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Charlie Kirk
Episode Transcript
The last thing that I wanted to talk about rambling on and get it putting a cap on this and the thing that I'm really disliked about
More than and it's not that I don't like or that I that I'm okay with rather
The white supremacy and the Christian nationalism and the fascism.
I'm not just throwing words out there, but I'm not gonna
I'm gonna go into definitions of those things, but yeah, absolutely was those things
But he fucked up language and fucked up
Really like I think I he using this word is a sounds a little weird
But to me like honor and actually like trying to
Be as honest as you can and trying like to if you're having a discussion with somebody not a debate
But a discussion and somebody makes a point and somebody is actually right
recognizing the right
acknowledging that
Learning from it those kinds of things
You know actually having your mind to change those are really important things and people like this guy
Completely eliminated them.
They completely have fucked things up so badly and it's not just them
It's like you know again the left versus right thing the idea of you know
What is what is radical you know like I think everybody should have universal health care
I think you should be able to have housing for free as somebody who exists
I think you should have
Education for free as somebody who exists and then people will go like well
How do how are you going to compel people that work to people people don't need to be compelled to do those things people will actually do
Those things for free
If they don't have that gun to the head of
You know you have to do this to survive they really will
And I'll tell you how you know that they would because I'm doing it right now
I'm doing like I have a fucking PhD if I didn't have to pay for that
I'd still be doing this in fact what I would be doing probably is
Doing research and talking to people and sharing things that I know and probably putting more and more time and effort into this because I wouldn't have other things to do
I wouldn't have again like this.
I this thing that I have to get the score in my
Game of imaginary
You know money thing
Get that score up to some number just so that I can survive and so that I can live reasonably well and be comfortable and
Not be an horrible situation
That is it's a horrible thing.
It's a really horrible thing and I think I I wish and again, I'm not
I don't think
That things used to be better or worse or you know, I'm not a nostalgia guy as a general rule
But I do really wish that people would have a concept of honor
a concept of
Honesty a concept of good faith and when I say that like I don't just mean that you know you act in those ways like I
I genuinely do my best
To do those things.
I care about honor.
I care about reputation.
I care about these things.
They matter to me
I care about honesty.
I if I find out that I was wrong about something
My
Gut reaction there and the thing that I tried to do and I tried to demonstrate and I tried to even like go a little bit overboard on this
Is it to acknowledge that somebody was correct and I was wrong and
To correct myself and to learn from it and I think that's something that we should all be doing
That's something you know you shouldn't be doing this shit where you're just like convincing people of
of of nonsense that's wrong and
That is a mass of harm to society as much of a harm as actually like saying
Oh these these terrible people are doing these terrible things and then you're putting a target on them or you know like we are totally
Under threat because of x y and z when you're the dominant category, you know like it's such a fucking weird thing
Like you have these white males
Particularly like people that kind of look like me, but they're especially like Christian they're especially and they talk about how
You know
Much that they are under threat or they're being discriminated against you're all those other bullshit and then you look at every like bored room
You look at the any the cabinet of the president you look at the president himself and all of our presidents except for one
And they're all dudes that look like that and it's kind of like
What's what's going on here guys are you are you little little full of shit little fucking full of shit?
You know, it's it's just such a fucking it's it's a frustrating thing how much people reverse the stuff and it's also a very frustrating thing.
I think how much
I guess this will be the actual like in the cap to this but how much people are algorithmically
Balkanized so part of this is like you know
One person watches fox news one person watches and MSNBC which is fox news for liberals and
They have a completely different
Preception of reality both of them are completely just
Disconnected from actual reality by the way and both of them as somebody who's outside of both of those things
If I go to somebody's house and I see like either one of those channels on
And I don't just mean those two because it's this is a very common problem for
Pretty much all legacy media
But I see that stuff and
It's it's excruciating.
It's physically painful for me.
I have to leave the fucking room
I feel like I'm gonna crawl out of my skin.
