AS255: How To Be Wrong Better

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 255, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Okay, it's been a little while since I've done a merely commentary, or still, I guess, kind of Tom and Terry, I guess I never officially got rid of the name, I was going to, but then some people said they liked it, but I'll keep Tom and Terri, I just hate, I don't like appearing, you know, full of myself, I got to, when I saw a GAD SAD, or SOD, or whatever, naming everything after his name, that's, I think that's when I was like, okay, I gotta get rid of Tom and Terry, I don't want to do that, but whatever, none of that, it doesn't matter what I call it, I'm going to be talking about a number of different things, so here's the thing, interesting-ish story, I had been planning on talking about a lot of things, for one thing, there's been attacks in Bangladesh, in Iraq, in, gosh, name a place, there has been a horrible attack there in the last 24 to 48 hours, unfortunately, and I had some other topics, little things here and there.

One thing was I saw, I had seen David Smalley wrote an article about The fact that Christian Mingle was going to have to provide services to gay people, and I had seen Tyler Vela, who you may know on the show. Tyler Vella is, I appreciate that he comes on from time to time and will debate and I really love that about him. However, I'll say, and he will agree with me, that he and I disagree on just about every possible thing that there is. So when I saw Tyler Vela quoting Smalley's article and saying,

0:02:10 Thomas: Well, if the quote that Tyler quoted was something like, if this ruling is right, then secular media group will have to start providing Christian content or whatever. And that, I just thought, that can't be right. I'm not a lawyer, but there's no way that that's the same thing. And so I was going to just talk about it and talk about what I thought. And then... I just happened to see on a post on Facebook that Eli was asking some opinions on that article that Smalley wrote. He was asking his friends, you know, what do you think about this? And Smalley and Andrew Torrez, who you'll know and love, who's going to be a guest once again. I'm going to, literally going to talk to him tomorrow about the Second Amendment, which, of course, in podcast land means that episode will be out in, who knows, a week or a week and a half.

0:03:00 Thomas: But anyway, great guest. I love Andrew. He's one of my favorite people. He's knowledgeable, fun to talk to, extremely nice. And I saw a vicious argument where Smalley got incredibly personal and incredibly insulting. And I'll be honest, it turned it from, oh, I was going to talk about this thing and say, oh, maybe, you know, maybe Smalley got this wrong. Maybe he's right. You know, I was going to talk about it just like I would talk about any other blog post. It turned from that to now I'm going to talk about why Smalley completely failed in this respect, because he was wrong and then doubled down and went ad hominem in order to protect, which is something we wouldn't tolerate from any religious person.

0:03:53 Thomas: You know, as a skeptic community, we would not, we would call out that behavior. So, that's what I, and then I also wanted to talk about some other stuff. I wanted to talk about the gun control show, the gun control debate between Eli and Travis. Got a tremendous number of comments. I wanted to be sure to read some because I so rarely get to read your guys's comments, but I always, and by that I mean on the show, I always look at them, But I wanted to read some on the show because it's always good to do that. And I appreciate that you participate and comment on the show. That being said, it wasn't even for me. I mean, there's a healthy debate going on on Facebook and I think on the website about those shows and I'm not even really involved. So it's not as though those comments are for me necessarily, but I even still, I want to make sure I show my appreciation for you guys participating by reading some of them.

0:04:47 Thomas: So that was that's kind of my agenda for the show. I just brought that up to say, you know, the David Smalley article was going to be one small thing on the agenda. But now I don't know, seeing my friend being called names really, I'm going to have to call Smalley out on this. So I'm gonna spend maybe a little more time than I would have otherwise.

0:05:15 Thomas: So I want to start this out by saying a couple of things. First, I want to let you guys know, even though you may know this already, you may not, you may not believe this, I don't know, I'm not sure how you feel, but I just want to give you my assurance that whenever I'm critiquing someone like in the way that I'm about to critique David Smalley and how he handled this, the first thing I do is, it's like the saying, when you point your finger at someone and you got two pointed back, or whatever the hell that is, four, three, some weird thing. It's like that for me. The first thing I do is, wait a minute, do I do this? Am I guilty of this? Just to let you guys know, I am way, way too internalizing.

0:06:01 Thomas: I internalize everything. I think it's good to internalize. I think it, on the whole, we would be much better as a society if people did internalize. I think my internalization dial is dialed up way too much, and it causes me problems in my personal life because I have a terrible time with that, just to share a little too much about myself. I have hard time, you know, when I know I've done something wrong, I really beat myself up about it too, way too much. So that's kind of where I am. So I just want to put that out there because it's always easy. It's my show. It is easy for me to come on and just point fingers at people who do things wrong, or use it as a platform to just make it seem like everything I do is right and everything, other, you know, everything everyone else does is wrong, and everything they think is right. I don't want to do that, and I'm really conscious of that.

And I also will point out that the number one criticism I do receive, and actually, I received this criticism on that PodTrack survey, and by the way, you can still fill that out if you want to. There's, if you go to AtheisticallySpeaking.com, there's a link that'll say, "Fill out the PodTrack survey." I don't need it anymore. I need a certain number.

