It Could Happen Here Weekly 104

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alzo Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's got to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hello everybody, and welcome to it could happen here. This
is Sharene and I am so excited to be joined
by author and journalist Sim Kern. Their latest novel, The
Free People's Village is available now, so go to your
local bookstore and order it and support a voice that
I believe we all need in our zeitgeist right now.

(00:51):
So welcome Sim. Thank you so much for being here,
Thanks for having me. For those of you who don't know,
Sim has been making videos recently about the genocide and
Gaza from a queer Jewish anti Zionist perspective, and this
is one that I think a lot of people need
to be exposed to and to listen to. I mentioned
this to you before the recording, but a Jewish friend
of mine told me how much she connected with your

(01:11):
voice and how much she's learned from you, and how
your videos have been helping her approach really awkward and
difficult conversations with her peers. So I appreciate you very much.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Happy to do whatever I can when.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
You decided to start making like the first video that
got a lot of attention, like were you seeing something
that you wanted to like make sure you correct in
the zeitgeist, like what was your perspective as a Jewish person?

Speaker 4 (01:33):
Well, this is the first video that I made, was
encouraging people to read books by Palestinian authors, just to
learn about the Palestinian perspective which is so often censored
and not really allowed in our media. And also is
you really have to go seek out in publishing. And
this isn't the first time I've done this since I

(01:55):
think twenty seventeen or something was the first time I
created Read for Palestine challenge on YouTube. And just creating
this Read for Palestine challenge was enough to get me
put on the Canary Mission website.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
I'm like outed as a.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
Anti semi by this very zionist website that of course
is a blocklist of mostly students who organize with like
Students for Justice in Palestine and really anyone who speaks
out publicly against Israeli apartheid. So simply like encouraging people
to read these books, I think is really powerful. And
I know for me, growing up Jewish in the United States,

(02:37):
I was just inundated with a lot of Zionist propaganda
from my more conservative family. My more liberal family would
take the line of like, it's just very complicated, both
sides hate each other, who can say who's right? And
it was only by reading Palestinian voices that I really
developed an anti Zionist perspective.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
That's awesome that you did the Read for Palestine challenge,
but also like not surprising about the Canary Mission thing, unfortunately,
but I'm glad that that didn't stop you or discourage
you when you start to learn more about Palestine. How
did you approach conversations with your friends and family?

Speaker 4 (03:16):
Again, Like I guess initially it's different talking to friends
and family than it is talking to the internet. Honestly,
it's much easier, I think sometimes to connect with the
Internet because it is not that like personal connection. I
think I've made more headway and had a much greater
impact online than I have with certain friends and family members.

(03:38):
But you know, I do think that everyone having those conversations,
putting your beliefs out there, whether it's one on one
in face to face conversations or whether it is doing
it online, where like certainly your friends and family are
going to see the things that you're posting and the
things that you care about, it has a great impact.
And like I've definitely noticed friends of mine over time

(04:01):
who maybe a few intense bombing campaigns ago, were very
checked out on this issue are now very.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Active and are and are speaking out themselves.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
And so that's I guess that would be my message
to other like anti Zionist Jews is even if the
first time you're putting stuff out there about Palestine it
feels like no one's listening, and it feels like, you know,
you're not making a difference over time, you're planting the
seeds of like questioning the Western media's you know, pro

(04:34):
Israeli perspective over time.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, it's a really really good point. But my friend
also mentioned she would never have been exposed to your
voice if I if I didn't share it, or people
were not sharing it. So I think people really underestimate
the value of social media sometimes or speaking up on
social media, they're just like, oh, people are already talking
about it or whatever. But everyone has a community they

(04:57):
can reach that no one else can reach. So I
think that's important to remember. You made some points in
some videos that you made that I would love for
you to not like regurgitate, but maybe just like cover
for people that haven't watched your videos or are just unaware.
In general, I think a really important point you made
was how suffering is not monopolized or exclusive or any

(05:20):
worse or better than other people suffering if regardless of
what identity they are. Can you get into that a
little bit?

Speaker 4 (05:27):
Yeah, So I made a video that was actually responding
to a comment by someone saying like, how dare you
compare the suffering of Palestinians to the suffering of Jews?
How dare you compare genocides? That that's disgusting and that
cheapens the Holocaust? And that was again I think responding
to a video or I was saying, like, read about

(05:48):
other genocides besides the Holocaust, because I think it again,
as a Jewish American, I grew up steeped in Holocaust literature.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
I read every book I could about it.

Speaker 4 (05:58):
You know, I think a lot of Jewish kids, by
the time more adolescents we have like this PhD level
knowledge of the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
I think that our.

Speaker 4 (06:06):
Peers who are non Jewish maybe don't have quite as
much exposure and understanding of the Holocaust. But that is
often the only genocide that is taught in US schools,
and so there's a narrative that the suffering of the
Jews and the persecution of Jews is uniquely specific, and
that it was all about the religion. It's something about

(06:27):
Judaism itself is why.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
We've been persecuted.

Speaker 5 (06:31):
Well.

Speaker 4 (06:31):
As an author, I currently I'm writing a book on
Jews in the seventeenth century, and I've just done a
ton of research on medieval and early modern Jewish history.
And of course there was religious hate, but it was
motivated by and I contended in this video that all
genocides are motivated by land and wealth and power, and

(06:51):
the hate is manufactured by people in power to justify
taking people's land and wealth to solidify their own power
as rulers and the Christian Church use this against.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Jews in the medieval and early.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
Modern period and in our times it's, uh, there there's
no one religion that has a monopoly. I'm committing genocide,
you know, there's no one state. And because really it's
states that are that are committing genocide that you know,
it's not directed to one people. So I've encouraged people
to read books about here in the United States, obviously

(07:29):
the genocide of the Native peoples, the Congolese genocide. You know,
I just recommended a couple of different titles on the
Rwandan genocide for a more recent example. And uh it
is I reject the framework that you can't make comparisons
between genocides. I think that keeps us ignorant. I think
that keeps us from being in solidarity with one another

(07:51):
and understanding the mechanisms of power and control and wealth
accumulation that underlie all these genocides. And I do believe
what is happening in Palestine right now is a genocide
being committed by the Israeli state.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, and also really good point about justifying it by
creating all of people in Palestine as barbarians or terrorists
or this rhetoric that becomes really dangerous and harmful and
as we've seen, like people can die, A sixty year
old can die from this rhetoric.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
Right, and Yahoo just said this is a struggle between
children of light and children of darkness like that genocidal rhetoric.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
I cannot believe that tweet. And I mean he deleted it,
but I mean the internet is forever. I just can't
believe that was that is so normal for him to
tweet just confidently at one point, just to say that
out loud. I think that's absurd. And also just like
to see how Yov Galant has been saying like human
animals or referring to Palestinians in such a dehumanizing way.

(08:58):
You mentioned something really important that I think I appreciated
about how maintaining the dehumanization of the Palestinians is vital
to maintain the white supremacist, imperialistic thing that is Israel.
Can you get into that a little bit?

Speaker 4 (09:14):
Yeah, Well, I think that was me trying. That came
out of me trying to understand why there was such
backlash when I first when I first years ago started
recommending people read Palestinian books. Is because when you read
a book by a Palestinian author, it is going to
humanize the Palestinian people for you, and that is incredibly threatening.

(09:35):
And Palestinian authors face a ton of discrimination within publishing.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
I mean, look at what was it.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
Earlier this week the Frankfurt Book Festival polled or canceled
a ceremony for a Palestinian author, Adania Shibley, and then
has made more time for Israeli voices and Israeli specific
panels that book festival. And simply because she is a Palestinian.

(10:05):
She writes books dealing with real, factual Palestinian history, and
her books are critical of Israel. But the silencing of
Palestinian voices is a global project. It is across all
media industries. You see it in you know, traditional book
publishing as well as journalism. Another an author friend of mine,

(10:28):
Hanin Ricott, has had the hardest time. She's been on
sub with her book and she's been told by multiple
editors to change the main character from a Palestinian character
to just a generic Arabic character because being Palestinian is
seen as inherently too controversial to publish.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
Yeah, I read that. That's just I mean, again not
completely surprised, but just so shameful that that is something
that is still happening in these modern times. I think
another thing to remember is a lot of people get
confused between the differences between being non white and white
in the scope of like this world. I guess it

(11:09):
just seems so obvious that colorism and racism both exist
in today's world. And I really liked what you mentioned
about the difference between colorism and racism. Can you talk
about that for a little bit.

Speaker 4 (11:20):
Yeah, So I was explaining that in the Western media,
Israelis are treated as white and Palestinians are treated as
non white, and it really is regardless of the color
of your skin. So a lot of people giving me
pushback on that common say, oh, but there's black and
brown and white Israelis. Yes, and in the racist apartheid
state that is Israel, people of different skin tones are

(11:44):
treated very differently. Within Israel, there was four sterilization of
African Jews immigrating to Israel. Well, when it comes to
the Western media, our view of the conflict is not
as nuanced as recognizing those differences. And so I was
explaining that colorism is, you know, discrimination based on the

(12:04):
color of your skin. Racism is a racial construct us
about social economic and legal discrimination. And while colorism is
often used to determine racism, that's not always one hundred
percent the case. And in the case of Israel, when
you're talking about the Western media looking at Israel, they
report on Israelis as people, as people who are to

(12:27):
be mourned, as people are whose deaths are important, as
people whose lives are valuable, And they report on people
in Gaza Palestinians as you know, human shields is the
most sympathetic way we hear them talked about. Their deaths
are not deemed important, They are not humanized within the media.

(12:50):
If they're killed, they're either combatants or they were a
human shield. They were someone being used by combatants, and
their deaths are you know, maybe the lip services paid
to those debts being regrettable, but they're seen as necessary
and not not unconscionable in the way that deaths in
Israel are reported on.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, I think you bring a really good point about
the media and how important semantics are. I think something
that we've been seeing time and time again is how
deep the dehumanization goes. Like Israelis have been killed versus
Palestinians have died. The Gaza strip is being referred to.

Speaker 4 (13:29):
I've seen it as an enclave, Oh my god, you know,
an enclave where terrorists lurk. So yeah, the words used
to describe the city of Gaza, the words used to
describe people as combatants, the words like, you know, Palestinians
die in a clash, when that clash was racist Jewish

(13:52):
settlers with machine guns coming after them, you know.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
So yeah, yeah, passive always.

Speaker 6 (13:59):
Does a lot of work, it does.

Speaker 7 (14:01):
It does.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
I mean, we've seen it just recently with the hospital bombing.
How the New York Times changed their headline like three
times from strike and then to blast I believe was
what they landed on blast, which I just find honestly
comical when I really think about it too hard.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
Yeah, Elizabeth Warren came out and condemned blasts.

Speaker 5 (14:24):
Like that is just so.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Just the passive voice is so dangerous because it really
it really off use case the truth, which is that
Palestine people are dying of genocide. Even calling it a
war or a conflict does not do what's happening justice
because it still implies there are two equal sides that
are fighting against each other, versus an occupier and oppressor

(14:48):
versus the occupied the oppressed. So I think semantics are
so important for us to keep in mind even when
we're talking about it with our peers, to make sure
that we talk about it in the correct way, because
I like, unconsciously becomes ingrained in us, even if we
don't realize it when we keep talking about certain things
the way the media wants us to talk about them

(15:09):
as a conflict or as a clash or whatever it is.

Speaker 4 (15:13):
And something else that I've really tuned into is really
being careful not to pit this as a struggle between
Muslims and Jews. Any framing like that is both Islamophobic
and anti Semitic and incredibly inaccurate. This is about an
ethno state, a nation state, and apartheid state, which is
Israel targeting is captive population. And and there are Palestinians

(15:40):
who are of all different faiths who are discriminated against
because they are Palestinians within occupied Palestine. So like, for example,
it just came to my attention that there are some
in the I'm a book talker. My book talk channel,
it's in books Instagram is mostly what I do is

(16:02):
just you know, share about books for folks to read
and share about the books I'm working on, and some
of my fellow book talkers have been recommending people read
books by both Palestinian and Jewish authors so they can
show both sides. A Paladinian author, Hanna Mushback, just wrote
a great letter to sort of call in our community

(16:24):
and explain this is this is very antisemitic to conflate
Judaism with Israel, the policies of Israel. You know, yesterday
we saw five hundred Jewish activists get arrested in the
Capitol building here in d C. In protests and demanding
an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. So there are many many

(16:44):
anti Zionist Jews. Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing,
but conflating them gives Israel more power and gives it
a stronger moral foothold to say, oh, we're representing all Jews,
not just this this state. So that's something also to
be really careful about, is to not pit this as

(17:07):
a Muslim versus Jewish fight, because it's not. It's about Israel,
the state versus Palestinian people.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, that's vital to remember. Let's take our first break
right here, and we will beat right back, and we
are back, you were just talking about how this is
just one hundred percent not a religious issue, and I
think talking about semantics again, I framing it as a
religious issue is another way for people to stop talking
about it, to be too afraid to get into this complicated,

(17:41):
ancient battle of all times, archaic thing that we can't
even get into because we can't understand it. I think
the Zionist narrative wants us to believe it's about religion
so people can ignore what's actually going on and be
too scared to speak out. It's like time and time
again something that I want to remind people that it's
not Muslim versus Jewish, which is what it gets framed

(18:03):
by most of the time. But speaking of Zionism and
how it's not equated to the Jewish religion at all.
If anything, Zionism is anti Semitic in and of itself.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
I believe that wholeheartedly. I believe Zionism makes all Jews
so much more unsafe.

Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, it's it's also rooted in a lot of anti Semitism.
Even the way it was even the way the state
of Israel was created, was Europeans being like, hey, Jews,
can you go here? It wasn't this gift to the
Jewish people. It was also about to be in Africa,
which I find fascinating. And also I think people always
forget the majority of Zionists in the United States are

(18:39):
Evangelical Christians. That is one percent accurate. That's why they
support Zionism, and it's because they want all the Jews
to go to Israel for the rapture to happen. It
is the most like comic book idea I've ever heard,
and everyone just goes along with it. Yeah, that brings
me to another thing he brought up in your videos
about a homeland. I think what you discussed is really

(19:04):
important because because of this narrative that a lot of
Zionists teach to Jewish people about how they're constantly being persecuted,
I think people are led to believe that Israel is
their safe haven, Like if all of us fails, I
have Israel to go back to that as my home,
even like American Jews that have no connection to Israel. Really, why,
in your opinion, do the Jewish people not necessarily need

(19:27):
a homeland?

Speaker 5 (19:29):
Right?

Speaker 1 (19:29):
Well, I made that video speaking to like other leftists.

Speaker 4 (19:34):
I was addressing other leftists, so I think if you
agree with me on the premise that everyone should have
a safe place to live and everyone should have equal rights,
which I think are two pretty pretty basic tenets of
being a leftist, then you just can't have anybody having

(19:54):
a theocratic ethno state, which is what Israel is de
fact I mean, they say they're not, but that is
how they act and how that is how that country
is run. And so, you know, a lot of people
misinterpreted that videos is you know, which I kind of
try to argue with me saying, but there's other theocratic
ethno states. But I'm saying, yeah, if you're a leftist,

(20:15):
you should think that's bad everywhere, because a theocratic ethno
state is an inherently fascist construct. It's inherently saying one
religion and or one ethnicity, in the case of the
way Israel interprets Judaism, these people are more valuable and
are more citizens here and have more rights here than

(20:36):
everybody else, and that is just incompatible with leftist values,
I think. And so I the point of that video
is nobody should have a theocratic ethno state. And this
is a line that I've heard even some leftist Jews
saying well, oh, we you know this is a complicated
issue because Jews need a homeland. Well, I'm sorry, our

(20:57):
world is just two heterogenous too diverse. You know, migrations
have been going on for tens of thousands of years
all over the place. There's no one plot of land
on Earth anymore that you can carve out and say, Okay,
just this one type of people are going to get
to live here and be citizens here and have rights here. Now,

(21:19):
I'm an anarchist personally, so I when I say no
theocratic ethno states, I'm also like in a bigger picture
way saying like no states would be the ideal for me.
But certainly theocratic ethno states are even worse within that
framework compared to like liberal democracies or something. So yeah,

(21:44):
that was a video that was like intended to be
an in group conversation, and then it got a million
views and got because my following has like really exploded
over the last week. So I wasn't expecting it to
go so far. And so for people who idealize ethno states,
like Japan or Sweden, they were really having a hard

(22:08):
time with me, with me saying that and thinking it
was really anti Semitic for me to say, oh, I
don't think Jews should have theocratic ethno state, but no,
I think nobody should have a theocratic ethno state.

Speaker 3 (22:19):
That's a really good point to make. It's I mean,
it goes back to the idea of Jewish suffering being
more valuable in some way than other suffering. I think
it continues this hierarchy of sorts and everything you described
about people not being treated the same and not having
enough rights, that's all apartheid. I think people forget like
Israel is committing the definition of apartheid and has been

(22:42):
against the Palestinian people. And I find it weird that.
I mean, Amy Schumer posted this crazy video proving in
her words, that it's not an apartheid state actually and
how people have all the rights in the world when
in reality it's shameful.

Speaker 4 (23:00):
Yeah, it's like the UN, Amnesty, International, Human Rights Watch
are all saying this is an apartheid state. But okay,
Amy Schumer, Yeah, it's not actually that complicated.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
It's really not. I've been really appreciating Amanda Seals. She
did like a reaction video to what Amy Schumer posted
and laid out all the racist reasons why Actually apartheid
is what you would call that. I think something that
has bothered me within the both sides thing is this

(23:33):
is not a term that I hear often anymore. But
like the progressive except Palestine, I think that idea has
been really damaging because it makes it seem like you
can still be so liberal and progressive and still not
really recognize that Palestinians are being genocided for almost a century.

Speaker 4 (23:54):
Yeah, and this is just so frustrating because again, what
you're seeing in Palestine, it's so stark, the violence is
so obvious, and it's so egregious. And there's all these
social justice you know, organizations and accounts that I followed.
There's like queer Jewish liberation accounts who said nothing about Palestine.

(24:16):
There's also non jew it just queer you know, all
sorts of queer liberation queer activists out there, which is
like a whole other network that I'm tapped in into,
and many of them are staying silent on this genocide.
And it's like we are all fighting the same evils,
the same type of oppression. And if you want people

(24:37):
to stand with you when your rights are being taken away,
you got to stand with everybody else.

Speaker 6 (24:42):
That's the only way.

Speaker 4 (24:43):
Intersectionality is the only way that we can overcome these
enormous forces of oppression in the world. So, yeah, it's
it's been very frustrating to see just how many, you know,
anti racist organizations, queer liberation organizations are just staying completely
silent on Palestine.

Speaker 5 (25:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
I have been really frustrated about that as well, because
it encourages this sort of selective outrage that is reserved
for certain kind of people that are deemed as human
versus the people that are not. I really believe one
of the most powerful voices in the fight for Palastine
liberation are Jewish anti zionists because they can speak to

(25:25):
what people deem is the source of that problem from
a different place. But I hope you realize how important
your voice is just in general, especially now. And Yeah,
I just really thank you for what you've been doing,
because it's kind of scary too. I'm sure to suddenly
have a big platform and have all these people analyzing

(25:47):
everything you're saying and trying to find little holes in
your arguments. But I appreciate that you're not backing down.

Speaker 4 (25:55):
Yeah, I went from six thousand to one hundred eighty
thousand followers on Instagram in like a week.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
I didn't realize that you started a six thousand. I
was wondering about that. That is a crazy jump.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, it happened really really fast.

Speaker 4 (26:08):
And on TikTok too, I had I had fifty thousand
on TikTok just from my book talk author talk account,
which I've been you know, growing over the course of
two years, and then it went Now it's like at one.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Hundred and fifty thousand, so like tripled on TikTok.

Speaker 4 (26:23):
But yeah, it's definitely made me more careful about what
I say. Like again, I had that one video that
was sort of like an in group comment to leftist
because I'm used to being on like the leftist side
of TikTok, and then realized, like, oh crap, like everything
I say is going to go out to like absolutely
every single kind of audience, so I need to like

(26:43):
really think about the context of what I say and
that it.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, it's a it's a lot, it's a lot.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
Yeah, I'm I mean it sounds really overwhelming and even
navigating it well and I don't know, I really appreciate
you before where we wrap this up. I would love
for you to talk about your work a little bit,
maybe your book where people can find it, where they
can support you in your work. The platform is all yours.

Speaker 8 (27:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (27:11):
So I actually had a book come out about a
month ago called The Free People's Village, and it is
relevant to this topic.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
It's a very leftist book.

Speaker 4 (27:19):
It's about a punk band organizing to save their warehouse
from demolition to make room for a new electromatagnetic hyperway
in an alternate timeline where al Gore won the two
thousand election and declared a war on climate change instead
of a war on terror. But it's a book that's
really critical of neoliberal politics. So this solar punk utopia

(27:41):
that's been created this world has really only impacted wealthy
white neighborhoods while leaving everybody else behind. So it's a
book about centering racial justice within climate organizing. And the
final scene of the book actually takes place at a
Free Palestine protest, and so that's definitely a presence throughout
the book. And based on experiences I've had organizing with

(28:05):
the incredible Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestini youth
movement organizers that we have here in Houston.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
So for people who are.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
Listeners of this podcast, I do think they would enjoy
the Free People's Village and you can get it. The
best place to get it is always your local indie bookstore.
Of course, you can also support your local indie bookstore
by shopping at bookshop dot org, which allows you all
the convenience of ordering online, but you get to pick
your favorite indie bookstore to benefit. And then of course

(28:38):
you can get it also from all of the big
corporate retailers. And it's available in hardcover and ebook and audiobook.
And you can find me online at sim Kern on
TikTok and if you search simcr it's at sim Bookstagram's
badly on Instagram, but if you just search sim Kernel,

(29:01):
I'll pop up on Instagram.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
And that is s I N k r N.

