Speaker 1: Alzo Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
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Speaker 3: Hello everybody, and welcome to it could happen here. This
Speaker 3: is Sharene and I am so excited to be joined
Speaker 3: by author and journalist Sim Kern. Their latest novel, The
Speaker 3: Free People's Village is available now, so go to your
Speaker 3: local bookstore and order it and support a voice that
Speaker 3: I believe we all need in our zeitgeist right now.
Speaker 3: So welcome Sim. Thank you so much for being here,
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me. For those of you who don't know,
Speaker 3: Sim has been making videos recently about the genocide and
Speaker 3: Gaza from a queer Jewish anti Zionist perspective, and this
Speaker 3: is one that I think a lot of people need
Speaker 3: to be exposed to and to listen to. I mentioned
Speaker 3: this to you before the recording, but a Jewish friend
Speaker 3: of mine told me how much she connected with your
Speaker 3: voice and how much she's learned from you, and how
Speaker 3: your videos have been helping her approach really awkward and
Speaker 3: difficult conversations with her peers. So I appreciate you very much.
Speaker 1: Happy to do whatever I can when.
Speaker 3: You decided to start making like the first video that
Speaker 3: got a lot of attention, like were you seeing something
Speaker 3: that you wanted to like make sure you correct in
Speaker 3: the zeitgeist, like what was your perspective as a Jewish person?
Speaker 4: Well, this is the first video that I made, was
Speaker 4: encouraging people to read books by Palestinian authors, just to
Speaker 4: learn about the Palestinian perspective which is so often censored
Speaker 4: and not really allowed in our media. And also is
Speaker 4: you really have to go seek out in publishing. And
Speaker 4: this isn't the first time I've done this since I
Speaker 4: think twenty seventeen or something was the first time I
Speaker 4: created Read for Palestine challenge on YouTube. And just creating
Speaker 4: this Read for Palestine challenge was enough to get me
Speaker 4: put on the Canary Mission website.
Speaker 1: I'm like outed as a.
Speaker 4: Anti semi by this very zionist website that of course
Speaker 4: is a blocklist of mostly students who organize with like
Speaker 4: Students for Justice in Palestine and really anyone who speaks
Speaker 4: out publicly against Israeli apartheid. So simply like encouraging people
Speaker 4: to read these books, I think is really powerful. And
Speaker 4: I know for me, growing up Jewish in the United States,
Speaker 4: I was just inundated with a lot of Zionist propaganda
Speaker 4: from my more conservative family. My more liberal family would
Speaker 4: take the line of like, it's just very complicated, both
Speaker 4: sides hate each other, who can say who's right? And
Speaker 4: it was only by reading Palestinian voices that I really
Speaker 4: developed an anti Zionist perspective.
Speaker 3: That's awesome that you did the Read for Palestine challenge,
Speaker 3: but also like not surprising about the Canary Mission thing, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: but I'm glad that that didn't stop you or discourage
Speaker 3: you when you start to learn more about Palestine. How
Speaker 3: did you approach conversations with your friends and family?
Speaker 4: Again, Like I guess initially it's different talking to friends
Speaker 4: and family than it is talking to the internet. Honestly,
Speaker 4: it's much easier, I think sometimes to connect with the
Speaker 4: Internet because it is not that like personal connection. I
Speaker 4: think I've made more headway and had a much greater
Speaker 4: impact online than I have with certain friends and family members.
Speaker 4: But you know, I do think that everyone having those conversations,
Speaker 4: putting your beliefs out there, whether it's one on one
Speaker 4: in face to face conversations or whether it is doing
Speaker 4: it online, where like certainly your friends and family are
Speaker 4: going to see the things that you're posting and the
Speaker 4: things that you care about, it has a great impact.
Speaker 4: And like I've definitely noticed friends of mine over time
Speaker 4: who maybe a few intense bombing campaigns ago, were very
Speaker 4: checked out on this issue are now very.
Speaker 1: Active and are and are speaking out themselves.
Speaker 4: And so that's I guess that would be my message
Speaker 4: to other like anti Zionist Jews is even if the
Speaker 4: first time you're putting stuff out there about Palestine it
Speaker 4: feels like no one's listening, and it feels like, you know,
Speaker 4: you're not making a difference over time, you're planting the
Speaker 4: seeds of like questioning the Western media's you know, pro
Speaker 4: Israeli perspective over time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really really good point. But my friend
Speaker 3: also mentioned she would never have been exposed to your
Speaker 3: voice if I if I didn't share it, or people
Speaker 3: were not sharing it. So I think people really underestimate
Speaker 3: the value of social media sometimes or speaking up on
Speaker 3: social media, they're just like, oh, people are already talking
Speaker 3: about it or whatever. But everyone has a community they
Speaker 3: can reach that no one else can reach. So I
Speaker 3: think that's important to remember. You made some points in
Speaker 3: some videos that you made that I would love for
Speaker 3: you to not like regurgitate, but maybe just like cover
Speaker 3: for people that haven't watched your videos or are just unaware.
Speaker 3: In general, I think a really important point you made
Speaker 3: was how suffering is not monopolized or exclusive or any
Speaker 3: worse or better than other people suffering if regardless of
Speaker 3: what identity they are. Can you get into that a
Speaker 3: little bit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I made a video that was actually responding
Speaker 4: to a comment by someone saying like, how dare you
Speaker 4: compare the suffering of Palestinians to the suffering of Jews?
Speaker 4: How dare you compare genocides? That that's disgusting and that
Speaker 4: cheapens the Holocaust? And that was again I think responding
Speaker 4: to a video or I was saying, like, read about
Speaker 4: other genocides besides the Holocaust, because I think it again,
Speaker 4: as a Jewish American, I grew up steeped in Holocaust literature.
Speaker 1: I read every book I could about it.
Speaker 4: You know, I think a lot of Jewish kids, by
Speaker 4: the time more adolescents we have like this PhD level
Speaker 4: knowledge of the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: I think that our.
Speaker 4: Peers who are non Jewish maybe don't have quite as
Speaker 4: much exposure and understanding of the Holocaust. But that is
Speaker 4: often the only genocide that is taught in US schools,
Speaker 4: and so there's a narrative that the suffering of the
Speaker 4: Jews and the persecution of Jews is uniquely specific, and
Speaker 4: that it was all about the religion. It's something about
Speaker 4: Judaism itself is why.
Speaker 1: We've been persecuted.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 4: As an author, I currently I'm writing a book on
Speaker 4: Jews in the seventeenth century, and I've just done a
Speaker 4: ton of research on medieval and early modern Jewish history.
Speaker 4: And of course there was religious hate, but it was
Speaker 4: motivated by and I contended in this video that all
Speaker 4: genocides are motivated by land and wealth and power, and
Speaker 4: the hate is manufactured by people in power to justify
Speaker 4: taking people's land and wealth to solidify their own power
Speaker 4: as rulers and the Christian Church use this against.
Speaker 1: Jews in the medieval and early.
Speaker 4: Modern period and in our times it's, uh, there there's
Speaker 4: no one religion that has a monopoly. I'm committing genocide,
Speaker 4: you know, there's no one state. And because really it's
Speaker 4: states that are that are committing genocide that you know,
Speaker 4: it's not directed to one people. So I've encouraged people
Speaker 4: to read books about here in the United States, obviously
Speaker 4: the genocide of the Native peoples, the Congolese genocide. You know,
Speaker 4: I just recommended a couple of different titles on the
Speaker 4: Rwandan genocide for a more recent example. And uh it
Speaker 4: is I reject the framework that you can't make comparisons
Speaker 4: between genocides. I think that keeps us ignorant. I think
Speaker 4: that keeps us from being in solidarity with one another
Speaker 4: and understanding the mechanisms of power and control and wealth
Speaker 4: accumulation that underlie all these genocides. And I do believe
Speaker 4: what is happening in Palestine right now is a genocide
Speaker 4: being committed by the Israeli state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also really good point about justifying it by
Speaker 3: creating all of people in Palestine as barbarians or terrorists
Speaker 3: or this rhetoric that becomes really dangerous and harmful and
Speaker 3: as we've seen, like people can die, A sixty year
Speaker 3: old can die from this rhetoric.
Speaker 4: Right, and Yahoo just said this is a struggle between
Speaker 4: children of light and children of darkness like that genocidal rhetoric.
Speaker 3: I cannot believe that tweet. And I mean he deleted it,
Speaker 3: but I mean the internet is forever. I just can't
Speaker 3: believe that was that is so normal for him to
Speaker 3: tweet just confidently at one point, just to say that
Speaker 3: out loud. I think that's absurd. And also just like
Speaker 3: to see how Yov Galant has been saying like human
Speaker 3: animals or referring to Palestinians in such a dehumanizing way.
Speaker 3: You mentioned something really important that I think I appreciated
Speaker 3: about how maintaining the dehumanization of the Palestinians is vital
Speaker 3: to maintain the white supremacist, imperialistic thing that is Israel.
Speaker 3: Can you get into that a little bit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, I think that was me trying. That came
Speaker 4: out of me trying to understand why there was such
Speaker 4: backlash when I first when I first years ago started
Speaker 4: recommending people read Palestinian books. Is because when you read
Speaker 4: a book by a Palestinian author, it is going to
Speaker 4: humanize the Palestinian people for you, and that is incredibly threatening.
Speaker 4: And Palestinian authors face a ton of discrimination within publishing.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at what was it.
Speaker 4: Earlier this week the Frankfurt Book Festival polled or canceled
Speaker 4: a ceremony for a Palestinian author, Adania Shibley, and then
Speaker 4: has made more time for Israeli voices and Israeli specific
Speaker 4: panels that book festival. And simply because she is a Palestinian.
Speaker 4: She writes books dealing with real, factual Palestinian history, and
Speaker 4: her books are critical of Israel. But the silencing of
Speaker 4: Palestinian voices is a global project. It is across all
Speaker 4: media industries. You see it in you know, traditional book
Speaker 4: publishing as well as journalism. Another an author friend of mine,
Speaker 4: Hanin Ricott, has had the hardest time. She's been on
Speaker 4: sub with her book and she's been told by multiple
Speaker 4: editors to change the main character from a Palestinian character
Speaker 4: to just a generic Arabic character because being Palestinian is
Speaker 4: seen as inherently too controversial to publish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I read that. That's just I mean, again not
Speaker 3: completely surprised, but just so shameful that that is something
Speaker 3: that is still happening in these modern times. I think
Speaker 3: another thing to remember is a lot of people get
Speaker 3: confused between the differences between being non white and white
Speaker 3: in the scope of like this world. I guess it
Speaker 3: just seems so obvious that colorism and racism both exist
Speaker 3: in today's world. And I really liked what you mentioned
Speaker 3: about the difference between colorism and racism. Can you talk
Speaker 3: about that for a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I was explaining that in the Western media,
Speaker 4: Israelis are treated as white and Palestinians are treated as
Speaker 4: non white, and it really is regardless of the color
Speaker 4: of your skin. So a lot of people giving me
Speaker 4: pushback on that common say, oh, but there's black and
Speaker 4: brown and white Israelis. Yes, and in the racist apartheid
Speaker 4: state that is Israel, people of different skin tones are
Speaker 4: treated very differently. Within Israel, there was four sterilization of
Speaker 4: African Jews immigrating to Israel. Well, when it comes to
Speaker 4: the Western media, our view of the conflict is not
Speaker 4: as nuanced as recognizing those differences. And so I was
Speaker 4: explaining that colorism is, you know, discrimination based on the
Speaker 4: color of your skin. Racism is a racial construct us
Speaker 4: about social economic and legal discrimination. And while colorism is
Speaker 4: often used to determine racism, that's not always one hundred
Speaker 4: percent the case. And in the case of Israel, when
Speaker 4: you're talking about the Western media looking at Israel, they
Speaker 4: report on Israelis as people, as people who are to
Speaker 4: be mourned, as people are whose deaths are important, as
Speaker 4: people whose lives are valuable, And they report on people
Speaker 4: in Gaza Palestinians as you know, human shields is the
Speaker 4: most sympathetic way we hear them talked about. Their deaths
Speaker 4: are not deemed important, They are not humanized within the media.
Speaker 4: If they're killed, they're either combatants or they were a
Speaker 4: human shield. They were someone being used by combatants, and
Speaker 4: their deaths are you know, maybe the lip services paid
Speaker 4: to those debts being regrettable, but they're seen as necessary
Speaker 4: and not not unconscionable in the way that deaths in
Speaker 4: Israel are reported on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you bring a really good point about
Speaker 3: the media and how important semantics are. I think something
Speaker 3: that we've been seeing time and time again is how
Speaker 3: deep the dehumanization goes. Like Israelis have been killed versus
Speaker 3: Palestinians have died. The Gaza strip is being referred to.
Speaker 4: I've seen it as an enclave, Oh my god, you know,
Speaker 4: an enclave where terrorists lurk. So yeah, the words used
Speaker 4: to describe the city of Gaza, the words used to
Speaker 4: describe people as combatants, the words like, you know, Palestinians
Speaker 4: die in a clash, when that clash was racist Jewish
Speaker 4: settlers with machine guns coming after them, you know.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, passive always.
Speaker 6: Does a lot of work, it does.
Speaker 7: It does.
Speaker 3: I mean, we've seen it just recently with the hospital bombing.
Speaker 3: How the New York Times changed their headline like three
Speaker 3: times from strike and then to blast I believe was
Speaker 3: what they landed on blast, which I just find honestly
Speaker 3: comical when I really think about it too hard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Elizabeth Warren came out and condemned blasts.
Speaker 5: Like that is just so.
Speaker 3: Just the passive voice is so dangerous because it really
Speaker 3: it really off use case the truth, which is that
Speaker 3: Palestine people are dying of genocide. Even calling it a
Speaker 3: war or a conflict does not do what's happening justice
Speaker 3: because it still implies there are two equal sides that
Speaker 3: are fighting against each other, versus an occupier and oppressor
Speaker 3: versus the occupied the oppressed. So I think semantics are
Speaker 3: so important for us to keep in mind even when
Speaker 3: we're talking about it with our peers, to make sure
Speaker 3: that we talk about it in the correct way, because
Speaker 3: I like, unconsciously becomes ingrained in us, even if we
Speaker 3: don't realize it when we keep talking about certain things
Speaker 3: the way the media wants us to talk about them
Speaker 3: as a conflict or as a clash or whatever it is.
Speaker 4: And something else that I've really tuned into is really
Speaker 4: being careful not to pit this as a struggle between
Speaker 4: Muslims and Jews. Any framing like that is both Islamophobic
Speaker 4: and anti Semitic and incredibly inaccurate. This is about an
Speaker 4: ethno state, a nation state, and apartheid state, which is
Speaker 4: Israel targeting is captive population. And and there are Palestinians
Speaker 4: who are of all different faiths who are discriminated against
Speaker 4: because they are Palestinians within occupied Palestine. So like, for example,
Speaker 4: it just came to my attention that there are some
Speaker 4: in the I'm a book talker. My book talk channel,
Speaker 4: it's in books Instagram is mostly what I do is
Speaker 4: just you know, share about books for folks to read
Speaker 4: and share about the books I'm working on, and some
Speaker 4: of my fellow book talkers have been recommending people read
Speaker 4: books by both Palestinian and Jewish authors so they can
Speaker 4: show both sides. A Paladinian author, Hanna Mushback, just wrote
Speaker 4: a great letter to sort of call in our community
Speaker 4: and explain this is this is very antisemitic to conflate
Speaker 4: Judaism with Israel, the policies of Israel. You know, yesterday
Speaker 4: we saw five hundred Jewish activists get arrested in the
Speaker 4: Capitol building here in d C. In protests and demanding
Speaker 4: an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. So there are many many
Speaker 4: anti Zionist Jews. Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing,
Speaker 4: but conflating them gives Israel more power and gives it
Speaker 4: a stronger moral foothold to say, oh, we're representing all Jews,
Speaker 4: not just this this state. So that's something also to
Speaker 4: be really careful about, is to not pit this as
Speaker 4: a Muslim versus Jewish fight, because it's not. It's about Israel,
Speaker 4: the state versus Palestinian people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's vital to remember. Let's take our first break
Speaker 3: right here, and we will beat right back, and we
Speaker 3: are back, you were just talking about how this is
Speaker 3: just one hundred percent not a religious issue, and I
Speaker 3: think talking about semantics again, I framing it as a
Speaker 3: religious issue is another way for people to stop talking
Speaker 3: about it, to be too afraid to get into this complicated,
Speaker 3: ancient battle of all times, archaic thing that we can't
Speaker 3: even get into because we can't understand it. I think
Speaker 3: the Zionist narrative wants us to believe it's about religion
Speaker 3: so people can ignore what's actually going on and be
Speaker 3: too scared to speak out. It's like time and time
Speaker 3: again something that I want to remind people that it's
Speaker 3: not Muslim versus Jewish, which is what it gets framed
Speaker 3: by most of the time. But speaking of Zionism and
Speaker 3: how it's not equated to the Jewish religion at all.
Speaker 3: If anything, Zionism is anti Semitic in and of itself.
Speaker 4: I believe that wholeheartedly. I believe Zionism makes all Jews
Speaker 4: so much more unsafe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's also rooted in a lot of anti Semitism.
Speaker 3: Even the way it was even the way the state
Speaker 3: of Israel was created, was Europeans being like, hey, Jews,
Speaker 3: can you go here? It wasn't this gift to the
Speaker 3: Jewish people. It was also about to be in Africa,
Speaker 3: which I find fascinating. And also I think people always
Speaker 3: forget the majority of Zionists in the United States are
Speaker 3: Evangelical Christians. That is one percent accurate. That's why they
Speaker 3: support Zionism, and it's because they want all the Jews
Speaker 3: to go to Israel for the rapture to happen. It
Speaker 3: is the most like comic book idea I've ever heard,
Speaker 3: and everyone just goes along with it. Yeah, that brings
Speaker 3: me to another thing he brought up in your videos
Speaker 3: about a homeland. I think what you discussed is really
Speaker 3: important because because of this narrative that a lot of
Speaker 3: Zionists teach to Jewish people about how they're constantly being persecuted,
Speaker 3: I think people are led to believe that Israel is
Speaker 3: their safe haven, Like if all of us fails, I
Speaker 3: have Israel to go back to that as my home,
Speaker 3: even like American Jews that have no connection to Israel. Really, why,
Speaker 3: in your opinion, do the Jewish people not necessarily need
Speaker 3: a homeland?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: Well, I made that video speaking to like other leftists.
Speaker 4: I was addressing other leftists, so I think if you
Speaker 4: agree with me on the premise that everyone should have
Speaker 4: a safe place to live and everyone should have equal rights,
Speaker 4: which I think are two pretty pretty basic tenets of
Speaker 4: being a leftist, then you just can't have anybody having
Speaker 4: a theocratic ethno state, which is what Israel is de
Speaker 4: fact I mean, they say they're not, but that is
Speaker 4: how they act and how that is how that country
Speaker 4: is run. And so, you know, a lot of people
Speaker 4: misinterpreted that videos is you know, which I kind of
Speaker 4: try to argue with me saying, but there's other theocratic
Speaker 4: ethno states. But I'm saying, yeah, if you're a leftist,
Speaker 4: you should think that's bad everywhere, because a theocratic ethno
Speaker 4: state is an inherently fascist construct. It's inherently saying one
Speaker 4: religion and or one ethnicity, in the case of the
Speaker 4: way Israel interprets Judaism, these people are more valuable and
Speaker 4: are more citizens here and have more rights here than
Speaker 4: everybody else, and that is just incompatible with leftist values,
Speaker 4: I think. And so I the point of that video
Speaker 4: is nobody should have a theocratic ethno state. And this
Speaker 4: is a line that I've heard even some leftist Jews
Speaker 4: saying well, oh, we you know this is a complicated
Speaker 4: issue because Jews need a homeland. Well, I'm sorry, our
Speaker 4: world is just two heterogenous too diverse. You know, migrations
Speaker 4: have been going on for tens of thousands of years
Speaker 4: all over the place. There's no one plot of land
Speaker 4: on Earth anymore that you can carve out and say, Okay,
Speaker 4: just this one type of people are going to get
Speaker 4: to live here and be citizens here and have rights here. Now,
Speaker 4: I'm an anarchist personally, so I when I say no
Speaker 4: theocratic ethno states, I'm also like in a bigger picture
Speaker 4: way saying like no states would be the ideal for me.
Speaker 4: But certainly theocratic ethno states are even worse within that
Speaker 4: framework compared to like liberal democracies or something. So yeah,
Speaker 4: that was a video that was like intended to be
Speaker 4: an in group conversation, and then it got a million
Speaker 4: views and got because my following has like really exploded
Speaker 4: over the last week. So I wasn't expecting it to
Speaker 4: go so far. And so for people who idealize ethno states,
Speaker 4: like Japan or Sweden, they were really having a hard
Speaker 4: time with me, with me saying that and thinking it
Speaker 4: was really anti Semitic for me to say, oh, I
Speaker 4: don't think Jews should have theocratic ethno state, but no,
Speaker 4: I think nobody should have a theocratic ethno state.
Speaker 3: That's a really good point to make. It's I mean,
Speaker 3: it goes back to the idea of Jewish suffering being
Speaker 3: more valuable in some way than other suffering. I think
Speaker 3: it continues this hierarchy of sorts and everything you described
Speaker 3: about people not being treated the same and not having
Speaker 3: enough rights, that's all apartheid. I think people forget like
Speaker 3: Israel is committing the definition of apartheid and has been
Speaker 3: against the Palestinian people. And I find it weird that.
Speaker 3: I mean, Amy Schumer posted this crazy video proving in
Speaker 3: her words, that it's not an apartheid state actually and
Speaker 3: how people have all the rights in the world when
Speaker 3: in reality it's shameful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like the UN, Amnesty, International, Human Rights Watch
Speaker 4: are all saying this is an apartheid state. But okay,
Speaker 4: Amy Schumer, Yeah, it's not actually that complicated.
Speaker 3: It's really not. I've been really appreciating Amanda Seals. She
Speaker 3: did like a reaction video to what Amy Schumer posted
Speaker 3: and laid out all the racist reasons why Actually apartheid
Speaker 3: is what you would call that. I think something that
Speaker 3: has bothered me within the both sides thing is this
Speaker 3: is not a term that I hear often anymore. But
Speaker 3: like the progressive except Palestine, I think that idea has
Speaker 3: been really damaging because it makes it seem like you
Speaker 3: can still be so liberal and progressive and still not
Speaker 3: really recognize that Palestinians are being genocided for almost a century.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is just so frustrating because again, what
Speaker 4: you're seeing in Palestine, it's so stark, the violence is
Speaker 4: so obvious, and it's so egregious. And there's all these
Speaker 4: social justice you know, organizations and accounts that I followed.
Speaker 4: There's like queer Jewish liberation accounts who said nothing about Palestine.
Speaker 4: There's also non jew it just queer you know, all
Speaker 4: sorts of queer liberation queer activists out there, which is
Speaker 4: like a whole other network that I'm tapped in into,
Speaker 4: and many of them are staying silent on this genocide.
Speaker 4: And it's like we are all fighting the same evils,
Speaker 4: the same type of oppression. And if you want people
Speaker 4: to stand with you when your rights are being taken away,
Speaker 4: you got to stand with everybody else.
Speaker 6: That's the only way.
Speaker 4: Intersectionality is the only way that we can overcome these
Speaker 4: enormous forces of oppression in the world. So, yeah, it's
Speaker 4: it's been very frustrating to see just how many, you know,
Speaker 4: anti racist organizations, queer liberation organizations are just staying completely
Speaker 4: silent on Palestine.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I have been really frustrated about that as well, because
Speaker 3: it encourages this sort of selective outrage that is reserved
Speaker 3: for certain kind of people that are deemed as human
Speaker 3: versus the people that are not. I really believe one
Speaker 3: of the most powerful voices in the fight for Palastine
Speaker 3: liberation are Jewish anti zionists because they can speak to
Speaker 3: what people deem is the source of that problem from
Speaker 3: a different place. But I hope you realize how important
Speaker 3: your voice is just in general, especially now. And Yeah,
Speaker 3: I just really thank you for what you've been doing,
Speaker 3: because it's kind of scary too. I'm sure to suddenly
Speaker 3: have a big platform and have all these people analyzing
Speaker 3: everything you're saying and trying to find little holes in
Speaker 3: your arguments. But I appreciate that you're not backing down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I went from six thousand to one hundred eighty
Speaker 4: thousand followers on Instagram in like a week.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize that you started a six thousand. I
Speaker 3: was wondering about that. That is a crazy jump.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it happened really really fast.
Speaker 4: And on TikTok too, I had I had fifty thousand
Speaker 4: on TikTok just from my book talk author talk account,
Speaker 4: which I've been you know, growing over the course of
Speaker 4: two years, and then it went Now it's like at one.
Speaker 1: Hundred and fifty thousand, so like tripled on TikTok.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's definitely made me more careful about what
Speaker 4: I say. Like again, I had that one video that
Speaker 4: was sort of like an in group comment to leftist
Speaker 4: because I'm used to being on like the leftist side
Speaker 4: of TikTok, and then realized, like, oh crap, like everything
Speaker 4: I say is going to go out to like absolutely
Speaker 4: every single kind of audience, so I need to like
Speaker 4: really think about the context of what I say and
Speaker 4: that it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a it's a lot, it's a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm I mean it sounds really overwhelming and even
Speaker 3: navigating it well and I don't know, I really appreciate
Speaker 3: you before where we wrap this up. I would love
Speaker 3: for you to talk about your work a little bit,
Speaker 3: maybe your book where people can find it, where they
Speaker 3: can support you in your work. The platform is all yours.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I actually had a book come out about a
Speaker 4: month ago called The Free People's Village, and it is
Speaker 4: relevant to this topic.
Speaker 1: It's a very leftist book.
