Sam Harris and Douglas Murray have a conversation about hate speech, and someone at YouTube thinks it must be called "hateful speech" and a community guideline strike, and a man at Google thinks it's a "hate speech" strike. What does this have to do with hate speech? And why does this matter? And what does it mean, exactly, and how does it affect our understanding of what we should be talking about when we talk about ideas and ideas about ideas? All this and more on this episode of Thick & Thin, hosted by John Rocha ( ) and Alex Blumberg ( ), featuring special guest Douglas Murray ( ). This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Micah Vellian and Sarah Abdurrahman. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for the episode was done by Dee McDonnell. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Additional music by Ian Dorsch and Mark Phillips. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and we'll be sure to include it in future episodes of Thick and Thin episodes. Thanks for listening and reviewing! Thank you so much for listening, John and Alex and Sarah! Your support is so appreciated, thank you, and we're grateful for your support, and your support is greatly appreciated! Love ya, bye, bye. - The Weezer. Cheers, Cheers! - John and Sarah, Kristian, EJ & EJared, AKA John, and EJ, - EJ and Ejr. & Ej and E.M. . - Sam Harris - M.A. ( ) (A. ( ) ( ) & E.C. ( ) ( & EZ ( ) . (S. ( ), and EZY ( ) - EZC ( ) Thank you, E. (?) , EJ ( )( ) ( ), EJ( ) & JT-RKC-C-X ( ) ? ( ) , EZ & EK ( )& EJ&C-EZ ( ). ( ) AND EJ-C ( ), & EY ( ), AND EZE ( )?? ( ) !!
00:00:12.000You've become an example to me, or your conversation with Sam Harris has become an example to me of how squirrely things have gotten lately with the way people interpret conversations about ideas.
00:00:25.000Because of this, Jamie, pull that thing up.
00:00:28.000This is a tweet that someone sent out, and he got a strike, a community guideline strike, just for listening, just for putting you on his playlist, a conversation between Sam Harris and you.
00:00:43.000And this man, or I don't know if it's a man.
00:01:03.000Got a community guideline strike for just putting this.
00:01:07.000Now, I brought this up to, I was having dinner with some friends, one of them who used to work at Google, and someone who was there was a highly ranked person at YouTube.
00:01:18.000I brought this up, and the exact quote was, that was because it's hate speech.
00:01:24.000And I said, you said that so flippantly.
00:01:28.000I go, please tell me the contents of the conversation.
00:02:25.000My most sort of yogic, calm, blissed out west coast of America friend.
00:02:32.000And I'm pretty amazed that anyone at Google or anywhere else would think that anything that could come out of his mouth was hate speech unless you decided that hate speech is just anything you personally don't like or that words don't matter anymore.
00:02:47.000Well, that's what I'm concerned about.
00:02:49.000I'm concerned that there's an agenda that people who work in these, we don't even have to name the organizations, but certain organizations are extremely left-leaning.
00:03:01.000And, I mean, it's probably better than being extremely right-leaning.
00:03:07.000It's probably better than them being white supremacists, white nationalists, hate groups.
00:03:11.000It's probably far better that they're radical lefties.
00:03:15.000But it becomes a problem when you're doing things like that, because things like that limit free speech, and they limit the free discussion of ideas.
00:03:25.000I think I listened to a little bit of it, but I didn't listen to enough of it to know whether or not you guys started screaming out the N-word halfway in.
00:03:39.000I had another thing that I talked about with this same person I brought up Jordan Peterson and you know that There's there's issues with every time he's on podcast the podcast get flagged for demonetization and the exact words were he's a troublemaker And I'm like what in the fuck are you talking about like are you listening to his conversations?
00:04:03.000He is Very articulate, and he's extremely careful going over these ideas that I think we should all be discussing.
00:04:13.000So to call this hate speech or to call someone a troublemaker, to me it symbolizes what we're dealing with today.
00:04:22.000This is a very strange time when it comes to communication and the people that regulate and distribute our communication.
00:04:28.000It is, and whenever I've had a chance to speak with People in that kind of world, in that sort of role.
00:04:35.000The question I always want to ask among other things is, do you know where this is going to lead?
00:04:41.000Do you know what it's going to do if you keep breaking down definitions and terms and words?
00:04:46.000Do you know what happens, for instance, down the road if you keep on saying that Sam Harris and Douglas Murray having a conversation about something is hate speech?
00:04:54.000Do you know what relief that's going to give other people down the road about what they're going to be able to get away with?
00:05:01.000This is what's being created all the time at the moment, it seems to me.
00:05:04.000This idea that you police the discussion along incredibly narrow lines that happen to surround your own comfort zone and call everything outside it not just stuff I don't agree with or things that I would argue with or debate with, but hate speech.
00:05:21.000It's just, I think, very, very dangerous down the road.
00:05:24.000You can see exactly the trail that bit of gunpowder goes to.
00:05:31.000I think it goes to a point where people become cynical about any claims made about anyone.
00:05:37.000And the likelihood is that if 99 times you've seen Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, whoever, called hate speech, then the hundredth time that somebody uses the term hate speech might be on somebody who is engaging in hate speech.
00:05:54.000And all your defenses are going to be down.
00:05:58.000You're very unlikely to become sceptical and think, I'm really going to dig down.
00:07:22.000You can't help thinking among other things that the people trying to make the rules at the moment have no idea of the fact that these debates have happened before.
00:07:30.000Or have not bothered to look into them.
00:07:33.000And seem to think that history started with them.
00:07:37.000And I just wish that among other things with social media, people realize we have been through this several times before at least, and the lessons are pretty clear.
00:07:46.000They are not that you can limit speech in order to obtain political nirvana, for instance, nor are they that you can simply use, as I say, for short-term gain, accusations you know to be wrong in order to further a short-term political goal.
00:08:55.000And empower them, which is something – You don't want actual racists and Nazis to have legitimate grievance claims.
00:09:04.000And you don't want them to be able to disguise themselves as something they're not.
00:09:09.000So I had a friend who, a lot of friends involved in the Northern Ireland conflict many years ago in the UK, not that many years ago.
00:09:18.000One writer had a beautiful phrase about it where you got to a stage where everyone was killing everyone.
00:09:23.000He said, you also got to the stage where truth was whatever you were having yourself.
00:09:29.000And we're not far away from that place where I say what you call is hate speech, you say what I say is hate speech, let's call the whole thing off.
00:09:41.000We're not very far away from that actually.
00:09:45.000Yeah, it's very strange that this echo chamber is being so reinforced and that very few people are stepping out and saying, well, wait, let's take a look at this objectively.
00:09:57.000And the people that do do that are signaled out as being racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or fill in the blank, whatever is convenient.
00:10:07.000But it's not surprising that more people don't want to stick their heads above that parapet because, I mean, if you had a normal job, You worked in a normal office or shop or something.
00:10:18.000You really don't want this coming towards you.
00:10:22.000I mean, this can tear apart and tear down people who spend a lifetime demonstrating they are not the thing that they're being accused of.
00:10:32.000So if nobody knows anything about you, you have no particular persona out there, you have no particular back record, you don't want this thing coming to tear your life down.
00:10:42.000Right, because recovering from that accusation is almost impossible, and it would take forever.
00:10:47.000It is basically impossible, and all that you do along the way is to keep reminding people of the charge.
