Common Sense 309 – A Bodyguard Of Lies

Secrecy, hacking, information leaks, whistle-blowers, foreign-operative propaganda pushers, disinformation, election tampering and the search for any truth in cyberspace occupy Dan's thoughts in this show.

2016, Dan Carlin
Common Sense with Dan Carlin
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An automatic speech recognition transcript example from the first 10 minutes of Common Sense 309 by Dan Carlin. Click the link above to listen to the original audio file. The Google Cloud Speech API was used as speech recognition engine without any further manual editing.

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He's Dan Carlin and this is common sense.

Hillary Clinton

[0:14] 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.
And everybody gets mad at me as you might expect cuz I don't pick sides cuz 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 as she's a neoconservative basically I mean all these things that we have problems with Hillary Clinton is the poster child for those.

[0:55] So when we talk sometimes 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.

[1:13] You watch there's something about her where she is so suspicious of everything and maybe rightly so she's been hounded by,
the opposition since the days when her husband was the governor of Arkansas that she is habitually almost Nick Sony in 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% of stuff that never happened and is not real.
And 10% of stuff that might be and she's going to act in a way that gets her in trouble the political system in the ability to destroy your political opponents through the politics of Scandal.
Will work very well on her and it to believe that that won't happen you would have to believe that the Republic that the Republican opposition would act differently than they always have and if they already are.
So 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 two girls my girls asked 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.

The Other Guy

[2:22] And then there's the other guy who is who defies description really.
And in the last show I think it was it so long ago I can't remember thousand apologies ladies and gentleman but the good news is I've been getting a ton done on the history showing.
Whatever you don't hear me doing some work over here I'm probably doing work over there.

[2:43] But said some things about Trump in the last year which were totally honest and we know that the Trump bites got all angry with me but that's how it's going to be focusing and the one critique that's so funny is the one that suggested it because for 25 years,
I've been saying I want an outsider who 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 then work that way.

[3:10] 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 a scale of 1 to 10 he's an 11 narcissist cuz 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 be the greatest political story and 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 can think of if they're not Donald Trump he's an amazingly.
Polarizing figure in a way like I said I think.
Standard operating procedure candidates Crush Hillary Clinton because of her unpopularity so this is a depressing election for yours truly cuz 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 none of us are so I'm not talking about it cuz it doesn't matter at this point for me.

[4:26] Neither one of those people are going to solve my problems now on a different front though.

The Death Of Objective Truth

[4:33] There was something interesting going on that I think is worth talking about Anna dovetails into what I consider to be the larger issues than who the president of the United States may be here next January.
I guess you could say bottom line it revolves around information right back in my more,
protesti righteous self-righteous hay day I probably would have said instead of information I would have put a spin on it and said truth.
I was about 20 I wrote a piece it was never publish what 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 and I was talking about how Once Upon a Time there was,
certain agreed upon facts a 10 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 the dishes at 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 arguments now on the Merit of the specific case you're not going back and arguing with I don't even believe you're right about your basic assumptions.
The reason 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.
That's a 20 year olds fantasy nonetheless I do find myself in positions all the time now.

[6:03] For a long time ago but I know many of you are in the same boat I'm not talking to the general public on the show we just have a saying it's a little it's a little insulting so I apologize if it was but but very early on one of the ones we use for the show is it at the shows too smart for you it's not our fault.
And we've never dumbed The Showdown you know for a common denominator I figured that it's an unserved audience if you're talking about things reasonably.
Get a little high level when I think we do things could reasonably high level so you folks are not really my target audience when I say that I find.
So does certain jealousy in my mother-in-law's book clubs because she'll go to these book clubs and their popular.
Women like these things and especially your mom's and and whatnot and join these book clubs in the all decide you know we're going to read this book and then we finish it will all get together over coffee and we'll talk about the book.
And the reason I'm jealous about it is because they've all read the same book.
Nobody's going to argue about what happened to the main character in all these things you can talk about what you think above and beyond,
you know the events themselves are we all agreed that this happened now what we think about it it's the one we think about it part that is the really meaty fruitful part of a political discussion,
not the arguing over the basic facts.

[7:23] Back and 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.
Diverse the entire Affair so you're not talking about the thing you can't when 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 found myself jealous that we all haven't read the same books.

We Don'T Know The Same Things

[7:50] 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.

[8:00] Can you eat want to explain a certain reality but they don't know about that reality and so you find yourself having a discussion about,
well on this happened back here and you don't blow away any other words you know 10 minutes anyway you realize you're not discussing the issue that you wanted to discuss it all you're trying to find a meaningful point of agreement.
Every earlier level of actual level M&K some point where we were talking about essential information right truth is I would have said that as a 20 year old.

Nonsense Discussions

[8:32] 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 am venturing gas that we have never ever in our history talk more often.
With more people involved in the discussion of politics ever.
We have millions and millions of people who tune into Political radio and tell him you catch huge right with lots of people talking about it but when you look at the discussion.
So much of it is nonsense in the discussion about the things that aren't really happening or have no basis or fat 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.

[9:21] And it's immensely frustrating.
And it boils down to know something that we've talked about on this program a lot cuz you know I'm addicted to trying to find at least would appear to be to me,
root causes of things,
which is why I think the show gets boring at times cuz I think when you factor things down to root causes you end up with 4 to 8 root causes and they're the same ones that you could Factor almost anything down to.
One of them is information though.

Free Society

[9:49] In a free society and I say this a lot because folks free societies exist on a Spectrum 2 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.

[10:05] 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 8 on a scale of 10 back when I was growing up and we're off for now still free societies but we're down for Naches.