Challenging Opinions >>

Jay Townsend is a political consultant from Indiana who has worked for a variety of candidates, mostly Republican.

Jay said that he believed Ronald Reagan was not a racist, but it is worth noting the location for a high-profile speech by Reagan, in the immediate aftermath of winning the Republican Convention in 1980. He gave the speech at Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, an odd choice since Mississippi was not in play in that election. The Neshoba County Fair was a short distance from the scene of the notorious murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner 16 years earlier. The murderers were never charged with a crime under Mississippi state law, and a federal civil rights trial was only partly successful. It is believed that some of the murderers were present to hear Reagan’s speech.

In the speech Reagan emphasised his support for ‘states’ rights‘, a phrase popular with racist politicians such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, who asserted that individual states should be allowed to choose to implement civil rights laws or not.

In that campaign, Reagan also, in dozens of speeches, popularised the term ‘Welfare Queen, claiming that an unnamed Chicago woman … “used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” The claim was almost entirely a fabrication, but came to represent African-American women claiming welfare.

Ryan Hagemann is the the director of technology policy at the Niskanen Center. We talked about his article on AI.

There’s a great film that you should watch if you haven’t already, called When We Were Kings.

It’s about Muhammad Ali’s  Rumble in the Jungle boxing match against George Foreman. That’s right George Foreman used to be a boxer before he made it big as a grill salesperson. In fact Foreman was such a good boxer that everyone expected him to win the Rumble in the Jungle boxing match in Kinshasa in 1974. Ali was seen as being towards the end of his boxing career, and well past his peak, 32 years of age,  compared to Foreman who was 25.

From the start of the match, Ali hardly even tried to hit Foreman. He just concentrated on defence and dodging Foreman’s blows. And he concentrated on psychologically destroying Foreman. Every time Foreman did manage to land a blow, Ali whispered to him “Is that all you got George? Is that all you got?”

As he got more frustrated, Foreman got more exhausted, trying harder and harder to hit Ali. Finally, in the eighth round, Ali landed a series of blows on Foreman, culminating with one that sent him down. There’s a very famous photo of this, with Foreman falling, if you can picture Muhammad Ali in a boxing match photo, that’s probably the one you’re thinking of this.

I was thinking of this match, and Ali’s genius in winning a match he was supposed to lose all last week when I saw the reactions to the suggestion that Oprah Winfrey might run for president in 2020. The right couldn’t contain themselves from posting meme after meme saying that people who complained about one billionaire TV star with zero political experience could hardly support another when it suited them.

There are two things to say about this. Sure, it’s easy to categorise Winfrey and Trump together if you craft your language carefully enough. But Oprah Winfrey is no Donald Trump. Trump was born rich, and there is no evidence that he made any more money than he would have if he had just stuck the millions his father left him in the New York Stock Exchange. He had every advantage and privilege he could have had.

Winfrey was born dirt poor to a teenage single mother. She was sexually abused as a child, and pregnant at 14. She worked her way to having a multi-billion dollar media empire starting by reading the news on a small local black radio station. She has used her money to, among other things,

Zach Elwood is a former professional poker player and the editor of Reading Poker Tells, but I talked to him about the articles he wrote Examining fake-American Facebook accounts posting rightwing and pro-Trump content and Top 7 signs a Facebook account is fake.

We talked about a few accounts he examined including that apparently belonging to Isabelle Jaden (see right), which was apparently originally opened in the name Naqasa Ali.

Also, accounts in the name of Elizabeth Tatishvili and Eliza Rockefeller had profile photos evidently lifted from internet images of Margot Robbie and Jennifer Lawrence.

Strangest was the series of accounts in the name of the apparently real person Harry Taylor of Lynchburg, Virginia, all of which had profile photos of what was evidently the same person. These accounts all suddenly switched to making extensive pro-Trump postings on Facebook, many having previous content that suggested that their owners were not American, and were not the people they presented in the current version of their profile.

Typically, this content suggested connections with Macedonia or the Indian subcontinent.

Alex Kack is a comedian and blogger, and we talked about his piece on Venezuela and its collapsing economy. The collapse is so severe that Venezuelans are literally starving; 75 per cent of Venezuelans have lost an average of 19lb, 8.5kg each.

Rampant corruption is contributing to the problem, with looting by blackmarketeers – often members of the military whose wages have become worthless – causing severe shortages of medical supplies. The Venezuelan government’s attempts at price controls have led to bizzare incentives, meaning that toilet paper is a sought-after commodity, and that what was once a major sugar exporter now can’t even supply its internal market for sugar, to the extent that Cocal Cola have pulled out of the country.

I made a mistake about the date of the Communist Manifesto, it was first published in 1848.

Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She is the author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. 

Some statistics on our discussion: Black are men nearly three times as likely to die from police use of force, as judged by how they are represented in the population, however Heather makes the point that it is more valid to calculate the proportion not by representation in the whole population, but by representation in the population that encounters the police, such as being arrested.

I believe that this point is weak because if the hypothesis is that black men are more likely to die because of police racism, it is not surprising that they are also more likely to be arrested in instances where a white man would not be.

Research shows that although blacks are arrested far more often for drug use, they report drug use at almost exactly the same levels. Heather contends that this is because blacks falsely under-report their levels of drug use. This is not impossible, but it seems surprising that blacks falsely under-report their drug use to exactly the right degree to make them appear to have the same level of drug use as whites.