00:11:05.000I feel like we're in some strange adolescent stage of communication, and there's been a bunch of talk lately.
00:11:12.000There was something that I tweeted earlier today, some new technology that they believe where AI is going to allow people to Literally see other people's thoughts right and I I am I mean I am forever optimistic but also terrified and my feeling is that our Transition from language here.
00:11:36.000It is new AI system can see what you are thinking which is just what the hell does that mean?
00:11:42.000I'm I'm concerned, but also optimistic.
00:11:45.000I feel like we're in this transitionary period from regular communication to written communication to written communication online, to speech online, video online, where there's this instant access to all this and these ideas are being debated and tossed around like beach balls in real time.
00:12:53.000Well, that's almost all politics in your country at any rate is about that at the moment.
00:12:59.000How can we make sure that the other side trips up on this?
00:13:03.000I've written this all through the Me Too era that in your country and in mine, people basically are willing to go for somebody who is a political opponent who does something very minimal.
00:13:17.000And they're willing to defend somebody on their own side who does something bigger.
00:13:33.000We had a case recently in the UK where somebody who was a great hero to the left for all sorts of complicated reasons is accused of some fairly serious groping accusations among others.
00:13:46.000And exactly the left-wing MPs who had been claiming that somebody who had sent out a tweet about a woman's breasts in 2009 should never hold any role in public said that this person who just happened to be a friend and an icon of theirs Was a changed man and we have to recognize it's 18 months ago now.
00:14:06.000My favorite video on this was there was a guy who is some religious Christian man on television and he was talking about Trump and he was talking about who Trump was before he became president.
00:14:21.000He goes, but I don't know about you, but I found Jesus, and I did not have a past.
00:14:47.000There was a journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, a very distinguished figure in the media, some years ago.
00:14:51.000It was often noted that he converted to Catholicism.
00:14:55.000A mutual friend once said that it was noticeable that Malcolm Muggeridge always attacked a vice immediately after he had become incapable of it himself.
00:15:05.000LAUGHTER When it was clear that Margaret didn't have as much sex as he did fairly often in his youth, sex was a big problem.
00:16:05.000I mean, that's becoming part of the problem.
00:16:09.000I mean, I'd be very suspicious of any umpire put forward, but where would you roughly look for one?
00:16:17.000I mean, I like to think that truth still matters.
00:16:19.000But, you know, when you discover that a lot of people don't seem to particularly care for it or willing to sacrifice it, as I say, for some other purpose, including winning a goal...
00:16:30.000It's hard to see how you could adjudicate in this era.
00:16:35.000But just one other thought, which is a lot of this has to do with whether or not the online world can forgive.
00:16:43.000This seems to me to be a really central thing.
00:16:45.000One of the things that came up, the case I said recently about this 2009 case of somebody in Britain who tweeted about a woman's breasts among other things was He mistook Twitter for a conversation with friends.
00:18:25.000We had somebody out recently in Britain who everyone wanted to go for suddenly.
00:18:30.000And they found an article he had written about...
00:18:33.000Saying he didn't agree with Holocaust denial laws.
00:18:36.000He said he just thought it was a bad idea for free speech.
00:18:41.000When the internet was for seconds trying to find out other stuff about him, they found an article which said, I'm a Holocaust denier, so, you know, prosecute me sort of thing, which he isn't a Holocaust denier.
00:18:53.000It's just nobody bothered to read beneath the headline.
00:18:56.000And so suddenly, in the middle of the thing where everyone was tearing apart his life, they also said, and he's a Holocaust denier.
00:19:20.000I mean, it's obviously the case of living in glass houses and throwing tons of rocks.
00:19:24.000But it's almost like everyone is just trying to throw as many rocks as they can before rocks start coming their way because they know it's inevitable.
00:19:31.000Well, I thought until fairly recently the object of life in the modern era...
00:19:38.000Was to prove everyone else was a racist, Nazi, misogynistic, transphobe.
00:22:15.000Another experience I've had in recent years that led me to not want to engage in this is walking around at various events and sort of breakout things.
00:22:42.000These used to be serious people engaged in serious things, and here they are, engaged in these flailing fistfights.
00:22:52.000And often, let's face it, on things which, if you didn't do it like that, seeking out the fight, are the sort of thing that would allow for normal human interaction.
00:23:01.000I mean, how many disagreements do we have with people in our personal lives all the time, if we wanted to?
00:23:34.000I mean, you think it's what we were discussing earlier, that it's idea sport, and then you just get caught up and, like, someone volleyed your way, and so you have to smash that tennis ball back their way?
00:23:47.000That old Chinese proverb about sitting by the river watching the bodies of your enemies float by.
00:23:54.000I had a big sense of that the other day when somebody I deeply disliked became a cropper on social media at the same time as somebody else I deeply disliked was being held by the French police on serious charges.
00:24:07.000And I thought that was a – I felt like the Chinese proverb then.
00:24:21.000I mean, I think that's the big thing of, you know, look, I poked that, you know, what, in the eye.
00:24:30.000I never engaged on social media for precisely that reason among others, that I would never want somebody to know they could get to me.
00:24:38.000Even if you just block them, there's many people who take pride, even in their heading.
00:24:44.000They say, I am blocked on Twitter by all these people.
00:24:47.000And actually, I do sometimes read what people send to me.
00:24:52.000And I've never blocked anyone because I sort of think if you put your ideas out there, you might as well be as open as possible to receiving them back.
00:24:58.000Some time ago when I got into a row with the Turkish president about something, I got all these Turkish sort of accounts.
00:25:08.000There was one guy who just repeatedly sent me pornography of animals having sex with animals.
00:25:17.000And so I used to go down the field, and I didn't even block him, actually, because I sort of thought, well, somewhere in Turkey, he's a really angry man, desperately finding horse pornography to send to me.
00:25:31.000And in a way, I felt so sorry for him that that was how his life had come, you know, the end his life had come to at this stage, that I couldn't even block him.
00:25:40.000And also, he'd be like, I'm the donkey...
00:25:53.000Well, the short story is a couple of years ago, the Turkish president tried to get the German chancellor to imprison a German comic for a very rude poem he'd read on air on German television that was insulting about the Turkish president.
00:26:10.000And the German authorities actually started a case against the comedian for insulting the Turkish president, Erdogan.
00:26:20.000And I decided to launch an offensive poetry competition to offend the Turkish president.
00:26:28.000And there was a thousand pounds cash prize and it sort of took off.
00:26:32.000And in the end, the now foreign secretary entered and won.
00:26:39.000It was really good because at the same time that the Germans were looking at imprisoning a comedian, the now Foreign Secretary of the UK was guilty of precisely the same alleged crime.
00:26:52.000meaning it wasn't a crime, it couldn't be a crime.
00:26:54.000A couple of other people did a wonderful...
00:26:56.000Dutch comedian friend Hans Janssen did a similar thing at the time.
00:27:00.000He decided to do an interview live on Dutch television explaining how much he hated Edouard because he still owed him money from the blowjob he'd given Edouard in a sauna.
00:27:10.000And the Dutch authorities were looking at...
00:27:17.000Actually, looking, they were asked if they would prosecute him.
00:27:19.000But anyhow, I had a great time with this, of course, and I wrote a limerick explaining how abusive I wanted people to be about Erdogan, that it was necessary to be highly defamatory, and you wouldn't get away with it if you just called him a wanker or something.