Speaker 6 (29:06):
For people that don't know, Yes.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
Just to leave us with something that we can take
away from this, do you have any advice for people
that are trying to open up these discussions with their
peers and how should they approach them? And I don't know.
I think these conversations are essential to humanizing Palestinians. Again,
so do you have any advice before we sign off.

Speaker 4 (29:31):
You know, same advice which was the first piece I gave,
which was just to read a lot and learn a
lot and seek out those Palestinian voices. Also Jewish Voice
for Peace if you go to their JVP dot org website,
they have a ton of like great tools and kits
for learning how to talk about Palestine.

Speaker 5 (29:50):
And so I.

Speaker 4 (29:50):
Would say, you know, always be learning and reading if
you feel like you don't have the language yet to
have these conversations. Like you said, it's really powerful to
repost things by you know, commentators that you respect, journalists
on the ground in Gaza right now who are doing amazing.

Speaker 6 (30:10):
Courageous work.

Speaker 4 (30:11):
Just letting people know what is happening and putting something
out that disrupts an imperialist narrative can be really really powerful.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Thank you for saying all of that, because it's really needed.
And I will put in the description all the info
to where you can follow sim in their work and
maybe I can put some recommendations for Palestinian books as well.
And yeah, that's the episode. Thank you so much for being.

Speaker 4 (30:38):
Here, Thanks for having me Free Palestine.

Speaker 7 (30:56):
Greetings podcasts. Excuse the asset, it's me James A. Man
who has commenced his one man war against cutter airlines,
who detained me against my will for most of the
last two days in a very small part of a
very big plane.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
See there's a there's a you know. Airlines from Middle
Eastern countries are are usually like the best airlines are
like Royal Jordanian and Air Immirates. If it's if it's
owned by a king, it's usually a safe bet. But
but cutter airways.

Speaker 7 (31:33):
That's what they say about.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
England breaks that mold, proudly breaks that mold. Yeah, yeah,
fuck me.

Speaker 7 (31:40):
One of the one of the less pleasant experiences available
to a human being that doesn't end in death is
a thirty six hour trip from Keston to southern California,
which see I've just enjoyed.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
I always enjoyed those trips back from Air Emirates because
when you're on the Air Emirates flight, if you ask
the steward or whatever to if you tell him, hey,
I would like eight shots of vodka and four glasses
of orange juice, He'll just give it to you, like,
not even a question, not even a question. And so

(32:13):
have I vomited on a couple of eir Emirates flights. Yes,
is it always a good time? Probably you don't remember. No, No, yeah,
I see.

Speaker 7 (32:23):
I was at the point of frustration where like and
I'm as an english Man, if if I've become frustrated
and drunk, then my instinct is to fight everyone or
throw bottles, and I thought that that would probably result
in further detention, so decided against decided against becoming bladdered.
Or I could have started singing. I guess that's the

(32:43):
other option available to me. That sure fits my culture. Yeah,
So we're not here to talk about things that I
like to do in my free time, as much as
I would love that, but we are here to talk
about things that I have been seeing in my worktime.
When I was traveling to Kurdistan a couple of weeks. Kurdistan,

(33:05):
for people who are not familiar, is a big area,
the area where Kurdish people live, and it spans several countries.
The areas I went, we're in a rock and in
Syria or in that it's not really in I guess
Syrian regime territory. But if you look on the.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Map, northeast Syria known as Rojava, the other two parts
that are generally considered part of Kurdistan. Are a chunk,
big chunk of southern Iran and also a big chunk
of southern Turkey.

Speaker 7 (33:31):
Yeah, so Java just means west. I think Roja lat
is east eastern Kurdistan. So yeah, I've spent the last
several last week and change in that area. And while
I was there, the Turkish state began a massive drone
bombing campaign, which is what we are gathered here today

(33:54):
to discuss. So for people who are not familiar, it's
for years almost to This drone bombing campaign started almost
four years to the day since Turkey's invasion of what
they call the M four Strip. So that's the area
around Surakania and Tel Abiyad. We've talked about that before
on the Podka, so if you want to know more
about that, you can go back and listen to it.

(34:17):
It's the area along the border, one of the areas
on the border between Turkey and Syria. And as people
will know, Syria is a country that has had a
long and terrible civil war, which they've heard about in
lots of episodes, right, and we're not talking about that
today so much as we're talking about the Turkish state's

(34:39):
use of drones to bomb what people generally in this
country will know as for a Java, right, So just
to give them statistics off the top, this is the
fourth year in a row of aggression at this time
of year, right, So there have been two land attacks
I think Operation Olive Branch and Operation with someone called

(35:00):
peace Spring, and then two years the last two years
there have been drone strikes at this time of year.
This time of year, it seems very hard not to
conclude that these are attempts to destroy civilian infrastructure and
make it very hard for people in the cold months
of the year. So right now around two million people

(35:21):
in north East Syria are going to be without power
and without water. And I experienced some of that when
I was there, and the places I stayed will run
off generators, so you'd have like intermittent power. You'd have
power from it, and then they'd put some petru in
the generator and the power will go down, or the
generator would have a little tantrum and the power would
go down. But generally I had a lot better access

(35:43):
to power that some people had a lot better access
to water. So as I was traveling around, I noticed
some people didn't have access to like running water, right,
they can't turn on the tap and get water. Obviously
that's a massive problem. It's something I think. Look, as
people are listening to this, Israel is also bombing the
shit out of Gaza, the whole of the Gaza Strip,

(36:05):
and the US recently intervened to ensure that people there
had access to water, and they have done very little
in the case of protecting people in North and East Syria.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Right.

Speaker 7 (36:17):
So across this drone campaign, forty eight people have died,
and in the worst I guess the highest casualty of
producing strike was one that happened while I was there,
twenty nine. Like internal security forces, sometimes you'll see it
translated as police, but I don't think that's quite accurate,
like that, they don't do cop shit, like they're not

(36:39):
there to you know, like arrescue for parking in the
wrong place, and they do the things that cops do.
They're there largely is like internal security due to the
various non state arm groups that are in the area
and state armed groups I guess that are operating in
the area that would make things dangerous for people living there.
So these particular essays were anti narcotic essay. And again

(37:02):
why I'm grounding this and what they do is because
they're not the people who like send you to jail
for the rest of your life for like having an
ounce of weed. They're the people whose job is to
prevent the trading cap to gone. Will people know what
people know what Captagon is?

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Absolutely yeah, it's it's it's it's one of the drug
I mean, it's that when you when you hear about
drug in addiction forces, like like police in Rojava, they're
going after CAPTI Gone. It's a big chunk of both
what kept isis it's it's the it's the purveten, you know,
the meth that Nazis took that for isis right, and
it was also a big chunk of how they got
their funding was was moving and the a Sad regime

(37:38):
also gets a piece of a lot of the Captigon trade.

Speaker 7 (37:42):
It continues to fund these largely like it's the mist
insurgent groups right in the area because it's small and
it's high value, and like Robert, they has to give
it to the fighters. It's this is very common like
around the world. We we discussed this in miandmar too,
right that the military there take something else called yaba,
But these kind of math derivatives are very common and

(38:03):
they're very commonly sold. That's how a lot of these
non state arm groups get money to buy stuff. Right,
So when we're talking about drug interdiction, it's not done
in a vacuum. It's not done because I could they
think that necessarily that drugs are bad or that you know,
there's some kind of moral failure that comes from the
use of these substances. It's because it allows funding for

(38:26):
groups that are trying to kill people on the ground.
So like interdicting the drugs is part of an anti
terrorism operation that allows people to live safely, which is
what they deserve after ten plus years of war in
that area. So twenty nine people is a lot of people, right,
twenty nine anti narcotics, I say issues is a lot
of the people who do that job. It's going to

(38:47):
make it significantly harder for them to continue doing that job,
which means it's going to make it significantly easier for
those arm groups to get funding. Right. It's also so
while I was there, there was a massive funeral for
these people. Right, every town, every settlement across where Java
has lost somebody in that strike. Right, So in Kamishlo,

(39:10):
in Kabani, in Alhasaka, like all these places had big
funerals because you know, three or four or ten people
came from that town and like that's I saw a
little girl like going to her dad's funeral, right, like
a little girl holding a picture of her dad. And
it's pretty fucked up. Like it's hard for that not
to affect you, especially as like these people weren't fighting anyone,

(39:33):
they weren't attacking anyone, right, they were just they were
taking a training. They were taking an anti narcotics training
at night, and sixty of them were gathering it's building.
Twenty nine were killed, twenty eight injured. It's in the
sort of furthest northeast part of North and Eastsyria, but
around a town called Derek, which is on the board
of it al Malkay Derek. Yeah, Bobody, my pronunciation is

(39:57):
asked al Malachaia might say on the map if if
you're looking at Google Maps, so you're trying to work
out what it is. Lots of these places. The reason
they will have two names is cored edition and Arabic. Right,
So like under the previous side regime, like Arabic was
the sort of language that people were enforced to speak
and use, and now under the self administration, people tend

(40:19):
to use Kurdish, and they tend to use a Latin
script as opposed to an Arabic script. Right, So that's
why you'll see two names very often you're looking on
a map, But like twenty nine is only you know,
there's nineteen other people, mostly civilians, right, who were killed.
Then two million people are now living without power, without water,

(40:40):
and without these basic services, which in turn will result
in more death. Right, More people will die because they
don't have access to those things which are life sustaining, right,
or people, young people, sick people. Both things are the
very basics of sustaining human life, and so without the
things are going to get a lot harder. I want

(41:03):
to talk a little bit about like where these drone
strikes happened, because largely aside from the one of their age,
they weren't at like large groups of people or buildings. Instead,
they were like deliberately targeting infrastructure. So of the ones
that I saw and the ones that I read about,
and they targeted like an electricity substation in one case,

(41:27):
they targeted a lot of water facilities, right, like like
water pumping stations, et cetera that allow people to get water,
a cooking gas plant, which it's pretty obvious what that does, right,
It allows people to get bottles of gas to cook
their food, and a lot of oil in destructures. So
I saw a few of those. Theyre called like donkeys,

(41:49):
you know, the things that go up and down. Yeah
my using the word, I don't.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
Know the word, but the little crane.

Speaker 7 (41:55):
Things yeah, yeah, yeah, the like the things you can
see if you drive through Bakersfield.

Speaker 3 (42:00):
I'm sure there's a name.

Speaker 7 (42:02):
Yeah, are they oiled derricks? Yeah? Someone someone googled the
name of the nodding dog.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
That pumps jack? Is that no?

Speaker 7 (42:12):
Yeah, that's that's the first sounds like like a dude
who goes to the gym a lot, Yeah, broke and
pump jacked.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
I mean it is called the an oil donkey as well.
So you were, yeah, nodding donkey pumps. Yeah, that's what
I thought they were, noding donkeys. Okay, Yeah, that's that's
that's a phrase we're going with. So you could see
a lot of these that were like knocked over on
their side, right, that had been drone struck, and then
you could see others that were just knocked out because

(42:40):
the power to them had been knocked out. So obviously
that's not only a major revenue source, but also like
that is how people in the region get fuel, right,
so it's going to be harder for them to get diesels,
going to be harder for them to drive around. People
already don't drive around a lot because a lot of
the drone strikes on people in the yepegay Yepija, so

(43:02):
that the People's Defence Forces and Women's Defense Forces, lots
of drone strikes have happened when those people are driving
their cars, when they get in a car, so it
can be quite hairy driving and a lot of people
were driving too, like I drive around, but that's one
of the areas of risk for people.

Speaker 9 (43:21):
Right.

Speaker 7 (43:22):
Of the people killed thirty fives as eleven were civilians
and two s efs, so most of these were either
internal security or civilians. And I think Robert you were
Robert and I spoke while I was there, and Robert
made a good point about how this enables these non
state armed groups like either ISIS or like HD.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
That my main concern for you while you were there
was not that you would get hit in an air strike,
but it was that because of the damage done to
the security forces as a result of the Turkish are strikes,
you would it would. There's there's always been is as
cells there right that they've never gotten rid of all

(44:05):
of them. And periods where the A and E. S
self administration is under attack are the periods in which
it's most dangerous because it provides there's less security forces,
you know, watching everything. People in general are outless, which
provides cover for some of these groups that may want
to do like a kidnapping.

Speaker 7 (44:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's not a place where a
lot of I guess folks who look like me. That
was a concern for us, and like it's a concern
for these people too. Write they still do car bombs
in de rezor not, you know that they things still
kill civilians. Yeah, they roll up Isis people on a

(44:44):
probably weekly basis. People are interested in getting more information
both about the drone strikes and about what they call
sleeper cells. There are Java Information Center, very nice people.
They have a good website. It's Jarva Information Center to org.
They produce monthly report on both things. So that will
give more information on those things. That would be a

(45:05):
good time to pivot to adverts. But I've got all
that is.

Speaker 10 (45:11):
Do you know who else provides great services?

Speaker 7 (45:14):
I don't think we can. I don't reasonably make that claim.

Speaker 10 (45:18):
The products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 7 (45:20):
Here they are. We're back and we are discussing toerone
strikes on North Easyria. I guess not just from North Asyria,
like these also happen up around Sulimani SOLMANI if you're
looking on the map. Depends again on that language, right,
those have happened again against casey K, which is like

(45:42):
the Kurdistan Communities Council. So that would be the I
guess the if you look at like Syria, Iran, Turkey
and Iraq as different countries, all of which have some
administry to give control over the nation of Kurdish people, right,

(46:03):
Kurdish people live in all four countries, and they live
in other countries too. Of course, then the movements in
each of those countries are subsidiary to the k CK
and so some of those KKK folks who are up
in Solimani so like that there will be drone strikes
there and that's that's far inside Iraqi Kurdistan, right, You're

(46:24):
you're a long way from the border there, and that's
that's what these drone strikes, I guess. The drone strikes
allow Turkish intelligence in the Turkish military to target people
much much further inside with very little consequent or risk
on their own. Right, these drones are largely not being
targeted because certainly in an Ees, the Autonomous Administration in

(46:47):
North Eastyria, they don't have the means to target them, right,
the United States hasn't supplied them with the weapons that
they would need to shoot down those drones, which I
think brings me onto the role of the US in
this and I guess more broadly the role of the
coalition in this case. Coalition is a coalition to defeat ISIS. Right,

(47:08):
it's made up of dozens of countries, the UK, the US, Germany,
lots of other Western I guess countries broadly, and countries
in that part of the world too, like I think
Iraq is part of it. Certainly, like Iraqi, Kurdistan has
done their own operations against ISIS sleeper cells, peshmurger and

(47:30):
like everywhere you go, right, you go through Peshmerga checkpoints,
like I was going through an area where they had
arrested an ISIS member the day before, so like it's
they'll be getting you out of the car, you know,
going through your bags, looking through your stuff. Right, So
that's all part of the same operation. But the US
has a base in a place called Alhassaka, which again

(47:52):
you can look up on the map, right, it's a
little west trying to light up my compass here, a
little west of Kamishloh, which is a capital of the region,
and the US pretty much US troops don't do a
great amount of leaving that base. It's fair to say
they'll come out in helicopters. They were going out like
sort of supporting SDF patrols in the Ahuska region, but

(48:17):
they were supporting them from the air. Right. They generally
aren't going out and about like with people on the ground,
talking to people, unless it's a specific mission, which they
do sometimes you can if people are interested in like
the US presence. It's called Operation Inherent Resolve, And they
have a Twitter account whether sometimes post themselves doing things.
But what they don't do is protect that. And so

(48:39):
the US and the Autonomous Administration are allies in this
fight against ISIS, right, but they are only allied in
this fight against ISIS. The US is not supporting them
in defending themselves from drone strikes or like ensuring that
civilian population is protected from those attacks. So the US
has the capacity city to shoot down these drones, and

(49:02):
they prove that by shooting one down last week or
the week before. I'm a little bit jet legged, so
a bit bugled on time, but I think it was
last week the US shut down a Turkish drones.

Speaker 10 (49:13):
It came out two weeks ago for when this is airing. Yes, yeah, sure,
good point.

Speaker 7 (49:18):
Yeah, so yeah, two weeks ago the United States shut
down and F sixteen shut down a Turkish drone. So
specifically it was a drone called an a Kinji, which
is a newer variant of the Bairaktar drone. We've spoken
about these drones before, right, they're the drones that people like,
I know, you can go on actually and buy a
stuffy version of these drones, which, right, that's concerning.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
Yeah, it's really dystopian and crazy.

Speaker 10 (49:46):
I don't like it.

Speaker 7 (49:47):
Yeah, I do not like it either. I think it
illustrates the way the war in Ukraine has become like
a football match for some people, yeah yes, or like
a film where like I just want to reinforce it, like.

Speaker 10 (49:59):
It's turned into fandom. Yeah yes, yeah.

Speaker 7 (50:01):
I think that's an excellent way of putting it. Gara saying, like,
it's not cool when anyone gets fucking drone struck. It's
not cool when, like everyone in an area spends every
night worrying if death is going to come from the
sky at some point, right, Like, the effect of these
drones trucks isn't just on the people killed, or the
people injured, or even the infrastructure. The effect is on

(50:25):
every single person worrying what's going to happen tonight? Right Like,
And I can speak to a tiny part of that experience.
Right Nothing compared to what people are living there have
gone through at all. But it's a concern every time
it gets dark, you know, well it's tonight the night,
especially for the rural folks who might be living in
a rural area but near to a substation, or near
to one of those nodding donkeys or other infrastructure which

(50:48):
has been targeted, or near a cooking gas plant. Right,
those things I can imagine explode with quite some force.
They can't leave, right, they can't just upen and not
live near any infrastructure. Infrastructures will allows place to be
survivable for civilians, So they just have to live with
this constant fear. And it's very odd to see that

(51:08):
and then simultaneously see this, this sort of deification of
drone strikes that are happening in Ukraine and like this,
you know, people with dog dressed as Napoleon Twitter avatars, Yeah,
cheering someone's kid dying.

Speaker 5 (51:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (51:24):
I mean throughout all of the kind of new conflicts
we've had the past five years, like the and especially
the past like two three years, Like the idea of
like politics as fandom has produced some of the like
most like inhumane, gross aspects of how people have been

(51:45):
like consuming social media and just the sheer. It's like
people forget that this is like thousands of people's actual,
like human lives that they're like yes, sneaming about, and
it's it just it just becomes just they talk about
it in the same way they talk about like a
Marvel movie or like a star like it's it's it's yeah,
or sports like.

Speaker 5 (52:04):
It's it it it.

Speaker 10 (52:06):
It's like this weird like gamified it allows you to
to approach these things from a just a from a
very separate perspective when you're when you're viewing it from
like this fandom angle, I think. But politics is fandom
in general. I think it's gotten a whole lot worse
since the Trump era. Ye had, you know, like that's
where we had like resistance libs that were like copying

(52:29):
off some of the stuff from the New Star Wars trilogy,
which is kind of the inspiration for a lot of
their stuff. We got nazi's doing a whole bunch of
politics as fandom as well. It just creates like it's
it's it's like this team sports like fandom thing that
is just pervate.

Speaker 5 (52:44):
It's it's it's it's.

Speaker 10 (52:45):
Seeped into like almost every single aspect of like not
just politics, but not like conflict and like geopolitics.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
It's like whoever has the best branding is the one
that's has the best chance.

Speaker 10 (52:58):
Yeah, and it's I don't know, it's it's disturbing to watch.
I don't know how to like counter counter it because
it feels like the more you engage, the further sucked
into the abyss you become. But it also doesn't feel
good to just like ignore it as well, because it's
just it's like it feels like this kind of endless
trap that is just a part of existing in this

(53:21):
weird postmodern internet world.

Speaker 7 (53:24):
Yeah, I don't know. I think like one would hope
that the Internet in some ways could help us see that,
like at the end of every drone strike is a
little fucking child most of the time, or like like
I spent some time last week with a family who
almost exactly one year ago lost their fifteen year old
time in a drone strike, and like it that, Like
I understand people die in these things, like on an

(53:47):
intellectual level and even on a personal level, like having
spent time in these places, you know, for a decent
amount of my life, But fuck me, it's just like
it destroyed you. Like seeing a mum mary her son
cry for her little boy. It's fucking heartbreaking, and like
I got to live that for one morning, and those
people live that every single day and every time. And

(54:10):
I don't, I know, it makes me want to shout
at people when I see this.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
I don't actually think it's I don't mean to be
a doomer here. I don't think it's a solvable problem. Yeah,
this is we are talking about it within the language
of fandom because that is kind of the defining public
social relationship of our time. But like, this is always
what people have done to war, one way or the other. Right, Yeah,

(54:38):
it's faster now and more commercial, right, like one thing
for whatever reason, I think just because we're a culturated
to it. Hearing people talk about, you know, doing what
they do in times of war because of patriotism, because
of nationalism, because of belief in the founding principles of
their country, seems a little bit less coarse than like

(55:00):
doing it because you fell in with a bunch of
memers who use little dog avatars and shit. But like,
I don't know, it's not it's not like less logical
than than being right or die because like you happen
to be born under you know so and so the king.

