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He's Dan Carlin, and this is Common Sense.
I know many of you want me to talk about the election, but I have to be honest
with you. Like many of you, I find the whole thing depressing. pressing.
And everybody gets mad at me, as you might expect, because I don't pick sides
because I don't like any of them, which seems to be the majority position for
most Americans right now. So maybe in that sense, I'm just a follower.
But with Hillary Clinton, we have the champion of the establishment running.
So everything we talk about when we talk about corruption in government,
or she's a neoconservative, basically, I mean, all these things that we have
problems with, Hillary Clinton is the poster child for those.
So when we talk sometimes and we use that metaphor about the ship of state heading
towards an iceberg, Hillary Clinton is not the person to steer us away from the iceberg.
She's one of the main types of people in this system who for more than 20 years
has been setting the course. She steered toward the iceberg.
When you watch, there's something about her where she is so suspicious of everything.
And maybe rightly so. So she's been hounded by, you know, opposition since the
days when her husband was the
governor of Arkansas, that she is habitually almost Nixonian about things.
And it will catch up with her and it will catch up with her if she becomes president,
because the Republicans will investigate her for, you know, 90 percent of stuff
that never happened is not real and 10 percent of stuff that might be.
And she's going to act in a way that gets her in trouble. The political system
and the ability to destroy your political opponents through the politics of
scandal will work very well on her.
And to believe that that won't happen, you would have to believe that the Republican
opposition would act differently than they always have, and that they already are.
Are so as the old saying goes if
current trends continue and if hillary clinton becomes president
all those women who are so excited about having the
first female president and i would be excited about that myself actually the
father of two girls my girls ask me difficult to answer questions along those
lines all the time i doubt she's going to be the poster child you're looking
for in the long run and then there's the other guy who is who defies description really.
And in the last show i think it was it's so long ago i can't remember a thousand
apologies ladies and gentlemen but the good news is i've been getting a ton
done on the history show and so whenever you don't hear me doing some work over
here i'm probably doing work over there.
But said some things about Trump in the last show, which were totally honest.
And, you know, the Trumpites got all angry with me. But that's how it's going to be, folks.
And the one critique that's so funny is the one that suggested that because
for 25 years I've been saying I want an outsider who's going to come in and
upset the system and blah, blah, blah, that I have to be a Trump supporter.
As though it doesn't matter who shows up at your door representing that figure.
You are pledged to vote for them regardless. Well, I'm sorry. It didn't work that way.
He's one of the strangest candidates i've ever
seen i don't think i'm out of line here
saying the guy is a narcissist i think that's on display for everyone and
i mean on on a scale of one
to ten he's an 11 narcissist because i think a lot of these politicians fall
into the narcissism category somewhere on the spectrum and
i don't think he's believable and i'm
tempted to believe what others have said that maybe he doesn't even look like
he really wants the job wouldn't it be be the greatest political story in
all american history if a guy got this far
in the electoral campaign when he really didn't want the job that he
ran for subsidiary reasons i don't know if any of that's true but
it's it's interesting to wonder about i happen
to believe that hillary clinton loses to almost any
candidate you could think of if they're not i mean donald
trump he's he's an amazingly polarizing figure
in a way like i said i think i think standard operating
procedure procedure candidates crush hillary clinton because of
her unpopularity so this is a depressing election for yours truly because i
seemingly get what i want and i get it like a a weird sort of twisty way i think
i'm getting that birthday cake and it's loaded with nails nonetheless uh so
i'm not talking about it because it doesn't matter at this point for me um.
Neither one of those people are going to solve my problems. Now,
on a different front, though, there was something interesting going on that
I think is worth talking about.
And it dovetails into what I consider to be the larger issues than who the president
of the United States may be, you know, next January.
