File" doesn't seem to be posting in good faith here.
I mean, it’s strange reading defenses of riots (not protests) on here.
I think the confusion started when we failed to make the distinction between the rioters and the protesters at the beginning. To be fair, I don’t think the British guy in the episode made the distinction either, which helped start this long thread.
Sorry! Things are getting complicated.
Okay, but the people setting out to get mardy on the streets of the UK did so in response to a UK citizen murdering children, not to make a grand statement about immigration. The protests here in Belfast were aimed directly at mosques and brown people specifically. The "legitimate concerns" crowd don't have a singular leg to stand on.
I think we were writing the same response at the same time, lol.
What do you think the connection is between these concerns, that are pretty widely shared in the UK, and the actual motivation of the rioters?
Couldn’t tell ya.
Then I'm not entirely sure why you mention them?
Because that’s the topic of conversation and I’m just writing what I know?
If you’re seeking an in-depth, peer-reviewed analysis of rioter motivations as regards to larger British concerns about immigration, maybe hit up a university sociology department and not a Substack comments section.
I think that there's some pretty clear difficulty with integration in the U.K., and in much of Europe as a whole. This is exacerbated by a perceived lack of consistency in the way events are delt with via the authorities. An example is the 1400 or so – predominantly white – young girls groomed by Asian men in Rotherham. The victims were repeatedly ignored by the authorities due to a concern at being viewed as racist. There’s the Adriana Grande concert that was bombed in Manchester which killed 22 kids. There was the 7/7 underground bombings. There were 4 Islamic terror attacks in 2017 alone. Between 850 and 1500 British born citizens left the U.K. to join ISIS. Compared to the continent though, the Brits have had it relatively good.
-The response to each of these events by those same authorities can be summed up by Norm MacDonald thus: “My biggest fear is that ISIS or some terrorist group like that would get ahold of a dirty bomb and explode it over a major city within the United States and kill tens of millions of people, because then the blowback against innocent Muslims would be absolutely terrible.”
The rioters went off of bad intel and acted foolishly. But to ignore the decades worth of context that led to such a blowup is disingenuous on the part of Mr. Williams. Sadly, this two dimensional thought pattern in a common one with people who have a pretty black and white view of the world.
And do you not see any black and white thinking in this post? You lose me with the "response from authorities" bit. This is always were things get black and white for the "let's understand the concerns" side. Shits complicated.
Take grooming. The grooming thing is complicated and has a lot of compounding factors, one of which is *absolutely* particular communities attitude towards women and girls but it is just *one* factor. The "police not wanting to be seen as racist" factor is miniscule. "Police not wanting to deal with a race riot for the sake of chavvy little slags" is much closer, which of course is its own problem but not the one that became a popular take. These were poor children from poor communities and that's not a coincidence. How much do you think the police would have cared about not being racist if it was Jemima being raped rather than Tracy?
All those things need talking about and dealing with and saying "the authorities *always* take this side because they care more about antiracism than anything else" is just as limiting as saying "most groomers are white so we shouldn't bother talking about it".
If we're being honest, I think people were more upset with the cultural aspect of the girls who were picked to be groomed. They were chosen specifically because they were poor girls who were not of the islamic faith. The US has worked so well as a melting pot because it's multiracial, but not especially multicultural. Peope in the UK perhaps feel a bit vexed that those who hold a different culture from their own didn't see their new neighbors as fellow citizens, but as lesser creatures that can be used like a sock a school boy masturbates into. They quite literally think of the kafir (re: their neighbors) in the same way as any supremicist does. I can see how people might be offended by that.
There were also poor Asian victims.
They just didn’t get coverage in the news cycle.
The common denominator was poverty and vulnerability. They were looking for easy victims no-one in authority cared about. The majority of them happened to be white because of the demographics of this country.
Sorry if this wasn't clear but I am a person in the UK so I don't need to wonder what my fellow Brits were saying, I heard it. Still I'm not sure what your point is. I am not talking about why people were upset I'm pointing out that these are complex issues. You say that Mr Williams is disingenuous for "black and white" thinking but have only reiterated the same, single, point and failed to engage with the rest of what I said.
You said:
"What were the legitimate concerns of the rioters? I am curious here because you are specifically saying that some "rioters" had legitimate concerns and I am genuinely interested to how you came to this conclusion"
I responded to that. That's what the point is.
Anyone who brings up ‘Asian grooming gangs’ is a racist who is not arguing in good faith.
I state that with confidence because they don’t care about white girls being raped by white men. Which is the overwhelming majority of cases - including some who are Tommy Robinson supporters. They only care about rape when it can be used to advance their racist agenda.
I care about any girls being raped by any men. And I think that Asian grooming gangs were atrocious and should have resulted in a huge reset of our approach to integration.
Has that affected your confidence at all?
Not at all.
You see, those rapes had nothing to do with ‘integration’, and everything to do with a broken care system and police mysogyny. You don’t tackle that by harassing Asian people about ‘integration’.
You can’t stop women and girls being raped and exploited by changing the approach to ‘integration’, since the vast majority of them are victimised by born and bred, white, Brits. Many of whom are in positions of power in their community or their family.
So you just proved my point. You are only interested in this subject as a way of demonising immigration.
This post is misinformation.
Rioting is not a good response to things like excess immigration. But it's worth noting that when there are riots over pet left wing causes we hear that "riots are the voice of the unheard."
Riots are not justified. But there are legitimate concerns about immigration, crime, and housing costs. And the establishment in the West appears mostly unwilling to reduce immigration.
The problem is many places need immigration. Many poor Northern towns are desperate to attract immigration, preferably mid earning families. A band 7 nurse with a spouse who is a carer. Perfect. They can buy one of the hideous new build houses they throwing up everywhere. They will bring money in rather than taking it out and they won't need social care because they are working age adults. The spouse can fill some gaps they desperately need in the labour market and keep the wages in social care down saving the council money. They'll spend money locally and pay sweet council tax then the council can improve infastructure and services and get more funding for education and health to meet the growing population.
Everyone's a winner.
Only from the other side they just built a hosting estate on your football pitch and nobody round here can afford a house there. And the school is already full and the road is full of potholes and your nans carers are always late and don't speak English. If you complain they call you racist.
Some of the Northern towns may want immigrants. Though I would bet not everyone in those towns does. But there are probably other towns which are getting excess immigrants that really don't want them.
And I think the governing elites (for lack of a better term) ignore or shit on the latter group you described. And I think there concerns are legitimate.
And I don't know if this is politically sustainable. You are seeing parties in Europe winning elections that couldn't before almost entirely on immigration.
If only fascists will control immigration eventually the public will vote for fascists.
>Though I would bet not everyone in those towns does.
Indeed, this was the point of the last paragraph of my post. This is a result of decades of decline and neglect of these communities.
>But there are probably other towns which are getting excess immigrants that really don't want them.
We have to be clear here that there is a difference between illegal and legal immigration. These towns all want legal immigration, desperately. No town wants to have to deal with illegal immigration. Its a huge strain on services for a population that cannot legally work and have no money to spend.
>And I think the governing elites (for lack of a better term) ignore or shit on the latter group you described. And I think there concerns are legitimate.
Of course they don't but that's capitalism baby, why do you think these towns ended up desperate for immigration in the first place? They can either have immigrants or move to London. Why should the south east pay for the north? What is the other option? What are the fascists going to do to save Blackpool?
To me this seems to be the neoliberal approach of just throwing more and more labor into the economy in hopes of goosing GDP and ignoring everything else. Including cultural and quality of life concerns
And illegal immigration just shouldn't (ideally) exist at all. Illegal immigrants should not get in or be deported as quickly as possible. In America a lot, perhaps most, of the immigration anger is against illegal immigration. We must have control.
From what I can tell, they have a lot of the same concerns about unchecked mass migration that we have in the US. Immigration is good, but if it’s unchecked to the point that we can’t absorb people fast enough then it’s harmful. In Britain, I see people complaining that there’s not enough housing, for example. That immigrants are being given free housing while the indigenous population is sent to the back of the queue. This is just one example, but people have a right to voice concern without being called racist. There’s also the complaint of two tier policing. The elite politicians would probably say that’s not happening. That they’re all crazy right wing nuts. But the people on the ground have a different story, and I’m more likely to believe them.