00:27:35.000So I wrote the opening verse and invited the world to contribute, which they did.
00:27:41.000And it became, among other things, the highest paid poetry competition in the world.
00:27:44.000If, like me, you wrote a limerick for just five lines, this is £200 a line.
00:27:48.000I mean, no poetry magazine could pay you for such work.
00:27:55.000So anyhow, on the basis of that, I became very, very unpopular in Turkey.
00:27:59.000And there were many pieces talking about how this gay, atheist, terrible Erdogan hater in Britain was exactly what we were up against.
00:28:28.000I'm fairly sure they did only drop it in the end because of the international attention that was paid to it.
00:28:34.000You see, there was this law on the books that still said it was a laissez-majeste law about defending foreign rulers.
00:28:40.000And he had done it for such an important reason as well, which was to say, you know, we in Germany should have the right to be rude about Erdogan, particularly Erdogan, who, you know, was promoted from mayor to prime minister, now to president, wants to be sultan.
00:28:55.000You know, I mean, he's a very bad man, locked up more journalists per capita, I think, than any other country in the world other than China, which I don't think we can get the stats on.
00:29:05.000A very, very evil, I think, man who has led his country backwards in the last 20 years and is in the process of trying to destroy a wonderful country.
00:29:17.000And if you can't be rude about him, if you can't pretend that he sleeps with animals, which is what the German...
00:29:26.000Comedians started with, then somewhere down the line you won't be able to say anything about the imprisoned journalists either and so on.
00:29:32.000And since also, by the way, people don't seem to spend much time worrying about the Turkish journalists, Erdogan, in prisons, the least they paid attention when I said that he and Angela Merkel got up to really filthy, filthy acts in the zoo.
00:29:51.000Well, obviously, the worst case of retaliation for humor is probably Charlie Hebdo, right?
00:30:17.000But they were saying that instead of concentrating on the murder, which was done completely out of this reinforcing their rules of their ideology and retaliation for any mocking of that ideology,
00:30:33.000instead of that, they were talking about how racist Charlie Hebdo was.
00:31:24.000This doesn't seem to vindicate my side's ideology.
00:31:28.000Therefore, let me find what I can do to defame them.
00:31:30.000And, oh, good, somebody at Charlie Hebdo once did this cartoon that was off-color, and I can't understand what the words are beneath it, but I'll claim it's racist.
00:31:40.000I mean, people were actually doing that.
00:31:41.000Actually, there was one cartoon that was used against Charlie Hebdo after the massacre.
00:31:47.000That was a joke against the Front National and the claims they were making about a black woman in the Sarkozy government.
00:31:57.000But because the joke, if you didn't speak French, it wasn't clear apparently.
00:32:04.000And if you knew nothing about recent French history, you knew nothing about the Sarkozy administration and the minister in question, these people just went to it and said, racist cartoon, not noticing that the cartoon was actually a joke about racists.
00:32:20.000But they didn't bother to find that out.
00:32:22.000And I thought that whole thing, among many, many other things, was deeply worrying from that point of view.
00:32:28.000Because it means that in the immediate aftermath of something that should be so damn clear, a bunch of people can just try to reframe the narrative.
00:32:39.000And change the history of a publication.
00:32:48.000And for a lot of people, of course, that was very convenient.
00:32:53.000Because after all, if Charlie Hebdo's staff actually were these racists, then, you know, you didn't need to worry too much about them or why you'd been silent on the issues they'd spoken up about.
00:33:04.000Yeah, the narrative had then been that these people had been mocking this disenfranchised, marginalized group in society and that they had it coming in some very strange way.
00:33:47.000And in that case, as in many others, totally lose sight of the only thing that matters.
00:33:53.000The only thing that matters in that case being, is it ever right to make apologies for people walking into an office and gunning down people for an opinion you don't like?
00:34:08.000The answer to which has to be, of course, no.
00:34:13.000And yet, in these moments, so we had one 20 years before with the Rushdie Affair, the Satanic Versus Affair.
00:34:19.000In these moments, you discover you don't have the allies on your side you thought you did.
00:34:26.000In the wake of the Rushdie Affair in 89, it was people from the right and the left in Britain who started making excuses for the Ayatollah.
00:34:36.000We had the chief rabbi then of the UK, Jacobovitz, to his shame said, both Mr. Rushdie and the Ayatollah have offended people's feelings.
00:34:47.000As if Salman Rushdie had called on all novelists to go to Tehran, assassinate the Ayatollah if they had a chance.
00:34:56.000You had somebody like a right-wing conservative minister, Geoffrey Howe, who said that Bush had really offended Britain.
00:35:07.000He'd been rude about Britain as if that had anything to do with anything.
00:35:11.000There was one famous case of a conservative peer who said about Rushdie that it wouldn't bother him if a group of young Muslims took Mr Rushdie into an alleyway and taught him some manners.
00:35:28.000And you had that from the left as well.
00:35:31.000Bernie Grant, a Labour MP, famously said at that point that burning books wasn't a problem for him.
00:35:37.000And that was when they were burning the satanic verses in Bradford.
00:35:41.000So you get these weird coalitions of people who suddenly turn out not to get the point.
00:36:13.000There was an assurance, I think, given some years ago in the Labour government with Tehran that they would not actively encourage the murder of Rushdie anymore.
00:36:43.000With the Charlie Hebdo events, the murder of the staff and the contributors to that magazine, we knew in the immediate aftermath what was going on.
00:36:54.000And that there were people who just wanted to make excuses.
00:37:09.000And I remember in every one of the things in recent years, from the Danish cartoons to the...
00:37:15.000Jewel Medina scandal, where a publisher in London was firebombed for publishing a novel that was actually amazingly fawning about Mohammed, to Charlie Hebdo.
00:37:26.000And since, you just get this strange group of people from right and left, some believers, some non-believers.
00:37:34.000Who always just come up with these bullshit, bullshit arguments and say things like, well, I didn't find the cartoon very funny, or I never took that magazine seriously, or I didn't think it was right when they did this.
00:37:49.000They just don't, for some reason, have the fortitude to just say the only thing that matters in the wake of that, which is no.
00:37:57.000Do you think that's because Islam is unique in their approach to anything that goes outside the lines of what they feel is acceptable?
00:38:09.000I mean, in terms of like, they will murder you if you draw Muhammad.
00:38:12.000Yeah, this is what's been described as the internalization of the fatwa.
00:38:19.000I'm sure you've had this experience, but it's actually worse now.
00:38:23.000The presumption is worse than the actual reality.
00:38:26.000I have quite often people saying to me, I'd like to write this piece about X, but I don't know if I can because, you know, I might get a death sentence.
00:38:35.000And actually, I always say, what are you talking about?
00:38:41.000Fortunately, so far, I haven't given that advice and the person's been in any way under any actual danger, let alone being killed.
00:38:48.000And I think I might feel differently if that was the case.
00:38:54.000But there is an overcompensation occurring at the moment.
00:38:58.000And it goes far, far within the boundaries of what actually could plausibly get you into any trouble, whether or not the trouble is, you know, legitimate to get into or not.
00:39:11.000So that now, yeah, I've had many journalists in recent years, particularly since Charlie Hebdo sort of sidled up to me and said, well, I'd quite like to do this, but I don't dare.