Speaker 4: It's about a punk band organizing to save their warehouse
Speaker 4: from demolition to make room for a new electromatagnetic hyperway
Speaker 4: in an alternate timeline where al Gore won the two
Speaker 4: thousand election and declared a war on climate change instead
Speaker 4: of a war on terror. But it's a book that's
Speaker 4: really critical of neoliberal politics. So this solar punk utopia
Speaker 4: that's been created this world has really only impacted wealthy
Speaker 4: white neighborhoods while leaving everybody else behind. So it's a
Speaker 4: book about centering racial justice within climate organizing. And the
Speaker 4: final scene of the book actually takes place at a
Speaker 4: Free Palestine protest, and so that's definitely a presence throughout
Speaker 4: the book. And based on experiences I've had organizing with
Speaker 4: the incredible Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestini youth
Speaker 4: movement organizers that we have here in Houston.
Speaker 1: So for people who are.
Speaker 4: Listeners of this podcast, I do think they would enjoy
Speaker 4: the Free People's Village and you can get it. The
Speaker 4: best place to get it is always your local indie bookstore.
Speaker 4: Of course, you can also support your local indie bookstore
Speaker 4: by shopping at bookshop dot org, which allows you all
Speaker 4: the convenience of ordering online, but you get to pick
Speaker 4: your favorite indie bookstore to benefit. And then of course
Speaker 4: you can get it also from all of the big
Speaker 4: corporate retailers. And it's available in hardcover and ebook and audiobook.
Speaker 4: And you can find me online at sim Kern on
Speaker 4: TikTok and if you search simcr it's at sim Bookstagram's
Speaker 4: badly on Instagram, but if you just search sim Kernel,
Speaker 4: I'll pop up on Instagram.
Speaker 3: And that is s I N k r N.
Speaker 6: For people that don't know, Yes.
Speaker 3: Just to leave us with something that we can take
Speaker 3: away from this, do you have any advice for people
Speaker 3: that are trying to open up these discussions with their
Speaker 3: peers and how should they approach them? And I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think these conversations are essential to humanizing Palestinians. Again,
Speaker 3: so do you have any advice before we sign off.
Speaker 4: You know, same advice which was the first piece I gave,
Speaker 4: which was just to read a lot and learn a
Speaker 4: lot and seek out those Palestinian voices. Also Jewish Voice
Speaker 4: for Peace if you go to their JVP dot org website,
Speaker 4: they have a ton of like great tools and kits
Speaker 4: for learning how to talk about Palestine.
Speaker 5: And so I.
Speaker 4: Would say, you know, always be learning and reading if
Speaker 4: you feel like you don't have the language yet to
Speaker 4: have these conversations. Like you said, it's really powerful to
Speaker 4: repost things by you know, commentators that you respect, journalists
Speaker 4: on the ground in Gaza right now who are doing amazing.
Speaker 6: Courageous work.
Speaker 4: Just letting people know what is happening and putting something
Speaker 4: out that disrupts an imperialist narrative can be really really powerful.
Speaker 3: Thank you for saying all of that, because it's really needed.
Speaker 3: And I will put in the description all the info
Speaker 3: to where you can follow sim in their work and
Speaker 3: maybe I can put some recommendations for Palestinian books as well.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that's the episode. Thank you so much for being.
Speaker 4: Here, Thanks for having me Free Palestine.
Speaker 7: Greetings podcasts. Excuse the asset, it's me James A. Man
Speaker 7: who has commenced his one man war against cutter airlines,
Speaker 7: who detained me against my will for most of the
Speaker 7: last two days in a very small part of a
Speaker 7: very big plane.
Speaker 2: See there's a there's a you know. Airlines from Middle
Speaker 2: Eastern countries are are usually like the best airlines are
Speaker 2: like Royal Jordanian and Air Immirates. If it's if it's
Speaker 2: owned by a king, it's usually a safe bet. But
Speaker 2: but cutter airways.
Speaker 7: That's what they say about.
Speaker 2: England breaks that mold, proudly breaks that mold. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: fuck me.
Speaker 7: One of the one of the less pleasant experiences available
Speaker 7: to a human being that doesn't end in death is
Speaker 7: a thirty six hour trip from Keston to southern California,
Speaker 7: which see I've just enjoyed.
Speaker 2: I always enjoyed those trips back from Air Emirates because
Speaker 2: when you're on the Air Emirates flight, if you ask
Speaker 2: the steward or whatever to if you tell him, hey,
Speaker 2: I would like eight shots of vodka and four glasses
Speaker 2: of orange juice, He'll just give it to you, like,
Speaker 2: not even a question, not even a question. And so
Speaker 2: have I vomited on a couple of eir Emirates flights. Yes,
Speaker 2: is it always a good time? Probably you don't remember. No, No, yeah,
Speaker 2: I see.
Speaker 7: I was at the point of frustration where like and
Speaker 7: I'm as an english Man, if if I've become frustrated
Speaker 7: and drunk, then my instinct is to fight everyone or
Speaker 7: throw bottles, and I thought that that would probably result
Speaker 7: in further detention, so decided against decided against becoming bladdered.
Speaker 7: Or I could have started singing. I guess that's the
Speaker 7: other option available to me. That sure fits my culture. Yeah,
Speaker 7: So we're not here to talk about things that I
Speaker 7: like to do in my free time, as much as
Speaker 7: I would love that, but we are here to talk
Speaker 7: about things that I have been seeing in my worktime.
Speaker 7: When I was traveling to Kurdistan a couple of weeks. Kurdistan,
Speaker 7: for people who are not familiar, is a big area,
Speaker 7: the area where Kurdish people live, and it spans several countries.
Speaker 7: The areas I went, we're in a rock and in
Speaker 7: Syria or in that it's not really in I guess
Speaker 7: Syrian regime territory. But if you look on the.
Speaker 2: Map, northeast Syria known as Rojava, the other two parts
Speaker 2: that are generally considered part of Kurdistan. Are a chunk,
Speaker 2: big chunk of southern Iran and also a big chunk
Speaker 2: of southern Turkey.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so Java just means west. I think Roja lat
Speaker 7: is east eastern Kurdistan. So yeah, I've spent the last
Speaker 7: several last week and change in that area. And while
Speaker 7: I was there, the Turkish state began a massive drone
Speaker 7: bombing campaign, which is what we are gathered here today
Speaker 7: to discuss. So for people who are not familiar, it's
Speaker 7: for years almost to This drone bombing campaign started almost
Speaker 7: four years to the day since Turkey's invasion of what
Speaker 7: they call the M four Strip. So that's the area
Speaker 7: around Surakania and Tel Abiyad. We've talked about that before
Speaker 7: on the Podka, so if you want to know more
Speaker 7: about that, you can go back and listen to it.
Speaker 7: It's the area along the border, one of the areas
Speaker 7: on the border between Turkey and Syria. And as people
Speaker 7: will know, Syria is a country that has had a
Speaker 7: long and terrible civil war, which they've heard about in
Speaker 7: lots of episodes, right, and we're not talking about that
Speaker 7: today so much as we're talking about the Turkish state's
Speaker 7: use of drones to bomb what people generally in this
Speaker 7: country will know as for a Java, right, So just
Speaker 7: to give them statistics off the top, this is the
Speaker 7: fourth year in a row of aggression at this time
Speaker 7: of year, right, So there have been two land attacks
Speaker 7: I think Operation Olive Branch and Operation with someone called
Speaker 7: peace Spring, and then two years the last two years
Speaker 7: there have been drone strikes at this time of year.
Speaker 7: This time of year, it seems very hard not to
Speaker 7: conclude that these are attempts to destroy civilian infrastructure and
Speaker 7: make it very hard for people in the cold months
Speaker 7: of the year. So right now around two million people
Speaker 7: in north East Syria are going to be without power
Speaker 7: and without water. And I experienced some of that when
Speaker 7: I was there, and the places I stayed will run
Speaker 7: off generators, so you'd have like intermittent power. You'd have
Speaker 7: power from it, and then they'd put some petru in
Speaker 7: the generator and the power will go down, or the
Speaker 7: generator would have a little tantrum and the power would
Speaker 7: go down. But generally I had a lot better access
Speaker 7: to power that some people had a lot better access
Speaker 7: to water. So as I was traveling around, I noticed
Speaker 7: some people didn't have access to like running water, right,
Speaker 7: they can't turn on the tap and get water. Obviously
Speaker 7: that's a massive problem. It's something I think. Look, as
Speaker 7: people are listening to this, Israel is also bombing the
Speaker 7: shit out of Gaza, the whole of the Gaza Strip,
Speaker 7: and the US recently intervened to ensure that people there
Speaker 7: had access to water, and they have done very little
Speaker 7: in the case of protecting people in North and East Syria.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: So across this drone campaign, forty eight people have died,
Speaker 7: and in the worst I guess the highest casualty of
Speaker 7: producing strike was one that happened while I was there,
Speaker 7: twenty nine. Like internal security forces, sometimes you'll see it
Speaker 7: translated as police, but I don't think that's quite accurate,
Speaker 7: like that, they don't do cop shit, like they're not
Speaker 7: there to you know, like arrescue for parking in the
Speaker 7: wrong place, and they do the things that cops do.
Speaker 7: They're there largely is like internal security due to the
Speaker 7: various non state arm groups that are in the area
Speaker 7: and state armed groups I guess that are operating in
Speaker 7: the area that would make things dangerous for people living there.
Speaker 7: So these particular essays were anti narcotic essay. And again
Speaker 7: why I'm grounding this and what they do is because
Speaker 7: they're not the people who like send you to jail
Speaker 7: for the rest of your life for like having an
Speaker 7: ounce of weed. They're the people whose job is to
Speaker 7: prevent the trading cap to gone. Will people know what
Speaker 7: people know what Captagon is?
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah, it's it's it's it's one of the drug
Speaker 2: I mean, it's that when you when you hear about
Speaker 2: drug in addiction forces, like like police in Rojava, they're
Speaker 2: going after CAPTI Gone. It's a big chunk of both
Speaker 2: what kept isis it's it's the it's the purveten, you know,
Speaker 2: the meth that Nazis took that for isis right, and
Speaker 2: it was also a big chunk of how they got
Speaker 2: their funding was was moving and the a Sad regime
Speaker 2: also gets a piece of a lot of the Captigon trade.
Speaker 7: It continues to fund these largely like it's the mist
Speaker 7: insurgent groups right in the area because it's small and
Speaker 7: it's high value, and like Robert, they has to give
Speaker 7: it to the fighters. It's this is very common like
Speaker 7: around the world. We we discussed this in miandmar too,
Speaker 7: right that the military there take something else called yaba,
Speaker 7: But these kind of math derivatives are very common and
Speaker 7: they're very commonly sold. That's how a lot of these
Speaker 7: non state arm groups get money to buy stuff. Right,
Speaker 7: So when we're talking about drug interdiction, it's not done
Speaker 7: in a vacuum. It's not done because I could they
Speaker 7: think that necessarily that drugs are bad or that you know,
Speaker 7: there's some kind of moral failure that comes from the
Speaker 7: use of these substances. It's because it allows funding for
Speaker 7: groups that are trying to kill people on the ground.
Speaker 7: So like interdicting the drugs is part of an anti
Speaker 7: terrorism operation that allows people to live safely, which is
Speaker 7: what they deserve after ten plus years of war in
Speaker 7: that area. So twenty nine people is a lot of people, right,
Speaker 7: twenty nine anti narcotics, I say issues is a lot
Speaker 7: of the people who do that job. It's going to
Speaker 7: make it significantly harder for them to continue doing that job,
Speaker 7: which means it's going to make it significantly easier for
Speaker 7: those arm groups to get funding. Right. It's also so
Speaker 7: while I was there, there was a massive funeral for
Speaker 7: these people. Right, every town, every settlement across where Java
Speaker 7: has lost somebody in that strike. Right, So in Kamishlo,
Speaker 7: in Kabani, in Alhasaka, like all these places had big
Speaker 7: funerals because you know, three or four or ten people
Speaker 7: came from that town and like that's I saw a
Speaker 7: little girl like going to her dad's funeral, right, like
Speaker 7: a little girl holding a picture of her dad. And
Speaker 7: it's pretty fucked up. Like it's hard for that not
Speaker 7: to affect you, especially as like these people weren't fighting anyone,
Speaker 7: they weren't attacking anyone, right, they were just they were
Speaker 7: taking a training. They were taking an anti narcotics training
Speaker 7: at night, and sixty of them were gathering it's building.
Speaker 7: Twenty nine were killed, twenty eight injured. It's in the
Speaker 7: sort of furthest northeast part of North and Eastsyria, but
Speaker 7: around a town called Derek, which is on the board
Speaker 7: of it al Malkay Derek. Yeah, Bobody, my pronunciation is
Speaker 7: asked al Malachaia might say on the map if if
Speaker 7: you're looking at Google Maps, so you're trying to work
Speaker 7: out what it is. Lots of these places. The reason
Speaker 7: they will have two names is cored edition and Arabic. Right,
Speaker 7: So like under the previous side regime, like Arabic was
Speaker 7: the sort of language that people were enforced to speak
Speaker 7: and use, and now under the self administration, people tend
Speaker 7: to use Kurdish, and they tend to use a Latin
Speaker 7: script as opposed to an Arabic script. Right, So that's
Speaker 7: why you'll see two names very often you're looking on
Speaker 7: a map, But like twenty nine is only you know,
Speaker 7: there's nineteen other people, mostly civilians, right, who were killed.
Speaker 7: Then two million people are now living without power, without water,
Speaker 7: and without these basic services, which in turn will result
Speaker 7: in more death. Right, More people will die because they
Speaker 7: don't have access to those things which are life sustaining, right,
Speaker 7: or people, young people, sick people. Both things are the
Speaker 7: very basics of sustaining human life, and so without the
Speaker 7: things are going to get a lot harder. I want
Speaker 7: to talk a little bit about like where these drone
Speaker 7: strikes happened, because largely aside from the one of their age,
Speaker 7: they weren't at like large groups of people or buildings. Instead,
Speaker 7: they were like deliberately targeting infrastructure. So of the ones
Speaker 7: that I saw and the ones that I read about,
Speaker 7: and they targeted like an electricity substation in one case,
Speaker 7: they targeted a lot of water facilities, right, like like
Speaker 7: water pumping stations, et cetera that allow people to get water,
Speaker 7: a cooking gas plant, which it's pretty obvious what that does, right,
Speaker 7: It allows people to get bottles of gas to cook
Speaker 7: their food, and a lot of oil in destructures. So
Speaker 7: I saw a few of those. Theyre called like donkeys,
Speaker 7: you know, the things that go up and down. Yeah
Speaker 7: my using the word, I don't.
Speaker 3: Know the word, but the little crane.
Speaker 7: Things yeah, yeah, yeah, the like the things you can
Speaker 7: see if you drive through Bakersfield.
Speaker 3: I'm sure there's a name.
Speaker 7: Yeah, are they oiled derricks? Yeah? Someone someone googled the
Speaker 7: name of the nodding dog.
Speaker 3: That pumps jack? Is that no?
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's that's the first sounds like like a dude
Speaker 7: who goes to the gym a lot, Yeah, broke and
Speaker 7: pump jacked.
Speaker 3: I mean it is called the an oil donkey as well.
Speaker 3: So you were, yeah, nodding donkey pumps. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 3: I thought they were, noding donkeys. Okay, Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 3: that's a phrase we're going with. So you could see
Speaker 3: a lot of these that were like knocked over on
Speaker 3: their side, right, that had been drone struck, and then
Speaker 3: you could see others that were just knocked out because
Speaker 3: the power to them had been knocked out. So obviously
Speaker 3: that's not only a major revenue source, but also like
Speaker 3: that is how people in the region get fuel, right,
Speaker 3: so it's going to be harder for them to get diesels,
Speaker 3: going to be harder for them to drive around. People
Speaker 3: already don't drive around a lot because a lot of
Speaker 3: the drone strikes on people in the yepegay Yepija, so
Speaker 3: that the People's Defence Forces and Women's Defense Forces, lots
Speaker 3: of drone strikes have happened when those people are driving
Speaker 3: their cars, when they get in a car, so it
Speaker 3: can be quite hairy driving and a lot of people
Speaker 3: were driving too, like I drive around, but that's one
Speaker 3: of the areas of risk for people.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 7: Of the people killed thirty fives as eleven were civilians
Speaker 7: and two s efs, so most of these were either
Speaker 7: internal security or civilians. And I think Robert you were
Speaker 7: Robert and I spoke while I was there, and Robert
Speaker 7: made a good point about how this enables these non
Speaker 7: state armed groups like either ISIS or like HD.
Speaker 2: That my main concern for you while you were there
Speaker 2: was not that you would get hit in an air strike,
Speaker 2: but it was that because of the damage done to
Speaker 2: the security forces as a result of the Turkish are strikes,
Speaker 2: you would it would. There's there's always been is as
Speaker 2: cells there right that they've never gotten rid of all
Speaker 2: of them. And periods where the A and E. S
Speaker 2: self administration is under attack are the periods in which
Speaker 2: it's most dangerous because it provides there's less security forces,
Speaker 2: you know, watching everything. People in general are outless, which
Speaker 2: provides cover for some of these groups that may want
Speaker 2: to do like a kidnapping.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's not a place where a
Speaker 7: lot of I guess folks who look like me. That
Speaker 7: was a concern for us, and like it's a concern
Speaker 7: for these people too. Write they still do car bombs
Speaker 7: in de rezor not, you know that they things still
Speaker 7: kill civilians. Yeah, they roll up Isis people on a
Speaker 7: probably weekly basis. People are interested in getting more information
Speaker 7: both about the drone strikes and about what they call
Speaker 7: sleeper cells. There are Java Information Center, very nice people.
Speaker 7: They have a good website. It's Jarva Information Center to org.
Speaker 7: They produce monthly report on both things. So that will
Speaker 7: give more information on those things. That would be a
Speaker 7: good time to pivot to adverts. But I've got all
Speaker 7: that is.
Speaker 10: Do you know who else provides great services?
Speaker 7: I don't think we can. I don't reasonably make that claim.
Speaker 10: The products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 7: Here they are. We're back and we are discussing toerone
Speaker 7: strikes on North Easyria. I guess not just from North Asyria,
Speaker 7: like these also happen up around Sulimani SOLMANI if you're
Speaker 7: looking on the map. Depends again on that language, right,
Speaker 7: those have happened again against casey K, which is like
Speaker 7: the Kurdistan Communities Council. So that would be the I
Speaker 7: guess the if you look at like Syria, Iran, Turkey
Speaker 7: and Iraq as different countries, all of which have some
Speaker 7: administry to give control over the nation of Kurdish people, right,
Speaker 7: Kurdish people live in all four countries, and they live
Speaker 7: in other countries too. Of course, then the movements in
Speaker 7: each of those countries are subsidiary to the k CK
Speaker 7: and so some of those KKK folks who are up
Speaker 7: in Solimani so like that there will be drone strikes
Speaker 7: there and that's that's far inside Iraqi Kurdistan, right, You're
Speaker 7: you're a long way from the border there, and that's
Speaker 7: that's what these drone strikes, I guess. The drone strikes
Speaker 7: allow Turkish intelligence in the Turkish military to target people
Speaker 7: much much further inside with very little consequent or risk
Speaker 7: on their own. Right, these drones are largely not being
Speaker 7: targeted because certainly in an Ees, the Autonomous Administration in
Speaker 7: North Eastyria, they don't have the means to target them, right,
Speaker 7: the United States hasn't supplied them with the weapons that
Speaker 7: they would need to shoot down those drones, which I
Speaker 7: think brings me onto the role of the US in
Speaker 7: this and I guess more broadly the role of the
Speaker 7: coalition in this case. Coalition is a coalition to defeat ISIS. Right,
Speaker 7: it's made up of dozens of countries, the UK, the US, Germany,
Speaker 7: lots of other Western I guess countries broadly, and countries
Speaker 7: in that part of the world too, like I think
Speaker 7: Iraq is part of it. Certainly, like Iraqi, Kurdistan has
Speaker 7: done their own operations against ISIS sleeper cells, peshmurger and
Speaker 7: like everywhere you go, right, you go through Peshmerga checkpoints,
Speaker 7: like I was going through an area where they had
Speaker 7: arrested an ISIS member the day before, so like it's
Speaker 7: they'll be getting you out of the car, you know,
Speaker 7: going through your bags, looking through your stuff. Right, So
Speaker 7: that's all part of the same operation. But the US
Speaker 7: has a base in a place called Alhassaka, which again
Speaker 7: you can look up on the map, right, it's a
Speaker 7: little west trying to light up my compass here, a
Speaker 7: little west of Kamishloh, which is a capital of the region,
Speaker 7: and the US pretty much US troops don't do a
Speaker 7: great amount of leaving that base. It's fair to say
Speaker 7: they'll come out in helicopters. They were going out like
Speaker 7: sort of supporting SDF patrols in the Ahuska region, but
Speaker 7: they were supporting them from the air. Right. They generally
Speaker 7: aren't going out and about like with people on the ground,
Speaker 7: talking to people, unless it's a specific mission, which they
Speaker 7: do sometimes you can if people are interested in like
Speaker 7: the US presence. It's called Operation Inherent Resolve, And they
Speaker 7: have a Twitter account whether sometimes post themselves doing things.
Speaker 7: But what they don't do is protect that. And so
Speaker 7: the US and the Autonomous Administration are allies in this
Speaker 7: fight against ISIS, right, but they are only allied in
Speaker 7: this fight against ISIS. The US is not supporting them
Speaker 7: in defending themselves from drone strikes or like ensuring that
Speaker 7: civilian population is protected from those attacks. So the US
Speaker 7: has the capacity city to shoot down these drones, and
Speaker 7: they prove that by shooting one down last week or
Speaker 7: the week before. I'm a little bit jet legged, so
Speaker 7: a bit bugled on time, but I think it was
Speaker 7: last week the US shut down a Turkish drones.
Speaker 10: It came out two weeks ago for when this is airing. Yes, yeah, sure,
Speaker 10: good point.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so yeah, two weeks ago the United States shut
Speaker 7: down and F sixteen shut down a Turkish drone. So
Speaker 7: specifically it was a drone called an a Kinji, which
Speaker 7: is a newer variant of the Bairaktar drone. We've spoken
Speaker 7: about these drones before, right, they're the drones that people like,
Speaker 7: I know, you can go on actually and buy a
Speaker 7: stuffy version of these drones, which, right, that's concerning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really dystopian and crazy.
Speaker 10: I don't like it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I do not like it either. I think it
Speaker 7: illustrates the way the war in Ukraine has become like
Speaker 7: a football match for some people, yeah yes, or like
Speaker 7: a film where like I just want to reinforce it, like.
Speaker 10: It's turned into fandom. Yeah yes, yeah.
Speaker 7: I think that's an excellent way of putting it. Gara saying, like,
Speaker 7: it's not cool when anyone gets fucking drone struck. It's
Speaker 7: not cool when, like everyone in an area spends every
Speaker 7: night worrying if death is going to come from the
Speaker 7: sky at some point, right, Like, the effect of these
Speaker 7: drones trucks isn't just on the people killed, or the
Speaker 7: people injured, or even the infrastructure. The effect is on
Speaker 7: every single person worrying what's going to happen tonight? Right Like,
Speaker 7: And I can speak to a tiny part of that experience.
Speaker 7: Right Nothing compared to what people are living there have
Speaker 7: gone through at all. But it's a concern every time
Speaker 7: it gets dark, you know, well it's tonight the night,
Speaker 7: especially for the rural folks who might be living in
Speaker 7: a rural area but near to a substation, or near
Speaker 7: to one of those nodding donkeys or other infrastructure which
Speaker 7: has been targeted, or near a cooking gas plant. Right,
Speaker 7: those things I can imagine explode with quite some force.
Speaker 7: They can't leave, right, they can't just upen and not
Speaker 7: live near any infrastructure. Infrastructures will allows place to be
Speaker 7: survivable for civilians, So they just have to live with
Speaker 7: this constant fear. And it's very odd to see that
Speaker 7: and then simultaneously see this, this sort of deification of
Speaker 7: drone strikes that are happening in Ukraine and like this,
Speaker 7: you know, people with dog dressed as Napoleon Twitter avatars, Yeah,
Speaker 7: cheering someone's kid dying.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I mean throughout all of the kind of new conflicts
Speaker 10: we've had the past five years, like the and especially
Speaker 10: the past like two three years, Like the idea of
Speaker 10: like politics as fandom has produced some of the like
Speaker 10: most like inhumane, gross aspects of how people have been
Speaker 10: like consuming social media and just the sheer. It's like
Speaker 10: people forget that this is like thousands of people's actual,
Speaker 10: like human lives that they're like yes, sneaming about, and
Speaker 10: it's it just it just becomes just they talk about
Speaker 10: it in the same way they talk about like a
Speaker 10: Marvel movie or like a star like it's it's it's yeah,
Speaker 10: or sports like.
Speaker 5: It's it it it.
Speaker 10: It's like this weird like gamified it allows you to
Speaker 10: to approach these things from a just a from a
Speaker 10: very separate perspective when you're when you're viewing it from
Speaker 10: like this fandom angle, I think. But politics is fandom
Speaker 10: in general. I think it's gotten a whole lot worse
Speaker 10: since the Trump era. Ye had, you know, like that's
Speaker 10: where we had like resistance libs that were like copying
Speaker 10: off some of the stuff from the New Star Wars trilogy,
Speaker 10: which is kind of the inspiration for a lot of
Speaker 10: their stuff. We got nazi's doing a whole bunch of
Speaker 10: politics as fandom as well. It just creates like it's
Speaker 10: it's it's like this team sports like fandom thing that
Speaker 10: is just pervate.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's it's.
Speaker 10: Seeped into like almost every single aspect of like not
Speaker 10: just politics, but not like conflict and like geopolitics.
Speaker 3: It's like whoever has the best branding is the one
Speaker 3: that's has the best chance.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it's I don't know, it's it's disturbing to watch.