I can't stand it because it's so
ridiculous and it's so
Like it's not just that it's not connected to reality and it's you know
Whatever they're saying is like it's own universe under itself
But they have the exact same kinds of things about like agreement and in group versus out group
And talking about how bad some group of people are and you got the the demonization and we're under threat and it like it's really
So similar is one of the reasons why
I talk so much about blue maga
Is not just because I think it's like a convenient short hand but because
the differences between
blue and red maga are
Paper thin like there's zero daylight between these two groups and it's when you're when you see it
And when you see people going down these paths and you see them like sharing
It's the most ridiculous.
I'm sharing exactly the same memes except
One of them is making Trump and a Superman and one of them's making Gavin Newsom who's a fucking horrible person also in the Superman
And it's like the same shit they've got you know
Kamala Harris as a super girl and then they've got somebody also the super it's just the same shit
It's like the same fucking thought process.
It's the same and it's not surprising because they're coming from the same society
But the same stuff
But alternate universe versions of each other and they're both clownish
They're both like super ableists
Really love to talk about people's intelligence really love to focus on like somebody's not educated or they're they like the throw-around
How it's stupid or like you or all these kinds of things and
Most of these things you can take the words and you have legitimately no idea if I took one of the posts
From the liberals the that I know and I took another post from some of the maga people the red maga people
And I took out like the context so you don't know
They're talking about Trump or they're talking about Biden
You would not know the difference legitimately like I'm not just exaggerating or making that up you would not know the difference
And so that's a problem what you're watching and then you also have that all of the social media that you're in
A you're connecting the people your following pages and doing things like this that align with you
But also
There's this algorithmic Balkanization
So you get into sort of a cluster and then they keep showing you more and more stuff from your cluster
So with Charlie Kirk and I think this is
This is the thing that kind of prompted the the spying thing I was gonna talk about but it matters
With him you have one group of people who see him and they're seeing just the stuff
That sounds completely reasonable and sounds like oh he's one of us and he said you know
I don't understand why people are so upset about him.
I don't know you know and it
Is that they're not completely wrong because that's what they're seeing and the even other group of people and they're seeing
All of the Christian nationalism and the racism and the sexism and the anti-immigrant stuff
And the demonization of trans people and the talking about how people need to get the stone and all of these
horrible the political punishments and all that kind of stuff and they're not wrong because that's what they're saying
and then you know
Because those are the the little areas that they're in
People are starting I think and I think this is actually like a vaguely hopeful thing
This will be my sort of positive end cap to this whole thing but I think it's vaguely hopeful that I've got people and both of these domains
Now kind of mentioning like they're shocked by the disparity of how people are reacting and they're sort of
Getting a crack into that algorithmic with those bubbles that they're in and starting to see like oh, maybe there's something else going on here
And it's not it's not about him so much like it's funny that it appears that the guy that did
Shoot him was probably actually just like even more extreme and right wing
Then him and probably didn't think that he was barren off
You know, and then but people blamed him or people blamed your other leftists
Especially at the beginning and they're like oh, we have to political violence is wrong and all of this stuff as though as though war is not political violence as though
Police brutality is not political violence as though you know structural racism
Is not political violence
You know this plenty of political violence that the country was founded on political violence like I
This is a this is a thing that just strikes me as bizarre but like
When I went to public school I swear every fucking year
We went over the foundational myth of the US every year
Maybe there were a couple that we kind of skipped it, but I'm pretty sure like every year
We at least touched on it and some years we spent a lot of time on it and
That's all about like
Revolution and people shooting people and all kinds is and people seem to not
Remember that or something.
