Podcasts/Sacred Tension-A Satanic Defense of Free SpeechMASTERED7uhao

A_Satanic_Defense_of_Free_SpeechMASTERED7uhao SUMMARY KEYWORDS people, anon, podcast, satanic temple, point, satanic panic, tolerance, rock candy, free speech, kinds, conspiracy theory, talking, feel, karl popper, spotify, long, argument, movement, satanic, ideas SPEAKERS Will, Doug Misicko, Stephen Bradford Long

Will 00:00 You're listening to a rock candy podcast. Hey, I'm Will and they call me the doctor. And I'm Joe, the maestro, we host a podcast called common creatives, where we break apart the art, we love to see what makes it tick. Basically, we give you the definitive take on whatever or whoever we're discussing, you don't need to go anywhere else. So check out common creatives wherever you listen to podcasts.

Stephen Bradford Long 00:48 This is sacred tension, the podcast about the discipline of asking questions. My name is Steven Bradford long and we are here on the rock candy Podcast Network. For more shows like this one, go to rock candy recordings.com. All right. Well, as always, I really have to thank my patrons for this show. My patrons are keeping the show going especially now. Because I have taken a considerable cut to my pay, I am no longer teaching yoga. And I've cut some of my hours as an essential worker to reduce my exposure to the public. I do work in a college town and all three colleges have reopened. And so all of these hordes of college students are buying groceries from me now and it it fills me with terror. So I'm, I've I've reduced my hours so that I I'm less exposed to the public. But that does mean that I'm getting paid less. So I'm relying on my patrons now more than ever, and if you want to join their number, if you find yourself looking forward to sacred tension every single week excited for these conversations, please consider becoming a patron, you can do that by going to patreon.com forward slash Steven Bradford long, there will also be a link in the show notes. And just $1 a month, you get full access to all of the benefits of being a patron with just $1 a month, if you want to give more you're more than welcome to but the entry is just $1 a month and you get all kinds of awesome extra content. So if you are unable to give financially, as a lot of people are, we are in difficult financial times right now. And if that's you, there are other ways to support this show. And one of the best ways is to just subscribe whatever podcast app you use Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher doesn't matter what it is, go ahead and just subscribe to it that really helps that tells the algorithms that it is worth recommending to others. And also please leave a review. So I'm going to read the latest positive review. By the way I might, if I start getting some hate reviews, I might also read those on air because those can be really fun. But one sundown left this very nice review on iTunes. They say, brilliant man, a gift from the Dark Lord, which is very sweet of them. And then they go on Stephens podcast and black mass appeal is where I come to meditate and absorb my dose of satanic wisdom. Aside from being thought provoking sacred tension challenges, my own deeply held beliefs, and a format that is very enjoyable. Also, it helps that Steven has a great voice and a sense of cadence. Well, that's very nice of you. I personally after years of editing my own voice feel like I have a speech impediment. But that's just me. Come here to deconstruct your worldview and create a stronger sense of what is real and true about the spiritual experience of existence and all of its strange manifestations. The mystery is never ending and neither should anyone's curiosity. Very, very sweet review. I really appreciate that. And leaving reviews, five star reviews, it really does do an enormous amount of help. So if you leave a nice review, and it's well worded as well written, I might read it on the show as a thanks to you. Also. Finally, this show is also sponsored by the satanic temple.tv. There is all kinds of stuff on the Satanic Temple TV, there is there are documentaries, live streams, talk shows, conversations, there's a new cooking show on there with this satanic chef. There's also some kinky stuff on there if that's your thing. So there's all kinds of amazing content and you can use my code at checkout sacred tension all caps, no space and you'll get one month free. All right, I'm almost done, I promise. Finally, we are continuing to grow the rock candy Podcast Network. So we have a number of fantastic shows on the network brown sugar diaries, common creatives Bible bash bubble and squeak eleventy life and we have more on the way and if you like the kind of content that we're doing, if you like this weirdness, the quirkiness the For the dedication to creating a more curious world than please send me your pitch. I would love to hear what podcast you're working on. And maybe we can help you make it even better as part of the rock candy Podcast Network. All right, with all of that out of the way, Lucien Greaves, welcome back to the show.