00:39:20.000And I'm talking about very basic reporting and things.
00:39:25.000They're not people saying, hey, I've decided to draw a great big cartoon of Mohammed with a great big dick and having sex with the Pope or something.
00:39:44.000It's always something way, way, way down.
00:39:47.000I'm thinking of even like saying something critical of certain regimes.
00:39:53.000So the internalization of the fatwa since 1989, which has been exacerbated now by the killings of Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere, and the attacks on the in Denmark, means that we are in this period where people are really hyper, hyper sensitive, and they really shouldn't be, because it really isn't that bad.
00:40:13.000But this is, you know, you can do so much work if you say to people, I've got Kalashnikovs on my side.
00:40:23.000I mean, the extent, and people in free societies like ours are really, really loathe to admit this, but it's a classic sort of mob trick, you know, knocking on someone's door.
00:40:35.000I'm very disappointed in you, but my friend here, my huge friend, is really angry and I'm just holding him back.
00:40:47.000You can do an amazing amount of work if you're willing to pull that kind of trick.
00:40:51.000And if you can persuade people, and it's actually the case that there are people you're holding back.
00:40:58.000You can make enormous inroads like that.
00:41:00.000Well, especially when there's actual evidence that people have been murdered and have been...
00:41:26.000Apart from your parents, you know, I mean, they were still under the impression that these must be, you know, incredibly pornographic cartoons that were really, really viciously attacking somebody.
00:41:36.000But no, anyone young could find this out for themselves.
00:41:40.000And you're right, they gave up the space to the net.
00:41:44.000And they all had, again, these sort of...
00:41:47.000Rubbish arguments of their own about it.
00:41:49.000I tried in Britain to get the press to do it at one go a couple of days after the massacre and got pretty close that if everyone says I am Spartacus tactic.
00:42:06.000If everyone did it at once, then it would be okay, or it would make it easier.
00:42:10.000And the argument you always get about that is, and it's a very persuasive argument, is that the editor of the magazine or newspaper might get protection and so on.
00:42:22.000But, you know, a girl from the typing pool sort of thing.
00:42:26.000Which is what happened actually in some of the satanic verses, killings and stabbings and things.
00:42:31.000You know, it's like a Norwegian translator, Japanese translator.
00:42:34.000You know, it's people who under no security protocol could possibly end up all getting protected.
00:42:41.000And on the basis of fearing that, the boss almost always says no.
00:42:47.000One of the more uniquely American responses to the Charlie Hebdo attack was they had a Draw Muhammad contest in Texas.
00:43:06.000That's just not the place to fuck around.
00:43:08.000True, although, I mean, it's worth mentioning that, I mean, the editor at Charlie Hebdo had police protection in Paris, and they just, I mean, I suppose they're not worth dwelling on, but the battle-trained people who were sent from Yemen to carry out that operation just were better prepared than the French authorities realized.
00:44:21.000In these sorts of times, I always get people on the – apart from the Turkish donkey porn guy, other people on Twitter send me things like, you know, well, why don't you draw Mohammed sort of stuff?
00:44:33.000And first of all, I mean, I'm not a cartoonist, but – Secondly, the way in which this is always presented is amazing, because it's always from, like, Xena Warrior Princess 1293. You don't have the guts to draw Muhammad Murray.
00:44:47.000And, you know, like, well, you don't even have the guts to have your own name on Twitter, mate.
00:44:53.000But there's a bit of egging along that happens in those cases.
00:45:01.000I don't want to piss people off by drawing the cartoon.
00:45:03.000But what I do want to point out is that if you don't defend people's rights to draw things without getting murdered, then you're living in an insane society.
00:46:07.000And that's one of my big beefs about this, is that I don't want to not say what I think is true.
00:46:15.000And even if that does offend, you know, 1.3 or 4 billion people, as is often said in tones that are not entirely unthreatening.
00:46:26.000If Charlie Hebdo or somebody else can't draw a cartoon on Mohammed, then I know that exactly in tandem with that is somebody saying, and you, Douglas, or you, Joe, or you, or anyone else, I think?
00:46:55.000Think of applying to Islam the same kind of speech you would apply to Mormonism.
00:48:33.000Weirdly, it's like, you know, fatwa against South Park.
00:48:35.000Well, I didn't see that headline coming.
00:48:38.000And again, everyone internalizes and everyone thinks, well, you know, I admire them in their Mormon work, but I'm not sure I'd follow them in their Mohammed work.
00:48:52.000And that's, I think, where we are at the moment on this.
00:48:57.000The cartoon will never be funny enough, the joke will never be funny enough, the novel will never be good enough, and so on.
00:49:04.000And then in the end, the speech will never be worth speaking enough.
00:49:09.000I, a little while ago, had a very clear experience of this.
00:49:12.000I read about it on the radio in Britain where I was in a discussion with a Muslim cleric who's a sort of reformist figure and admire in some ways, who in a discussion about something said, well, you know, also Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
00:49:40.000I mean, whatever else you can say, Mohammed, not really good on the criticism of himself bit.
00:49:48.000And I gave an example of a female poetess who he had killed because she criticized him.
00:49:53.000And this guy went absolutely apeshit and refused to continue and so on.
00:49:59.000Because you gave an actual historical example?
00:50:01.000Because I gave an historical example from his own religious texts.
00:50:06.000And in the end, it was a pre-record, and in the end, the BBC were like, Douglas, can you find another way of trying to make the same point?
00:50:17.000Wait a minute, another way of making the same point, rather than pointing out the historical text that showed that Muhammad did have a female poet killed?
00:51:25.000Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things, isn't it?
00:51:28.000Because although it's true you can, like, suppress a lot of this, you know, we do live in an age when basically anyone can Google and find texts and they can find this.
00:51:37.000It's a book that a billion people have read.
00:51:39.000I'm not sure they've read it, but yeah.
00:51:44.000How many people do you think read the Bible?
00:51:46.000Like, if you had to guess the number of Christians in this country...
00:51:50.000There are those tests, aren't there, they sometimes do.
00:51:53.000The Humanist Society in the UK did a few years ago, asking very basic questions of self-professed Christians about their knowledge of the texts, and very few...
00:52:03.000My favorite is self-professed Christians with religious tattoos.
00:52:07.000Like, hey man, you gotta read the whole book.
00:52:12.000You are literally showing on your skin that you didn't read the whole book.
00:52:16.000Didn't pay attention in the early bits.
00:55:34.000Yeah, there's so many of those stories that are so strange.
00:55:36.000But I bet that most, if we were to go to the people who say that they're Christians in the polls and ask them about, we don't even need to go to the bald head bear nightmare.
00:56:27.000There's something, by the way, I've often thought this is one of the reasons why it's possible to get a certain fanaticism going within Muslim communities on some issues to do with blasphemy.
00:56:38.000I think is to do with a realization of this.
00:56:43.000You said that this was the case about our prophet.
00:57:07.000Like the Christians with the bald beds.
00:57:09.000And this causes a really serious problem for them because they are told from the cradle that they are following a religion founded by the most perfect man imaginable.
00:57:24.000And if you discover that, it's like, you know, there's no description of Helen of Troy in the ancient text.
00:57:31.000Why does nobody describe Helen of Troy?