I don't know and then you know the country is also full of
Just racism
It's like yeah, but between the original
Send of the country that was being founded on a genocide on the scale of like a hundred million people that were there before
And then also
You know you have the racism of
Having Black people
Doing all the labor and being forced into servitude and yeah, you do that it's a pretty fucked up thing that the country is founded on violence
It has violence and it's bones right
Capitalism I would say is violence the idea that you have to work for somebody else
And if you don't do whatever shit somebody else tells you
They can throw you into a position where you're gonna be on the street that is violence the idea that you know
Your health care is contingent on
Having to do whatever somebody else says is violence it is
You know, it's implicit violence it's not like they're actually like beating you with a stick or something like that
But it is
It's violence because they are doing something they're putting you into position where you're going to be her harmed and you know it
Potentially very severely
If you don't do
What they're telling you to do what they're making you do
It's as surely violence as if somebody you know, and this is the thing that I get with them
You know, but if you look back at the mightest was cheese thing
I talk about how you know, like statistical mass murder
Is mass murder just because you're not
Pointing a gun at people and pulling the trigger
If you make a policy decision that kills millions of people
That's still murder that's still like you've killed millions of people
I don't care what the mode of action is but if you do something like that if you
Spread lies that kill people like RFK junior and he's back junior
Or wake field there are all of these other people you were a murderer as
Surely as if you pointed a gun at people and killed them and you're also a mass maemer as
Surely as if you chopped off people's legs and you know again shot them and caused all kinds of problems
And it's weird to me that we don't see those as equivalent
But we don't
So anyway
This algorithmic Balkanization I think I hope people are starting to at least catch a little drift though
Starting to maybe realize that there's a little bit of
Pro wrestling going on.
There's maybe
Maybe
I don't follow for wrestling so I don't know to characters from it, but maybe the two
That is the good is that you think of that you know the ones that you follow and the their opponents
Maybe they're actually friends
Maybe they're actually getting along maybe they're actually like when you're not looking at them laughing at you for falling for their shit
Maybe they're drinking together.
Maybe they're having dinner together
Maybe they're very very chummy.
Maybe they're being paid by the same people.
Yeah, maybe it's pro wrestling
Just just think about that and I think it's one of those things where if you start thinking about it and you start looking at it
I know obvious it's kind of again like the magic trick where if somebody tells you how it's done
And especially if it's not done very artfully and these guys
They're not hiding it.
They're not even trying to hide it is the most it's one of the reasons why I'm losing my mind with people because it's so obvious
Once you see it
They're they don't care enough
To to lie to you well.
They don't care enough to make it hard to see
It's just frustrating and so anyway
I wish I wish people would see it and I hope by listening to this maybe it will help you see some of that stuff
I'm gonna I've got a lot of this was kind of extent branious and
Sort of broad
scattered shot of stuff
I have a lot of things that I mentioned in here and some things that I didn't mention but I wanted to
But I forgot about that I'm gonna talk about in more depth later on
So
I don't want it to be like the theme the theme of tangents is just me talking about this stuff
But it's gonna be something that
For a little while I'll at least be
I'll probably always come back to it unless I feel like somehow magically the problem is solved which I don't I don't think I think for
I think we're a ways from solving the problem
Unfortunately so it'll be a subject that I think about and talk about for a while
But I don't want it to be everything but it will be something
So with that as always thank you for listening and
Especially actually thanks to my two friends who
Really prompted this episode and prompted some thoughts and kind of
I really will say gave me a wink of hope
Just well not not just
Then but like between them and some other people that I've seen
Starting to go like what's going on here like maybe maybe there's something else
I hope that that's the thing that prevails and not the
Sort of you know people go and use this thing to justify doing horrible shit
Maybe we can learn maybe we could do something better and maybe we can start
Noticing what's actually going on and maybe we can start getting together and realizing
There are there are a lot of things that we're getting fucked out of this is this is one thing incidentally
This will be my actual indicate so this will be about an hour and a half but
Going out of the country and seeing how things can be a little bit and seeing what it's like to live in a country
Where you do have public transit and where you do have universal health care of some sort
And
Understanding that you know things don't need to be the way are there they are and not only that
But you know like just because other countries are doing stuff that's better
Doing some other stuff that's worse.
You can take the best you can make the world but you want it to be and
We could very easily for not even all of the money that we spend waste on defense
We could have universal health care.
We could have universal college
We could have cities that are walkable and at public transit and have high speed rail between them
We could do so much better and
We should we should do so much better.
We deserve it.
