AS252: Commentary; Inciting Incident

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking, this is episode 252, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Got a couple of different things. I'm going to do some of the, I'm on, really, I needed to follow up on a few things. And there's a consistent comment I've been getting that I want to address. So I want to talk about that. And then I've got a little interview with Al Laiman from Inciting Incident, the podcast. And we actually talk about something pretty relevant to this. There's a little bit of talk about PC culture and about a suicide epidemic academic at his school. So it's really fascinating. So that'll be later. But first, as to the comment that I wanted to get to. There's been an ongoing question that I've talked about, about whether or not PC culture is responsible for Trump.

0:01:23 Thomas: I thought I answered that pretty convincingly a couple episodes ago. I really, but it seems to me that this, this meme is not going away, that people really want to believe that's true, and they're really convinced that it is true. Interesting side note, some of you may know, a lot of you know, Dave Rubin, who I've been a little critical of in the past, launched his Patreon the other week, and it's at like, God, I don't know, 21,000, or it might even be 22,000 now, and I think that's made me realize, along with the fact that I get a lot comments that are resistant when I have criticism for him, and other points, that caused me to think like this is a significant faction of my audience.

0:02:15 Thomas: I think it's I think it's quite a significant percentage of you that are either Dave Rubin fans or at least sympathetic to kind of the movement that he stands for, which is the anti-regressive left kind of movement. And the only reason I bring it up is that as a result of seeing how much support he had, I went back and I started paying more attention to him because, look, my show purports to, and I think I've done a decent job of this, I want to get at the disagreement among atheists. Now, before I thought Rubin, I guess I just didn't know how big his show was. I'll be honest, I just have never been that impressed with it. I mean, I mean, clearly I'm in the minority, but so the evidence is in that his show is really big and it's a big percentage of our community.

0:03:08 Thomas: And so the reason I bring it up is I've gone back and listened to a lot of, there's actually a podcast version of it. So I've listened to several of his episodes and things became really clear. I'll tell you what became clear. A lot of the pushback and comments that I've gotten, I've seen him say those exact things and think, ah, this is where this is coming from. So I do believe that's kind of what's happening. At least either if it's not from his show directly, it's likely from the same attitudes that have led to his show being so popular and to that movement being popular. Case in point, he has said in, I can't remember what episode I listened to, but Ruben said he thinks PC, the regressive left, is the blame for Trump.

0:03:57 Thomas: 100%, you know, in his mind. He said as much in an interview. It might have been with Milo, which, God, I could do a whole show on that interview, and I may someday, maybe with Eli.

0:04:09 Thomas: So, just to put a button on the whole Rubin thing, let's suffice to say, I'm paying attention to the show now, so I'm gonna be more informed on the kind of claims that are in that side, and the kind guests, and, you know, that sort of thing, so, I found stuff I agree with, there's plenty of stuff I agreed with Dave Rubin on, it's just my main criticism has been that he doesn't, he just has one side on, and then pretends he's having a conversation, he keeps saying he wants a battle of ideas, and then he has one side on the entire time and he'll disagree with him sometimes, but it's not not very much. And he doesn't go out of his way to point out, you know, some of the really bad statements that his guests have made in times past. But but that's the thing.

0:04:55 Thomas: It's, I don't like the pretending to be having the conversation that's not happening. You're not, you're not having the battle of ideas. You're just representing the other side that you don't of the side that you don't like. So you've picked that you don't like the regressive left and now you're just representing the other side, which by the way, is totally fine. Like that's 100% cool. Just don't pretend that's the battle. You're not, you're, you're hosting a great battle of ideas on your show. You're not. You're having one side come on your show over and over and just bash the other side. So that's, that's been my main criticism. That doesn't mean that I don't agree with, with a lot of what he says. I'm, I'm very pro free speech and he is as well. And I do do like that part of it. And I think, to my mind, I might be the only show where I had someone to the far social justice side in Eli battle with someone to the other side in James, in James Lindsay.

0:05:51 Thomas: I mean, maybe that's why, to be honest with you, maybe the show rubs me the wrong way, is because I'm trying to do that, and I think I'm doing maybe a better job of actually having the the debate, and then meanwhile, someone else just says, oh yeah, I want to have the debate and then just has one side on all the time. So I think if I'm being honest, that's probably why it frustrates me a little bit personally.

So, okay, so I'll put a button on that. And now let's talk about Trump and whether or not PC culture is responsible for him. I already covered it, but there's a common misperception of the argument I'm making, and I need to solve that here. I need try to put that to rest. So, I think the objection, or what I think is just a misconception of my argument, is best exemplified by Mike Paps, he said on the site, Thomas underestimates that ignorance, when he finds it hard to imagine that people would support Trump, simply because he says, fuck you, to what they perceive to be PC culture, and consider a big problem. This is precisely not what I'm doing. I was saying, here's, so here's my argument. So some and this is not just Mike. I brought his up because it was on the website and that's my go to for comments.