00:57:32.000Why does nobody say that she had this beautiful blonde ringlet?
00:57:36.000It's because it actually catches on as a theme because everyone makes Helen of Troy their most beautiful woman.
00:57:44.000If you started to describe it, you'd be like, I'm not into redheads.
00:57:50.000Helen of Troy becomes the person upon whom you put all of those things.
00:57:55.000And in the same way, Mohammed becomes, if you say he is the perfect human being, people will just throughout their lives put the kind of things they think are perfect onto Mohammed.
00:58:03.000He must have been very kind, very generous, very caregiving, and so on.
00:58:07.000So that if you then say, well, what about when he then did this?
00:58:14.000This is something they'll have to get over, of course, because, I mean, we can't go away and not identify these issues.
00:58:23.000But it causes, in the short term, an enormous, enormous pain.
00:58:27.000I have an example I gave recently in a book of somebody I spent some time with a couple years ago, an extraordinary man called Morten Storm.
00:58:52.000And he ended up being the main go-to person for something called Anu Awalaki, who was the head of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
00:59:00.000And, in fact, was asked to get a wife, Awalaki, to supplement his wife collection.
00:59:06.000And Morton Storm, among other things, ended up falling out with Al-Qaeda and ended up working for the CIA and Danish intelligence and ended up helping lead them to Awalaki, who was then droned by Obama in 2011 or so.
00:59:19.000Anyhow, I once said to Morton Storm, what was the moment that made you get out of Al-Qaeda?
00:59:27.000And he had such a fascinating answer because he came out of al-Qaeda and Islam at the same moment.
00:59:32.000He says what was happening was he was waiting for a package from al-Qaeda drop-off to get then from him to al-Awlaki.
00:59:40.000And the person carrying the package was late and then really late.
00:59:45.000And he was sitting in his apartment somewhere in Germany, I think, at that point.
01:00:53.000He read a book called Agent Storm about two years ago.
01:00:58.000One of the weirdest conversations that I ever saw anybody have with someone who's a believer was Dawkins, I think it was, was having a conversation with someone and he asked him point-blank whether or not he believed that Mohammed split the moon.
01:01:14.000I think I know this was with a very close enemy of mine called Mehdi Hassan, who works for Al Jazeera and who Richard Dawkins did an interview with.
01:01:23.000And I think he, that's right, he fluffed something earlier on, Dawkins, that he didn't take on, then he took him on on this.
01:01:36.000And then it led to this terrible problem, which is a really interesting, interesting problem of our era, which is then Dawkins said, I can't believe that somebody, or said afterwards, I can't believe that somebody could be a working journalist and believe that, you know, Mohammed flew to the moon on a half-human horse.
01:02:05.000And if we started saying you can't have public office or working journalism, if you profess to be of this particular faith, then we wouldn't have anyone left.
01:03:49.000And then he says, would you say the same thing about the Muslim God?
01:03:53.000And I just knew exactly what was happening.
01:03:55.000Dawkins says, about the Muslim God I don't know so much, which he, as I say, he thinks I shouldn't rip him on this.
01:04:05.000And the thing was, what I noticed was that I just, I completely felt he's been a very brave and brilliant writer and thinker on these matters.
01:04:13.000Nobody's done more in some ways, but he I knew exactly what was happening.
01:04:18.000He was staring right over the cliff edge and somebody was behind him nudging.
01:04:24.000And if he had have said, as it were, live on Al Jazeera, oh yes, Allah, you know, the total bastard, then...
01:05:43.000I always have a very, very visual aid of it.
01:05:46.000Somebody who actually is a terrific reformer in Islam now and another cleric who once described to me, he went to fight for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan 30 years ago now.
01:05:57.000And described to me, he's not a very fighterly like person, but described how he did actually sort of rile them up to sort of run over and get at the Soviets.
01:06:05.000He's like, you know, we're all agreed.
01:06:34.000Any rational discussion of that particular subject, you could kind of get away – I mean, I get criticism from Christians, but it's not scary.
01:06:46.000Yes, that is – That is a big difference at the time being, isn't it?
01:06:51.000This is something that's just so important, a nuance that almost never gets added in, but of course we all just assume it, so we don't think it's worth saying.
01:06:59.000But we are aware that any religion or thought like this could be this dangerous at different phases.
01:07:30.000One can't imagine the Anglican Church becoming militant about anything at any point soon.
01:07:34.000You do have some angrier types of Christian here than we have in my country, and so it's easy for me to think they're slightly less risky at some point in the future than you might.
01:07:46.000But it's just that we do recognize this could happen elsewhere as well.
01:07:50.000It's just that at the moment, it's not the Quakers.
01:07:55.000They really don't send me a death threat from one year to the next.
01:08:01.000There's an inherent danger of a retaliation from people who are more radical Christian, that if this continues and if you see more and more attacks from people of Muslim faith,
01:08:18.000you could possibly see a retaliation from people, especially in this country.
01:08:23.000Like, after 9-11, there was an extreme amount of hate for Muslims and irrational hate for people who had done nothing wrong.
01:08:32.000Most of which was directed at Sikhs, as I remember.
01:09:09.000Big, bad terrorist attacks last year in the UK, including the Manchester Arena bomb, where 22 young people were blown up on a Monday night for going to hear Ariana Grande.
01:09:20.000And after the third of those attacks, which was on London Bridge, when three people who were actually known to the authorities, as they generally are, slashed people's throats on the street and ran to Borough Market as people were drinking and stabbed.
01:09:38.000People are shouting, this is for Allah.
01:09:40.000After the third of those attacks, it felt like, oh God, is this really just going to keep happening?
01:09:47.000What are we going to do about it and what can we do?
01:09:49.000And after the Manchester one in particular, there was this kind of thing of...
01:09:53.000Everyone sang, apart from John Lennon's Imagine, there was the Oasis hit, Don't Look Back in Anger.
01:09:59.000And these themes, we weren't meant to think anything other than that.
01:10:04.000And then just a terrible thing happened from another direction.
01:10:12.000Outside Finsbury Park Mosque, which is a mosque of a very troubled and bad history in London, a guy from Wales in a van drives into the crowds as they're milling around outside the mosque, kills one man and injures a number of others.
01:10:32.000That guy, by the way, just to show how complex all this can get, is he was tried, found guilty last month in the courts in the UK. He had been, he was obviously very mentally deranged and he had a history of mental illness and all that sort of thing,
01:10:49.000as very often people do in these situations.
01:10:51.000But he had watched a BBC drama called Three Girls, which is the first time that the BBC... I'd really address the issue of the Rotherham Rochdale rape gangs that happened in the last decade in the UK which is still a sore that's going on where about 1500 girls in one town alone were basically Abused by gangs of Muslim,
01:11:16.000And it's a very, very ugly business, partly because it was so awful that nobody at the state, at the police level, wanted to look into it.
01:11:25.000And they are now in the government inquiry, so they didn't look into it because they were worried about being called racist and Islamophobic and so on.
01:11:32.000The press did a lot of not being interested in this as well.
01:11:36.000Eventually, after all these years, the BBC makes a documentary called Three Girls, about three of the girls who suffered from these rape gangs.
01:11:43.000And then a man in Wales sees it and gets so enraised, people say at the local pub he was railing against the bloody Muslims and all this sort of thing.