As far as BLM and JSO are concerned, I think I used to believe that they were righteous, and I honestly think that most participants feel they’re doing the right thing. However, here we are four years later and how many BLM chapter leaders have been charged with fraud? Where did the money go? Did anyone help clean up the neighborhoods after the riots, or was everyone stuck fending for themselves? Same with JSO. Who are the backers, and who’s profiting?
Sorry I specifically asked about the rioters. They didn't call anything out, they burned down a library. I'm on the ground, I personally know at least 4 people who rioted (although I have only seen one of them in the last year), I can 100% promise you that they would have rioted if the police shooting of a black man had kicked this off (which was the trigger for our last riots).
I think people who are removed from this have a completely warped view of it. It was mostly people who enjoy rioting and stealing, some were far right or far right adjacent but most just enjoy that kind of this. My evidence (apart from my first hand knowledge) is both the documentary edlvidence of theft and the trials. I am open to alternative evidence so please share it if you have it.
I think it’s interesting that this totally new user parachutes in, acts like a dickhead to people responding in good faith, and these and only these comments get liked by Dan Williams. Makes one wonder about who you are.
I'll stand up for My file here. She's not a new user, I've interacted with her for a long time. She gets particularly exercised about this topic leading to otherwise uncharacteristic slap fights, I think she called me a "bell end" last time this came up, lol.
That's what you think, I've been playing the long game.
British insults are so much cooler than ours. “Bell end” is great and of course “wanker” is just perfect in so many ways... Now that hipsters are culturally appropriating my “dipshit” I’m just lost for good insulting terms.
Or the threads on this episode regarding a conversation about disinformation has been hijacked by people making ill informed & factually inaccurate rants about UK immigration & the UK riots and My File objected (unsurprisingly).
If Jesse’s guest likes those posts, may be it’s because he too recognises in accuracies & mischaracterisations 🤷🏼♂️.
I’d be genuinely curious as to where some of these American posters have got their info from, but they seem very confident about something of which they have no first hand experience.
Ugh, britbong slang is so dumb.
Yes, I noticed those likes too. But I think he just genuinely likes the (quite erroneous IMO) comments from My File. Does not improve my opinion of the guy.
Yes, I am probably a plant.
I don't want to fight here, and I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to ask a loaded question. (I really like you, but for some reason this is what we fight about.)
Do you make a distinction between the rioters and the protestors? Like, the 60-year-old man who shows up to a protest because he's freaked out by sudden demographic change vs the thug who shows up because burning shit and intimidating people is fun for a certain type of person?
Of course, I do but I think yall accross the pond are missing huge bits of this story. For example a lot of the places that had the worse riots are not the places that are facing the large demographic shifts. This is a complex situation. Wolfstar made a terrific post in the midst of the riots about the combination of funding cuts, generally thuggery and anti-immigration sentiment (of varying legitimacy) that lit the fuse on this shit show.
I end up being a dick because I have Americans tellling me (a previously homeless Brit who works in the public sector) about how immigrants get "free housing" and jump the queue in front of locals. I have another one telling me Saint Tommy Robinson (a legit far right violent thug who made a 2 hour documentary full of lies about how a actual *child* deserved to be beaten and bullied) is a great guy who is being jailed for reporting on... something. It's incredibly frustrating.
Oh, I have no doubt Americans are missing enormous parts of this.
My general experience as an insulated American was to plop right into the middle of riot coverage with a preexisting distrust of media narratives and to say "Huh? What's happening? Who the hell is Tommy Robinson? Is he the villain everyone says or is he being maligned for wrongthink (I've come to think he's a legitimate chode after looking into it more, but that's the one where you and I came to blows.)
Anyway, just trying to tread lightly and learn more, but it's easy to step on a landmine in complicated issues. Carry on.
Again, I request you broaden your outlook by watching Jordan Peterson interviews of Tommy Robinson. Take a chance on seeing the bigger picture.
I have watched it. I have also watched both Tommy Robinsons documentaries. I have read the entire ruling from his most recent court case.
I urge you to broaden your horizons beyond youtube videos that reinforce your current view, then perhaps you wouldn't end up looking like a fucking idiot.
It's not easy to be lectured at about things you have direct experience of by people who do not. I thought Lana Diesel in particular was being quite arrogant and frustrating during the interaction above. Calling Dan a "Fucking idiot" is probably pushing it, but I can totally understand why.
No sensible person would take a Jordan Peterson interview with Tommy Robinson seriously.
Peterson has descended into crack-pottery and Robinson is. Racist thug
I’m sure it sounds silly unless you’re the one who gets pushed down the waiting list for housing after you’ve been waiting for years. It all seems ludicrous until you’re the one clearly getting screwed over by the government.
Mate, you clearly don't have the slightest fucking clue how housing allocation works in the UK. What government? What housing? Where are these people waiting? How is the housing free? Can you answer *any* of these questions?
Calm down.
Lana I *am* a completely new poster "parachuting" in just to tell you that I really very strongly feel like it was you who was the problem in these interactions. You began by lecturing someone who knows much more about this topic than you do, and then you "didn't like their tone" when they understandably became very irritated by that. Although you keep saying it's My File who has a problem here, it is not. It is you.
I thought you were going to stop engaging with me? Or was that flirting?
Whoa there, why so angry??? You’re right, I don’t have a clue how housing works in the UK. But I very much know how it works to sign up for government housing in the US. It takes years.
If you don't have a clue about how it works how about you don't lecture me on it?
Girl, didn’t you start this conversation? Put the damn phone down and go outside so you can interact with other humans! No one on here gives a shit about your bad attitude. It’s pitiful.
You seem to care deeply, so much so you have forgotten the most basic functions of the app and just insulted somebody you agree with. You may want to delete the post before she takes offence.
Also this thing about housing is extremely silly. It's a complex issue and the definition of "housing" is so broad its essentially unfalsifiable but to sum it up its almost certainly nonsense. Its such a huge issue I would need you to be more specific to explain why so feel free to link something.
Which isn't to say there aren't legitimate concerns around immigration but I think your regurgitation these talking points kind of demonstrates why the conversations are so difficult to have.
Yup. And did anyone clean up those neighborhoods (except insurance money we end up subsidizing).
I actually think balanced police reform is a necessity, and protests (though I don't personally care for them) are legitimately motivated. Looters and other destructive people could be shot as far as I care.
And, unfortunately, I think a lot of insurance policies in the US won’t cover damage caused by riots or political violence. So everyone loses.
Just going to reiterate a point that I've made many times before, which is that when your soi-disant "concern" is "I dislike this group of people and attribute low morals/criminal tendencies/adverse social consequences to individual members of this group based on my perception of their group tendencies," that is literally the definition of racism. You do not have any purported right to voice racist concerns without being (accurately) called racist.
(In point of fact, in a country that enjoys free speech, you don't have a right to voice ANY concerns without being called racist, but I digress.)
Yes, what you describe there is the definition of racism. But here’s the million dollar question: is it possible for any group of people to complain about being utterly screwed over by their government and all the money laundering NGOs that love to virtue signal with complete disregard for the current residents WITHOUT being called racist and xenophobic? Because it’s definitely not just white people who are pissed. Look at Chicago, for example. What we have here is a class conflict, not a race conflict.
"Look at Chicago, for example." I can confirm that I have looked at the Chicago Wikipedia page, which confirms that it is the third-most populous city in the United States. Since it provides no support whatsoever for your arguments, however, what this tells me is that you are either incapable of supporting those arguments or feel you don't have to. Either way, you're not worth listening to.
I suppose I should have known that from the various chemtrails-level allusions to "NGOs" in the clouds, but whatever. Fool me once, etc etc. Not a poster's name I've seen before, but I know now that you are a conspiracist nutbag, and will engage with you accordingly.
Seriously?? Either you haven’t read a newspaper in the last five years so you have no clue how to engage in this debate, or you know I’m right but you don’t have a good response so you resort to vague insults to make you seem smarter than you are. This isn’t third grade. Everything I stated earlier is well documented and even reported by your basic nightly news on a regular basis. Either way, you never answered the question.