I think other people have Facebook commented, et cetera, That, of course, people are saying, you look at what they're saying. They're saying, oh, I hate PC culture. It's people are too PC nowadays. That's why I'm voting Trump. No, I get that. I get the people are saying that. The question is whether or not PC culture is responsible for Trump.

Not simply a cause and effect, because if people are making a bad judgment in voting for Trump just because they're mad at what they perceive to be PC culture, they're making an error,

0:07:41 Thomas: And I don't think people should be responsible for other people making a terrible error as a result of their attitudes. I'll try to spell it out a little bit more clearly. What should have put this to rest a long time ago was that last episode when I said every Republican candidate ran on a platform, if you go back to the debates, the Republican debates, had a part in their speeches about PC culture, about things being too PC, all of them said that, so to say that we're, you know, PC people or progressives are responsible for Trump is wrong if your claim is that they wouldn't have been responsible for just a normal Ted Cruz, Cruz presidency or a, or rather a candidacy or a Jeb Bush candidacy. They all said that, every single one of them said we're being too PC.

0:08:29 Thomas: So that's my first point that I really think is a good point that I haven't seen people bring up. In order to illustrate the other point better, I would ask you this, if you still don't see what I'm saying, what, how bad would Trump have to be for PC culture to not be morally responsible, to not actually accountable? Forget cause, just mere cause and effect. But to actually say they're doing something wrong that they need to not do. How bad would Trump have to be for it not to be PC culture's fault? So just, again, this is, we'll take it to an extreme, just to illustrate a point. If Trump ran on a platform of, I want to murder every child, like we should just, every black child, it was all white supremacy, just every black child, every Mexican, every whatever, murder them all.

0:09:25 Thomas: Would it still be okay to say, well, okay, I don't agree with all his stances, but he's really flying in the face of that PC culture. He's really giving the big F you to PC culture, and so, you know, I'm gonna vote for him. I'm taking it to the extreme to illustrate there is a point at which it is unacceptable and therefore PC culture is not blameworthy if you're voting for this guy. Mind you, this is assuming PC culture is even culpable at all, this, this assuming that part, which I, I was granting for the sake of argument, I don't even know that I grant that. We'll be right back. So, just to remind you what that argument was, that was when I said, yes, climate scientists are responsible for climate change denial. They are the cause of that.

0:10:11 Thomas: There wouldn't, if we had no such thing as climate science and we didn't know about global warming, there wouldn't be global warming deniers. That's true. That's a true statement. Does that mean they did something wrong? No, that doesn't mean they didn't something wrong. Same argument could be made for PC culture. We'd have to evaluate the specific claims of where, you know, you or whoever has this point of view. Thinks that PC culture has gone too far.

So back to my extreme example, I think, my view is that Trump is way, way over the line in terms of what's a reasonable amount of horrible to vote for. Like, even granting, so let's say I grant for the sake of argument, PC culture bad. Okay, I get it. We need to be less PC, I guess. Let's say, I grant that. How bad can a candidate be, but just be right on that one issue for us to vote for him or her? Her. Trump is so far over that line to me. So far over that line.

He's not a real candidate, guys. He is not a serious candidate. It's not even close. Go and listen to Sam Harris's recent episode. Someone who is just as anti-regressive left as it gets, I think, and he talks at length why he's supporting Hillary. It is just not a reasonable choice. It's not a reasonable way of thinking, a reasonable thought process to say, yeah, I'm voting for Trump because, you know, PC culture. No, he's not a serious candidate. He's fundamentally not a serious presidential candidate. You can't even, it blows my mind that people could even consider voting for him.

0:11:48 Thomas: I don't get it. Now, let's say we had a more reasonable candidate. Let's say, oh, here, more hypotheticals. Let's say we had Hillary running against Hillary, just to isolate the variables here, but one Hillary was saying, let's call it extreme Islam. Let's stop being so PC, and the other one wasn't. Well, sure, vote for the non-PC version of Hillary, but that's such a minor thing. Like, we don't have that. We have someone who's saying we need to call out extremist Islam. Okay, we have someone who's saying that. Plus, they think Mexicans are rapists. They want to, you know, not let Muslims into the country. They have no qualifications to be president. They lie constantly.

0:12:36 Thomas: I mean, there's just too much other baggage to say that it's reasonable to support him because of PC culture. Now I'm gonna take it a step further. I actually want to know... I want someone to tell me, what are the mechanics behind Trump sticking it to the PC police? I actually, I think we all think we know what that means and then the more I try to think about it, the more it disappears. I don't even understand what the mechanics of that are. Because, okay, let's pretend for this, I'm not even going to entertain the notion, and I'm even not going to speak to the part of my audience, if that even exists, which I don't think it does, who agrees with Trump on all his positions. Because I'm throwing that out the window.

