Finding Common Battle Grounds

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we are joined by Vance Reavie from the Independent Center. We start with a lengthy discussion about independent voters - how many there are, what they want in candidates, what issues are important to them, and why they often feel marginalized in US elections. We then turn to the primary question of whether independent voters will decide the Presidential election in 2024. The answer is likely "Yes," but it's complicated because neither of the two major party candidates is particularly appealing to independent voters and hasn't done much to make themselves more attractive. We all agreed that the current primary and then "first past the post" election system ends up disenfranchising moderate voters. We then turn to our second topic - scientific fraud in academic publishing. We talk about the broken incentive structures - "publish or perish" and for-profit publishers who own the copyright to scholars' work and then sell it back to the scholars' universities for billions every year. We also talk about ways to address this issue and even come up with a brilliant technological solution for tracking peer-reviewers' effectiveness that should be monetized. We conclude that peer review is far from perfect but the best system we currently have for advancing science.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Josh, Tom, and Ryan discuss the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and the instances of censorship taking place around the world. Amazingly, we have clear agreement on the debate - Harris won by baiting Trump and then letting him lose the debate by looking like a fearmongering crazy old man. The memes that resulted from Trump's false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets were pretty amazing. We go into more detail about the debate, but that's the short version. On censorship, we all agree that censoring free speech is generally bad and the situation in Brazil with a single supreme court justice being able to silence his critics and X shutting down operations in opposition to that is both a serious problem but also a response to censorship we support. However, there may be more nuance to this than we realize. We ended with a bit more disagreement when it came to who was censoring and whether censorship was okay when it came to what kids were allowed to encounter.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Ryan, Tom, and Josh start with a discussion of Kamala Harris's entrance into the Presidential race in the US. Josh and Tom aren't fans. They argue that Biden was forced out of the race, that Kamala isn't competent, and that the media has basically been working for Harris to remake her image and give her a boost. Ryan disagrees with most of this. He isn't ecstatic about Harris but thinks she'll be fine. We then turn to Ukraine's push into Russian territory. Josh and Tom both noted that invasions into Russia have not been very successful, historically. But they also think it may have been a brilliant tactical move to ease pressure on the front lines and potentially destroy some of the logistics of the Russian military. Ryan raised the issue of whether the territory could be used as part of a peace agreement, which intrigued Tom and Josh but they were skeptical since they didn't think Ukraine would be able to hold it. Josh also suggested that he thinks Putin will drop a nuclear bomb if he doesn't get some victory in this war.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Ryan and Tom tackle two topics. First, we start with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Tom asks Ryan a number of questions related to the attack, from whether he thinks the attack was staged (as some conspiracy theorists have started to argue) to whether this was a massive failing on the part of the Secret Service to whether Donald Trump is divinely protected. Ryan's answers to these three questions were all "No," but there are a number of additional questions. We mostly agree on the responses, though Tom notes at the end of the discussion that he is pretty skeptical about a lot of the information available at this point. We then turn to a recently signed bill in California that makes it so public schools do not have to report to parents the preferred pronouns or gender identities of students. Tom thinks that schools should have to report this while Ryan prioritizes the safety of the children and pushes Tom on the idea that some homes are not safe places for LGBTQ kids. There is actually a fair amount of agreement between the two on this, but this is also an issue where we fundamentally do not agree.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we tackle two topics. Joe Biden's poor debate performance has been in the news a lot as of late. Rather than examine that, specifically, we discuss who is "pulling the strings" in the Democratic Party: who ultimately picks the candidates and who helps them get the nomination and get elected. This was spurred by a video clip from congressional representative Adam Smith (D-Washington), who argued that Biden was the beneficiary of the unnamed power brokers in the Democratic Party in 2020 but now may be playing defense against them as they try to convince him to drop out of the race. We then turn to a discussion of Labour's victory in the UK and the forces behind it. Ryan and Tom agree that the election outcome was largely a vote against the Tories/Conservative party, but we also explore some of the other issues that have played out over the last 14 years of conservative control in the UK, including immigration and underfunding of public services like the National Health Service, education, and public transportation.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Ryan and Tom are again joined by Josh who may be more of a permanent fixture on the podcast. We tackle two topics. First, we explore Elon Musk's pay package which was recently approved by Tesla shareholders and would net him tens of billions of dollars. Ryan argues that his opinion isn't worth anything as he is no longer a shareholder, but he does think it's excessive. Tom and Josh argue that Elon delivered so he deserves it. This leads us down many other meandering paths before we get to our second topic - Hunter Biden's gun conviction. Ryan raised this topic because he saw it as extremely hypocritical that Republicans were claiming that Donald Trump's felony convictions for hiding the Stormy Daniels hush money payments were a political witch hunt, Republicans are raving over how corrupt Hunter Biden is and are delighted at his conviction. Ryan makes two points: (1) Trump and Hunter Biden broke the law and no one should be above the law. (2) Both of these trials are political in the sense that they would have been unlikely to have happened if not for the prominent political profiles of these two individuals. Tommy agrees with Ryan on both counts. Josh agrees with the latter point but isn't as convinced that Trump's felony convictions are a real crime.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we're joined by a special guest - Josh Cragun is back after a nearly two-year hiatus. (And he has hair!) We cover two topics in this episode. First, we start with the COVID-19 lab leak theory. We read an editorial from the New York Post editorial claiming that it is now definitive that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in China. Tom and Josh are now convinced that it came from a lab. Ryan is not convinced, even though he agrees that there is circumstantial evidence supporting such a claim. We then turn to Iran and their continued enrichment of nuclear material in their pursuit of nuclear weapons. We discuss what has led up to the current situation and talk about whether we think they're going to get a nuclear weapon and, more disturbingly, whether they would use such a weapon. With both stories, we talk about media bias. Tom and Josh argued that the COVID-19 lab leak theory was depicted as a conspiracy theory and that was unfair. Ryan argues that there has been a spate of recent stories blaming Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons on Biden in conservative media outlets, none of which mentioned that it was Trump who pulled the US out of an agreement and re-asserted sanctions. These biases lead Josh to say we can't trust any media, Tom to say we need to examine both sides, and Ryan to continue to say that media can largely be trusted to report basic news, but with a fair dose of skepticism.