Speaker 10: I don't know how to like counter counter it because
Speaker 10: it feels like the more you engage, the further sucked
Speaker 10: into the abyss you become. But it also doesn't feel
Speaker 10: good to just like ignore it as well, because it's
Speaker 10: just it's like it feels like this kind of endless
Speaker 10: trap that is just a part of existing in this
Speaker 10: weird postmodern internet world.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I don't know. I think like one would hope
Speaker 7: that the Internet in some ways could help us see that,
Speaker 7: like at the end of every drone strike is a
Speaker 7: little fucking child most of the time, or like like
Speaker 7: I spent some time last week with a family who
Speaker 7: almost exactly one year ago lost their fifteen year old
Speaker 7: time in a drone strike, and like it that, Like
Speaker 7: I understand people die in these things, like on an
Speaker 7: intellectual level and even on a personal level, like having
Speaker 7: spent time in these places, you know, for a decent
Speaker 7: amount of my life, But fuck me, it's just like
Speaker 7: it destroyed you. Like seeing a mum mary her son
Speaker 7: cry for her little boy. It's fucking heartbreaking, and like
Speaker 7: I got to live that for one morning, and those
Speaker 7: people live that every single day and every time. And
Speaker 7: I don't, I know, it makes me want to shout
Speaker 7: at people when I see this.
Speaker 2: I don't actually think it's I don't mean to be
Speaker 2: a doomer here. I don't think it's a solvable problem. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is we are talking about it within the language
Speaker 2: of fandom because that is kind of the defining public
Speaker 2: social relationship of our time. But like, this is always
Speaker 2: what people have done to war, one way or the other. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's faster now and more commercial, right, like one thing
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, I think just because we're a culturated
Speaker 2: to it. Hearing people talk about, you know, doing what
Speaker 2: they do in times of war because of patriotism, because
Speaker 2: of nationalism, because of belief in the founding principles of
Speaker 2: their country, seems a little bit less coarse than like
Speaker 2: doing it because you fell in with a bunch of
Speaker 2: memers who use little dog avatars and shit. But like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's not it's not like less logical
Speaker 2: than than being right or die because like you happen
Speaker 2: to be born under you know so and so the king.
Speaker 7: Yeah fair, yeah, yeah, and like that dehumanization. I think
Speaker 7: the difference, like to me is like, so, like Robert
Speaker 7: and I have both experiences right to to in order
Speaker 7: to kill somebody, you have to dehumanize them. To kill
Speaker 7: people on mass you have to do that on mass, right,
Speaker 7: if you're fighting a war, it doesn't behoove you too.
Speaker 2: You make it sound like we're killing people, James.
Speaker 7: Well, that's the thing that we do on the podcast
Speaker 7: Robert's yeah, we kill people in mass Yeah, yeah, sure,
Speaker 7: you're gonna have to school A zone is where we
Speaker 7: talk about the killings. People want to subscribe. That's what
Speaker 7: we do instead of adverts, is we list the people
Speaker 7: we've killed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, James, as the as the quote on your Blue
Speaker 2: Sky account says, one death is a tragedy, one million
Speaker 2: is a statistic messed out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, that's right, and it's ever every day I
Speaker 7: strive to get my number up, you know, but so
Speaker 7: far I've let everyone down. That's not true. And to
Speaker 7: my knowledge, none of us have killed anyone but your knowledge,
Speaker 7: to my knowledge, yeah, suren's probably got some bodies in
Speaker 7: the in the class, you know, Jesus Christ. It's so
Speaker 7: what I wanted to say is that like when yeah,
Speaker 7: like if you're in the military, you probably know this, right,
Speaker 7: like like this sort of blood makes a grass grows, shit, fine, whatever,
Speaker 7: Like that's how wars work. War is undesirable. It's horrible.
Speaker 7: You have to be horrible, you have to you have
Speaker 7: to dehumanize people to kill them. You don't have to
Speaker 7: fucking do that if you're on Twitter dot com. But
Speaker 7: like people, you know, people with the silly dog advatars chiefly,
Speaker 7: but other people to have begun to see themselves as
Speaker 7: like participants in conflict in a way that they maybe didn't.
Speaker 7: Maybe they did and I just wasn't around in second one.
Speaker 10: Yeah, No, that's I think I think that does tie
Speaker 10: into part of how the fandom things works, because a
Speaker 10: part of participating in fandom is being in these kind
Speaker 10: of very very alienating online spaces. Because any type of
Speaker 10: like engagement on the Internet in this way is is
Speaker 10: fuel through the process of alienation. But when that kind
Speaker 10: of starts applying to politics, you feel like either the
Speaker 10: act of consuming or or like you know, joining in
Speaker 10: on conversation is itself like a form of activism. By
Speaker 10: just like just through like consuming or sharing content, you
Speaker 10: feel like you're actually participating in the thing itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think some of it's this almost narcissistic
Speaker 2: need to not let the world pass you by because
Speaker 2: it's there. There's something deeply uncomfortable about just like watching
Speaker 2: massive things happen and realizing like there's nothing I can
Speaker 2: do about this. Yeah, to feel like there isn't a
Speaker 2: lot of the time, right, like your your take, you know,
Speaker 2: the the instant a hospital gets attacked in Gaza, your
Speaker 2: take on that is not particularly helpful or necessary unless
Speaker 2: your I don't know Joe Biden, right.
Speaker 5: But which is not.
Speaker 2: I don't think his take was helpful, but right, it
Speaker 2: was like it had an impact because he's the president,
Speaker 2: but like most of us were just kind of part
Speaker 2: of the churn, and there's almost there's like a degree
Speaker 2: of emotional need to it, especially when you see these
Speaker 2: horrible footage of bodies piled high. Right, you feel like
Speaker 2: I'm a bad person if I don't do something, and
Speaker 2: the only thing I can do is tweet or whatever
Speaker 2: your social media, I feel like I.
Speaker 3: Just just to play Devil's advocate for hot sake. I
Speaker 3: think it's a little different when there's so much conflicting information,
Speaker 3: especially I mean, like the Gaza thinks a great example,
Speaker 3: because the electricity is out, they don't want them to
Speaker 3: share anything. So I think when it comes to something
Speaker 3: like that, it's more about like spreading awareness versus like
Speaker 3: having a take. In my opinion, it's more just like, hey,
Speaker 3: the news might say this, but this is from the
Speaker 3: actual person on the ground telling you what's happening. So
Speaker 3: I think there's a little bit of nuance because I
Speaker 3: also think the only reason that like just for Palestine
Speaker 3: for example, just is we don't have to go into
Speaker 3: it too much. But a huge reason why there's so
Speaker 3: much more support for the Palestinian movement is because of
Speaker 3: social media.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so definitely, Yeah, people see people in Gaza as
Speaker 7: people now, not as statistics or just through the lens
Speaker 7: of Hamas or rightever, like yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it depends. I think it depends on
Speaker 2: how you do it, and like I mean, it is
Speaker 2: it is accurate to say that to a significant extent,
Speaker 2: the ultimate outcome of these conflicts are determined in large
Speaker 2: part due to public sympathy, right Like, That's going to
Speaker 2: be probably true of, however, things that ultimately shake out
Speaker 2: in Gaza, and it's certainly been true of the conflict
Speaker 2: in Ukraine, right Like. The degree to which weapons keep
Speaker 2: flowing to that country is going to be heavily based
Speaker 2: on the degree to which sympathy for that cause remains
Speaker 2: among US taxpayers and taxpayers in other countries that are
Speaker 2: sending them those weapons. That's going to have an impact
Speaker 2: on the presidential election. Maybe. I mean that is the
Speaker 2: other thing, right that, like everyone who is engaging with
Speaker 2: this stuff via social media, there's a tendency to get
Speaker 2: caught up in a bubble in terms of just thinking
Speaker 2: about how much this is on the mind of like
Speaker 2: American voters. Maybe it'll be different this election, but generally,
Speaker 2: like again, my feelings on this are kind of muddled,
Speaker 2: but like very very often, no matter how big a
Speaker 2: deal a story is, you know, online and stuff, American
Speaker 2: voters rarely vote based on foreign policy concerns. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: want to say, I'm not saying that's what matters morally.
Speaker 7: I'm just talking about like you're totally correct. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: and especially in terms of your ability to influence something,
Speaker 7: it doesn't matter how much if other people don't. An
Speaker 7: election time, I want to maybe finish up. I've just
Speaker 7: knocked over bottle of os of procole alcohols. My office
Speaker 7: is rapidly becoming.
Speaker 5: Yourself.
Speaker 7: That's why I went to turn on the fan and
Speaker 7: open the door. Good times. So maybe I want to
Speaker 7: finish up before I evacuate. By saying that that it's
Speaker 7: something you can do, and like it's to give your
Speaker 7: time and money. I know that doesn't feel as good
Speaker 7: as like, yeah, you know, trying to do amateur ocin
Speaker 7: on Reddit. But you can help, actually, like and you
Speaker 7: can make a meaningful difference with a few bucks. And
Speaker 7: I know I sound like an MPR advert now, but
Speaker 7: like the Rajarv Information Center has some good resources and
Speaker 7: like they they have, I'm not going to read them
Speaker 7: because it's very complicated. Like I said, it's bank transfer information.
Speaker 7: But if you feel helpless, you are not, Like you
Speaker 7: can do a lot with a little. You can raise money,
Speaker 7: you can help to organize donations, right that like this,
Speaker 7: these things make a difference. If someone who doesn't have
Speaker 7: water now gets a palette of bottled water, that makes
Speaker 7: a difference. If someone gets a heater for their home,
Speaker 7: that makes a difference. If even if it's someone whose
Speaker 7: kid has died, right like making their life a little
Speaker 7: less painful in a physical sense, rightly helping them be
Speaker 7: warm at night, that does make a difference. And you
Speaker 7: can do that. And if you want to make a difference,
Speaker 7: I would really encourage you to do whatever it is.
Speaker 7: And it doesn't have to be here, right, It's happened
Speaker 7: that there's like there's an ethnic cleansing happening in azabadiant
Speaker 7: there is an ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza, right, Like
Speaker 7: these are places where like you can show meaningful solidarity
Speaker 7: and support with a little bit of a donation or
Speaker 7: a fundraiser. It's happening at our fucking border, right, Like
Speaker 7: someone died at our border since I last recording. Someone
Speaker 7: else got run over by some child in the truck
Speaker 7: or like you can make a difference in a meaningful
Speaker 7: way with actions, And it's really easy to get sucked
Speaker 7: into like just posting into the void and feeling helpless,
Speaker 7: but like very helpful things you can do.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and you don't have to just you don't have
Speaker 10: to be like rich or have a lot of disposable
Speaker 10: income to do this. There's a lot of like traditionally
Speaker 10: anarchist communities have put on benefit shows to run to
Speaker 10: fundraise from an entire community. So that's not just you
Speaker 10: trying to you know, you know, put like your few
Speaker 10: pennies aside. Uh, there is there's ways, there's ways to
Speaker 10: do this that just involve you actually like getting involved
Speaker 10: with your like local culture, and a part of that
Speaker 10: is like it's not politics as fandom. It is metapolitics.
Speaker 10: It's where you actually put your politics into your into
Speaker 10: your actual everyday life and it influences the friends you have,
Speaker 10: the communities you have. So whether that's you know, a
Speaker 10: whole bunch of trans musicians doing a benefit show to
Speaker 10: to get donations to send over to Rajava or send
Speaker 10: over to to Gaza, or you know, there's a lot
Speaker 10: of other sorts of things that that is a way
Speaker 10: of actually having part of your politics be not just
Speaker 10: like consumption have not. It's not just like Twitter accounts
Speaker 10: with flags and your avatar. It's actually like living your
Speaker 10: life in a way that matches the things that you believe.
Speaker 7: And I think that that like, sorry, having spoken to
Speaker 7: people in Java in the Yepigae and the Yepijay and
Speaker 7: these other organizations, Like one of the things that makes
Speaker 7: them distinct from other militaries is that they are building
Speaker 7: the world they want to see while they're fighting against
Speaker 7: the thing that's killing it, right like they're destroying it.
Speaker 7: Like a lot of times we'll see leftist military is
Speaker 7: not exactly doing the equality. The leftism is about one hopes.
Speaker 7: So like you can participate in that, as Garrison said,
Speaker 7: right by doing the mutual aid by doing the benefit show,
Speaker 7: by doing the fundraiser, Like, you are making a world
Speaker 7: in which this shit will happen less when you do
Speaker 7: things to stop it happening or to ease the pain
Speaker 7: of it happening.
Speaker 11: Now.
Speaker 7: So and you're building communities, right and in strong communities
Speaker 7: are more resilient to this shit. Yeah, And like things
Speaker 7: are getting pretty bleak and we're only going to get
Speaker 7: through them by helping each other and building a network
Speaker 7: that continue. Like, if I think about how much better
Speaker 7: the mutual aid response has been this time to what's
Speaker 7: happened at the border compared to what it was in May.
Speaker 7: That's because people built networks didn't go away, and it
Speaker 7: was good in May in part because we built networks
Speaker 7: that help to make being gun housed in San Diego
Speaker 7: feel be survivable. Right, And like those networks are resilient
Speaker 7: and they're flexible, and they help us like mentally process
Speaker 7: all the horrible shit and also physically help people. So yeah,
Speaker 7: you have that within your means too, Right, you have
Speaker 7: a signal on your telephone, like you can organize things.
Speaker 7: I don't have to feel helpless, but I feel dizzy
Speaker 7: due today, I suppose, but alcoholic that has feeled. So
Speaker 7: maybe that's a wonderful time to end.
Speaker 2: The All right, everyone, James is going to hallucinate in
Speaker 2: his office, and you, I hope are going to hallucinate
Speaker 2: wherever you happen.
Speaker 7: To be right now. Enjoy the better world.
Speaker 2: Hallucinate the better world. It might be the only way
Speaker 2: to live through one wonderful podcast.
Speaker 7: To Garrison Davis's everyone, Hi, it's me James. You thought
Speaker 7: I died, but I have not. I survived the I
Speaker 7: superbot alcohol fumes. I wouldn't advise doing that to yourself.
Speaker 7: Very unpleasant, But I'm back just to update you. We
Speaker 7: recorded that last week and I am recording this today
Speaker 7: before this goes out, So I'm recording this on the
Speaker 7: afternoon of Monday, the twenty third of October. I just
Speaker 7: wanted to update everyone. As Robert mentioned in the show,
Speaker 7: the weakening of the essay shrint and the fact that
Speaker 7: people are not able to be out and about because
Speaker 7: of these drone strikes, combined with the events in Israel
Speaker 7: and Palestine in the last couple of weeks, have resulted
Speaker 7: in a significant uptake in violence in the area. So
Speaker 7: I just wanted to update you on that. I've seen
Speaker 7: a decent amount of misinformation, which will be shocking to
Speaker 7: many of you on Twitter dot com. So there have
Speaker 7: been a series of rocket and uav UOV and manned
Speaker 7: aerial vehicle right drones drone attacks on US bases across
Speaker 7: the north of Iraq and across Syria. So some of
Speaker 7: those happened Altant, which is further south. Some of them
Speaker 7: happened to Al Hussaka. Some of them also happened to
Speaker 7: oil pipelines. And I would be very wary of people
Speaker 7: posting pictures of big fires and claiming that there are
Speaker 7: attacks at the US Bass. Every time I've seen that,
Speaker 7: it's actually been an attack on an oil pipeline, and
Speaker 7: either the person doesn't know that that's not a US
Speaker 7: base or they are wilfully being leading to try and
Speaker 7: get more clicks. People get paid on Twitter for engagement now,
Speaker 7: so I'm quite cynical about people's reasons for doing that.
Speaker 7: But there definitely have been attacks that they have not
Speaker 7: resulted in much loss of life. One contractor I believe
Speaker 7: did lose their lives due to Carliac incident that happened
Speaker 7: when they were sheltering from a what turned out to
Speaker 7: be a false alarm of a drone attack, but no
Speaker 7: one has been directly killed by the drone munitions. There
Speaker 7: have been a number of people killed in increasing conflict
Speaker 7: in the area. Both one person was killed in Khamishlo
Speaker 7: very very close to where I stayed. Actually, you can
Speaker 7: probably see it from my Houtolium in a car bomb,
Speaker 7: which is not a normal thing to happen in the
Speaker 7: middle of that city, a car bomb going off, So
Speaker 7: that's obviously caused for concern for some people in Derrazor.
Speaker 7: SDF and coalition forces have conducted a number of operations
Speaker 7: against ISIS sleeper cells who are still there, arrested, obtained
Speaker 7: a number of suspected ISIS members. They've also been fighting
Speaker 7: against Iranian backed militias across the Euphrates. We've also seen
Speaker 7: fighting between the Peshmerga, so that those are the military
Speaker 7: forces of the Kurdist down regional government in that area
Speaker 7: of Iraq and the Iraqi Army around the Macmaal refugee camp,
Speaker 7: which is a refugee camp for Kurdish people who have
Speaker 7: fled from turky And of course we've seen a lot
Speaker 7: of threats, a lot of even fighting inside Iran, but
Speaker 7: it it's generally be an Iranian back to relations attacking
Speaker 7: US spaces so far across that whole area. So I
Speaker 7: just wanted to update you on those things. Obviously we'll
Speaker 7: keep updating you on them, and also to just suggest
Speaker 7: once again that people verify the sources of information because
Speaker 7: I have seen, especially about this area where I think
Speaker 7: literacy is very low among the general US populations, and
Speaker 7: outrageous claims being made by people who either don't know
Speaker 7: what they're talking about or are wilfully misleading people. So
Speaker 7: I wanted to counsel people to be concerned about that.
Speaker 7: We don't have exact I don't have exact numbers of
Speaker 7: the numbers of drone attacks. I'm looking at a Pentagon
Speaker 7: press conference that happened thirty nine minutes ago, and then
Speaker 7: they're not giving them out there. So I have asked
Speaker 7: them for comment on a couple of things. So didn't
Speaker 7: email me back, very sad ghosting me. Bit, Yeah, that's
Speaker 7: the latest information on that. I wanted to make sure
Speaker 7: that we have the leader's update for you.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here. I am Robert Evans,
Speaker 2: and this is a podcast about things falling apart. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's about how to make things not fall apart, and
Speaker 2: other times it's more about enduring it. Today is more
Speaker 2: on the endurance side of things, and we're talking about
Speaker 2: a subject that we get a lot of requests about here.
Speaker 2: We've discussed this a year or so ago with one
Speaker 2: of our guests, a great Carl Casarta. We're talking about
Speaker 2: like security culture, and particularly the aspect of security culture
Speaker 2: that involves digital devices and how to communicate with your friends'
Speaker 2: affinity groups, whomever via your phone essentially or your computer.
Speaker 2: This is a thing where there's a huge amount of
Speaker 2: disinformation as to which apps are safe. What does it
Speaker 2: actually mean to say that an app is a cryptied
Speaker 2: How far does encryption get you? What sort of like
Speaker 2: cultural things come alongside the actual, like physical reality of
Speaker 2: the security of the device in order to kind of
Speaker 2: make a comprehensive security profile. We're gonna be talking about
Speaker 2: all that today and hopefully giving you some good advice
Speaker 2: on what you can trust. Because I am the furthest
Speaker 2: thing in the world from a technical expert. We have
Speaker 2: two actual experts with us today. Carolyn Senders and Cooper
Speaker 2: Quinton have both recently published a paper alongside several other
Speaker 2: authors Leila Wagner, Tim Bernard, Ami Meta, and Justin Hendricks
Speaker 2: called What is Secure? An Analysis of Popular Messaging Apps,
Speaker 2: and it's it's basically going over what is the actual
Speaker 2: level of security with a number of things like Telegram,
Speaker 2: you know, Telegram's private messaging system, Facebook Messenger, Apple Message,
Speaker 2: or I Message. I guess it's called and obviously signal
Speaker 2: and kind of as a spoiler, signal is your best bet.
Speaker 2: But that also isn't where you should end, right, I
Speaker 2: think we want to also talk about kind of like
Speaker 2: why and to what extent that's the case. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I'm going to turn things over to Carolyn and Cooper
Speaker 2: now because I have talked enough about this. Hey, guys,
Speaker 2: welcome to the show.
Speaker 9: Hey, Robert, thanks so much for having us on.
Speaker 6: Yeah ah yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 12: A big fan of the podcast, so always lovely, really
Speaker 12: lovely to be here.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really lovely to have you both again. Listeners.
Speaker 2: If you want to take a look at this their paper,
Speaker 2: if you just google what is Secure and Analysis of
Speaker 2: Popular Messaging Apps, you'll find the Tech Policy Press has
Speaker 2: a summary of it that's pretty quick. The full paper
Speaker 2: is eighty six pages or so. I also recommend reading that,
Speaker 2: but if you wanted to give this, you know, the
Speaker 2: summary a skim before you continue, that might help. But
Speaker 2: I kind of wanted to start by asking you, guys,
Speaker 2: what is it that makes signal a good option for people?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: Because I think most folks you describe it as sort
Speaker 2: of security folklore, right, this the stuff that you hear
Speaker 2: about security from your friends, and if you're not a
Speaker 2: technical person, you kind of just like trust what the
Speaker 2: folks around you were saying. And that was sort of
Speaker 2: how I got into Signal. Right, I'm not a technical person,
Speaker 2: but people I knew and trusted who were were like,
Speaker 2: this is your best option?
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 12: That's such a good question, and I think Cooper and
Speaker 12: I probably have similar but also like very different answers
Speaker 12: to it.
Speaker 6: Cooper, I can go first if you want.
Speaker 12: One of the things I love about Signal is it's
Speaker 12: just really easy to use. It's in and encrypted, it's
Speaker 12: a messaging app. There's not a lot of stuff on it,
Speaker 12: but you can do a lot with it. So you
Speaker 12: can do video calls, you can send actually pretty large
Speaker 12: files like PDFs. You can have drag and drop stuff,
Speaker 12: it's like such a low threshold for use for users
Speaker 12: because it is a messaging app, but it does so
Speaker 12: many different kinds of things. But then related to that,
Speaker 12: it's also actually quite minimal. So the paper which everyone
Speaker 12: should read, and we'll probably get into this later. Different
Speaker 12: apps like Telegram or of Facebook's Messenger app, for example,
Speaker 12: have have this thing we've been.
Speaker 6: Calling a feature bloat.
Speaker 12: They are messaging services that actually feel a bit more
Speaker 12: like social networks if you look at the amount of
Speaker 12: stuff that's on there, and by stuff, I don't just
Speaker 12: mean like stickers, I mean if you look at there's
Speaker 12: all these sort of specific and strange settings you can
Speaker 12: use to have all different kinds of messages and all
Speaker 12: different kinds of privacy settings, and all privacy settings.
Speaker 6: Are really really great.
Speaker 12: Because Telegram and Facebook Messenger are not encrypted by default,
Speaker 12: actually some of those settings can make you feel more
Speaker 12: secure when you're not so. Kind of the beauty of
Speaker 12: Signal is that out of the box, it's incredibly secure.
Speaker 12: It's an encrypted they're not holding any data about you.
Speaker 6: I believe.
Speaker 12: The only only day they hold is like when you've
Speaker 12: like when a phone number or a profile has downloaded
Speaker 12: Signal like when you've when you've signed up. But again
Speaker 12: it's it's incredibly easy to use. And another thing is,
Speaker 12: you know, if this was a few years ago, we've
Speaker 12: been looking at wire for example, when the nice things
Speaker 12: about Signal, and this might be controversial to some designers,
Speaker 12: is that it does follow modern design patterns and standards.
Speaker 12: So if you're using an iOS or Android version, like
Speaker 12: there are buttons in places where you expect them to be.
Speaker 12: Signal is not perfectly designed, but it is quite usable. Yeah,
Speaker 12: So for me, that's kind of what I think makes
Speaker 12: it makes it really wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's definitely as much as I love it, and
Speaker 2: it's my like standard messaging app I do every now
Speaker 2: and then run into the thing where like my friends
Speaker 2: will call me through Signal, which is great if you
Speaker 2: need a call to be secure, but it's not nearly
Speaker 2: as good, Like it drops a lot more often than
Speaker 2: a regular phone call and I'm like, we're just trying
Speaker 2: to meet at the movie theater. It's okay if the
Speaker 2: NSA no, right, Like, I've definitely.
Speaker 12: Had that with friends where I'm like I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 12: I'm like, we're just calling to talk about like your dog.
Speaker 2: It's probably fine, Yeah, the FBI can have this stuff.
Speaker 12: Yeah, please send, please send, please send dog picks through
Speaker 12: all messaging apps.