Heather is right that the statistics strongly suggest that members of some minorities are disproportionally responsible for serious violent crime, and is also right that, despite that, most members of minority communities have no involvement in crime.

Criminologists agree that statistics for serious crimes are generally accurate, and the more serious they are,

Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of editor of Shadowproof. We talked about his article on the FCC under Ajit Pai relaxing the rules on cross-media ownership, and Kevin mentioned in particular this piece by John Oliver about the potential dominance of the Sinclair Broadcast Group:

Over the past couple of weeks, Bitcoin has bounced around in value, while in general surging upwards. To give you an idea of its surge, at the start of this year, in January 2017, Bitcoins were trading at less than US$1,000 each. Nine months later, by the middle of September, Bitcoin had risen to $3,000. By the end of November, less than three weeks ago, it hit $10,000, and in the last week it has traded over $18,000.

And by the way, if you’re not sure exactly what Bitcoin is, if you feel you need to learn more about it, I have just one piece of advice for you: don’t bother.

There are two types of people who are raving about Bitcoin at the moment. One of those types is the libertarians who want to remove the role of governments from backing money. If you advocate the total, or almost total, absence of state power over people’s lives, and say that this will lead to a blossoming of the economy, an obvious stumbling block is the fact that governments create and guarantee money, which is pretty important for the economy.

In case you don’t know, a Bitcoin is a type of computer file which is unique and traceable online. The Bitcoin is traceable, but its owner is not, and thanks to a bit of fancy computer mathematics, there is a limit to the total number of Bitcoins that can exist. The theory is that anything that’s scarce is valuable. Also thanks to that fancy mathematics, each Bitcoin needs some hefty computing power to be calculated, and each Bitcoin is exponentially more difficult to calculate than the last.

You might have heard of Bitcoin mining, that basically means setting a computer going to do the calculations to claim the next Bitcoin. But actually setting one computer going isn’t going to get you far right now. This isn’t like leaving your computer to defrag overnight. As I speak, there are people building warehouses full of specially-built high-spec comput...

Mike Buchanan is the leader of the Justice for Men and Boys party in the UK, (and is a former member of the more mainstream Conservative Party).

The party hosted the 2016 International Conference on Men’s Issues in London, in 2016 in association with the organisations A Voice for Men. The leader of A Voice for Men is Paul Elam, who has written that some women “walk through life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH—PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”

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UPDATE: I got this comment from Danuta MG

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Hi William,

This is the first ‘Challenging Opinions’ podcast I have heard

Very fair, balanced interviewing.

I have taken an interest in Men’s Rights and j4mb over the last six months since reading j4mb’s Manifesto.

I was moved and haunted by the unfair treatment and suffering that men face in many areas of life in our society, detailed in the Manifesto.

The questions and areas that you chose to touch upon are very apt.

In the section where you say that j4mb’s website/twitter contains a lot that shows women in a negative light – well yes,

j4mb does catalogue/collect newspaper/media articles out there that report women’s bad behaviour.

If the women concerned don’t like their bad behaviour exposed then they shouldn’t behave in the bad ways that they do or commit the crimes that they do.

The female individuals themselves are to blame for themselves being presented in a negative light.

I can perfectly understand why a Men’s Rights/Justice for Males party catalogues incidences of female bad behaviour.

For decades males as a class have been ridiculed, disrespected, talked down, criticised by feminists and the media.

J4MB are simply saying, hang on a minute women aren’t all sweet, innocent creatures, the reality is that they can and do behave just as badly, if not worse at times than men, as illustrated daily in newspaper reports etc.

Where women commit the same crime as men,

Lenore Skenazy is an author, columnist, and president and chief blogger at Let Grow, a non-profit dedicated to overthrowing overprotection. In our discussion I mentioned Risk by John Adams, an excellent book on the topic of risk and risk-aversion.

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There’s something happening that you might not have noticed in the news. What’s happening is MBS. If you don’t know what MBS is, then listen up.

First, a little history. Saudi Arabia, as we know it, came into being in the 1930s, the oil business there started in earnest in the 1940s, and by the 1970s it had become the largest oil producer in the world. In 1973 they led the oil boycott in protest against the West’s support for Israel.

To say that Saudi Arabia is conservative doesn’t begin to describe it. Music is banned. Dancing is banned. Cinema is banned. I don’t mean that some films are banned from cinemas. I mean that there are no cinemas at all. They are totally illegal.

Up to recently, it was illegal for women to drive. It’s still illegal for them to go almost anywhere without their father, husband or son chaperoning them. Also, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. There is no pretence of democracy whatsoever. The king’s word is, literally, law. And the kings are old. For the whole of this century, there has been no king aged under 80.

Actually, that’s not quite true, the current King, Salman, was a few months short of his eightieth birthday when he came to power almost three years ago. And how kings come to power is another matter. Islamic law allows a man to have up to four wives. But that’s four wives at a time. In reality, these rich and powerful men have a conveyor belt of wives, with a one-in-one-out system meaning that they are never married to more than four of them at any given time.

This means that there are hugely complex families with sons – girls don’t count for much here – with dozens of sons, nephews, half brothers all competing in the game of thrones for the succession. Usually an uneasy peace is kept. Usually. In 1975,

Barrett Holmes Pitner is a journalist who has written for The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Daily Dot, and The Huffington Post.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA spy who was jailed following his public statements about the the CIA’s use of torture. He is the author of Doing Time Like A Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison and Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.

In our discussion, I mentioned predictions ascribed to the CIA that Pakistan would fail as a state by 2015.