01:11:52.000And then he hires a van and drives into a crowd of people outside a mosque.
01:11:56.000And you have this awful feeling that The BBC didn't want to deal with the issue that the program was about for years because it was so awful and ugly and sounded like something made up by some kind of nativist, racist.
01:13:42.000I mean it seems to me the only way through it is to say – first of all, I mean I read the American press all the time.
01:13:49.000I think that it's worse than the British press in that self-appointed role of believing its task is to stand between the public and the facts and sort of negotiate between the two.
01:14:00.000See what they think the public can cope with or should know and then feed them that.
01:14:06.000The American press seems to be rife with that temptation as ours is.
01:14:11.000But it seems to be the only way around this is to not give in to that and to try just to publish the facts when they happen.
01:14:19.000Because it just obviously seems to be much worse.
01:14:21.000We always know in political scandal what's worse, the cover-up.
01:14:27.000And that may be the case with all this.
01:14:28.000Maybe the argument for just the papers explaining stuff that's happened is maybe that's all they can do and that one could just say to them, it'd be a lot worse if you bottle this up because otherwise people will get the idea that there is some conspiracy to cover over certain stories and they'll be on to something.
01:14:53.000In fact, if you think about the millions of people that must have seen that, The story on the rape of 1500, the fact that only one person responded that way, is pretty extraordinary in and of itself.
01:15:07.000And I would have thought on some of this.
01:15:09.000I mean, I don't know, again, I mean, there are lots of examples one could use, but when something bad happens, like the Manchester Arena attack, I'm amazed in a way that people are so...
01:16:07.000With all the history and all the terrible things, especially in England, with so many attacks over such a relatively short period of time, where there was a very small history of that before.
01:16:18.000It seemed like this immediate eruption of all these issues.
01:16:22.000Yes, and I mean, the country, in some ways, I write about my latest book most is France, where the book comes out in translation there in a couple of months' time.
01:16:31.000I'm very interested to see what happens because France had even, I mean, we mentioned Charlie Hebdo, but that 18 months or so it had was just, I mean, again, it all sort of disappears now.
01:16:43.000Every day has got bad news of some kind.
01:16:45.000But, you know, to have a major Western capital city with 130 people killed in an evening with multiple suicide bombings and people being gunned down from mopeds as they're sitting outside a bar and You know, another group of people going into a rock concert and,
01:17:02.000you know, going through the disabled section and shooting everyone one by one in the disabled section and gunning everyone else down and catching them in the lavatories and shooting them.
01:17:11.000I mean, that happened in one night alone in Paris.
01:17:16.000But the Parisians didn't become You know, they didn't become wicked, terrible people or anything, but they have...
01:17:22.000I think that a lot of these terrible events that have happened, actually what happens is they sink down to a lower level of our consciousness so that what actually happens is we get over the immediate thing quite fast.
01:17:39.000But that something at the foundational level changes.
01:17:42.000I had a case nobody really wanted to linger on, but there was one in November in the UK on Oxford Street where, because of course everyone does after these attacks, they always say, you know, we will not be changed.
01:17:54.000Everyone tries to sort of channel the spirit of Churchill and all that sort of thing.
01:17:58.000I'm Churchill, hear me roar, and so on.
01:18:01.000And actually, the facts are otherwise.
01:18:05.000In November, on Oxford Street, all we know is that there were two men who may have had some disagreement on the platform of a tube platform.
01:18:16.000Whatever happened, it was misunderstood by crowds, and it developed into a stampede.
01:18:21.000Out of the tube station, then all the way down Oxford Street, people were locked and barricaded into the big department stores.
01:18:28.000A pop singer called Olly Murs tweeted out to his million followers.
01:18:32.000You know, there were shots of being fired.
01:18:34.000I'm in the back room of the store, H&M, and this sort of thing.
01:18:38.000And other people claimed that a truck had gone down Oxford Street mowing people down.
01:18:53.000The next day, two men handed themselves into a local police station saying they thought they might have been responsible for it, but they were let off without any charge.
01:19:13.000But my point is that we can simultaneously say we will not be cowed.
01:19:20.000And also, actually, be at the stage where if you just hear a bang, everyone goes running.
01:19:25.000You don't want to be the last person to figure out what's going on.
01:19:30.000So as soon as something you think is happening, people in this day and age, when there's just this recent history of horrible things happening over and over again in Orlando, here, I mean, there's just so many of them, that people just instantaneously want to react.
01:19:46.000And then, like in the Vegas shooting, One of the things that was very confusing about the Vegas shooting is people would go into casinos.
01:19:53.000They would flee from the concert into casinos and then talk about a shooter.
01:19:58.000And then people would say there's an active shooter at the Tropicana.
01:20:09.000They were claiming there were shooters all over the city, but there was no actual...
01:20:14.000Shooting in these other casinos was just reports of active shooters.
01:20:18.000And by the way, if you're interested, there's a fascinating thing about why this happens and I wrote a book some years ago about Bloody Sunday, a terrible event in Northern Ireland.
01:20:33.000I went through all the testimony of everyone who had seen it.
01:20:36.000One of the most interesting things was the number of people whose memories were just totally different from what we know actually happened.
01:20:43.000And one of the conclusions I came to was that there's a book by a Harvard professor called The Seven Sins of Memory about this.
01:20:50.000But one of the things that clearly happens is after any very traumatic event or very terrible event where people are effectively in the situation of a war zone when they were just shopping or at a concert at the moment before, Is that our memories immediately become even more suggestible than they are already.
01:21:07.000And the most obvious thing of suggestibility in these situations is that the situation was worse around you and you came off better than you did.
01:21:20.000The shots that were quite a bit away were very close.
01:21:27.000You have to, your memory, without knowing it, we all do it, our memory tells us we behave better than we did and that the threat was worse because this is one of our ways of coping, I think.
01:21:42.000But it's a terrible thing, obviously, with these school shootings and things that are going on here at the moment.
01:21:51.000I watched your podcast the other day where you were discussing this with the latest one with the Florida.
01:21:56.000And I think the sort of, in a way, bafflement going on in this society about this is understandable.
01:22:04.000Yeah, the unimaginable horror of being involved in that situation, your mind is just not prepared to cope with that.
01:22:11.000I mean, maybe if you're a soldier and you experience combat and you know how to stay calm in a firefight because you've been in a bunch of them, but for the average person, I mean, it's one of the reasons why...
01:22:23.000It's one of the worst pieces of evidence you could ever get, including, I mean, about basically everything, about fistfights to, you know, anything.
01:22:44.000But now you have this thing here where – I mean in some ways even worse than we do of the search to notch it up for your own political side or against the enemy.
01:22:54.000It's the same thing with the Twitter point.
01:22:57.000But I mean this obscene glee that goes on after any terrorist attack in Europe but I think also here as well, the attempt to – To immediately call it for the other side or for your side or whatever.
01:23:10.000And to try to use terrible events as a way to justify whatever your own team is.
01:23:19.000I find this amazing with the gun debate here.
01:23:22.000And I would find it amazing coming from a different society on it.
01:23:25.000But the way to sort of notch it up for one side or the other in it.
01:23:31.000You've got a real problem on this one.