Speaker 9: You know. But on that note, it's uh writing, writing
Speaker 9: usable software that is also secure is really hard, right,
Speaker 9: And like as a like as cryptographer, I'm not a cryptographer,
Speaker 9: but like as somebody cryptographer adjacent, we got that wrong
Speaker 9: for a long time, right, like before Signal the problem,
Speaker 9: you know, there were the the the sort of most
Speaker 9: used encryption methods were probably uh PGP email, which is
Speaker 9: a method for encrypting email, and off the record chats,
Speaker 9: and both of those none of those ever got to
Speaker 9: the sort of level of user base that Signal and
Speaker 9: and certainly not WhatsApp have, right, And and that's largely
Speaker 9: because they were pretty much unusable, like PGP, almost entirely
Speaker 9: unusable even by cryptography professionals, right, even by computer security
Speaker 9: professionals like ourselves. OTR chat total pain in the butt, right,
Speaker 9: like just a real nightmare to use. So, like Signal,
Speaker 9: there are still some rough edges, and we talked about
Speaker 9: some of those in our paper, But overall, I think
Speaker 9: that the big, the big innovation they've had is just
Speaker 9: remembering that what people want to do on a chat
Speaker 9: app is not encrypt things. What people want to do
Speaker 9: on a chat app is they want to they want
Speaker 9: to chat right. And and the second that that that
Speaker 9: the security sort of gets in the way of that,
Speaker 9: people will stop using it and go find something that's
Speaker 9: more usable. And it seems like that's been Signals sort
Speaker 9: of guiding star and it's and they've you know, doing
Speaker 9: the doing the most secure thing that you can well
Speaker 9: still being fun and usable to actually just chat on right,
Speaker 9: And I think that that has served them quite well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's it's it's so important. One of
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that that contributes to
Speaker 2: good overall security is setting yourself up for success, which
Speaker 2: means setting yourself up for a system that can function
Speaker 2: well if you're lazy, which is one of the nice
Speaker 2: things that you know, with Signal, you don't have to
Speaker 2: worry about like opting in and out and like selecting
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff. It's pretty safe, especially for a
Speaker 2: normal person's uses right out of the box, which is
Speaker 2: huge and kind of in the same line as that
Speaker 2: is the fact that because Signal doesn't store metadata, you're
Speaker 2: not relying upon them being like committed, you know, anti
Speaker 2: state actors or whatever like, because they don't have access
Speaker 2: to the thing that, for example, Facebook will hand over
Speaker 2: to the cops if the cops just like breathe in
Speaker 2: their direction.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's that's exactly right, And that's that is That
Speaker 9: is the other really cool thing about Signal. You know, we,
Speaker 9: as Carolyn said, the only data that Signal gives over
Speaker 9: in response to a subpoena is the time that the
Speaker 9: phone number signed up for Signal account and the last
Speaker 9: time it connected to the Signal server. And the reason
Speaker 9: we know that is because Signal publishes transparency reports with
Speaker 9: the full text and full response of any subpoena that
Speaker 9: they get, so like, we can actually just see in
Speaker 9: the responses that all they've given over is these two
Speaker 9: pieces of information, because that's all they have, and they've
Speaker 9: done some pretty clever things to make that be.
Speaker 12: The case, right, And that's actually so different than how
Speaker 12: other companies are i think, reporting on either subpoenas or
Speaker 12: any kind of.
Speaker 6: Weight that law enforcement puts on them.
Speaker 12: So for our report, I don't remember how much's it's
Speaker 12: mentioned in the report actually, but we did go through
Speaker 12: and look at Apple Meta and I think Google, like
Speaker 12: in their own transparency reports to try to get a
Speaker 12: sense of how that would stack up in comparison to Signals.
Speaker 12: I think in some cases it's saying like they received
Speaker 12: some kind of like notification, but like no, nothing really
Speaker 12: clear or specific on what they received from law enforcement
Speaker 12: or government, but rather just that they received one. And
Speaker 12: so that's also the really great thing about Signal is
Speaker 12: you are getting all this information that you're not getting
Speaker 12: from other companies or platforms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I wanted to kind of in the
Speaker 2: same subject and going back to we kind of opened
Speaker 2: this introducing the concept that y'all introduced me to. I
Speaker 2: guess I was aware of this, but not the terminology
Speaker 2: security folklore, and I wanted to chat a little bit
Speaker 2: about kind of the most recent example of this something
Speaker 2: a lot of folks have probably been wondering about since
Speaker 2: we started talking about Signal, which is that roughly a
Speaker 2: week before y'all and I sat down to talk about this,
Speaker 2: a kind of viral info meme started coming through that
Speaker 2: was like Signal has a zero day exploit, which is
Speaker 2: basically a hole that a hacker found in an Apple
Speaker 2: program that is that can't expose you. You have to turn
Speaker 2: off link previews, right, which is that when you when
Speaker 2: someone sends you like a link to an article in Signal,
Speaker 2: you get a little preview, not not dissimilar to how
Speaker 2: I think to be fair, just based on my very
Speaker 2: limited knowledge, that is, when I think about, like, what
Speaker 2: are potential holes in Signal, I don't think it's unreasonable
Speaker 2: to be concerned about that specific feature. But that warning
Speaker 2: was not what it kind of seemed to be basically
Speaker 2: or not as accurate as I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people took it as being.
Speaker 10: I know.
Speaker 2: I'll I'll tell I'll turn it over to you, guys.
Speaker 2: I think that's the next thing I want to talk about.
Speaker 6: I'll turn it over to Cooper who had you had? Ah?
Speaker 6: You have a lot of feels about that.
Speaker 9: I have so many feelings about this. I was working
Speaker 9: on this all weekend. So this Yeah, so this copy pasta.
Speaker 9: I'm calling this like the Signal copy pasta. Yeah, which
Speaker 9: is a term from you know, four Chan and other
Speaker 9: horrible Internet places.
Speaker 6: But some media audience is probably Internet enough.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna guess a good half of the people listening
Speaker 2: at least got that message.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And it's it's like, first of all, this is
Speaker 9: not if you if you have a zero DA and signal,
Speaker 9: which is it, which is an exploit for signal that
Speaker 9: has been unpatched, that has not been patched by the vendor,
Speaker 9: so you can actively exploit it. There are no people
Speaker 9: in the world who would choose to quietly leak this
Speaker 9: over you know, over vague signal texts. There are two
Speaker 9: types of people. One uh, you know, people like us
Speaker 9: that would bring this to signal immediately and get them
Speaker 9: to patch it to protect the you know, millions of
Speaker 9: high risk users that you signal, or to the type
Speaker 9: of people that would go sell this exploit to some
Speaker 9: horrible company that would use it, you know, sell it
Speaker 9: to Saudi Arabia or something and use it to kill activists.
Speaker 13: Right, Like there is and there's no in between.
Speaker 9: There's nobody that is going to quietly leak this for
Speaker 9: you know, just for fun with vague details.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 9: So, so this this message set up red flags immediately,
Speaker 9: and like it's because I really do not like ling previews.
Speaker 9: And in our paper we discussed some of the issues
Speaker 9: that we have with link previews. You know, we think
Speaker 9: that they can they can leak some information about your
Speaker 9: chats to the owner of the website. Right, we think
Speaker 9: it's a kind of a large attack service. It's not
Speaker 9: super necessary.
Speaker 12: Would you mind explaining to actually the audience to like
Speaker 12: a little bit about what what we found when looking
Speaker 12: at link previews.
Speaker 9: Yeah. So, the way that link previews work is when
Speaker 9: you the way that they work on Signal and on
Speaker 9: WhatsApp is that when you send a link to somebody,
Speaker 9: the Signal app or WhatsApp goes and like fetches the
Speaker 9: web page that that you know for that link, right,
Speaker 9: It goes and downloads, you know, downloads the content of
Speaker 9: that link and gets a There are some there's some
Speaker 9: special HTML tags that describe, you know, sort of what
Speaker 9: the page is about, what the title of the page is.
Speaker 13: And like an image for the page.
Speaker 9: And it gets those tags and it puts them all
Speaker 9: together in this little package and then sends that all
Speaker 9: as part of the signalsage. So when you put a
Speaker 9: link in Signal, your phone actually goes out and gets
Speaker 9: that web page, and it gets that web page with
Speaker 9: a what's called the user agent, which is like a
Speaker 9: piece of text that's attached to the request that uniquely
Speaker 9: that that identifies it as being a request from Signal
Speaker 9: and from like from Signal and from your IP address. Right,
Speaker 9: So when you put a link in the owner of
Speaker 9: that website, whoever has the logs for that website, can
Speaker 9: know that somebody at your IP address is using Signal
Speaker 9: and sending this link over signal.
Speaker 13: What we're what our concern is is that if that link.
Speaker 9: Is unique, then anybody else who visits that link can
Speaker 9: be inferred to be somebody that you are talking with
Speaker 9: over signal, right, and so like this can be this
Speaker 9: can be a good an interesting a source of intelligence
Speaker 9: for website owners, especially for big websites that can easily
Speaker 9: generate unique links with like tracking parameters at the end
Speaker 9: of them, right, Like when you.
Speaker 13: Share a.
Speaker 9: Instagram post, and like at the end it's like question
Speaker 9: mark I G, S H I D equals you know,
Speaker 9: a long string of numbers and letters, right, or a
Speaker 9: Twitter post where you know T equals a long string
Speaker 9: of letters and numbers.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 13: That makes a unique link, and then anybody who.
Speaker 9: Visits that same link can be determined to be somebody
Speaker 9: that you're speaking with over signal. So and also WhatsApp
Speaker 9: and so so for that reason.
Speaker 8: We we we think that Signal and WhatsApp should turn
Speaker 8: link previews off by by default because we think that
Speaker 8: that's an unncessary information.
Speaker 9: Link Signal and WhatsApps pushback on that is that link
Speaker 9: previews are a core feature that people demand, and if
Speaker 9: they if they were to turn off link previews by default,
Speaker 9: there were the people would leave the platform for less
Speaker 9: secure platforms like Telegram.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean, I don't want to tell them
Speaker 2: their business, because I'm sure they have data on this,
Speaker 2: but I've never thought about link previews as being a
Speaker 2: thing that I needed.
Speaker 12: It's like, yeah, I think it's I think it's one
Speaker 12: of those things. And you know, we haven't necessarily done
Speaker 12: like extensive general design research in this right, Like we
Speaker 12: haven't surveyed like three thousand people in the US. We
Speaker 12: have had like a Pew Research survey across countries and
Speaker 12: be like, what are your thoughts on link previews?
Speaker 6: But I would.
Speaker 12: Probably argue because it is it is included in so
Speaker 12: much of modern messaging apps that we now assume it's
Speaker 12: like a core feature. One thing I will give Signal
Speaker 12: that I think is amazing that other apps don't do,
Speaker 12: and this is true of WhatsApp is pretty much every
Speaker 12: feature except for encryption you can there's something you can
Speaker 12: talk or turn off.
Speaker 6: Right, So, like link preview already was available for people.
Speaker 12: To turn off on signal, WhatsApp does not allow that,
Speaker 12: and it seems like they're making no moves to allow
Speaker 12: that future to be optional to turn on or off.
Speaker 6: But that is I will say, one of the things that's.
Speaker 12: Really lovely about Signal that is so different from modern
Speaker 12: design and modern like big tech platforms and just platforms
Speaker 12: in general, is that those a lot of features are optional,
Speaker 12: whereas you know, WhatsApp in meta's sort of stance on
Speaker 12: design is that a lot of things are not optional,
Speaker 12: that those are things users would want. Why would we
Speaker 12: make foundational elements like link previews optional? And you're just
Speaker 12: like starting like gesturing wildly, but like you know, it's like, well,
Speaker 12: you don't know what people want, And I mean, what's
Speaker 12: the harm in turning off some of some of these things, right?
Speaker 12: You know, like maybe maybe people don't want to receive gifts.
Speaker 12: I don't know, maybe they don't want to receive stickers.
Speaker 12: Why don't you like let them have that option. What's
Speaker 12: the harm that could happen?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 13: Yeah, two things I want to say on that.
Speaker 9: One is one is that at first we should acknowledge
Speaker 9: that this it turns out that there was no zero.
Speaker 13: Day, there was no vulnerability.
Speaker 9: Yeah, this was absolutely just something that that spread virally
Speaker 9: out of nowhere. I'd be really interested to find out
Speaker 9: what the origin of this copy past I was, but
Speaker 9: I haven't. I haven't been able to.
Speaker 12: But it's I'm curious about that as well, because I
Speaker 12: was in another group threw that was like, we really
Speaker 12: need outside auditors to look at these.
Speaker 6: And I was like, we have a whole report that
Speaker 6: we wrote that didn't look at this.
Speaker 2: Speaking of outside auditors, I gotta pause you guys just
Speaker 2: a second because it is time for an ad break,
Speaker 2: So please spend your money and then come back to
Speaker 2: learn more. Ah and we're back. Okay, sorry about that, Cooper, Carolyn.
Speaker 2: You may continue as you were.
Speaker 13: The other thing I was, I was going to say
Speaker 13: that the idea that anybody would leave WhatsApp because they
Speaker 13: stopped having link previews is completely preposterous to me.
Speaker 14: Like Clownish has over two billion users, they are the
Speaker 14: you know, in a position to set the standard for
Speaker 14: what people expect from a messaging app.
Speaker 9: And so like they could do things like turn on
Speaker 9: disappearing messages by default and change that culture. They could
Speaker 9: do things like turn off link previews by default and
Speaker 9: change that culture. Like, they could do these things, and
Speaker 9: you know they would you know, they would not lose
Speaker 9: enough users to even.
Speaker 13: Notice or care about.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 9: They are the only people in the position in the world,
Speaker 9: in the position to decide what the culture should be.
Speaker 9: And this is what they've decided the culture should be.
Speaker 6: Totally.
Speaker 12: I hate to break it to you, but if WhatsApp
Speaker 12: just got rid of link previews, I'm just throwing whole
Speaker 12: phone into.
Speaker 6: The garbage garbage can, getting rid of it.
Speaker 2: Just tossing it back to a landline.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I'm just gonna eat it into a river. I
Speaker 12: feel like I don't need this anymore. Actually, I'm going.
Speaker 6: Back to carrier pigeons. That's how far back I'm going
Speaker 6: to go.
Speaker 2: I mean that that does kind of lead into the
Speaker 2: next thing I wanted to talk about, which is sort
Speaker 2: of the other wing from security folklore, which is security nihilism.
Speaker 2: And yeah, this is kind of you introduce this when
Speaker 2: talking about sort of if you do try to engage
Speaker 2: somewhat with the technology, or if you wind up just
Speaker 2: kind of in the position I think most lay people are,
Speaker 2: where you know, maybe you have some friends who know more,
Speaker 2: or maybe you have some friends who think they know more,
Speaker 2: and you get all these conflicting things about like this
Speaker 2: is safe, No, it's not. You can't trust signal. The
Speaker 2: FEDS could be running signal all this kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: and to be fair, the FEDS have run security based
Speaker 2: services before. It's not like I don't believe that's happening
Speaker 2: with signal, but it's not like I understand where paranoia
Speaker 2: like that can can enter into people's calculus, especially if
Speaker 2: you're not tech knowledgeable, and that can lead to this
Speaker 2: sort of state of security nihilism where you're just like,
Speaker 2: you can't communicate it all online. There's no way to
Speaker 2: do it securely, and obviously there's no perfect right. You
Speaker 2: never have it, but you don't have one hundred percent
Speaker 2: with like talking in person to somebody right There are
Speaker 2: individuals in prison right now who you know, somebody they
Speaker 2: loved and trusted rat it on them. There's no one
Speaker 2: hundred percents in this world. But that doesn't mean nihilism
Speaker 2: is the right response to like trying to figure out
Speaker 2: how to set up your communications standards with people right totally.
Speaker 12: I mean, I think the approach we take in because
Speaker 12: throughout this report, we were also teaching workshops to reproductive
Speaker 12: justice activists across the US and states where abortion is banned.
Speaker 12: I'm from Louisiana, I live half the year there, the
Speaker 12: abortion is banned there, And we were also working with
Speaker 12: journalists in India. So a big big thing for us
Speaker 12: was also teaching threat modeling and different kinds of what
Speaker 12: Matt Mitchell, a security trader and expert, calls digital hygiene.
Speaker 12: And so a lot of this was recognizing that there
Speaker 12: was certain practices we were picking up on, particularly with
Speaker 12: folks we were working with. So like a lot of
Speaker 12: reproductive justice activists we were working with are new to security,
Speaker 12: they're new to technology, they don't have a background in tech,
Speaker 12: and generally, you know, the American South, American Deep South
Speaker 12: is super overlooked in terms of tech policy, in terms
Speaker 12: of just I think a general focus when people are
Speaker 12: talking about tech or tech literacy or tech activism, and
Speaker 12: that is like leaving really massive gaps and knowledge for people.
Speaker 12: And so you know, when we were working on this,
Speaker 12: security folklore and security nihilism were both actually very almost
Speaker 12: like I won't say like a pendulum, but they were
Speaker 12: very connected. And so some of that was people hearing
Speaker 12: things like oh, I should put my phone in a
Speaker 12: microwave when I'm having a very sensitive conversation, right, And
Speaker 12: so that's where some of that security folklore is coming in.
Speaker 12: It is something that is technically safe, but it's like
Speaker 12: not the thing you necessarily like totally need to do
Speaker 12: in that moment. And with security nihilism what it kind
Speaker 12: of came down to, And this is stuff we've seen
Speaker 12: with other groups and other circumstances. A great example are
Speaker 12: are you know Palestinine activists and journalists Let's say, who
Speaker 12: are you know facing the threat of all different kinds
Speaker 12: of governmental censorship and surveillance of sort of saying like
Speaker 12: when there's this large threat sort of hanging on us,
Speaker 12: and there's also physical surveillance. And this is true for
Speaker 12: a lot of journalists in other countries like India as well,
Speaker 12: for example, you know, like should everything go through signal
Speaker 12: or does it really matter?
Speaker 6: Like does it really matter?
Speaker 12: And this is also something again we saw with some
Speaker 12: some reproductive justice activists as well.
Speaker 6: Where it's like if everything is being monitored, what's safe?
Speaker 6: Like can I send stuff?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 6: Can I even use Google?
Speaker 12: And part of this was, you know, by teaching privacy
Speaker 12: and security workshops, by teaching things like threat modeling, which
Speaker 12: is a.
Speaker 6: Framework just assessing are what are threats?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 12: Are what are all the potential threats you could face
Speaker 12: and kind of mapping them from like the most minor
Speaker 12: to like the most major and what you can do
Speaker 12: about that. That's a way to try to combat security nihilism.
Speaker 12: But I think an approach Cooper and I are also
Speaker 12: really fond of is thinking of this like safer sex.
Speaker 12: There's all different kinds of things you can do that
Speaker 12: our mitigations are actually incredibly helpful, and we can't look
Speaker 12: at it as a binary of safe or not safe.
Speaker 12: It's actually like much more of a gradient. But you know,
Speaker 12: the focalore and the nihilism, I think come from a
Speaker 12: very similar place, which is we're asking people, like society
Speaker 12: is kind of asking or demanding that people be experts
Speaker 12: and something that's really hard. I am like a fairly
Speaker 12: technical person and even there are some things that I
Speaker 12: find hard to serve wrap my head around. And I've
Speaker 12: been working in privacy and security for like quite a while.
Speaker 6: And I think, you know, it's.
Speaker 12: Also really hard when you think about these apps as
Speaker 12: like a brand new person. It's like one of the
Speaker 12: things that popped up a lot in our research is
Speaker 12: like why should we trust signal? And that's actually a
Speaker 12: great question, Like what about Signal in its interface and
Speaker 12: its design would cause you to trust it? Like some
Speaker 12: people were like it's a nonprofit. That's great, but I
Speaker 12: don't know what that means. I'm like, that's actually a
Speaker 12: fantastic question, Like what does that mean?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 12: Like why should you trust this? You've heard through the
Speaker 12: grapevine that you should. And I think these are kind
Speaker 12: of all the things that people are dealing with because
Speaker 12: if you sort of take a step back and just
Speaker 12: look at software or any different kinds of software generally,
Speaker 12: why should you trust that it's safe and secure when
Speaker 12: there have been so many different kinds of leaks or
Speaker 12: breaches or things breaking.
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like so these.
Speaker 12: Are I think really really closely tied. But I think
Speaker 12: a big thing for us is trying to combat that
Speaker 12: security nihilism, like when whenever we can like there is
Speaker 12: things you can do, I don't want to say like
Speaker 12: no matter how great the threat. But I believe like,
Speaker 12: no matter how great the threat, there is stuff.
Speaker 6: There is stuff you can do.
Speaker 9: No matter how great the threat is, there's stuff that
Speaker 9: you can do to make it more difficult and more
Speaker 9: expensive for that person to attack you. Right, Like we
Speaker 9: all lock the doors to our house, or you know,
Speaker 9: for the most part.
Speaker 13: Or you know, we all we all do things.
Speaker 9: To to protect ourselves like that that aren't fool proof, right.
Speaker 9: Somebody can always break a window to get into your house, right,
Speaker 9: So we can find other ways to get into your house.
Speaker 9: But locking the door makes it so that somebody has
Speaker 9: to do the noisy thing of breaking a window.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 9: It makes it so that, you know, somebody has to
Speaker 9: spend more time and effort and more risk of getting
Speaker 9: caught in getting.
Speaker 13: Into your house. Right. And that's and that's like we layer.
Speaker 9: When you layer these protections, right, the idea, you know
Speaker 9: is that you're you're you're making it harder, You're making
Speaker 9: there be more friction right to piercing your security.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's that's a really good point, and
Speaker 2: that the concept of friction. You know, this is something
Speaker 2: I've talked about, not that these are exactly the same things,
Speaker 2: but in the although there's not not wildly different when
Speaker 2: it comes to like how insurgents win insurgencies, right, It's
Speaker 2: not by carrying out these sort of like great battlefield
Speaker 2: victories that sweep the enemy from the field. It's by friction, right,
Speaker 2: which wears down both the culture and the kind of
Speaker 2: readiness of the opponent until they simply bounce, which is
Speaker 2: a pretty durable and effective strategy. You can keep it up.
Speaker 2: It's this matter of like there's no like sweeping sudden
Speaker 2: like ninety minute three act win here. It's more a
Speaker 2: matter of the more difficult, the more expensive you make it,
Speaker 2: the more you hold on to and the more all
Speaker 2: of us hold on to. Right. That's the other benefit
Speaker 2: is like, even if you're not even if you are
Speaker 2: the most law abiding person in the world like myself,
Speaker 2: having these security measures in place means that you're kind
Speaker 2: of contributing to the overall immune system of a kind
Speaker 2: of community of people who don't want the NSA listening
Speaker 2: to the ship.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly exactly. And the friction thing is is also
Speaker 9: exactly what Signal does, right, Like by the threat model
Speaker 9: for Signal is stopping the NSA or other global adversaries
Speaker 9: from listening to all communications as they travel over the internet, right,
Speaker 9: And that's when you can when you can do that,
Speaker 9: like when you can when you can listen to everybody's
Speaker 9: conversations as they travel over the internet, it's really cheap
Speaker 9: to spy on anybody, right when you're encrypting that communication. Uh,
Speaker 9: then the NSA or whatever other global adversary has to
Speaker 9: go actually hack your phone, right, they have to. They
Speaker 9: have to target you specifically, they have to burn resources
Speaker 9: and you know, burn weapons, right, zero days to get
Speaker 9: access to your phone. And that's a lot more costly,
Speaker 9: it's a lot more noisy, it's a much higher.
Speaker 13: Risk of them getting caught.
Speaker 9: So it's introduced to huge friction, uh in that in
Speaker 9: that area. Go ahead, okay, go ahead, go ahead, I say,
Speaker 9: And I think you're asymmetic. The sort of comparison to
Speaker 9: asymmetric warfare is exactly spot on, because none of us
Speaker 9: are ever going to have the money that that the
Speaker 9: NSA or MASADE has. None of us are ever going
Speaker 9: to have the the total technical acumen that the NSA
Speaker 9: or MASADA has.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 9: But like those that you know, so we have to
Speaker 9: kind of fight a you know, in terms of caryption
Speaker 9: in terms of encryption, a guerrilla war, right, and we
Speaker 9: have to make things so expensive and so annoying for
Speaker 9: them that it's.
Speaker 6: Not worth it totally. And just to sort of building that.
Speaker 12: One of the things I love about Signal is while
Speaker 12: they're creating friction for our adversaries, it's actually so frictionless
Speaker 12: to use as a user. And I think that's one
Speaker 12: of the things I find just continually.
Speaker 6: Impressive about that. I don't want this to turn into like.
Speaker 12: The like we're all himbos for Signal, except we probably are,
Speaker 12: but because like that's one of the things as a
Speaker 12: researcher like Kuber and I stimes have to be like,
Speaker 12: we're not paid by a Signal at all, Like, but
Speaker 12: this is in fact, like one of the best things
Speaker 12: you can use. But again, one of the things I
Speaker 12: think is amazing is that it is so easy to use,
Speaker 12: and it really is designed for and I'm using the
Speaker 12: term usability as a design term, meaning that it is
Speaker 12: they're thinking about a common user, including those with like
Speaker 12: lower digital literacy or those that are have never used
Speaker 12: any kind of any kind of security tool, and so
Speaker 12: they're hitting a specific threshold of usability for things to
Speaker 12: be understandable, and again, that's incredibly hard to do well,
Speaker 12: and they are. They are doing it quite well. Like
Speaker 12: it's very I would argue it's very easy and sort
Speaker 12: of seamless for people to make a jump from WhatsApp
Speaker 12: or if you're on like Google or Android using like
Speaker 12: Google Messages, sorry Google, if.
Speaker 6: You're on Android or an iPhone.
Speaker 12: From like I Messages to Google Messages to signal like
Speaker 12: it doesn't.
Speaker 6: It might look slightly different.
Speaker 12: I might feel a lot more blue, maybe a lot
Speaker 12: more black, depending up on how yours is constructed. But
Speaker 12: for the most part, a lot of the features are
Speaker 12: kind of where you expect them to be, and it's
Speaker 12: not at all difficult to get it up and running,
Speaker 12: which is not something against Cooper said earlier we could
Speaker 12: say about things like PGP.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to kind of move on to talking
Speaker 2: about other apps and their security or lack of it,
Speaker 2: And I think we should start probably by talking about Telegram,
Speaker 2: because that's probably close to top of the list of
Speaker 2: things people use for secure communications that is not nearly
Speaker 2: as secure as they think. So yeah, I wanted to
Speaker 2: kind of chat with you about like why that is,
Speaker 2: and I specifically I wanted to talk One of the
Speaker 2: things that is frustrating about Telegram is they kind of
Speaker 2: have they have like a secret chat or private chat,
Speaker 2: like they have a couple of different options that don't
Speaker 2: necessarily mean what they sound like they mean to most people.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so that's actually one thing our report found. So
Speaker 12: private chat and secret chat are in fact.
Speaker 6: The same thing.
Speaker 12: They're just called slightly different things in the app, which
Speaker 12: for for again, for those listening.