Speaker 7 (55:18):
Yeah fair, yeah, yeah, and like that dehumanization. I think
the difference, like to me is like, so, like Robert
and I have both experiences right to to in order
to kill somebody, you have to dehumanize them. To kill
people on mass you have to do that on mass, right,
if you're fighting a war, it doesn't behoove you too.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
You make it sound like we're killing people, James.

Speaker 7 (55:39):
Well, that's the thing that we do on the podcast
Robert's yeah, we kill people in mass Yeah, yeah, sure,
you're gonna have to school A zone is where we
talk about the killings. People want to subscribe. That's what
we do instead of adverts, is we list the people
we've killed.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Yeah, James, as the as the quote on your Blue
Sky account says, one death is a tragedy, one million
is a statistic messed out.

Speaker 7 (56:01):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, and it's ever every day I
strive to get my number up, you know, but so
far I've let everyone down. That's not true. And to
my knowledge, none of us have killed anyone but your knowledge,
to my knowledge, yeah, suren's probably got some bodies in
the in the class, you know, Jesus Christ. It's so

(56:27):
what I wanted to say is that like when yeah,
like if you're in the military, you probably know this, right,
like like this sort of blood makes a grass grows, shit, fine, whatever,
Like that's how wars work. War is undesirable. It's horrible.
You have to be horrible, you have to you have
to dehumanize people to kill them. You don't have to
fucking do that if you're on Twitter dot com. But
like people, you know, people with the silly dog advatars chiefly,

(56:51):
but other people to have begun to see themselves as
like participants in conflict in a way that they maybe didn't.
Maybe they did and I just wasn't around in second one.

Speaker 10 (57:00):
Yeah, No, that's I think I think that does tie
into part of how the fandom things works, because a
part of participating in fandom is being in these kind
of very very alienating online spaces. Because any type of
like engagement on the Internet in this way is is
fuel through the process of alienation. But when that kind
of starts applying to politics, you feel like either the

(57:22):
act of consuming or or like you know, joining in
on conversation is itself like a form of activism. By
just like just through like consuming or sharing content, you
feel like you're actually participating in the thing itself.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Yeah, And I think some of it's this almost narcissistic
need to not let the world pass you by because
it's there. There's something deeply uncomfortable about just like watching
massive things happen and realizing like there's nothing I can
do about this. Yeah, to feel like there isn't a
lot of the time, right, like your your take, you know,

(57:58):
the the instant a hospital gets attacked in Gaza, your
take on that is not particularly helpful or necessary unless
your I don't know Joe Biden, right.

Speaker 5 (58:14):
But which is not.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
I don't think his take was helpful, but right, it
was like it had an impact because he's the president,
but like most of us were just kind of part
of the churn, and there's almost there's like a degree
of emotional need to it, especially when you see these
horrible footage of bodies piled high. Right, you feel like
I'm a bad person if I don't do something, and
the only thing I can do is tweet or whatever

(58:38):
your social media, I feel like I.

Speaker 3 (58:40):
Just just to play Devil's advocate for hot sake. I
think it's a little different when there's so much conflicting information,
especially I mean, like the Gaza thinks a great example,
because the electricity is out, they don't want them to
share anything. So I think when it comes to something
like that, it's more about like spreading awareness versus like
having a take. In my opinion, it's more just like, hey,

(59:02):
the news might say this, but this is from the
actual person on the ground telling you what's happening. So
I think there's a little bit of nuance because I
also think the only reason that like just for Palestine
for example, just is we don't have to go into
it too much. But a huge reason why there's so
much more support for the Palestinian movement is because of

(59:23):
social media.

Speaker 7 (59:24):
Yeah, so definitely, Yeah, people see people in Gaza as
people now, not as statistics or just through the lens
of Hamas or rightever, like yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Yeah, I mean it depends. I think it depends on
how you do it, and like I mean, it is
it is accurate to say that to a significant extent,
the ultimate outcome of these conflicts are determined in large
part due to public sympathy, right Like, That's going to
be probably true of, however, things that ultimately shake out

(59:55):
in Gaza, and it's certainly been true of the conflict
in Ukraine, right Like. The degree to which weapons keep
flowing to that country is going to be heavily based
on the degree to which sympathy for that cause remains
among US taxpayers and taxpayers in other countries that are
sending them those weapons. That's going to have an impact

(01:00:15):
on the presidential election. Maybe. I mean that is the
other thing, right that, like everyone who is engaging with
this stuff via social media, there's a tendency to get
caught up in a bubble in terms of just thinking
about how much this is on the mind of like
American voters. Maybe it'll be different this election, but generally,

(01:00:36):
like again, my feelings on this are kind of muddled,
but like very very often, no matter how big a
deal a story is, you know, online and stuff, American
voters rarely vote based on foreign policy concerns. Yeah, I
want to say, I'm not saying that's what matters morally.

Speaker 7 (01:00:55):
I'm just talking about like you're totally correct. Yeah, yeah,
and especially in terms of your ability to influence something,
it doesn't matter how much if other people don't. An
election time, I want to maybe finish up. I've just
knocked over bottle of os of procole alcohols. My office
is rapidly becoming.

Speaker 5 (01:01:11):
Yourself.

Speaker 7 (01:01:13):
That's why I went to turn on the fan and
open the door. Good times. So maybe I want to
finish up before I evacuate. By saying that that it's
something you can do, and like it's to give your
time and money. I know that doesn't feel as good
as like, yeah, you know, trying to do amateur ocin
on Reddit. But you can help, actually, like and you

(01:01:35):
can make a meaningful difference with a few bucks. And
I know I sound like an MPR advert now, but
like the Rajarv Information Center has some good resources and
like they they have, I'm not going to read them
because it's very complicated. Like I said, it's bank transfer information.
But if you feel helpless, you are not, Like you
can do a lot with a little. You can raise money,

(01:01:56):
you can help to organize donations, right that like this,
these things make a difference. If someone who doesn't have
water now gets a palette of bottled water, that makes
a difference. If someone gets a heater for their home,
that makes a difference. If even if it's someone whose
kid has died, right like making their life a little
less painful in a physical sense, rightly helping them be
warm at night, that does make a difference. And you

(01:02:19):
can do that. And if you want to make a difference,
I would really encourage you to do whatever it is.
And it doesn't have to be here, right, It's happened
that there's like there's an ethnic cleansing happening in azabadiant
there is an ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza, right, Like
these are places where like you can show meaningful solidarity
and support with a little bit of a donation or

(01:02:41):
a fundraiser. It's happening at our fucking border, right, Like
someone died at our border since I last recording. Someone
else got run over by some child in the truck
or like you can make a difference in a meaningful
way with actions, And it's really easy to get sucked
into like just posting into the void and feeling helpless,
but like very helpful things you can do.

Speaker 10 (01:03:02):
Yeah, and you don't have to just you don't have
to be like rich or have a lot of disposable
income to do this. There's a lot of like traditionally
anarchist communities have put on benefit shows to run to
fundraise from an entire community. So that's not just you
trying to you know, you know, put like your few

(01:03:24):
pennies aside. Uh, there is there's ways, there's ways to
do this that just involve you actually like getting involved
with your like local culture, and a part of that
is like it's not politics as fandom. It is metapolitics.
It's where you actually put your politics into your into
your actual everyday life and it influences the friends you have,

(01:03:44):
the communities you have. So whether that's you know, a
whole bunch of trans musicians doing a benefit show to
to get donations to send over to Rajava or send
over to to Gaza, or you know, there's a lot
of other sorts of things that that is a way
of actually having part of your politics be not just
like consumption have not. It's not just like Twitter accounts

(01:04:07):
with flags and your avatar. It's actually like living your
life in a way that matches the things that you believe.

Speaker 7 (01:04:14):
And I think that that like, sorry, having spoken to
people in Java in the Yepigae and the Yepijay and
these other organizations, Like one of the things that makes
them distinct from other militaries is that they are building
the world they want to see while they're fighting against
the thing that's killing it, right like they're destroying it.
Like a lot of times we'll see leftist military is
not exactly doing the equality. The leftism is about one hopes.

(01:04:38):
So like you can participate in that, as Garrison said,
right by doing the mutual aid by doing the benefit show,
by doing the fundraiser, Like, you are making a world
in which this shit will happen less when you do
things to stop it happening or to ease the pain
of it happening.

Speaker 11 (01:04:54):
Now.

Speaker 7 (01:04:55):
So and you're building communities, right and in strong communities
are more resilient to this shit. Yeah, And like things
are getting pretty bleak and we're only going to get
through them by helping each other and building a network
that continue. Like, if I think about how much better
the mutual aid response has been this time to what's
happened at the border compared to what it was in May.

(01:05:15):
That's because people built networks didn't go away, and it
was good in May in part because we built networks
that help to make being gun housed in San Diego
feel be survivable. Right, And like those networks are resilient
and they're flexible, and they help us like mentally process
all the horrible shit and also physically help people. So yeah,

(01:05:37):
you have that within your means too, Right, you have
a signal on your telephone, like you can organize things.
I don't have to feel helpless, but I feel dizzy
due today, I suppose, but alcoholic that has feeled. So
maybe that's a wonderful time to end.

Speaker 2 (01:05:52):
The All right, everyone, James is going to hallucinate in
his office, and you, I hope are going to hallucinate
wherever you happen.

Speaker 7 (01:06:01):
To be right now. Enjoy the better world.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
Hallucinate the better world. It might be the only way
to live through one wonderful podcast.

Speaker 7 (01:06:12):
To Garrison Davis's everyone, Hi, it's me James. You thought
I died, but I have not. I survived the I
superbot alcohol fumes. I wouldn't advise doing that to yourself.
Very unpleasant, But I'm back just to update you. We
recorded that last week and I am recording this today
before this goes out, So I'm recording this on the

(01:06:32):
afternoon of Monday, the twenty third of October. I just
wanted to update everyone. As Robert mentioned in the show,
the weakening of the essay shrint and the fact that
people are not able to be out and about because
of these drone strikes, combined with the events in Israel
and Palestine in the last couple of weeks, have resulted

(01:06:54):
in a significant uptake in violence in the area. So
I just wanted to update you on that. I've seen
a decent amount of misinformation, which will be shocking to
many of you on Twitter dot com. So there have
been a series of rocket and uav UOV and manned
aerial vehicle right drones drone attacks on US bases across
the north of Iraq and across Syria. So some of

(01:07:19):
those happened Altant, which is further south. Some of them
happened to Al Hussaka. Some of them also happened to
oil pipelines. And I would be very wary of people
posting pictures of big fires and claiming that there are
attacks at the US Bass. Every time I've seen that,
it's actually been an attack on an oil pipeline, and
either the person doesn't know that that's not a US
base or they are wilfully being leading to try and

(01:07:40):
get more clicks. People get paid on Twitter for engagement now,
so I'm quite cynical about people's reasons for doing that.
But there definitely have been attacks that they have not
resulted in much loss of life. One contractor I believe
did lose their lives due to Carliac incident that happened
when they were sheltering from a what turned out to
be a false alarm of a drone attack, but no

(01:08:01):
one has been directly killed by the drone munitions. There
have been a number of people killed in increasing conflict
in the area. Both one person was killed in Khamishlo
very very close to where I stayed. Actually, you can
probably see it from my Houtolium in a car bomb,
which is not a normal thing to happen in the
middle of that city, a car bomb going off, So

(01:08:23):
that's obviously caused for concern for some people in Derrazor.
SDF and coalition forces have conducted a number of operations
against ISIS sleeper cells who are still there, arrested, obtained
a number of suspected ISIS members. They've also been fighting
against Iranian backed militias across the Euphrates. We've also seen

(01:08:44):
fighting between the Peshmerga, so that those are the military
forces of the Kurdist down regional government in that area
of Iraq and the Iraqi Army around the Macmaal refugee camp,
which is a refugee camp for Kurdish people who have
fled from turky And of course we've seen a lot
of threats, a lot of even fighting inside Iran, but

(01:09:08):
it it's generally be an Iranian back to relations attacking
US spaces so far across that whole area. So I
just wanted to update you on those things. Obviously we'll
keep updating you on them, and also to just suggest
once again that people verify the sources of information because
I have seen, especially about this area where I think
literacy is very low among the general US populations, and

(01:09:29):
outrageous claims being made by people who either don't know
what they're talking about or are wilfully misleading people. So
I wanted to counsel people to be concerned about that.
We don't have exact I don't have exact numbers of
the numbers of drone attacks. I'm looking at a Pentagon
press conference that happened thirty nine minutes ago, and then
they're not giving them out there. So I have asked
them for comment on a couple of things. So didn't

(01:09:50):
email me back, very sad ghosting me. Bit, Yeah, that's
the latest information on that. I wanted to make sure
that we have the leader's update for you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
Welcome back to it could happen here. I am Robert Evans,
and this is a podcast about things falling apart. Sometimes
it's about how to make things not fall apart, and
other times it's more about enduring it. Today is more
on the endurance side of things, and we're talking about
a subject that we get a lot of requests about here.
We've discussed this a year or so ago with one

(01:10:35):
of our guests, a great Carl Casarta. We're talking about
like security culture, and particularly the aspect of security culture
that involves digital devices and how to communicate with your friends'
affinity groups, whomever via your phone essentially or your computer.
This is a thing where there's a huge amount of
disinformation as to which apps are safe. What does it

(01:10:58):
actually mean to say that an app is a cryptied
How far does encryption get you? What sort of like
cultural things come alongside the actual, like physical reality of
the security of the device in order to kind of
make a comprehensive security profile. We're gonna be talking about
all that today and hopefully giving you some good advice
on what you can trust. Because I am the furthest

(01:11:19):
thing in the world from a technical expert. We have
two actual experts with us today. Carolyn Senders and Cooper
Quinton have both recently published a paper alongside several other
authors Leila Wagner, Tim Bernard, Ami Meta, and Justin Hendricks
called What is Secure? An Analysis of Popular Messaging Apps,

(01:11:40):
and it's it's basically going over what is the actual
level of security with a number of things like Telegram,
you know, Telegram's private messaging system, Facebook Messenger, Apple Message,
or I Message. I guess it's called and obviously signal
and kind of as a spoiler, signal is your best bet.
But that also isn't where you should end, right, I

(01:12:01):
think we want to also talk about kind of like
why and to what extent that's the case. But anyway,
I'm going to turn things over to Carolyn and Cooper
now because I have talked enough about this. Hey, guys,
welcome to the show.

Speaker 9 (01:12:15):
Hey, Robert, thanks so much for having us on.

Speaker 6 (01:12:17):
Yeah ah yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 12 (01:12:19):
A big fan of the podcast, so always lovely, really
lovely to be here.

Speaker 6 (01:12:24):
Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
Yeah, it's really lovely to have you both again. Listeners.
If you want to take a look at this their paper,
if you just google what is Secure and Analysis of
Popular Messaging Apps, you'll find the Tech Policy Press has
a summary of it that's pretty quick. The full paper
is eighty six pages or so. I also recommend reading that,
but if you wanted to give this, you know, the
summary a skim before you continue, that might help. But

(01:12:48):
I kind of wanted to start by asking you, guys,
what is it that makes signal a good option for people?

Speaker 5 (01:12:54):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
Because I think most folks you describe it as sort
of security folklore, right, this the stuff that you hear
about security from your friends, and if you're not a
technical person, you kind of just like trust what the
folks around you were saying. And that was sort of
how I got into Signal. Right, I'm not a technical person,
but people I knew and trusted who were were like,
this is your best option?

Speaker 6 (01:13:14):
Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 12 (01:13:15):
That's such a good question, and I think Cooper and
I probably have similar but also like very different answers
to it.

Speaker 6 (01:13:21):
Cooper, I can go first if you want.

Speaker 12 (01:13:24):
One of the things I love about Signal is it's
just really easy to use. It's in and encrypted, it's
a messaging app. There's not a lot of stuff on it,
but you can do a lot with it. So you
can do video calls, you can send actually pretty large
files like PDFs. You can have drag and drop stuff,
it's like such a low threshold for use for users

(01:13:45):
because it is a messaging app, but it does so
many different kinds of things. But then related to that,
it's also actually quite minimal. So the paper which everyone
should read, and we'll probably get into this later. Different
apps like Telegram or of Facebook's Messenger app, for example,
have have this thing we've been.

Speaker 6 (01:14:05):
Calling a feature bloat.

Speaker 12 (01:14:06):
They are messaging services that actually feel a bit more
like social networks if you look at the amount of
stuff that's on there, and by stuff, I don't just
mean like stickers, I mean if you look at there's
all these sort of specific and strange settings you can
use to have all different kinds of messages and all
different kinds of privacy settings, and all privacy settings.

Speaker 6 (01:14:26):
Are really really great.

Speaker 12 (01:14:28):
Because Telegram and Facebook Messenger are not encrypted by default,
actually some of those settings can make you feel more
secure when you're not so. Kind of the beauty of
Signal is that out of the box, it's incredibly secure.
It's an encrypted they're not holding any data about you.

Speaker 6 (01:14:44):
I believe.

Speaker 12 (01:14:44):
The only only day they hold is like when you've
like when a phone number or a profile has downloaded
Signal like when you've when you've signed up. But again
it's it's incredibly easy to use. And another thing is,
you know, if this was a few years ago, we've
been looking at wire for example, when the nice things
about Signal, and this might be controversial to some designers,

(01:15:05):
is that it does follow modern design patterns and standards.
So if you're using an iOS or Android version, like
there are buttons in places where you expect them to be.
Signal is not perfectly designed, but it is quite usable. Yeah,
So for me, that's kind of what I think makes
it makes it really wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:15:24):
Yeah, it's definitely as much as I love it, and
it's my like standard messaging app I do every now
and then run into the thing where like my friends
will call me through Signal, which is great if you
need a call to be secure, but it's not nearly
as good, Like it drops a lot more often than
a regular phone call and I'm like, we're just trying
to meet at the movie theater. It's okay if the
NSA no, right, Like, I've definitely.

Speaker 12 (01:15:46):
Had that with friends where I'm like I'm like, yeah,
I'm like, we're just calling to talk about like your dog.

Speaker 2 (01:15:52):
It's probably fine, Yeah, the FBI can have this stuff.

Speaker 12 (01:15:56):
Yeah, please send, please send, please send dog picks through
all messaging apps.

Speaker 9 (01:16:03):
You know. But on that note, it's uh writing, writing
usable software that is also secure is really hard, right,
And like as a like as cryptographer, I'm not a cryptographer,
but like as somebody cryptographer adjacent, we got that wrong
for a long time, right, like before Signal the problem,
you know, there were the the the sort of most

(01:16:25):
used encryption methods were probably uh PGP email, which is
a method for encrypting email, and off the record chats,
and both of those none of those ever got to
the sort of level of user base that Signal and
and certainly not WhatsApp have, right, And and that's largely
because they were pretty much unusable, like PGP, almost entirely

(01:16:50):
unusable even by cryptography professionals, right, even by computer security
professionals like ourselves. OTR chat total pain in the butt, right,
like just a real nightmare to use. So, like Signal,
there are still some rough edges, and we talked about
some of those in our paper, But overall, I think
that the big, the big innovation they've had is just

(01:17:12):
remembering that what people want to do on a chat
app is not encrypt things. What people want to do
on a chat app is they want to they want
to chat right. And and the second that that that
the security sort of gets in the way of that,
people will stop using it and go find something that's
more usable. And it seems like that's been Signals sort
of guiding star and it's and they've you know, doing

(01:17:35):
the doing the most secure thing that you can well
still being fun and usable to actually just chat on right,
And I think that that has served them quite well.

Speaker 2 (01:17:47):
Yeah, I think there's it's it's so important. One of
I think one of the things that that contributes to
good overall security is setting yourself up for success, which
means setting yourself up for a system that can function
well if you're lazy, which is one of the nice
things that you know, with Signal, you don't have to
worry about like opting in and out and like selecting
a bunch of stuff. It's pretty safe, especially for a

(01:18:09):
normal person's uses right out of the box, which is
huge and kind of in the same line as that
is the fact that because Signal doesn't store metadata, you're
not relying upon them being like committed, you know, anti
state actors or whatever like, because they don't have access
to the thing that, for example, Facebook will hand over
to the cops if the cops just like breathe in

(01:18:31):
their direction.

Speaker 9 (01:18:33):
Yeah, that's that's exactly right, And that's that is That
is the other really cool thing about Signal. You know, we,
as Carolyn said, the only data that Signal gives over
in response to a subpoena is the time that the
phone number signed up for Signal account and the last
time it connected to the Signal server. And the reason
we know that is because Signal publishes transparency reports with

(01:18:55):
the full text and full response of any subpoena that
they get, so like, we can actually just see in
the responses that all they've given over is these two
pieces of information, because that's all they have, and they've
done some pretty clever things to make that be.