Doug Misicko 05:17 Good to be here. Thank you.

Stephen Bradford Long 05:18 Yeah, so people love these conversations with you on sacred tension. So I just thought that I would have you back for a casual hangout. How have you been? How's life

Doug Misicko 05:29 more of the same since last time I've been staying in waiting out the pandemic.

Stephen Bradford Long 05:35 Very good. Excellent...

Doug Misicko 05:37 A little more tense here. I think since our abortion ritual rollout. Yeah. Tell me about that. Which part of it the the life being more tense in regards to fears for security or just about the campaign itself?

Stephen Bradford Long 05:53 Well, I'm so I talked to Jane Essex about the campaign so that episode was a week or two back more your the your security

Doug Misicko 06:05 It's hard to know, how much is unique to the moment? Because we've rolled this out and how much is we're just seeing because we have people watching more vigilantly now to see if they can pick up on chatter to see who's talking about coming to do something stupid, but it can be harrowing to know that, you know, it's deep in the forums, there were people chatter openly about their militant agendas that people regularly bring up bringing violence upon the Satanic Temple and sometimes particularly the headquarters building. Yeah, but I'm really looking forward to the end of this whole election cycle. I don't know when that'll land. I feel like there's gonna be a lot of dispute after November 3 about who actually won, even if it's quite clear, who won. If it's, but if, if Biden takes the election, I'm sure Trump is not, he's already well proven that he's not enough of an adult to accept that. And his followers aren't independently willed enough to see reason and do anything but take his perspective on everything. So we'll see how that plays out. But a lot of the angst I think we see online now is in relation to the pending election and a lot of it is being spurred on by by trolls and in others just trying to sow division. So hopefully things kind of level off after sometime by December.

Stephen Bradford Long 07:40 Yeah, the Q anon people have been paying attention to me lately, which is not a comfortable experience at all. On on Twitter, they've been, you know, they I'm on their radar now as someone who promotes apparently, you know, sacrificing babies, because there's there's that contingent of people who who saw the satanic abortion ritual is just us admitting that we sacrifice babies

Doug Misicko 08:08 Oh, like, Q anon is a direct line into the most persuadable segments of the population that I think a lot of the election time trolls are just kind of tapping into, you know, and it's, it's kind of ironic, they view themselves as the absolute opposite of gullible because they believe these outrageous things on the idea that they are somehow seeing past the mainstream media lies in into the truth about the reality of the situation, where in reality, these are some extremely gullible people who have somehow been sold a narrative that has them lining up behind a corrupt sitting president, while also thinking that they're the defenders of liberty against a more secretive shadow government operating things in the background. It's I like to think optimistically, that there's a future not too terribly far off when everybody essentially everybody knows well enough to be disgusted by the fact that we had this in cell movement and Q Anon, all at the same time. And in, you know, hopefully, that causes people to have some shame for humanity overall,

Stephen Bradford Long 09:27 do you feel like Q anon and, and the Insell movement are are similar, like are they connected in some way or the symptom of something similar?

Doug Misicko 09:37 I mean, you you're really talking bottom of the barrel type stuff.

Stephen Bradford Long 09:42 That's true.

Doug Misicko 09:45 Yeah, it's like a judging shades of shit at a point.