And i guess you could say bottom line it revolves around information or back in my more,
protest-y righteous self-righteous heyday
i probably would have said instead of information i would
have put a spin on it and said truth when
i was about 20 i wrote a piece and it was never published which you know
i'm grateful for now but i had talked
to i think i called it the death of objective truth and at
the time and this was probably 1985 or something
you know i was talking about how once upon a time there was
certain agreed upon facts and and upon those
facts you could then build an argument and when
you had an argument with somebody else about you know which way the country should turn
to this or that political event you wouldn't be arguing about
the base level facts there would be an understanding and agreement
on that and you can have the the arguments now on the merit of the
specific case you're not going back and arguing well i don't even believe that
you're right about your basic assumptions but the reason i'm glad that wasn't
published 20 years ago is i think an older wiser more cynical version of me
today realizes that there never
was anything like objective truth i think that's a 20 year old's fantasy.
Nonetheless i do find myself in positions all the
time now well for a long time but but i know many of you are in the same boat
i'm not talking to the general public on this show we used to have a saying
it's a little it's a little insulting so i apologize if if it was but but very
early on one of the slogans we use for this show is that if the show is too
smart for you it's not our fault,
and we've never dumbed the show down you know for a common denominator i figure
that it's an an unserved audience.
If you're talking about things reasonably, you know, at a high level,
and I think we do things at a reasonably high level.
So you folks are not really my target audience. When I say that I find sort
of a certain jealousy in my mother-in-law's book clubs.
Because she'll go to these book clubs and they're popular, uh,
um, women like these things.
And especially, you know, moms and, and whatnot, and they'll join these book
clubs and they'll all decide you know we're going to read this book and then
when we finish it we'll all get together over coffee and we'll talk about the
book and the reason i'm jealous about it is because,
well they've all read the same book nobody's going to
argue about what happened to the main character and all these things you
can talk about what you think above and beyond you know
the events themselves right we all agree that this happened now what do
we think about it it's the what do we think about it part
that is the really meaty fruitful part of
a political discussion discussion not the arguing over the
basic facts back in
debating class that was considered a debate technique
for the person that couldn't win the argument can't win the argument
question the sources divert the entire affair so you're not talking about the
thing you can't win you're now talking about where this person got their information
from right we went to the book club meeting and i read this book and you read
that one doesn't make for a very interesting conversation about what we thought
right so i find myself jealous that we all haven't read the same books,
because i'll have discussions with people about things and i can't get to square
one because we don't know the same things if that makes sense.
You know, you want to explain a certain reality, but they don't know about that reality.
And so you find yourself having a discussion about, well, this happened back
here and blah, blah, blah.
In other words, you know, 10 minutes into it, you realize you're not discussing
the issue that you wanted to discuss at all.
You're trying to find a meaningful point of agreement at a very earlier level, a factual level.
I mean, case in point, what we're talking about essentially is information,
right? Truth, as I would have said as a 20-year-old.
The reason this is so important is because
without it you are not having the right
discussion i mean in the united states today i venture a
guess that we have never ever in our history
talked more often with more
people involved in the discussion of politics ever
i mean we have millions and
millions of people who tune into political radio and
tell i mean it's huge right lots of people talking about
it but when you look at the discussion so much of it is nonsense and the discussion
about the things that aren't really happening or or have no basis or i mean
it's as though the people talking about them were born yesterday and have no
sense of what came before so you can't even have a conversation because we don't
even know the same things.
And it's immensely frustrating and it
boils down to you know something that we've talked about on
this program a lot because you know i'm addicted to trying to find at least
what appeared to be to me root causes of things which is why i think the show
gets boring at times because i think when you factor things down to root causes
you end up with four to eight root causes and they're the same ones that you
could factor almost anything down to one of them is information though,
in a free society and i say this a lot because folks
free societies exist on a
spectrum too too and you can say today we still
live in a free society but are we the same number on the
dial of a free society as we were 30 or 40
years ago if a higher
number denotes a more free society more free and open society where the people
are more involved in the decision making and the government somehow adopts policies
that are somehow connected to what the people want i bet you could make a case
that we were an eight on a scale of 10 back when i was growing up and we're
a four now still ill-free societies, but we're down four notches.