The BLM protesters absolutely had some legitimate concerns, and I assume many of the rioters shared those concerns.
I'd be astonished if you could find many people to say that the police are shooting about the right number of unarmed suspects. (Maybe some economists, but not normal people.)
Some police reform is needed and overdue. We all (I think) hate seeing genuine abuses of police power, though often what the media frames as abusive behavior by police is not.
And I am always unhappy to see police shoot a person who they mistake as having a weapon. Though some of these victims ought to have behaved more cooperatively (others were definitely victimized by bad cops).
US police kill about 1000 people a year, justified and unjustified. That's about 3 a day.
Did you see the recent footage of the knife slasher attack on X (posted a link below). Notice how fast it goes south and how the attacker keeps coming on after being shot.
https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1845963129026498974
“Men can have babies.” The most blatant misinformation I’ve ever heard.
I’m all ears to hear the ‘legitimate concerns’ of people who tried to burn children alive in a hotel, hurled bricks at cops & attacked Taxi drivers targeted for no apparent reason other than being non white & torched a community centre containing a library. 🤦🏽
And I’m sure you’re equally open to hearing the justification for groups of men walking around with machetes, or maybe the reasoning behind random knife attacks on complete strangers in the streets. Were those justified?
There are crazy, violent people of all stripes. Some of them like to take over protests and cause chaos just for the hell of it. And, Believe it or not, in some cases they are even paid to be agitators. Not saying that’s the case in England, but it’s happened multiple times in the US. We’ve had full congressional hearings about it. Why would they do that? Because as soon as it gets violent all legitimate concerns of the original protesters go out the window and all anyone talks about is the violence. Not only that, but becomes the justification for future crackdowns against dissent. It serves a purpose.
Yeah, that lens in your item 2 is slowly starting to crack for me as well. Maybe not as fast as it has for others, but I'm increasingly seeing how tendentious and skewed the news can be in both directions. An uncritical assertion that the left is less likely to engage in that just feels very circa-2010.
What I've noticed is that anything that isn't left of center is now described as "far right."
And sometimes that's true. Some things are far right. But the boy has cried wolf so many times that I just don't believe them anymore.
What has happened is that the left *is* the establishment and the elite now and they have decided that anything that isn't them is probably bad.
This was the same kidn of behavior that the used to engage in and I see no recognition of that on the left.
Aside the ludicrous broad brush cliche of your claim, can you point to any time where Jesse’s guest suggested anything that just wasn’t of the left was far right?
He suggested riots which involved attempts to burn down a hotel containing children & attacks on a Taxi driver were ‘far right’.
His description of the rioters as a mixture of the racist far right, people with a long history of violent anti social behaviour & people heavily influenced by drugs & alcohol is entirely born out by the evidence of actions, statements & past criminal history of those who ended up going for the courts.
You and others have them turned up to talk about these people’s ’legitimate concerns’.
I’m still waiting to discover not only what are these legitimate concerns are, but why I or anyone else needs to be listening carefully to someone who’s tried to burn children alive.
On #1, he was describing the rioters, not average joes who may have reasonable concerns. I’m often frustrated by the failure to recognize what people are worried about, but in this case I had no problem with him criticizing rioters
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I am struck by how quickly "a riot is the language of the unheard" got memory holed.
Yeah, agreed. I was yelling at my friends that it’s bad for black people if black communities burn.
Well said! I wasn’t in the mood to finish after reading how the crime stats were juked (Wire fan) & not a peep from the left leaning journalists who essentially said any reporting on an uptick was fake news. So many stories like this!
Jesse would greatly benefit from a road trip with Batya!
Oh god, not Batya.
I love Batya, even if she's wrong about everything.
That’s a relatable feeling.
What is your objection to Batya?
I’m not onboard with her populist/union absolutism stuff. I like her though, I think her heart’s in the right place.
Yes she's a bit dogmatic sometimes and engages in some broad generalizations. But she's correct in her overall analysis of the class cleavage in American society. To a GenXer, the complete absence of discussion about class in our elections is startling.
But I suppose what should we expect in a country where people who make $50k and people who make $250k are equally adamant in labeling themselves "middle class".
No idea who this is, liking just because reading it made me smile
I find this last point the most infuriating. Like the Cheney’s have been SO CLEAR that the reason they support Kamala is specifically bc of the threat they feel Trump poses to democracy. Might i remind you they voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. The break only came after Liz Cheney served on the Jan 6 committee.
Right! Like they haven't suddenly become liberals. Look up Liz Cheney's actual voting record in Congress, there was no change after she became part of the J6 committee. She's as right-wing as she ever was. The difference in their behavior is that they, to their credit, have concluded that temporarily enduring a President with policy ideas with whom they disagree is preferable to enabling the permanent takeover of the government by people who propose to render their policy ideas irrelevant by eliminating the democratic means by which those views might translate into action.
In regard to the mis/disinformation I noticed he compared NYT vs Infowars. Wouldn't it make sense to compare similar outlets? No one would consider Infowars to be the NYT of the right.
You misunderstood. His comparison there wasn’t between left & right but between a mainstream outlet & one that peddles in conspiracy theory.
Obviously you’re right, but his comparison in that instance was of an entirely different category.
But the right are also still corporate elite warmongers playing at being populist.
I think it’s very fair to argue that both parties support war too easily. But the idea that now it’s the right who is anti war is too much. Including and especially Trump.
Trumpists *might* be anti war but I don't really trust them on that. You can also be anti war without sucking up to dictators like Putin.
But the neocons have openly said they are trying to colonize the Democrats. They didn't just go away.
I honestly don't know if Trump would or not. I think his impulses are kind of isolationist.
I think he could stumble into a war like an idiot and if he did I think he would run it terribly.
Absolutely comical to see the exact same arguments that are routinely lambasted when employed on the part of black communities get raucous reception when employed on behalf of rioting right-wing racists, who are, after all, merely responding to the horrible provocations of immigrants a. existing, and b. seeking to exercise rights under international law.
Never change, BARPod comment section.
Don't look now .... just found out that the stabber had an Al Qaeda manual and a supply of Ricin! fun times. This was kept from the public.
To point three - in the us, the conservative press has convinced the vast majority of conservatives that donald trump lost the election, a thing that did not happen.
There are many questions about why dick cheney is supporting democrats. The questions are more why he is one of the few conservatives with the balls to name that trump is a deranged demented fascist who is constantly shitting himself. And the answer is that the right is so ideologically captured that they all march in lockstep to whatever the party line is, a thing this interview seemed to argue didn't happen.
Rioting is simply the voice of the unheard!
Man I struggled with this episode. In part because, of course I agree with Williams's underlying thesis and conclusion. However it is entirely spoken through the lens of like, a 2015 progressive who is somewhat skeptical of underlying assumptions in the modern environment. And I don't even think it deserves 70 minutes of talking through, and several underlying assumptions are just not even remotely persuasive to people who don't share the underlying priors of Jesse and Williams. For example, although Williams states "the NYT is almost never going to publish fake news in the technical sense of that term", while Apoorva Mandavilli consistently, pervasively, aggressively and wantonly promoted clear "fake news" in the NYT on covid. Absolutely insane corrections on obviously disprovable information (e.g. 900,000 pediatric hospitalizations later corrected to 62,000 in October 2021; 3% case fatality rate corrected to less than 1% in December 2022; daily covid death rate of 1,500 corrected to 1,500 per week in February 2024), and plenty of examples where corrections would have been warranted on things that were obviously wrong, but harder to disprove by literally just an exercise pointing to the CDC, etc. website. And to be clear, this is misinformation (disinformation?) that reached Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court in deciding cases at the highest levels of the judiciary.
You don't even need to tell independents (let alone conservatives) that there's no "vaccine" for "misinformation". It is clearly incorrect on its face. I appreciate the Jacob Blake reference in the episode, but one of the more egregious examples of clear misinformation in recent years is the "Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation" (which, to be clear, using the "proper" terms, was disinformation by the security experts, for those who obviously knew the FBI had the laptop in hand since December of 2019).