I don't need those anymore, but I do still read them, and it is a good anonymous place to leave feedback for what features of the show you like and what you don't like.

0:07:31 Thomas: And it's tough. Part of that internalization is it's hard when I see people criticizing me. That's never easy for anybody. I think it's really hard for me. I know I don't brush stuff off easily, but it's also helpful. It's also, and I would say the biggest criticism I got was that I apologize too much and that I don't just say what I'm thinking, that I qualify things too much by saying, well, this is my opinion, etc., etc., so it's interesting that that is the biggest criticism I've got. I have also had people say they like that about me, that that I'm not just telling people I know all the answers, etc. So, who knows? You can't please everyone, but I do take that to heart. I have tried to do that less. I've tried to apologize for what I'm saying less.

0:08:18 Thomas: I may be particularly sensitive for this episode because I'm really quite upset with how David acted, and really am honestly just going to call him out for being kind of terrible on this respect. So, I think doing that makes me feel really self-conscious for that reason. So I hope you understand that. And with that said, I'm going to get to that, what happened. So here it is, "How Not to Be Wrong." I think that should be, maybe that'll be the episode title, "How to Not Be Wrong," this is how to NOT handle being wrong about something. So somewhere in the depths of this Facebook interaction, I know it's going to be, it's a little weird that I'm reading Facebook comments, but they're all public, they're all out there, and I think this is important because David Smalley is a public guy, he's he's writing his blog.

0:09:13 Thomas: He's putting his thoughts out there, and he has a podcast. I mean, he's perfectly capable of defending himself, so I'm going to read what happened here. Wait, sorry, first I'd better summarize the article. I take it back. The article is, Pro-Gay Atheist Sides with Christian Mingle. I don't, probably shouldn't read the whole thing. I will find some good quotes to summarize it. It. The overall story is Christian Mingle agreed to a settlement in which it's going to provide dating services to gay members, and that's the key word. It's a settlement. This is not, I don't, this is something that David missed in his article. He, David treated this settlement as though this was now legal precedent, and you'll find out why that was a mistake later if you don't know already.

0:10:01 Thomas: Ready. So I guess here's one point that he made. "None of the articles covering this have mentioned that UNRWA also includes the line saying that all people are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever. Notice how it mentions in all businesses establishments. It's one thing to protect existing customers, like a gay couple sitting in a restaurant being asked to leave, but this claim isn't addressing that.

It was filed against Christian Mingle for not accommodating future or potential customers, even online, by not offering an option they preferred. That's not discrimination and certainly isn't mistreatment in a business. That's a service not offered by a private company which they have a right not to offer. Since when can the government tell us what products or services we must offer to future customers?" Part that Tyler quoted, so I think it's important to read here. Yes, the outcome of this claim now sets the precedent, again it doesn't, if you don't make services available based on accommodating the religion of potential customers, you're also in violation of UNRWA. And he said that because religion is one of the protected classes, just like sexuality. Let's wrap our heads around that. The parent company of Christianmingle.com is the Spark network, they also own Catholic blah blah blah.

But But since they don't have a site focused on gay singles or same-sex option on Kristen Mingle, they are in violation of UNRWA. This is a huge problem. I am an atheist business owner. According to this judge's interpretation of UNRA, again, let's just highlight that. We'll come back to that later. If I were to move secular Media Group LLC to California, I'd be in violation too.

0:11:40 Thomas: We have seven podcasts we offer in our network. None of them are Christian. We offer children's books on science. None are Muslim. We offer blogs and news from an atheist perspective. None of them are Jewish. According to this logic, a judge would be able to rule that secular media group discriminates based on religion by not offering podcasts or books for potential Christian, Muslim, or Jewish customers, thereby forcing me, by way of a judge's ruling, to begin offering religious-based materials so that potential religious customers aren't offended by what I don't offer. Uh, okay, so I think that's probably enough to go on there. So here's the thing, I had some opinions on this, but it would be impossible for me to, now that I've read a lot of Andrew's posts, to try to salvage what my original thoughts were before reading an expert's opinion.

0:12:31 Thomas: So I'm just going to have to go ahead and give credit to pretty much everything I'm going to say to Andrew Torrez. He deserves all the credit because reading his posts really helped. I, again, I was going to comment before I saw this, but his comments are so much better that I'll like, it would be impossible for me to comment and not just reference his better legally informed comments. So here's what happened on Facebook. Andrew said, I think he had commented a number of places, he commented on the article itself and David never replied or anything, so here's the thing. We need to put this in context, which admittedly, perhaps David Smalley didn't have, I'm not sure if he knows Andrew or to what extent he clicked, all he'd have to do is click on the name Andrew Torrez, he would see the profile that he's a lawyer, that would be pretty easy.

0:13:19 Thomas: Um, but for this, this is something that Andrew is an expert on, and this is David who has just completely bungled basically all the relevant information, uh, and has made a total mockery of the law. So imagine being an expert in something. See, because, you know, I wouldn't know that. I'm not a lawyer, but imagine being in expert like Andrew and seeing someone completely bungle this. Here's what he said. "David Smalley, you're just wrong about this. CM does not offer straight dating services.