We're getting fucked over
And it doesn't need to be that way and it'd be nice to do you know
It'd be nice to start figuring this shit out and start actually
Maybe changing things
But that's that's the last I want to say so as ever
Thank you for listening
Thanks for talking and
再见
View all episodes
By Scott Menor, PhDEpisode Transcript
The last thing that I wanted to talk about rambling on and get it putting a cap on this and the thing that I'm really disliked about
More than and it's not that I don't like or that I that I'm okay with rather
The white supremacy and the Christian nationalism and the fascism.
I'm not just throwing words out there, but I'm not gonna
I'm gonna go into definitions of those things, but yeah, absolutely was those things
But he fucked up language and fucked up
Really like I think I he using this word is a sounds a little weird
But to me like honor and actually like trying to
Be as honest as you can and trying like to if you're having a discussion with somebody not a debate
But a discussion and somebody makes a point and somebody is actually right
recognizing the right
acknowledging that
Learning from it those kinds of things
You know actually having your mind to change those are really important things and people like this guy
Completely eliminated them.
They completely have fucked things up so badly and it's not just them
It's like you know again the left versus right thing the idea of you know
What is what is radical you know like I think everybody should have universal health care
I think you should be able to have housing for free as somebody who exists
I think you should have
Education for free as somebody who exists and then people will go like well
How do how are you going to compel people that work to people people don't need to be compelled to do those things people will actually do
Those things for free
If they don't have that gun to the head of
You know you have to do this to survive they really will
And I'll tell you how you know that they would because I'm doing it right now
I'm doing like I have a fucking PhD if I didn't have to pay for that
I'd still be doing this in fact what I would be doing probably is
Doing research and talking to people and sharing things that I know and probably putting more and more time and effort into this because I wouldn't have other things to do
I wouldn't have again like this.
I this thing that I have to get the score in my
Game of imaginary
You know money thing
Get that score up to some number just so that I can survive and so that I can live reasonably well and be comfortable and
Not be an horrible situation
That is it's a horrible thing.
It's a really horrible thing and I think I I wish and again, I'm not
I don't think
That things used to be better or worse or you know, I'm not a nostalgia guy as a general rule
But I do really wish that people would have a concept of honor
a concept of
Honesty a concept of good faith and when I say that like I don't just mean that you know you act in those ways like I
I genuinely do my best
To do those things.
I care about honor.
I care about reputation.
I care about these things.
They matter to me
I care about honesty.
I if I find out that I was wrong about something
My
Gut reaction there and the thing that I tried to do and I tried to demonstrate and I tried to even like go a little bit overboard on this
Is it to acknowledge that somebody was correct and I was wrong and
To correct myself and to learn from it and I think that's something that we should all be doing
That's something you know you shouldn't be doing this shit where you're just like convincing people of
of of nonsense that's wrong and
That is a mass of harm to society as much of a harm as actually like saying
Oh these these terrible people are doing these terrible things and then you're putting a target on them or you know like we are totally
Under threat because of x y and z when you're the dominant category, you know like it's such a fucking weird thing
Like you have these white males
Particularly like people that kind of look like me, but they're especially like Christian they're especially and they talk about how
You know
Much that they are under threat or they're being discriminated against you're all those other bullshit and then you look at every like bored room
You look at the any the cabinet of the president you look at the president himself and all of our presidents except for one
And they're all dudes that look like that and it's kind of like
What's what's going on here guys are you are you little little full of shit little fucking full of shit?
You know, it's it's just such a fucking it's it's a frustrating thing how much people reverse the stuff and it's also a very frustrating thing.
I think how much
I guess this will be the actual like in the cap to this but how much people are algorithmically
Balkanized so part of this is like you know
One person watches fox news one person watches and MSNBC which is fox news for liberals and
They have a completely different
Preception of reality both of them are completely just
Disconnected from actual reality by the way and both of them as somebody who's outside of both of those things
If I go to somebody's house and I see like either one of those channels on
And I don't just mean those two because it's this is a very common problem for
Pretty much all legacy media
But I see that stuff and
It's it's excruciating.
It's physically painful for me.
I have to leave the fucking room
I feel like I'm gonna crawl out of my skin.