In this episode of Finding Common Battlegrounds, we start the podcast with a discussion of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his candidacy for President. We discuss whether he will be more detrimental to Trump's campaign or Biden's. We also talk briefly about his anti-vaccination views and his advocacy for free speech. Tom concludes he'll vote for him over Biden or Trump but Ryan is discounting him because he's anti-vaccines, so we don't agree there. We then turn to recent news articles suggesting there has been a decline in homicide rates this year and discuss why this may be happening and what it means. We don't perfectly find common ground on this as Tom thinks it's too early to tell if this is a real reversal, but we generally agree about perceptions of violence (and racism) in society. In a bonus topic, Tom raises concerns about the coming persecution of Christians in the US, drawing similarities to how Christians persecuted pagans during the Roman empire. This brings us to a discussion of white Christian nationalism. Ryan strongly disagrees with Tom that Christians in the US are being persecuted for two reasons: (1) they are still a substantial majority and (2) asking for the same privileges as Christians and Christians either having to give up their privileges or share them is not the same things a persecution. Tom agrees with the second item but disagrees with the first. We ultimately bet dinner over whether white Christian nationalists will have to register with the government by April 24, 2029.

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we start with a discussion about a recent court case decided in Norway that resulted in the federal defunding of Jehovah's Witnesses because of their ostracism practices. We both agree that the Norwegian government is well within its rights not to give JWs money if they engage in practices that are deemed to be coercive. We then turn to a recent incident in which Donald Trump suggested that there would be a "bloodbath" for the American automotive industry if he isn't elected, which was deceptively framed by the mainstream media as Trump claiming there would be violence if he isn't elected. We don't fight over this at all - Tommy's point that this was deceptive is accurate. Then, as a bonus, we discuss the SPAC that recently incorporated Truth Social and became DJT. Ryan was interested in possibly shorting it and asked Tommy, who does a lot of investing, how that would work. We discuss it at length and ultimately decide that puts and calls are better options (pun intended).

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we are joined by a new guest, Sean Patrick Tario, who now runs https://mark37.com/ and advocates for security and privacy from "big tech." But before we discuss big tech, Tom wanted to discuss efforts by the US to get Israel to accept a ceasefire agreement with Gaza/Hamas. In the process, we find common ground that there is no "good" solution for the Israel/Palestine situation, including Ryan's suggestion of massive bribes to relocate Palestinians which he suggests would be marginally better than the genocide we're observing but admits is unlikely to happen. We then turn to big tech and discuss the efforts of large corporations like Google, Meta, X, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft to invade our privacy and influence our behaviors, which some governments have recently started to regulate. Sean refers to this as "consciousness hacking." While the conversation swings awfully close to conspiracy theories at times (okay, there are conspiracy theories in this episode), we all agree that these large companies do manipulate software and services in sometimes subtle and sometimes more transparent ways. Where we disagree is on the motivations. Sean is convinced there is a small cabal of wealthy elites - that includes military, government, and corporate leaders - who are trying to wipe out billions of people and enslave the masses. Ryan and Tom aren't convinced that an Illuminati-like cabal exists, but do agree that there is likely some collusion and manipulation going on behind the scenes. In a surprising twist, Ryan and Sean geek out on their shared love for all things Linux, though how they arrived at Linux differs pretty substantially.