Western Standard - November 27, 2023


Professor Michel Gagné chats with Cory on conspiracy theories

Mentioned
Lee Harvey Oswald Julianne Mercer Jack Ruby Trudeau
The Pipeline： Chrystia Freeland's hair-of-the-dog economic update Wilkinson, Guilbeault ‘bewildered’ by Smith’s ‘anti clean’ Sovereignty Act

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

197.08

Word count

391

Sentence count

22

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Canadian academic and journalist, Dr. Andrew Yang, to talk about conspiracy theories and what to look out for in the minds of journalists, scientists, professors, and politicians. We talk about what we should be looking out for, what to watch for, and how to deal with them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, I think we live in an age where we're very suspicious of people in authority. And that's unfortunate. I mean, we should be skeptical. People in authority are still humans. And if they're given the chance, they might be corrupt. They might do something illegal.
00:00:11.680 But ultimately, if we start with a default assumption that scientists, professors, journalists like yourself are deliberately part of some larger scheme, then we're not even giving ourselves a chance to look for truth. We start with the assumption that everything happens behind closed doors by some furtive force that we can only identify with words like oligarchy or patriarchy or military industrial complex.
00:00:39.560 At the end of the day, these words don't mean anything.
00:00:42.180 You know, one of the things to watch for as well, you pointed out was was an assumption of hyperconfidence. I mean, when we look at government, this is the same sort of person who would sit and say, look, I feel Trudeau's a fool and his cabinet's weak and and the bureaucrats are incompetent. 0.98
00:00:55.220 But somehow they're pulling off a massive conspiracy to do such and such. Well, you've got a conflict of your logic going on right there. It's one of the things perhaps people should watch for. Don't assume that the government's really that good at being able to keep a conspiracy like this. 0.98
00:01:07.780 What's interesting is often that same line, those two contradictory points are made by the same people that somehow the conspirators are hyper competent so they can use laser beams or they can somehow brainwash us through the media.
00:01:20.220 But at the same time, they are so incompetent that they leave this breadcrumb of evidence supposedly all over the place.
00:01:28.320 You know, I have a story on my podcast this week about a woman called Julianne Mercer, who thought she saw Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald sneaking a rifle onto the grassy knoll. 0.97
00:01:37.780 Well, if they did that, they were profoundly stupid because they're doing this in broad daylight where they could get arrested before they even get their caper pulled off. 0.79
00:01:46.480 So, yeah, it's not just the fact about hyper competence. It's the contradictory ways that hyper competence is often used. 0.99
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