I can't stand it because it's so
ridiculous and it's so
Like it's not just that it's not connected to reality and it's you know
Whatever they're saying is like it's own universe under itself
But they have the exact same kinds of things about like agreement and in group versus out group
And talking about how bad some group of people are and you got the the demonization and we're under threat and it like it's really
So similar is one of the reasons why
I talk so much about blue maga
Is not just because I think it's like a convenient short hand but because
the differences between
blue and red maga are
Paper thin like there's zero daylight between these two groups and it's when you're when you see it
And when you see people going down these paths and you see them like sharing
It's the most ridiculous.
I'm sharing exactly the same memes except
One of them is making Trump and a Superman and one of them's making Gavin Newsom who's a fucking horrible person also in the Superman
And it's like the same shit they've got you know
Kamala Harris as a super girl and then they've got somebody also the super it's just the same shit
It's like the same fucking thought process.
It's the same and it's not surprising because they're coming from the same society
But the same stuff
But alternate universe versions of each other and they're both clownish
They're both like super ableists
Really love to talk about people's intelligence really love to focus on like somebody's not educated or they're they like the throw-around
How it's stupid or like you or all these kinds of things and
Most of these things you can take the words and you have legitimately no idea if I took one of the posts
From the liberals the that I know and I took another post from some of the maga people the red maga people
And I took out like the context so you don't know
They're talking about Trump or they're talking about Biden
You would not know the difference legitimately like I'm not just exaggerating or making that up you would not know the difference
And so that's a problem what you're watching and then you also have that all of the social media that you're in
A you're connecting the people your following pages and doing things like this that align with you
But also
There's this algorithmic Balkanization
So you get into sort of a cluster and then they keep showing you more and more stuff from your cluster
So with Charlie Kirk and I think this is
This is the thing that kind of prompted the the spying thing I was gonna talk about but it matters
With him you have one group of people who see him and they're seeing just the stuff
That sounds completely reasonable and sounds like oh he's one of us and he said you know
I don't understand why people are so upset about him.
I don't know you know and it
Is that they're not completely wrong because that's what they're seeing and the even other group of people and they're seeing
All of the Christian nationalism and the racism and the sexism and the anti-immigrant stuff
And the demonization of trans people and the talking about how people need to get the stone and all of these
horrible the political punishments and all that kind of stuff and they're not wrong because that's what they're saying
and then you know
Because those are the the little areas that they're in
People are starting I think and I think this is actually like a vaguely hopeful thing
This will be my sort of positive end cap to this whole thing but I think it's vaguely hopeful that I've got people and both of these domains
Now kind of mentioning like they're shocked by the disparity of how people are reacting and they're sort of
Getting a crack into that algorithmic with those bubbles that they're in and starting to see like oh, maybe there's something else going on here
And it's not it's not about him so much like it's funny that it appears that the guy that did
Shoot him was probably actually just like even more extreme and right wing
Then him and probably didn't think that he was barren off
You know, and then but people blamed him or people blamed your other leftists
Especially at the beginning and they're like oh, we have to political violence is wrong and all of this stuff as though as though war is not political violence as though
Police brutality is not political violence as though you know structural racism
Is not political violence
You know this plenty of political violence that the country was founded on political violence like I
This is a this is a thing that just strikes me as bizarre but like
When I went to public school I swear every fucking year
We went over the foundational myth of the US every year
Maybe there were a couple that we kind of skipped it, but I'm pretty sure like every year
We at least touched on it and some years we spent a lot of time on it and
That's all about like
Revolution and people shooting people and all kinds is and people seem to not
Remember that or something.