That would be a violation of UNRRA Act 2. CM," you know, Christian Mingle, "offers dating services, period. And until this settlement kicks in, they offer them in a way that plainly violates the UNRWA Act. David, what I'd like to know from you is where was your outrage when Christian-backed dating site eHarmony entered into this exact same settlement six years years ago, and given your parade of bizarre, slippery slope horribles hasn't happened in the six years since the eHarmony settlement," isn't it possible that you're just engaged in hyperbole now? Okay, so definitely a bit confrontational there, so I grant that, but check out this response.

Wow, Andrew Torrez, your arrogance is unprecedented. For starters, this is a highly nuanced topic that can have multiple opinions and interpretations. No one has to be just wrong. That's a childish way of looking at it. Secondly, I did rage about this six years ago. Really? Color me skeptical. Show me proof. Proof. Finally, CM is a private company that offers Christian dating. How they believe dating should be? Well, we may disagree with it. That is their right. Allowing our government to step in and determine what services they offer as a private country puts us all at risk of government overreach.

0:15:06 Thomas: "You're fighting for something that will eventually lead to every secular company being in violation of this interpretation of the law and being forced to have Christian options and hiring Christian people. Be careful what you wish for." Now, I apologize for reading from Facebook posts. I really do. This is not the show I want to do, but it's so crucial when we're talking about how to be a skeptic, how to be a public intellectual, or even how to reason in public, or just interact. As a skeptical person, as someone who should be open to argument, should want to hear an expert opinion, I just have to to read a couple more posts here. So bear with me to really illustrate how not to do this. So Andrew answers in order.

0:15:53 Thomas: He said, I'm sorry if I'm coming across as arrogant to you. This is what I do for a living. And sometimes it's painful when amateurs get on and start offering extremely confident and extremely wrong opinions about the law, particularly those that begin with gross misconceptions about what the law is. I'm Sorry If That Hurts Your Feelings, but you you repeatedly describing a settlement as though it were a judicial opinion. And that's kind of like if I came on your podcast and started describing podcasts as if they were some kind of kangaroo. This is not a highly nuanced topic. Just because you happen to have a contrary opinion, go ahead and talk to a dozen other lawyers, and I promise you that none of them will agree with you. I asked if you raged about eHarmony. Okay, that's not that important. Oh, no, it is. And he said, I didn't assume you didn't, so given that you apparently did and given that nothing like what you said would happen has happened over the past six years, why would you double down and say it's going to happen now?

0:16:49 Thomas: "Four, allowing our government to step in and determine what services they offer as a private company puts us all at risk for government overreach. Congratulations, you've just argued against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Seriously, Robert Bork said this in 1987, and and that's why he was deemed unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. You're fighting for..." He's quoting, David. "No, I'm not. You could go read the UNRRA Act for yourself. It's only one sentence long, and Wikipedia article is pretty good for a layperson. I've already explained at great length in multiple threads here and in a short comment on your website that your slippery slope arguments are ill-founded. You haven't engaged with any of the substance of what I said. I don't know why you're digging in your heels here. You've screwed up legal analysis. That's not a big deal." You're not a lawyer. Why not just say, oops, I didn't realize this was a settlement, and now that I look at the act, that I get that this is limited in scope. Lots of other people have done that in this thread already.

0:17:47 Thomas: And then David Smalley replied, "Amateur? Fuck you. Being an attorney doesn't make you right 100% of the time. You clearly have no idea what I do for a living to call me an amateur." Okay, I have to point out that it actually says "armature," he said, "Armature? Fuck you," and I think what's so funny about that is that it also says "edited," so he edited the comment, I, look, Smalley might have just been drunk, I'll be honest, he could have just been drunk, but then we just need to not drunk Facebook or something, "armature," edited, um, so he went straight to like literally said "fuck you" because he called him an amateur, which is strictly speaking correct.

0:18:33 Thomas: So I'm going to read one more thing just to see how this played out, again, bear with me, I'm sorry, it, it is, I think it is important though. I'll, so, Andrew said, And then David's reply to this, Do you think he's going to back down? I got news for you. He's not backing down. Andrew Torrez, yeah, no shit. I debate for a living, so that would make you the amateur in this discussion.

0:19:21 Thomas: That's one of the dumbest things I think I've ever seen in print. I really, I'm at a loss here. I mean, because you debate for the sake of the show, for a loving that makes you not an amateur on any topic you might discuss. Hey, look, Sean Carroll. Look, I know you're into physics and all that. You know something about physics. I'm going to debate you. And furthermore, you're the amateur because I debate. I do a lot of debating. So I'm the expert in this situation. What a stupid thing to say. Sorry. I think what's most funny about this that Andrew replied with is he's actually not only a listener to Dogma Debate, but a subscriber to Dogmatebate, so he knew and knows what David does for a living, and it had no impact on this discussion, so I think that was the most hilarious part.