01:23:33.000I've been watching a lot of it from the perspective of the gun owners, the NRA members, and the people that want to defend the idea of having guns, even of arming teachers, and you're looking at their perspective on it,
01:23:48.000and their perspective on it is all about their rights, all about the Constitution, all about the Bill of Rights, all about protecting the Second Amendment, all about Gun ownership being taken away, gun ownership under attack, the NRA under attack, they're coming after our guns, and this is this constant battle of ideas that's on Twitter,
01:24:56.000I thought there was a very pertinent one a few years ago in New York on 5th when somebody shot their colleague and outside the office came back as a disgruntled worker, shot the colleague and locally there were some policemen around the corner and they came out and started firing at the guy who'd done it,
01:25:16.000ended up wounding about 11 pedestrians.
01:25:59.000And if you were starting from now, you might not do that.
01:26:04.000But clearly, with the gun ownership thing, it is we are willing to take...
01:26:11.000Bad things happening quite often because we want to hold on to the Second Amendment.
01:26:16.000Well, the Second Amendment has been around forever.
01:26:18.000The bad things happening quite often is really from Columbine on.
01:26:21.000I mean, there was a few of them before.
01:26:23.000There was the Austin, Texas tower shootings.
01:26:27.000But it seems – I mean, again, it's such an obvious point.
01:26:32.000I don't want to sound like a snotty Brit who's saying something about America that's not – But it seems obvious that you could do a lot more damage with a semi-automatic rifle than you can with a knife.
01:26:46.000And most people, we see this in the terrorism as well, there are really committed terrorists who don't commit acts of violence unless they can get hold of the means to do it.
01:26:57.000Because we often think, well, why don't you just go out with a knife?
01:27:08.000So, stopping them having the means of getting that very easily seems to me very obvious.
01:27:16.000But that isn't to say that, I mean, of course, I think you made a point the other day, it's like saying, If you say everyone who has a gun is part of the problem, then obviously not, because it's like saying everyone who's got a truck is a part of the problem.
01:27:28.000One is the psychological and whatever the social issues are that cause this to keep happening.
01:27:32.000And that is obviously very, very important to try to get to the root of.
01:27:37.000But you can get to the root of that or try to get to the root of that and also recognize that people having access to some of the weapons they have access to in this country Must be a part of the problem.
01:28:55.000There was an article recently that was saying, contrary to popular belief, most school shootings are not committed by people who are mentally ill.
01:29:03.000Well, that's a fucking stupid thing to say.
01:29:43.000There's a conservative commentator in the UK called Peter Hitchens who always makes a point after Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe that there's a large number of them as well as other types of attack who seem to be on some kind of medication.
01:30:31.000And they feel like it's a slippery slope.
01:30:34.000The people that I follow online that are tweeting about this on a regular basis, you can go to a lot of them, like, they're making videos about it, Dana Lash, and Colin, actually his name is, it's not Colin, it's Colion, Colion Noir,
01:30:50.000N-O-I-R. He's very, very vocal about it.
01:30:53.000I'm reading all his stuff, it's like, all anyone's taking into account is this idea that they're coming after your rights.
01:32:12.000It's always that if you address the question, difficult as it might be, you are attacking an individual who might suffer from it, who might be upset by us addressing the question.
01:32:24.000I mean, I have a lot of suspicions about all sorts of things.
01:32:28.000I'm a very, you know, skeptical person, as it were, about things that I'm told, so I'd like to look into things.
01:32:33.000I'm amazed at the number of things in our societies that we just don't discuss, and they're all the things that we ought to be discussing.
01:32:42.000Issues like mental health issues, issues that have to do with the social presumptions that are going on left, right and center at the moment, where you're not meant to discuss Things that are, apart from anything else, very, very interesting and very important.
01:33:01.000This might, by the way, so this is a slightly strange segue to make, but there was a fascinating one in Britain a couple of days ago.
01:33:09.000A slightly lighter subject, but there's a diver in the UK called Tom Daley who married a screenwriter from Hollywood called Dustin Lance Black.
01:33:20.000And it was announced a couple of weeks ago on Valentine's Day that they were having a baby.
01:33:24.000And there was a photograph of them holding a scan they sent out on their Twitter, two men who are married who have an ultrasound scan.
01:33:33.000And all the papers and the BBC and everyone else reported saying Dustin and Tom are having a baby.
01:33:40.000And, I mean, I'm gay and I don't think I'm homophobic, but I looked at this and I was like, how?
01:34:54.000But this was just on, this was like, literally, literally until the day before yesterday, it was possible to say, I don't think two guys can just, like, have sex and make a child.
01:35:04.000Literally that was okay until the day before yesterday.
01:35:06.000And it's not okay today, so what will not be okay tomorrow?
01:35:11.000And I just think, and I wrote about it, and maybe a couple of other people ended up doing it too, but I think that's really interesting.
01:35:20.000Like a lot of this other stuff, I think it's really interesting about this, that you are, things that seem very obvious to us are all the things you're not meant to write about, almost as if they're like booby traps waiting to go off.
01:36:06.000But in that case, anyone who does have a voice...
01:36:11.000As a writer or speaker, whatever, broadcaster, I think has a disproportionate duty to do so.
01:36:19.000I mean, there's no point in just repeating those same new lies.
01:36:25.000There's a disproportionate duty to try to break them down.
01:36:29.000I can't remember one of my favorite quotes, that one from H.L. Mencken, who says, you know, that history was always progressed by jolly fellows heaving dead cats into sanctuaries.
01:36:54.000And it's one of the only things worth doing if we're all going to be told lies and expected to go along with them, whether it's about terrorism or gay parenting or mental health or anything else.
01:38:09.000And it was right after she had been spacing out behind the wheel, slammed into a woman, and pushed her into traffic in a head-on collision, and the woman died.
01:38:18.000And that was almost just completely forgotten.
01:38:22.000Not only that, she doesn't believe in gay marriage.
01:38:27.000Like, you have the wrong spokesperson.
01:38:31.000I mean, you could not have a more wrong spokesperson, but yet ESPN and Glamour Woman of the Year and all these different things and Athlete of the Year and wearing dresses and fabulous things.
01:38:44.000Let's get your chin shaved down, because that's who you really are.
01:38:48.000Who you really are is not this person there.
01:38:51.000No, you've got to shave your chin down.
01:38:54.000It goes back to that thing about almost as if you're being dared.
01:38:58.000Yes, you're being dared to discuss it.
01:39:01.000I got him into trouble just on his podcast by saying this, and he didn't attack me, apparently.
01:39:06.000Apparently he got a whole load of transphobe accusations because of me saying something.
01:39:10.000But I said to him, I thought what was happening was that we were being asked not only to agree that Bruce Jenner had become Caitlyn Jenner and that Caitlyn Jenner was a woman, but that you had to find her attractive.
01:39:36.000Pretending that Tom and Dustin can't have a baby.
01:39:39.000LAUGHTER And it was the same way, a little while ago, there was a boy in Britain who was, I can't remember whether he wanted to turn up to school in a dress, he's like nine years old, and there was a row, I can't remember whether the school said yes or no, but it was a big thing, and then it became a weigh-in on behalf of the nine-year-old trans kid.
01:39:58.000I've got lots of questions to ask there.
01:40:00.000And then it became, the nine-year-old kid became a model for a fashion shoot, And then it's like, find the nine-year-old boy who says he's a girl attractive and say it's beautiful.
01:40:19.000How much more do you want to push people?