Speaker 6: That are don't have the background in design, that's bad design.
Speaker 12: That's actually not that's not professional, that's a that is
Speaker 12: a mistake. There's no reason for a feature to have
Speaker 12: like two different names inside of inside of your software.
Speaker 12: And so I don't know if that's an oversight on
Speaker 12: their part, I'm assuming so, But like those two things
Speaker 12: correlate to the same feature, and so they should actually
Speaker 12: be called the same thing. But then even further that
Speaker 12: being said, what does private mean to a user?
Speaker 6: What does secret mean?
Speaker 12: You know, Facebook Messenger they call their encrypted message secure
Speaker 12: or no, they also call it secret. Sorry, they also
Speaker 12: call it secret, But like does that mean security? Does
Speaker 12: that mean encrypted? And so that's like one of the
Speaker 12: one of the weird things where it's like, you know,
Speaker 12: I think by using a very sort of like normalize
Speaker 12: or culturally almost like emotional name like private, it makes
Speaker 12: something seem like it's actually quite safe, when in fact
Speaker 12: it's not.
Speaker 6: And there's a variety of reasons as why, like.
Speaker 12: Telegram is not not a very secure app that I
Speaker 12: will let Cooper talk about more.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I would never advise anybody to have a chat
Speaker 9: over Telegram if they are concerned about the privacy of that. Yeah,
Speaker 9: So we were talking about friction and the fact that
Speaker 9: and encrypted chats are not the default in Telegram creates
Speaker 9: a friction for users to have an actually secure chat.
Speaker 13: Right, you have to go remember to turn it.
Speaker 12: On, and you can only turn it on turn it
Speaker 12: on individually per message. It's not like an overall feature
Speaker 12: on Telegram or Facebook Messenger, like you have to go
Speaker 12: select a specific like the specific conversation per conversation, which
Speaker 12: is and another thing ourper gets into is how also
Speaker 12: those chats don't look very different. They look almost identical
Speaker 12: to a normal chat. So for low vision users or
Speaker 12: anyone with any kind of like disability, especially a vision
Speaker 12: related disability, it's almost impossible to It's like nearly impossible
Speaker 12: to recognize which chat you're using if you're looking at
Speaker 12: the chat logs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, outside of that, like if people you know, in
Speaker 2: terms of like things that may not be options right now,
Speaker 2: I think basically everyone listening signal is a perfectly viable option.
Speaker 2: But it's not impossible that, for example, you might wind
Speaker 2: up in a country where, even if there's not a
Speaker 2: specific law against it, there is a precedent established that
Speaker 2: if you have signal on your phone, you know, it
Speaker 2: can be at least used as a justification for charges
Speaker 2: that you are planning to use. Like you know, with Atlanta,
Speaker 2: people are getting charges because they had a lawyer's name
Speaker 2: written on their arm, right, and so the state saying, well,
Speaker 2: that's evidence that we're planning to commit a crime. You know,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean that convictions will go through on that
Speaker 2: kind of thing, but it may be a reason why
Speaker 2: signal might not be an option, or say, you know,
Speaker 2: something comes out about it that makes it seem less secure.
Speaker 2: What are other good or or acceptable options? And I
Speaker 2: know when we're talking about this, these are often options
Speaker 2: that require more input and work from the user in
Speaker 2: order to maximize their potential security. But I do think
Speaker 2: it's good to like let people kind of know what
Speaker 2: else is out there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so when signal isn't an option, WhatsApp is actually
Speaker 9: not a bad option. So WhatsApp it is owned by Meta,
Speaker 9: which is a you know, which is which is you
Speaker 9: know not which is not ideal. But WhatsApp actually uses
Speaker 9: the same encryption protocol as signal. Uh So, like under
Speaker 9: the hood, the way that the you know, the way
Speaker 9: that the math works to hide your messages from the
Speaker 9: NSA is exactly the same, right, and and they've implemented it. Well,
Speaker 9: you know, there are a few more steps that, you know,
Speaker 9: few more precautions that you need to take with WhatsApp,
Speaker 9: like making sure that your chats aren't backed up being
Speaker 9: the main one. But WhatsApp is certainly good enough, right
Speaker 9: if you're if you're you know, chat networks aren't using signal,
Speaker 9: if you're in a country where you can't use signal, right, Like,
Speaker 9: WhatsApp has two billion users, I'm you know, it's it's
Speaker 9: you can use WhatsApp almost anywhere in the world. It's
Speaker 9: and it's ubiquitous enough that it's not going to mark
Speaker 9: you as you know, somebody with something to hide, right,
Speaker 9: And like and I don't want to I don't want
Speaker 9: to discount what's app. Right, getting two billion people to
Speaker 9: have end to end encrypted messaging by default overnight basically
Speaker 9: was a major cupe like that that was world changing, right,
Speaker 9: and like they they really do deserve applause for that obviously,
Speaker 9: you know, I think partly because of their scale, partly
Speaker 9: because they're owned by Meta, right, they haven't taken all
Speaker 9: of these same steps, like they do have more a
Speaker 9: metadata on their servers then Signal does, right, But if
Speaker 9: that's your option, that is a fine option.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's really good to know, particularly since
Speaker 2: options are always more secure than not having any kind
Speaker 2: of a backup plan totally.
Speaker 12: And if people are like even slightly nervous about WhatsApp,
Speaker 12: of great things they do have disappearing messages. The downside
Speaker 12: is like the fastest disappearing message is only twenty four hours.
Speaker 12: But that's something that again you still have and that's
Speaker 12: like that is that is an amazing feature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that kind of gets into also what kind
Speaker 2: of stuff you can do in order to maximize the
Speaker 2: value of features like that, Like, for example, if you're
Speaker 2: coming back into the country or a country and your
Speaker 2: phone gets confiscated by customs or whatever, because security services
Speaker 2: have some sort of eye on you for whatever reason.
Speaker 2: If you've got you know, thumbprint log in or face
Speaker 2: log in, they're going to get into that phone right
Speaker 2: in your twenty four hour delete thing may not have
Speaker 2: gotten taken care of everything. If you've got like a
Speaker 2: complicated eight digit password and no biometrics enabled, maybe depending
Speaker 2: on where you are and whatnot, that'll keep your phone
Speaker 2: locked long enough for those messages to get deleted, right, Like,
Speaker 2: it's all about kind of maximizing the chances that something
Speaker 2: like that helps.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly. We definitely recommend that people turn on disappearing messages.
Speaker 9: I think that that's just a good sensible default to have.
Speaker 9: Also definitely recommend that if you're going to be in
Speaker 9: a situation where you think you're going to be, you know,
Speaker 9: there's a higher likelihood if you interacted with law enforcement,
Speaker 9: if you're crossing a border, if you're going to a protest,
Speaker 9: turn off the biometric unlock on your phone. Certainly, especially
Speaker 9: in the US, there's the case law isn't settled, but
Speaker 9: there's a lot of state courts that have decided that
Speaker 9: police can force you to unlock your phone with your
Speaker 9: biometrics and that that's totally fine. So, you know, in
Speaker 9: the in the US context, it's a good idea. In
Speaker 9: any context, I think it's a good idea if you're
Speaker 9: at heightened risk to turn off.
Speaker 12: Total I mean, one thing we're also a big fan
Speaker 12: of is figuring out too like and this is again
Speaker 12: where threat modeling is so key, is like, is this
Speaker 12: a circumstance where you need your phone or Another thing
Speaker 12: that you know you can always do if you are
Speaker 12: nervous about traveling across the border, is you can delete
Speaker 12: signal and reinstall it and everything is gone. You can
Speaker 12: delete WhatsApp temporarily while you're crossing a border so it's
Speaker 12: not on your phone. You know, there are things like
Speaker 12: that you can do if you feel comfortable wiping your phone,
Speaker 12: that's something also you can do. You know, these are
Speaker 12: all again, these are these are these are different things,
Speaker 12: and I think this is one of the things our report.
Speaker 12: I don't remember how too much we get into a
Speaker 12: bit something that at least we've been thinking about. Cooper
Speaker 12: and I run a little lab called Convocation, and one
Speaker 12: of the things we've been thinking about there is just
Speaker 12: also how do we install sort of like better, better,
Speaker 12: holistic practices where we understand that a phone is just
Speaker 12: one component of our safety, and so like secure messaging,
Speaker 12: encrypted messaging is one component of that safe safety.
Speaker 6: So like what are other things we can do? And
Speaker 6: some of that can.
Speaker 12: Be you know, wiping your phone of traveling if that
Speaker 12: makes sense for you or if that's thing that makes
Speaker 12: you feel safer, or removing certain apps and then you know,
Speaker 12: reinstalling them, reinstalling them later.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, and it and it really is holistic.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 9: Like a thing that a thing that people need to
Speaker 9: keep in mind is that, you know, disappearing messages can't
Speaker 9: stop an untrustworthy uh, conversation partner, right, Like if if
Speaker 9: my conversation partner is untrustworthy, they can take screenshots of
Speaker 9: the messages, right, they can you know, go they can
Speaker 9: go snitch to law enforcement about what I've told them, right, Uh,
Speaker 9: Encrypted messaging, disappearing messages, these are not panaspeas.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 9: You still have to you still have to keep all
Speaker 9: of your other aspects of security as well, right, So
Speaker 9: don't entirely rely on these technologies to save you.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 9: You have to also trust the people you're working with,
Speaker 9: and build these layers of security up.
Speaker 6: It's true.
Speaker 12: I mean, Cooper, you could leak all of my secrets
Speaker 12: right now on this podcast, and you chose them that
Speaker 12: to what a gentleman.
Speaker 5: And that is color.
Speaker 2: That is the other thing right where when it comes
Speaker 2: to like what is secure? One thing to remember is
Speaker 2: that signal for all the good things about it, nothing,
Speaker 2: nothing at all about that app stops the recipient of
Speaker 2: a message from you from taking a screen grab or
Speaker 2: just handing their phone over to their friendly local federal agent, right,
Speaker 2: which is always you know, we don't want to be
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to be a security nihilist here. I
Speaker 2: think you know there's no replacing communication over phones in
Speaker 2: many situations. But if you are, a full example, going
Speaker 2: to be transferring a bunch of Plan B pills in
Speaker 2: an area where that is prosecutable, that probably shouldn't go
Speaker 2: on your phone in that language.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 2: Perhaps you know you could come up with a clever
Speaker 2: codeword or whatever, but don't you know it is security
Speaker 2: is like you said, holistic. You know you should not
Speaker 2: be looking at it as just like, well the app
Speaker 2: is secure, So that's enough.
Speaker 12: I mean one thing I also want people sort of
Speaker 12: think about too, because that's a really great point Robert is, like,
Speaker 12: we do all different kinds of things every day in
Speaker 12: our lives that could, you know, in dangerous. Like I
Speaker 12: think a lot of the work I do is I
Speaker 12: work a lot with people facing all different kinds of
Speaker 12: online harassment. So like falling in love, for example, is
Speaker 12: a dangerous thing to do. You could have your heart
Speaker 12: broken or that person could hurt you. Learning how to
Speaker 12: trust people, you know, crossing the street, deciding to jaywalk right,
Speaker 12: all different things we do sort of every day actually
Speaker 12: can expect to harm. And so one thing I think
Speaker 12: for people listening to keep in mind is that's the
Speaker 12: same when we have conversations. And I think a way
Speaker 12: to avoid nihilism is just to remember that that every
Speaker 12: day we are sort of going out there and actually
Speaker 12: being incredibly brave just by living our everyday lives, by
Speaker 12: deciding to be in community and have friendships and have relationships.
Speaker 12: And in my case, I love jaywalking, and no one
Speaker 12: around me does, and that's why that's my choice. And
Speaker 12: I have not yet gotten hit by a car j walking.
Speaker 2: I think it's good to look at this the same way.
Speaker 2: There's there's a concept that the military has sort of
Speaker 2: developed when talking about how not to die when you're
Speaker 2: in a gunfight or something. It's called the survivability onion, right,
Speaker 2: And I think it's extremely useful both if you're talking
Speaker 2: about like, well, I'm going to a protest and there
Speaker 2: will be violence there, you know, should I wear armor,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But it's also just really it's really useful
Speaker 2: with any kind of security and and the onion, it's
Speaker 2: it's in vision, doesn't on you because like the largest
Speaker 2: outside chunk of it is don't be seen, don't be acquired,
Speaker 2: which means somebody actually getting you in their head sights,
Speaker 2: don't be a hit, which means being behind cover or something.
Speaker 2: And then the very internal part of it is like
Speaker 2: have some sort of armor in.
Speaker 7: Case you are shot.
Speaker 2: But if you if the armor is useful, the majority
Speaker 2: of the onion has already failed. Right. If encryption is useful,
Speaker 2: that is not a dissimilar sort of situation. Right, So
Speaker 2: there's a there's a degree of canniness is super helpful
Speaker 2: and thinking about like what is what is visible about me?
Speaker 2: If I'm doing something, I know that I have to
Speaker 2: be extra concerned about the state seeing what is visible
Speaker 2: about me from the outside, you.
Speaker 12: Know, I mean, I think that's an amazing thing to
Speaker 12: think about. Like where where are you sending a text message?
Speaker 12: Are you in a place in which like someone can
Speaker 12: lean over, Like I'm the nosiest motherfucker in all the time.
Speaker 12: I'm constantly like looking around being like what's that person
Speaker 12: watching on an airplane? Or like if someone is sitting
Speaker 12: next to me scrolling, so like you wouldn't want to
Speaker 12: like send a sensitive text message like next to me,
Speaker 12: because I'd be like, that's that's interesting fodder.
Speaker 6: That's kind of a Texas to.
Speaker 12: Cooper later, you know, And so I think it's important
Speaker 12: to think about that, like who's around you?
Speaker 5: Is?
Speaker 12: This is like how are you describing something? Do you
Speaker 12: know the person you're messaging? If you're in a group message,
Speaker 12: you know everybody there? Like do you trust all of them?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 12: And if you're ever nervous there are this is I
Speaker 12: guess the upside also to in person conversations. You can have,
Speaker 12: you know, a phone call or an in person conversation
Speaker 12: with someone. Right if you're really not sure or you
Speaker 12: don't feel comfortable even sending something over signal, that might
Speaker 12: be the time to be like, hey, do you want
Speaker 12: to meet up and get a coffee and then you know,
Speaker 12: try to find a discreet place to have have a conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I do want to roll to ads real quick.
Speaker 2: One second, and I think Cooper had something to say,
Speaker 2: and we'll we'll continue, but first products Ah, we're back Cooper.
Speaker 2: You look like you had something to add on that.
Speaker 13: Nothing particularly serious, just that I think that that's I
Speaker 13: think that that's.
Speaker 9: Really good advice for the military and absolutely justifies the
Speaker 9: nine hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad they put together a fucking graphic. I
Speaker 2: wonder how many billions of dollars that did cost.
Speaker 12: I could I could make a graphic for hundreds of
Speaker 12: millions of dollars.
Speaker 9: Yeah, if anybody, if anybody wants to fund us for
Speaker 9: hundreds of millions, we will will do it less now
Speaker 9: a year, hundreds of millions.
Speaker 12: We have so many good T shirt ideas and sticker ideas, y'all, like,
Speaker 12: so many good ones, so many unhinged ones that the
Speaker 12: world needs to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I uh, I mean I do. I guess just
Speaker 2: because of the amount of time I've spent thinking about
Speaker 2: this stuff from my old job. There are a couple
Speaker 2: of concepts from military planning I think about in this context,
Speaker 2: and one of them that I also think is relevant
Speaker 2: to what we're talking about with friction is the concept
Speaker 2: of an ode loop, right, which is how do you
Speaker 2: win and combat against an opponent, And it's by disrupting
Speaker 2: this thing called the ode loop, and the odor loop
Speaker 2: is how an adversary carries out actions in a conflict
Speaker 2: like this, right. And the steps you have to go
Speaker 2: for are observe, orient, decide, and act. And if you
Speaker 2: can disrupt any stage of that, you can stop them
Speaker 2: from taking actions, right, which stops them from being able
Speaker 2: to harm you. And the good security is going to
Speaker 2: impact all three of those things, right, It's going to
Speaker 2: stop them from being able to see you sometimes if
Speaker 2: they can see you, stuff like you know, you were
Speaker 2: just talking, we were just talking earlier about link previews, right,
Speaker 2: and how that can kind of expose maybe who you're
Speaker 2: in communication with potentially well, that could allow the state
Speaker 2: to orient themselves to you and to your friends, right.
Speaker 2: And obviously stuff like locking down your device is not
Speaker 2: having unnecessarily info online can stop them bring being able
Speaker 2: to decide you know what you're doing, and how they
Speaker 2: should respond to that. And I think that's also good
Speaker 2: if you're thinking, if you're not just somebody who is
Speaker 2: concerned about your security like most people are, because it's
Speaker 2: good to have some security. If you're actually dealing with
Speaker 2: the state or a corporation as an adversary in some way,
Speaker 2: it can be useful to think about your security culture
Speaker 2: in those terms.
Speaker 13: Yeah. Absolutely, I think that's absolutely right. It's it's and.
Speaker 9: I think that it's you know, it points to like
Speaker 9: we should we should understand what the you know mode
Speaker 9: of thinking of our adversaries is, right, like we you know,
Speaker 9: we should if your adversary is the NSA, right, which
Speaker 9: is like probably actually not most people in the US,
Speaker 9: Like for most US activists, the NSA is not actually
Speaker 9: your biggest adversary, right, Like your biggest adversary is going
Speaker 9: to be local police, right, your biggest adversary is going
Speaker 9: to be you know, the the you know, somebody like
Speaker 9: your abusive partner, right. And you need to And this
Speaker 9: is why threat modeling is important, because you need to
Speaker 9: to really to really think about, you know, think through
Speaker 9: like you know, well, okay, wait, am I actually worried
Speaker 9: about protecting myself from the NSA or am I more
Speaker 9: worried about? Uh uh, you know the the racist police
Speaker 9: officer that drives down my street every day?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 9: And yeah, probably it's the latter. And so you can
Speaker 9: you can take a lot more useful actions, right uh
Speaker 9: and and you know you can, you can you know,
Speaker 9: break that oda loop for him once you know actually
Speaker 9: what it is. Right, Yeah, if you're defending yourself against
Speaker 9: the NSA, you're gonna leave yourself wide open to the
Speaker 9: actual threat.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's really I think a great example. And I I
Speaker 2: don't mean to be like quote unquote sub tweeting somebody here,
Speaker 2: but I've known a couple of folks like this. It's like,
Speaker 2: if you have if you're super paranoid, you're not putting
Speaker 2: anything online, You're only talking with your close friends. You
Speaker 2: use a dumb you have burners, but you also drive
Speaker 2: around with a shitload of weed in your car in
Speaker 2: a state where that's illegal. It's like, well, like your
Speaker 2: your threat modeling is not great in that situation, right,
Speaker 2: Or like I do all that, but I carry in
Speaker 2: a legal handgun with me wherever I go. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: it may be more of a threat than your phone.
Speaker 6: My partner the other day, was like, what if I
Speaker 6: got a dumb phone? I was like, what if I
Speaker 6: divorced you? Like, like what if? They were like what
Speaker 6: do you mean?
Speaker 12: And I was like, well, I'm going to be the
Speaker 12: one using all the maps for both of us, Yeah.
Speaker 6: And having to google all the dumb shit you want
Speaker 6: to google.
Speaker 12: That doesn't make I'm now your weakest link, Like go
Speaker 12: fuck yourself. But also I was like, I'm absolutely not
Speaker 12: going to be your your Google maps bitch, Like I'm
Speaker 12: not not doing that.
Speaker 6: But but I.
Speaker 12: Mean I think also, do you know to both of
Speaker 12: y'all's points to get serious again for a second. I mean,
Speaker 12: you know, like my threat model, for example, might be
Speaker 12: similar or slightly different, maybe slightly less than Cooper's. But
Speaker 12: you know, like some of the like the the the
Speaker 12: journalists in India we were working with, have quite a
Speaker 12: high threat model, right, Like, yeah, the Indian police force
Speaker 12: are very much like the NSA. They're very talented, they
Speaker 12: have a lot of money and tech at their disposal,
Speaker 12: and that might be different for some of the activists
Speaker 12: we're working with, let's say in like Louisiana or Texas, right,
Speaker 12: But the differences is like we're still talking about I
Speaker 12: would argue two brutal police forces that just have different
Speaker 12: means of disposal at their hands. So like the Louisiana
Speaker 12: Police are our groups you should totally be worried about.
Speaker 12: They might not be able to hack your phone, but
Speaker 12: maybe eventually they could. But there are other there are
Speaker 12: obviously other things we're about with them. But you know,
Speaker 12: in the context of like with some of the folks
Speaker 12: who are working with in the South, like reproductive justice activists,
Speaker 12: some of the things are probably much more.
Speaker 6: Serious in terms of your threat model.
Speaker 12: Would be like a nurse for someone who, let's say,
Speaker 12: is miscarring or has sought an abortion. This is something
Speaker 12: Kate Bertash from the Digital Defense Fund, a friend of
Speaker 12: of you know ours, has talked about where like the
Speaker 12: people that are supposed to take care of you might
Speaker 12: be the ones that are actually your your biggest threat, right,
Speaker 12: the ones that have heard you say something or you've
Speaker 12: can fight it in for example, And that is kind
Speaker 12: of a horrifying thing to think about, but that is
Speaker 12: that is a thing you have to threat model, right
Speaker 12: is can I trust this person?
Speaker 6: How am I describing you know what's happening?
Speaker 13: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Well did y'all have anything else you wanted
Speaker 2: to make sure to get into in this conversation. There's
Speaker 2: so much more in your in the great paper you
Speaker 2: you helped co author What is Secure and Analysis of
Speaker 2: Popular Messaging Apps on the Tech Policy Press. But yeah,
Speaker 2: is there anything else y'all wanted to really make sure
Speaker 2: you hit before we roll out.
Speaker 12: Yeah, please don't use Telegram for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 12: but also like it's very unclear how they respond to
Speaker 12: any law enforcement or government. They don't say anything, and
Speaker 12: it's kind of impossible to reach anyone that works there.
Speaker 12: Please don't use Facebook Messenger other than maybe sending memes.
Speaker 12: There's a lot of really gross surveillance capitalism inside a
Speaker 12: Facebook Messenger that the paper gets into. But effectively, Meta
Speaker 12: is building this weird, sprawling infrastructure inside of Facebook Messenger
Speaker 12: and try to link Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker 6: And one of the things we noticed.
Speaker 12: Is that like if you've blocked someone on Instagram or
Speaker 12: mute to them, but you haven't blocked me them on Facebook,
Speaker 12: but your stories, like all those stories are still coming
Speaker 12: across in messengers, so you can still see content from
Speaker 12: someone because it's linking both of those both of those profiles,
Speaker 12: so you know, you could see how we're taking like
Speaker 12: an online harassment lens, like why that's why that's really bad,
Speaker 12: Why that's really harmful and could be potentially you know,
Speaker 12: upsetting and triggering for folks.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'll add that thing.
Speaker 9: My The major thing I want people to to think
Speaker 9: about is that encryption really does work, and it works
Speaker 9: really well. And we can see that because a lot
Speaker 9: of countries right now are trying to pass laws that
Speaker 9: either weaken or byan encryption right and in fact, the
Speaker 9: UK uh did passed, did just pass such a law.
Speaker 13: The Online Safety Built in the UK.
Speaker 9: And so it's really important that we that we you know,
Speaker 9: push back against these laws and fight back against these
Speaker 9: laws and whenever we can, right And I'm not I'm
Speaker 9: not coming at this as somebody who's a big believer
Speaker 9: in the you know, in in incrementalism and in working
Speaker 9: with governments, but I think that I still think that
Speaker 9: it's really important to you know, educate folks and push
Speaker 9: back against these laws and try to not let these
Speaker 9: pass because these will be you know, really bad for
Speaker 9: all of us totally.
Speaker 12: And not to defend the online safe build because I
Speaker 12: would never do that, will go to my grave, not
Speaker 12: speaking highly of it, only speaking critically at least, like
Speaker 12: the pushback from encryption experts and encryption supporters like Merrit Whitaker,
Speaker 12: president of Signal, did lead to lawmakers in the UK,
Speaker 12: for example, admitting that there's no sort of feasible.
Speaker 6: Safe way to build a back door, right, And that
Speaker 6: is I.
Speaker 12: Think also a win because of so much pushback, because
Speaker 12: of so much research, because of so much criticism that
Speaker 12: security and privacy folks gave people that are pro encryption
Speaker 12: like that, we you know, we were able to walk
Speaker 12: back that part. And I do think that's a big deal,
Speaker 12: even if there are other issues with that bill, because
Speaker 12: I think it also sends a signal pun intended to
Speaker 12: other governments as well, and I think that that's incredibly important.
Speaker 12: But yeah, I would also say just just use Signal
Speaker 12: whenever you can.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, we'll all right, folks, is going to
Speaker 2: be it for us here at it could happen here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you all for listening, and thank you Cooper and
Speaker 2: Carolyn for coming on.
Speaker 9: Thank you for having us, yeah, and thank you for
Speaker 9: having us.
Speaker 12: You can find us on social media for now, I
Speaker 12: guess until it all lights on fire.
Speaker 5: Yeah, whichever one you want to trust.
Speaker 9: I'm Cooper Cue on most social media's Blue Sky Mastered
Speaker 9: on Shitter.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I'm Caroline Cinders, my first name, last name. Our
Speaker 12: lab is Convocation Research and Design Record Labs on Twitter
Speaker 12: at the moment.
Speaker 6: Hopefully we'll get begetting on Blue Sky very soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'll probably get back on there more. Now.