0:20:10 Thomas: Now David went on, he did go on in a bit to say some more stuff about how he was pissed off, and then he made some more legal arguments that Andrew replied to and were totally wrong, I won't bore you with that, that would be another ten minutes of just reading, so I won't bore you that, I hear from Andrew, from the horse's mouth, that he's going to put up a blog post explaining the legality, I'm sure, Andrew, and this is the thing, this is why I have to call Smalley out on this, because Andrew is the nicest guy in the world. And he's so nice, he'll probably just write a blog post and just explain the legality. He probably wouldn't even mention this exchange. But anyway, who knows? I could be wrong about that. But he's the nicest guy. And I can't not call out someone saying fuck you and calling him an asshole and all that when he's The Expert and Smalley is not.

0:21:03 Thomas: Ask yourselves, would we we tolerate this from, uh, a climate change skeptic to a climate scientist? Would we do, would we say, Oh, look, ask, fuck you. The people disagree, man. There's, you don't have to be a lawyer. You know, you'd have to beat climate scientists to understand, to read a thermometer dude here. Let me tell you why, why you're wrong. I mean, it is okay to say, to, to pose questions. It's totally cool to say, oh, okay, you're a lawyer. Here, let me run this by you. Here's what I think. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. You don't have to have the same opinion as every expert. Experts disagree. You can have a different opinion. That's totally Cool. You can even, if you want, you can have a different Opinion on Climate Change.

0:21:50 Thomas: But you need to take the attitude that you're going to maybe learn. When you're not an expert in life, when you're not the expert, take the attitude that you're going to possibly learn from the expert. I think telling the expert, fuck you, you arrogant, you know, whatever, for having a more informed opinion than me, I think that's when you've lost it. Can we agree that that is when you bought? Look, we've all been there. I don't know. I think possibly David, again, I'm not going to pretend to know what's going on in his mind, but it's clear that, I mean, he had a lot invested in this opinion. I don't know if he still feels the same way, but you know clearly when you've written a blog post and you've you've gone Out on a limb with this opinion, you're getting, naturally, it's a human impulse to feel defensive about your opinion, that's totally, that happens to me, that happen to you, that happened to everybody, we get defensive about our opinions, for sure.

0:22:47 Thomas: Personally, I just would expect a little better from someone who does what David Smalley does and who's a successful podcaster, probably has a billion more listeners than I do, I don't even, the reason I don′t even worry about talking about him on my show is he probably won't even notice me, he's got more listeners, he′s doing fine. I would expect more from him, I would, I mean, that is not how to be an example to the skeptic community, that's being a terrible example.

Example, so for whatever, I mean, who knows, maybe caught him at a bad time, bad mood, had a drink, who could be, any number of those things, I don't mean to condemn the person of David Smalley, not not by any means, but his actions in this case were really pretty terrible in my opinion and were completely contrary to what should be the example to the skeptic community, and I, I expect, in fact, guys, if I ever do anything like this, call me out on it. I'm going to do my best to not do anything like this. I mean, people get heated sometimes, I get it, but this seems so preemptive to me.

It seems so, it I mean, he flew off the handle almost immediately, granted, you know, Andrew said he was wrong, he said, look, you're wrong, and this is why, and that's direct, that's not easy, but it's, it wasn't quite, you know, fuck you level, I mean that was, that a whole, that is a different level, you know, that, he kicked into that gear far too soon, and Andrew is my friend, sure you could, If you want to call me biased, you can. I do like Andrew, but call me crazy. I'm going to be a little bit more biased toward the lawyer when it comes to a legal topic.

0:24:35 Thomas: So sue me for that one. Oh, just to wrap up the actual, uh, errors in Smalley's article, to speak nothing of this Facebook exchange, um, the settlement is the key thing, so the judge doesn't decide anything in the settlement, I think, I can't remember if Andrew said that in what I read of him already, the judge just, dis-, the judge, in a settlement, the judges just says, this is an okay settlement, like, he doesn't, it's, it has nothing to do with the UNRWA Act or anything like that, and Smalley said several places, the judge's ruling and the judge's interpretation of the UNRWA Act, that turns out to be totally incorrect statement. The judge doesn't interpret anything. And as Andrew said, settlements are not legally binding. This settlement could go one way completely, and then the next case could go a completely different way based And that could be that.

0:25:23 Thomas: Settlements aren't a precedent. That's the right way to put it. They aren't precedent. Furthermore, as Andrew pointed out, if we take, there's a crucial part of David's article where he said, you know, online things shouldn't be businesses, like that's not, they're not storefronts, they are not places of business, so therefore this shouldn't apply, Andrew pointed it out, well then, would it be okay for Amazon to just say no gays, you now, because it's not a storefront, or it's a place of business? Obviously you don't want to go down that road, so that's also incorrect. Correct. Now, here's the interesting thing, because I've actually been quite confused on this in the past, and I'm really glad, and, that I had a chance to read Andrew's posts and become more informed, because I was actually really confused on this.