0:13:21 Thomas: So you don't agree with Trump. I'm taking it as a given that pretty much no one agrees with him on his platform or whatever, because that's what I hear every time. Oh, well, you know, I don't agree with everything. He's got, he was wrong about the Mexicans being rapists, whatever, but he really sticks it to PC police. How is he doing that? What is he saying that does that? He's just saying wrong and racist things. I don't really see how that sticks it to the PC police. Him saying Mexicans are rapists is not wrong because it's politically incorrect. It's just wrong. The only example I can think of, and I think it may be the only example, of something that he has said that's both politically incorrect and it's something you might agree with, so then therefore you would say, ah, he's being properly politically incorrect where others won't be, is the question of radical Islam.

0:14:20 Thomas: But it's not even as though he's getting that issue correct, so it's, it's that... as though I could even see, okay, hypothetically, if you thought Muslims are such a threat around the world, that it's such a big deal that we have to be one-issue voters and it's THAT issue. I could almost see, OK, if we had candidate A, or if we, let's say we have Hillary and then candidate, hypothetical candidate who says, you know, we need to call out, I guess, Islamic extremism. But not only that, we need to call out the everyday Muslims who blend in, who, uh, are very anti-gay, very antiwomen, so, that other candidate said all that stuff. Once again, if it was just that issue, and there wasn't all the other external insanity that is Trump, it would be something you could consider.

0:15:12 Thomas: But Trump doesn't even have a good solution on Islam. His solution is, do not allow anyone to come across the border. That had nothing to do with this latest shooting. It had nothing to do with it. It wasn't some recent immigrant. It wasn't from a refugee that we just took in or someone that blended into the refugee program. That's what Trump thinks is the problem. He thinks it's we're letting in too many Muslim immigrants and we need to stop doing that. That is not even going to solve. And furthermore, like I said last time, Trump says, oh, we need to stop letting them in just for a little while till we figure out what's going on. How could you think that was a good solution to the problem? It's not a solution. But moving on to more stuff that seems to be important, I would say what's really important to the Rubinites and people of that crowd is, like, campus free speech issues.

0:16:04 Thomas: Who has done more speeches as a candidate or as a, rather, as a public politician, who has done more speeches in favor of campus free-speech than Barack Obama? Now, I get it, he's not running for president right now. But that's on the Democrats' side. I mean, Hillary has run on a platform of four more years of Obama, essentially. And Obama, he's given speech after speech, go look it up, speech after speech of don't shout people down, free exchange of ideas.

Obama has been very supportive of that. Can we give him credit for that? Can we give the Democrats a little credit for the leader of the country, who's a Democrat, being in favor of free speech on campuses? There's a lot more I could say on this, but I'm actually way over the time I wanted to go anyway, but, um, the last thing I want to say is, do you really envision, And again, I'm talking to the people who hypothetically supposedly are either supporting Trump or almost going to support Trump because they're so mad at the regressive left. Do you think that whoever is president makes a difference on these campus free speech things? Because clearly it doesn't. If Obama is pro-campus-free speech, then clearly that doesn't change the left. That doesn't somehow trickle down to influence everybody on these campuses. Naive to think that whoever is president even will have any effect on the PC police and the campus police and all this stuff that the Rubinites are scared of. Why would you even think the president would make a difference in that? I really, I don't think so.

0:17:43 Thomas: Once again, Obama is giving speech after speech. It's at least like three where he said he supports campus free speech and we should have all the, you know. That hasn't affected it. So why would having a Trump as a President somehow make that even better? If anything, you could argue that it's going to get worse. People on the left are going to react even further to the left in that direction. I'm agnostic about that claim. I don't even think it would help. So all this is to say, I think it's utter madness. It is complete ridiculosity, just to make up a word, to think that it is in any way a rational choice that anyone should be even considering to vote for Trump because of PC culture.

0:18:29 Thomas: If someone wants to be irrational and do that, that's fine. But you're being irrational and you can't blame PC culture for you being irrational.

0:18:49 Thomas: Joining me right now is Al Laiman from the Inciting Incident Podcast. How are you doing, Al?

0:18:55 Al: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.

0:18:57 Thomas: Oh, my pleasure. So, I was on your show a while back. I don't know, a little over a month ago by now, probably.

0:19:03 Al: Yeah, it was episode 15.

0:19:05 Thomas: Episode 15, if people want to check that out. And, you know, I thought I'd have you on and talk about the show, return the favor, you know, that kind of thing, podcast love.

0:19:14 Al: Certainly, certainly.

0:19:15 Thomas: So why don't you tell, for people who aren't familiar with your show, tell, what would you say is kind of your mission statement of your podcast?