Speaker 12 (01:19:10):
The case, right, And that's actually so different than how
other companies are i think, reporting on either subpoenas or
any kind of.

Speaker 6 (01:19:20):
Weight that law enforcement puts on them.

Speaker 12 (01:19:22):
So for our report, I don't remember how much's it's
mentioned in the report actually, but we did go through
and look at Apple Meta and I think Google, like
in their own transparency reports to try to get a
sense of how that would stack up in comparison to Signals.
I think in some cases it's saying like they received

(01:19:46):
some kind of like notification, but like no, nothing really
clear or specific on what they received from law enforcement
or government, but rather just that they received one. And
so that's also the really great thing about Signal is
you are getting all this information that you're not getting
from other companies or platforms.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
Yeah, you know, I wanted to kind of in the
same subject and going back to we kind of opened
this introducing the concept that y'all introduced me to. I
guess I was aware of this, but not the terminology
security folklore, and I wanted to chat a little bit
about kind of the most recent example of this something
a lot of folks have probably been wondering about since
we started talking about Signal, which is that roughly a

(01:20:28):
week before y'all and I sat down to talk about this,
a kind of viral info meme started coming through that
was like Signal has a zero day exploit, which is
basically a hole that a hacker found in an Apple
program that is that can't expose you. You have to turn

(01:20:49):
off link previews, right, which is that when you when
someone sends you like a link to an article in Signal,
you get a little preview, not not dissimilar to how
I think to be fair, just based on my very
limited knowledge, that is, when I think about, like, what
are potential holes in Signal, I don't think it's unreasonable
to be concerned about that specific feature. But that warning

(01:21:12):
was not what it kind of seemed to be basically
or not as accurate as I think a lot of
people took it as being.

Speaker 10 (01:21:17):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:21:17):
I'll I'll tell I'll turn it over to you, guys.
I think that's the next thing I want to talk about.

Speaker 6 (01:21:21):
I'll turn it over to Cooper who had you had? Ah?
You have a lot of feels about that.

Speaker 9 (01:21:27):
I have so many feelings about this. I was working
on this all weekend. So this Yeah, so this copy pasta.
I'm calling this like the Signal copy pasta. Yeah, which
is a term from you know, four Chan and other
horrible Internet places.

Speaker 6 (01:21:43):
But some media audience is probably Internet enough.

Speaker 11 (01:21:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
I'm gonna guess a good half of the people listening
at least got that message.

Speaker 13 (01:21:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:21:53):
Yeah, And it's it's like, first of all, this is
not if you if you have a zero DA and signal,
which is it, which is an exploit for signal that
has been unpatched, that has not been patched by the vendor,
so you can actively exploit it. There are no people
in the world who would choose to quietly leak this

(01:22:15):
over you know, over vague signal texts. There are two
types of people. One uh, you know, people like us
that would bring this to signal immediately and get them
to patch it to protect the you know, millions of
high risk users that you signal, or to the type
of people that would go sell this exploit to some
horrible company that would use it, you know, sell it

(01:22:36):
to Saudi Arabia or something and use it to kill activists.

Speaker 13 (01:22:40):
Right, Like there is and there's no in between.

Speaker 9 (01:22:42):
There's nobody that is going to quietly leak this for
you know, just for fun with vague details.

Speaker 11 (01:22:48):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:22:48):
So, so this this message set up red flags immediately,
and like it's because I really do not like ling previews.
And in our paper we discussed some of the issues
that we have with link previews. You know, we think
that they can they can leak some information about your
chats to the owner of the website. Right, we think

(01:23:09):
it's a kind of a large attack service. It's not
super necessary.

Speaker 12 (01:23:13):
Would you mind explaining to actually the audience to like
a little bit about what what we found when looking
at link previews.

Speaker 9 (01:23:22):
Yeah. So, the way that link previews work is when
you the way that they work on Signal and on
WhatsApp is that when you send a link to somebody,
the Signal app or WhatsApp goes and like fetches the
web page that that you know for that link, right,
It goes and downloads, you know, downloads the content of
that link and gets a There are some there's some

(01:23:46):
special HTML tags that describe, you know, sort of what
the page is about, what the title of the page is.

Speaker 13 (01:23:52):
And like an image for the page.

Speaker 9 (01:23:54):
And it gets those tags and it puts them all
together in this little package and then sends that all
as part of the signalsage. So when you put a
link in Signal, your phone actually goes out and gets
that web page, and it gets that web page with
a what's called the user agent, which is like a
piece of text that's attached to the request that uniquely

(01:24:15):
that that identifies it as being a request from Signal
and from like from Signal and from your IP address. Right,
So when you put a link in the owner of
that website, whoever has the logs for that website, can
know that somebody at your IP address is using Signal
and sending this link over signal.

Speaker 13 (01:24:34):
What we're what our concern is is that if that link.

Speaker 9 (01:24:38):
Is unique, then anybody else who visits that link can
be inferred to be somebody that you are talking with
over signal, right, and so like this can be this
can be a good an interesting a source of intelligence
for website owners, especially for big websites that can easily

(01:25:01):
generate unique links with like tracking parameters at the end
of them, right, Like when you.

Speaker 13 (01:25:06):
Share a.

Speaker 9 (01:25:08):
Instagram post, and like at the end it's like question
mark I G, S H I D equals you know,
a long string of numbers and letters, right, or a
Twitter post where you know T equals a long string
of letters and numbers.

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
Right.

Speaker 13 (01:25:20):
That makes a unique link, and then anybody who.

Speaker 9 (01:25:22):
Visits that same link can be determined to be somebody
that you're speaking with over signal. So and also WhatsApp
and so so for that reason.

Speaker 8 (01:25:34):
We we we think that Signal and WhatsApp should turn
link previews off by by default because we think that
that's an unncessary information.

Speaker 9 (01:25:45):
Link Signal and WhatsApps pushback on that is that link
previews are a core feature that people demand, and if
they if they were to turn off link previews by default,
there were the people would leave the platform for less
secure platforms like Telegram.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
So yeah, I mean, I don't want to tell them
their business, because I'm sure they have data on this,
but I've never thought about link previews as being a
thing that I needed.

Speaker 12 (01:26:18):
It's like, yeah, I think it's I think it's one
of those things. And you know, we haven't necessarily done
like extensive general design research in this right, Like we
haven't surveyed like three thousand people in the US. We
have had like a Pew Research survey across countries and
be like, what are your thoughts on link previews?

Speaker 6 (01:26:39):
But I would.

Speaker 12 (01:26:40):
Probably argue because it is it is included in so
much of modern messaging apps that we now assume it's
like a core feature. One thing I will give Signal
that I think is amazing that other apps don't do,
and this is true of WhatsApp is pretty much every
feature except for encryption you can there's something you can
talk or turn off.

Speaker 6 (01:27:01):
Right, So, like link preview already was available for people.

Speaker 12 (01:27:05):
To turn off on signal, WhatsApp does not allow that,
and it seems like they're making no moves to allow
that future to be optional to turn on or off.

Speaker 6 (01:27:18):
But that is I will say, one of the things that's.

Speaker 12 (01:27:19):
Really lovely about Signal that is so different from modern
design and modern like big tech platforms and just platforms
in general, is that those a lot of features are optional,
whereas you know, WhatsApp in meta's sort of stance on
design is that a lot of things are not optional,
that those are things users would want. Why would we
make foundational elements like link previews optional? And you're just

(01:27:43):
like starting like gesturing wildly, but like you know, it's like, well,
you don't know what people want, And I mean, what's
the harm in turning off some of some of these things, right?
You know, like maybe maybe people don't want to receive gifts.
I don't know, maybe they don't want to receive stickers.
Why don't you like let them have that option. What's
the harm that could happen?

Speaker 9 (01:28:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (01:28:02):
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 13 (01:28:04):
Yeah, two things I want to say on that.

Speaker 9 (01:28:06):
One is one is that at first we should acknowledge
that this it turns out that there was no zero.

Speaker 13 (01:28:10):
Day, there was no vulnerability.

Speaker 9 (01:28:12):
Yeah, this was absolutely just something that that spread virally
out of nowhere. I'd be really interested to find out
what the origin of this copy past I was, but
I haven't. I haven't been able to.

Speaker 12 (01:28:24):
But it's I'm curious about that as well, because I
was in another group threw that was like, we really
need outside auditors to look at these.

Speaker 6 (01:28:31):
And I was like, we have a whole report that
we wrote that didn't look at this.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
Speaking of outside auditors, I gotta pause you guys just
a second because it is time for an ad break,
So please spend your money and then come back to
learn more. Ah and we're back. Okay, sorry about that, Cooper, Carolyn.
You may continue as you were.

Speaker 13 (01:28:56):
The other thing I was, I was going to say
that the idea that anybody would leave WhatsApp because they
stopped having link previews is completely preposterous to me.

Speaker 14 (01:29:07):
Like Clownish has over two billion users, they are the
you know, in a position to set the standard for
what people expect from a messaging app.

Speaker 9 (01:29:24):
And so like they could do things like turn on
disappearing messages by default and change that culture. They could
do things like turn off link previews by default and
change that culture. Like, they could do these things, and
you know they would you know, they would not lose
enough users to even.

Speaker 13 (01:29:44):
Notice or care about.

Speaker 10 (01:29:45):
Right.

Speaker 13 (01:29:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:29:46):
They are the only people in the position in the world,
in the position to decide what the culture should be.
And this is what they've decided the culture should be.

Speaker 6 (01:29:54):
Totally.

Speaker 12 (01:29:55):
I hate to break it to you, but if WhatsApp
just got rid of link previews, I'm just throwing whole
phone into.

Speaker 6 (01:30:00):
The garbage garbage can, getting rid of it.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
Just tossing it back to a landline.

Speaker 12 (01:30:05):
Yeah, I'm just gonna eat it into a river. I
feel like I don't need this anymore. Actually, I'm going.

Speaker 6 (01:30:10):
Back to carrier pigeons. That's how far back I'm going
to go.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
I mean that that does kind of lead into the
next thing I wanted to talk about, which is sort
of the other wing from security folklore, which is security nihilism.
And yeah, this is kind of you introduce this when
talking about sort of if you do try to engage
somewhat with the technology, or if you wind up just
kind of in the position I think most lay people are,

(01:30:33):
where you know, maybe you have some friends who know more,
or maybe you have some friends who think they know more,
and you get all these conflicting things about like this
is safe, No, it's not. You can't trust signal. The
FEDS could be running signal all this kind of stuff,
and to be fair, the FEDS have run security based
services before. It's not like I don't believe that's happening
with signal, but it's not like I understand where paranoia

(01:30:54):
like that can can enter into people's calculus, especially if
you're not tech knowledgeable, and that can lead to this
sort of state of security nihilism where you're just like,
you can't communicate it all online. There's no way to
do it securely, and obviously there's no perfect right. You
never have it, but you don't have one hundred percent
with like talking in person to somebody right There are

(01:31:18):
individuals in prison right now who you know, somebody they
loved and trusted rat it on them. There's no one
hundred percents in this world. But that doesn't mean nihilism
is the right response to like trying to figure out
how to set up your communications standards with people right totally.

Speaker 12 (01:31:36):
I mean, I think the approach we take in because
throughout this report, we were also teaching workshops to reproductive
justice activists across the US and states where abortion is banned.
I'm from Louisiana, I live half the year there, the
abortion is banned there, And we were also working with
journalists in India. So a big big thing for us

(01:31:58):
was also teaching threat modeling and different kinds of what
Matt Mitchell, a security trader and expert, calls digital hygiene.
And so a lot of this was recognizing that there
was certain practices we were picking up on, particularly with
folks we were working with. So like a lot of
reproductive justice activists we were working with are new to security,
they're new to technology, they don't have a background in tech,

(01:32:19):
and generally, you know, the American South, American Deep South
is super overlooked in terms of tech policy, in terms
of just I think a general focus when people are
talking about tech or tech literacy or tech activism, and
that is like leaving really massive gaps and knowledge for people.
And so you know, when we were working on this,

(01:32:42):
security folklore and security nihilism were both actually very almost
like I won't say like a pendulum, but they were
very connected. And so some of that was people hearing
things like oh, I should put my phone in a
microwave when I'm having a very sensitive conversation, right, And
so that's where some of that security folklore is coming in.
It is something that is technically safe, but it's like

(01:33:03):
not the thing you necessarily like totally need to do
in that moment. And with security nihilism what it kind
of came down to, And this is stuff we've seen
with other groups and other circumstances. A great example are
are you know Palestinine activists and journalists Let's say, who
are you know facing the threat of all different kinds
of governmental censorship and surveillance of sort of saying like

(01:33:24):
when there's this large threat sort of hanging on us,
and there's also physical surveillance. And this is true for
a lot of journalists in other countries like India as well,
for example, you know, like should everything go through signal
or does it really matter?

Speaker 6 (01:33:39):
Like does it really matter?

Speaker 12 (01:33:40):
And this is also something again we saw with some
some reproductive justice activists as well.

Speaker 6 (01:33:44):
Where it's like if everything is being monitored, what's safe?
Like can I send stuff?

Speaker 5 (01:33:49):
Like?

Speaker 6 (01:33:50):
Can I even use Google?

Speaker 12 (01:33:51):
And part of this was, you know, by teaching privacy
and security workshops, by teaching things like threat modeling, which
is a.

Speaker 6 (01:33:59):
Framework just assessing are what are threats?

Speaker 5 (01:34:02):
Like?

Speaker 12 (01:34:03):
Are what are all the potential threats you could face
and kind of mapping them from like the most minor
to like the most major and what you can do
about that. That's a way to try to combat security nihilism.
But I think an approach Cooper and I are also
really fond of is thinking of this like safer sex.
There's all different kinds of things you can do that
our mitigations are actually incredibly helpful, and we can't look

(01:34:24):
at it as a binary of safe or not safe.
It's actually like much more of a gradient. But you know,
the focalore and the nihilism, I think come from a
very similar place, which is we're asking people, like society
is kind of asking or demanding that people be experts
and something that's really hard. I am like a fairly

(01:34:44):
technical person and even there are some things that I
find hard to serve wrap my head around. And I've
been working in privacy and security for like quite a while.

Speaker 6 (01:34:53):
And I think, you know, it's.

Speaker 12 (01:34:56):
Also really hard when you think about these apps as
like a brand new person. It's like one of the
things that popped up a lot in our research is
like why should we trust signal? And that's actually a
great question, Like what about Signal in its interface and
its design would cause you to trust it? Like some
people were like it's a nonprofit. That's great, but I
don't know what that means. I'm like, that's actually a
fantastic question, Like what does that mean?

Speaker 8 (01:35:17):
Right?

Speaker 12 (01:35:17):
Like why should you trust this? You've heard through the
grapevine that you should. And I think these are kind
of all the things that people are dealing with because
if you sort of take a step back and just
look at software or any different kinds of software generally,
why should you trust that it's safe and secure when
there have been so many different kinds of leaks or
breaches or things breaking.

Speaker 8 (01:35:36):
Right?

Speaker 6 (01:35:36):
Yeah, Like so these.

Speaker 12 (01:35:40):
Are I think really really closely tied. But I think
a big thing for us is trying to combat that
security nihilism, like when whenever we can like there is
things you can do, I don't want to say like
no matter how great the threat. But I believe like,
no matter how great the threat, there is stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:35:55):
There is stuff you can do.

Speaker 9 (01:35:56):
No matter how great the threat is, there's stuff that
you can do to make it more difficult and more
expensive for that person to attack you. Right, Like we
all lock the doors to our house, or you know,
for the most part.

Speaker 13 (01:36:09):
Or you know, we all we all do things.

Speaker 9 (01:36:11):
To to protect ourselves like that that aren't fool proof, right.
Somebody can always break a window to get into your house, right,
So we can find other ways to get into your house.
But locking the door makes it so that somebody has
to do the noisy thing of breaking a window.

Speaker 13 (01:36:25):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:36:26):
It makes it so that, you know, somebody has to
spend more time and effort and more risk of getting
caught in getting.

Speaker 13 (01:36:32):
Into your house. Right. And that's and that's like we layer.

Speaker 9 (01:36:36):
When you layer these protections, right, the idea, you know
is that you're you're you're making it harder, You're making
there be more friction right to piercing your security.

Speaker 2 (01:36:48):
Yeah, I think that's that's a really good point, and
that the concept of friction. You know, this is something
I've talked about, not that these are exactly the same things,
but in the although there's not not wildly different when
it comes to like how insurgents win insurgencies, right, It's
not by carrying out these sort of like great battlefield
victories that sweep the enemy from the field. It's by friction, right,

(01:37:12):
which wears down both the culture and the kind of
readiness of the opponent until they simply bounce, which is
a pretty durable and effective strategy. You can keep it up.
It's this matter of like there's no like sweeping sudden
like ninety minute three act win here. It's more a

(01:37:33):
matter of the more difficult, the more expensive you make it,
the more you hold on to and the more all
of us hold on to. Right. That's the other benefit
is like, even if you're not even if you are
the most law abiding person in the world like myself,
having these security measures in place means that you're kind
of contributing to the overall immune system of a kind

(01:37:57):
of community of people who don't want the NSA listening
to the ship.

Speaker 9 (01:38:02):
Yeah, exactly exactly. And the friction thing is is also
exactly what Signal does, right, Like by the threat model
for Signal is stopping the NSA or other global adversaries
from listening to all communications as they travel over the internet, right,
And that's when you can when you can do that,

(01:38:22):
like when you can when you can listen to everybody's
conversations as they travel over the internet, it's really cheap
to spy on anybody, right when you're encrypting that communication. Uh,
then the NSA or whatever other global adversary has to
go actually hack your phone, right, they have to. They
have to target you specifically, they have to burn resources

(01:38:43):
and you know, burn weapons, right, zero days to get
access to your phone. And that's a lot more costly,
it's a lot more noisy, it's a much higher.

Speaker 13 (01:38:53):
Risk of them getting caught.

Speaker 9 (01:38:54):
So it's introduced to huge friction, uh in that in
that area. Go ahead, okay, go ahead, go ahead, I say,
And I think you're asymmetic. The sort of comparison to
asymmetric warfare is exactly spot on, because none of us
are ever going to have the money that that the
NSA or MASADE has. None of us are ever going

(01:39:15):
to have the the total technical acumen that the NSA
or MASADA has.

Speaker 13 (01:39:19):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:39:20):
But like those that you know, so we have to
kind of fight a you know, in terms of caryption
in terms of encryption, a guerrilla war, right, and we
have to make things so expensive and so annoying for
them that it's.

Speaker 6 (01:39:32):
Not worth it totally. And just to sort of building that.

Speaker 12 (01:39:35):
One of the things I love about Signal is while
they're creating friction for our adversaries, it's actually so frictionless
to use as a user. And I think that's one
of the things I find just continually.

Speaker 6 (01:39:47):
Impressive about that. I don't want this to turn into like.

Speaker 12 (01:39:51):
The like we're all himbos for Signal, except we probably are,
but because like that's one of the things as a
researcher like Kuber and I stimes have to be like,
we're not paid by a Signal at all, Like, but
this is in fact, like one of the best things
you can use. But again, one of the things I
think is amazing is that it is so easy to use,

(01:40:11):
and it really is designed for and I'm using the
term usability as a design term, meaning that it is
they're thinking about a common user, including those with like
lower digital literacy or those that are have never used
any kind of any kind of security tool, and so

(01:40:31):
they're hitting a specific threshold of usability for things to
be understandable, and again, that's incredibly hard to do well,
and they are. They are doing it quite well. Like
it's very I would argue it's very easy and sort
of seamless for people to make a jump from WhatsApp
or if you're on like Google or Android using like
Google Messages, sorry Google, if.

Speaker 6 (01:40:51):
You're on Android or an iPhone.

Speaker 12 (01:40:53):
From like I Messages to Google Messages to signal like
it doesn't.

Speaker 6 (01:40:58):
It might look slightly different.

Speaker 12 (01:40:59):
I might feel a lot more blue, maybe a lot
more black, depending up on how yours is constructed. But
for the most part, a lot of the features are
kind of where you expect them to be, and it's
not at all difficult to get it up and running,
which is not something against Cooper said earlier we could
say about things like PGP.

Speaker 2 (01:41:16):
Yeah, I wanted to kind of move on to talking
about other apps and their security or lack of it,
And I think we should start probably by talking about Telegram,
because that's probably close to top of the list of
things people use for secure communications that is not nearly
as secure as they think. So yeah, I wanted to

(01:41:37):
kind of chat with you about like why that is,
and I specifically I wanted to talk One of the
things that is frustrating about Telegram is they kind of
have they have like a secret chat or private chat,
like they have a couple of different options that don't
necessarily mean what they sound like they mean to most people.

Speaker 12 (01:41:55):
Yeah, so that's actually one thing our report found. So
private chat and secret chat are in fact.

Speaker 6 (01:42:01):
The same thing.

Speaker 12 (01:42:03):
They're just called slightly different things in the app, which
for for again, for those listening.

Speaker 6 (01:42:08):
That are don't have the background in design, that's bad design.

Speaker 12 (01:42:11):
That's actually not that's not professional, that's a that is
a mistake. There's no reason for a feature to have
like two different names inside of inside of your software.
And so I don't know if that's an oversight on
their part, I'm assuming so, But like those two things

(01:42:32):
correlate to the same feature, and so they should actually
be called the same thing. But then even further that
being said, what does private mean to a user?