Stephen Bradford Long 09:50 These are the darkest, darkest levels of the internet. Q

Doug Misicko 09:54 anon really is more interesting to me because it's on that continuum of the Satanic Panic. Yeah, I've written recently about how, you know, the International Society for the Study of trauma and dissociation, which is this kind of professionally accredited mental health organization provides the intellectual roots for Q anon. I mean, that's a whole different topic for a whole different podcast discussion. But it is disappointing to me that we've never really kind of confronted the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s in such a way to help mitigate this rise up of q&a now. And I think it's something those of us who work with gray faction have seen coming for a long time, but we just could not get licensing boards in the mental health field and others to take it seriously enough to do anything about it. And that that's really disappointing,

Stephen Bradford Long 10:54 you know, so there has been this criticism going around that I've heard on occasion on the internet, which is, why are you still obsessed about the Satanic Panic? And I don't mean this to at you in particular, but just like in general, like, why are you still? Why are you so obsessed with the Satanic Panic? This isn't an imminent threat, it was it it died in the 90s? And my answer to that is, no, it is very much alive and well, and it's still abusing people. And look what it has given birth to I mean, Q anon is the latest manifest like big huge manifestation of the Satanic Panic stuff that never truly died, it just went under ground, it was never actually defeated in a tangible way, in such a way that it could be pushed out of the culture, right. And

Doug Misicko 11:43 anytime you've created some kind of imaginary outgroup, where you set the parameters as to who belongs within that out group and who doesn't, and you've, you've designated them as morally reprehensible lives unworthy of life, and, you know, criminal to the core and irredeemable. Then you're you're also looking at a movement that is going to, of course, you know, put people into that category at will. And this is going to serve as a proxy for all their other prejudices and irrationalities to the point that, you know, they're going to disguise any type of bigotry they have as being attached to this. And so if you allow, you know, a Satanic Panic to persist, you're still very much contributing to xenophobia, racism, anti LGBTQ movements in the like, who simply take take those elements and just plug them into into their imaginary satanic sets. And they go about then, oppressing people at will thereafter, it's no small thing, you know, in Nazi Germany was predicated on a conspiracy theory. You know, conspiracy theories aren't these kinds of little whimsical eccentricities, where at the end of the day, people are doing this kind of noble thing by by questioning the government as some people like to present it as but as as you see, in the case of Q Anon, they're very much lining up behind and corrupt administration, but still, still imagining themselves on the outside of that kind of authoritarian movement, and somehow the rebels against it, but really, they're the highly persuadable army that's been sold a complete complete fraud.

Stephen Bradford Long 13:38 Do you feel like so Another criticism that I hear on occasion is, and this actually came up today on my Discord. And, you know, I have been personally talking about Q anon quite a bit on this podcast, because I think it's fascinating. Do you think that we're giving it oxygen by talking about it publicly? You know,

Doug Misicko 14:01 it's gonna set point. Yeah, there's, there's there's that fear, I think when something's at a lower level than Q Anon, but at this point, I think it's really it's important to talk about q&a at the point where we actually have people heading into potential political office where they're openly endorsing this ridiculous conspiracy theory. It's it's time to confront it headlong. And it's also time to stop pretending that it's a legitimate point of view. Beyond that, I mean, it is something we should talk about and confront. But we really shouldn't be open and pointing out to people that they these are really bizarre and not intellectually coherent ideas by any stretch of the imagination, because I get that criticism sometimes where people say is does it really help for you to call this stupid as often as you do? And the answer is, I don't really know but Mmm, maybe it does. You know, I don't want people to think that I think there is any intellectual credibility to something as stupid as Q anon. I mean, I really can't help but I look at it and I think this is stupidity. And to call it anything else or to say that doesn't it is stupid as to redefine stupidity to me to the point where I can't recognize it any longer. You know, I look at the q&a material and it is so divorced from reality. So gullible, and so embarrassingly simplified. And in its application of logic,

Stephen Bradford Long 15:41 I need to not assume that everyone listening is quite as you know, internet basement dwelling people as much as we are. So for people who might not know what Q anon is, I need to clarify. So Q anon is oh god, how to even explain it. Q anon is the belief that there is a poster named Q on 4chan, who is leaving cryptic messages and he is a deep state member in Trump's administration or something and that Trump has actually kind of this freedom fighter for trying to fight the pedophiles and cannibals who are torturing children and then eating their Audrina Chrome for the for the Head Rush, so yeah, it's it's fucking nuts. And you I don't know if you're familiar with the book them by Jon Ronson. It came out I think in the early 2000s. But Jon Ronson, you know, one of the points that Jon Ronson talks about is how every extreme you know, he went and hung out with extremists and every extremist group that that he hung out with he he detected a a central conspiracy theory with every extremist group. And so be it, you know, white nationalists, the Ku Klux Klan radical Islamic terrorists, or, you know, crazy cuz you know, you know, crazy off the grid militia people. And he basically basically, the thesis of the book them, and I highly recommend everyone read it is that at the heart of every extremist movement is a conspiracy theory. And maybe that's an essentializing thing to say. But I do think that that usually holds up to scrutiny.