0:19:26 Al: The statement is really to just have conversations with people who agree with us or disagree with us and at least come to an understanding and a respect for each other, if nothing else, because we've definitely had people on the show who disagree vehemently with us. But we always try to be respectful. We always trying to make it very clear what our opinions are, but that we can understand where other people are coming from. And we just want to bring visibility to not only the atheist community, but everybody surrounding it. You know, we're very active in, uh, the the LGBT community. We're very active in suicide prevention. And we also just, you know, really like stand-up comedians, movies, and uh, well, of course, atheist podcasters, hence them dominating the majority of our guests, but it to have a conversation and hopefully come out of it a better person, whether or not we come to an agreement.

0:20:18 Thomas: I I like It. So what are some topics that you're finding you have disagreement with? Because those are the ones that I like the most. The ones where atheists are disagreeing with each other. I also kind of don't mind just speaking with religious people and trying to bridge that gap. But in terms of atheists, what are some subjects that you found people disagree or you disagree with people or vice versa?

0:20:31 Al: Certainly.

0:20:47 Al: Well, you experienced this firsthand, uh, political, political correctness, social justice warriors, safe space, that whole thing. We had, we had to have more than one part of an episode devoted to that because we had people coming on who disagreed with it, people who went way to the other side of it. And then we sort of had to be the people going, okay, both of you have a point, this is where we stand.

Um, you know, some people who come on are like, you know, safe spaces are stupid and unrealistic and social justice warriors are ruining everything and feminism and blah blah blah. And then the others are, you know, there needs to be a safe space everywhere and everybody needs to watch what they say all the time. And, you know, both of those are unrealistic and we, we disagree with that. I mean, we agreed with Eli a lot more on the podcast that you did, but I did find some points where I agreed with James. It was very tough to know where we fell on that. But I think what we're against the most is drawing a line in the sand and making ultimatums, because another part of the reason we like to have people on the show is because we want our minds to be changed. We want to learn new information and hopefully improve our position.

So if somebody tells us that we're wrong or misguided or factually incorrect, we're at least going to look into it and give it some level of respect. But that was the big one. Political correctness is ruining everything and nobody can say anything anymore. And we just pretty much had to say, that's really not true.

0:22:21 Thomas: What guest, I'm curious, had that point of view? I know you had Gaytheist manifesto on, so that covers the pro side.

0:22:30 Al: This was Actually, before we started getting some of the atheist podcasters on. You were the first really atheist podcaster to come on our show. And this started before that. These were listeners who would call in and have discussions. And Then I had some other guests who I either happened to know or heard the episode and were interested in rebutting. So that's kind of how those couple episodes went, was, you know, we have one episode where the anti people called in, and then a couple people wanted to come in and say how full of crap they were. And we just sort of ended up talking about the points we heard and what we agreed with and disagreed with. But whenever we're interviewing something, even if we disagree with them, we're always very polite about it and try to ask more, more leading questions rather than giving them our straight opinion, if that makes sense.

0:22:31 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:23:22 Thomas: Yeah, no, totally. I think the biggest disappointment with that whole thing is just how little space there really is if you get down to arguments. There's not that much disagreement. There are a few things. I'm not trying to paint a picture of that.

Actually, James and Eli totally agree, but just to pick them as examples of either their side, uh, you know, just for the sake of ease, they agree on a lot more than I think you would think just from the nature of listening to them debate and argue and all that. But so much of it is just, you know, I really think it's just, I've got my side I've identified with and, you know, he's got his side he's identified with.

And it just blows out of proportion because of that, which I, I hate to always harp on this because it does tend to be true with most everything, but that's the reason I have to keep harping on it is because it's always the case that in-group, out-group is the biggest amount of divisiveness. Now, when it's something like atheism versus religion, I actually, there are, of course, in- group, out group problems. Of course, there always are with every group and everyone's guilty of it. But I wouldn't say that that's the main difference. You know, there's a difference here, right?

There's some genuine, you know, like when you believe in God and I don't, and you believe, you know, the Bible can teach you something about morals. And I think that's the worst idea ever to use that. You know, there's major disagreement there to the point where, you know, I'm not just trying to constantly be someone in the middle who's like, no, let's talk.

0:24:58 Thomas: It's like, no, I do think that we need to try to hash that out because the one side I believe is pretty much wrong. And the other side's right. When it comes to something like the social justice divide, I'm not even talking about, hey, we're all atheists here, so let's get along. I don't even mean that. I just mean in terms of the actual difference in opinion, it's not as broad.

I mean, when you ask like, okay, what trigger warnings are you in favor of or against? They ended up being virtually similar. Like Eli and James ended up kind of being similar on that. It's just that, the anti-social justice side is looking at the trend line and they're looking at like the worst examples and saying, oh, this is where it's going, you know. Yeah, mandatory trigger warnings on a daily conversation. They're just looking at, you know... And then Eli's side is doing the same thing. They are saying, well, the other side is just racist. They want us to constantly do hate speech against everybody just to toughen them up. And it's like, it's not really, we're not really that different. It's kind of interesting. So I don't know if you've found that to be true.