Misinformation is rampant -- it comes from all levels of society, whether its racists living in London or white collar professionals in DC -- but this is and has always been true. And the recent handwringing of leftists/progressives on the topic only highlights how out of touch they are with the misinformation they're consuming (implicitly presuming their media diets is free of misinformation, and that they must solve for the bad people who politically disagree with them). And of course this is true, see e.g. Ben Collins only ever fact checking political enemies.
I just can't get on board with engaging with the discussion at all. It's so dumb. But of course it needs to be done, when we have governmental entities mandating (EU) or pressuring under threat of regulation (the US) the censorship and monitoring of information deemed misinformation. It just exhausts me that we even need to do this exercise.
I have trouble with the one on one interviews. Jesse in particular doesn't challenge his guests much, so unless the guest is fascinating, I usually don't want a whole hour of whatever they've got to say.
This is when Jesse demonstrates that he wants to be seen as a Good Liberal and get back into the good graces of the journalism establishment
Katie has no fucks to give.
Aw. Jesse is clearly very high in agreeableness and Katie is low in agreeableness. (The contrast is part of what makes their banter fun to listen to, IMO.) I’m not convinced he wants to be a Good Liberal; if he really did, he wouldn’t have made gender medicine his beat. I think it’s just that his setpoint is “get along with people,” especially one-on-one.
I think it's going to be a blast when he starts giving less fucks.
Wait, are you the same guy who kept spamming this nonsense on the reddit and then got banned?
Agreed, though Katie doesn’t challenge them either because she agrees with everyone she invites on. Never mind disputing how many episodes Primos get for their money, we are at the point where we get 1.5 listenable episodes a month for free.
I always imagine Katie's episodes as Andy or Helen telling Katie about some Internet BS, and Jesse's as somebody telling Jesse about the book they wrote. The first one is a lot better.
Maybe Jesse could get Taylor on a one-on-one and break the comment system. ;)
Jesse's episode with Jeff Maurer was ok, prob because he is funny and/or didn't write a book
The one with the crazy guy was interesting too. Didn't love the guy but at least it was a discussion I hadn't heard anywhere else before.
Oh yeah, guy with schizophrenia, I forget the name. He did have a book too though.
Jesse isn't particularly funny though he tries to be.
not Jesse, Jeff Maurer is funny
If only it was just Andy and Helen on a rotating basis. Andy‘s voice is like having liquid chocolate poured into your ears, never get tired of him. And Helen is one of the smartest journalist working in the UK today.
More of them and less of the “show us on the imaginary doll where the wicked autogynophile committed literal violence” please.
Does Katie ever 'challenge' the string of UK radfem guests - Julie Bindel, Sarah Ditum, Helen Lewis, etc? I think there's plenty they write that's highly questionable, far more than Dan Williams. It's just that the sort of conservative feminist culture war issues they're pushing square with the priors of much of the audience here. Double standards abound!
I am not saying Dan Williams is questionable -- I agree with him after all!
I just don't really enjoy 70 minutes of discussion on a topic that I already agree with, spoken through a lens that exhausts me.
And to be honest, I thought Williams was fine! But Jesse was a little too uncritical throughout. The last thing i want to listen to is Williams advancing a position i agree with, and Jesse just walking that story line through the most milquetoast commentary throughout. And the great reveal was just "yeah, doesn't seem like there's a vaccine for misinformation"
I think rather the opposite, Jesse definitely pushes back more on guests than Katie does. Which makes sense, both Katie and Jesse pretty much only invite people they already like and already agree with.
It also means I'm letting my subscription lapse, the guest episodes are just not for me and now they've started taking over primo episodes too. Unfortunate.
I’d just like to say Katie and Jesse invite what seems like everyone they disagree with. No one who disagrees with them takes up the offer 🤷♀️
Oh of course, I wasn't implying otherwise. I also don't think I want them to push back and turn it into a debate. On the other hand I don't like the guest episodes anyway so maybe I just don't care.
IIRC the only primo episode(s) that have been interview format are Katie’s split ep with Andy and his nerd friend. And those were released during what was nominally a vacation for K&J, plus the North Carolina disaster, so I didn’t hold it against Katie too much.
This episode totally sucked and was boring. This is not the kind of stuff that I signed up for.
Honestly having just listened to it I struggled...to pay attention. The guy was boring, humorless, and not making any interesting points. Jesse seemed to zone out at times as well.
Re: fake news in the NYT: Jesse and Katie interviewed David Zweig at a point in the pandemic when I had my doubts about the CDC recommendations but wasn't sure where to find non-nuts discussing the weak evidence for, e.g., masking children. The NYT was not, as far as I can recall, publishing a lot of skeptical looks at the state of the evidence.
I gave (and give) them a lot of credit for that. Maybe Jesse just couldn't call the abysmal NYT COVID reporting circa 2021 to mind in the middle of this week's interview (?).
I am still generally disgruntled by Jesse's laissez faire attitude towards covid coverage. I couldn't tell you which episode of B&R it was, but there was one episode where they spent 5-10 minutes discussing a chart that was like: x axis exposure time, y axis mask quality; with respect to how long you need to be exposed next to someone with covid to catch covid (e.g. 1 minute next to maskless; 5 minutes next to cloth masks... etc).
That chart was entirely fabricated -- or if you prefer more polite words, driven by heuristics of (biased) scientists based on their directional sense of what might be right. Empirical evidence predating covid, through covid, and post covid have all consistently always said masking is ineffective to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses. The most robust evidence has always been clear on this. And I bang my head against the wall at Jesse for not taking the critical eye he has taken towards trans-care in the same way towards covid. But I also understand covid was traumatic to people and so looking to closely can be exhausting and defeating.
(but at the same time, if Jesse wants that easy way out, don't spend time in this episode talking about covid masking as a misinformation topic! Jesse is willfully uninformed or mal-informed, and so just leave it be and don't talk about it!)
I'm sure that there are journalists (David Zweig maybe) who are sending FOIA requests to get the emails and meeting minutes behind the decision to recommend and then mandate masks and I really want to see them. I really want to know if the CDC allowed itself to be bullied by masksforAll, or it if they realized that essential workers were going to have to go back to work and they figured that even thought hey wouldn't make people safe, at least they'd make people feel safe. I also want to see the documents about why the CDC and people like Fauci were so opposed to doing high quality trials on masks.
I kinda understand why the podcast doesn't want to do a deep dive into masking (they did a brief one a while ago). Highly educated liberals went deep into the mask hole and it's going to be embarrassing to admit that masking didn't really do much to prevent the spread of the virus given how many of them lost their shit whenever they saw an unmasked toddler. The pandemic was really traumatic but also a lot of people made complete asses of themselves and should be ashamed of their behavior. (Remember double masking.) Bringing it up means that a lot of people are going to be embarrassed. They might have to admit that the Trumpy uncle was right about something. Or that they defended blatantly cruel policies like toddler mask mandates. And if that's your social circle, that's going to make your social circle angry.
That said, I think it's still really important to go over the pandemic policies and clearly state what worked, what we still have no idea about, what didn't work and what was phenominally stupid/cruel. Covid clearly showed how even really educated people fall for misinformation when they're scared. IT's also really important to bring it up again so that in the next pandemic we don't make these same mistakes. Plus, a lot of the stuff that happened as part of the pandemic response was completely unethical and that kind of breech of ethics isn't something we can just shrug our shoulders and move on from.
Agree overwhelmingly with a lot of how you put it. I'd love to sit down and get lunch with Zweig and talk about these things.