Speaker 6 (01:42:40):
What does secret mean?

Speaker 12 (01:42:43):
You know, Facebook Messenger they call their encrypted message secure
or no, they also call it secret. Sorry, they also
call it secret, But like does that mean security? Does
that mean encrypted? And so that's like one of the
one of the weird things where it's like, you know,
I think by using a very sort of like normalize
or culturally almost like emotional name like private, it makes

(01:43:07):
something seem like it's actually quite safe, when in fact
it's not.

Speaker 6 (01:43:11):
And there's a variety of reasons as why, like.

Speaker 12 (01:43:13):
Telegram is not not a very secure app that I
will let Cooper talk about more.

Speaker 9 (01:43:19):
Yeah, I would never advise anybody to have a chat
over Telegram if they are concerned about the privacy of that. Yeah,
So we were talking about friction and the fact that
and encrypted chats are not the default in Telegram creates
a friction for users to have an actually secure chat.

Speaker 13 (01:43:41):
Right, you have to go remember to turn it.

Speaker 12 (01:43:44):
On, and you can only turn it on turn it
on individually per message. It's not like an overall feature
on Telegram or Facebook Messenger, like you have to go
select a specific like the specific conversation per conversation, which
is and another thing ourper gets into is how also
those chats don't look very different. They look almost identical

(01:44:06):
to a normal chat. So for low vision users or
anyone with any kind of like disability, especially a vision
related disability, it's almost impossible to It's like nearly impossible
to recognize which chat you're using if you're looking at
the chat logs.

Speaker 2 (01:44:25):
Yeah, outside of that, like if people you know, in
terms of like things that may not be options right now,
I think basically everyone listening signal is a perfectly viable option.
But it's not impossible that, for example, you might wind
up in a country where, even if there's not a
specific law against it, there is a precedent established that
if you have signal on your phone, you know, it

(01:44:46):
can be at least used as a justification for charges
that you are planning to use. Like you know, with Atlanta,
people are getting charges because they had a lawyer's name
written on their arm, right, and so the state saying, well,
that's evidence that we're planning to commit a crime. You know,
that doesn't mean that convictions will go through on that
kind of thing, but it may be a reason why
signal might not be an option, or say, you know,

(01:45:09):
something comes out about it that makes it seem less secure.
What are other good or or acceptable options? And I
know when we're talking about this, these are often options
that require more input and work from the user in
order to maximize their potential security. But I do think
it's good to like let people kind of know what
else is out there.

Speaker 9 (01:45:26):
Yeah, so when signal isn't an option, WhatsApp is actually
not a bad option. So WhatsApp it is owned by Meta,
which is a you know, which is which is you
know not which is not ideal. But WhatsApp actually uses
the same encryption protocol as signal. Uh So, like under

(01:45:47):
the hood, the way that the you know, the way
that the math works to hide your messages from the
NSA is exactly the same, right, and and they've implemented it. Well,
you know, there are a few more steps that, you know,
few more precautions that you need to take with WhatsApp,
like making sure that your chats aren't backed up being
the main one. But WhatsApp is certainly good enough, right

(01:46:10):
if you're if you're you know, chat networks aren't using signal,
if you're in a country where you can't use signal, right, Like,
WhatsApp has two billion users, I'm you know, it's it's
you can use WhatsApp almost anywhere in the world. It's
and it's ubiquitous enough that it's not going to mark
you as you know, somebody with something to hide, right,
And like and I don't want to I don't want

(01:46:31):
to discount what's app. Right, getting two billion people to
have end to end encrypted messaging by default overnight basically
was a major cupe like that that was world changing, right,
and like they they really do deserve applause for that obviously,
you know, I think partly because of their scale, partly

(01:46:53):
because they're owned by Meta, right, they haven't taken all
of these same steps, like they do have more a
metadata on their servers then Signal does, right, But if
that's your option, that is a fine option.

Speaker 2 (01:47:08):
Yeah, I think that's really good to know, particularly since
options are always more secure than not having any kind
of a backup plan totally.

Speaker 12 (01:47:18):
And if people are like even slightly nervous about WhatsApp,
of great things they do have disappearing messages. The downside
is like the fastest disappearing message is only twenty four hours.
But that's something that again you still have and that's
like that is that is an amazing feature.

Speaker 2 (01:47:36):
Yeah, And that kind of gets into also what kind
of stuff you can do in order to maximize the
value of features like that, Like, for example, if you're
coming back into the country or a country and your
phone gets confiscated by customs or whatever, because security services
have some sort of eye on you for whatever reason.

(01:47:57):
If you've got you know, thumbprint log in or face
log in, they're going to get into that phone right
in your twenty four hour delete thing may not have
gotten taken care of everything. If you've got like a
complicated eight digit password and no biometrics enabled, maybe depending
on where you are and whatnot, that'll keep your phone

(01:48:17):
locked long enough for those messages to get deleted, right, Like,
it's all about kind of maximizing the chances that something
like that helps.

Speaker 9 (01:48:24):
Yeah, exactly. We definitely recommend that people turn on disappearing messages.
I think that that's just a good sensible default to have.
Also definitely recommend that if you're going to be in
a situation where you think you're going to be, you know,
there's a higher likelihood if you interacted with law enforcement,
if you're crossing a border, if you're going to a protest,
turn off the biometric unlock on your phone. Certainly, especially

(01:48:47):
in the US, there's the case law isn't settled, but
there's a lot of state courts that have decided that
police can force you to unlock your phone with your
biometrics and that that's totally fine. So, you know, in
the in the US context, it's a good idea. In
any context, I think it's a good idea if you're
at heightened risk to turn off.

Speaker 12 (01:49:06):
Total I mean, one thing we're also a big fan
of is figuring out too like and this is again
where threat modeling is so key, is like, is this
a circumstance where you need your phone or Another thing
that you know you can always do if you are
nervous about traveling across the border, is you can delete
signal and reinstall it and everything is gone. You can

(01:49:26):
delete WhatsApp temporarily while you're crossing a border so it's
not on your phone. You know, there are things like
that you can do if you feel comfortable wiping your phone,
that's something also you can do. You know, these are
all again, these are these are these are different things,
and I think this is one of the things our report.

(01:49:47):
I don't remember how too much we get into a
bit something that at least we've been thinking about. Cooper
and I run a little lab called Convocation, and one
of the things we've been thinking about there is just
also how do we install sort of like better, better,
holistic practices where we understand that a phone is just
one component of our safety, and so like secure messaging,

(01:50:09):
encrypted messaging is one component of that safe safety.

Speaker 6 (01:50:11):
So like what are other things we can do? And
some of that can.

Speaker 12 (01:50:15):
Be you know, wiping your phone of traveling if that
makes sense for you or if that's thing that makes
you feel safer, or removing certain apps and then you know,
reinstalling them, reinstalling them later.

Speaker 9 (01:50:28):
Yeah, yeah, and it and it really is holistic.

Speaker 5 (01:50:31):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:50:31):
Like a thing that a thing that people need to
keep in mind is that, you know, disappearing messages can't
stop an untrustworthy uh, conversation partner, right, Like if if
my conversation partner is untrustworthy, they can take screenshots of
the messages, right, they can you know, go they can

(01:50:51):
go snitch to law enforcement about what I've told them, right, Uh,
Encrypted messaging, disappearing messages, these are not panaspeas.

Speaker 7 (01:51:00):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:51:00):
You still have to you still have to keep all
of your other aspects of security as well, right, So
don't entirely rely on these technologies to save you.

Speaker 11 (01:51:13):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:51:13):
You have to also trust the people you're working with,
and build these layers of security up.

Speaker 6 (01:51:18):
It's true.

Speaker 12 (01:51:18):
I mean, Cooper, you could leak all of my secrets
right now on this podcast, and you chose them that
to what a gentleman.

Speaker 5 (01:51:24):
And that is color.

Speaker 2 (01:51:26):
That is the other thing right where when it comes
to like what is secure? One thing to remember is
that signal for all the good things about it, nothing,
nothing at all about that app stops the recipient of
a message from you from taking a screen grab or
just handing their phone over to their friendly local federal agent, right,

(01:51:47):
which is always you know, we don't want to be
I'm not trying to be a security nihilist here. I
think you know there's no replacing communication over phones in
many situations. But if you are, a full example, going
to be transferring a bunch of Plan B pills in
an area where that is prosecutable, that probably shouldn't go

(01:52:10):
on your phone in that language.

Speaker 13 (01:52:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:52:12):
Perhaps you know you could come up with a clever
codeword or whatever, but don't you know it is security
is like you said, holistic. You know you should not
be looking at it as just like, well the app
is secure, So that's enough.

Speaker 12 (01:52:27):
I mean one thing I also want people sort of
think about too, because that's a really great point Robert is, like,
we do all different kinds of things every day in
our lives that could, you know, in dangerous. Like I
think a lot of the work I do is I
work a lot with people facing all different kinds of
online harassment. So like falling in love, for example, is
a dangerous thing to do. You could have your heart
broken or that person could hurt you. Learning how to

(01:52:51):
trust people, you know, crossing the street, deciding to jaywalk right,
all different things we do sort of every day actually
can expect to harm. And so one thing I think
for people listening to keep in mind is that's the
same when we have conversations. And I think a way
to avoid nihilism is just to remember that that every
day we are sort of going out there and actually

(01:53:12):
being incredibly brave just by living our everyday lives, by
deciding to be in community and have friendships and have relationships.
And in my case, I love jaywalking, and no one
around me does, and that's why that's my choice. And
I have not yet gotten hit by a car j walking.

Speaker 2 (01:53:33):
I think it's good to look at this the same way.
There's there's a concept that the military has sort of
developed when talking about how not to die when you're
in a gunfight or something. It's called the survivability onion, right,
And I think it's extremely useful both if you're talking
about like, well, I'm going to a protest and there
will be violence there, you know, should I wear armor,

(01:53:53):
et cetera. But it's also just really it's really useful
with any kind of security and and the onion, it's
it's in vision, doesn't on you because like the largest
outside chunk of it is don't be seen, don't be acquired,
which means somebody actually getting you in their head sights,
don't be a hit, which means being behind cover or something.
And then the very internal part of it is like

(01:54:14):
have some sort of armor in.

Speaker 7 (01:54:16):
Case you are shot.

Speaker 2 (01:54:17):
But if you if the armor is useful, the majority
of the onion has already failed. Right. If encryption is useful,
that is not a dissimilar sort of situation. Right, So
there's a there's a degree of canniness is super helpful
and thinking about like what is what is visible about me?
If I'm doing something, I know that I have to

(01:54:39):
be extra concerned about the state seeing what is visible
about me from the outside, you.

Speaker 12 (01:54:46):
Know, I mean, I think that's an amazing thing to
think about. Like where where are you sending a text message?
Are you in a place in which like someone can
lean over, Like I'm the nosiest motherfucker in all the time.
I'm constantly like looking around being like what's that person
watching on an airplane? Or like if someone is sitting
next to me scrolling, so like you wouldn't want to

(01:55:07):
like send a sensitive text message like next to me,
because I'd be like, that's that's interesting fodder.

Speaker 6 (01:55:12):
That's kind of a Texas to.

Speaker 12 (01:55:14):
Cooper later, you know, And so I think it's important
to think about that, like who's around you?

Speaker 5 (01:55:20):
Is?

Speaker 12 (01:55:21):
This is like how are you describing something? Do you
know the person you're messaging? If you're in a group message,
you know everybody there? Like do you trust all of them?

Speaker 6 (01:55:30):
You know?

Speaker 12 (01:55:31):
And if you're ever nervous there are this is I
guess the upside also to in person conversations. You can have,
you know, a phone call or an in person conversation
with someone. Right if you're really not sure or you
don't feel comfortable even sending something over signal, that might
be the time to be like, hey, do you want
to meet up and get a coffee and then you know,
try to find a discreet place to have have a conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:55:56):
Yeah, yeah, I do want to roll to ads real quick.
One second, and I think Cooper had something to say,
and we'll we'll continue, but first products Ah, we're back Cooper.
You look like you had something to add on that.

Speaker 13 (01:56:12):
Nothing particularly serious, just that I think that that's I
think that that's.

Speaker 9 (01:56:15):
Really good advice for the military and absolutely justifies the
nine hundred billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:56:22):
Yeah, I'm glad they put together a fucking graphic. I
wonder how many billions of dollars that did cost.

Speaker 12 (01:56:28):
I could I could make a graphic for hundreds of
millions of dollars.

Speaker 9 (01:56:32):
Yeah, if anybody, if anybody wants to fund us for
hundreds of millions, we will will do it less now
a year, hundreds of millions.

Speaker 12 (01:56:39):
We have so many good T shirt ideas and sticker ideas, y'all, like,
so many good ones, so many unhinged ones that the
world needs to see.

Speaker 2 (01:56:48):
Yeah, I uh, I mean I do. I guess just
because of the amount of time I've spent thinking about
this stuff from my old job. There are a couple
of concepts from military planning I think about in this context,
and one of them that I also think is relevant
to what we're talking about with friction is the concept
of an ode loop, right, which is how do you

(01:57:09):
win and combat against an opponent, And it's by disrupting
this thing called the ode loop, and the odor loop
is how an adversary carries out actions in a conflict
like this, right. And the steps you have to go
for are observe, orient, decide, and act. And if you
can disrupt any stage of that, you can stop them
from taking actions, right, which stops them from being able

(01:57:32):
to harm you. And the good security is going to
impact all three of those things, right, It's going to
stop them from being able to see you sometimes if
they can see you, stuff like you know, you were
just talking, we were just talking earlier about link previews, right,
and how that can kind of expose maybe who you're
in communication with potentially well, that could allow the state

(01:57:55):
to orient themselves to you and to your friends, right.
And obviously stuff like locking down your device is not
having unnecessarily info online can stop them bring being able
to decide you know what you're doing, and how they
should respond to that. And I think that's also good
if you're thinking, if you're not just somebody who is
concerned about your security like most people are, because it's

(01:58:16):
good to have some security. If you're actually dealing with
the state or a corporation as an adversary in some way,
it can be useful to think about your security culture
in those terms.

Speaker 13 (01:58:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, I think that's absolutely right. It's it's and.

Speaker 9 (01:58:33):
I think that it's you know, it points to like
we should we should understand what the you know mode
of thinking of our adversaries is, right, like we you know,
we should if your adversary is the NSA, right, which
is like probably actually not most people in the US,
Like for most US activists, the NSA is not actually

(01:58:54):
your biggest adversary, right, Like your biggest adversary is going
to be local police, right, your biggest adversary is going
to be you know, the the you know, somebody like
your abusive partner, right. And you need to And this
is why threat modeling is important, because you need to
to really to really think about, you know, think through
like you know, well, okay, wait, am I actually worried

(01:59:15):
about protecting myself from the NSA or am I more
worried about? Uh uh, you know the the racist police
officer that drives down my street every day?

Speaker 4 (01:59:23):
Right?

Speaker 9 (01:59:23):
And yeah, probably it's the latter. And so you can
you can take a lot more useful actions, right uh
and and you know you can, you can you know,
break that oda loop for him once you know actually
what it is. Right, Yeah, if you're defending yourself against
the NSA, you're gonna leave yourself wide open to the
actual threat.

Speaker 7 (01:59:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:59:45):
It's really I think a great example. And I I
don't mean to be like quote unquote sub tweeting somebody here,
but I've known a couple of folks like this. It's like,
if you have if you're super paranoid, you're not putting
anything online, You're only talking with your close friends. You
use a dumb you have burners, but you also drive
around with a shitload of weed in your car in
a state where that's illegal. It's like, well, like your

(02:00:06):
your threat modeling is not great in that situation, right,
Or like I do all that, but I carry in
a legal handgun with me wherever I go. It's like, well,
it may be more of a threat than your phone.

Speaker 6 (02:00:18):
My partner the other day, was like, what if I
got a dumb phone? I was like, what if I
divorced you? Like, like what if? They were like what
do you mean?

Speaker 12 (02:00:27):
And I was like, well, I'm going to be the
one using all the maps for both of us, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:00:32):
And having to google all the dumb shit you want
to google.

Speaker 12 (02:00:35):
That doesn't make I'm now your weakest link, Like go
fuck yourself. But also I was like, I'm absolutely not
going to be your your Google maps bitch, Like I'm
not not doing that.

Speaker 6 (02:00:47):
But but I.

Speaker 12 (02:00:49):
Mean I think also, do you know to both of
y'all's points to get serious again for a second. I mean,
you know, like my threat model, for example, might be
similar or slightly different, maybe slightly less than Cooper's. But
you know, like some of the like the the the
journalists in India we were working with, have quite a
high threat model, right, Like, yeah, the Indian police force

(02:01:10):
are very much like the NSA. They're very talented, they
have a lot of money and tech at their disposal,
and that might be different for some of the activists
we're working with, let's say in like Louisiana or Texas, right,
But the differences is like we're still talking about I
would argue two brutal police forces that just have different

(02:01:32):
means of disposal at their hands. So like the Louisiana
Police are our groups you should totally be worried about.
They might not be able to hack your phone, but
maybe eventually they could. But there are other there are
obviously other things we're about with them. But you know,
in the context of like with some of the folks
who are working with in the South, like reproductive justice activists,

(02:01:54):
some of the things are probably much more.

Speaker 6 (02:01:58):
Serious in terms of your threat model.

Speaker 12 (02:02:00):
Would be like a nurse for someone who, let's say,
is miscarring or has sought an abortion. This is something
Kate Bertash from the Digital Defense Fund, a friend of
of you know ours, has talked about where like the
people that are supposed to take care of you might
be the ones that are actually your your biggest threat, right,
the ones that have heard you say something or you've

(02:02:21):
can fight it in for example, And that is kind
of a horrifying thing to think about, but that is
that is a thing you have to threat model, right
is can I trust this person?

Speaker 6 (02:02:31):
How am I describing you know what's happening?

Speaker 13 (02:02:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:02:35):
Yeah, absolutely, Well did y'all have anything else you wanted
to make sure to get into in this conversation. There's
so much more in your in the great paper you
you helped co author What is Secure and Analysis of
Popular Messaging Apps on the Tech Policy Press. But yeah,
is there anything else y'all wanted to really make sure
you hit before we roll out.

Speaker 12 (02:02:55):
Yeah, please don't use Telegram for a variety of reasons,
but also like it's very unclear how they respond to
any law enforcement or government. They don't say anything, and
it's kind of impossible to reach anyone that works there.
Please don't use Facebook Messenger other than maybe sending memes.
There's a lot of really gross surveillance capitalism inside a
Facebook Messenger that the paper gets into. But effectively, Meta

(02:03:18):
is building this weird, sprawling infrastructure inside of Facebook Messenger
and try to link Facebook and Instagram.

Speaker 6 (02:03:24):
And one of the things we noticed.

Speaker 12 (02:03:26):
Is that like if you've blocked someone on Instagram or
mute to them, but you haven't blocked me them on Facebook,
but your stories, like all those stories are still coming
across in messengers, so you can still see content from
someone because it's linking both of those both of those profiles,
so you know, you could see how we're taking like
an online harassment lens, like why that's why that's really bad,

(02:03:49):
Why that's really harmful and could be potentially you know,
upsetting and triggering for folks.

Speaker 13 (02:03:57):
Yeah, I'll add that thing.

Speaker 9 (02:04:00):
My The major thing I want people to to think
about is that encryption really does work, and it works
really well. And we can see that because a lot
of countries right now are trying to pass laws that
either weaken or byan encryption right and in fact, the
UK uh did passed, did just pass such a law.

Speaker 13 (02:04:19):
The Online Safety Built in the UK.

Speaker 9 (02:04:21):
And so it's really important that we that we you know,
push back against these laws and fight back against these
laws and whenever we can, right And I'm not I'm
not coming at this as somebody who's a big believer
in the you know, in in incrementalism and in working
with governments, but I think that I still think that
it's really important to you know, educate folks and push

(02:04:46):
back against these laws and try to not let these
pass because these will be you know, really bad for
all of us totally.

Speaker 12 (02:04:53):
And not to defend the online safe build because I
would never do that, will go to my grave, not
speaking highly of it, only speaking critically at least, like
the pushback from encryption experts and encryption supporters like Merrit Whitaker,
president of Signal, did lead to lawmakers in the UK,
for example, admitting that there's no sort of feasible.

Speaker 6 (02:05:16):
Safe way to build a back door, right, And that
is I.

Speaker 12 (02:05:18):
Think also a win because of so much pushback, because
of so much research, because of so much criticism that
security and privacy folks gave people that are pro encryption
like that, we you know, we were able to walk
back that part. And I do think that's a big deal,
even if there are other issues with that bill, because

(02:05:41):
I think it also sends a signal pun intended to
other governments as well, and I think that that's incredibly important.
But yeah, I would also say just just use Signal
whenever you can.

Speaker 2 (02:05:56):
But yeah, yeah, we'll all right, folks, is going to
be it for us here at it could happen here. Yeah,
thank you all for listening, and thank you Cooper and
Carolyn for coming on.

Speaker 9 (02:06:11):
Thank you for having us, yeah, and thank you for
having us.

Speaker 12 (02:06:13):
You can find us on social media for now, I
guess until it all lights on fire.