0:25:44 Al: Classism.

0:26:06 Al: I definitely agree with you. And I think there are a lot of people who would agree with each other more if they sat down and talked about it, which is what, you know, I know you try to do, and I've tried to do with a lot of our listeners. And I benefited from that because I live in one extreme and go to school in another. So I've kind of had both views of each end of it, which allows me to sort of try to bring people closer to the center. I live in a very very very red section of Pennsylvania near Harrisburg, but I commute to Philadelphia to the University of Pennsylvania, which, you know, they, the Ivy League schools have been in the news for this for being too far on the other side. The Yale incident specifically brought a lot of attention to it. So since I commute, and when I was still working in retail, I would be at school where people would be almost, I don't want to say overprotected, but highly protected.

0:27:02 Al: A lot of safe spaces. Most classes had trigger warnings. You know, if there was something that needed to come up, it could be discussed. And in any class I've had, there's never been any real problem. But then I'd go to work and I worked with mostly 50s conservative white male Republicans who would not only mock the people I love and the people that I would see every day, but then would make comments like, those elite soft people over at that liberal Ivy League school don't understand this, but I just read this email that says Obama's really going to use the Washington Monument to transmit Muslim recipes over to Seattle and use the Space Needle to make a tightrope that he's going to make all the Republicans crossers, you know, something like that.

0:27:46 Thomas: Hey, you don't have to tell me about conservative conspiracy theories. Like, I honestly, I, again, I try to be in the middle. I can totally recognize some conservative ideals that I would be cool with exploring, you know, taxation, small government. I'm totally cool with, in principle, exploring those ideas. But boy, is the Republican side rife with conspiracy theories about Obama. It's so common. It's alarmingly common. That's interesting. So you're really on both sides of that in your life, you know, to a real personal degree. That's fascinating. So how does that inform your view on some of this stuff? Have you seen examples of like, oh, this is, don't know, know, for lack of a better term, this is social justice stuff going too far, or is that not really, has that not really come up for you? Oh

0:27:50 Al: Hasn't Not really come up for me personally, just because I'm a lot older than most of the students I'm in class with, and they've sort of been raised with that idea that they have safe spaces and places to go, and most of the people in my classes know where those places are and know where they can go. But at the same time, there has been a suicide epidemic at our school. So that's really why they've been trying to push forward those safe spaces and let people know where counselors are, where psychiatric help is, because it's all free for students. So, that's more of what I've seen, is people not knowing the resources they have beyond being able to go to a place with other people to talk about things. That's been the worst thing I've seeing, because I think our school had like 10 suicides in a year or something, thing and It's but yeah, so suicide prevention is something we've definitely been championing a lot because, meme 25

0:29:23 Thomas: My gosh. What's the total attendance there? Sorry to interrupt.

0:29:31 Al: 000, yeah.

0:29:32 Thomas: Gosh, because I, so I went to a smaller school of only 5,000, but I don't think there was a suicide my entire four years in college. That's 10 suicides in a year? Wow.

0:29:44 Al: And the biggest problem, I think, is that they're panicking and they don't know what to do, which is completely understandable because it's out of control. But the most recent one that spawned a lot of the handing out flyers where the counseling services were and everything, uh, they weren't even calling it a suicide, they were calling it an accident, but the girl stepped in front of a train. It's ugly. And because I've lost 16 people in my life that way too, since I was in ninth grade, I've left 16 people that I've known to suicide. I dedicate as much time as I can to talk about that because that's something people don't want to talk about at all. And I had a speaker on episode 30 who lost two brothers to suicide and now goes all around the country talking, you know, like we said, just trying to get a conversation started, but about one of the things that's hardest to talk about.

0:30:39 Thomas: Yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, I don't know much about what would solve that problem. I'm assuming, you know, maybe nobody does if it's such a big problem. But gosh, anything that could curb that, 10 suicides in a year in one school, that is incredible. That would be really depressing. I would have a hard time dealing with that if I went there. Is there any sort of pattern of the kinds of people it's affecting or the kinds of problems that those people have? Is it LGBT or is it, you know, is there any pattern to it? Or is it just kids who are feeling too much pressure, you know, in general or something?

0:31:15 Al: The biggest problem seems to be the stress. And that's been the biggest problem with most of the students I've encountered because I'm 30. Most of the kids I go to school with are 18 to 22. So that may not sound like a lot of years, but there really is a generation gap. There really is a generation gap there. You asked earlier if I saw a lot of the problems with the SJWs, and most of the problem I have with the particular kind of people I go to school with is oblivion. They're not aware of anything outside of their very rich, very privileged perspective, but it's never malicious. It's more just being completely unaware. To wear. And I think that's also the problem that may be leading to a lot of these drastic solutions, because these are kids who have trust funds and are related to diplomats and politicians and doctors and lawyers. I mean, Donald Trump's daughter and Joe Biden's granddaughter just graduated from my school this semester. So it's not like we're talking obscurity.