>"I really want to know if the CDC allowed itself to be bullied by masksforAll, or it if they realized that essential workers were going to have to go back to work and they figured that even thought hey wouldn't make people safe, at least they'd make people feel safe"
So I definitely think it's more the latter than the former, but I don't think that tells the full story. I think what likely happened is that the generalist employees at the CDC convinced themselves that masking worked, and the specialists got cold feet when they saw how politically charged the topic became (and there was no way politically Fauci could change his recommendation AGAIN). And there was a confluence of a number of things coming together: (1) cocksure MBA/Startup types like "Hammer and Dance" Tomas Pueyo coming out of left field early-on telling people with the utmost confidence how to act when the responsible scientists were being cautious; (2) observational studies that lacked control groups conflating (what we can now clearly identify as) the seasonal decline of NYC covid in April with masking efforts, and confusing the causation of the decline of cases; (3) the empirical models that assumed fixed spread based on interactions confusing the whole effort -- I remember closely monitoring the IHME group's (Bill Gates's UW-funded group) model religiously in like April and May before ultimately concluding the empirical modeling was no better than dressed-up guesswork -- I still have a funny screenshot of Andrew Cuomo's daily briefing on April 11 showing the actual hospitalizations observed, compared to the models from McKinsey, Columbia and IHME being wildly off; (4) a few early low-quality (and arguably p-hacked, in the case of the Jena Germany mask study) studies that people prioritized over existing higher-quality masking studies because of a "well covid is novel and so all prior research is inapplicable" approach; and (5) wall-to-wall media attention perverting incentives across the board.
Layer in the political dimension of Ds on one side, Rs on the other, and we were doomed to end up losing our heads. Not to mention the stir-craziness of being isolated indoors on a near-constant basis. But I think the politics of it all is going to prevent us from ever fully having an account of the story (plus it would ruin people's careers and reputations -- especially the very people we would most need to take up the mantle of an investigation as a cause worth fighting for).
I heard #4 all the time and it is mind-bogglingly stupid. There were already four human coronaviruses. There are similarities between how all respiratory viruses transmit and for this one to be that different, it would hav had to defy the laws of physics.
For #1 and 2, I spent a lot of time explaining to highly educated people why RCTs were more likely to accurately measure an effect than the observational ones and it often didn't work. I'd get "but we don't know if the people in the RCTs did what they were supposed to do". Well, yeah, but with observational studies you have confounding factors which usually aren't a problem with RCTs and if you rely on people's self reports you have to worry about recall bias. There was definitely a lot of overconfidence - I think a lot of people assumed that having a college degree meant that they were equipped to evaluate scientific data when they really weren't. What was interesting was that I met plenty of people who did not have college degrees who could understand these concepts so I think it may be a personality thing.
I also agree with you that it's going to be nearly impossible to have a proper Covid commission because people's reputations and careers will go down the tubes. Some of the the European countries that were less polarized and crazy are trying to set up Commissions and it's entirely possible that on yet another issue of scientific importance, the US will be an outlier and our medical institutions' official positions will be regarded as crackpottery in places like Norway and France.
I am not arguing with you in the slightest. I am just trying to "assuming good faith" rationalize how things happened.
I agree our institutions failed. I was just trying to charitably advance their arguments (that I disagree with).
All said and done, it is a failure of our experts/institutions. And there is no path forward without reconciliation. Even if it is easier not to. But here we are. Just trying our best to move forward
"I think what likely happened is that the generalist employees at the CDC convinced themselves that masking worked."
This is exactly what happened with a well intentioned person I know who was working for the CDC at the time. It was a case of all my professional contacts are doing this + I live in Maryland + the people who are loudly protesting masks seem like Trump fanatics. (This individual is not lefty but definitely runs in highly degreed, anti-Trump circles, much as I do.)
Add to that the fact that people were busy doing their jobs and not looking at the masking data, and you get what we saw in 2021.
I think it was inexcusable but totally explicable.
I think you have a very good point about the political aspect to this. It would be a great subject for a social psychology paper; unfortunately psychologists are on team masks still work so even if the research gets done, the paper will have a hard time getting published.
Where is the "robust evidence" that masking is ineffective?
See, for example the Cochrane review:
https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses
"Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people)."
"Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people)."
See, for example, Xiao et. al from May 2020:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/pdfs/19-0994-combined.pdf
"Evidence from RCTs of hand hygiene or face masks did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza, and limited evidence was available on other environmental measures."
See, for example, the World Health Organization in 2019:
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/non-pharmaceutical-public-health-measuresfor-mitigating-the-risk-and-impact-of-epidemic-and-pandemic-influenza
(This direct download appears to have been taken down by the WHO, but I have the study as a PDF if you'd like me to send it to you)
"Ten RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, and there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza."
I find that a lot of the discussion around CoViD in general and masking in particular to be characterized by motivated reasoning, regardless of the particular opinions held by any given person.
Or, you could look at the studies that I provided this comment within 10 minutes of him/her posting it.
I have, in fact, read them. It is my perception that the people who already had reason to believe that masks are a nuisance will overstate the negative findings of those studies, and that people who are convinced that masks work will emphasize their shortcomings and disregard them.
I think Jesse glossed over a key point of the exposure phenomena. It’s not just being online, it’s being online and the kind of person that seeks out crazy content.
If Jesse is inundated with crazy content, it’s because he seeks out crazy content.. the algorithm gives what the user wants.
Which is why it’s so disturbing to me that Insta is convinced I’m obsessed with hobby horsing, people who walk pigs with a switch and a death stare, and Christian remixes of popular music like Kendrick Lamar / revivals with people speaking in tongues.
IS THIS WHO I AM???
Instagram is crazy. It saw I was interested in babies and baby wraps (wearing not eating), and so it deduced I would want to know about how I was a terrible mother who was doing everything wrong, all medicine was poison and immunisations are dangerous. I had to delete it after that.
Yup. It's amazing how much overlap there is between baby wearing and other crunchy stuff like not believing in the MMR vaccine and giving your kids essential oils for their colds.
I happen to like baby wearing because I hate dealing with strollers and shopping carts, but there's no algorithm catering to parents like me.
Yeah, exactly. It was all practical considerations for me. I wasn't a "concept parent" trying to be the platonic ideal of the natural mother. I just didn't want to wait for another bus because there was already a pram on it.
I'm trying not to be the person who my phone thinks I am. Google's recommended content screen is a harsh mirror.
The algorithm thinks I like watching videos of cows and horses having their hooves cleaned. Which, I’ll be honest, it turns out I really do find utterly compelling. But how did it know?! I didn’t even know.
Is it fair to say like Jesse you have a hoof fetish?
It’s the most surprisingly satisfying thing!
Same. There was a brief period of time last year when I was so sick of my job that I seriously considered reaching out to Nate the Hoof Guy about apprenticeship/training opportunities.
One account I had on Tik Tok or something got locked in to feeding me a never ending stream of disabled people dancing or singing or something. Like amputees, disfigured people, dwarves, flipper limbs...you name it.
I can only assume it fed me one once and I froze....stunned at what I was looking at and the algorithms was like "we got him. maximum engagement. this is the way".
I must believe in every right wing nut case idea plus Meghan Markle.
The algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. You needn't live in fear. Mount the horse and be happy!
Yeah, one of the reasons I HATE the podcast mini-genre of talking about what's wrong with the podcasters' Twitter is that my (private, anonymous) Twitter feed is just fine. I'm sure it helps to be a nobody, but it's probably also beneficial to aggressively unfollow everyone except the weirdos you actually enjoy reading.
That's a good point. I signed up for Twitter in 2020 because it was the only way to get up-to-date information on the release of a new motorcycle I was dying to hand over a non-refundable downpayment to secure. Since then I follow MotoGP and the various riders and teams that I like. I don't see the crazy shit everyone is always talking about.
After all these years, the algorithm still hasn’t figured me out and I’d love to keep it that way. C-sections? Montreal? Real housewives? Horror movies? All of this is currently showing in my instagram “suggested” posts, none of it is relevant for me, and I get to smugly appreciate the fact that the algorithm’s going to have to try quite a bit harder to understand me.
I now need to retrace my steps and work out when I lead the algorithm into believing I was interested in reactionary feminists and Nazis.
What I really liked about this episode is how philosophy really cuts through the noise and nonsense of politics, and I don't mean being political or having a political view, but thinking politically.
Williams was using very basic premises from late Wittgenstein and making an analysis that is almost trivial (and accurate!) about the faulty methods of sociolinguistic approaches to analyzing so-called fake news.
I walked away from this thinking more people should spend time studying philosophy, art, and literature rather than consuming political thought pieces--including the work Jesse and Katie do. Don't get me wrong, Jesse and Katie make entertaining content, but if you want to transcend the bullshit of the culture wars, you need to consume some real culture.