Speaker 2: Twitter has gotten remarkably worse, which you know, we had
Speaker 2: a back back in the day on the old something
Speaker 2: Awful forums. There was a thread in one of the
Speaker 2: debate forums about this very right wing site, Free Republic,
Speaker 2: which is like one of the earliest reservoirs of what
Speaker 2: became trump Ism, and the tagline for the thread, just
Speaker 2: kind of watching these people was there is always more
Speaker 2: and it is always worse, And boy goddamn if that
Speaker 2: hasn't been a continually accurate statement about the whole of
Speaker 2: social media right now, isn't it time.
Speaker 6: Amazing to watch someone just light forty billion dollars on fire?
Speaker 5: Yeah, just like, yeah, totally to it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's like the nihilist and me being like, wow.
Speaker 2: Comrade Musk really really taking some hits to capitalism here.
Speaker 7: Hello, reviewone, it's me James. Today, I am back from
Speaker 7: my trip to kutis Don and I'm talking today with
Speaker 7: Rania Hayat, a name that I've probably just butchered, but
Speaker 7: Ranier is the communications officer for the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate,
Speaker 7: and we're very, very lucky to have Rennie talking to us.
Speaker 7: Welcome RENI, thank.
Speaker 15: You, Jams, thank you for contacting me and letting me
Speaker 15: be letting me with you.
Speaker 7: Yeah, of course you're very welcome. So I think Rania,
Speaker 7: it's been a really hard time to consume news. For
Speaker 7: the first week of what's happening. I was in mostly
Speaker 7: Sying and Iraqi, Curtistan, and I wasn't maybe consuming as
Speaker 7: much news so I normally do, because I was trying
Speaker 7: to write news in Todead, and then I got back
Speaker 7: just the the barraers you. Information and disinformation has been
Speaker 7: very hard for people to sort of wade through, and
Speaker 7: I wonder I think one of the things I'd like
Speaker 7: us to focus on first and foremost is the impact
Speaker 7: of Israel's bombing campaign on journalists, specifically working in Gaza.
Speaker 7: I know, like friends of mine a journalists in Gaza.
Speaker 7: We featured on this podcast before the people of Parkour,
Speaker 7: Gazah and I know that many journalists have lost their
Speaker 7: lives covering what's been happening. So can you explain a
Speaker 7: little bit about what's been happening and maybe bring us
Speaker 7: up to day on the amount of every loss is
Speaker 7: a tragedy, but like the amount of people who have
Speaker 7: lost their lives covering this.
Speaker 15: Yes, James, well, let's start that journalists in Gaza are
Speaker 15: civilians who are people who travel, they work, usually they
Speaker 15: should travel, but they work, They do their job. They
Speaker 15: try to cover the news with very hard conditions, with
Speaker 15: the daily life of Gaza. Since the beginning of the
Speaker 15: war against Gaza on the seventh of October, you know
Speaker 15: how the war started targeting everything in Gaza, not even
Speaker 15: all the people, more than the people, you know, the buildings,
Speaker 15: the children, even the animals, the plants, you know, just
Speaker 15: bombing and bombing and bombing, air strikes the whole time.
Speaker 15: At the beginning, we try to we have some our
Speaker 15: contacts with journalists and us we have our General Secretary
Speaker 15: member and so we try to get information from them.
Speaker 15: At the beginning, yeah, it was not easy, but it
Speaker 15: was okay to get some information about what's going on.
Speaker 15: But by the time. Now we reached to a place
Speaker 15: that when I call them, they always tell dozens of
Speaker 15: we don't know. We are disconnected. I'm homeless. Now, I
Speaker 15: am not able to get any news. I can't tell
Speaker 15: you about my friend or my neighbor next to me,
Speaker 15: but I'm not able to tell you about further than this.
Speaker 15: I will just give some statistics. Up to now, we
Speaker 15: have eighteen killed journalists who have been either killed while
Speaker 15: track covering, others were killed in their homes, being through
Speaker 15: air strikes with their families and so on. We have
Speaker 15: also many many journalists who have dozens of them have
Speaker 15: been injured. I'm really sorry, I was I wanted to
Speaker 15: have some you know, I curate statistics, but I can't
Speaker 15: give you until now. We are now trying trying to
Speaker 15: develop like a tool to get some statistics, but until
Speaker 15: now it's not working well. We have many journalists who
Speaker 15: lost their homes, homes because it was bomb bombed or
Speaker 15: ye air strikes. Others they were this place. Yeah, and
Speaker 15: many of them moves from their homes either because their
Speaker 15: homes was a bomb or other because they were threatened
Speaker 15: to stay at their home safely, so they go to
Speaker 15: other like schools, hospitals and so on. The most tragic
Speaker 15: is the journalists who are losing their families. When you
Speaker 15: call a journalist to ask him about any thing, they
Speaker 15: told you Okay, I lost my son, I lost my wife,
Speaker 15: I lost all my family, I lost my mother. Now
Speaker 15: they they are completely broken. You can't talk to them.
Speaker 15: They are you know, it's really very tragic situation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's I mean, it's literally unimaginable, Like, yeah, I
Speaker 7: think I've attended wars, I've lost friends, but nothing. I
Speaker 7: can't imagine what it's like on this scale. And it's
Speaker 7: heartbreaking to even think about it. And I think some
Speaker 7: of what you said obviously, like part of the situation
Speaker 7: this creates is that it's very hard to do reporting
Speaker 7: on the ground. It's always been hard to do reporting
Speaker 7: on the ground at Gaza. I have made plans to
Speaker 7: go to Gaza, which probably won't work out now, but
Speaker 7: like it's hard foreign press, and of course there are
Speaker 7: many very capable journalists within Ghays that we don't need
Speaker 7: foreign press to go then necessarily. But can you explain
Speaker 7: a little bit of how when this war started it
Speaker 7: didn't just like affect these people in terms of killing
Speaker 7: them killing their families, displacing them, destroying their homes. But
Speaker 7: also like every day this war goes on, it gets
Speaker 7: harder for us to see I think the impact of
Speaker 7: this war on civilians living in Gaza, right because of
Speaker 7: the damage to infrastructure.
Speaker 11: Is that fair to say, yes, this is what's going on,
Speaker 11: and yes, reporting is getting more and more complicated because
Speaker 11: as also you know, there is no electricity.
Speaker 15: Communication is very very difficult when sometimes through phone call
Speaker 15: I call them just to get something, they tell me, okay,
Speaker 15: wait until I get some internet and I will get
Speaker 15: back to you. I wait for hours and hours, sometimes
Speaker 15: for the second day to get a little information. So
Speaker 15: you can imagine how they can even contact with each other.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and yeah, that makes it very hard. I think
Speaker 7: often like we might have more into this is not
Speaker 7: uncommon actually, like you have more information sitting somewhere with
Speaker 7: a broad bank connection and access to Twitter than you
Speaker 7: do on the ground, right, Like they may not know
Speaker 7: everything that's happening.
Speaker 15: Yes, yeah, I don't know if I can talk about this,
Speaker 15: but you know about the restrictions that on all social
Speaker 15: media applications, the restrictions on the Palestinian contact content on
Speaker 15: the social media we're facing a big massive wave against
Speaker 15: our content, against our new was through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,
Speaker 15: all those applications, So we are not able even to
Speaker 15: reach many people are banned, many people are hacked, and
Speaker 15: we are just hearing about the banning of many accounts
Speaker 15: of Palestinians. The very limited reach, very limited, and there
Speaker 15: are sometimes many times they are blocked or yeah, blocked
Speaker 15: or from posting and so on. So even also this
Speaker 15: is another problem that we are facing to reach out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think this is in a sense obviously, like
Speaker 7: it's in terms of specifically getting information about it, because
Speaker 7: I think that is important. I think if people could
Speaker 7: understand what it's like to see someone lose their baby,
Speaker 7: and then I think very few people would be able
Speaker 7: to in good conscious support that. And the fact that
Speaker 7: this has come at a time when I think generally,
Speaker 7: certainly for the US, reporting on things outside the US
Speaker 7: is an all time low, like it's atrocious, and so
Speaker 7: people lack the context to understand, not through any fault
Speaker 7: of their own right, but they've just been fed terrible,
Speaker 7: you know, opinion pieces for the last few years. They
Speaker 7: like the context to understand why what's happening is happening
Speaker 7: and I think obviously Elon Muskersport, Twitter and and just
Speaker 7: it's assessable. It's terrible, it's full of false information. And
Speaker 7: as you say, often videos that I have friends who
Speaker 7: are photographers in Gaza, a friends who are just people
Speaker 7: in Gaza and videos that they post will be taken down.
Speaker 7: It's sometimes they're to say it's too graphic, it's too violent,
Speaker 7: but like also that's their everyday life. Now that's been
Speaker 7: happening for two weeks. The graphic violence is sadly what's
Speaker 7: visited upon them every day.
Speaker 15: Yeah, yes, believe me, what's going on and because is
Speaker 15: very you can't imagine, you can't hold it when you
Speaker 15: when you watch it. Even the TV channels they try
Speaker 15: to make to minimize how dangerous and how violent are
Speaker 15: the scenes that we see. At the same time, I
Speaker 15: had a discussion this morning, I don't want people to
Speaker 15: cry for us. It's not I don't want people to
Speaker 15: cry for the babies killed and so with very hard
Speaker 15: pictures and videos, I just want the humanity without seeing
Speaker 15: the video just here that there is a child. It's
Speaker 15: loading child. Children. Thousands of children are losing their child's
Speaker 15: life or nothing, are losing their hands their legs. They
Speaker 15: are now handicapped. They don't know why. You know, we
Speaker 15: don't need to see the video, just know that this
Speaker 15: is going on. We don't want to make a tragedy.
Speaker 15: We don't want to to to people to cry with us.
Speaker 15: We cry. Yes, we want, okay, some solidarity, but it's
Speaker 15: not something to have the emotions and then then we
Speaker 15: sleep and then we wake up. That's what or no, no,
Speaker 15: there is something going on. We don't need the sympath
Speaker 15: you know, we need some actions, we need steps, we
Speaker 15: need humanity now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So I think that's an excellent, really really excellent point.
Speaker 7: It's not a film or like something you can consume
Speaker 7: and then step away from. So what sort of solidarity
Speaker 7: actions can people take to support people in Gaza, to
Speaker 7: support journalists there, to support the greater cause of not
Speaker 7: having this issue where every few years thousands of Palestinian
Speaker 7: civilians get killed.
Speaker 15: Yes, well, to be honest, we want when we want
Speaker 15: to feel better, we turn on the television to see
Speaker 15: the demonstrations. When we see the demonstrations London, blocks cell
Speaker 15: the United States and different cities Arab world everywhere. When
Speaker 15: we see these demonstrations, we feel that somebody knows there
Speaker 15: is like a kind of movement. This helps us, and
Speaker 15: we need further steps after the demonstration. We need lobbying.
Speaker 15: We need the people who elect their governments who support
Speaker 15: those massacs and to say no, we give you legitimate
Speaker 15: legitimacy to be human. Stop this inhumanity. We need the
Speaker 15: people to lobby on their governments that this should not
Speaker 15: be supported. This is this is the real action that
Speaker 15: we need. Lobbying, lobbying, lobbying by the people, by the
Speaker 15: power of people.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's one of those things like some
Speaker 7: things will never change in America, at least not by voting,
Speaker 7: but like some things, yeah, I have enough people, and
Speaker 7: I think more people, Like I remember when I moved
Speaker 7: to America fifteen years ago, when I was young at
Speaker 7: twenty one, and I came into America and I had
Speaker 7: a free Palestine, like a badge on my jacket, like
Speaker 7: things on my jacket, you know, and they sent me
Speaker 7: straight to secondary you know, like the like where they
Speaker 7: pat you down and take your clothes and go through
Speaker 7: your bags and stuch and like it just wasn't as
Speaker 7: big of a concern. I think more people in the
Speaker 7: fifteen years since then have become aware of the tragedy
Speaker 7: and the loss of life. And certainly now I've seen
Speaker 7: more people wake up to what's happening and protest or
Speaker 7: you know, get out and do things in a way
Speaker 7: that they wouldn't have done ten years ago. And I
Speaker 7: think that's really it's good, Like hopefully that demand for
Speaker 7: people to be allowed to live with dignity and safety continues.
Speaker 15: Yes, I mean, I just always want to ask anybody
Speaker 15: you'd like to say, are you happy to pay your
Speaker 15: taxt for killing others?
Speaker 7: Is it?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Jesus, Yeah, this is.
Speaker 15: The very initial, very first question. Are you happy with this?
Speaker 15: Do you pay your tax for this or for anything
Speaker 15: that you like to have your text to be paid for? Yeah,
Speaker 15: this is what we want. We're we are facing killing,
Speaker 15: we are facing assination and bombarding and so on, and
Speaker 15: we need all what we need as humanity, nothing else.
Speaker 7: I was thinking this morning of like, how very obviously
Speaker 7: right when when Russia bombed Ukrainian cities, most people said
Speaker 7: we should help the Ukrainians, send them ms, send them
Speaker 7: medical supplies, and some of them went and volunteered to
Speaker 7: fight for the Ukrainians when and I understand that like
Speaker 7: this obviously this, this conflict began in very different circumstances
Speaker 7: other than the Russia Ukraine conflict, but nonetheless, like, little
Speaker 7: children are being killed and continue to be killed, and
Speaker 7: the response wasn't the same. And I think some of
Speaker 7: that comes from like and not particularly hard to see
Speaker 7: orientalism in the US and the US media. Also some
Speaker 7: of it comes from the complete absence of Palestinian voices
Speaker 7: in certainly in like English language press in America. And
Speaker 7: I wonder, like I know that there are certain organizations
Speaker 7: which have specifically worked to make it harder for Palestinian journalists,
Speaker 7: like my friend Hausam Salem. He's an excellent photographer. You
Speaker 7: can find him on all the places where you find
Speaker 7: people on the internet. But we worked on stories together,
Speaker 7: and I know he's now had he's lost contract with
Speaker 7: major outlets because of this sort of campaign of accusing
Speaker 7: him of biased. I think it's hard not to be
Speaker 7: biased when you see a little children die. But I
Speaker 7: wonder if you could talk about that, like how Palestinian
Speaker 7: voices are excluded or missing from what even now right
Speaker 7: the Atlantic since two weeks of bombing now and I
Speaker 7: was looking this morning and they've managed to find two
Speaker 7: Palestinian voices to share, like you know, it's maybe not,
Speaker 7: and I'll have to check that after we've done. But
Speaker 7: I was flicking through these big sort of opinion piece
Speaker 7: type outlets and it's very clear that like even now,
Speaker 7: people haven't editors specifically or the greater press has not
Speaker 7: stopped excluding Palestinia voices. So maybe we could talk about
Speaker 7: like how that happens, what allows it to happen, and
Speaker 7: what people can do to help lift up those voices.
Speaker 15: Well, yes, Prestilian voices are being banned all over by
Speaker 15: different movements. There are many times fired from their works
Speaker 15: and big news outlets and media outlets for different political reasons.
Speaker 15: And if you want to go and through the stories,
Speaker 15: you find that some people are just trying to make
Speaker 15: to make problems for those people to let them leave
Speaker 15: their work and stop writing or telling their news or
Speaker 15: analyzing or anything about the Perestinian cause and what's going on.
Speaker 15: We're facing this globally, and we have many cases recorded
Speaker 15: undocumented in the PGS, and we can give you many
Speaker 15: examples about them. But I have to tell about something
Speaker 15: that we're a member of the International Federation of Journalists
Speaker 15: and we have also even our president of Brazilian Perlisinian
Speaker 15: Journalist Syndicate. He's a vice president of the International Federation
Speaker 15: of Journalist. He has been elected last year in the
Speaker 15: last congress. We have sister unions. One of them one
Speaker 15: of the best friends of us are the National Writers Union,
Speaker 15: the American National Writers Union, which is a very big
Speaker 15: supporter to us. They even Harry got Better, the general secretary,
Speaker 15: even he visited us in Palestine a few months ago,
Speaker 15: and he's a very supporter of what's going on, of
Speaker 15: all our statements of our news at the beginning of
Speaker 15: the world. They they produced like a statement about biasity
Speaker 15: and misleading news and so on, how to avoid them,
Speaker 15: supporting the Pristinians, supporting our life, our right to life,
Speaker 15: and so on. So we we highly appreciate this movement.
Speaker 15: Of course, it's not the only one. Many many syndicates,
Speaker 15: many unions all over the world sent us solidarity letters.
Speaker 15: Some of them supported us even with some in kind contribution,
Speaker 15: with some funds in addition to solidarity, in addition to
Speaker 15: demonstrations and so on, which really gave us a lot
Speaker 15: of power of hope. So we can continue and we
Speaker 15: are not alone.
Speaker 7: Mm hmm, yeah. I think that's really powerful. Yeah, and well,
Speaker 7: I mean it's not enough, but it's something the unions.
Speaker 7: I think people also the members of the union can
Speaker 7: encourage the union to do that, right, just to make
Speaker 7: a statement. Yeah, it's the show some solidarity. I wonder
Speaker 7: like what you talked about in kind donations and you
Speaker 7: talked about the support you're getting from unions. I know
Speaker 7: one unions which i'm a member, that's your Workers of
Speaker 7: the World FJAU just did a fundraiser, still doing a
Speaker 7: fundraiser for flag Vest, bullet professors, for journalists. What kind
Speaker 7: of support can people give, like in a concrete sense,
Speaker 7: beyond getting in the streets and protesting and writing letters
Speaker 7: and emails and phone calls. Is the stuff that they
Speaker 7: can do with their money if they have some money.
Speaker 15: Well, it's not a kind of money, it's a kind
Speaker 15: of I will tell you now. The situation in Gaza
Speaker 15: we can't or what we do we need is a ceasfire,
Speaker 15: to be honest. They even don't have fresh water they drink,
Speaker 15: by the way, they say, try to minimize that the
Speaker 15: water they drink, and they know that the water they
Speaker 15: drink is not very clean. But just to survive, so
Speaker 15: you can start with this very basic need of life
Speaker 15: and then you go further. As I already told you
Speaker 15: that the safety vests are very important, but when you
Speaker 15: are under strikes, this will never help you. But if
Speaker 15: I want to talk about the daily life, about how
Speaker 15: it's going and the West Bank and Gaza, our journalists,
Speaker 15: we all work under the same conditions of aggressive events,
Speaker 15: covering aggressive events and so on. So we try as
Speaker 15: PJAS to contact all the media outlets in Palestine to
Speaker 15: offer or provide safety kits for all journalists who work
Speaker 15: in the field. But for example our freelancers, they work
Speaker 15: on their on responsibility and a very denserse situation. We
Speaker 15: try to to to tell how dangerous that what they
Speaker 15: do when you go to cover with you don't have
Speaker 15: very full safety kits or it's it's very dangerous for them,
Speaker 15: but they are not able to to cover it and
Speaker 15: they want to they need to work, they need to
Speaker 15: do their job, so they do it in a very strange,
Speaker 15: very dangerous conditions. So one of the things that we
Speaker 15: can support Junius is yes, safety kets which are very important.
Speaker 15: Medical kits also are very important. What what else we
Speaker 15: try we try to to do also we try to
Speaker 15: raise the awareness to make some materials for the journals
Speaker 15: about safety. Safety is very important for us. We try
Speaker 15: to to to teach them more about how to take
Speaker 15: care of them themselves, how to report and so on,
Speaker 15: about their security and so on. Yeah, this is mainly
Speaker 15: what I can talk about for the needs or the
Speaker 15: in kind contribution, as I told you, in the current situation,
Speaker 15: for example, we try to support through some donations, through
Speaker 15: support to support the journalists with better charging. But it
Speaker 15: is because of the lack of electricity and power sources
Speaker 15: in Gaza, so just to give them connected currently and
Speaker 15: they are very useful for them and it helps. Now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I can see. It's probably best that you
Speaker 7: guys just have money and then you can be flexible
Speaker 7: in getting what people need. I think that's generally the
Speaker 7: best advice is when there's a crisis, is to send
Speaker 7: the people nearest to it money and then they can
Speaker 7: decide what they need. Certainly, I found that I found
Speaker 7: that in a lot of places I worked. Yes, so
Speaker 7: you talked about the power situation. I think that's sort
Speaker 7: of it has gone relatively unreported. I mean it'll still
Speaker 7: say like the power and water being cut off, but
Speaker 7: that creates a lot of other dangerous situations, right, Like
Speaker 7: obviously some people rely on that power if they're infirm,
Speaker 7: if they have medical devices, that kind of thing. But
Speaker 7: also like where there are places to charge, that results
Speaker 7: in a very high concentration of people, right Like my
Speaker 7: friend was telling me that their parents were in a
Speaker 7: hospital to charge their their devices. Right They wanted to
Speaker 7: call their child and say we're safe, we're alive, but
Speaker 7: their phone had run out of batteries, so they had
Speaker 7: to go to the hospital. Yeah, can you explain a
Speaker 7: little bit of some of the things that like that
Speaker 7: that has resulted in the loss of power for people.
Speaker 15: Yes, of course. But first of all, let me tell
Speaker 15: you that we already asked quested all our journalists and
Speaker 15: Gaza to be in the hospitals. Well, there's safety, we try,
Speaker 15: we expect that it would be a safe pless but
Speaker 15: there is no safe less in Gaza now, as you're
Speaker 15: already know about the hospitals that have been targeted. But
Speaker 15: we we already asked them to be in the hospitals.
Speaker 15: We try to make some press zones and the hospitals
Speaker 15: in some places where it's for press for journalists to
Speaker 15: be there, So they can get some electricity power and
Speaker 15: so they can all to be together, try to exchange
Speaker 15: information and work together, so it will be better for
Speaker 15: them to work and safer between brackets always for them
Speaker 15: to work. To be honest, yes, I don't know. If
Speaker 15: you see the news now, it's we had the sun
Speaker 15: has set, so it's completely dark because you just can
Speaker 15: have some lightned spots which are the hospitals. And you
Speaker 15: know that even the solar and the sorry, the fuel
Speaker 15: for school for hospitals is about to to to finish
Speaker 15: here and in two days I think maximum. But we
Speaker 15: will see. Maybe we'll have some trucks or they will
Speaker 15: get something inside Gaza for fuel and so on. But
Speaker 15: I'm not sure about this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think, yeah, every day it's changing, I guess.
Speaker 7: And I wondered, like talking about getting things into gather,
Speaker 7: getting getting things two people in Gaza, a thing that
Speaker 7: seems to be completely like, I don't know, it genuinely
Speaker 7: seems to be that people think people could just walk
Speaker 7: out of Gaza and and you know, go somewhere else.
Speaker 7: So I guess, just to be extremely clear on that,
Speaker 7: can you explain the situation for people in Gaza with
Speaker 7: respect to if they want them mobility and their ability
Speaker 7: to leave, because I think it's something that again has
Speaker 7: been like criminally overlooked in the United States, discourse.
Speaker 15: Ability to leave Gaza.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, like a lack thereof would be more accurate, right,
Speaker 7: like they complete absence of that.
Speaker 15: Well, unfortunately, people and gas are blocked. They are all
Speaker 15: and they are not allowed to leave Gaza with any
Speaker 15: kind of borders. Even the people who have international passports
Speaker 15: like American, European or whatever passports, they are not now,
Speaker 15: they are not able to leave gazam. They have to
Speaker 15: face their fate.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 15: They are just displaced from place to another. Some people
Speaker 15: have been displaced four times and for areas different areas,
Speaker 15: and others were displaced and bombed later. So no, they
Speaker 15: are blocked. They have They are blocked in a like
Speaker 15: a very limited area which is under strikes the whole time.
Speaker 15: No place is safe. Even the Baptist hospital. They thought
Speaker 15: that it would be a Baptist hospital hospital related to
Speaker 15: a church and so on. It was strike massively cruely.
Speaker 15: More than five hundred have been killed. They were all children.
Speaker 15: Mothers are sitting just as a thinking that it would
Speaker 15: be a shelter for them. So yes, this is the
Speaker 15: situation Gaza. There is no safe place, no hospitals. If
Speaker 15: you are in a hospital, you will be bombed. If
Speaker 15: you're in school you'll be bombed. If you are in
Speaker 15: a mosque if you will be bombed. If you're in
Speaker 15: a church, you will be bombed. No safe place unfortunately.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's unimaginable. And like the act
Speaker 7: of bombing that we were talking about this before we started,
Speaker 7: but like when you're being bombed, it's very different from
Speaker 7: like a small art conflict or even like a you
Speaker 7: know whatever, artillery motors rockets like you, there isn't much
Speaker 7: you can do to be safe. It's not like there
Speaker 7: is no like cover from bombs. You know that you
Speaker 7: you there's no.
Speaker 15: By the way, there's not under ground shoulders.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Yeah, and now they are intense. By the way, they
Speaker 15: were in houses. The houses they were falling on their heads,
Speaker 15: so they went to tense. So when they were tent falls, it's.
Speaker 7: Not so yeah Jesus, Yeah, it's bit's bleak. It's yeah,
Speaker 7: it's it's unimaginable. Like I said, yeah, I just spent
Speaker 7: a week in a place that was being.
Speaker 15: Very fat protected by the sky which is full of
Speaker 15: planes bombing them.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, and every time you look up you wonder
Speaker 7: what that is and it's this still time, or it's
Speaker 7: just so on. So I think one thing people are
Speaker 7: really struggling with is like overload of information missed information, right,
Speaker 7: just some of the worst pieces I've ever seen in
Speaker 7: opinion pieces, things center on social media, which are like
Speaker 7: it seems that we've returned to like peak aslamophobic rhetoric
Speaker 7: of like September twelve, two thousand and one, and we've
Speaker 7: learned absolutely nothing from twenty years of killing and dying.
Speaker 7: So I wonder where you would recommend if there are
Speaker 7: members of your syndicate or other places where people can
Speaker 7: find reliable and for reporting, which is you know, fact checked,
Speaker 7: which is not overloading them with you know, like if
Speaker 7: you go on Twitter to try and find your information
Speaker 7: at the minute, you're just going to get into an
Speaker 7: argument with someone who has the worst opinions in the world,
Speaker 7: and it's not good and it can dissuade you from
Speaker 7: taking action in the ways that you've mentioned which are
Speaker 7: actually useful. So is there a place you'd suggest people
Speaker 7: look for information outlets or individuals they could follow.