I don't know and then you know the country is also full of
Just racism
It's like yeah, but between the original
Send of the country that was being founded on a genocide on the scale of like a hundred million people that were there before
And then also
You know you have the racism of
Having Black people
Doing all the labor and being forced into servitude and yeah, you do that it's a pretty fucked up thing that the country is founded on violence
It has violence and it's bones right
Capitalism I would say is violence the idea that you have to work for somebody else
And if you don't do whatever shit somebody else tells you
They can throw you into a position where you're gonna be on the street that is violence the idea that you know
Your health care is contingent on
Having to do whatever somebody else says is violence it is
You know, it's implicit violence it's not like they're actually like beating you with a stick or something like that
But it is
It's violence because they are doing something they're putting you into position where you're going to be her harmed and you know it
Potentially very severely
If you don't do
What they're telling you to do what they're making you do
It's as surely violence as if somebody you know, and this is the thing that I get with them
You know, but if you look back at the mightest was cheese thing
I talk about how you know, like statistical mass murder
Is mass murder just because you're not
Pointing a gun at people and pulling the trigger
If you make a policy decision that kills millions of people
That's still murder that's still like you've killed millions of people
I don't care what the mode of action is but if you do something like that if you
Spread lies that kill people like RFK junior and he's back junior
Or wake field there are all of these other people you were a murderer as
Surely as if you pointed a gun at people and killed them and you're also a mass maemer as
Surely as if you chopped off people's legs and you know again shot them and caused all kinds of problems
And it's weird to me that we don't see those as equivalent
But we don't
So anyway
This algorithmic Balkanization I think I hope people are starting to at least catch a little drift though
Starting to maybe realize that there's a little bit of
Pro wrestling going on.
There's maybe
Maybe
I don't follow for wrestling so I don't know to characters from it, but maybe the two
That is the good is that you think of that you know the ones that you follow and the their opponents
Maybe they're actually friends
Maybe they're actually getting along maybe they're actually like when you're not looking at them laughing at you for falling for their shit
Maybe they're drinking together.
Maybe they're having dinner together
Maybe they're very very chummy.
Maybe they're being paid by the same people.
Yeah, maybe it's pro wrestling
Just just think about that and I think it's one of those things where if you start thinking about it and you start looking at it
I know obvious it's kind of again like the magic trick where if somebody tells you how it's done
And especially if it's not done very artfully and these guys
They're not hiding it.
They're not even trying to hide it is the most it's one of the reasons why I'm losing my mind with people because it's so obvious
Once you see it
They're they don't care enough
To to lie to you well.
They don't care enough to make it hard to see
It's just frustrating and so anyway
I wish I wish people would see it and I hope by listening to this maybe it will help you see some of that stuff
I'm gonna I've got a lot of this was kind of extent branious and
Sort of broad
scattered shot of stuff
I have a lot of things that I mentioned in here and some things that I didn't mention but I wanted to
But I forgot about that I'm gonna talk about in more depth later on
So
I don't want it to be like the theme the theme of tangents is just me talking about this stuff
But it's gonna be something that
For a little while I'll at least be
I'll probably always come back to it unless I feel like somehow magically the problem is solved which I don't I don't think I think for
I think we're a ways from solving the problem
Unfortunately so it'll be a subject that I think about and talk about for a while
But I don't want it to be everything but it will be something
So with that as always thank you for listening and
Especially actually thanks to my two friends who
Really prompted this episode and prompted some thoughts and kind of
I really will say gave me a wink of hope
Just well not not just
Then but like between them and some other people that I've seen
Starting to go like what's going on here like maybe maybe there's something else
I hope that that's the thing that prevails and not the
Sort of you know people go and use this thing to justify doing horrible shit
Maybe we can learn maybe we could do something better and maybe we can start
Noticing what's actually going on and maybe we can start getting together and realizing
There are there are a lot of things that we're getting fucked out of this is this is one thing incidentally
This will be my actual indicate so this will be about an hour and a half but
Going out of the country and seeing how things can be a little bit and seeing what it's like to live in a country
Where you do have public transit and where you do have universal health care of some sort
And
Understanding that you know things don't need to be the way are there they are and not only that
But you know like just because other countries are doing stuff that's better
Doing some other stuff that's worse.
You can take the best you can make the world but you want it to be and
We could very easily for not even all of the money that we spend waste on defense
We could have universal health care.
We could have universal college
We could have cities that are walkable and at public transit and have high speed rail between them
We could do so much better and
We should we should do so much better.
We deserve it.
We're getting fucked over
And it doesn't need to be that way and it'd be nice to do you know
It'd be nice to start figuring this shit out and start actually
Maybe changing things
But that's that's the last I want to say so as ever
Thank you for listening
Thanks for talking and
再见