Challenging Opinions >>

Dave Lefcourt is an author, writer and left-wing activist since the 1960s.

Dr Joseph Zernik is a writer, a researcher and a Human Rights activist based in Israel.

Submissions which he wrote on behalf of the organisation Human Rights Alert – NGO have been incorporated into UN Human Rights Council Periodic Reports.

Iona Italia is the sub-editor of Areo Magazine and we discussed this piece that she wrote about Sarah Jeong. 

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This is turning into a political correctness bumper edition, so sorry about that but I wanted to comment a bit about the controversy that blew up in the UK about Boris Johnson’s comment about Muslim women who wear burkas.

Boris Johnson, in case you don’t know, is the British conservative politician who resigned recently in protest that Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan wasn’t strong enough. Now, everything about Johnson’s behavior in regards to Brexit suggests that he has little or no principled beliefs on the matter and is just using it as a leverage to try to get himself into her job, but that’s a different story.

Johnson started a controversy when he said that women who wear the niqab or burka look like bank robbers or letterboxes.

Let’s be clear about terms here, by far the majority of Muslim women who wear headscarves wear a hijab, or something similar, which basically covers their hair and neck. Some go further and wear a niqab, which includes a veil which exposes only their eyes, and the most extreme, notably in Afghanistan under the Taliban, wear a burka, which even covers the eyes with a semi-transparent gauze.

It’s worth noting that women covering their hair is by no means confined to the Islamic world. It’s common in more traditional areas, like in Greece or Armenia – both Christian – for women to wear scarves in public. It’s pretty common in Russia too, particularly in more rural areas, and it would have been quite normal in Western Europe up to maybe 50 years ago, not to mention among Amish and other religious groups in the United States.

I have a couple of views about this. Firstly, for people in the west, I don’t like the idea of people wearing special clothes to mark out the fact that they are of a minority religion. I don’t confine that to Muslim women; the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro has defined the right of Muslim women to wear the hi...

Gary Kebbel served as dean at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In the podcast, I mentioned my previous interview with Professor Henry Jenkins of USC.

George Marlin is the author of Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy published by St Augustine’s Press. George also served two terms as Executive Director and CEO of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and he is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need. In our discussion I mentioned the Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike and a claim (unconnected with George) that 100,000 Christians are murdered for their faith each year, which was debunked extensively by a BBC investigation.

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I don’t normally talk about certain figures; I’ve mentioned not mentioning the T-word, or at least not mentioning it too often before. There are a few other highly polarizing figures such as Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos that I tend to stay away from. One reason is because they are so polarizing.

As far as I can see there are some things that both of them say that are obviously correct, there are things that they say that are obvious nonsense, but they have such strong hold over their followers, not to mention over their detractors that everything they every say is parsed and analyzed to death, so there’s not much more for me left to say about it.

But recently I heard a clip of a speech by Jordan Peterson where, I think, he made a point that he hasn’t made before, at least not quite so often as the handful of points that he normally makes, and I think it’s a good point, it’s something that hadn’t occurred to me in this form before.

Leaving aside Peterson’s love of asking himself questions and then answering them as though he were a genius, and his style of shouting out statements as though someone was trying to interrupt him, this is a good point.

There are people at all points on the political spectrum. Half of them, by definition, are more right-wing than average. Only the dumbest left-winger would dispute the point that there are perfectly reasonable and intelligent people who take a conservative position; and only the dumbest right-winger would dispute the point that, at some point on the spectrum, there is a line beyond which it’s not possible to debate with people in the normal democratic way.

That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to racists or Nazis – I may have done that myself – b...

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at USC Annenberg, and previously of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also presents the How Do you Like It So Far podcast.

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I was watching the press conference after the Helsinki summit, the would-he-wouldn’t-he summit. I didn’t really have much of a choice, other than turning off the TV, because I was in Russia, still on holiday and that press conference was being carried live on basically every single major TV channel, including NTV and Rossya 1, as well as all the news channels.

That’s not like it being carried live on CNN and Fox News, that’s the equivalent of it being carried live on ABC and CBS and NBC and Fox, all at the same time. And one thing to know about what goes out on Russian TV. If you’re in Russia watching TV, you’re watching what Vladimir Putin wants you to watch. There is absolutely no pretense of press freedom.

Most of the TV channels are outright owned by the government, the Kremlin hires and fires the editors, and the content is developed in consultation with Putin’s team, designed to do nothing but serve his interests.

This is not new to Putin, it was true, if not so strictly enforced, under Yeltsin rule in the 1990s, and of course under the communists before him. But under Yeltsin new TV and other independent media sprung up offering a range of voices. It wasn’t what we would recognize as a totally free first-amendment-protected press, but they weren’t just regime mouthpieces.

When Putin took power in 2000, that trend reversed, and particularly since 2012, when Putin returned to being president after a short hiatus as prime minister, all independent broadcasting and press evaporated. The basic operating method to get independent news off the air was for a crony of Putin to offer the owners to buy the channel. Most complied. Those that didn’t were hit with massive tax bills, far higher than the total value of the enterprise, forcing them to sell up. Others had greater and greater restrictions placed on their broadcasting licenses, and their owners and journalists were harassed until they complied.