A resounding agree! Also, I think this should be explored in an individualistic way. I grew up in a 'group-think' family environment (a family member recently joked we, as a family, were like a 'cult' back then, and probably now in some ways). There would be stern looks of disapproval if you had a different opinion than the tribe (da family) and it terrified me enough to break from it for several years. Jesse's insight about tribes and truths was spot on. An interesting discussion would be on whether belonging is more important than truth/authentic expression, and the repercussions for those who choose either.
So while I've disagreed with some Blocked and Reported material in the past (usually nitpicks here or there), this is the first time I've been disappointed. I understand that the simplicity vs "it's complicated" narrative is catnip to Jesse, but in this conversation complexity itself is being used as a simplistic crutch.
The researchers working on inoculation theory as a means of countering disinformation do not have a simplistic linear model between false information and belief. There is plenty of recognition that humans are complex and dozens of factors play a role in shaping beliefs. But it is undeniable that information (and false information) do play some role in shaping beliefs. Also, this didn't spring into existence in 2016, or is merely one guy dusting off a theory from the 60s. There are dozens, if not hundreds, or researchers working on this topic (I know, cue the "there are dozens of us" Arrested Development meme). Even a brief glance at the literature will find meta-analyses of studies dating back to the 2010 and earlier. Yes it did start getting more media attention after 2016 (for obvious and valid reasons), and yes there have been some who have abused the misinformation lingo.
The fingerprints discussion is also disappointingly simplistic. The presence of the factors mentioned don't automatically mean disinformation is at play. Accurate information could have some or all of the fingerprints mentioned. But it is VASTLY more likely that disinformation will have many of those hallmarks. Similarly, it is possible that a piece of disinformation has none of those hallmarks. Yet that is overwhelmingly not the case. The fingerprints are merely a heuristic to identify when you should be far more skeptical of a claim that one otherwise would be. In a slightly different framing, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's not a simplistic on/off switch, it is a be careful warning. Further, the conversation does gloss over that while there is definitely a robust debate to be had about inoculating people to disinformation at an extremely broad level, there is basically no controversy that inoculation/prebunking works with specific false claims.
To use an admittedly simple analogy: There is a guy holding a lit match in front of a pile of wood doused with gasoline. The guy throws the match on the wood, and it bursts into flames. Inoculation researchers look at this and point at the lit match being tossed on the pile. What Dan and Jesse are doing here is the equivalent of "Well, there are plenty of complex reasons why the pile of wood was built, where the gasoline came from and who poured it, why the guy lit the match, who may have manufactured the match and/or lighter, so really this situation is to complicated and who is to say what really happened." And indeed, all that background might be terribly complex, but it doesn't change the reality that a match was lit and thrown, and that sparked the fire. Now maybe if the guy with the match wasn't there the pile would've caught on fire in another way, and a different pile would've reacted differently, but that doesn't mean nothing can be done about preventing said fire being lit here and now.
Without disinformation, the anti-vax movement wouldn't be nearly as prevalent. Same goes for the belief that the 2020 election was stolen (I know plenty of conservatives in my extended family and social network, the strength of their belief (based on false info) is not remotely equivalent to leftists who complain on a poll that they'd rather be obliterated by a meteor than have another Trump presidency). Same goes for denial of global warming largely resulting from human activities. One could also apply this to narratives about identity across the political spectrum. There has been a terminally online/elite counter-narrative that "oh, people don't really believe that. They are merely expressing their deep seated value system to appeal to others." This is annoyingly simplistic at best, and usually not true. People overwhelmingly genuinely hold their beliefs, which is obvious when talking with almost anyone IRL. Now some of those beliefs might have far less wiggle room than others. And people can and often do both, genuinely believe something and virtue signal with said belief. Also, I have yet to meet a person who goes "yeah, I don't actually genuinely believe such and such, I just want to be included in the group." I genuinely believe my ideas (some more than others), and everybody I've ever met seems to as well. The cognitive dissonance from not genuinely believing what I think/do would be much more than my brain could handle lol.
Further, the inoculation theory research holds valuable lessons regardless of where one is on the political spectrum. If you believe the other side(s) are full of shit, you can use inoculation and prebunking to help change minds. It is a tool that doesn't particularly care who wields it, though it will work substantially better if the accurate information actually is on your side.
Ironically, one of the comments here about recently reading "how the crime stats were juked" is a perfect example of the power of disinformation. The author of the recent claims that have swept right-wing media about the FBI stealth editing crime numbers to hide a crime increase is John Lott, a notorious fraud who has been caught fabricating data, lying under oath, and way back when pretending to be his own female student to heap praise on himself. He is also the main "researcher" behind the claim that guns make people safer, a conclusion rejected by the overwhelming majority of studies yet is believed by more than half the American public (which did not used to be the case, and is an excellent case study of the power of disinformation). The FBI case is no exception, where the FBI found FEWER crimes than they had originally reported in 2021 and 2022 combined. However, because there was a large crime revision down in 2021, and a more modest crime revision up in 2022, Lott turns that into thousands of additional crimes and murders being hidden. He also fails to notify the readers that the FBI revises its previous crime estimates every year, and in some years more than what they this past time. The FBI has never trumpeted this, but because it is an election year and Lott is Lott, it is turned into a conspiracy with multiple Republican Congressmen calling it election interference and Elon Musk's PAC blasting it out to millions.
While I know Dan Williams has responded to these rebuttals to his claims (responses which I don't find as persuasive as the rebuttals, but I want to mention they exist for transparency), I do find that these articles provide a much more sophisticated and nuanced picture than Williams presents, and I do hope Jesse at least reaches out to the some of the many scholars in the inoculation/prebunking field to provide that perspective:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/10/08/misinformation-is-a-threat-to-society-lets-not-pretend-otherwise/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mental-immunity/202306/are-the-critics-of-cognitive-immunology-in-denial#_ftnref6
Finally, I want to make clear that none of this is meant as claiming that Dan Williams is trying to deceive anyone, and I do think it is important for the disinformation field to have skeptics challenging it in a robust manner. I simply think the inoculation researchers have substantially better arguments and much more extensive research on their side. But further research could definitely prove them (and me by extension) wrong, and if it is wrong we definitely need to know. Same goes if it is correct. I just wish the conversation had extended the "it's complicated" and nuanced catch phrases more rigorously, and I hope that a future conversation with a leading academic in the field might provide the other side of the story.
I listened to the Studies Show episode on this subject and they very persuasively made the case for the entire field of inoculation/prebunking being complete nonsense. Your work notwithstanding.
I am new to this topic but it reminds me of bias training where the idea is if you are taught how bias exists and shown examples of it then you’ll be less biased. But there’s no evidence it actually works despite workplaces embracing the anti-bias training.
And, I’m fairly certain, there are studies showing that bias training leads to more bias (citations pending.)
So I looked at reference (1) by van der Linden et al in the first of your links (the Psychology Today article.) I have come to have a very low opinion of the quality of most psychology research- probably even lower than Jesse’s- and he has written a book on the subject. So that’s my bias going in.
My first observation is that Jesse and his guest seem pretty much right on in their criticism of the ‘misinformation fingerprints’- they seem like a hopelessly broad and squishy set of criteria. It seems like one would have to search hard to find a news or commentary article- misinformation or not-that does not arguably match at least some of the fingerprints. Since these fingerprints are the practical basis of the inoculation theory, that seems like a very big problem.
Then there is the VERY big problem that the article defines examples of misinformation by using- who could have guessed- misinformation. As a specific example, it defines ‘climate misinformation’ by relying on the ‘97% of climate scientists agree’ claim. But this well known and widely cited claim is itself misinformation based on terrible and biased methodology. So the theory seems to lack a reliable criterion for actually determining what is or is not misinformation in the first place (as I believe Jesse and guest discussed.) That would mean that the inoculation method may be equally good at making people a little more skeptical of misinformation AND correct information.
So teaching subjects a bit of a critical thinking technique may make them slightly more skeptical readers. Not exactly revolutionary.