0:31:18 Thomas: Hmm.

0:31:29 Thomas: No, it's a lot of years. That's a ton of years, yeah.

0:32:18 Al: But when you, you grow up with that kind of privilege and you've never known anything else, to suddenly come to a school like this where the average reading per class is 700 pages a week. And, you know, it's so competitive that if you get anything less than a B, you might as well get an F, at least in a lot of the perspectives. I mean, it is so competitive. I am in the arts programs, you know, English and film. So, we do not see that as much. But when you have Wharton School of Business, Wharton School of Engineering, the nursing program, Penn Hospital, Penn's Children's Hospital, the Penn Law. There are so many different schools of education because there's 12 sub-schools within our school.

0:33:05 Al: And most of them are in competition with Harvard and Yale and Princeton as tops in the nation. So you go from a relatively low stress, living at home with mom mom and dad, never having to struggle, never having to work, never having to worry about money, to going to confront that level of competition and that level of stress. And it just breaks some people, unfortunately. One of the guys who committed suicide relatively recently was a track star, and then just suddenly started getting more distant and more distant and disappeared. And it's terrifying.

0:33:43 Thomas: Wow, that is, yeah, is it essentially like just way too high expectations, you think, like on the part of parents or friends or whoever it is, and the kids are maybe just not thinking they're able to live up to that? Is that the kind of common thread you're identifying there?

0:34:02 Al: It could be, I think it's more just the jump in the level of stress and expectation. Because if you look at the younger kids right now, and people my age were really the last group of kids who were able to go out and play by themselves, or who were able to get into fights with each other and resolve it, or go to the park by themselves. I have a nine and an eight-year-old, and I'll get arrested if I let them go to the park and it's three blocks away.

0:34:07 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:34:30 Al: So there's always been that, you know, know the parents hovering, and I'm sure it's especially prevalent with rich people because they don't want, you know, those poor ghetto kids intermingling with them, and I don't even really think they're that malicious, but they do it unintentionally. When you have that it's

0:34:47 Thomas: Well, okay, but this is so weird because the whole social justice thing seems to be from a point of view of trying to encourage, you know, people of color in schools. And so it's curious that there's like a, you've got a privileged school, a very privileged school, but then that's also where this social justice stuff is happening so much. Why do you think that is?

0:35:12 Al: Hard to say, um, part of it is just that a lot of people with different identities are allowed to explore it, and you know, our school has a whole big building completely dedicated to the LGBT community, and and it's definitely a safe space for them. But even within those who would be considered minorities or relatively oppressed, level of privilege that comes along with having the money to go there. Just to give you some perspective, like I said, 25,000 kids go to that school. I'm part of the very, very, small minority who are allowed in based on community college excellence. So, you know, we're the only part of the school that is allowed to have loans for financial aid. Even they have a no loan policy. We're the Only exceptions. And there are 300 of us. So that's really the level of it.

0:36:01 Thomas: Does that mean no loan policy? So that means the, why would they have a no loan policymakers? What does that mean? Like, what does that accomplish for them?

0:36:09 Al: Me, their Financial aid program is based entirely on income. Uh, so if you're not one of the non-traditional community college transfers like myself, uh, you can get grants and it's all based on, you know, you and your family's level of income, but they, they do not do student loans, uh, because they don't want people leaving the school with debt, which once again is another level of privilege that someone like myself who had to go back to school at 25 and work his entire way through college will never know, uh, Well,

0:36:42 Thomas: Yeah, well, and this is totally not all that relevant, but it's just kind of blowing my mind. How would would you even enforce a no loan policy? Like, how can they stop me from just getting a loan and saying, yeah, I got this money here. I'll pay for, for school.

0:36:55 Al: Well, you can get a loan on your own, but you can't get it through the financial aid department. They won't do it. That's what it is. You Can seek out private loans, but the financial aide office isn't going to do a Stafford loan for you unless you're someone like me who is 30 years old and commuting 100 miles. So

0:36:59 Thomas: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. Okay So I want to wrap it up a little bit, but this is very interesting. And, and I guess the last last thing I want to ask as regards the suicide problem is, I wonder, at that point, when you're a school that's having, you know, again, I suppose in the grand scheme of things, 10 people out of 25,000, it's not like a huge number. It's not, like, oh, if you go there, it is a guarantee. You know, it s a pretty small percentage, but from a sort of a visceral, you now, visibility perspective, that's definitely got to affect people. And it's certainly something no school would want to have. I wonder if just, is there a lot of just in general suicide prevention stuff, you know, getting out like if first day of class syllabus, if you're feeling too much pressure, if You're feeling like you can't handle it, you Know, we've got all these resources for you.