Speaker 5 (02:06:19):
Yeah, whichever one you want to trust.

Speaker 9 (02:06:23):
I'm Cooper Cue on most social media's Blue Sky Mastered
on Shitter.

Speaker 12 (02:06:29):
Yeah, I'm Caroline Cinders, my first name, last name. Our
lab is Convocation Research and Design Record Labs on Twitter
at the moment.

Speaker 6 (02:06:38):
Hopefully we'll get begetting on Blue Sky very soon.

Speaker 2 (02:06:42):
Yeah, yeah, I'll probably get back on there more. Now.
Twitter has gotten remarkably worse, which you know, we had
a back back in the day on the old something
Awful forums. There was a thread in one of the
debate forums about this very right wing site, Free Republic,
which is like one of the earliest reservoirs of what

(02:07:03):
became trump Ism, and the tagline for the thread, just
kind of watching these people was there is always more
and it is always worse, And boy goddamn if that
hasn't been a continually accurate statement about the whole of
social media right now, isn't it time.

Speaker 6 (02:07:19):
Amazing to watch someone just light forty billion dollars on fire?

Speaker 5 (02:07:23):
Yeah, just like, yeah, totally to it.

Speaker 6 (02:07:26):
Yeah, it's like the nihilist and me being like, wow.

Speaker 2 (02:07:29):
Comrade Musk really really taking some hits to capitalism here.

Speaker 7 (02:07:49):
Hello, reviewone, it's me James. Today, I am back from
my trip to kutis Don and I'm talking today with
Rania Hayat, a name that I've probably just butchered, but
Ranier is the communications officer for the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate,
and we're very, very lucky to have Rennie talking to us.

(02:08:09):
Welcome RENI, thank.

Speaker 15 (02:08:10):
You, Jams, thank you for contacting me and letting me
be letting me with you.

Speaker 7 (02:08:17):
Yeah, of course you're very welcome. So I think Rania,
it's been a really hard time to consume news. For
the first week of what's happening. I was in mostly
Sying and Iraqi, Curtistan, and I wasn't maybe consuming as
much news so I normally do, because I was trying
to write news in Todead, and then I got back

(02:08:39):
just the the barraers you. Information and disinformation has been
very hard for people to sort of wade through, and
I wonder I think one of the things I'd like
us to focus on first and foremost is the impact
of Israel's bombing campaign on journalists, specifically working in Gaza.

(02:09:01):
I know, like friends of mine a journalists in Gaza.
We featured on this podcast before the people of Parkour,
Gazah and I know that many journalists have lost their
lives covering what's been happening. So can you explain a
little bit about what's been happening and maybe bring us
up to day on the amount of every loss is

(02:09:22):
a tragedy, but like the amount of people who have
lost their lives covering this.

Speaker 15 (02:09:27):
Yes, James, well, let's start that journalists in Gaza are
civilians who are people who travel, they work, usually they
should travel, but they work, They do their job. They
try to cover the news with very hard conditions, with
the daily life of Gaza. Since the beginning of the

(02:09:48):
war against Gaza on the seventh of October, you know
how the war started targeting everything in Gaza, not even
all the people, more than the people, you know, the buildings,
the children, even the animals, the plants, you know, just

(02:10:09):
bombing and bombing and bombing, air strikes the whole time.
At the beginning, we try to we have some our
contacts with journalists and us we have our General Secretary
member and so we try to get information from them.
At the beginning, yeah, it was not easy, but it

(02:10:30):
was okay to get some information about what's going on.
But by the time. Now we reached to a place
that when I call them, they always tell dozens of
we don't know. We are disconnected. I'm homeless. Now, I
am not able to get any news. I can't tell

(02:10:50):
you about my friend or my neighbor next to me,
but I'm not able to tell you about further than this.
I will just give some statistics. Up to now, we
have eighteen killed journalists who have been either killed while
track covering, others were killed in their homes, being through

(02:11:13):
air strikes with their families and so on. We have
also many many journalists who have dozens of them have
been injured. I'm really sorry, I was I wanted to
have some you know, I curate statistics, but I can't
give you until now. We are now trying trying to
develop like a tool to get some statistics, but until

(02:11:37):
now it's not working well. We have many journalists who
lost their homes, homes because it was bomb bombed or
ye air strikes. Others they were this place. Yeah, and
many of them moves from their homes either because their

(02:11:58):
homes was a bomb or other because they were threatened
to stay at their home safely, so they go to
other like schools, hospitals and so on. The most tragic
is the journalists who are losing their families. When you
call a journalist to ask him about any thing, they
told you Okay, I lost my son, I lost my wife,

(02:12:20):
I lost all my family, I lost my mother. Now
they they are completely broken. You can't talk to them.
They are you know, it's really very tragic situation.

Speaker 7 (02:12:33):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's literally unimaginable, Like, yeah, I
think I've attended wars, I've lost friends, but nothing. I
can't imagine what it's like on this scale. And it's
heartbreaking to even think about it. And I think some
of what you said obviously, like part of the situation

(02:12:55):
this creates is that it's very hard to do reporting
on the ground. It's always been hard to do reporting
on the ground at Gaza. I have made plans to
go to Gaza, which probably won't work out now, but
like it's hard foreign press, and of course there are
many very capable journalists within Ghays that we don't need

(02:13:15):
foreign press to go then necessarily. But can you explain
a little bit of how when this war started it
didn't just like affect these people in terms of killing
them killing their families, displacing them, destroying their homes. But
also like every day this war goes on, it gets
harder for us to see I think the impact of

(02:13:37):
this war on civilians living in Gaza, right because of
the damage to infrastructure.

Speaker 11 (02:13:42):
Is that fair to say, yes, this is what's going on,
and yes, reporting is getting more and more complicated because
as also you know, there is no electricity.

Speaker 15 (02:13:56):
Communication is very very difficult when sometimes through phone call
I call them just to get something, they tell me, okay,
wait until I get some internet and I will get
back to you. I wait for hours and hours, sometimes
for the second day to get a little information. So
you can imagine how they can even contact with each other.

Speaker 7 (02:14:18):
Yeah, and yeah, that makes it very hard. I think
often like we might have more into this is not
uncommon actually, like you have more information sitting somewhere with
a broad bank connection and access to Twitter than you
do on the ground, right, Like they may not know
everything that's happening.

Speaker 15 (02:14:36):
Yes, yeah, I don't know if I can talk about this,
but you know about the restrictions that on all social
media applications, the restrictions on the Palestinian contact content on
the social media we're facing a big massive wave against

(02:14:57):
our content, against our new was through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,
all those applications, So we are not able even to
reach many people are banned, many people are hacked, and
we are just hearing about the banning of many accounts
of Palestinians. The very limited reach, very limited, and there

(02:15:22):
are sometimes many times they are blocked or yeah, blocked
or from posting and so on. So even also this
is another problem that we are facing to reach out.

Speaker 7 (02:15:32):
Yeah, I think this is in a sense obviously, like
it's in terms of specifically getting information about it, because
I think that is important. I think if people could
understand what it's like to see someone lose their baby,
and then I think very few people would be able

(02:15:52):
to in good conscious support that. And the fact that
this has come at a time when I think generally,
certainly for the US, reporting on things outside the US
is an all time low, like it's atrocious, and so
people lack the context to understand, not through any fault
of their own right, but they've just been fed terrible,

(02:16:14):
you know, opinion pieces for the last few years. They
like the context to understand why what's happening is happening
and I think obviously Elon Muskersport, Twitter and and just
it's assessable. It's terrible, it's full of false information. And
as you say, often videos that I have friends who

(02:16:34):
are photographers in Gaza, a friends who are just people
in Gaza and videos that they post will be taken down.
It's sometimes they're to say it's too graphic, it's too violent,
but like also that's their everyday life. Now that's been
happening for two weeks. The graphic violence is sadly what's
visited upon them every day.

Speaker 15 (02:16:55):
Yeah, yes, believe me, what's going on and because is
very you can't imagine, you can't hold it when you
when you watch it. Even the TV channels they try
to make to minimize how dangerous and how violent are
the scenes that we see. At the same time, I

(02:17:19):
had a discussion this morning, I don't want people to
cry for us. It's not I don't want people to
cry for the babies killed and so with very hard
pictures and videos, I just want the humanity without seeing
the video just here that there is a child. It's
loading child. Children. Thousands of children are losing their child's

(02:17:42):
life or nothing, are losing their hands their legs. They
are now handicapped. They don't know why. You know, we
don't need to see the video, just know that this
is going on. We don't want to make a tragedy.
We don't want to to to people to cry with us.

(02:18:02):
We cry. Yes, we want, okay, some solidarity, but it's
not something to have the emotions and then then we
sleep and then we wake up. That's what or no, no,
there is something going on. We don't need the sympath
you know, we need some actions, we need steps, we
need humanity now.

Speaker 7 (02:18:21):
Yeah, So I think that's an excellent, really really excellent point.
It's not a film or like something you can consume
and then step away from. So what sort of solidarity
actions can people take to support people in Gaza, to
support journalists there, to support the greater cause of not
having this issue where every few years thousands of Palestinian

(02:18:43):
civilians get killed.

Speaker 15 (02:18:45):
Yes, well, to be honest, we want when we want
to feel better, we turn on the television to see
the demonstrations. When we see the demonstrations London, blocks cell
the United States and different cities Arab world everywhere. When
we see these demonstrations, we feel that somebody knows there
is like a kind of movement. This helps us, and

(02:19:09):
we need further steps after the demonstration. We need lobbying.
We need the people who elect their governments who support
those massacs and to say no, we give you legitimate
legitimacy to be human. Stop this inhumanity. We need the
people to lobby on their governments that this should not

(02:19:29):
be supported. This is this is the real action that
we need. Lobbying, lobbying, lobbying by the people, by the
power of people.

Speaker 7 (02:19:39):
Yeah, I think it's one of those things like some
things will never change in America, at least not by voting,
but like some things, yeah, I have enough people, and
I think more people, Like I remember when I moved
to America fifteen years ago, when I was young at
twenty one, and I came into America and I had
a free Palestine, like a badge on my jacket, like

(02:20:00):
things on my jacket, you know, and they sent me
straight to secondary you know, like the like where they
pat you down and take your clothes and go through
your bags and stuch and like it just wasn't as
big of a concern. I think more people in the
fifteen years since then have become aware of the tragedy
and the loss of life. And certainly now I've seen

(02:20:20):
more people wake up to what's happening and protest or
you know, get out and do things in a way
that they wouldn't have done ten years ago. And I
think that's really it's good, Like hopefully that demand for
people to be allowed to live with dignity and safety continues.

Speaker 15 (02:20:39):
Yes, I mean, I just always want to ask anybody
you'd like to say, are you happy to pay your
taxt for killing others?

Speaker 7 (02:20:46):
Is it?

Speaker 11 (02:20:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (02:20:47):
Jesus, Yeah, this is.

Speaker 15 (02:20:50):
The very initial, very first question. Are you happy with this?
Do you pay your tax for this or for anything
that you like to have your text to be paid for? Yeah,
this is what we want. We're we are facing killing,
we are facing assination and bombarding and so on, and

(02:21:10):
we need all what we need as humanity, nothing else.

Speaker 7 (02:21:14):
I was thinking this morning of like, how very obviously
right when when Russia bombed Ukrainian cities, most people said
we should help the Ukrainians, send them ms, send them
medical supplies, and some of them went and volunteered to
fight for the Ukrainians when and I understand that like
this obviously this, this conflict began in very different circumstances

(02:21:37):
other than the Russia Ukraine conflict, but nonetheless, like, little
children are being killed and continue to be killed, and
the response wasn't the same. And I think some of
that comes from like and not particularly hard to see
orientalism in the US and the US media. Also some
of it comes from the complete absence of Palestinian voices

(02:21:58):
in certainly in like English language press in America. And
I wonder, like I know that there are certain organizations
which have specifically worked to make it harder for Palestinian journalists,
like my friend Hausam Salem. He's an excellent photographer. You
can find him on all the places where you find
people on the internet. But we worked on stories together,

(02:22:19):
and I know he's now had he's lost contract with
major outlets because of this sort of campaign of accusing
him of biased. I think it's hard not to be
biased when you see a little children die. But I
wonder if you could talk about that, like how Palestinian
voices are excluded or missing from what even now right
the Atlantic since two weeks of bombing now and I

(02:22:41):
was looking this morning and they've managed to find two
Palestinian voices to share, like you know, it's maybe not,
and I'll have to check that after we've done. But
I was flicking through these big sort of opinion piece
type outlets and it's very clear that like even now,
people haven't editors specifically or the greater press has not

(02:23:03):
stopped excluding Palestinia voices. So maybe we could talk about
like how that happens, what allows it to happen, and
what people can do to help lift up those voices.

Speaker 15 (02:23:14):
Well, yes, Prestilian voices are being banned all over by
different movements. There are many times fired from their works
and big news outlets and media outlets for different political reasons.

(02:23:34):
And if you want to go and through the stories,
you find that some people are just trying to make
to make problems for those people to let them leave
their work and stop writing or telling their news or
analyzing or anything about the Perestinian cause and what's going on.

(02:23:54):
We're facing this globally, and we have many cases recorded
undocumented in the PGS, and we can give you many
examples about them. But I have to tell about something
that we're a member of the International Federation of Journalists
and we have also even our president of Brazilian Perlisinian

(02:24:18):
Journalist Syndicate. He's a vice president of the International Federation
of Journalist. He has been elected last year in the
last congress. We have sister unions. One of them one
of the best friends of us are the National Writers Union,
the American National Writers Union, which is a very big

(02:24:39):
supporter to us. They even Harry got Better, the general secretary,
even he visited us in Palestine a few months ago,
and he's a very supporter of what's going on, of
all our statements of our news at the beginning of
the world. They they produced like a statement about biasity

(02:25:05):
and misleading news and so on, how to avoid them,
supporting the Pristinians, supporting our life, our right to life,
and so on. So we we highly appreciate this movement.
Of course, it's not the only one. Many many syndicates,
many unions all over the world sent us solidarity letters.

(02:25:29):
Some of them supported us even with some in kind contribution,
with some funds in addition to solidarity, in addition to
demonstrations and so on, which really gave us a lot
of power of hope. So we can continue and we
are not alone.

Speaker 7 (02:25:46):
Mm hmm, yeah. I think that's really powerful. Yeah, and well,
I mean it's not enough, but it's something the unions.
I think people also the members of the union can
encourage the union to do that, right, just to make
a statement. Yeah, it's the show some solidarity. I wonder
like what you talked about in kind donations and you

(02:26:06):
talked about the support you're getting from unions. I know
one unions which i'm a member, that's your Workers of
the World FJAU just did a fundraiser, still doing a
fundraiser for flag Vest, bullet professors, for journalists. What kind
of support can people give, like in a concrete sense,
beyond getting in the streets and protesting and writing letters

(02:26:29):
and emails and phone calls. Is the stuff that they
can do with their money if they have some money.

Speaker 15 (02:26:37):
Well, it's not a kind of money, it's a kind
of I will tell you now. The situation in Gaza
we can't or what we do we need is a ceasfire,
to be honest. They even don't have fresh water they drink,
by the way, they say, try to minimize that the

(02:26:57):
water they drink, and they know that the water they
drink is not very clean. But just to survive, so
you can start with this very basic need of life
and then you go further. As I already told you
that the safety vests are very important, but when you
are under strikes, this will never help you. But if

(02:27:18):
I want to talk about the daily life, about how
it's going and the West Bank and Gaza, our journalists,
we all work under the same conditions of aggressive events,
covering aggressive events and so on. So we try as
PJAS to contact all the media outlets in Palestine to

(02:27:41):
offer or provide safety kits for all journalists who work
in the field. But for example our freelancers, they work
on their on responsibility and a very denserse situation. We
try to to to tell how dangerous that what they

(02:28:04):
do when you go to cover with you don't have
very full safety kits or it's it's very dangerous for them,
but they are not able to to cover it and
they want to they need to work, they need to
do their job, so they do it in a very strange,
very dangerous conditions. So one of the things that we

(02:28:26):
can support Junius is yes, safety kets which are very important.
Medical kits also are very important. What what else we
try we try to to do also we try to

(02:28:48):
raise the awareness to make some materials for the journals
about safety. Safety is very important for us. We try
to to to teach them more about how to take
care of them themselves, how to report and so on,
about their security and so on. Yeah, this is mainly
what I can talk about for the needs or the

(02:29:10):
in kind contribution, as I told you, in the current situation,
for example, we try to support through some donations, through
support to support the journalists with better charging. But it
is because of the lack of electricity and power sources
in Gaza, so just to give them connected currently and
they are very useful for them and it helps. Now.

Speaker 7 (02:29:33):
Yeah, yeah, I can see. It's probably best that you
guys just have money and then you can be flexible
in getting what people need. I think that's generally the
best advice is when there's a crisis, is to send
the people nearest to it money and then they can
decide what they need. Certainly, I found that I found
that in a lot of places I worked. Yes, so

(02:29:53):
you talked about the power situation. I think that's sort
of it has gone relatively unreported. I mean it'll still
say like the power and water being cut off, but
that creates a lot of other dangerous situations, right, Like
obviously some people rely on that power if they're infirm,
if they have medical devices, that kind of thing. But
also like where there are places to charge, that results

(02:30:15):
in a very high concentration of people, right Like my
friend was telling me that their parents were in a
hospital to charge their their devices. Right They wanted to
call their child and say we're safe, we're alive, but
their phone had run out of batteries, so they had
to go to the hospital. Yeah, can you explain a
little bit of some of the things that like that
that has resulted in the loss of power for people.

Speaker 15 (02:30:37):
Yes, of course. But first of all, let me tell
you that we already asked quested all our journalists and
Gaza to be in the hospitals. Well, there's safety, we try,
we expect that it would be a safe pless but
there is no safe less in Gaza now, as you're
already know about the hospitals that have been targeted. But

(02:31:03):
we we already asked them to be in the hospitals.
We try to make some press zones and the hospitals
in some places where it's for press for journalists to
be there, So they can get some electricity power and
so they can all to be together, try to exchange
information and work together, so it will be better for

(02:31:27):
them to work and safer between brackets always for them
to work. To be honest, yes, I don't know. If
you see the news now, it's we had the sun
has set, so it's completely dark because you just can
have some lightned spots which are the hospitals. And you

(02:31:49):
know that even the solar and the sorry, the fuel
for school for hospitals is about to to to finish
here and in two days I think maximum. But we
will see. Maybe we'll have some trucks or they will

(02:32:10):
get something inside Gaza for fuel and so on. But
I'm not sure about this.

Speaker 7 (02:32:14):
Yeah, I think, yeah, every day it's changing, I guess.
And I wondered, like talking about getting things into gather,
getting getting things two people in Gaza, a thing that
seems to be completely like, I don't know, it genuinely
seems to be that people think people could just walk
out of Gaza and and you know, go somewhere else.

(02:32:36):
So I guess, just to be extremely clear on that,
can you explain the situation for people in Gaza with
respect to if they want them mobility and their ability
to leave, because I think it's something that again has
been like criminally overlooked in the United States, discourse.

Speaker 15 (02:32:52):
Ability to leave Gaza.

Speaker 7 (02:32:54):
Yeah, yeah, like a lack thereof would be more accurate, right,
like they complete absence of that.

Speaker 15 (02:33:00):
Well, unfortunately, people and gas are blocked. They are all
and they are not allowed to leave Gaza with any
kind of borders. Even the people who have international passports
like American, European or whatever passports, they are not now,
they are not able to leave gazam. They have to

(02:33:20):
face their fate.

Speaker 5 (02:33:21):
Now.

Speaker 15 (02:33:21):
They are just displaced from place to another. Some people
have been displaced four times and for areas different areas,
and others were displaced and bombed later. So no, they
are blocked. They have They are blocked in a like
a very limited area which is under strikes the whole time.

(02:33:44):
No place is safe. Even the Baptist hospital. They thought
that it would be a Baptist hospital hospital related to
a church and so on. It was strike massively cruely.
More than five hundred have been killed. They were all children.

(02:34:05):
Mothers are sitting just as a thinking that it would
be a shelter for them. So yes, this is the
situation Gaza. There is no safe place, no hospitals. If
you are in a hospital, you will be bombed. If
you're in school you'll be bombed. If you are in
a mosque if you will be bombed. If you're in
a church, you will be bombed. No safe place unfortunately.

Speaker 7 (02:34:27):
Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's unimaginable. And like the act
of bombing that we were talking about this before we started,
but like when you're being bombed, it's very different from
like a small art conflict or even like a you
know whatever, artillery motors rockets like you, there isn't much

(02:34:50):
you can do to be safe. It's not like there
is no like cover from bombs. You know that you
you there's no.

Speaker 15 (02:34:59):
By the way, there's not under ground shoulders.

Speaker 7 (02:35:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:35:03):
Yeah, and now they are intense. By the way, they
were in houses. The houses they were falling on their heads,
so they went to tense. So when they were tent falls, it's.

Speaker 7 (02:35:13):
Not so yeah Jesus, Yeah, it's bit's bleak. It's yeah,
it's it's unimaginable. Like I said, yeah, I just spent
a week in a place that was being.

Speaker 15 (02:35:23):
Very fat protected by the sky which is full of
planes bombing them.