Doug Misicko 17:29 I do have an optimistic take, though. And it's not necessarily the point of view I subscribe to but this is how you could look at this optimistically. And it's, I feel a plausible scenario, but we shall see. And that is that Q movement just kind of takes things too far to the point where, you know, this will have to bring in sort of leveling off and things had been being pushed further and further towards irrationality and conspiracy theory. And hopefully, there's kind of a breaking point where the pendulum starts to swing the other way. But one thing that Q anon movement started doing is hijacking the Save the Children hashtag Yeah. Which people have been associating with fighting child trafficking and that kind of thing. And what the what most people writing about this haven't realized is that this has been happening since the original Satanic Panic. This is how the ISS TD has survived, while still propagating ridiculous conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, that at the end of the day, they'll paint themselves as being merely defenders for victims of human trafficking and that kind of thing. Nobody's going to argue against you, if you're trying to, if you're claiming that that's the core of your mission. And, of course, I don't think they have as much of an interest at all and actually combating human trafficking or anything of the type. It's more that they're using this movement as a shield against scrutiny towards their rational, idiotic claims. And you can see this this kind of effect happening in a lot of different places where somebody will attach themselves to a cause, or some kind of organization will pop up in the name of a certain cause. And because the cause is just, it doesn't allow for any conversation or expert exploration regarding their tactics. Their tactics must be sound because their their alignment with a certain issue is is is perfectly calibrated, or whatever. And I think we were seeing that on the left too. We're seeing people claim that so long as they believe in this certain cause their behavior is justified or their tactics must be working and to even ask like Like what good they're actually doing besides grandstanding, you know, often is supposed to place you on the other side of the issue entirely. And I'm hoping that after this example of Q Anon, that people start to think more clearly about just saying, it's not enough to say that you're against child trafficking or something like that, it's not enough to say you're, for science, it's not enough to say that you're the Woman's March or whatever else, you actually have to have some kind of theory of change some plan of action, you have to, you have to kind of prove yourself out in the field, you have to really be have a coherent message towards getting the world to a place where you want it to be, you have to be advancing this mission somehow, before everybody can claim allegiance to you in the name of that, that cause. And I think if that happens, we'll be doing a lot better off because I feel like progressive causes have been really crippled by just moral grandstanding without a whole lot of action behind it.

Stephen Bradford Long 21:03 Yeah. So I'm really glad that you bring that up, because that has been kind of an ongoing conversation lately on my podcast, and on my patrons only podcast house of heretics. And I want to pivot more to that topic of the left every week, every other day or so I post one of the tenets of the Satanic Temple from my morning meditation. And you know, I quote The Tenet, and just asked my audience, well, what does this mean for you today, and the fourth, tenet always causes a bit of anxiety for people, which is the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend, to willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forego your own. So, this, this particular tenant has always been challenging for a lot of people. And so I posted this today. And some people responded, like, this is the one tenant that I really, really, really struggle with. And I, you know, we are living in a climate where the riots in the protests are still going on. Just a few days ago, an unarmed man was shot in the back seven times unarmed black man was shot in the back by the cops seven times. Right. And and so there there are, and there are more protests, and it's just this heated tense time. And we're also living on the internet. And where, where does, where does this tenant fit? In your, in your view? It right now, here? And now how do we how, how do we navigate this tenet? In times of of protest and times when it when when you know, we're dealing with Nazis on the internet? And that's the question that I get a lot.