Once ownership was transferred, independent-minded journalists and editors were typically fired en masse, and either news content was cancelled completely or it was replaced with slavishly-obedient coverage.

Within a couple of years,

Helen Raleigh is an immigration policy Fellow at the Centennial Institute and she is a leading voice for a free market based legal immigration reform. In October 2016, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights appointed Helen to the Colorado State Advisory Committee. In November 2016, she was recognized as a “distinguished toastmaster” (DTM) by Toastmaster International for her achievement in both communication and leadership.

We also talked about the book When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques. 

Dr Ed Gogek is a psychiatrist and a specialist in treating addiction.  He’s also the author of Marijuana Debunked: A handbook for parents, pundits and politicians who want to know the case against legalization. 

The BBC reported on the effects of marijuana legalization here. In addition I tried to bring up the Russell Newcombe and Sally Woods model for comparing the mortality risks of various drugs, but Ed was having none of it. This is the model:

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There was a ballot initiative in Maine …

No, no hang on, this is serious stuff, it’s important I swear.

There was a ballot initiative in Maine a couple of weeks ago to preserve the voting system that they have there that is called Ranked Choice Voting.

No, seriously, don’t skip, this really is important and I promise that I’ll try to make it interesting.

About two years ago, the state of Maine introduced this voting system, and it’s really complicated and really simple at the same time. There was a ballot initiative a couple of weeks back that could have scrapped it, but that didn’t happen, so this system stays in force in Maine.

To give you the simple explanation, it means that to vote for a candidate, you put the number 1 beside his or her name. It’s that simple. But also, you have the choice – you don’t have to, but you can – put the number 2 beside the name of your second-favorite candidate. And 3 beside your third favorite, and all the way down.

The system is that simple; even a child who can tell you what their favorite ice cream is, and their second-favorite, and so on, could use it.

Now here comes the complex part. I’ll try to make it simple. Basically to win, a candidate needs to get more than half the votes. That’s pretty simple if there are only two candidates, but if there are several, like an a typical competitive primary, what happens if no candidate gets 50 per cent? That’s when that number 2, the second favorite comes in. The counters go to the candidate who came last.

Jeffrey Miron is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, as well as being Director of Economics Studies at the Cato Institute.

We talked about the huge increase in the U.S. prison population – it really is striking:

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By now you know all about the Mueller investigation, you know all about the Russian collusion allegations, you know all about the denials, you know all about the Don Junior meeting in Trump Tower.

You might have an opinion on it, you might think that anyone on the Trump campaign team was entitled to seek opposition information from wherever, you might think that they were entitled to hear out the Russians who contacted them, you might think that it doesn’t matter whether those turned out to be FSB spies, or that the Trump team had no way of knowing that so you can’t hold that against them.

You might even think that a president who commits a crime is entitled to pardon himself.

You could agree or disagree with any of those positions and still be a loyal American.

But that leaves out one thing. I’ll get to it in a moment, but one thing to understand first. It’s surprisingly difficult for humans to make up random numbers. Our brains like patterns, we can’t get away from them.

For example, during the years of the Vietnam war, at five o’ clock every day, the U.S. military briefers would tell journalists how the war was going. It took a long time for the journalists to notice that the number of enemy dead in any given week never ended in the figure 0 or 5. Never 65 people killed, 64. Week in, week out for several years, the enemy dead was Never 60 it was 59, or 69, or 71.

Needless to say, the military were lying. In trying to pick random, precise-sounding numbers, they choose a pattern that was vastly improbable. There are a lot of mathematical tools that clever people can use to analyse large volumes of data, and see if that data is really coming from the source that it claims to be coming from.

Dr Gregory L. Schneider  is Professor of History at Emproia State University, and he’s the author of The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Critical Issues in American History).

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This is the Meads v Meads text that I referred to.

Lawyers, the story goes, were originally paid by the word when they were writing legal texts, and that is the supposed reason why they write in a long-winded jargon that is often impossible for anyone else to understand.

Lawyers say that they need to be exact, and they do, but they are certainly never afraid to call a shovel a manual digging implement suitable for the displacement of building material.

So there aren’t many legal texts that you would read for pleasure. But there is one. If, in the whole of your life, you only read one legal text for pleasure, or in the whole of your life, you only read one legal text at all, I’ve got the one for you.

It’s a real legal text, it’s the judgment of a real judge in a real court. The judge is Chief Justice J.D. Rooke, and the judgment was delivered in 2012 in the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta. And it’s not short either, the main document is about 150 pages.

But it’s worth reading. Honestly. Even if you’re not a lawyer, especially if you’re not a lawyer.

The case is called Meads versus Meads, I’ve got a link to it in the show notes, and it doesn’t sound like it should be that interesting because it is a case that arises out of a divorce, but I promise you, it is well worth reading.

The reason it’s worth reading is because Larry Meads, one of the litigants, is what’s called a Freeman on the Land. This is a weird cross between a con trick, a cult and a conspiracy theory, it’s related to Sovereign Citizen movements, and when you read the judgment you get a sense of the exasperation that the judge went through in hearing the case, and the forensic takedown that he did of the Freeman on the Land ideology.

And this is a deeply deluded ideology.

In case you don’t know,