0:26:09 Thomas: I was, okay, when it comes to the gay wedding cake controversy, the, uh, can't, does a Christian bakery have to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding? So, I always thought, and I've heard this argument before, well, does the Jewish bakery have to make a, you know, Nazi wedding cake or whatever? And I always thought, oh, that's a good counter argument because, yeah, I don't want that. I don'T want Jews being forced to make Nazi stuff, do I? Here's the thing. There's actually a totally reasonable distinction that I did not understand. I'm not a lawyer. I did NOT get this. And I'm so glad I've now learned this. And maybe you were like me and you had no idea too. Too. There's a difference between refusing your service and being asked to do a service you don't do anyway.

0:27:02 Thomas: So let me explain. If a baker is asked to make a cake that is, like, has a certain decoration on it, like a gay, like two naked dudes, like just fucking, and they're like, Christian Bakery, you gotta make this cake, because otherwise, you're not doing it, because we're gay, and then you'd be discriminating. They don't have to make product, now I hope I have this right, I'll run it by Andrew, and Andrew will tell me if I'm wrong, but I think this is what I've gathered from his posts. They don't have to make a product that they don't already make. So if they don't have to make a two guys butt fucking cake, they could just be like, we don't make that cake. Sorry, that's not. But that's different from making a cake and your business is you make cakes or whatever.

0:27:49 Thomas: And then two gay people come along and say, can we have a cake for our wedding? That you can't refuse on the basis of sexuality because you're just giving them your product that you would make anyway. So that answers the Nazi-themed cake conundrum. You can't actually just say if you're, for some reason, a Jewish bakery and you have a, there's a, the Klan rally and they're like, you know what would be good? A Nazi cake. Let's, yeah, let's go.

Let's get a Nazi cake, and so they come in there like, can we have this Nazi cake? You can tell them, I don't make Nazi cakes. That's not a cake thing. That's Not a product that I provide anyone. Nazis are not Nazis, and I think one of the solutions was. If they want like a gay decor, if they want like, a, uh, Nazi themed decoration, say, or like an inscription, Say you do inscriptions, you write like, "Happy birthday, Bobby," whatever, and they ask you, "Hey, can you write 'death to all Jews' on our cake?" Yeah, that's D-E-A-T-H. Oh, no, you weren't asking spelling, you were just confused. No, if you do that, and you say, "Can you write 'death to all Jews'?" They can say, "I'm not gonna do that, but I've provided the cake and the icing for you to write whatever you want on it." I'm pretty sure, from what I've gathered legally, that's acceptable.

There's the difference. Now, the way this applies to Christian Mingle and dating sites is that, and it is a little tricky here, so it's totally fine to be wrong about this, I probably, maybe I would have been wrong if I decided to write an article, again, it's fine to totally be wrong with something, you just do need to listen to an expert when they suggest that you are wrong and they're an expert, but been sure of.

0:29:34 Thomas: Because some people said in comments, they said, well, Christian Mingle is providing a man seeks woman or woman seeks man function or feature or whatever, a service to anyone. They're offering that to gays and straights alike. And this is a bit of a word game you can play. And Andrew pointed out that this is actually what Scalia did in a ruling, I think, about gay marriage, where he said, Well, yeah, it's not discriminatory because gays can get married to women. Gay men can get married to women too and whatever. So in that way, everyone's allowed to get straight married, even gay people. And technically, I think if you were just running this by some sort of numbers robot or logic bot and you're like, does that make sense?

0:30:22 Thomas: They'd be like, well, yes, that computes. You're offering a straight thing to gay people and straight people. So technically, but it turns out that that's just not how the law is followed. So and this is this is interesting. So I'm glad it's not how laws fall because really or how it's interpreted, because what they're really doing is they're offering dating services and they're doing it differently depending on sex. So if you're a man, they're only showing you women. And if youre a woman, theyre only showing men. Men. So they're doing it differently based on what gender you are. And that already is a red flag in terms of UNRWA and Civil Rights Act and all that. So that's the key there. And again, it's okay to be wrong about this kind of thing.

0:31:09 Thomas: I might have interpreted it the wrong way myself. But yeah, like I said, there's a right way to be wrong and there's wrong way to be wrong. David Smalley did the wrong way to be wrong.

0:31:31 Thomas: This actually branches me off to another topic. I, it's very, I think very brief, but something that I think is important to say, I just want to make clear that I, it's, this is no offense to people who enjoy Dogma Debate and listeners of Dogma Debate and all that, and the reason I say that, you know, really have fun, listen to Dogma Debate. I'm not, not damning, you know, David Smalley the person to hell for all eternity for one bad interaction. I don't mean that at all. So, but I bring that up because one of my favorite people, Harley, he's at Secular Lad on Twitter, and he's been on the show, I think probably twice, to talk about Jehovah's Witnessism, which I never know what the proper term is, Jehovah-ing, and I love Harley.

0:32:22 Thomas: He's been a listener of the T and the B for a while. He did intros for them. I think he's a little too busy now. He's going to school and all that. Really cool stuff. One of my favorite people. He posted a bit of a rant on Twitter about how he didn't think anyone had the right to tell him what to listen to. And I don't know if it was necessarily directed at me. It could have been. I'm not sure. But the end, the punchline of the whole thing was, "Here's what I'm admitting, I listen to my Milo Yiannopoulos and I support Dave Rubin," etc. This is Harley speaking, what he said, and it's okay, basically his thesis is, "It's OK that I don't agree with things he says, and that I, I dislike a lot of what he says, I can still listen to him and just be, you know, neutral and kind of be skeptical and take in information from all sides."