Doug Misicko 22:53 Right. Well, but i What's ironic is that I see the situations we're in and I see that I kind of see it as affirming how vital that tenant is, especially at the point where, you know, you have people tearing down Confederate memorials. And then you have this uprising of conservatives saying, well, if these Confederate memorials can be torn down, because they're offensive, why can't we tear down the Baphomet? Monument? You know, because we're offended by that. And the fact of the matter is, is people aren't protesting, because they're offended. They're protesting because people are getting fucking murdered on the street. To say we're offended is not enough. That's never enough of an argument, to say you've created an imminent threat to somebody that you've that you've put somebody's life in danger, or that you've slandered somebody's reputation, based on completely, completely false information, fabrications, lies or whatever. That's totally different than saying that something merely offends you. And I think in identifying as a Satanist people should realize that just the act of doing that is offensive to people. The act of our participation in anything is offensive to some people and even see people trying to justify their revolt against our our symbols being placed anywhere on public grounds or anything on the grounds that on this kind of dissonant logic that though they agree with with religious freedom.

Stephen Bradford Long 24:41 Yeah, so dear audience, we just had a technical glitch that just derailed what it was that we were talking about. And now neither of us can remember what it was that we were talking about. So, okay, yeah, so So I guess hearing Okay, here's the question that was coming into my mind as as you were Talking is where do we draw? How do we determine what is the line between offense and abuse? Like, how do we determine that? And I think that's what a lot of people struggle with when it comes to this tenant, like, like, how does this apply to, say, 14 Nazis? How does this apply to, to people with really reprehensible beliefs?

Doug Misicko 25:27 Yeah, I mean, the thing about people with reprehensible beliefs is I don't think that preventing them from talking about those beliefs in any forum, one prevents them from talking about those beliefs. And two, I don't think it prevents them from from even recruiting or, or maintaining those beliefs. So I think, you know, what we've really seen in recent times, because I really think the kind of free speech standards we've had for generations now have served us well, in where, you know, we don't we don't allow somebody to say that something needs to be censored merely because it is offensive. But we do say that, you know, this is a direct provocation to violence. You know, this is this is libelous, or slanderous. And and there's kind of a burden of proof to show that they actually are that in these in this isn't so open to subjective, subjective interpretation, that it can just kind of go with whatever the politics are, or the person that judging it in the moment. And in that way, we try to keep things neutral and principled. But I think things are different now. Because the idea of the open place of the open marketplace of ideas has been corrupted by social media companies like Facebook, Intuit, a degree, Twitter as well and

Stephen Bradford Long 26:54 Google with Yeah, and Google with their search engines and the algorithms of their search engines, too.

Doug Misicko 27:00 Right, right. Yeah, no, exactly. And people feel like they're getting neutral information when they're not. But also, the direct targeting of misinformation to the people most willing to embrace it. And most easily persuaded by it is really cutting out the marketplace of ideas, because a lot of us aren't seeing the conspiracist materials that are going directly to Trump voters and other other people in those far right circles who are seeing this stuff, feeling that it's entirely normalized. And really not exposed to the other point of view to the point where we really do have people in this kind of insular online environment further and further down a spiral into extremism, that I do think would be mitigated if the entire business model of say Facebook was entirely gutted, in the way that they did not keep private data on every user, the kind of information that they they collect in detail and shouldn't have at all, and that they also use so people can directly market their messages to them. I think the the reprehensible business model of Facebook is really destroying our kind of marketplace of ideas. And it's, it really has come time to regulate these things. But I think the answer is not giving even more increased powers to Google and Facebook to a judge political content and things like that. I just think they shouldn't be allowed to, to target their marketing like they do. Yeah. And I think then we'll be able to, to confront ludicrous ideas that some people I think, come across and don't even realize how many people would find it ludicrous or don't naturally embrace the kind of information that would disabuse them of their their delusions?