01:40:40.000You must have been thinking about this.
01:40:43.000This bizarre, illogical conversation that falls into these very convenient, well-cut grooves that you're really not allowed to slide the ideas out of.
01:41:07.000What I mean is that if people aren't seeing increases in their living standards, I mean, my generation, I'm 38, just above this generation, but a generation ever so slightly below me is becoming aware that it won't get on the property ladder.
01:41:29.000The things that their parents' generation got, not easily by any means, it wasn't easy for boomers, but that somehow they're going to have it harder than their parents' generation, or might not enjoy the living standards that their parents' generation enjoyed.
01:41:47.000Might be, certainly in Western Europe coming home, it might be occurring to them.
01:41:55.000You've got to have other things to get worth from.
01:41:59.000If, for instance, you're not going to own a home until you're 40 and at that point, if you're a woman, like your career, you need to have children but you can't afford to take the time off work and you might not be able to start a family.
01:42:10.000And then you're trying to start a family in your 40s and it's harder, very hard.
01:42:15.000And a whole set of other things like that, that are definitely delayed for a new generation.
01:42:19.000Now I think that it's possible, I'm not saying it's certain, but it's possible, it seems to me, that that generation might discover new gods.
01:42:29.000I might want to enforce the new rules just as avidly as the old gods.
01:42:36.000And there is an element of that going on.
01:42:41.000I can't understand why otherwise every time I talk about the things we talk about today, there would just continuously be this very angry reaction.
01:44:16.000Other people in the carriage, they all move away.
01:44:18.000And of course, you can see what's coming.
01:44:19.000The culmination of it is she says she gets off the train.
01:44:22.000She wonders whether she should have said something.
01:44:24.000But she says, conscious of her white privilege, and that these people were people of color, And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, what?
01:44:36.000Now, if you saw a man of different skin pigmentation from you abusing a woman of different skin pigmentation from you, the right thing is not to defend the woman.
01:44:49.000That seems like just a real justification for being a coward.
01:45:45.000It is not the nirvana they think that they're creating.
01:45:49.000So this is a really good moment to try to look at some of this and to talk about it and to think about it as widely and as freely as we can and yet the effort is to do the opposite.
01:46:03.000I think you're onto something with the idea that this radical, progressive, very restrictive line of communication, ideology that we're experiencing, that we're talking about, is coming from a lot of people that don't have a religion.
01:46:44.000I was speaking at a campus in the U.S. a little while ago, and I spoke to a guy who was a really, really clever student who was a free thinker.
01:46:54.000He said, afterwards we were talking, he said, you know, he'd had some hideous experience at a local free-thinker society, you know, where everyone was like, get in your lane.
01:47:03.000And he was like, I thought that being among free-thinkers, like, the rest would all be good.
01:47:12.000Just as able to be blindfolded if you, you know, on certain things down...
01:47:17.000Wouldn't you imagine this, of course, self-proclaimed free thinkers would be even more inclined to adopt a rigid ideology.
01:47:24.000They're proclaiming themselves to be a free thinker.
01:47:28.000And it's possible this comes from that, you know, the old joke about censors, you know, that the censor knows everything that the people are really into.
01:47:40.000And I spoke once to a man who was on the British Board of Film Classification.
01:47:44.000He spent all day watching really hardcore pornography, deciding what could be legalized and all that sort of thing.
01:47:49.000You must have a very dark view of humanity.
01:47:52.000Well, that wasn't Justice Scalia's interpretation of pornography.
01:47:56.000I don't know how to describe it, but I'll know it when I see it.
01:48:02.000And it may be, but it may be that these people, that a lot of conservatives have this thing, that one becomes rigid about something because you've seen into the abyss, because you don't know you mightn't behave in a certain very terrible way.
01:48:20.000And so you want to pull back from that chaos.
01:48:24.000You want to pull other people back as well.
01:48:26.000Seems to me that a lot of so-called free thinkers, self-designated free thinkers, may well have these glimpses and may well think, I don't know what's holding this together, and therefore might precisely for that reason be disproportionately rigid on almost any new ideology that came along.
01:49:05.000It would be absurd to pretend we didn't.
01:49:09.000Yeah, it's interesting because the more you, like, we found ways to mock it, right?
01:49:16.000And one of the ways to mock it, and I think that that's important.
01:49:19.000And that mockery, although it seems trivial, what it does do is let people know how ridiculous other people feel those ideas are, and then it makes them re-examine them themselves because they don't like being mocked.
01:49:30.000The term social justice warrior is wonderful for that, because it just makes you look like such a fucking fool.
01:49:35.000You know, I'm a social justice warrior.
01:49:39.000I was a colleague of mine, a spectator in London called Rod Little wrote a few years ago, any man who says he's a feminist clearly just is seeking a shag.
01:49:51.000Well, I mean, it's one thing to want equality, but to proudly state that you're a feminist, it's almost, I've joked around about it, like, I see what you're doing.
01:50:01.000You don't run fast, you can't pick things up, but you still like to fuck.
01:51:19.000You know, I mean, people are experimenting with various different ways of gaining social preference points.
01:51:26.000Well, this is why I would say even if people aren't believers, there are things they can learn from religion and from tradition.
01:51:35.000And I've always thought that there's one central insight to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which I wish that the social justice warriors bore in mind.
01:51:48.000And what Kant would call the crooked timber of humanity.
01:51:53.000Just to recognize the central truth, which is in that tradition and in others, that we're not born in this situation of Rousseauian perfection or goodness.
01:52:07.000Quite otherwise, we are this very, very contorted being.
01:52:16.000Which is capable of incredible greatness and beauty and kindness and forgiveness and also capable of their opposites and that it's not that you are one and other people are the other but that all of us are both all the time and so there never is a victory and there never is a win.
01:52:41.000Other than trying to deal with and restrain your own worst impulses in the life that you have.
01:52:51.000And honestly express all the issues that arrive while you're trying to do that.
01:53:05.000It just seems so clear to me that if people could realize this is a central problem of the thing that you and I and others all face is the desire to claim that somebody who disagrees on an issue isn't just...
01:53:25.000And that in any, you know, we have in Britain, we are racked at the moment still by 18 months after a single vote on a single matter of governance.
01:53:34.000We are still racked by really unpleasant politics.
01:53:39.000And I suspect it's not, I hate the overlap of the two, but it's probably something like the Trump events here.
01:53:46.000But Again and again you come back to the same thing, which is just instead of thinking one side is entirely right and the other entirely wrong, this isn't to say you give up on objective fact or anything else, but just consider that your opponent might be approaching this with an honest motive and might have honest reasons for disagreeing with you.
01:54:04.000And in the absence of that, and with media just endlessly feeding us whatever it is we know our own side happens to think, in the absence of that I just see our trenches in both our countries just being dug deeper and deeper until there's just no hope of being able to even shout over the top and be heard.
01:54:24.000And one can only get to that stage if, as I say, you recognize that it's not a constant fight Against Nazis.
01:55:00.000It is, but going back to where we started, what if the cheap trick ends up having some terrible consequence of making all of our defenses go down?
01:55:14.000You know, if Sam Harris is a Nazi, then...
01:55:19.000Well, the both of you, I mean, when we started the conversation off with that community guidelines strike, I'm like, good lord.
01:55:26.000This really is a very, very strange time.