Well for starters the practical basis of inoculation theory is not the fingerprints. Inoculation theory predates the fingerprints by decades, and would exist perfectly well if one were to never mention them. They are a way to try to broaden the scope of inoculation to where it doesn't have to be deployed on a case by case basis, and is therefore necessarily broad. And yes, it is a form of "critical thinking technique," which does make it kind of ironic the scorn you heap on inoculation, but then it's common sense and "not exactly revolutionary" when called by a different name.
Ah yes, the "97% of climate scientists agree is debunked" piece of disinformation, based on a delightful combination of oil & gas funded "experts," disinfo factories like Cato, and cranks who aren't actually climate scientists. The critiques of the 97% paper were pathetically bad, and ripped to shreds not only by the authors, but other scientists as well. For a mere sampling:
https://skepticalscience.com/docs/24_errors.pdf
https://www.realskeptic.com/2014/06/05/richard-tols-97-percent-scientific-consensus-gremlins/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/may/28/global-warming-consensus-climate-denialism-characteristics
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/jul/23/climate-change-andrew-neil-bbc-errors-take2
https://www.realskeptic.com/2013/08/29/cooks-97-climate-consensus-paper-doesnt-crumble-upon-examination/
Or some NASA links for fun:
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change/
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/scientific-consensus/
Now, to be fair, the 97% study is outdated by now. The consensus among scientists studying the issue is even stronger:
https://theconversation.com/the-97-climate-consensus-is-over-now-its-well-above-99-and-the-evidence-is-even-stronger-than-that-170370
But thank you for proving just how widespread and common disinformation is with that helpful example.
Finally, if one actually reads the literature on inoculation you'll find studies that examine the question of whether it makes people more skeptical of accurate information. This is a bit of debate on this within the field, but the evidence thus far indicates it largely does not, and there are ways to mitigate it when the effect does appear.
Was definitely not my intention to ‘heap scorn’ on the misinfo fingerprints inoculation theory or practice- misinformation is a real problem and it makes sense to study it from various angles. But when looking at the van der Linden paper I immediately saw some gnarly problems along the lines of what Jesse and his guest discussed. This was just my take and not any kind of condemnation of the work.
I actually think applied critical thinking techniques including possibly being aware of the kind of criteria in the fingerprints may be one of the best options available for dealing with the new media and information environment. But the theory seems to propose them as something more than critical thinking heuristics- as signatures by which misinformation can be at least somewhat reliably identified. This is where I see methodological problems.
So certainly a lot has been said about the 97% claim. I’ll just say that the study it ‘came from’ measured statements in research paper abstracts and did not in any way measure or intend to measure the personal beliefs of scientists on climate science. Yet everyone always says it found ‘97% of climate scientists believe…’ That is why I called it misinformation, bc the study doesn’t say anything of the sort. I only brought it up because van der Linden makes this same mistaken claim in his paper- ironically as part of his justification for classifying other people’s claims as misinformation. So I think it well illustrates problem of finding objective criteria for misinformation.
Anyhow, I enjoyed your posts and I think it’s good to have someone knowledgeable on here speaking up for the theory, bc Jesse and the guest didn’t seem to be fans.
Fair enough, and apologies if I was a tad heated. The simplifications of the entire field in the interview irked me, and I saw the 97% comment as a red flag of sorts.
I definitely agree that there is potential for inoculation theory to be too broad or misused, and I think it will be valuable going forward to make sure it doesn't overstep the evidence. I do fear though throwing out the entire field on the basis of "humans are too complicated," rather than a more nuanced approach of seeing what evidence is strongest in the field, which areas may be incorrect, and then figuring out what works best. There are just too many studies in this area with similar findings to lump this in with the replication crisis that has embarrassed so many others. There is something here of value, even if the exact contours are yet to be properly defined.
I also feel (after reading dozens upon dozens of these studies for a project I was working on a couple years ago) that inoculation theory is necessary but debatably might not be sufficient to change minds at sufficient scale outside the lab. As in, it is best used as one tool in a broader approach, rather than merely operating on its own.
My core belief on this is that ideas matter, whether true or false, and can shape a ton of behavior whether consciously or otherwise. They aren't the only factor by any stretch, but they are a relatively important one. Heck, and even as the 233 episodes of this podcast itself shows, dis/misinformation is rampant, otherwise Katie and Jesse wouldn't have nearly this much material.
On the 97%, I think a large part of the confusion/issue is the way media broadly covered it, which left out a decent portion of the nuance. That being said, the authors did also contact the authors of the studies to get their views, and that exercise also yielded 97%ish. And there have been follow-up studies backing it up in the 90-100% range. It's a rabbit-hole I went down back when the controversy first exploded, and is a reason I like to see the original claim, the critique, the rebuttal to the critique, and hopefully even a rebuttal to the rebuttal of the critique before drawing firm conclusions on something controversial that I don't have expertise in (which is basically everything outside gun violence stats, finance, and decimating people at board games like a total nerd lol).
Cheers
Yeah, I thought I sensed a slight beleaguered tone in some of your comments. As if I could almost hear you saying ‘But Jesse, don’t you remember how you always used to say “It’s complicated”?’
Seriously , Katie’s and Jesse’s epistemic values are among the things I most like about them.
>Also, I have yet to meet a person who goes "yeah, I don't actually genuinely believe such and such, I just want to be included in the group."
I saw this happen during the 2020 Flloyd riots. My best friend felt pressured into posting the black square on instagram even though she didn't believe it. She wanted to be accepted by her peers at work. While I would never virtue signal like her even I keep quiet to make it look like I agree with everyone else when politics gets discussed.
Good point. Also I remember multiple street interviews where people were asked about their views during the Israel/ Palestine protests and a lot of them weren’t able to say what they believed. They said they didn’t really know enough about it and were just there to show support. I think a lot of younger people fall into this trap.
History is full of people who claimed to be healers, but it bears keeping in mind that many of them were using leeches. Evidence-based medicine is relatively new, severely limited, and immensely corrupt.
So that’s my frame of reference when considering other endeavors that haven’t even made it to that point of progress yet. I’ve yet to see anything that would suggest to me that any “misinformation researcher” is any better at figuring out the truth than the average person walking down the street in Paducah.
Yeah, I had this feeling that because of some weird premises, or because it would not solve the problem, it was bad research. Sometimes premises are weird, but weird things are true. Also, maybe it's being praised more than it should be, but research results sometimes are incremental. I just could not discern quite well if everything is really that bad or if they were being too rigorous with their expectations. (Even if the specific comment on the experimental design made it clearer one source of problems in the research)
I definitely get that. And my guess is in certain quarters there has been too much hype in the media. The studies themselves (which have been replicated extensively across multiple experiment types (both synthetic and real-world), so this isn't a replication crisis situation) don't show overwhelming shifts, just modest ones that are still statistically significant. It isn't a cure all, but nothing is. It is definitely reasonable to suggest as well that the fingerprints are overstretching or merely glorified critical thinking (and it is definitely something to see all the responses saying the equivalent of "critical thinking is bad" or "critical thinking doesn't work," by people who would almost certainly consider themselves critical thinkers, as well as those for whom the "too skeptical" label would almost certainly apply being concerned about this approach making people too skeptical of legitimate information).
I'm pretty convinced by the case that inoculation works at a case-by-case basis (dispelling a single myth, or a group of interconnected myths). I'm much less certain about the fingerprints being as effective, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if their effect turns out to be fairly small. I would be surprised if it turned out that critical thinking skills are actually bad though, or if people turn out to be incapable of changing their minds when new/accurate information is provided along with the inaccurate information being debunked.
At it's core, this is a debate between those who believe ideas matter and shape beliefs in some fashion, and those who don't. Confirmation bias is obviously real, as is pressure to conform with your chosen tribe. Those factors don't make inoculation or changing minds impossible -- or beyond the reach of accurate information -- it just means the approach needs to be tuned to not threaten a person's core values. We are undeniably emotional creatures, but that doesn't make facts or logical persuasion impossible. And the biggest irony is that those often arguing that ideas don't shape beliefs often hold that belief for others, but not for themselves. It is almost always some variation of, "Well I as an intellectual form my opinions based on the best available evidence and my own research, but these mere peasants nearby are purely driven by emotions, virtue signaling, and what others in their tribe tell them to believe." It is a bizarre form of elitism (that I am by no means accusing you of to be clear, it's just a lot of the other criticism I've seen). There is also a false dichotomy that seems to develop between something either have a precise outcome/measurement, or it is too complex to even attempt. Whereas in reality it is definitely possible to be vaguely right about something, even if the measurement is murky.