0:33:21 Thomas: I think this is certainly correct. I'm not telling anyone who to listen to, per se. I would never say you can't, you know. I am not here to forbid anyone from listening to something, but I do understand that.

I understand how when I say I don't think Ruben's having the real conversation, he's pretending to do something he's not, when I criticize that show or when I criticized Milo and say he said horrible stuff and go into examples, I do see that argument, and I think I think that's something interesting to think about where you can say, well, I listen to him, but I filter out the bad stuff or I disagree with it or whatever.

I think that's valid, but then I also think it, I can lament the popularity of people like Milo and Dave Rubin, I don't want to put them in the same, I think, well, it's funny that Rubin has been so enamored and enabled and broadened or broadcasted Milo's viewpoints, But I was just about to say I don′t think Rubin is anywhere near as bad as Milo, and then I realized, well, he promotes Milo all the time, he said, "I had him on the show multiple times and loves him." But anyway, I don't think he's anywhere near as bad as Milo, but I, I feel like I should both be able to lament the sweeping influence of Dave Rubin's show, and simultaneously, you can, you know, feel free to listen to it. There's nothing wrong with that.

I guess maybe when I criticize Ruben and Milo and people like that who have a huge following, I'm lamenting that huge following, so, so that's my middle ground there, I'm telling you, don't listen to people, whatever, you can listen to whoever you want, I mean, half the The religious nutjobs that other atheist podcasts talk about, like, I don't know, Ken Ham or whatever, like half their support is probably atheists laughing at him.

0:35:12 Thomas: I get that you can, you know, you could certainly watch something you don't agree with. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't know what to say. I lament how broad that viewpoint is and how broad his appeal is, that so many people think that the important sides of the war are anti-regressive left, to the point where it's okay to ally yourselves with Milo and Tommy Robinson and all kinds of guests who say pretty bad things in a lot of ways.

Like, why, I just wish that mindset weren't so prevalent, that the idea that the, the important, that the regressive left is so bad that it's okay to even maybe vote for Donald Trump over Hillary. I mean, I really, I, I don't need to talk about that more, maybe I'll do it again at a later date, we'll see, but go back to previous shows if you, if you want to hear more about that, but that's all I'm saying, it's true, no one should tell you what to listen to, definitely not me, but yeah, no-one should tell what to you listen to. I think that's true and I don't mean to tell people what to what to do, listen to what you want, support what you what, I suppose I'm lamenting and wishing more people didn't want to support that kind of thing, I guess, but the fact is, they do, he's got a huge following, lot bigger than mine, that's hey, my show's growing.

I think people are liking the fact that you get to hear more sides of things, and that's what I'm going to try to bring you. Now, when I'm just talking by myself, you're obviously getting my view, but hopefully I can find the guests and the debates to kind of bring you two sides of the issues, and you get to decide for yourself, and I think that people are really liking that.

0:36:59 Thomas: The show is growing, and I thank you guys so, so much for listening and And for makin' that growth happen. It's all because of you.

0:37:20 Thomas: Alright, well, I'm going to at least get to one comment. I just looked, again, at the website and the Facebook. There's 20 tri-billion-mrillion comments. Is that a number? So there's no way I'm getting to even a small portion of them. And then, when there's so many, it makes it hard to decide, like, what one do I pick? What do I do? Well, here's one that represents quite a few counter-arguments. Randy Harrison on Facebook says, Thomas, how many innocent people die each year in drunk driving accidents? How many wives beaten to death by drunk husbands? How many drunken date rapes abuse children? Just because you don't have the data nor any apparent desire to look for it doesn't mean the argument doesn't have merit.

0:38:07 Thomas: For your military objections, I will simply point you to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. More than a million well-supplied and trained Soviet soldiers, modern guns, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, bombs, and missiles were held off and eventually driven out by several thousand tribesmen with mostly just hunting rifles at first. And armed citizenry can mount an effective resistance against even a motivated modern-day militia force, which our military would not be in that situation. I don't think I get that last sentence, sorry Randy, but, oh, okay, so, uh, the first thing, I'll just, maybe I should go point by point, so the first, because there's more, the First thing was about, uh drunk driving, yeah, I mean, yeah that's illegal, um, it, I get it, so that, so okay, let's go back to the alcohol and guns comparison.

0:38:58 Thomas: Comparison, I admit this was a tough one. This is, I had to think a lot about this, and in the end, I think there are just too many differences in the two things for the analogy to work. I think that human brains like analogies, and it's easy to just say yes, these are analogous, therefore they're the same, and we should do the same thing with them. But I think enough differences, like, how did we ask you this, how many little differences do there have to be for an analogy not to work? I don't know that there's any rule on that. It's sort of a question of what you accept. And I think that's where this gets difficult, because you accept whichever side you want to make your argument. I think everyone's guilty of that. And you could say that's what I'm doing.