Speaker 15: Well, who wants to know the truth will be will
Speaker 15: find it. You know, the media is always any media outlet,
Speaker 15: it has its it has its mandate and vision and
Speaker 15: so on. So I just advise everyone when you will
Speaker 15: go for any media outlets, just try to read about
Speaker 15: what's what's its mandate, who's they are related to, who's
Speaker 15: they are supporting, and so on, so to know from
Speaker 15: which perspective you will know the truth. I can't tell
Speaker 15: now the names of outlets because it's not me who
Speaker 15: to decide who's who's the right one. As you know,
Speaker 15: I am. I work in a syndicate which is like
Speaker 15: a union, which is for all journalists with all foods,
Speaker 15: all at outlets, so they are all our members.
Speaker 7: So yeah, yeah, I think that's good advice so that
Speaker 7: people can take more. It's it's good advice that people
Speaker 7: can take more broadly, because I think people are completely
Speaker 7: unaware the ownership of some outlets that mandate there perceived biases.
Speaker 15: Yes, try to read about them, not only the new
Speaker 15: not the news itself, but try to see about this outlets,
Speaker 15: about this establishment, how it's working, what their objectives, how
Speaker 15: do they work, and what are their connections and so on,
Speaker 15: so you will know which kind of news they are
Speaker 15: covering and how do they cover it. Yes, this is
Speaker 15: what I can say for us as Telisinia Journalists Syndicate.
Speaker 15: We try now to report about journalists because this is
Speaker 15: our manda, this is our work to tell about what's
Speaker 15: going for our members, to try to get any protection
Speaker 15: for them. Actually were in this very hard condition. But
Speaker 15: we tried, through our friends, through our relations, through our supporters,
Speaker 15: through our memberships and so on, to have some international
Speaker 15: support for them through information, through like a flow of
Speaker 15: information telling what's going on, how many journalists have been killed,
Speaker 15: how many journals are displaced, how many and so on,
Speaker 15: So we try to give them those that are not.
Speaker 15: As I already told you, it's really a hard job
Speaker 15: that we are going we are doing now. It's getting
Speaker 15: more and more difficult. We are trying to cope, trying
Speaker 15: to develop new tools to cope with this hard, very
Speaker 15: hard situation. But we try our maximum to be honest,
Speaker 15: to get very real and true information, not to get
Speaker 15: any misleading information. There's a flow of misleading information. Even
Speaker 15: we hear about many journalists that they are killed, but
Speaker 15: when we try to make sure that we found that
Speaker 15: they are not journalists. We don't get them put them
Speaker 15: in our lists. We try to investigate as much as
Speaker 15: we can, so to put our lists to be limited
Speaker 15: to journalists, to our members, to the people who work
Speaker 15: with us, with our within, our man dead and so on,
Speaker 15: so to be credible source of information.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's very important. I so, I don't
Speaker 7: know if you guys who shared it. I sure a
Speaker 7: video early on. It was when I was still in
Speaker 7: Syrian Curdistan, but we were watching it of a funeral
Speaker 7: of three journalists who have been killed. Yeah, and like
Speaker 7: someone was saying at the funeral that they was speaking
Speaker 7: and someone else will pick up his camera and like
Speaker 7: keep documenting things, which really was very emotional for me
Speaker 7: and my friends. Yeah, it was really sad, but yes
Speaker 7: it is. I believe it's just you know, that's the
Speaker 7: thing that I do. And I see people, you know,
Speaker 7: dressed like me. People. I know it's been very of
Speaker 7: your coverage of that has been very emotionally challenging for me,
Speaker 7: But it should be emotionally challenging. It's terrible, but I
Speaker 7: think people should definitely tune into it if they can.
Speaker 7: I wonder are they're like social media accounts that the
Speaker 7: PJS has that people can follow.
Speaker 5: Yes, we have.
Speaker 15: Facebook page. It's on Facebook. Yes, it's a place senior
Speaker 15: and journalists syndicats. Yeah, just and we try to download
Speaker 15: all our news on it. Also we have our website
Speaker 15: which is www dot PJS dot ps. Also you can
Speaker 15: find some news statements, updates and so on.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's great, and I encourage people to follow that
Speaker 7: they're able to. I wonder, really, is there anything else
Speaker 7: you think that people are like anything that's been missing
Speaker 7: from the media narrative that you'd like people to know
Speaker 7: about the situation now in Palestine, or like the situation
Speaker 7: more broadly that hasn't been reported on as much as
Speaker 7: it should be. Yeah.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I just want to add something about besides what's
Speaker 15: going on, and because even a journalists in the West Bank,
Speaker 15: even in Palestinian journalists in Israel are facing a lot
Speaker 15: of threats, facing a lot of problems. There is a
Speaker 15: massive a campaign of arrests. So up to now one thousand,
Speaker 15: in three days, one thousand persons have been arrested. We're
Speaker 15: trying to find the number of journalists which is I'm
Speaker 15: not sure about it, but I can't give you the figure.
Speaker 15: As I told you, because of the big number, we're
Speaker 15: trying to make sure who are the journalists, But a
Speaker 15: massive arrests campaign is taking place now. Also, journalists are
Speaker 15: facing a lot of threats about a lot of violations
Speaker 15: while covering many times that are prevented from coverage. They
Speaker 15: are threatened by weapons, They are threatened sometimes by the settlers,
Speaker 15: armed settlers, even not the army, while covering many of them. Also,
Speaker 15: they are subject to incitement through social media pages like
Speaker 15: spreading their photo or there and so to make a
Speaker 15: kind of excitement how to kill them or to get
Speaker 15: rid of them and so on. So also the journalists
Speaker 15: are facing a very hard time now. Yeah, they are
Speaker 15: under the threat.
Speaker 7: Yeah damn. Yeah, that's terrible and completely unacceptable. So yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm glad you shared that, And I think it's important
Speaker 7: that people follow this and do whatever they can to help,
Speaker 7: do whatever they can to to I don't know, to
Speaker 7: encourage people to stop bombing other people, Like it's never
Speaker 7: a good situation. People are bombing children and hopefully it
Speaker 7: comes to an end. They get it. I don't know.
Speaker 7: I've never seen this much outgoing support for Palestine the
Speaker 7: United States. But I've also you know, this is an
Speaker 7: unprecedented act of again war crimes, so delicated's it's very
Speaker 7: hard to see where this is going.
Speaker 15: I suppose, Yes, we believe that the voice is rich,
Speaker 15: maybe a little by not that fast that that's easy,
Speaker 15: because it's not easy. But we believe in every person
Speaker 15: who thinks and and say no, this is inhuman I
Speaker 15: should not I should be with those people who are
Speaker 15: under attack, who are under under Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 15: hard life. Yeah, it's a hard life, a lot of oppress.
Speaker 15: So yeah, when we see the as aduld, when we
Speaker 15: see the demonstrations, it really gives us power. It really
Speaker 15: gives us that we have right to life. You know,
Speaker 15: this is a minimum right that we need people to
Speaker 15: tell us, Yes, you have a right to life.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's it's nice to hear.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 7: It's like if you can feel that you're helping, even
Speaker 7: just helping people, feel like a little bit, you know, elevated,
Speaker 7: a little bit better, a little bit less despairing, because
Speaker 7: I can see how it would be very easy if
Speaker 7: you're stuck in guys to feel like the world's and
Speaker 7: in you. Because it has to a large degree, right,
Speaker 7: the words allowed this to happen and it's you know,
Speaker 7: it's not it's American bombs, American plaints dropping bombs.
Speaker 15: Fortunately.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I think that's really good to hear. It's
Speaker 7: good to hear that that has made some difference. Thank
Speaker 7: you so much for giving us some of your time.
Speaker 15: I know it's thank you, Jams, thank you for having
Speaker 15: me with you. I wish you all good luck. Thank you,
Speaker 15: Thank you all who listeners, listeners to this podcast. I
Speaker 15: hope that I was able to give you an overview
Speaker 15: of what's going on. And let's pray that this violence
Speaker 15: will end very soon.
Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, yeah, indeed, let's thank you very much. I
Speaker 7: was wonderful.
Speaker 16: Thank you.
Speaker 5: It's spoky week. It can happen here. It's spooky week,
Speaker 5: the week where things are spooky. I'm your host, Mio Wong,
Speaker 5: and with me is Garrison.
Speaker 10: Hello, and today all right, all right.
Speaker 5: We've gotten, we've gotten, we've gotten the preliminary spooky out
Speaker 5: and so today we're gonna be talking about one of
Speaker 5: the sort of key elements of Halloween, and that is
Speaker 5: chocolate and so on. On a very basic level, we're
Speaker 5: going to ask what is chocolate? And the answer and
Speaker 5: it pains me to say this as someone who really
Speaker 5: loves chocolate is really really bleak. Yeah, but before we
Speaker 5: get into exactly how bleak it is, uh, we're gonna
Speaker 5: look at sort of the early history of chocolate. So
Speaker 5: so okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement about exactly
Speaker 5: how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that say three
Speaker 5: thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen hundred BC.
Speaker 5: The sevente hundred b C is the one that's pretty consistent.
Speaker 5: It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate. That's it.
Speaker 5: It's a sort of bitter drink that they sometimes put
Speaker 5: vanilla or red pepper in. Yeah, it was, it was.
Speaker 11: It was.
Speaker 10: It was like a bitter slurry that you from what
Speaker 10: I hear, not very enjoyable, but it got you like
Speaker 10: really high, like not high like like like weed, but
Speaker 10: like kind of like cocaine.
Speaker 11: It was.
Speaker 10: It was like it was it was a massive stimulant,
Speaker 10: is yeah, from what I hear about these kind of
Speaker 10: early gross bitter chocolate slurries.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And you know, I mean this is the thing
Speaker 5: that's this is not a regular consumption drink. Basically everyone
Speaker 5: he uses this and this, and and chocolate is consumed
Speaker 5: by a bunch of different civilizations like across like most
Speaker 5: of South America. There's something sort of like the Mayans obviously,
Speaker 5: the Mayans and the Aztecs too. There's a lot of
Speaker 5: places where where this is being used, and it's everyone
Speaker 5: seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah, I think
Speaker 5: at some point the I think it was the the
Speaker 5: Omes at some point we're doing these like they were
Speaker 5: making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate,
Speaker 5: you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like
Speaker 5: a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans, and
Speaker 5: they were making like a fermented thing out of that.
Speaker 5: And I don't know, I leave as an exercise to
Speaker 5: the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the
Speaker 5: sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand
Speaker 5: years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using
Speaker 5: it for ritual purposes, and the story basically is okay.
Speaker 5: So Herman Cortes drinks chocolate with stick king Maktazuma. Cortes goes,
Speaker 5: this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he
Speaker 5: brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they
Speaker 5: mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly
Speaker 5: with sugar, and it becomes you know, it becomes very
Speaker 5: very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is
Speaker 5: like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about
Speaker 5: like three hundred years to figure out how to make
Speaker 5: cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can
Speaker 5: it's not it seems to be bitter like it in
Speaker 5: the in the way that it sort of is naturally.
Speaker 10: You can you can process it with like like like
Speaker 10: basic solutions, which which neutralizes some of the acidic and
Speaker 10: bitter bitter tastes, which is why you should always buy
Speaker 10: a Dutch process cocoa powder, which is unfortunately hard to
Speaker 10: find these days. But it is, it is, it is,
Speaker 10: it is the shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's that's actually yeah, so the that's that's
Speaker 5: Dutch cocoa. And then twenty years later someone figures out
Speaker 5: how to make that into a chocolate bar and you know,
Speaker 5: sort of a law, you have chocolate. Now, the conventional
Speaker 5: histories are missing something very very important, which is something
Speaker 5: that defined has defined the production of chocolate since Europeans
Speaker 5: got a hold of it. And continues to define it today.
Speaker 5: And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah, And you
Speaker 5: know this is slavery is a very sort of important
Speaker 5: part of the history of chocolate because slavery is what
Speaker 5: transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a bunch of
Speaker 5: different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into modern chocolate.
Speaker 5: And this is this is the point that I want
Speaker 5: to make because most most histories of chocolate tend you know,
Speaker 5: when they're trying to find the origin of modern chocolate,
Speaker 5: they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I think they're wrong.
Speaker 5: I think they're very wrong. I think the distinct European
Speaker 5: innovation of chocolate is to add sugar to it. Yes,
Speaker 5: and this raises the very bleak question where does sugar
Speaker 5: come from? And the answer, of course is slavery. Sugar
Speaker 5: is one of the primary crops of slave economies in
Speaker 5: both the colonies and the West Indies. It is one
Speaker 5: of the key elements of the so called triangle trade
Speaker 5: where you know, you may have probably you have learned
Speaker 5: this in school, but you know, for people, for people
Speaker 5: who've been out of school for a long time. So
Speaker 5: the triangle trade is Europe since manufacturer goes to Africa,
Speaker 5: it trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people are
Speaker 5: taken from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America,
Speaker 5: sometimes to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And
Speaker 5: then they take you know, the products of slavery from
Speaker 5: plantations back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum,
Speaker 5: and critically sugar back to Europe. Actould wait did did
Speaker 5: they Did they teach you the triangle trade? Yeah?
Speaker 10: Yes, I mean I I I did learn. My Christian
Speaker 10: Homescholing curriculum wasn't the best, but.
Speaker 5: We did, we did.
Speaker 10: We did cover some basic things.
Speaker 5: It's interesting because the triangle trade as a model, like
Speaker 5: isn't that old, even though even though like this is
Speaker 5: the way that we all understand, like Tyler sort of
Speaker 5: colonial trade work, it's a kind of recent thing. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So sugar, sugar is a very very key part of
Speaker 5: this entire thing. And there's a very very famous this
Speaker 5: sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W.
Speaker 5: Mitz's Sweetness and Power, which is a fundamental tax and
Speaker 5: a lot of sort of a lot of the sort
Speaker 5: of fields around the study of slavery, and one of
Speaker 5: his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is fueled
Speaker 5: by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant that
Speaker 5: you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant.
Speaker 5: They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is
Speaker 5: a thing that allows them to keep working for longer
Speaker 5: than they otherwise would have been able to.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and this also was the origin of Britain's probably
Speaker 10: largest cultural trait, bad teeth.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And you know, so, so this is this is this
Speaker 5: is a many aspects of British culture I've are descended
Speaker 5: from from slavery and you know, but but the other,
Speaker 5: the other important thing for our story is that sugar
Speaker 5: is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And
Speaker 5: and this isn't a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do.
Speaker 5: You know, they do this with tobacco too. You haven't
Speaker 5: you have something that you're only supposed to use in
Speaker 5: fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans
Speaker 5: are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit
Speaker 5: out of it and they just ate it literally every day?
Speaker 10: Yeah, have you ever tried like unsweetened on like chocolate liquor.
Speaker 5: Fucking sucks. I hate it. It's not good.
Speaker 10: You can certainly nibble, it can be a fun novelty
Speaker 10: to nibble, but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like
Speaker 10: a whole bar of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's some real hope boy. Yeah. So, like
Speaker 5: I mean, it makes sense that they added sugar to it.
Speaker 5: But the consequence of this is that we can ask
Speaker 5: we can finally ask the question right now, now, now
Speaker 5: that it's been transformed by sugar into this object, a
Speaker 5: sort of popular consumption, we can ask the question what
Speaker 5: is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism
Speaker 5: plus slavery. It is a fusion of cocoa, which is
Speaker 5: an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the
Speaker 5: wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a
Speaker 5: slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know,
Speaker 5: you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right,
Speaker 5: even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the
Speaker 5: sixteen hundred, surely surely that's not sure now, wasn't wasn't.
Speaker 10: Wasn't slavery abolished in the eighteen hundreds, and now I assume,
Speaker 10: I assume Nesle's barving practices are totally above board.
Speaker 5: See, and this is I think the interesting part of
Speaker 5: the story is gare like our readers is assuming a
Speaker 5: thing I'm about to launch into here is the Mars
Speaker 5: Nestley Child slavery lawsuit, and we will because that is
Speaker 5: a critical elements of slavery and chocolate production. But there
Speaker 5: is also still slavery and sugar production capitalism. And not
Speaker 5: only is your slavery and sugar production, there is slavery
Speaker 5: in sugar production in the exact same places there were
Speaker 5: slavery and sugar production five hundred years ago. And this
Speaker 5: is one of the sort of stunning things about you know,
Speaker 5: the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, okay, capitalism
Speaker 5: has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them
Speaker 5: a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know,
Speaker 5: like I I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit of
Speaker 5: credit and give it only with being responsible for four
Speaker 5: hundred years of this and not five hundred years of this,
Speaker 5: because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether the capitalist
Speaker 5: transition is in the fifteen hundreds to sixteen hundreds. But
Speaker 5: you know, they have had four hundred years to solve
Speaker 5: the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 5: It is there is still slavery on the island of
Speaker 5: Fispaniola four hundred years later. Because we're going to be
Speaker 5: discussing in a second. Still, the best possible thing here
Speaker 5: is that maybe, and this is it is arguable, maybe
Speaker 5: last year there stopped being slaves there. Now I don't
Speaker 5: even think that. I don't think that's true. And we're
Speaker 5: gonna get into to that, but you know, before before
Speaker 5: we sort of launch into you know what, like whether
Speaker 5: or not there are so slaves on checker plantations in
Speaker 5: the Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years
Speaker 5: to solve a problem and you have not solved it,
Speaker 5: you are never going to solve it.
Speaker 10: Hey, hey, let's not let's let's not visionhole ourselves here.
Speaker 10: There's a lot of things that have been around for
Speaker 10: four hundred years that ought not to be.
Speaker 5: That's true. But if you are an economic system and
Speaker 5: your economic system has been you are supposed to have
Speaker 5: you are supposed to have dealt with this at least
Speaker 5: two hundred years ago. But you know, we've arrived here,
Speaker 5: and it's something we've talked about before in the show
Speaker 5: at least a bit. We've arrived here at one of
Speaker 5: the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and radical
Speaker 5: accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both sets
Speaker 5: of accounts take as their starting point the fact that
Speaker 5: capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people
Speaker 5: who enter into contracts to sell you that their labor,
Speaker 5: and that forced labor is this sort of like hauled
Speaker 5: over from older economic systems.
Speaker 11: No.
Speaker 10: I actually just saw a thing today on the Dying
Speaker 10: Remains of Twitter about how capitalism is the only economic
Speaker 10: system that's not based on exploitation of violence. It's based
Speaker 10: on free trade between markets.
Speaker 5: It's like people really believe this shit. It's like I
Speaker 5: don't know, Like I don't know. So at some point
Speaker 5: I'm gonna do an episode about really good book whose
Speaker 5: name I'm forgetting right now because I didn't look this
Speaker 5: up beforehand. But there's a really good book on these
Speaker 5: sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the Tea economy
Speaker 5: in late eighteen hundred, so that there's there's one forced
Speaker 5: labor system in China and a different forced labor system
Speaker 5: in India that are both warring in each other to
Speaker 5: control the tea market.
Speaker 10: It is certainly interesting how much tea has impacted like geopolitics.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, we'll.
Speaker 10: Do an episode on that one day. Yeah, t is
Speaker 10: not that great, guys. I'm sorry, it's fine, rips. I
Speaker 10: would not we just don't have good tea here. I
Speaker 10: would do as much killing as people have done for
Speaker 10: It's it's not worth.
Speaker 5: Killing anyone over the number of people who've been killed
Speaker 5: over it is.
Speaker 10: Like in early cra is fine on like a rainy afternoon,
Speaker 10: but come on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not. It's not worth like conquering continents for huh.
Speaker 5: But okay, so we'll back back back to this sort
Speaker 5: of main plot that is not tea, that is in
Speaker 5: fact chocolate. So one of the things that we can
Speaker 5: learn that we learn from this is that, you know,
Speaker 5: forced labor is not just a holdover. It's been a
Speaker 5: It's been a central part of capitalism for as long
Speaker 5: as capitalism has existed, and given its current track record,
Speaker 5: it will be a part of capitalism for as long
Speaker 5: as it exists. And you know, so there's always been
Speaker 5: a racial compoundent to this right and this is like
Speaker 5: trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like,
Speaker 5: holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know,
Speaker 5: we can we can expand this a little bit, and
Speaker 5: it gets you to a some sort of interesting things,
Speaker 5: which is that race is one of you know, so
Speaker 5: like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor,
Speaker 5: but race is what mediates your access to wage labor
Speaker 5: in the first place. So, you know, white, like if
Speaker 5: you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always
Speaker 5: been able to get access to to wage labor, you know,
Speaker 5: and as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not
Speaker 5: as bad as the other things you can get forced into,
Speaker 5: you know. But yeah, so if you're black, like, you know,
Speaker 5: you get as successive forms of slavery. If you're indigenous,
Speaker 5: they tried to enslave you and then either sort of
Speaker 5: kept doing it or gave up and just killed did
Speaker 5: the genocide Asian people like who came to this continents
Speaker 5: and also sort of the West Indies largely get debt
Speaker 5: pion engine and entered service to you and you know,
Speaker 5: you can you can sort of work this out, so
Speaker 5: on and so forth, there's there's different like modes of
Speaker 5: stuff that are the normal sort of like what you
Speaker 5: by default have access to if you are ex race, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: and obviously this, this sort of racial access to wage
Speaker 5: labor spread across the world. You know, your your access
Speaker 5: to wage labor is dependent on sort of your subject
Speaker 5: position as colonizer or colonize as well as you know,
Speaker 5: you're sort of global and also you're like local racial hierarchies,
Speaker 5: because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up.
Speaker 5: But the upshot of this is that many of the
Speaker 5: descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today
Speaker 5: on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna
Speaker 5: we're gonna tell that story. But first we'd.
Speaker 10: Oh, god, do you know what doesn't know?
Speaker 5: I cannot guarantee that our products and services are slave
Speaker 5: free like I wish I could.
Speaker 10: But well, do you know what is also here for
Speaker 10: a spooky time this Halloween? That's right, these products and services. Okay,
Speaker 10: we are back. I'm drinking my not mocha coffee, drinking
Speaker 10: my regular unsweetened coffees. Therefore totally thought, no, yeah, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 5: Everything's nothing bad. Nothing bad has ever happened in the
Speaker 5: history of coffee.
Speaker 10: No, I'm here, no tea, no chocolate. I'm safe. I'm good.
Speaker 5: Anyway. So unfortunately, the people who are not safe is
Speaker 5: a Haitians in the Domaican Republic. So we are not
Speaker 5: going to do an entire history of slavery in the
Speaker 5: Jamaican Republic because.
Speaker 10: Because this is a chocolate episode, and yeah, we have
Speaker 10: so much time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the
Speaker 5: things that happened in so we're gonna we're gonna look
Speaker 5: at sort of the like the modern history of this,
Speaker 5: and by modern, I'm starting it in I'm starting it
Speaker 5: in the eighties because I have to pick a place. Now.
Speaker 5: One of the things that happens in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 5: is that the Dominican Army effectively so goes into Haiti
Speaker 5: or just recruitation people who are in the Jamaican Republic
Speaker 5: and are like, hey, you're gonna okay, we have like
Speaker 5: jobs for you, like come do this work. And so
Speaker 5: a bunch of people get in like these like army
Speaker 5: vans and then they get there and they get moorshed
Speaker 5: out of the van. A bunch of guys point guns
Speaker 5: at them and go, you're gonna work for free or
Speaker 5: we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you. So
Speaker 5: this is really bad. And this is this is how
Speaker 5: a lot of like through the eighties and kind of
Speaker 5: early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar production
Speaker 5: worked in the Jamaican Republic. And you know, it's it's
Speaker 5: very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar,
Speaker 5: and it produces a lot of sugar that specifically the
Speaker 5: US uses. Now this is like state run slavery right on,
Speaker 5: sort of like state run plantations. So then we had
Speaker 5: neoliberalism and so the state run plantations get privatized. However,
Speaker 5: come they still run on slave labor. So there's a
Speaker 5: very good Mother Jones report about this, and I'm gonna
Speaker 5: I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one
Speaker 5: of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate,
Speaker 5: isolated camps scattered around Centralman Central Romana. As a giant
Speaker 5: sugar plantation, Sentrau Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand acres
Speaker 5: of sugar cane attract almost as big as New York City.
Speaker 5: Most of the workers and their families live in these battaias,
Speaker 5: rising in the morning to work the cane and the
Speaker 5: punishing heat, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying the stalks. Nearly
Speaker 5: all are men of Haitian descent. Some were traffic back
Speaker 5: in the day of the journalists is doing this was
Speaker 5: the guy who basically uncovered a bunch of the original
Speaker 5: armies like the military slavery program in the nineties, and
Speaker 5: so he went back like a couple of years ago.
Speaker 5: So he s talked himself. Some of the people were
Speaker 5: traffic back touring the military slavery program, others were born
Speaker 5: and lived stateless, and others came from Haiti more recently,
Speaker 5: paying smugglers to sneak them across the border. For years,
Speaker 5: the government has resisted providing legal status to people of
Speaker 5: Haitian heritage in the country, even though born there and
Speaker 5: estimated two hundred thousand people who for generations have been
Speaker 5: to mean by ray and class are stateless. For the
Speaker 5: men in the camps, CenTra Romana is the state. Their
Speaker 5: villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.
Speaker 5: Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the
Speaker 5: railcars where they weigh and load the can and stocks,
Speaker 5: and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from
Speaker 5: the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So
Speaker 5: things going great here, yeah, and the conditions you know, Okay,
Speaker 5: so the sort of the capitalist reforms that neoliberalism has
Speaker 5: brought to this system are the number of child slaves
Speaker 5: has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when
Speaker 5: the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's
Speaker 5: a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrogress. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so we have less child slaves, right, and you know,
Speaker 5: so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults.