Speaker 7 (02:35:29):
Yeah. Yeah, and every time you look up you wonder
what that is and it's this still time, or it's
just so on. So I think one thing people are
really struggling with is like overload of information missed information, right,
just some of the worst pieces I've ever seen in
opinion pieces, things center on social media, which are like

(02:35:53):
it seems that we've returned to like peak aslamophobic rhetoric
of like September twelve, two thousand and one, and we've
learned absolutely nothing from twenty years of killing and dying.
So I wonder where you would recommend if there are
members of your syndicate or other places where people can
find reliable and for reporting, which is you know, fact checked,

(02:36:18):
which is not overloading them with you know, like if
you go on Twitter to try and find your information
at the minute, you're just going to get into an
argument with someone who has the worst opinions in the world,
and it's not good and it can dissuade you from
taking action in the ways that you've mentioned which are
actually useful. So is there a place you'd suggest people
look for information outlets or individuals they could follow.

Speaker 15 (02:36:41):
Well, who wants to know the truth will be will
find it. You know, the media is always any media outlet,
it has its it has its mandate and vision and
so on. So I just advise everyone when you will
go for any media outlets, just try to read about

(02:37:02):
what's what's its mandate, who's they are related to, who's
they are supporting, and so on, so to know from
which perspective you will know the truth. I can't tell
now the names of outlets because it's not me who
to decide who's who's the right one. As you know,

(02:37:25):
I am. I work in a syndicate which is like
a union, which is for all journalists with all foods,
all at outlets, so they are all our members.

Speaker 7 (02:37:36):
So yeah, yeah, I think that's good advice so that
people can take more. It's it's good advice that people
can take more broadly, because I think people are completely
unaware the ownership of some outlets that mandate there perceived biases.

Speaker 15 (02:37:52):
Yes, try to read about them, not only the new
not the news itself, but try to see about this outlets,
about this establishment, how it's working, what their objectives, how
do they work, and what are their connections and so on,
so you will know which kind of news they are

(02:38:12):
covering and how do they cover it. Yes, this is
what I can say for us as Telisinia Journalists Syndicate.
We try now to report about journalists because this is
our manda, this is our work to tell about what's
going for our members, to try to get any protection
for them. Actually were in this very hard condition. But

(02:38:36):
we tried, through our friends, through our relations, through our supporters,
through our memberships and so on, to have some international
support for them through information, through like a flow of
information telling what's going on, how many journalists have been killed,
how many journals are displaced, how many and so on,

(02:38:58):
So we try to give them those that are not.
As I already told you, it's really a hard job
that we are going we are doing now. It's getting
more and more difficult. We are trying to cope, trying
to develop new tools to cope with this hard, very
hard situation. But we try our maximum to be honest,

(02:39:20):
to get very real and true information, not to get
any misleading information. There's a flow of misleading information. Even
we hear about many journalists that they are killed, but
when we try to make sure that we found that
they are not journalists. We don't get them put them
in our lists. We try to investigate as much as

(02:39:42):
we can, so to put our lists to be limited
to journalists, to our members, to the people who work
with us, with our within, our man dead and so on,
so to be credible source of information.

Speaker 7 (02:39:58):
Yeah, I think it's very important. I so, I don't
know if you guys who shared it. I sure a
video early on. It was when I was still in
Syrian Curdistan, but we were watching it of a funeral
of three journalists who have been killed. Yeah, and like
someone was saying at the funeral that they was speaking
and someone else will pick up his camera and like
keep documenting things, which really was very emotional for me

(02:40:21):
and my friends. Yeah, it was really sad, but yes
it is. I believe it's just you know, that's the
thing that I do. And I see people, you know,
dressed like me. People. I know it's been very of
your coverage of that has been very emotionally challenging for me,
But it should be emotionally challenging. It's terrible, but I

(02:40:44):
think people should definitely tune into it if they can.
I wonder are they're like social media accounts that the
PJS has that people can follow.

Speaker 5 (02:40:52):
Yes, we have.

Speaker 15 (02:40:54):
Facebook page. It's on Facebook. Yes, it's a place senior
and journalists syndicats. Yeah, just and we try to download
all our news on it. Also we have our website
which is www dot PJS dot ps. Also you can
find some news statements, updates and so on.

Speaker 7 (02:41:17):
Yeah, that's great, and I encourage people to follow that
they're able to. I wonder, really, is there anything else
you think that people are like anything that's been missing
from the media narrative that you'd like people to know
about the situation now in Palestine, or like the situation
more broadly that hasn't been reported on as much as
it should be. Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:41:39):
Yeah, I just want to add something about besides what's
going on, and because even a journalists in the West Bank,
even in Palestinian journalists in Israel are facing a lot
of threats, facing a lot of problems. There is a
massive a campaign of arrests. So up to now one thousand,

(02:42:04):
in three days, one thousand persons have been arrested. We're
trying to find the number of journalists which is I'm
not sure about it, but I can't give you the figure.
As I told you, because of the big number, we're
trying to make sure who are the journalists, But a
massive arrests campaign is taking place now. Also, journalists are

(02:42:30):
facing a lot of threats about a lot of violations
while covering many times that are prevented from coverage. They
are threatened by weapons, They are threatened sometimes by the settlers,
armed settlers, even not the army, while covering many of them. Also,

(02:42:51):
they are subject to incitement through social media pages like
spreading their photo or there and so to make a
kind of excitement how to kill them or to get
rid of them and so on. So also the journalists
are facing a very hard time now. Yeah, they are

(02:43:14):
under the threat.

Speaker 7 (02:43:15):
Yeah damn. Yeah, that's terrible and completely unacceptable. So yeah,
I'm glad you shared that, And I think it's important
that people follow this and do whatever they can to help,
do whatever they can to to I don't know, to
encourage people to stop bombing other people, Like it's never
a good situation. People are bombing children and hopefully it

(02:43:36):
comes to an end. They get it. I don't know.
I've never seen this much outgoing support for Palestine the
United States. But I've also you know, this is an
unprecedented act of again war crimes, so delicated's it's very
hard to see where this is going.

Speaker 15 (02:43:56):
I suppose, Yes, we believe that the voice is rich,
maybe a little by not that fast that that's easy,
because it's not easy. But we believe in every person
who thinks and and say no, this is inhuman I
should not I should be with those people who are
under attack, who are under under Yeah, a lot of

(02:44:23):
hard life. Yeah, it's a hard life, a lot of oppress.
So yeah, when we see the as aduld, when we
see the demonstrations, it really gives us power. It really
gives us that we have right to life. You know,
this is a minimum right that we need people to
tell us, Yes, you have a right to life.

Speaker 7 (02:44:43):
Yeah, I think that's it's nice to hear.

Speaker 12 (02:44:45):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:44:45):
It's like if you can feel that you're helping, even
just helping people, feel like a little bit, you know, elevated,
a little bit better, a little bit less despairing, because
I can see how it would be very easy if
you're stuck in guys to feel like the world's and
in you. Because it has to a large degree, right,
the words allowed this to happen and it's you know,

(02:45:07):
it's not it's American bombs, American plaints dropping bombs.

Speaker 15 (02:45:12):
Fortunately.

Speaker 7 (02:45:14):
Yeah, so I think that's really good to hear. It's
good to hear that that has made some difference. Thank
you so much for giving us some of your time.

Speaker 15 (02:45:23):
I know it's thank you, Jams, thank you for having
me with you. I wish you all good luck. Thank you,
Thank you all who listeners, listeners to this podcast. I
hope that I was able to give you an overview
of what's going on. And let's pray that this violence

(02:45:44):
will end very soon.

Speaker 7 (02:45:45):
Yes, yeah, yeah, indeed, let's thank you very much. I
was wonderful.

Speaker 16 (02:45:49):
Thank you.

Speaker 5 (02:46:07):
It's spoky week. It can happen here. It's spooky week,
the week where things are spooky. I'm your host, Mio Wong,
and with me is Garrison.

Speaker 10 (02:46:17):
Hello, and today all right, all right.

Speaker 5 (02:46:23):
We've gotten, we've gotten, we've gotten the preliminary spooky out
and so today we're gonna be talking about one of
the sort of key elements of Halloween, and that is
chocolate and so on. On a very basic level, we're
going to ask what is chocolate? And the answer and
it pains me to say this as someone who really

(02:46:44):
loves chocolate is really really bleak. Yeah, but before we
get into exactly how bleak it is, uh, we're gonna
look at sort of the early history of chocolate. So
so okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement about exactly
how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that say three

(02:47:06):
thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen hundred BC.
The sevente hundred b C is the one that's pretty consistent.
It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate. That's it.
It's a sort of bitter drink that they sometimes put
vanilla or red pepper in. Yeah, it was, it was.

Speaker 11 (02:47:23):
It was.

Speaker 10 (02:47:23):
It was like a bitter slurry that you from what
I hear, not very enjoyable, but it got you like
really high, like not high like like like weed, but
like kind of like cocaine.

Speaker 11 (02:47:36):
It was.

Speaker 10 (02:47:37):
It was like it was it was a massive stimulant,
is yeah, from what I hear about these kind of
early gross bitter chocolate slurries.

Speaker 5 (02:47:45):
Yeah, And you know, I mean this is the thing
that's this is not a regular consumption drink. Basically everyone
he uses this and this, and and chocolate is consumed
by a bunch of different civilizations like across like most
of South America. There's something sort of like the Mayans obviously,
the Mayans and the Aztecs too. There's a lot of

(02:48:06):
places where where this is being used, and it's everyone
seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah, I think
at some point the I think it was the the
Omes at some point we're doing these like they were
making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate,
you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like

(02:48:26):
a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans, and
they were making like a fermented thing out of that.
And I don't know, I leave as an exercise to
the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the
sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand
years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using
it for ritual purposes, and the story basically is okay.
So Herman Cortes drinks chocolate with stick king Maktazuma. Cortes goes,

(02:48:51):
this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he
brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they
mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly
with sugar, and it becomes you know, it becomes very
very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is
like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about
like three hundred years to figure out how to make

(02:49:13):
cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can
it's not it seems to be bitter like it in
the in the way that it sort of is naturally.

Speaker 10 (02:49:23):
You can you can process it with like like like
basic solutions, which which neutralizes some of the acidic and
bitter bitter tastes, which is why you should always buy
a Dutch process cocoa powder, which is unfortunately hard to
find these days. But it is, it is, it is,
it is the shit.

Speaker 5 (02:49:43):
Yeah, that's that's that's actually yeah, so the that's that's
Dutch cocoa. And then twenty years later someone figures out
how to make that into a chocolate bar and you know,
sort of a law, you have chocolate. Now, the conventional
histories are missing something very very important, which is something
that defined has defined the production of chocolate since Europeans
got a hold of it. And continues to define it today.

(02:50:04):
And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah, And you
know this is slavery is a very sort of important
part of the history of chocolate because slavery is what
transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a bunch of
different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into modern chocolate.
And this is this is the point that I want

(02:50:25):
to make because most most histories of chocolate tend you know,
when they're trying to find the origin of modern chocolate,
they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I think they're wrong.
I think they're very wrong. I think the distinct European
innovation of chocolate is to add sugar to it. Yes,
and this raises the very bleak question where does sugar

(02:50:46):
come from? And the answer, of course is slavery. Sugar
is one of the primary crops of slave economies in
both the colonies and the West Indies. It is one
of the key elements of the so called triangle trade
where you know, you may have probably you have learned
this in school, but you know, for people, for people
who've been out of school for a long time. So
the triangle trade is Europe since manufacturer goes to Africa,

(02:51:08):
it trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people are
taken from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America,
sometimes to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And
then they take you know, the products of slavery from
plantations back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum,
and critically sugar back to Europe. Actould wait did did

(02:51:31):
they Did they teach you the triangle trade? Yeah?

Speaker 10 (02:51:33):
Yes, I mean I I I did learn. My Christian
Homescholing curriculum wasn't the best, but.

Speaker 5 (02:51:41):
We did, we did.

Speaker 10 (02:51:42):
We did cover some basic things.

Speaker 5 (02:51:46):
It's interesting because the triangle trade as a model, like
isn't that old, even though even though like this is
the way that we all understand, like Tyler sort of
colonial trade work, it's a kind of recent thing. Yeah.
So sugar, sugar is a very very key part of
this entire thing. And there's a very very famous this
sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W.

(02:52:08):
Mitz's Sweetness and Power, which is a fundamental tax and
a lot of sort of a lot of the sort
of fields around the study of slavery, and one of
his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is fueled
by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant that
you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant.
They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is

(02:52:28):
a thing that allows them to keep working for longer
than they otherwise would have been able to.

Speaker 10 (02:52:34):
Yeah, and this also was the origin of Britain's probably
largest cultural trait, bad teeth.

Speaker 7 (02:52:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:52:44):
And you know, so, so this is this is this
is a many aspects of British culture I've are descended
from from slavery and you know, but but the other,
the other important thing for our story is that sugar
is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And
and this isn't a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do.

(02:53:07):
You know, they do this with tobacco too. You haven't
you have something that you're only supposed to use in
fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans
are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit
out of it and they just ate it literally every day?

Speaker 10 (02:53:20):
Yeah, have you ever tried like unsweetened on like chocolate liquor.

Speaker 5 (02:53:26):
Fucking sucks. I hate it. It's not good.

Speaker 10 (02:53:30):
You can certainly nibble, it can be a fun novelty
to nibble, but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like
a whole bar of it.

Speaker 5 (02:53:36):
Yeah, it's it's some real hope boy. Yeah. So, like
I mean, it makes sense that they added sugar to it.
But the consequence of this is that we can ask
we can finally ask the question right now, now, now
that it's been transformed by sugar into this object, a
sort of popular consumption, we can ask the question what
is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism

(02:53:58):
plus slavery. It is a fusion of cocoa, which is
an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the
wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a
slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know,
you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right,
even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the
sixteen hundred, surely surely that's not sure now, wasn't wasn't.

Speaker 10 (02:54:21):
Wasn't slavery abolished in the eighteen hundreds, and now I assume,
I assume Nesle's barving practices are totally above board.

Speaker 5 (02:54:29):
See, and this is I think the interesting part of
the story is gare like our readers is assuming a
thing I'm about to launch into here is the Mars
Nestley Child slavery lawsuit, and we will because that is
a critical elements of slavery and chocolate production. But there
is also still slavery and sugar production capitalism. And not

(02:54:51):
only is your slavery and sugar production, there is slavery
in sugar production in the exact same places there were
slavery and sugar production five hundred years ago. And this
is one of the sort of stunning things about you know,
the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, okay, capitalism
has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them
a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know,

(02:55:14):
like I I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit of
credit and give it only with being responsible for four
hundred years of this and not five hundred years of this,
because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether the capitalist
transition is in the fifteen hundreds to sixteen hundreds. But
you know, they have had four hundred years to solve
the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that?

Speaker 1 (02:55:34):
No?

Speaker 5 (02:55:35):
It is there is still slavery on the island of
Fispaniola four hundred years later. Because we're going to be
discussing in a second. Still, the best possible thing here
is that maybe, and this is it is arguable, maybe
last year there stopped being slaves there. Now I don't

(02:55:58):
even think that. I don't think that's true. And we're
gonna get into to that, but you know, before before
we sort of launch into you know what, like whether
or not there are so slaves on checker plantations in
the Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years
to solve a problem and you have not solved it,
you are never going to solve it.

Speaker 10 (02:56:18):
Hey, hey, let's not let's let's not visionhole ourselves here.
There's a lot of things that have been around for
four hundred years that ought not to be.

Speaker 5 (02:56:27):
That's true. But if you are an economic system and
your economic system has been you are supposed to have
you are supposed to have dealt with this at least
two hundred years ago. But you know, we've arrived here,
and it's something we've talked about before in the show
at least a bit. We've arrived here at one of
the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and radical

(02:56:49):
accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both sets
of accounts take as their starting point the fact that
capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people
who enter into contracts to sell you that their labor,
and that forced labor is this sort of like hauled
over from older economic systems.

Speaker 11 (02:57:07):
No.

Speaker 10 (02:57:07):
I actually just saw a thing today on the Dying
Remains of Twitter about how capitalism is the only economic
system that's not based on exploitation of violence. It's based
on free trade between markets.

Speaker 5 (02:57:19):
It's like people really believe this shit. It's like I
don't know, Like I don't know. So at some point
I'm gonna do an episode about really good book whose
name I'm forgetting right now because I didn't look this
up beforehand. But there's a really good book on these
sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the Tea economy
in late eighteen hundred, so that there's there's one forced

(02:57:41):
labor system in China and a different forced labor system
in India that are both warring in each other to
control the tea market.

Speaker 10 (02:57:46):
It is certainly interesting how much tea has impacted like geopolitics.

Speaker 5 (02:57:52):
Oh yeah, yeah, we'll.

Speaker 10 (02:57:54):
Do an episode on that one day. Yeah, t is
not that great, guys. I'm sorry, it's fine, rips. I
would not we just don't have good tea here. I
would do as much killing as people have done for
It's it's not worth.

Speaker 5 (02:58:07):
Killing anyone over the number of people who've been killed
over it is.

Speaker 10 (02:58:11):
Like in early cra is fine on like a rainy afternoon,
but come on.

Speaker 5 (02:58:15):
Yeah, it's not. It's not worth like conquering continents for huh.
But okay, so we'll back back back to this sort
of main plot that is not tea, that is in
fact chocolate. So one of the things that we can
learn that we learn from this is that, you know,
forced labor is not just a holdover. It's been a
It's been a central part of capitalism for as long
as capitalism has existed, and given its current track record,

(02:58:38):
it will be a part of capitalism for as long
as it exists. And you know, so there's always been
a racial compoundent to this right and this is like
trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like,
holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know,
we can we can expand this a little bit, and
it gets you to a some sort of interesting things,

(02:58:59):
which is that race is one of you know, so
like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor,
but race is what mediates your access to wage labor
in the first place. So, you know, white, like if
you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always
been able to get access to to wage labor, you know,
and as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not

(02:59:21):
as bad as the other things you can get forced into,
you know. But yeah, so if you're black, like, you know,
you get as successive forms of slavery. If you're indigenous,
they tried to enslave you and then either sort of
kept doing it or gave up and just killed did
the genocide Asian people like who came to this continents

(02:59:41):
and also sort of the West Indies largely get debt
pion engine and entered service to you and you know,
you can you can sort of work this out, so
on and so forth, there's there's different like modes of
stuff that are the normal sort of like what you
by default have access to if you are ex race, right, yeah,
and obviously this, this sort of racial access to wage
labor spread across the world. You know, your your access

(03:00:01):
to wage labor is dependent on sort of your subject
position as colonizer or colonize as well as you know,
you're sort of global and also you're like local racial hierarchies,
because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up.
But the upshot of this is that many of the
descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today

(03:00:23):
on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna
we're gonna tell that story. But first we'd.

Speaker 10 (03:00:31):
Oh, god, do you know what doesn't know?

Speaker 5 (03:00:35):
I cannot guarantee that our products and services are slave
free like I wish I could.

Speaker 10 (03:00:39):
But well, do you know what is also here for
a spooky time this Halloween? That's right, these products and services. Okay,
we are back. I'm drinking my not mocha coffee, drinking
my regular unsweetened coffees. Therefore totally thought, no, yeah, yeah, I'm.

Speaker 5 (03:01:02):
Everything's nothing bad. Nothing bad has ever happened in the
history of coffee.

Speaker 10 (03:01:06):
No, I'm here, no tea, no chocolate. I'm safe. I'm good.

Speaker 5 (03:01:13):
Anyway. So unfortunately, the people who are not safe is
a Haitians in the Domaican Republic. So we are not
going to do an entire history of slavery in the
Jamaican Republic because.

Speaker 10 (03:01:26):
Because this is a chocolate episode, and yeah, we have
so much time.