0:39:43 Thomas: It might be. So it makes it tough. But I think they're so different. Again, a toddler can pick up a gun and has many times in just this year alone. I can't remember, it's probably like 12 toddlers have killed people in this year alone, I think it's something like that. They can't do that with a bottle of alcohol. They can, I mean, they can't just pick up a bottle vodka and then kill you or something. I mean...

And the other thing about the gun statistics that another commenter pointed out, Ooh, that gives me a chance to reference at least a second comment. Chiamit, whatever that name is, sorry if I'm not pronouncing that right, he said, uh, Eli, here's part of his comment, I won't read the whole thing pretty long, Eli noted that keeping a firearm in the house increases the risk of suicide by a factor of three to five, uh suicide, Blah blah blah, and Travis appeared more or less to accept this, with his argument being that, as Eli put it, if people want to kill themselves with guns, they have the right to do so. Travis stated numerous times that the fact that owning a gun increases your risk of committing suicide should not be an argument in favor of restricting guns since it's the individual's choice. The problem is, what this research does not, so far as I can see, address is ownership of the gun.

The conclusion of the Kellerman studies explicitly states, readily available firearms is associated with increased risk of suicide in the home. Weeb, or something, a name I don't know, concludes that having a gun at home is a risk factor of adults, etc. So what the point he's getting at is, that's, that's the other thing about guns, they're a risk for anyone in the house.

0:41:22 Thomas: When you own a gun, your child doesn't get a choice in that matter, and yet their suicide, murder, whatever, accidental death risk just went way up. The thing is, they're just different items. I mean, the purpose of a gun is to fire, is to be a lethal object, like, it kills people. Sure, you could say, "Oh, I don't do that though, I shoot targets with it," but that's what the purpose is. It's a, it's a a death hazard for anyone around it easily, it's an easy death hazard, it's not, it's not like, "Oh, that you might get drunk," like alcohol is like, "Oh, you might get drunk and you might go a little overboard," and some decision you're making, and that, you know, something like that, it's not a two-step, three-step process, it's a gun, just can kill people, it just can't, you just, you hold it wrong, your toddler grabs it, that, you killed somebody.

0:42:19 Thomas: I mean, it's just, it is enough different that I don't think the analogy works. The purpose of alcohol, as I don't need to explain to you drunkards, is to ingest, to consume, and people like the pleasant effect it has on their brains that is just different than a gun. I think you can say, oh, well, I enjoy having a gun, and as long as I do not kill anyone with Then I'm just enjoying it, but it's still not that's not really the point the point is it kills people It just is a fundamentally different object Oh, so now to defense, self-defense, and national defense, or defense against the government, I guess, so I had someone else say, I think it was on Twitter, I don't remember, oh, if guns aren't good at self-defence, why does the Secret Service carry a gun, huh, gotcha, checkmate, atheists, why do they carry guns, and to me, that's pretty simple, also, somewhat interesting is why doesn't the president carry a gun.

0:43:19 Thomas: See, guns are effective when you have a team of highly, highly, highly trained specialists at your disposal, but they're not even that effective then. I can't think of a single of all the assassination, the famous assassination attempts. I can think of one that was stopped by gunfire. Can you? I'm going through the list here. Okay, let's see how old the Secret Service is. Okay, well, it's been around since, like, Lincoln, maybe it was because of the assassination, but it looks like there wasn't too much organized gun carrying until, like the 50s and 60s, so let's start with Kennedy, so failure there, Kennedy was killed, no Secret Service were able to do anything about that.

0:44:07 Thomas: There was an attempt on Nixon, but that was Sam Bick who wanted to hijack a plane, so that doesn't really count because he wasn't around them. Let's keep going. Ah, two Two on Gerald Ford, and these, these are interesting, okay, so you might say, ah, did the Secret Service step in with guns and, and, no, the first one was, now, granted, these were crazy people, but, I mean, we're dealing with the examples that we have, Fromm tried to shoot Ford when he reached to shake her hand in the crowd, but she didn't have a bullet in the firing chamber, and so she was quickly restrained by the Secret but she was just restrained. I mean, they just grabbed her. They didn't, nobody shot her.

0:44:53 Thomas: Uh, and then the next one, Sarah Jane Moore fired a revolver at Ford from 40 feet away, fired several times. So she actually totally could have killed him, but a bystander grabbed her arm and, uh, the shot missed Ford. And that's, that's what happened. So in two, in two attempts, we've had, we've got some grabbing. We haven't had a lot of counter gun play going on. There wasn't a shooting at the Okay Corral situation.

Let's see, is there, so there's Reagan, he was shot, Hinkley was subdued by a bystander who hit him in the head and then they jumped on him, I mean, look, okay, it's just funny to me, this doesn't prove anything, I'm not saying guns are not important, and I think the Secret Service should carry guns, I'm not saying they shouldn't, it's just funny that in every attempt, assassination we have, none of them were stopped by a Secret Service man's bullet that I can find here, maybe there's one I'm missing, but I just think that's funny, I mean, but that tells you guns are chaotic. I mean there's not, we think of the movies of like, oh, we're going to protect people with guns. We're all going to just fire right at the guy. But I mean it really is chaos.