Speaker 5: But the conditions here are still effectively slavery even after
Speaker 5: this or a child slavery stuff like is driven under.
Speaker 5: On a good day, these workers make three dollars a
Speaker 5: day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now,
Speaker 5: there are a lot of reasons for this. One of
Speaker 5: the big ones is that most of the workers there
Speaker 5: are most like basically all like you. You might find
Speaker 5: a worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're
Speaker 5: caught in these debt traps by Central Romana who and
Speaker 5: these are like classic company, but they're not. They're worse
Speaker 5: than like, you know, the classic American company town, because
Speaker 5: at least an American company town, you can go to
Speaker 5: another town that is not controlled by the company, whereas
Speaker 5: these people like cannot And so they're caught in these
Speaker 5: debt traps by Central Romana, which is that the company
Speaker 5: that owns these plantations. And because they're so in debt,
Speaker 5: they're constantly forced to work for the company in order
Speaker 5: to pay off their debt. But you know, they never
Speaker 5: actually make enough money to pay the debt off, and
Speaker 5: so they have to take on more debt to survive
Speaker 5: until you know, and largely what happens is these people
Speaker 5: work there in debt until they die. This is classic
Speaker 5: debt Pia nine, where a sort of debt transforms people
Speaker 5: into the effective property of the debt holder, who exacerbate
Speaker 5: the debt by denying them the ability to live without
Speaker 5: taking on more debt. A very common way this happens
Speaker 5: is with medical debt, which is something you know, I
Speaker 5: think we're familiar with to some extent here, but is
Speaker 5: egregiously worse. And the other thing that I was realizing
Speaker 5: about this is that this is actually really eerily similar
Speaker 5: to the way that Cortez and the Conquistadores and slaved
Speaker 5: indigenous people during the genocide. They would do the same
Speaker 5: thing of like, well, okay, now you're in debt to me,
Speaker 5: and because you can't pay the debt, you have five
Speaker 5: hundred percent interest per week, and so you know, that
Speaker 5: just accumulates, and now you work for me for the
Speaker 5: rest of your lives. And this is you know, this
Speaker 5: is one of the one of the sort of ways
Speaker 5: in which this the long shadow of Spanish imperialism like
Speaker 5: looms over the Dominican Republic, even in what has really
Speaker 5: been about two hundred years of the age of the
Speaker 5: American Empire, you know, and as you know, obviously like
Speaker 5: as much of an effect as the Spanish Empire has
Speaker 5: had here, and oh god, it's not good. Today it
Speaker 5: is the American Empire that lines the pockets of the
Speaker 5: slavers of the Dominican Republic. So such a Romana is
Speaker 5: owned by this family called the Fundjewel family, who are
Speaker 5: these Cuban expats who run this like enormous resort in
Speaker 5: shit where they live in Florida and are handed this
Speaker 5: is really fun. One hundred and fifty million dollars for
Speaker 5: the American state every year in the form of price
Speaker 5: supports for sugar. So like you're an American, right, Like
Speaker 5: obviously your tax money very obviously goes to support slavery
Speaker 5: because we have prisons, and so your taxes are paying
Speaker 5: to enslaved people, but your taxes are also paying for
Speaker 5: slavery in other countries. It's incredible, really really great stuff
Speaker 5: from the American political system here. And you know, and
Speaker 5: the way this has been maintained is through like two
Speaker 5: I think in the last twenty years, Mother Jones reported
Speaker 5: they've they've spent the sugar lobbyists spent two hundred and
Speaker 5: twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, and it
Speaker 5: works really well. They've been able to influence the system
Speaker 5: for a very very long time. The other funny thing
Speaker 5: about the Fundjol family is that they've created the perfect
Speaker 5: political trap, which is so one of one of the
Speaker 5: brothers is like a Trump guy and the other person
Speaker 5: is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like incredibly immeshed
Speaker 5: in both of the circles. So it's great. Things are
Speaker 5: going very good. So after so the Mother Jones investigation
Speaker 5: was like in the last I think it was like
Speaker 5: last year the year before, and when the Mother Jones
Speaker 5: investigation about the fact that like all of this shit
Speaker 5: was still happening came out, there was a there was
Speaker 5: a giant uproar about it, and a couple of things happened.
Speaker 5: One is that so the village of the journalists had
Speaker 5: visited so Traya Romana, like, they didn't even bulldoze the villages.
Speaker 5: They blew everyone's houses down with like sledgehammers and forcibly
Speaker 5: move them to like other villages and separated people's families.
Speaker 5: So that's that's great. And then so in late twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, under under pressure from this reporting, the US
Speaker 5: government like banned imports from that specific company. And Okay,
Speaker 5: it's unclear what is going to happen with it, if
Speaker 5: you know, if if they're gonna get unbanned eventually, uh,
Speaker 5: if it's gonna stick, if they're just gonna like I
Speaker 5: don't know, like transfer the assets to another company or
Speaker 5: something and use that instead. As so, as of right now,
Speaker 5: this specific set of plantations is not able to export sugar.
Speaker 9: To the US.
Speaker 5: So this is this is as much of a victory
Speaker 5: over slavery as we're going to get in this episode,
Speaker 5: and this victory is inc trying to reassure it's only
Speaker 5: gonna get work. This is this is the peak of
Speaker 5: anti slavery stuff we're gonna see here. Yeah, so enjoy
Speaker 5: it while you can. And do you know what else
Speaker 5: you should enjoy?
Speaker 10: Oh? These products and services that support this podcast. That's good. Yes,
Speaker 10: this is this is the real peak of the episode, folks.
Speaker 10: All right, I am rejuvenated by the advertising industrial complex.
Speaker 10: I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress.
Speaker 5: Whoa Okay, So now now, now we're now we're gonna
Speaker 5: turn to the type of slavery that everyone, I think
Speaker 5: expected this episode to mostly be about, which is the
Speaker 5: fact that cocoa bean production is also largely produced by
Speaker 5: slave labor. So, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a
Speaker 5: bit from a report by the Food Empowerment Project, which
Speaker 5: has done some very good work on most like specifically
Speaker 5: slavery in West Africa. They're also one of the only
Speaker 5: media people have ever seen talk about the fact that
Speaker 5: a lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same,
Speaker 5: but a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also
Speaker 5: seems to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's
Speaker 5: effectively no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I
Speaker 5: don't know, so like, eventually, one day, I guess, like
Speaker 5: the fact that the other places other than West Africa
Speaker 5: have slavery will hit the anglophone media class or whatever.
Speaker 5: But until then, I'm going to read this section. In
Speaker 5: West Africa, coco is a commodity crowd grown primarily for export.
Speaker 5: Coco is the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up
Speaker 5: about half the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco
Speaker 5: farmers earn less than one dollar a day and income
Speaker 5: below the extreme poverty line. As a result, they often
Speaker 5: resort to the use of child labor to keep their
Speaker 5: prices competitive. In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one
Speaker 5: of the things that happens when you're reading about child
Speaker 5: slavery stuff. Even people who like are trying to, you know,
Speaker 5: draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff
Speaker 5: like that that's like Jesus Christ this. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 5: they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor.
Speaker 5: In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization
Speaker 5: calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are
Speaker 5: defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety,
Speaker 5: or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children
Speaker 5: in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most
Speaker 5: of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of
Speaker 5: child labor. Which is also really good that like we've
Speaker 5: we've capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex
Speaker 5: of its control of the commanding heights of the world economy,
Speaker 5: which means that we're talking about we're trying to make
Speaker 5: tear lists of how bad child labor is.
Speaker 10: Well, yeah, I mean, a whole bunch of child labor
Speaker 10: laws just got like rolled back across many states here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a great country, so it's very exciting. The
Speaker 5: children are for the minds, Yeah, it's it's it's it's great.
Speaker 5: You know. So, so obviously a lot of the child
Speaker 5: slavery on cocoa farms are from sort of like larger
Speaker 5: I mean, I guess they are corporate, but from sort
Speaker 5: of like larger plantations, but also less You think that
Speaker 5: it's better on family farms, No family farms, I mean,
Speaker 5: I guess it is technically better than like being kidnapped
Speaker 5: and enslaved, is merely doing child labor on your families,
Speaker 5: like just being born into.
Speaker 10: These pretty pretty uh not great labor practices that you
Speaker 10: really have no say it or any agency whatsoever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, and like you know, this is one of
Speaker 5: these things where like the economic conditions are so bad
Speaker 5: that people are people are facing impossible choices, and I
Speaker 5: think we can say that they make the wrong choice,
Speaker 5: which is a lot of Okay, So, like there are
Speaker 5: there were sort of different ways that children get trafficked
Speaker 5: into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by
Speaker 5: their own families who do not have enough resources to
Speaker 5: take care of them and are like, okay, we'll basically
Speaker 5: sell these people so they can go do this job.
Speaker 5: And these families don't know that like their child is
Speaker 5: about to be enslaved, right, They're just like, okay, well
Speaker 5: they're going to go off and do work. But the
Speaker 5: other way that this happens is that kids from like
Speaker 5: villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus
Speaker 5: on Mali as one of the places this happens for them.
Speaker 5: But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what
Speaker 5: are effectively raids into into Malli from the Ivory Coast
Speaker 5: to like steel children, and it's also happens to Bikina Fosso.
Speaker 5: You know, and this gets to the point where, you know,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna read a quote from one of these from
Speaker 5: this report again. In one village in Bikina Fosso, almost
Speaker 5: every mother in the village has had a child trafficked
Speaker 5: onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers.
Speaker 5: So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every
Speaker 5: American right winger, except it's you know, this is just
Speaker 5: how chocolate is made.
Speaker 10: Yeah, this is you know, all of all of the
Speaker 10: Sound of Freedom guys, uh with all of you know,
Speaker 10: the whole uproar around that movie earlier this year, versus
Speaker 10: all of them, Uh yeah, enjoying their little eminem said
Speaker 10: kit Cat said, Hey, I like the occasional kit Cats too.
Speaker 10: This is this is a massive problem.
Speaker 5: I I don't know, I really love chocolate. I have
Speaker 5: not eaten any chocolate since I started researching this, and
Speaker 5: I like, and there's and it's but it sucks because
Speaker 5: it's like you can't you can't and we're gonna get
Speaker 5: into board of this in a second, but like you
Speaker 5: can't like ethically consume your way out of this, right,
Speaker 5: like because the conditions but free trade cocoa exist. Oh boy, yeah,
Speaker 5: we're gonna get into that. But yeah, there's no there's
Speaker 5: no actual systemic like there's no way that you can
Speaker 5: like you can't change this stuff with your individual consumption habits.
Speaker 5: And you know that's something that's just really fucking bleak
Speaker 5: about this because these conditions are, I mean, as bad
Speaker 5: as you can possibly imagine. But the Food and Empowerment
Speaker 5: Project describes like children as young as five are forced
Speaker 5: to work up to fourteen hours a day, like chopping
Speaker 5: down cocoa pods and then chopping them open with machetes.
Speaker 5: And sometimes these people get Sometimes these kids are using
Speaker 5: chainsaws to like clear wood, like clear down like forests. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and you know, okay, so this goes exactly how you
Speaker 5: expected to go, which is a bunch of these kids
Speaker 5: just have a bunch of fucking scars from where they've
Speaker 5: been slashed by machetes, because again, you are handing machetes
Speaker 5: to children, some of whom are as young as five.
Speaker 5: And then they have to carry one hundred pound bags
Speaker 5: of cocoa beans through the jungle. And this is the
Speaker 5: thing that's also happening in to make a public and
Speaker 5: this happens a lot in a lot of places. Is
Speaker 5: that they just get you know, when when companies want
Speaker 5: to spray like they're farms with pesticides, right, they don't
Speaker 5: even bother even like clearing people out, which might you know,
Speaker 5: help like a tiny bit to make them not like
Speaker 5: die from fucking poison. But no, like these fucking dipshits
Speaker 5: just like spray them with toxic chemicals as they just
Speaker 5: like spray them with pesticides, like a lot of whom
Speaker 5: are Christinogians, a lot of And this is happening in
Speaker 5: the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican Republic too,
Speaker 5: And a lot of those people just fucking died because
Speaker 5: you know, they were stayed with these chemicals. There was
Speaker 5: a really terrible story of a of a guy who
Speaker 5: was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died
Speaker 5: from the like he wasn't able to get a pay
Speaker 5: off for the lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty
Speaker 5: before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great
Speaker 5: quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using
Speaker 5: child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food
Speaker 5: of ai, such as corn paste or the cassava and
Speaker 5: bananas that grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases,
Speaker 5: the children sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings
Speaker 5: without access to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know
Speaker 5: another key part of this, right is like, okay, so
Speaker 5: the conditions are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a
Speaker 5: key part of this, like any system of slavery, is
Speaker 5: the physical violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly
Speaker 5: and often beaten and abused and tortured in ways that
Speaker 5: are very reminiscent of sort of like older epochs of
Speaker 5: slavery if they try to escape. Now, this is the
Speaker 5: companies care about this to the extent that is bad.
Speaker 5: Pr Yes, and the charcout companies repeated, like the chocolate companies. Okay,
Speaker 5: they they signed a thing in the year two thousand
Speaker 5: where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst
Speaker 5: forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.
Speaker 10: Yeah, like this is this has been a non issue
Speaker 10: for like over two decades.
Speaker 5: Now, Garrison, Yes, what year is it right now?
Speaker 10: The year of our Lord to us in twenty three.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they have been They have been promising to end
Speaker 5: child slavery in so originally there's supposed to be endy
Speaker 5: child slavery and then and then they scaled it down
Speaker 5: to the worst forms the worst. But they have been
Speaker 5: promised you could do this for longer than you have
Speaker 5: been alive, yes, correct, which is terrifying. Yes, yes. And
Speaker 5: and as we'll get into later, right, the number of
Speaker 5: child slaves is higher than it was when they started
Speaker 5: doing these child slave reduction efforts, so quote unquote production efforts,
Speaker 5: which are just sort of pr bullshit. So industry lobbying
Speaker 5: groups are also very, very powerful, and this is part
Speaker 5: of part of how this stuff persists. So the University
Speaker 5: of Chicago has a center called NORAK, which is like
Speaker 5: a public research center. I don't know, I went to
Speaker 5: that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers,
Speaker 5: and NEI or should you, because it turns out there
Speaker 5: was so okay. So they released this report on how
Speaker 5: bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak
Speaker 5: of the original version of the report that was supposed
Speaker 5: to come out, and mean, the original version of the
Speaker 5: report has the number of child slaves at like two
Speaker 5: point two million. Now, when the report actually comes out
Speaker 5: with no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers
Speaker 5: for child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the
Speaker 5: Norak report was like, ah, there's only like one point
Speaker 5: six million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves
Speaker 5: just sort of vanished in an editorial process after they
Speaker 5: got they came under fire from uh, the they came
Speaker 5: under fire from the chocolate lobby.
Speaker 10: Yeah yeah, let's uh, let's round that down. Makes it
Speaker 10: makes it easier to palace.
Speaker 5: And the other thing that it hides is that there's
Speaker 5: a ten to fifteen percent increase in the number of
Speaker 5: child slaves working in like in the co in Cocoa
Speaker 5: since COVID started, because COVID has been a giant sort
Speaker 5: of you know, the economic damage that COVID caused forced
Speaker 5: a bunch of people into into you know, increasingly desperate things.
Speaker 5: And you know, okay, so we tease this a little bit,
Speaker 5: and you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair
Speaker 5: trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten dollars for a
Speaker 5: chocolate bars as a fair trade on it, and it
Speaker 5: will and that will make sure that I'm only eating
Speaker 5: chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications for the
Speaker 5: chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate. The
Speaker 5: follow is an excerpt from a study conducted by the
Speaker 5: Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in the
Speaker 5: chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand the
Speaker 5: gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we brought
Speaker 5: certified chocolate bars to villages where some are all of
Speaker 5: the farm were certified. We held up the bar with
Speaker 5: the label and explained to the farmers what consumers expected
Speaker 5: out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired a
Speaker 5: fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices like
Speaker 5: child labor and deforestation were not present. We also explained
Speaker 5: the difference in retail price between fair trade and uncertified chocolate.
Speaker 5: The overwhelming response from farmers to this information was shock
Speaker 5: and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn shirt in
Speaker 5: front of him and asked if it looked like he
Speaker 5: earned a decent living. A woman in one village said
Speaker 5: she can hardly afford to send to her children to school,
Speaker 5: so how could anyone think she earned a fair price.
Speaker 5: Our farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences between certified and
Speaker 5: uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education, access
Speaker 5: to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah,
Speaker 5: all the people who are telling you they're doing some
Speaker 5: fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places
Speaker 5: they are getting it from are as fucked as the
Speaker 5: as Hershey's yeah, so this is bad.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 5: You might also think, Okay, we can get out of
Speaker 5: this by buying from coco cooperatives. Except except, and this
Speaker 5: is a wonderful thing that capitalism is brought on the world.
Speaker 5: Most coco collectives aren't actually like workers collector like aren't
Speaker 5: actually co ops. They're just sort of.
Speaker 10: All people's republic of chocolate farmers. I'm sure they're all
Speaker 10: a little red book.
Speaker 5: This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered,
Speaker 5: because there's there's a bunch of firms in China that
Speaker 5: are also technical. I talked about this in my episode
Speaker 5: of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk
Speaker 5: company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company
Speaker 5: was technically a co op, but like it was a
Speaker 5: co op in the sense that there was a small
Speaker 5: group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares,
Speaker 5: and then they just hired every source everything out to
Speaker 5: independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,
Speaker 5: this is a thing. A lot this the cocoa trade
Speaker 5: stuff is actually worse because most of these things that
Speaker 5: are called co ops aren't even co ops at all.
Speaker 5: They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake
Speaker 5: co ops. And there they are like a very very
Speaker 5: small number of of of these coco farms that are
Speaker 5: actually workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which
Speaker 5: one is which unless you spend a bunch of time
Speaker 5: like actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's
Speaker 5: no sort of like ethically way out of this, right,
Speaker 5: you're just kind of you're, you know, like you can't
Speaker 5: you can't eat your way out of this problem. And
Speaker 5: of course everything across the board, all these conditions have
Speaker 5: gotten worse since the pandemic, So you know, it's it's
Speaker 5: not only is capitalism not making things better every like
Speaker 5: things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I
Speaker 5: promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about
Speaker 5: the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There
Speaker 5: were eight people from Molly who were enslaved by coke
Speaker 5: plantations after being traffic from Mali sued nest Le, Cargill, Berry, Caliba,
Speaker 5: I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's, and
Speaker 5: Models to try to get conversations from the companies by
Speaker 5: virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made
Speaker 5: by their child slave labor. Yeah. Now there's also a
Speaker 5: separate lawsuit against slightly different companies, so a lot of
Speaker 5: the same company is slightly different that's using a different
Speaker 5: set of legal arguments. Both of the lawsuits have been
Speaker 5: thrown out, and I want to take a second to
Speaker 5: look at the reasoning here, both of which are sort
Speaker 5: of just amazing. So I think the most famous one
Speaker 5: is the Supreme Courts eight to one decision that said, well, so, like,
Speaker 5: all this stuff happened, but it happened outside the US,
Speaker 5: so you can't sue companies for it. Here. She's an
Speaker 5: amazing piece of logic, which is just like, oh yeah, no, Actually,
Speaker 5: like corporations, like American corporations could just go everywhere else
Speaker 5: and do crimes. And this is in the American legal
Speaker 5: system is specifically written in such a way that like
Speaker 5: if in a American corporation enslaves you in like the
Speaker 5: Ivory Coast, there's nothing you can do about it in
Speaker 5: the US. And then a judgment do you see throughout
Speaker 5: the other case because you know, their argument was, well,
Speaker 5: you can't prove that the companies knew you were being
Speaker 5: enslaved on those farms. There's no quote traceable connection between
Speaker 5: the people who enslaved you in the company, and so
Speaker 5: there's nothing we can do. And the reason both these
Speaker 5: arguments work is the reason for the structure of the
Speaker 5: chocolate market, right the reason coco plantations in the Ivory
Speaker 5: Coast and also Brazil can get away with this. You know, well,
Speaker 5: the reason that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast
Speaker 5: or Brazil or other places, the reason they're happening there
Speaker 5: and not in the US is because these are places
Speaker 5: where you can get away with that level of exploitation
Speaker 5: in corporate violence that you know in the US would
Speaker 5: be a lot more difficult. And this shields them from
Speaker 5: legal liability. Furthermore, instead of just you know, jumping, instead
Speaker 5: of just running the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies
Speaker 5: could easily do, right, this is a very very large trade.
Speaker 5: They could just sort of like they could invertially vertically
Speaker 5: and not even vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate,
Speaker 5: like they could just run the process, and they they
Speaker 5: very specifically choose not to do it. And the reason
Speaker 5: they choose not to do it, this isn't one hundred
Speaker 5: billion dollar industry, right, But instead they what they choose
Speaker 5: to do is to just buy cocoa from the chocolate
Speaker 5: market where all these sort of nebulous producers sell, which
Speaker 5: allows the chocolate companies to go, oh, well, these people
Speaker 5: don't work for us. We just buy chocolate from the market.
Speaker 5: How are we supposed to know which these plantations use
Speaker 5: slave labor? So it puts like a one degree of separation, Yeah,
Speaker 5: well it's actually two degrees. It's an additional degree of
Speaker 5: separation from the way something like Walmart works. Right where
Speaker 5: Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors. This isn't even contractors.
Speaker 5: They're just buying finished products from things they're like they're
Speaker 5: completely unaffiliated with, and this gives them, like it gives
Speaker 5: them like two degrees of legal separation because it's not
Speaker 5: just that their contractors are doing something that they didn't
Speaker 5: know about. It's that they're just buying it right, and
Speaker 5: this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist to
Speaker 5: protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just wave
Speaker 5: their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you,
Speaker 5: but we have no choice but to let them off
Speaker 5: completely scott free. So sorry about that. And I want
Speaker 5: to end today with something that has been running through
Speaker 5: my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which
Speaker 5: is that the voorgeoisie must pay for their crimes. The
Speaker 5: state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs have failed.
Speaker 5: And if anything is ever going to fucking happen that
Speaker 5: forces these companies to be in any way, there there's
Speaker 5: to be like a single iota of justice for the
Speaker 5: fact that all of these companies have been fucking gorging
Speaker 5: themselves on the profits of slave labor. At all, we
Speaker 5: are going to do it or no one is. So
Speaker 5: congratulations you the American worker. It is unfortunately incumbent on
Speaker 5: you to deal with these fucking corporations that have been
Speaker 5: destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky week everyone. Yes,
Speaker 5: this is very scary.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, thank you for that lovely, uh depressing presentation.
Speaker 5: Uh, Mia, I mean.
Speaker 10: I guess is there is there is there a sort
Speaker 10: of takeaway besides, there's no ethical conception to under capitalism.
Speaker 5: I mean, like, I mean, capitalism will never abolish slavery.
Speaker 5: I don't think one.
Speaker 10: I know there is one US state where they grow chocolate,
Speaker 10: which is Hawaii, which has its own problems of colonization.
Speaker 10: So even if you try to buy from a place
Speaker 10: that is you know, arguably has less chocolate slavery, it's
Speaker 10: generally better produced, it still is you're still implicating yourself
Speaker 10: in in uh, all of the problems relating to like, uh,
Speaker 10: the independence of that island and the US's colonization. So
Speaker 10: it's it's it's we're really just really just kind of
Speaker 10: trapped on all sides. Here is what it feels like.
Speaker 10: I mean, this is this Halloween chocolate problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, and I think I think the way
Speaker 5: to think about this, right is that this this is
Speaker 5: an actual systemic issue, right, This is a systemic thing
Speaker 5: capitalism has been doing for about four hundred years, like
Speaker 5: since its entire existence. And if you want to if
Speaker 5: you want to end it, we have to you have to. Actually,
Speaker 5: it's not it's not even enough to destroy these companies, right,
Speaker 5: because even if you brought down every single one of
Speaker 5: these chocolate companies right, there would just be another round
Speaker 5: of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the same ship.
Speaker 5: So you have to you have to destroy the system
Speaker 5: of property by which these things are allowed to exist.
Speaker 5: And at that point maybe you can start on being
Speaker 5: able to eat food that isn't produced by slave labor.
Speaker 10: It turns out Willia Wogkill was the villain the whole time.
Speaker 5: You know, I was trying to think about the amount
Speaker 5: of slave labor that we see from him versus the
Speaker 5: amount of slavery Wonka. Yes, it's it's I think Wonka
Speaker 5: is using more slave labor, but not by as much
Speaker 5: as it should be.
Speaker 10: I don't know, I don't know, it's it's it's hard
Speaker 10: to say. I I I think it's pretty clear that
Speaker 10: Walka's use of slave labor is just an accurate representation
Speaker 10: of the real life chocolate industry.
Speaker 5: Yes, so yeah, go go, go enjoy your weekend and then.
Speaker 10: Don't enjoy that new fucking twink Walgka movie that looks
Speaker 10: I have to say, dog shit.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, bad herod, worst idea, badst idea, anyone's had
Speaker 5: since capitalism twin Kwonka.
Speaker 10: I'm sorry it doesn't slap I agree out of ten anyway, Well,
Speaker 10: tune in in the next few days for two more
Speaker 10: Spooky Week episodes for you. We only got We only
Speaker 10: got three this week because there's a lot of air
Speaker 10: news happen ach but yeah, we at least have two
Speaker 10: other Spooky Week episodes that I am about to finish
Speaker 10: working on, so stay tuned for that.
Speaker 16: Goodbye, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
Speaker 16: week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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