Speaker 5 (03:01:30):
Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the
things that happened in so we're gonna we're gonna look
at sort of the like the modern history of this,
and by modern, I'm starting it in I'm starting it
in the eighties because I have to pick a place. Now.
One of the things that happens in the nineteen eighties
is that the Dominican Army effectively so goes into Haiti

(03:01:54):
or just recruitation people who are in the Jamaican Republic
and are like, hey, you're gonna okay, we have like
jobs for you, like come do this work. And so
a bunch of people get in like these like army
vans and then they get there and they get moorshed
out of the van. A bunch of guys point guns
at them and go, you're gonna work for free or
we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you. So

(03:02:14):
this is really bad. And this is this is how
a lot of like through the eighties and kind of
early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar production
worked in the Jamaican Republic. And you know, it's it's
very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar,
and it produces a lot of sugar that specifically the
US uses. Now this is like state run slavery right on,

(03:02:37):
sort of like state run plantations. So then we had
neoliberalism and so the state run plantations get privatized. However,
come they still run on slave labor. So there's a
very good Mother Jones report about this, and I'm gonna
I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one
of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate,

(03:03:00):
isolated camps scattered around Centralman Central Romana. As a giant
sugar plantation, Sentrau Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand acres
of sugar cane attract almost as big as New York City.
Most of the workers and their families live in these battaias,
rising in the morning to work the cane and the
punishing heat, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying the stalks. Nearly

(03:03:21):
all are men of Haitian descent. Some were traffic back
in the day of the journalists is doing this was
the guy who basically uncovered a bunch of the original
armies like the military slavery program in the nineties, and
so he went back like a couple of years ago.
So he s talked himself. Some of the people were
traffic back touring the military slavery program, others were born

(03:03:42):
and lived stateless, and others came from Haiti more recently,
paying smugglers to sneak them across the border. For years,
the government has resisted providing legal status to people of
Haitian heritage in the country, even though born there and
estimated two hundred thousand people who for generations have been
to mean by ray and class are stateless. For the
men in the camps, CenTra Romana is the state. Their

(03:04:06):
villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.
Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the
railcars where they weigh and load the can and stocks,
and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from
the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So
things going great here, yeah, and the conditions you know, Okay,

(03:04:28):
so the sort of the capitalist reforms that neoliberalism has
brought to this system are the number of child slaves
has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when
the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's
a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrogress. Yeah,
so we have less child slaves, right, and you know,

(03:04:50):
so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults.
But the conditions here are still effectively slavery even after
this or a child slavery stuff like is driven under.
On a good day, these workers make three dollars a
day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now,

(03:05:12):
there are a lot of reasons for this. One of
the big ones is that most of the workers there
are most like basically all like you. You might find
a worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're
caught in these debt traps by Central Romana who and
these are like classic company, but they're not. They're worse
than like, you know, the classic American company town, because
at least an American company town, you can go to

(03:05:34):
another town that is not controlled by the company, whereas
these people like cannot And so they're caught in these
debt traps by Central Romana, which is that the company
that owns these plantations. And because they're so in debt,
they're constantly forced to work for the company in order
to pay off their debt. But you know, they never
actually make enough money to pay the debt off, and
so they have to take on more debt to survive

(03:05:56):
until you know, and largely what happens is these people
work there in debt until they die. This is classic
debt Pia nine, where a sort of debt transforms people
into the effective property of the debt holder, who exacerbate
the debt by denying them the ability to live without
taking on more debt. A very common way this happens
is with medical debt, which is something you know, I
think we're familiar with to some extent here, but is

(03:06:18):
egregiously worse. And the other thing that I was realizing
about this is that this is actually really eerily similar
to the way that Cortez and the Conquistadores and slaved
indigenous people during the genocide. They would do the same
thing of like, well, okay, now you're in debt to me,
and because you can't pay the debt, you have five
hundred percent interest per week, and so you know, that

(03:06:39):
just accumulates, and now you work for me for the
rest of your lives. And this is you know, this
is one of the one of the sort of ways
in which this the long shadow of Spanish imperialism like
looms over the Dominican Republic, even in what has really
been about two hundred years of the age of the
American Empire, you know, and as you know, obviously like

(03:07:03):
as much of an effect as the Spanish Empire has
had here, and oh god, it's not good. Today it
is the American Empire that lines the pockets of the
slavers of the Dominican Republic. So such a Romana is
owned by this family called the Fundjewel family, who are
these Cuban expats who run this like enormous resort in

(03:07:26):
shit where they live in Florida and are handed this
is really fun. One hundred and fifty million dollars for
the American state every year in the form of price
supports for sugar. So like you're an American, right, Like
obviously your tax money very obviously goes to support slavery
because we have prisons, and so your taxes are paying

(03:07:47):
to enslaved people, but your taxes are also paying for
slavery in other countries. It's incredible, really really great stuff
from the American political system here. And you know, and
the way this has been maintained is through like two
I think in the last twenty years, Mother Jones reported
they've they've spent the sugar lobbyists spent two hundred and

(03:08:08):
twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, and it
works really well. They've been able to influence the system
for a very very long time. The other funny thing
about the Fundjol family is that they've created the perfect
political trap, which is so one of one of the
brothers is like a Trump guy and the other person
is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like incredibly immeshed

(03:08:29):
in both of the circles. So it's great. Things are
going very good. So after so the Mother Jones investigation
was like in the last I think it was like
last year the year before, and when the Mother Jones
investigation about the fact that like all of this shit

(03:08:50):
was still happening came out, there was a there was
a giant uproar about it, and a couple of things happened.
One is that so the village of the journalists had
visited so Traya Romana, like, they didn't even bulldoze the villages.
They blew everyone's houses down with like sledgehammers and forcibly
move them to like other villages and separated people's families.

(03:09:12):
So that's that's great. And then so in late twenty
twenty two, under under pressure from this reporting, the US
government like banned imports from that specific company. And Okay,
it's unclear what is going to happen with it, if
you know, if if they're gonna get unbanned eventually, uh,

(03:09:33):
if it's gonna stick, if they're just gonna like I
don't know, like transfer the assets to another company or
something and use that instead. As so, as of right now,
this specific set of plantations is not able to export sugar.

Speaker 9 (03:09:48):
To the US.

Speaker 5 (03:09:51):
So this is this is as much of a victory
over slavery as we're going to get in this episode,
and this victory is inc trying to reassure it's only
gonna get work. This is this is the peak of
anti slavery stuff we're gonna see here. Yeah, so enjoy
it while you can. And do you know what else

(03:10:12):
you should enjoy?

Speaker 10 (03:10:14):
Oh? These products and services that support this podcast. That's good. Yes,
this is this is the real peak of the episode, folks.
All right, I am rejuvenated by the advertising industrial complex.
I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress.

Speaker 5 (03:10:33):
Whoa Okay, So now now, now we're now we're gonna
turn to the type of slavery that everyone, I think
expected this episode to mostly be about, which is the
fact that cocoa bean production is also largely produced by
slave labor. So, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a
bit from a report by the Food Empowerment Project, which

(03:10:53):
has done some very good work on most like specifically
slavery in West Africa. They're also one of the only
media people have ever seen talk about the fact that
a lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same,
but a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also
seems to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's
effectively no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I

(03:11:14):
don't know, so like, eventually, one day, I guess, like
the fact that the other places other than West Africa
have slavery will hit the anglophone media class or whatever.
But until then, I'm going to read this section. In
West Africa, coco is a commodity crowd grown primarily for export.

(03:11:34):
Coco is the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up
about half the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco
farmers earn less than one dollar a day and income
below the extreme poverty line. As a result, they often
resort to the use of child labor to keep their
prices competitive. In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one

(03:11:57):
of the things that happens when you're reading about child
slavery stuff. Even people who like are trying to, you know,
draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff
like that that's like Jesus Christ this. Yeah, so you know,
they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor.
In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization

(03:12:18):
calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are
defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety,
or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children
in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most
of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of
child labor. Which is also really good that like we've

(03:12:41):
we've capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex
of its control of the commanding heights of the world economy,
which means that we're talking about we're trying to make
tear lists of how bad child labor is.

Speaker 10 (03:12:56):
Well, yeah, I mean, a whole bunch of child labor
laws just got like rolled back across many states here.

Speaker 5 (03:13:03):
Yeah, it's a great country, so it's very exciting. The
children are for the minds, Yeah, it's it's it's it's great.
You know. So, so obviously a lot of the child
slavery on cocoa farms are from sort of like larger
I mean, I guess they are corporate, but from sort
of like larger plantations, but also less You think that

(03:13:24):
it's better on family farms, No family farms, I mean,
I guess it is technically better than like being kidnapped
and enslaved, is merely doing child labor on your families,
like just being born into.

Speaker 10 (03:13:38):
These pretty pretty uh not great labor practices that you
really have no say it or any agency whatsoever.

Speaker 5 (03:13:46):
Yeah, yeah, and like you know, this is one of
these things where like the economic conditions are so bad
that people are people are facing impossible choices, and I
think we can say that they make the wrong choice,
which is a lot of Okay, So, like there are
there were sort of different ways that children get trafficked
into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by

(03:14:10):
their own families who do not have enough resources to
take care of them and are like, okay, we'll basically
sell these people so they can go do this job.
And these families don't know that like their child is
about to be enslaved, right, They're just like, okay, well
they're going to go off and do work. But the
other way that this happens is that kids from like
villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus

(03:14:33):
on Mali as one of the places this happens for them.
But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what
are effectively raids into into Malli from the Ivory Coast
to like steel children, and it's also happens to Bikina Fosso.
You know, and this gets to the point where, you know,
I'm gonna read a quote from one of these from
this report again. In one village in Bikina Fosso, almost

(03:14:56):
every mother in the village has had a child trafficked
onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers.
So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every
American right winger, except it's you know, this is just
how chocolate is made.

Speaker 10 (03:15:14):
Yeah, this is you know, all of all of the
Sound of Freedom guys, uh with all of you know,
the whole uproar around that movie earlier this year, versus
all of them, Uh yeah, enjoying their little eminem said
kit Cat said, Hey, I like the occasional kit Cats too.

(03:15:35):
This is this is a massive problem.

Speaker 5 (03:15:39):
I I don't know, I really love chocolate. I have
not eaten any chocolate since I started researching this, and
I like, and there's and it's but it sucks because
it's like you can't you can't and we're gonna get
into board of this in a second, but like you
can't like ethically consume your way out of this, right,
like because the conditions but free trade cocoa exist. Oh boy, yeah,

(03:16:01):
we're gonna get into that. But yeah, there's no there's
no actual systemic like there's no way that you can
like you can't change this stuff with your individual consumption habits.
And you know that's something that's just really fucking bleak
about this because these conditions are, I mean, as bad

(03:16:21):
as you can possibly imagine. But the Food and Empowerment
Project describes like children as young as five are forced
to work up to fourteen hours a day, like chopping
down cocoa pods and then chopping them open with machetes.
And sometimes these people get Sometimes these kids are using
chainsaws to like clear wood, like clear down like forests. Yeah,
and you know, okay, so this goes exactly how you

(03:16:44):
expected to go, which is a bunch of these kids
just have a bunch of fucking scars from where they've
been slashed by machetes, because again, you are handing machetes
to children, some of whom are as young as five.
And then they have to carry one hundred pound bags
of cocoa beans through the jungle. And this is the
thing that's also happening in to make a public and
this happens a lot in a lot of places. Is
that they just get you know, when when companies want

(03:17:07):
to spray like they're farms with pesticides, right, they don't
even bother even like clearing people out, which might you know,
help like a tiny bit to make them not like
die from fucking poison. But no, like these fucking dipshits
just like spray them with toxic chemicals as they just
like spray them with pesticides, like a lot of whom

(03:17:27):
are Christinogians, a lot of And this is happening in
the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican Republic too,
And a lot of those people just fucking died because
you know, they were stayed with these chemicals. There was
a really terrible story of a of a guy who
was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died
from the like he wasn't able to get a pay
off for the lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty

(03:17:49):
before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great
quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using
child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food
of ai, such as corn paste or the cassava and
bananas that grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases,
the children sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings
without access to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know

(03:18:14):
another key part of this, right is like, okay, so
the conditions are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a
key part of this, like any system of slavery, is
the physical violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly
and often beaten and abused and tortured in ways that
are very reminiscent of sort of like older epochs of

(03:18:34):
slavery if they try to escape. Now, this is the
companies care about this to the extent that is bad.
Pr Yes, and the charcout companies repeated, like the chocolate companies. Okay,
they they signed a thing in the year two thousand
where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst

(03:18:55):
forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.

Speaker 10 (03:18:58):
Yeah, like this is this has been a non issue
for like over two decades.

Speaker 5 (03:19:03):
Now, Garrison, Yes, what year is it right now?

Speaker 10 (03:19:07):
The year of our Lord to us in twenty three.

Speaker 5 (03:19:09):
Yeah, they have been They have been promising to end
child slavery in so originally there's supposed to be endy
child slavery and then and then they scaled it down
to the worst forms the worst. But they have been
promised you could do this for longer than you have
been alive, yes, correct, which is terrifying. Yes, yes. And

(03:19:34):
and as we'll get into later, right, the number of
child slaves is higher than it was when they started
doing these child slave reduction efforts, so quote unquote production efforts,
which are just sort of pr bullshit. So industry lobbying
groups are also very, very powerful, and this is part

(03:19:55):
of part of how this stuff persists. So the University
of Chicago has a center called NORAK, which is like
a public research center. I don't know, I went to
that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers,
and NEI or should you, because it turns out there
was so okay. So they released this report on how
bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak

(03:20:17):
of the original version of the report that was supposed
to come out, and mean, the original version of the
report has the number of child slaves at like two
point two million. Now, when the report actually comes out
with no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers
for child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the
Norak report was like, ah, there's only like one point

(03:20:37):
six million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves
just sort of vanished in an editorial process after they
got they came under fire from uh, the they came
under fire from the chocolate lobby.

Speaker 10 (03:20:52):
Yeah yeah, let's uh, let's round that down. Makes it
makes it easier to palace.

Speaker 5 (03:20:58):
And the other thing that it hides is that there's
a ten to fifteen percent increase in the number of
child slaves working in like in the co in Cocoa
since COVID started, because COVID has been a giant sort
of you know, the economic damage that COVID caused forced
a bunch of people into into you know, increasingly desperate things.

(03:21:20):
And you know, okay, so we tease this a little bit,
and you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair
trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten dollars for a
chocolate bars as a fair trade on it, and it
will and that will make sure that I'm only eating
chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications for the
chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate. The

(03:21:41):
follow is an excerpt from a study conducted by the
Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in the
chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand the
gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we brought
certified chocolate bars to villages where some are all of
the farm were certified. We held up the bar with

(03:22:03):
the label and explained to the farmers what consumers expected
out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired a
fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices like
child labor and deforestation were not present. We also explained
the difference in retail price between fair trade and uncertified chocolate.
The overwhelming response from farmers to this information was shock

(03:22:24):
and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn shirt in
front of him and asked if it looked like he
earned a decent living. A woman in one village said
she can hardly afford to send to her children to school,
so how could anyone think she earned a fair price.
Our farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences between certified and

(03:22:45):
uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education, access
to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah,
all the people who are telling you they're doing some
fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places
they are getting it from are as fucked as the
as Hershey's yeah, so this is bad.

Speaker 9 (03:23:06):
Now.

Speaker 5 (03:23:06):
You might also think, Okay, we can get out of
this by buying from coco cooperatives. Except except, and this
is a wonderful thing that capitalism is brought on the world.
Most coco collectives aren't actually like workers collector like aren't
actually co ops. They're just sort of.

Speaker 10 (03:23:24):
All people's republic of chocolate farmers. I'm sure they're all
a little red book.

Speaker 5 (03:23:31):
This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered,
because there's there's a bunch of firms in China that
are also technical. I talked about this in my episode
of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk
company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company
was technically a co op, but like it was a
co op in the sense that there was a small

(03:23:51):
group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares,
and then they just hired every source everything out to
independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,
this is a thing. A lot this the cocoa trade
stuff is actually worse because most of these things that
are called co ops aren't even co ops at all.
They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake
co ops. And there they are like a very very
small number of of of these coco farms that are

(03:24:14):
actually workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which
one is which unless you spend a bunch of time
like actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's
no sort of like ethically way out of this, right,
you're just kind of you're, you know, like you can't
you can't eat your way out of this problem. And

(03:24:35):
of course everything across the board, all these conditions have
gotten worse since the pandemic, So you know, it's it's
not only is capitalism not making things better every like
things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I
promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about
the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There

(03:24:57):
were eight people from Molly who were enslaved by coke
plantations after being traffic from Mali sued nest Le, Cargill, Berry, Caliba,
I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's, and
Models to try to get conversations from the companies by
virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made
by their child slave labor. Yeah. Now there's also a

(03:25:21):
separate lawsuit against slightly different companies, so a lot of
the same company is slightly different that's using a different
set of legal arguments. Both of the lawsuits have been
thrown out, and I want to take a second to
look at the reasoning here, both of which are sort
of just amazing. So I think the most famous one
is the Supreme Courts eight to one decision that said, well, so, like,
all this stuff happened, but it happened outside the US,

(03:25:43):
so you can't sue companies for it. Here. She's an
amazing piece of logic, which is just like, oh yeah, no, Actually,
like corporations, like American corporations could just go everywhere else
and do crimes. And this is in the American legal
system is specifically written in such a way that like
if in a American corporation enslaves you in like the

(03:26:04):
Ivory Coast, there's nothing you can do about it in
the US. And then a judgment do you see throughout
the other case because you know, their argument was, well,
you can't prove that the companies knew you were being
enslaved on those farms. There's no quote traceable connection between
the people who enslaved you in the company, and so
there's nothing we can do. And the reason both these

(03:26:27):
arguments work is the reason for the structure of the
chocolate market, right the reason coco plantations in the Ivory
Coast and also Brazil can get away with this. You know, well,
the reason that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast
or Brazil or other places, the reason they're happening there
and not in the US is because these are places
where you can get away with that level of exploitation

(03:26:48):
in corporate violence that you know in the US would
be a lot more difficult. And this shields them from
legal liability. Furthermore, instead of just you know, jumping, instead
of just running the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies
could easily do, right, this is a very very large trade.
They could just sort of like they could invertially vertically
and not even vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate,

(03:27:09):
like they could just run the process, and they they
very specifically choose not to do it. And the reason
they choose not to do it, this isn't one hundred
billion dollar industry, right, But instead they what they choose
to do is to just buy cocoa from the chocolate
market where all these sort of nebulous producers sell, which
allows the chocolate companies to go, oh, well, these people

(03:27:31):
don't work for us. We just buy chocolate from the market.
How are we supposed to know which these plantations use
slave labor? So it puts like a one degree of separation, Yeah,
well it's actually two degrees. It's an additional degree of
separation from the way something like Walmart works. Right where
Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors. This isn't even contractors.
They're just buying finished products from things they're like they're

(03:27:54):
completely unaffiliated with, and this gives them, like it gives
them like two degrees of legal separation because it's not
just that their contractors are doing something that they didn't
know about. It's that they're just buying it right, and
this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist to
protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just wave

(03:28:16):
their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you,
but we have no choice but to let them off
completely scott free. So sorry about that. And I want
to end today with something that has been running through
my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which
is that the voorgeoisie must pay for their crimes. The
state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs have failed.

(03:28:38):
And if anything is ever going to fucking happen that
forces these companies to be in any way, there there's
to be like a single iota of justice for the
fact that all of these companies have been fucking gorging
themselves on the profits of slave labor. At all, we
are going to do it or no one is. So

(03:28:59):
congratulations you the American worker. It is unfortunately incumbent on
you to deal with these fucking corporations that have been
destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky week everyone. Yes,
this is very scary.

Speaker 10 (03:29:16):
Yeah, well, thank you for that lovely, uh depressing presentation.

Speaker 5 (03:29:22):
Uh, Mia, I mean.

Speaker 10 (03:29:25):
I guess is there is there is there a sort
of takeaway besides, there's no ethical conception to under capitalism.

Speaker 5 (03:29:31):
I mean, like, I mean, capitalism will never abolish slavery.
I don't think one.

Speaker 10 (03:29:38):
I know there is one US state where they grow chocolate,
which is Hawaii, which has its own problems of colonization.
So even if you try to buy from a place
that is you know, arguably has less chocolate slavery, it's
generally better produced, it still is you're still implicating yourself
in in uh, all of the problems relating to like, uh,

(03:30:02):
the independence of that island and the US's colonization. So
it's it's it's we're really just really just kind of
trapped on all sides. Here is what it feels like.
I mean, this is this Halloween chocolate problem.

Speaker 5 (03:30:17):
Yeah, I mean, and I think I think the way
to think about this, right is that this this is
an actual systemic issue, right, This is a systemic thing
capitalism has been doing for about four hundred years, like
since its entire existence. And if you want to if
you want to end it, we have to you have to. Actually,
it's not it's not even enough to destroy these companies, right,

(03:30:38):
because even if you brought down every single one of
these chocolate companies right, there would just be another round
of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the same ship.
So you have to you have to destroy the system
of property by which these things are allowed to exist.
And at that point maybe you can start on being
able to eat food that isn't produced by slave labor.

Speaker 10 (03:30:58):
It turns out Willia Wogkill was the villain the whole time.

Speaker 5 (03:31:02):
You know, I was trying to think about the amount
of slave labor that we see from him versus the
amount of slavery Wonka. Yes, it's it's I think Wonka
is using more slave labor, but not by as much
as it should be.

Speaker 10 (03:31:18):
I don't know, I don't know, it's it's it's hard
to say. I I I think it's pretty clear that
Walka's use of slave labor is just an accurate representation
of the real life chocolate industry.

Speaker 5 (03:31:30):
Yes, so yeah, go go, go enjoy your weekend and then.

Speaker 10 (03:31:34):
Don't enjoy that new fucking twink Walgka movie that looks
I have to say, dog shit.

Speaker 5 (03:31:40):
Oh yeah, bad herod, worst idea, badst idea, anyone's had
since capitalism twin Kwonka.

Speaker 10 (03:31:47):
I'm sorry it doesn't slap I agree out of ten anyway, Well,
tune in in the next few days for two more
Spooky Week episodes for you. We only got We only
got three this week because there's a lot of air
news happen ach but yeah, we at least have two
other Spooky Week episodes that I am about to finish
working on, so stay tuned for that.

Speaker 16 (03:32:08):
Goodbye, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
week from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 1 (03:32:21):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (03:32:24):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 1 (03:32:38):
Thanks for listening.

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