I think the reason that the Secret Service should carry guns and that they do carry guns is they have a highly, highly, heavily valuable person that they are protecting and they are are a team of trained individuals who may, who are likely to face an attack, who are somewhat likely, quite likely actually, a high profile target likely to face a, like it could even be a coordinated effort to attack the president.

0:46:33 Thomas: Most of their training, I think, involves just jumping on the car so that their bullets hit, you know, the bullets hit them and not Obama. I mean, it really it really isn't like, the idea is that the Secret Service is just going to shoot every gunman, the gun out of the gunman's hand before they fire. I mean, that's just not how it works. So, when Eli was saying guns are bad at self-defense, what he meant is, more often than not, they actually lead to more trouble. But again, I mean the president is just a different situation. Are you going to find yourselves in that situation? Are you, as a family, are you like a high value target that a team is going to come after? And it's just not how it works. I mean, so on the whole, if we look at the stats, guns are worse for self-defense than they are good. Even though they can have success stories, that's certainly true.

0:47:22 Thomas: You know, this reminds me, I actually had meant to share this clip with you guys, here's someone who, I will say, does have the conversations, this is a show that, I mean, he doesn't need any more support, Real Time with Bill Maher, I have not, I was never that big of a Bill Maer fan, I kind of didn't really like Religious or whatever his movie was, I think he's, he's super arrogant, I'm not like a huge fan of him, but credit where credit's due, I Think he's got one of the best damn TV He's got one of the best damn TV shows on television, in real time, because he has people who disagree on and they argue, and it's good, he has Republicans on, sure, he's liberal and it skews liberal, but he has people of both sides to talk. One such exchange was because, I'm just gonna play a few seconds, maybe like 30 seconds of it, it was so great.

It was between, uh, let's see, this girl's name is Emily Miller, I guess she's some gun enthusiast, and the other guy was Lawrence Wilkerson, uh, who was apparently, oh, it was General Lawrence Wilkerson, who's, so, he was actually the, uh kind of the anti, he's not anti-gun per se, but he was more pro-gun control on this, so listen to this exchange, this was just perfect, perfectly summed it up for me.

0:48:39 Clip: It's not a virtue. The whole point of gun ownership and the second amendment is that we, me, I'm not a gun owner, like you, I think you are? Yes. Because we want to defend ourselves, that's the purpose of the secondamendment, it's not that we can go out and kill people, nobody wants to kill people. By the way, let me clear something up here, I don't own guns to defend myself. Why do you own them? I own guns for home defense. So what happens if someone comes in your home, you're just gonna go, go? I don't own the guns in case someone comes into my home so that I can shoot them. I don't expect someone to come in my home because I have law enforcement and other people around me to keep up with that. Do you know what the response time is for law enforcement? Response time is ten minutes.

0:49:17 Clip: The average response time for law enforcement is ten minutes. So in those ten minutes when a person's in your home, you're telling them you're not going to touch their, I'm 71 years old. I've lived in this country for 71 years, except for the years I was deployed fighting for this country, when I did need my guns, and no one's ever entered my house and tried to kill me.

0:49:38 Thomas: Now look, that, again, that doesn't mean it won't ever happen, but it, I do think it's, I, I think there's this fantasy going on with gun owners that there's going to be an intruder, and you're going to just happen to get to know they're there, you know, somehow, and you're gonna perfectly know where they are, you're gonna be able to know it's not one of your kids walking in the dark or something, and you gonna get to your gun, you gonna do all this stuff, you going to shoot them, or you gonna stop them, whatever, and I just, that just never happens, like, more often than not, you or your kid will shoot you, or you'll commit suicide, I mean, just far more often then not, so that's what it means when Eli was saying guns are not effective self-defense, it doesn't mean that there's no conceivable situation where they would work.

0:50:24 Thomas: That's certainly true. There are conceivable situations. There Are times when a gun would help. The net product is negative on that. Wow, look at the time. Okay, well, I was going to talk about the terrorist attacks and stuff, which are obviously horrible and, you know, sympathies go out to all the victims and families and it's just non-stop, you know, it's three attacks, four attacks in the last week, could be more. I was gonna talk a little bit more about that. I'm out of time, but that's okay because I actually have Phil Torres, spelled slightly differently than Andrew Torrez, no relation, Phil Torres on to talk about some of those issues relating to his specialty, which is catastrophic events and existential threats and all that. So we talk a bit about terrorism and stuff.

0:51:11 Thomas: That will be on Thursday's episode. Very interesting stuff. And it's even an action-packed bonus long episode because I got more stuff to get to. I got more episodes to do than I can even ever get to in my lifetime, which is a good place to be. I love it because I want to have Andrew Torrez on right away after that to talk about the Second Amendment and finally get the legal questions that we all have about the second amendment answered. That'll be the next episode after Phil Torres. So lots of Torres's coming up, but they're, they're both great. And I'm so glad to be able to have guests like this who are just so entertaining and also know their stuff. So, looking forward to that, and thank you to all my patrons, patreon.com/atheist, and I will see you next episode.