0:38:04 Thomas: Please go to them. You know, is that because to my mind, that's not at all related to social justice. And I don't really think the two really even need to be related or trigger warnings or, you know what I mean? It's more like, just please use these resources if you need them.

0:38:21 Al: Yeah, I wouldn't connect the two issues other than that they are things that we have focused on on the show. And when it comes to suicide it's

0:38:29 Thomas: Oh, sorry. Well, maybe I was connecting them because people have, sorry, maybe that was going on in my brain and I didn't explain it. So I was making the connection because there are people on both sides who say, A, we need these trigger warnings to prevent this trauma that people people that would maybe be leading to a mental health crisis. And then on the other side, there's actually the people who say all this protection, trigger warnings, and all that are leading to the mental health crises. And there's kind of a debate on that. I don't know where you stand on that, and maybe I should have explained that better before asking the question. But now, having said that, now how

0:38:35 Al: I would

0:39:09 Thomas: Would you answer that question?

0:39:11 Al: Answer the question with the fact that suicide is not just a problem at our school, it's the third leading killer in the country, but you know, I don't really think the the social justice thing has a lot of connection to it. Uh, I I often see them in different arguments. Uh, the people who are connecting trauma are usually not the people who are having suicide problems. And that's just based on my own observations. But to answer your earlier question about the resources, no, they are not on the syllabus. They are not very well known. The school has been trying to catch up. And it's only been this semester that I've really started to see these things appear in my email inbox. The school sending out things, the president sending sending out messages about what the resources are, because I had been there.

0:39:59 Al: I just finished my junior year. So I've been there for three years. And this semester was the first time I even knew there was a counseling department you could go to and that it was free to students. I wasn't having suicidal or mental illness problems, but I was having a problem with learning a foreign language. And they ended up sending me there to get some neurological study done to see if there's some kind of disconnect. So I got sent there by a professor who happened to know about it. And I, I've spent there, I didn't even know this was here And you know, it's, it's on campus. It's accessible. Uh, there's always someone there and there's a lot of good psychologists and psychiatrists working there who are trying to do all they can, but the visibility has just not caught up with it yet. And with it, with the level of suicide at our school being called an epidemic, um, like I said, the first semester I was there, one of them happened, one of the girls jumped off the parking garage.

So I don't even have the statistics, but I know it's been a major, it's been enough of a problem to be considered an epidemic, as it is in this country, and as it does globally. Suicide doesn't discriminate. It doesn't, you know, discriminate against gender. It doesn't discriminate against income, religion, everything. It affects so many many different people.

And the best thing that I try to do is just let people know that those resources are out there at our school or the gentleman we had on the show.

0:40:25 Thomas: Huh. Yeah.

0:41:25 Al: He said his inbox is always open. He's more than willing to listen to anybody who contacts him. And we had Callie Wright talking about the trans hotline for people of specifically trans identifying labels. So It's just trying to catch up. And the biggest problem surrounding it isn't social justice or trigger warnings, it's the stigma surrounding mental health and people saying that suicide is weakness, especially when it happens with someone like Robin Williams, a celebrity. So when you go to an Ivy League school where there's that high level of competition, it often, if you're suffering or struggling, it's often seen as you're not trying hard enough, you need to step up your game. It's never addressed as are you having problems, is this going on. And I think that that drives a lot of people who have not had to have as many struggles in their lives to take drastic measures because they're overwhelmed. And that's the unfortunate sadness of the oblivion from people of a certain level of privilege who have not had to work through their own problems.

0:42:30 Al: And I know I'm generalizing and that's not fair to all of them, but at the same time, I recognize it every day when I'm in there, when I just have certain people looking at me going, why do you have to work? I don't understand. Like that. Like I said They're not mean about it, they're just completely unaware of what goes on outside of that little circle of a university in the middle of Philadelphia. I mean, I drive for Uber, there are people who won't go over to Temple because they think they might get shot. It's the same city, you just deal with that level of, I don't want to call it dissonance, but just an unaware outside the bubble.

I know there's always the joke of the religious and conservative bubble, but the liberal bubble is we have to stay here where we're safe because there are bad people out there who are going to rob us. So when people inside that bubble are struggling and they're feeling the pressure from their parents, they're feeling the struggle of the competition, especially especially in a law school where there's things like mandatory fails and, you know, you have all this work heaping up.