Stephen Bradford Long 29:05 Yeah. And honestly, it's one of the reasons why I podcast because I feel like podcasts are one of the really one of the last, you know, frontiers of free speech on the internet where you can have these long form conversations. And and they aren't quite as mediated by the platforms that they are on, you know, Lipson and pod bean. You know, I'm sure that they do some mediation, and this might actually be changing with Spotify, suddenly eating up all of the podcasts everywhere, you know, they just got a multimillion dollar deal with Joe Rogan exclusive for Joe, you know, with Joe Rogan on Spotify. last podcast on the left is exclusively on pot on Spotify. So, so this might change with Spotify and have some kind of social media model there. But I love podcasts because I feel like it's one of those last places where the market of ideas can actually exist on the internet, more so than on other platforms? Not perfectly, but more so than on other platforms. So I guess my question at this point is, do you feel like the left has a hard time judging the difference between offense and abuse? Right now, when it comes to speech?

Doug Misicko 30:20 I don't, I don't really know, I see a lot of people. The problem is, I see a lot of people making bold statements without a whole lot of examples, you know,

Stephen Bradford Long 30:31 about the left or from the left? From everywhere, okay, you know,

Doug Misicko 30:35 so yeah, people will decry what they call free speech absolutism. And to say that it's a, you know, now, you know, being a centrist has become this terrible thing as well. Where, you know, the idea is, if you support free speech, you're merely protecting Nazis or something, because apparently, the thinking is that if you have, you know, stronger censorship standards, that they're going to be the only ones who are going to be taken down by this, and that this couldn't possibly be abused. And that's just not how legal standards like this exist. You know, it's not how they how they work, you have to be worried that once somebody puts, you know, more prohibitive standards in place that other people are going to be accused of offenses, they have nothing to do with if you're not careful, if you don't care if we narrowly defined those things. And I think what everybody should see from their understanding of the Satanic Temple, if we even have just a rudimentary understanding of our history, you'll see how we've taken religious liberty rulings and use them to our benefit in ways that obviously, weren't probably intended by the people who are pushing for those kinds of exemptions or privileges for religion. And you always have to think if you're working in a system that is supposed to apply laws by principles, how does this work the other way? Yeah, so if you're going to say that we should be able to censor offensive material that people feel marginalizes them, you have to realize that that can that just leaving it that is easily going to throw the Satanic Temple under the bus? Because yeah,

Stephen Bradford Long 32:23 it's about who watches the watchmen who like, right, like, yeah, there isn't,

Doug Misicko 32:27 there isn't a religion in the world that can't claim itself a religious minority? You know, yes, Catholics are going to say that they're there. They're directly oppressed by what we do and paint themselves as religious minorities. And they have done that, whenever we've done events or whatever, say that we and they liken us to, to a hate group, you know, that's trying to, to marginalize and oppress them. And because they're offended, we should be censored from what we do. And if you're not careful with how you construct your arguments, so those kinds of things, you're going to have these kinds of unintended consequences, when we were talking about a controversial lawyer we worked with, because he defended a publisher who publish neo Nazi materials. I mean, he's not a good guy, you know, piece of shit. But he was defended on the grounds that the legal theory was a dangerous precedent to set, you know that he published stuff in awhile, he wasn't calling for anybody to get hurt. So this inspired people to do hateful things towards somebody in particular, and, you know, it worked in prosecuting this person. And the fear was, is that that was kind of an overly broad argument. And now, that argument is being used against some organizers of Black Lives Matter who supposedly their rhetoric is causing other people to hurt the police and things like that. And these aren't, this isn't an obscure case, anytime. I mean, this kind of situation isn't isn't unheard of, Anytime you open that door and say, All right, we got to crack down on this, the other side is going to be seeing how they can benefit from that as well. And you really, you really need to define things to to the point where you simply cannot say that somebody else's subjective interpretation, that something is offensive is enough in and of itself to say that something should be censored, there has to be more to it than that somebody you know, there has to be some tangible sense of physical danger attached to that there has to be some real measurable damage, damage done beyond that in not even I don't know how to say it, but you also have to account for the fact that, you know, if the truth is spoken, sometimes you can't hold the truth speaker responsible for the damage that causes either, you know, like, if I'm writing a great fiction article about a clinician or therapist who's engaged in egregious malpractice, you know, they can't just simply say that this makes them look bad. So you can't do that either in that saying that that protect Killer argument applies to any of the situations we were talking about earlier. But these are all these kinds of things you need to keep in mind. So, you know, you need to really come up with standards that address all of this and really narrowly define what you're what you're looking for when you're talking about restricting anything any further, or it's gonna have negative ramifications.

