Challenging Opinions >>

Mike Ludwig is a reporter for TruthOut.org. We talked about his article Scott Pruitt’s Embattled Science “Transparency” Rule Does Not Apply to Pesticides.

I also mentioned the Royal Society of Chemistry’s £1m bounty for the UK’s first chemical-free product – they say that they will pay £1m for anyone who can provide a handful of any substance that is ‘chemical-free’. The prize, first offered in 2010 remains unclaimed.

Miranda Yardley calls herself an ‘iconoclastic transexual’ and caused controversy recently when, as was widely reported she was banned from Twitter for what was branded ‘hate speech‘.

In our discussion, I mentioned the very high level of violence suffered by transwomen in particular, as documented here and here.

Daniel Ameli is a data scientist and cryptocurrency expert who has written extensively about Bitcoin.

Failed, raided and fraudulent Bitcoin exchanges have included Mt. Gox, Bitomat, MyBitcoin, Bitcoinica, Bitcoin Savings and Trust, Bitfloor, Instawallet, Bitcoin Foundation, Inputs.io, Global Bond Limited, Flexcoin, Bter, Bitstamp, Cryptsy, Gatecoin, Bitfinex, and NiceHash.

Aristotle defined money as follows:

* It must be durable. Money must stand the test of time and the elements. It must not fade, corrode, or change through time.

* It must be portable. Money hold a high amount of ‘worth’ relative to its weight and size.

* It must be divisible. Money should be relatively easy to separate and re-combine without affecting its fundamental characteristics. An extension of this idea is that the item should be ‘fungible’. Dictionary.com describes fungible as: “(esp. of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.”

* It must have intrinsic value. This value of money should be independent of any other object and contained in the money itself.

The BBC’s More or Less programme estimated that a Bitcoin transaction costs more than 50 times that of a credit card transaction.

Ani Zonneveld is the founder of Muslims for Progressive Values. In our discussion I mentioned some opinion research among British Muslims.

There was talk a couple of weeks back – among Trump supporters anyway – there was talk of Donald Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Before you laugh, remember Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Nominations for the prize that year closed eleven days after he took office.

And, I have to admit that I laughed a bit when I heard the suggestion of Trump getting the Nobel Prize, it sounded like a joke, but at that point, there was a plan for a summit between him and Kim Jong Un, there were clear de-escalation steps being taken on either side of the Korean border – blaring propaganda speakers were being switched off, the leaders of each side were meeting, and biggest of all, North Korea agreed to destroy its nuclear test site.

Trump supporters do have a point when they say, if Obama had achieved that, his people would be organising him a ticker tape parade. Obama got the Nobel for basically just winning the election. But let’s have a look at exactly what Trump has achieved.

It’s important to remember that North Korea, under its present leadership, is an extremely dangerous country, to say nothing of the suffering of their own people. Kim and his clique are clearly ruthless and paranoid. They have a huge arsenal of non-nuclear artillery pointed at Seoul, the capital of South Korea and its 25 million people. The North could kill hundreds of thousands of them in the time that it would take Trump to give the command to launch missiles.

And, a surprise strike from the North with nuclear missiles would be far worse; so diverting them from the nuclear path is important, but it’s not the only goal.

When Obama, and George W Bush before him, dealt with the Kim dynasty, they were extraordinarily careful. They targeted sanctions at products known to be loved by the leadership, such as brandy – that was hardly going to do any damage to the living standards of the average citizen. Also, they never agreed to personally meet Kim, or his father or grandfather.

They barely even said the name of the Korean lea...

Natalie Parrott produces the YouTube channel ContraPoints. I highly recommend her videos. I mentioned the interview I did Linda Bellos in February.

In our discussion, I mentioned the soaring referrals to the UK’s Tavistock clinic (which specialises in gender reassignment) of children. I also mentioned James Caspian, the doctoral candidate at Bath Spa University who approved, and later rejected, Caspian’s proposed research into gender reassignment reversal.

I also mentioned non-specialist doctors giving hormone treatment to young children, and the assault by trans activists on feminists wanting to organise a meeting; (Since the recording, trans activist Tara Wolf has been convicted of assault in this case) and Jessica Winfield, formerly known as Martin Ponting, while serving a sentence for a rape conviction, was relocated to a women’s prison in the UK.

 

Christopher Novembrino is a host of the Don’t Worry About The Government podcast.

In the podcast I mentioned rival protests organised in Houston, Texas to protest and defend the local Muslim community, which were both organised by Russian-controlled Facebook groups.

Roifield Brown is a student of history and the presenter of the Mid Atlantic podcast.

Trita Parsi is the founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council, the author of several books on foreign policy, and he’s a regular media commentator. His latest book is Losing an Enemy, Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

Hadley Heath Manning, is the director of policy for Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice, and a Fellow at the Steamboat Institute.In the podcast, I quoted from a piece by Steven Horwitz who is the right-leaning Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, who says that

The consensus of the economic studies is that there is still about 3 to 5 percentage points of the 20 percent, or roughly 15 to 25% of the gap, that cannot be accounted for by economic differences and that might well be due to discrimination.

This seems to undermine the arguments by people on different sides of this debate that none, or all, of the wage gap is accounted for by discrimination. I also mentioned the fact that Jennifer Lawrence was paid significantly less than her male co-stars on the film American Hustle, despite being objectively more valuable to the film studios than them, which is an excellent excuse to include a picture of Jennifer Lawrence in the blog post.

Ellen Brodsky is the owner of the blog Newshounds.us and was a researcher for the film Outfoxed. We mentioned research that shows that torture doesn’t work in the podcast.

A lot of people made fun of the questions Mark Zuckerberg was asked when he went to Congress last week, there were all sorts of gags of how it would be like having to set up your grandparents’ wifi, but Senator Dick Durbin, I think, made a good point with a simple question

That was fun, turning the tables a bit, but this, I think, was a much more important exchange.

That was Senator Brian Schatz asking the questions. And I’m suspicious of the answers there.

But before that I want to go back to a young southern governor who was an unlikely candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination more than quarter of a century ago. Back then, any association with drugs was a serious issue for any candidate.

Some enterprising journalist had the bright idea of sending a questionnaire to all candidates, which included a question about whether they had ever taken drugs. This candidate answered, apparently, clearly. He said that he had never broken our country’s drug laws. Case closed.

Except, not quite. The candidate in question was then-Governor Bill Clinton. He was later questioned more closely about his drug-taking and he said this:

But, he hadn’t lied. When asked about ever taking drugs, he reframed the question and answered something else, and nobody noticed. So, when caught, he could claim that he was telling the truth that he had never broken US drug laws.

This is called a non-denial denial. You’re asked if you did something. You answer in the negative, you say you didn’t do the thing, but within your answer, you subtly reframe the question, so that you are denying something that isn’t quite what you were asked about.

The average listener takes away a flat denial, but you have left open whether you actually did what you were accused of. By the way, when you use a non-denial denial, it’s really risky to do it in person, because if you phrase something wrongly, you might end up stepping over the line and actually lying, which is bad,