0:42:43 Thomas: Yeah, I

0:43:36 Al: Like I said, 700 pages of reading a week per class. I mean, it's exponential. In my experience, you know, I came from community college. The work is not harder. There's just so much more of it. A typical English class at my community college was we'd read three or four books and analyze them. In an English class, at Penn, novel a week. And we're not talking short novels, we're talking like Bronte novels. So trying to fit all that in

0:44:03 Thomas: Quit. I drop out. Sorry, can't do that much reading. Yeah, want just to put one further clarification, just because I don't want to leave people with the wrong impression. The mental health, I think you said, you know, it's not a university problem. It's a society problem because suicide is an epidemic in society and all that. I hope I kind of represent you correctly there. I just want to clarify that there is a recent mental health epidemic in colleges. So there's more people being identified as having major depression, having these issues in universities, and it's a recent thing. So that's why I think people are making the claim of, I think it's sort of a correlation claim, which is, or sorry, a, yeah, a correlation, but, but not necessarily a causation, but they're just saying, oh, trigger warnings and all this started getting popular around this time.

0:44:03 Al: Yeah. Well I've I've finished the English major, so I don't have to do it anymore. I

0:44:57 Thomas: And, you Know, this mental health epidemic started getting popularity around this time and, or getting popular, started going up around this time. And so, so surely they're, they're correlated and there's a relationship there. But so that's kind of the claim. But just to clarify that. But yeah, no, really good stuff. I'm really sad that, you know, there's not more visibility of those resources at your school. And I assume if it's happening at your School, you know, I'm sure it's somewhat representative of what's going on in universities around the country. So I would hope that that seems like a very, very easy thing. Just beginning of every class. Hey, you know, there's been a problem out there. There are people who are taking drastic measures, you know, when it comes to stress. And we just want to let you know that there's resources. If you feel this pressure, please talk to someone. Please talk to that.

0:45:04 Al: Yeah.

0:45:49 Thomas: You know that takes five seconds. It takes 10 seconds, you know. And that it's not, that's not even like a trigger warning or anything. So I don't know why that would be even at all controversial. I wish that would just be, you know, something that people would do. But oh, well, maybe someday.

0:46:04 Al: I Hope it, I hope it becomes more regular, because they've, they, the panic has really shown with how they're trying to go, oh no, we need to get this out now. You know, I, I had several emails from the president and the school in my inbox after the most recent one. So they're at least trying to catch up, but they need to make it more visible and more apparent. And an ad in the school newspaper isn't going to do it when you can't get most people to look up from their phones to pick it up. So yeah, that would be perfect, which is probably why they did it via email because your student email is connected to your regular email address. So there's definitely a level of visibility there.

0:46:20 Thomas: Right. Yeah, it needs to go right to their phones.

0:46:41 Thomas: Yeah. All right. Well, Al Laiman, the show is the Inciting Incident Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you coming on and talking to me.

0:46:52 Al: Thank you for having me on. I look forward to coming back again sometime.

0:47:14 Thomas: All right, that does it for episode 252. Sorry, my voice was a little terrible when I recorded with Al. Apologies for that. I think it was actually... I thought I was sick for like two weeks and then I realized this is too long to be sick. So I think I might have been allergies. I've been taking allergy medication for the past couple weeks and I think its cleared up a little bit. But boy, it is rough allergy-wise out in California this time of year. So anyway, I want to thank my patrons over at patreon.com/atheist. Thank you guys so much. It's been a while, so I actually have some new ones I need to thank. Dustin, wow, how do I pronounce that? Cycad, maybe? Allahng Blakok, Stephen Skinner, Torsten, wow. Why is everybody so hard to pronounce today? If you're supporting the show, you can be as hard to pronounce as you want. Torsten Pihl, I guess. Mary Crook. Well, that was easy. Malachi Constant, Ryan Lippen, Dan Irizarry, and Shiran Kochavi. Thank you guys so much. Sorry that I couldn't pronounce you. Really difficult to pronounce names.

0:48:22 Thomas: But then I got to thank my all-time greats as well. Allahng Blakok, $10 pledge. Thank you so much. Inciting Incident Podcast. Well there you go. We just talk to him. Thank you. Kaylee Reiser, Zimu Zinu Jr., Adrian Borschoff, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Steve Sigmund, Peter Skelton, Brian Garefort, Dale, Matt Garrett, and Ian Rozzano, Samantha. Thank you guys so much. In my opinion, you guys are heroes for supporting a show that really is trying to have the conversation. I really am trying to have both sides of the conversation on. That is the core of my show. That's the core of my personal beliefs that we need to get all sides on. And I'm really not afraid to do it. So thank you guys so much. I really want this to be the norm.

0:49:08 Thomas: I wish it was the norm and never will be. But the more listeners I can get and the more people supporting, then the more we make a statement that this should be the normal. We should have debates between James and Eli and whoever else, you know, we should get both sides of these issues. So thank you so much for making your voice heard by supporting the show. I really appreciate it. Is all for today's show, join next week I got good guests planned, and what else to say, pledge at patreon.com/atheist, get bonus content, Get early access to episodes, all that good stuff, and show that you care about a conversation, All right, that's all for this week. See ya.