Stephen Bradford Long 35:21 Yeah, you know, I approach free speech as a queer person, you know, I am a degenerate faggot. And there are so many people who would like to see me burn, you know, there are so many people who see my very existence as highly offensive. And, and what I am worried about is setting a precedent for policing just based on offense, you know, policing someone's speech just policing. So because who watches the watchmen when there's a change of power? When you know how, who will be the first people to be on the fucking firing squad? Like for real, it's going to be minorities? I mean, I don't mean that. I mean, that metaphorically? Who are going to be the first people who are the victims of, of that kind of precedent? When the tables turn, it's going to be people like me?

Doug Misicko 36:13 Well, the thing that really perplexes me is that these calls for more limitations on speech seem to have really been on the rise during the Trump administration. So who they're asking to be the watchmen in this case is a mystery to me. And I don't know why, you know, if we're looking for some kind of federal law against hate speech, or whatever else, why we would want to do that, while this administration sits. I mean, Trump has already indicated that he feels like that I even think he feels that Black Lives Matter is on the verge of a terrorist organization.

Stephen Bradford Long 36:51 Right? And if we don't have a like, Yeah, I mean, looking at what what counts is a violation of free speech, threats to violence, libel and slander. I think those are the big three, right? Violence, libel and slander. Those are the big three, I can't I don't know, what beyond those three, would would be applicable, you know, like, I don't know what beyond those would be applicable without it, turning around and, and, and biting us in the ass and, and ultimately marginalizing people who are marginalized to begin with.

Doug Misicko 37:27 Yeah, but again, I think people are responding to something that they don't necessarily keep up on the complexities of, but, and I don't think people really fully grasp how unbalanced the information ecosystem has become with the rise of social media and the fact that people really, by and large, get their news from the social media platforms that they frequent now, and they do that without an understanding necessarily, that their feeds are curated and cultivated by the algorithms that are meant to further reinforce what they already seem to believe in in that way. Our social media platforms really have become extremism machines, where they keep pushing people towards a certain direction, they keep giving them more and more bombastic content, skewed radically over to one side or the other in a way that makes make some more radical, extreme seem normal to people. It normalizes this in such a way that that we're at the place that we are now which I feel like you know, 15 years ago would have been unheard of, you know, I know, you know, back then, for me the idea that we would even need to be talking about Neo Nazis as a as a present threat was, you know,