This is a very interesting post, thanks for taking the time to write it and adding the links. It's nice to read something credible and optimistic.
Is this another "Jesse interviews someone he agrees with" eps?
damn do these only happen once a month? feels like we just had one lol
Probably and I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the fact I probably agree with them too.
Jesse I love you man but these episodes where you bring some guy on who you agree with to talk about their book are boooring. Its just not your strong suit.
At least do what Katie does and have them prepare an “internet bullshit” segment too, in order to keep things interesting.
This might sound kind of shitty but I read that and the thought immediately popped into my head, basically raped my brain to be honest: “What IS Jessie’s strong suit?”
Now I don’t know if I need to call the police or get that thoughts phone number…
Katie is almost always great though. Alone, with Jessie, with guests. I guess he’s just a good sidekick? That feels bad though.
I think Katie is just much more organized and has actual plans and outlines for the shows. Especially with guests. Jesse loves to dig into things and gets obsessed with topics but isn’t as organized. Also Jesse has the best reactions and their bantz are much better than with anyone else. Also he’s earnest and caring.
He's actually, sincerely honest. It shouldn't be such a significant strong suit but in his profession it's practically a unicorn.
Sidekick? C’mon man. Katie is the laughing gas, Jesse is yer veggies. We need ‘em both. More than the sum of their parts, and so on.
Lasted about 20 minutes, it’s just dull dog. Jessie has an incredibly odd way of asking a question and then answering it after the guest has given about two sentences.
Unfortunately I think jesse is kinda like me - I’m the sort of prof who procrastinates playing video games / on social media and then 30 min before class is like “oh goddamn it what was I supposed to be talking about in 30 min” and rushes off to class/podcast
Usually it’s… fine. But when Jesse has Katie around to keep him on task he’s able to deliver better lol. my calendar is my lifeline.
To be fair, this one was a lot less boring than the last few. I even finished it! It might have been the guest’s pleasant British cadence, but I’d consider going back and listening to at least part again at some point.
This is my favourite Jesse-led interview in quite awhile—plenty of food for thought!
I enjoyed the episode, but I definitely see why many Barpod listeners were bored by it. I subscribe Williams' substack. He's an interesting thinker, and I agree with most of his arguments against the misinformation Chicken Littles. I see why Jessie wanted to talk to him. Jesse's project of using science to critique sloppy, ideologically biased, scientific researchers is similar to Williams' project of critiquing sloppy, ideologically biased, misinformation researchers.
But Barpod didn't get popular for abstract criticism of intellectuals however interesting it is to me. It feeds on the banter between Jessie and Katie and on personal stories about people who get trapped in some kind of Woke BS. Some of Jessie's solo episodes are off-brand due to guests uncomfortable with the banter who don't have a personal story to tell. I haven't noticed that in any of Katie's solo episodes.
Yeah I guess the Jesse episodes are more like Singal-Minded episodes rather than B&R episodes
Which I personally am still interested in (I’m subscribes to Jesse’s Substack as well) but it’s quite different
A timely story on why both sides should be wary of giving the government power over misinformation: The State of Florida has been trying to block some ads in favor of an pro abortion rights amendment, arguing that the ads contain false and dangerous misinformation. A federal judge just blocked their attempts to stop the ads, writing "It's the First Amendment, stupid."
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/18/florida-abortion-desantis-tv-ads-judge
There are a lot of politicians who should have "it's the first amendment, stupid" tattooed on their foreheads, but DeSantis is definitely near the top of that heap of idiots.
DeSantis seems pretty good at running the state - he got the covid shots out as well as anybody, he's good at responding to hurricanes, and the state seems to be doing well.
But he does not have any commitment at all to limiting state power, and is happy to throw his weight around. In some ways, that makes him more dangerous than of he were all around incompetent.
His true saving grace is that he's one of the most genuinely awful retail politicians in recent memory.
Or rather, that's our saving grace, given his desire for authoritarian measures to punish and control.
Mmm, I'd take him over Rick Scott, aka Voldemort. DeSantis seems to be limited by his utter lack of Elvis-ness.
I don't want to be too mean but I think progressives fall for the idea of "MiSinForMaTiOn And DiSinForMaTiOn eXpeRTs" because it sounds nice, it's emotionally attractive. The problem is, you don't have to be a deep thinker to understand the problem with this thinking: who defines what is true and what is not true? The obvious answer is: those with power and influence.
We see this displayed in a really scary way with Tim Walz claiming that "misinformation and hate speech" aren't protected by the First Amendment. Of course, misinformation and hate speech are protected speech in the US, for a logical and important reason: what are misinformation and hate speech 🤷? I often say that "hate speech" doesn't exist, for all intents and purposes, because it cannot be defined, even in a general way. Everyone considers different ideas and speech to be "hateful."
There are two types of people who want misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech "experts" to be empowered with the ability to censor fellow citizens: those who understand this power and wish to use it, and those who think that "fighting misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech" is a noble goal and can be done fairly and safely. The latter is arguably more dangerous because good intentions of voters can help authoritarians wield tremendous power.
See, for example, the Klan march in Skokie. (What would the ACLU do today?)
The other side of the problem is that there are some very heavily moneyed interests funding most of the outfits in the mis/dis/mal-information space. It has quickly become something of a cottage industry since 2017. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have done some good reporting on tracing the money and the influence networks behind what they termed the "Censorship Industrial Complex." Following the money and then looking at their hiring pipelines gets really interesting, especially when you start looking not just in the US but at all of these groups across the western world. Lots of shell companies and "former intelligence" on staff.
What I realized after digging deep into the subject is that the modern left's obsession with misinformation, disinformation, and "malinformation" is that those emotionally attractive sentiments were laundered into the public discourse by influential people and institutions as a necessary step in the expansion of this project.
Great interview! I've been getting increasingly sceptical of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over 'misinformation'. Those concerns always seem to end up as "my ideas are correct and anyone who disagrees must be a drooling Neanderthal who can't string a sentence together".
Unfortunately, a really quick way to get 30 million dollars is to start a 501c(3) that researchers and flags "misinformation." There's a lot of money looking for proxies to do information operation work. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If you follow the money in the anti-disinformation space, it begins to get scary. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have done some good reporting on that.
I don't always love the interview episodes, *cough* Aella *cough* but I found this one fascinating. I appreciated the analysis of both the misinformation and misinformation research.
Hey - A Jesse interview is eating yer broccoli / cauliflower salad; the Katie-Jesse tete-a-tetes is skipping straight to the desert, with a side of laughing gas. Fun, yes, but ya gots to eat yer veggies kids!
Something I'm curious about that was kind of hinted at in the episode was the impact of "epistemic psychopaths" like Musk and Trump vs the less individualized, daily drone of misinformation that is more common from the left.
My totally uninformed and uneducated guess is that if you can discredit a guy like Trump or the political musings of Musk, you can more easily decouple yourself from their misinformation. But when there's a media ecosystem built around every Respectable (tm) outlet having the Correct (tm) view on something, it's very hard to shake free of that. After all, it's Respectable and Correct, and all these well-educated people know that police are gunning down thousands of unarmed Black men in the street every year.
Well I finally listened to this and I thought it was great. Really interesting and probably a favourite episode. I wish I had listened before engaging in the comments because the criticism is completely bonkers, almost everything he is criticised for saying he straight up didn't say.
I realise this isn't helping my case that I am not a Dan Williams plant.
I would have liked it if it was Dan Williams on the Good Fight with Yasha Mounk. I just think he’s better at this type of interview than Jesse. I come to this pod for something a bit more irreverent than this episode delivered.
Even if/when I don’t agree completely with the views expressed by the guests I appreciate the interview. Well done 👍🏻