Stephen Bradford Long 38:54 fucking insane. So, okay, yeah, an example of, of social media feeds distorting people's worldview, or disporting, distorting people's perspectives, okay. I just stumbled across this thing on the internet last night or two nights ago, and I'm super frustrated by it, and I haven't vented to anyone about it. So, Lucien, I'm going to vent to you about it. Okay. So there's this, there's this little cartoon that came out shortly after the Charlottesville rally, the white nationalist Charlottesville rally back when that happened. So this has been around for several years. And this became a really, really, really popular meme. And it's a little cartoon of a quote from Karl Popper from a footnote in one of his books, and Karl Popper, of course, fucking legend. He, you know, he's a genius, philosophy of science, political philosophy, all kinds of stuff. I mean, just an absolutely brilliant person, but, but it was a cartoon with this quote, and it's about the parrot what popper calls the paradox of tolerance. And so, here's the quote from the cartoon should A tolerant society tolerate intolerance? The answer is no, it's a paradox. But unlimited tolerance can lead to the extinction of tolerance. When we extend tolerance to those who are openly intolerant, the tolerant ones end up being destroyed and tolerance with them. Any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law, as paradoxical as it may seem, defending tolerance requires to not tolerate the intolerant. Okay, so reading that that looks like a that looks like a big glaring loophole in the rules of free speech, right? That, like, here's this eminent philosopher who's who is one of the best thinkers about, you know, civil society, basically saying, well, if someone's espousing terrible ideas, then then here's this loophole. And I've heard so many leftist people, you know, I watch a lot of leftist YouTubers, so many of them have, have suddenly been talking about the paradox of tolerance. Well, so the other day, I went back and I read the full quote, and here's how he ends. Here's how Karl Popper ins this footnote that so that he goes on later to say, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check. by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise, but we should claim the right to suppress them, if necessary, even by force, for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument. But begin by denouncing all argument, they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument because it is deceptive and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerance. So basically, what he's saying is it it isn't this, it was painted on the internet, in leftist spaces of Karl Popper the paradox of tolerance as being this exemption to speech that we find distasteful, right to too far right, or to homophobic or to this or to that. But if you and that's all people saw of that quote, and it became gospel, that's all people saw of that quote, but no one took the time to fucking read the rest of the footnote. And the rest of the footnote is actually Karl Popper saying something that's just really fucking obvious with that, that is, that is actually pretty obvious. Like the Allies during World War Two, they were enacting the paradox of tolerance by fighting against Hitler, because Hitler was committing acts of violence, that it and he says, you know, we should not suppress speech, we should. So basically, he's saying we should tolerate intolerance, up to a point up to a point that it becomes violent anyway, I just had to yell about that for a few minutes, because it was so fucking annoying when I found that.

Doug Misicko 43:10 Yeah, but, you know, I was saying the problem of really narrowly defining what you do and do not allow in making sure that you don't leave that too terribly flexible. A good kind of case study in that is looking at like the redefinition of religious freedom now, you know, it's in the name of tolerance, that the theocrats now try to paint their hope of homophobic point of views, you know, they're not homophobic, they're not they're not discriminate against anybody they're being discriminated against, because these are their deeply held beliefs, you know, they, they believe that this is a sin or whatever. So even, you know, people having their their homosexual lifestyle or whatever lifestyle choices they they painted out to be as part of the homosexual agenda or whatever it is, is, in some way, oppressing them. And this is this is a terribly long stretch. But this is that's the point they brought it to now they've stretched it that far, you know, and they will make those arguments. And you will see the lawyers for like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council are they're going to be making those kinds of arguments all the time. And when you open the door and say that we're not going to tolerate intolerance. Well, there again, too, you're going to see the Satanic Temple being charged with merely doing what we do in the name of intolerance and having people putting words in our mouths, you know, and if you give people that's my real fear when you start censoring people, is you start leaving it open to somebody's interpretation to tell other people what other parties mean by what they say. Yeah, you know, I feel like if there were standards in place, blasphemy, anti blasphemy standards and in hate speech restrictions that would have caused the Satanic Temple to be signed. Since from the beginning, people would never know what we were really about. And we would always be denigrated as this movement that was particularly meant to, you know, just take a shit upon true believers and make the world a less safe place for them. And I don't like to take anybody's word for it about where somebody stands on issues, especially if we're talking about doing anything that that might directly harm their, their reputation, their lives or whatever, you know.

Stephen Bradford Long 45:31 Absolutely. All right. Well, that is it for this show. This conversation with illusion went quite long. So I'm actually splitting this up into two episodes. So stay tuned next week for part two of my conversation with Lucien Greaves where we take some questions from my audience. This show is written produced and edited by me Steven Bradford long the music is by the jelly rocks and eleventy seven you can find them on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to music. The artwork is by Rama Krishna Das and this is a production of rock candy recordings as always, Hail Satan and we'll see you next week say something I

Doug Misicko 46:39 don't think. People

Stephen Bradford Long 47:59 Go. You